Chapter Five
Answers


When she woke up, her senses told her she was underwater.  They told her she was twenty stories under the earth.  They told her she had regressed to childhood, or before.  Her mind told her that the insubstantial experiences she had just had were dreams, but she felt like they must have been real, and her surroundings a dream.  She ached trying to think back to the last thing she had experienced that had been real.  Was it that talk in the music store?  No, that had been about the aliens.  She’d packed the next day, a few things in her purse and pockets and nothing more.  God, this is terrible, she fretted.  Everything I can remember has something to do with them.

Eva just lay and waited.  She had been hung over in her day, and worse; but she knew that waiting and letting things settle down inside would always sort the fact from the illusion—eventually.  Magically the truth would extract itself and the missing pieces would appear.  So she did not open her eyes.

Back to sleep she went.  To an extent her mind’s defense system, conscious and subconcsious, went into overdrive to perform just the task she had set it to, and distilled her real memories from her dreamy ones.  The process had only been halfway completed, however, when Eva felt in her shoulder a soft, flat nudge.

“Creature.  We are about to enter space,” a voice whispered.

Eva slowly opened her eyes, imagining that the sensation and remark would suddenly come into focus and make sense in just a moment.  She saw darkness.  Then there were shapes, and a light under the crack of a door.  And  an oddly textured body—like a panther built of black glass that had flowed down over long years.

She realized that her experience on the alien ship had been real.  It was a painful thing to assimilate.  On the ship she had been exhausting her physical and psychological reserves.  In the middle of it all it had not been an option to break down.  She had remained calm and taken things as they came, without panic, and now her psyche paid the price.

Incredible things.  So many questions.  To ask, to answer.  Eva was amazed, above all else, in her trust.  Why had she come onto their ship and allowed herself to be taken away?  Why follow all their instructions and cooperate despite all the incompetence surrounding her?  Because her brother’s creepy friends had told her to?  For the offer of free “stuff”?

She was under a sheet that felt much like a blanket but had properties of rubber.  It was growing tighter on her.  She gasped and clutched at the blanket, trying to throw it off.  Her head, which she had thought was lying on a pillow, hit the floor.  Eva groaned and felt herself twisting.  She panicked.  Her body was faint.  All around her dark shapes began moving through the air.  It was another painful wrench: she was back in dreamland after all.  She was floating.

Then, suddenly, jarringly, the light came on.  In her third shock of the minute, Eva saw that she was truly in the bedroom on the spaceship she had entered the previous night.  She was floating, just as was everything else in the room, because there was no gravity.  And there was a pommit, swinging gracefully before her, haunches under belly and up, and up.  Now the pommit was lying on its back, in the middle of the air.

Eva had never expected in her lifetime to experience zero gravity.  She had no idea what to do or if some foolish lack of precaution would cause her body irreparable harm.  She waved her right leg and struck the floor; pushing, her head again struck soild matter but this time she was fortunate enough to hit a pillow.  She turned, with some effort, laterally, and managed to spin around.  Facing the floor, Eva was struck with something remarkably like claustrophobia.  There was the floor before her, yet no effort of hers could bridge the gap between it and herself to bring her down.  All she could do was touch it cautiously with a finger and a toe in order to stop her spinning.  This is what she did.

“You should slide over to the wall,” suggested the pommit, whose name Eva remembered now was Angorim.  “I believe there is a strap to be found somewhere.”

“Somewhere.  Great.”  Eva didn’t see how she was supposed to slide.  Using a cautious touch, however, she was able to push off the floor slowly at a shallow angle, while spinning herself gradually along the way.  It worked decently.  Eva arrived without a total lack of grace at the wall, which she fingered delicately to approach the floor again.  She got closer to the corner with each push, as well as better as manuevering in this environment.

Once she had finally achieved something like a sitting state in the corner, she looked up at the pommit, Angorim.  She was still spinning gently, having made no effort to secure herself.  There were pillows of every size and shape floating through the room gently, like artificial clouds.  Angorim shrugged one shoulder at Eva and opened her eyes wide.  Eva didn’t know what that meant.

“Angorim.”

“Yes?”

“Doesn’t your ship have any sort of...you know...artificial gravity?”

