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"I'd like to talk to Radmer, Leia or both, when they are available, ideally in," and the last term did not translate, but ship-mind gave her a graphic showing the location of a room about the size of the recreation room but in a part of Hazard Leia had not yet visited.
Amable shooed them on their way. Once they were out the door and it had closed behind them, Radmer to Leia, grasped her other hand and kissed her. He took his time about it, but didn't press her up against the wall, or cop a feel, or any of the other things Leia expected to go along with a kiss that single-minded and extended. When he let her go, he dropped her other hand, and started walking down the corridor. He looked over at her out of the corner of his eye, and said, "I feel much better."
She could not tell if he was talking about the kiss, the conversation with Amable, or something else, but she agreed with him. "I do, too. Thank you. What do you think Esifwu wants?"
"In detail? I have no idea. In general, she probably is looking for more of your opinions and ideas of what kind of attack or trap we should plan for. She will be asking me to either assess or develop and assess a plan for defending against whatever you, she and everyone else she's roped into working on this come up with."
When they arrived at the specified room, they discovered they were not by any means the first in the door: the room was packed. It was tall room with steeply raked seating opposite a massive display, which was laid out like Bloomberg TV. There were a lot of graphics on side bars, a running scroll at the bottom and a couple of talking heads. Leia was disturbed to see what she had told Radmer laid out as an outline in the top left corner of the screen. As the scroll, graphics and talking heads switched topics, a highlight shifted to the appropriate entry in the outline. This was even creepier than the time she'd googled her full name in high school and discovered she was a major character in a pornographic online novel one of her classmates was writing. That had been very creepy, especially since she had not recognized the classmates name and had to look him up and compare their schedules to figure out how he knew her.
Someone on the opposite side of her from Radmer shifted position, and elbowed her in the ribs. She looked up to see Dulak grinning at her and pointing at her outline. Just to make sure she understood how he felt about this, he slapped her on the back. He leaned over and, slightly more seriously added, "Good call spending some time with Amable. It's important to come into conferences like this with the little details of your life in good order. Very distracting, otherwise. Did you stop for a quickie on the way back?"
"No! God. What is wrong with you?" People were looking around at her, but when they saw she was talking to Dulak, they mostly made sympathetic noises and gestures and turned back to the screen.
"There is nothing wrong with me. That's why I have this job. I have documentation to prove there's nothing wrong with me. Lots of it. Let me remind you of what I said earlier: not having sex is more of a problem than having sex. With the way Andal is shaping up, that just gets more true every minute that goes by."
Leia rolled her eyes, muttered, "Do not rush me."
"Think about it."
"Believe me. I am." Then she turned her back on him and paid attention to the screen.
Some people had shuffled around and made room for them on the seats. Radmer tugged her down to sit next to him. He leaned felt up first one ear (which did not have an ear piece on it) and then the other, and then whispered into the second: "Heads-up display?" At his suggestion, Leia extracted her glasses and put them on. Now when she looked at the screen, all the Target Language text was replaced with English, but everything else was left in place. Nice interface. If she ever made it back to Earth, she could go into business selling international teleconferencing equipment and make a killing. Yeah, that'd be the real money-maker of all the tech she'd encountered aboard Hazard. Not.
Better able to keep up with the discussion, she could understand that people were thrashing out various scenarios, as she had outlined, but in greater detail. They seemed to have a list of the Usual Suspects, people who might possibly want to attack Hazard and/or Hazard's crew, in addition to the list of Andal-specific suspects who they had been planning on investigating for the crop failures and suspicious epidemics. These people might not be at war, and they might, like most NGOs, have the purest of motives, but they weren't stupid; they knew there were a lot of people and organizations they'd offended at some point or other, or whose interests they had interfered with. She was not surprised to have this further confirmation that the structure of one's economy did not preclude conflict. She had expected the car-crash-critters to be on the list of Usual Suspects, but did not hear them mentioned. She wondered what proportion of the people in this super-culture were human-like-her-Esifwu-Radmer-etc., and what proportion were some entirely other kind of person, three-legged or otherwise. Obviously there were conflicts when one group started collecting members of another group to lock up in a zoo; did species otherwise have disparate enough activities interests and preferred habitat to be less inclined to conflict? Were misunderstandings more common because of even less shared between groups? The language problems must be enormous; at least she had the right vocal equipment to speak Target Language and the right kind of ears to hear it. No telling whether she was hearing the car-crash-critters correctly.
The group was reaching a consensus rapidly. The initial plan to simultaneously offload a lot of people at Upper Andal and Andal proper was going to be scrapped as too risky; there was no way to monitor the location and status of everyone under that plan, much less provide protection, or evacuate upon need. The debate at this point revolved around whether to just reduce the number of crew off-ship at once, or to stage the descent to Andal proper after everyone was out of Upper Andal. A small, but convincing group was arguing that Upper Andal should be completely secured by Hazard personnel, and only then should Andal be approached. Upper Andal could pose a significant threat to Hazard, as it was armed. The primary argument being offered against that proposal was the political impact; taking over a system's transit center would probably make them a long list of new enemies. There were legal concerns as well.
Leia saw another problem with trying to secure Upper Andal. Upper Andal itself could be a trap, in a wide variety of ways. The recent, substantial modifications and upgrades to station security could conceal any amount of unpleasantness. She waited a while to see who would bring it up, then poked Radmer and whispered it to him. She should not have been surprised that they were targeted by a baby spot and presented on screen. Fortunately, Radmer was happy to summarize her concerns for the crowd, relieving her of the language hassle, not to mention speaking in public.
Interestingly, the debate did not abandon the idea of securing Upper Andal first; it just moved into the logistics of detecting the kinds of problems Leia and Radmer were suggesting, and how to stage securing Upper Andal to detect various kinds of problems (the station itself was rigged to explode; nominal control of the station would prove to be only nominal and critical systems would fail to respond – or be under hostile control – at a crucial moment after believing they were secured) and disarm them. There was also an ongoing lively discussion of mitigating the political consequences of taking over the station, and an associated discussion of possible precedents for doing so.
Late in the afternoon, the conference broke for an evening meal. At least two working groups were arranging to meet over dinner to continue discussion. Since Esifwu had not left any indication with Leia or Radmer regarding what she wanted from them, they returned to their usual dining hall. Dulak tagged along after them.
"I wanted to ask you if anyone had shown you how to get clothing," asked Dulak. Leia was taken aback by the question; Esifwu had shown her, that first time she had explained how to use the workout equipment. Leia had memorized what Esifwu had done, and had done exactly the same thing thereafter. She was still unclear on whether she was getting back the same clothes back each time, cleaned or otherwise recycled or if they were literally brand new clothes each time. Nothing had ripped or acquired a characteristic mark that survived being run through whatever was happening behind the scenes.
"Is there something wrong with what I'm wearing?" Leia countered.
"Yes," responded Dulak bluntly, "or I would not have asked the question I did. Esifwu always wears exactly the same thing in a particular context. She doesn't vary pattern, color, texture."
"She wears a uniform, when there isn't a uniform," Leia summarized. Her summary did not survive translation, so she reproduced Radmer's characateristic dismissive gesture. Dulak shrugged and persisted.
"Ship-records indicate you are reproducing what she wears in every detail. If that's what you want to do, you should know that people will noticed and they might make some assumptions about you based on that. If you just don't know how to get something else to wear, well, just about anyone would be happy to help you out, and you could easily learn from ship-mind, now that you know it is possible."
"There's really no end of the things I don't now how to do, that everyone else knows how to do, and it just didn't occur to Esifwu to mention it to me."
"Yes. That's why I'm asking you rude questions. You seem to have had better luck with the food interface," Dulak commented as they picked up their meals. "Are you satisfied with what you've gotten there, or are you just copying from a larger number of people?"
"I'm satisfied; I like routines, especially with food. I do understand that interface."
Dulak continued to tag along with Radmer and Leia, and sat with them. Leia looked at Radmer who, as usual, sat next to her rather than across from her. Also as usual, he sat right next to her on the bench, their legs touching along the length of their thighs. He did not seem overly concerned about Dulak's presence. She had been starting to wonder if Dulak's persistent presence meant anything other than a desire to help and to do his job. She got no sense that Radmer was feeling any competition, but she was not sure she would get that sense from him. He was almost always touching her now; that could mean almost anything, given his remarks about feeling anxious and needing reassurance. From any romantic interest in her past, she would have considered that a cover story, but he was the least aggressive not-yet-lover she'd ever had. Or not had, at least not yet.