The pommit’s eyes opened even wider for a second.  “Artificial gravity?  I did not know they did Make any such thing!”

Eva snorted.  “They don’t!  I mean, I don’t know!  I was just hoping.  I mean, are we going to have to put up with this all the way to...to wherever we’re going?”

“What do you mean all the way?”

“I...I don’t know how I can make myself any more clear.”

“We will skip over most of the way.”

“What’s that?”  Skip over?

Angorim’s eyes narrowed this time.  “I do not know how to be more clear myself.  Skip.  Over.  Once Prywroth gets him-silly-self together and teleports us, we will be practically there.”

Angorim’s face rotated out of view.  Eva was treated to the fascinatingly unnerving sight of her large back feet swinging upward, joints relaxed and claws gleaming.

“You mean to say that you have teleportation??”

“It is called Instant Travel.  It is very Convenient.  This way we can be at Carapacia by mealtime instead of when our great-great-great Grandchildren have long since died.”

“That does sound like a preferable...option.”  Eva was having trouble keeping her legs from floating up and away.

“I do not know why it does take Prywroth so long with the machine.  He is very concerned with Caution I think.”  Her voice sounded a little...the best word would be pouty.

“Sounds like the kind of guy you could use around here.  Have I met him?”

“No, he was the only one Not in the windowroom yesterday because he was busy with the ship because he is Always Busy.  I think he is not much fun.”

“I’m glad you had someone taking care of the ship!”  Eva closed her eyes, wishing this dizzying experience would end...or move on, somehow.  “Are we going anywhere, Angorim?  On the ship, I mean?  Or are we just staying here for now?”

“Unelss you have a good idea we will simply stay here.”

“Good.  Fine.  Then would you mind turning off the lights again?  I didn’t get all the rest I wanted.”

The pommit glared at her strangely, but with a poke and a scratch at an armband she was wearing, the light went out.  The pillows became dark shapes again, though not so mysterious, and Eva felt a little better.  This way, it was as if she were still asleep.  Relaxing.

“Toss me a pillow, Angorim?”

The forms before her came alive and twisted about.  One was grabbed out of the air by another.  Moments later, the squarish shape loomed before her until it struck with a soft “pff.”  Eva carefully stowed the pillow under her head and leaned back upon it.

“I am hungry,” said Angorim.  “But I cannot get any food until we are out of space.”

“Why is that?”

“It is because all the foods have been taken away along with all the other objects.  Everything is packed down so it will not float all over.”

“That sounds fair,” said Eva, who supposed that pillows were an understandable exception.  She closed her eyes, set her mind to dwelling on nothing, and tried to enjoy the weightless sensation.  She tried to equate it to a very high-end waterbed.

Minutes passed.  Eva regained her sleep.  She was not delving deep into slumber anymore, though, just recovering her energy.  It was peaceful.  At one point a pillow floated into her arms and gave her extra momentum against the wall.  It was welcome like the weight of a blanket in winter.

In time, Eva awoke once more to her companion’s whisper.  “I suppose it is time to talk.”

Eva turned her face into her pillow, resisting the return to lucidity.  “The time has come, the pommit said, to talk of many things,” she murmured.

“Like of What things??” asked the curious pommit.

“Like... of ships and shoes and sealing wax.”  Eva yawned, looking back at Angorim in the darkness.  “And cabbages and kings.”

“Why all of those??”

“And why the sea is boiling hot,” she added.  “And...and why pommits have wings.”  Eva squinted and set her teeth.  That had been bothering her.  “Why do you have wings?  Aren’t you much too large for them?”

To her surprise, the pommit giggled.  At least, the high-pitched, diaphramtic outburst sounded like a giggle.  “We did want them,” she explained.

“Oh?”

“Yes, we did think wings would be most fun.  So we got them for ourselves.”

“You...got them?”

The pommit came closer: Eva could hear it as well as faintly see it.

“It happened when we did colonize TinyPlanet many hundreds of years ago,” whispered Angorim as if with a naughty secret.  “TinyPlanet does not have so much gravity as HomePlanet.”  And another giggle ensued.