"How do people choose to vary their clothing?" she asked Dulak. If neither of them wanted to talk shop, there was some entertainment potention in getting a couple of guys to talk fashion over dinner. She didn't expect much in response, so Dulak's fifteen minute disquisition on how people used clothing choices to express subcultural affiliation, aesthetic feeling, family or romantic status, sexual orientation or identity, and on and on and on. It made sense that Dulak would know all this. It made sense that Dulak would care about this. It made a lot of sense that Dulak would want to communicate as much of this as possible to her as quickly as possible, to enable her to perceive these non-verbals accurately and to present herself in this context.
It was not, however, what she had been expecting when she asked her extremely brief question. Fortunately, ship-mind recorded nearly everything, and furthermore was busily linking elements of his presentation to a variety of other files. Maybe there was a fashion magazine buried in there somewhere, too. And an Idiot's Guide.
While she was distracted looking at her screen, other people at the table had chimed in on the fashion conversation. Baylen and Ysbo had joined them partway through Dulak's speech, and as they picked up on what he was saying, Baylen in particular became impatient. He thought there was a much simpler way to explain clothing choices in the climate-controlled environment on Hazard.
"Tight clothing draws attention to the body's shape. Clothing which exposes a particular part of the body even more so. Clothing which in general exposes a lot of skin intends to encourage sexual interest. Clothing which is loose but generally follows the form of the body emphasizes the quality of motion, whether grace or athleticism. Very thick fabrics create a barrier; very thin fabrics the opposite. Radmer here is a fine test case. In general, he wears loose clothing of a medium weight, which follows but does not adhere to his form, not does it expose a lot of his skin. Once you showed up, he started wearing progressively thinner, closer fitting clothing. It's starting to distract us; we're all at a loss to explain why you, the target of all this distraction, are comparatively immune."
Ysbo laughed. "Baylen and Dulak both left out some very important factors. First, no one here is very young. You are, but the rest of us have all had a lot of years to try out different styles and pick ones we find very comfortable to us. There are fads that pass through Hazard, individual planets and stations, and larger cultural groups. Sometimes after we stop somewhere, we'll all be wearing something popular at that last stop, either as their current fad, or as a long-running local style. Clothing depicted in entertainment that is very popular can show up. For example, the design around your neck and wrists is one that was common on the world Esifwu grew up on when she was quite young. Most people who saw you wearing that and knew nothing else about you would assume you were from that planet. Really, people pick that design on occasion just because they like it. But the safe bet is to assume you're from Ottari."
"Shouldn't we be talking about Andal?" asked Leia, hoping to move off this topic.
Dulak smirked and replied, "No. They're going to talk and plan for a while yet, but they're going to decide to send roughly the same first team to Upper Andal, and delay sending anyone else down. They'll have a solid monitor-and-evacuate plan for the personnel who are off-ship, and most of the personnel left on-board will spend the extra time collating and analyzing their data to figure out which stages should go next. The people who weren't ever going down Andal will be tasked with defense of Hazard. You aren't getting us off topic that easily. But rather than continue our discussion in the abstract or picking on random people here at the table like Radmer, I'd rather just show you how the interface works so you can fiddle with it and come up with something new to wear."
"And this is a high priority for you because. . .?"
"Because much as we all love Esifwu, we're thoroughly sick of looking at that damn outfit she's worn for the last three hundred years. And I mean that literally. Seeing it on someone else was only amusing for about fifteen seconds." Dulak activated a screen in the middle of the table and asked ship-mind for Leia's measurements. Ship-mind was good with patterns, and promptly supplied as the first choice the outfit Leia (and Esifwu) always wore. Dulak grinned fiendishly and with a few keystrokes, told ship-mind not to ever offer that default up again. When Leia frowned at him, he shrugged and with a few more taps, produced a new default: a skin-tight bodysuit covering everything from neck to ankles and wrists (as had the previous outfit), with a bright, large-scale pattern that looked like leaves.
"No freaking way!" objected Leia, at which response Dulak gestured that she should take over. She asked questions as she tried to understand the interface. They all chimed in with information about how to use it, none of them exactly the same. That matched what she had discovered with the food interface; there were several ways to access any particular item, which was what she was used to with computer applications at home.
After several minutes of fiddling, she'd reproduced the flowing white gown of her namesake, from the movies her mother loved so much, and that Leia had never been able to muster much enthusiasm for. Ysbo was politely encouraging; everyone else made negative sounds ranging from raspberries to guffaws. She erased that outfit, then, to see what this thing could do, recreated her namesake's metal bikini from the slave barge. Even Ysbo wouldn't fake enthusiasm for that, although Dulak was intrigued. She tried to explain what she was doing. Once he understood she was recreating costumes from entertainments, and in fact from a character she had been named for, he thought what she was doing was funny. "But this isn't going to get you out of finding something you'll actually wear."