“I don’t understand.  Wait—wait, I think I do.  You found that you were able to...to leap high in the lower gravity.  And you wanted...to be able to control yourselves.”

“We wanted to Flyy!”  Angorim’s voice broke into an excited trill.  She flipped over backwards.  “Every pommit who is Born is given wings now.”

“Whether they live on the tiny planet or not?”

“Yes of course!  They are a part of us now.  How could we rustle without wings?”

“And yet you can’t actually fly unless you’re on the tiny planet?”

“Or unless we are in Space!!”  Eva heard Angorim open her wings.  She saw the pommit’s vague outline soar from the center of the room to the wall.  “Then it is most handy to be winged.”

Eva closed her eyes again.  She was afraid to ask any more questions.

Unbeknownst to her, however, she had built up a queue.

“As for ships and shoes, what did you want to know??” came Angorim’s delectable voice from over to the left.

Eva’s mind churned back into activity.  “This ship.  How does it fly?  When I climbed aboard, it was just hovering.  No propulsion of any kind that I could see.”

To this Angorim had no answer.  “I did not build it,” she said with a “rustle.”

“Shouldn’t all the astronauts on the crew have a basic understanding of how it works?”

“Am I an astronaut?  Whee, that does sound spiffy!”  The winged bullet flew from the wall on Eva’s left to the one on her right in a delighted motion.

“Does anyone on board know how the ship flies?”

“I do not know.  Possibly,” was the blithe answer.

“Why is it built like a cube?”

“Why not?  Is a cube not pretty?”

“Is that the most important factor?”

“Probably not, but maybe.  What did you want to know about shoes?”

Eva sighed inwardly.  “Some of you were wearing them on your hind feet, and some of you weren’t.”

“That is because some people find the smoothness of a metal floor hard to walk upon,” said Angorim.  “At times I find I agree which is why I have got shoes, too.  I even have got them for my hands if I want to do a lot of walking.”

“I see.  So you don’t wear shoes—or any other clothing—on your home planet?”

“Why would we do so?  The weather is nice there.  What about cabbages?  What is a cabbage?”

At this moment, there was an electric jolt.  Eva felt invaded by electricity or soemthing worse.  She felt scrutined to the depths of her bones.  She crashed against the wall she was sitting against and rebounded into the air.  It felt to her like when the shock wore off, she would be in quite a lot of pain.

But she was not.

Angorim let loose a giddy squeal.  “Finally!  We are at Carapacia now!”

“Carapacia?  What’s Carapacia?  I know you mentioned it before, but...”

The pommit switched on the light again.  She was staring at Eva with her wings out to the side, catching air.  It was a quizzical-looking position.

“Carapacia is where the Carapacians live.  Silllly.”

Eva rubbed her neck.  Nothing seemed damaged.  “Are we entering their atmosphere?”

“Yes of course we are.  That is why we have come, to pick one of them up.  But Anyway Why did you mention Cabbages?”  Angorim’s wings flapped once and her eyes glimmered pink.

Eva grabbed a pillow, eyed the wall’s distance, and tossed it away.  It flew in Angorim's direction.  The startled pommit caught the pillow and hugged it under her foreleg.  Eva, meanwhile, recoiled gently against the wall and sank, with some effort, back to her sitting position.  She never had found that strap Angorim had mentioned.

“Look.  How about I ask you a question about kings, instead.  Have you got any?”

“Kings?  Go Fish.”

Eva blinked, startled.  “When have you ever played Go Fish?”

The eyes were innocent.  “We love to play human games.  When we decided to come here we switched into Human mode.  We all speak in human languages when we can and had a Human Game Night.  I am the Mancala Champion!”

This was ridiculous.  “Does that mean you’re in Carapacian Mode now?”

Angorim’s turn to be startled.  “I had not thought of that.  We have not discussed it.”

“Fine.  What I meant by my question, though, was how you pommits handle leadership.  Who’s in charge, back at home?  For that matter, who’s in charge of this crew?  Is it Brogooi?”

Angorim’s ears contracted.  “What is in charge?  I think charge is an abominable human custom.  I do not intend offense by it.”

“You don’t approve of leadership?”