She thought about trying to reproduce the skin-tight skiwear from Hoth, or the tunic and leggings from the Ewok planet, or even the mercenary costume from the beginning of Return of the Jedi, but decided enough was enough. It would take her a while to get some decent denim equivalent out of this thing, but there wasn't anything stopping her from getting the layered tunics she was used to wearing, and some soft fleece or knit lounge pants. Trying to convey what she was looking for in the pants turned out to be hard. She started looking closely around at what other people in the dining hall were wearing. She spotted something close on someone on the opposite end of the hall, and did her best to discreetly point them out. Dulak took her by the arm, bodily pulled her up out of her seat and all but frog-marched her over to them. He introduced her to Wrinton, explained briefly what they were trying to figure out. Wrinton was happy to help. She not only showed them how to get the fabric she was wearing after moving her meal over to the table they had been sitting at; she told them how she happened to choose the fabric. It nicely encapsulated several of the points made earlier: the fabric had been worn in an entertainment that was popular on her planet of origin when she was young. Wrinton also suggested some changes to the tunics, pointing out an adjustment to change the sizes slightly so they would lay on top of each other without tugging or gapping.
Leia figured that would put an end to the discussion, but discovered she was sadly mistaken. The group would not be satisfied until she'd picked footwear to go with it. She had been wearing what she would have called slipper-socks, although she had noticed as wide a variety of footwear as clothing. Wrinton showed her something out that was more structured than a slipper, but softer than Uggs.
Leia finally had to ask the technical question: "This stuff is obviously made to order. What happens when I put the dirty ones back in?"
That got a laugh. "A huge mystery!" contributed Baylen. The explanation from Radmer sounded like a surface restructuring that had the effect of washing while simultaneously returning the item to more-or-less its original condition. It was, in fact, less energy-intensive to request the same item, or a very similar item, as what one had just returned. But the difference was not substantial.
"If you really could wear something new every day, why are there some many repeats?" asked Leia.
"We all lost interest or ran out of ideas decades, if not centuries, ago," said Dulak.
"Then why are you bugging me about this?" Leia asked.
Dulak raised both eyebrows, then slowly answered. "You're from somewhere we've never been, and know nothing about. Without a single new idea of your own, we would expect you to come up with stuff we might not have ever seen before. New is good. New is interesting. Amuse us! And you are young. Young people are supposed to be changing style all the time. If you don't, we worry about you."
"Ah. Let me guess. You want me to go change now."
Dulak laughed.
"Of course! We'll wait."
Wrinton jumped up, and said, "Here, I'll show you the closest place to access point." Wrinton showed her to a facilities-with-shower that Leia had not previously noticed. That reinforced Leia's realization that she had stuck to an extremely limited part of Hazard, not bothering to learn anything beyond her very short routine of eat-sleep-exercise-language-and-culture-learning. Leia got the new clothes and changed. She was shocked at how relieved she was to get rid of the one outfit she'd been wearing for about a month. There had been a trip overseas once where her checked baggage went missing and she'd had to live out of her carry-on for ten days. She'd loved what she had in the carry-on; nevertheless, she couldn't stand to look at anything like it for a year afterwards.
She remembered reading articles laser measurements to update women's clothing sizes that hadn't changed since World War II. Nothing in the stores had reflected any results from that. You could still try on three pair of jeans from the same boutique, or the same department of the same store, on the same day, nominally the same size, and have one pair be too large, another too small, and the third the right size but not fitting correctly anyway. Put on top of that changes in waist height, leg opening, and compatibility with whatever shirts one owned already, and Leia had already had to fight the temptation to, like Esifwu, adopt a uniform and wear the same thing every day. Some years, she had, although she'd at least varied colors, patterns and textures in T-shirts, shells and sweaters. When she'd been in high school, and there hadn't been any significant challenge in her coursework, she'd spent a lot of time on her appearance, but part way through college, she'd had to make a choice between the kinds of courses she took and the grades she got, and how she looked. She'd never really looked back, but she could feel a burbling little happiness inside her at the prospect of being able to assemble a little of this and a little of that, that made her feel good and look great, and got the people around her to smile a little wider when they said hi in passing. Right now, though, it felt really good to wear clothes that felt right, like something she would have put on at home on a lazy Sunday morning, the one or two times a month she might actually have one. She realized then that in all that talk of clothing, there had been no discussion of formality, of clothing appropriate to a particular event. She'd have to ask about that.
Returning to the dining room, she saw there had been a general clearing of the main meal dishes. People were sipping beverages, several of which she recognized from past encounters and borrowed tastes. No post-dinner coffee or port tradition pervaded the super-culture that was Hazard's default social setting; Baylen and Ysbo had both explained that their planets of origins did have pervasive post-dinner drinks, but neither one cared for those drinks. They'd ordered samples for Leia to try, and she had to agree; like coffee, they were probably an acquired taste. Leia didn't miss coffee particularly, although she hadn't disliked it particularly, either. Radmer had ordered her the one she liked best of what she had tried: hot, sweet, with a slight kick and a bean-like flavor that wasn't like carob, cocao, coffee or anything else she'd ever tried. It could have been something from another country on Earth; it tasted that almost-familiar.
Ysbo smiled at her, saying, "It looks even better in person than on screen!" Others murmured similar polite formulas, and a few hands reached out to feel the fabric. Baylen liked the several light layers. Leia wondered if she'd started a fad here by reproducing the current norm back home.
"I have a question," she started, when she felt her clothes had been petted enough. "Esifwu is vague about a lot of stuff, and she has done a good job, and Dulak here has done a better job of explaining how she didn't orient me to this ship, this language, and so on."
"I'm not done yet," interjected Dulak.
"I'm sure you aren't. But what I don't understand is why no one noticed. I've been here for twenty-seven days according to Radmer."
"I was wondering when you'd ask that," said Dulak. "I know you've only seen a small part of Hazard, right?"
"Yes, but I did ask about the size earlier today; it is a lot bigger and has a lot more people on it than I realized."
"Well, we pulled," he briefly consulted ship-mind, "3022 people off the car-crash-sound ship. We've been a little busy getting everyone home. We've had transports arriving and departing twice an hour from Hazard to transport everyone where they need to go. I started looking closely at the list of who was left yesterday when it had gotten down to the hard cases, where the destination was both distant and did not share an intermediate destination with someone else. That was the first time I realized we had someone on Hazard still listed without a destination. Until two days ago, you had company; we were still trying to figure out where they needed to go, because their closest kin had moved since they were grabbed. Yesterday, I got to about the last person without a known destination, and when I found out that not only had Esifwu known for over a day, but other people on Hazard knew and no one had told my team, let's just say I lost my temper."
Ysbo, Baylen and Radmer were busy staring into their cups and glasses, not meeting Dulak's eyes, or Leia's.
"Ah."
"They seemed to think that this wasn't important enough to merit distracting me," Dulak continued acidly. "If you are looking for someone to blame, there are a lot of people who can share. And please feel free to be angry. I am."
"Has this ever happened before?"
"Has what ever happened before?"
"You, uh, dismantle a ship, remove everyone on it, send them home, and discover in the process someone from an unknown planet?"
"Yes, it has, and there's a protocol for handling it. To be fair, this is the fourth time it has happened, so it is not common, and I might as well admit now, since someone is sure to discover it eventually and use it in their defense, that while the protocol has been in place since before the first incident, it has not once been followed. The problem lies in realizing that you have someone on board from an unknown planet, as that is extremely hard to distinguish from having someone on board from a planet that no one onboard knows about personally."
Leia digested that for a moment, then asked the next logical question, albeit in a very small voice. Looking up the number of people on the ship had been an eye-opener. She had a bad feeling about the answer to this one. "How many planets are known?"
Dulak consulted ship-mind for the answer, and pointed to the display still visible in the middle of the table. Ship-mind was showing it in two notations: Target Language, and scientific notation. The exponent on her side of the display was 14. She figured the significand didn't really matter under the circumstances, and it looked like ship-mind had opted not to display all the digits anyway.
She tried to say something, but all that came out was, "Ggguh."
Dulak, for once, did not grin. He grimaced. "You seem to understand this, which is impressive. A lot of people who grow up knowing about this number don't understand it at all. But I would like to ask a couple of questions as long as you're already shaken." He paused and eyed her for a moment, then tapped a query into ship-mind. Satisfied, he continued, "You understand this is not all in one galaxy, right."
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 9, 2012