“Oh, leadership!  I thought you meant buying things with Credit.  No, we do not have a leader exactly.  Not for the ship.  Sometimes in difficult times we are forced to elect a leader.”

“That is...well, that is very interesting, Angorim.  It puts a lot more questions in my head.  As to how you do without a leader.”

Angorim turned her head cutely and her ears flared forward for a moment.  “Basically the secret is just always to talk things out.”

Eva nodded sagely.

The two discurants plummeted suddenly to the floor and slid along its length, along with all the pillows in the room, into a heap in the corner.  Eva shrieked.  She was fortunate enough to land in a soft place, with pillows before and behind.  She heard Angorim flapping her wings.  A mechanical hum, the first she had heard from the FriendShip, was droning somewhere beneath them.

“Eliihmn has failed again to do a level entry!” cried Angorim.

“What do we do?  Where’s my purse?” spat Eva, growling.

Eva was tired of getting tossed about so much.  Finding the strap of her purse, she pulled it loose and broke free of the cushions.  She was prepared to struggle against gravity to the door, but gravity abruptly overcompensated for her.  The room tilted back the other way and she slid up to the door, only avoiding getting hit on the head again by holding her purse as a shield before her.  She swore.

“I think that we should go and find Eliihmn, and when we do what we should do is we should WHACK HER,” suggested Angorim.

“I assume Eliihmn is the pilot?”

“That is right.”

“Then I concur.”

The room straightened out at last.  Eva climbed to her feet and straightened her apparel.  She wondered for how long she could keep at this without sustaining injury.

The two scrambled out of the room and back along the path they had taken to get there.  They ran into two others along the way, also intent on escaping the brain scramblers that had become of their bedrooms.  Together, they invaded the control room, which was the room adjacent to the windowroom, and found Eliihmn, the small brownish pommit whom Eva had seen the night before manipulating something within the little box on the floor.  Now, she was at the black and white control levers—Eva assumed Eliihmn was a female, based on the accenting rule about names.  She doubted that many human cultures had a rule so handy.

“Eliihmn!!” shouted one of the party, revealed as the altogther-too-forward pommit with the high-pitched voice.  “What in the World is you DOING??  You has Pitched us both TO and FRO!”

“You have been careless aGain!” added Angorim.

The hapless pilot looked back, levers still clutched in her three-clawed hands.  “It is the atmosphere,” she said quietly and seriously.  “It is very much thicker than any other I have ever seen.”

“That is Nonsense!” Angorim persisted, body crouched with muscles taut.  “We were here BeFore only Yesterday!  Did you not get Used to the thickness Then?”

“No, I did Not,” answered Eliihmn solemnly, and a little sadly.  Her ears folded and unfolded with delicacy.  Eva found her attitude downright funny.

“Please in the FUture keep a Log of what measures you must Take to make a Level Entry,” contributed the sturdily-built pommit who had been eating the fruit the previous night.

“Yes, please do that,” said Angorim.

“I shall try,” said Eliihmn with a steady stare.  “However it is difficult to make any log when I am trying to Fly at the same Time.”

“Then you should go get Prywroth to Help You!!” trilled the high-voiced one.

Four pairs of eyes glanced awkwardly through a nearby door that Eva had not yet gone beyond.  Wings rustled.

“Prywroth has his own job to attend to,” whispered Eliihmn.

And so did she.  With a great rumble, the ship tumbled to one side.  While Eliihmn grabbed the levers with her hands and a pair of handles with her feet, keeping herself in place while she tried to steady the ship, Eva and the others lost their balance and crashed at various rates and after various attempts at resistence into the wall with the small window.  There were several cases of instruments there, and Eva had to sprawl to avoid hitting one.  The pommits, she reflected, were lucky; while they could lose their balance, at least with four feet they were not likely to lose their footing.  Perhaps this was why they had not taken precautions against this type of accident.

While Eva and the others were recovering, Gomeo entered the room.  He looked at Eva and ran over to her.  “Are you healthy?”

“I won’t be long at this rate!”

He glanced quickly around the room.  “Come with me.”  Without waiting long for Eva’s cooperation, he scooted back into the waindowroom, where Eva found several pommits milling around the view, and on through a new door.  Eva glanced out the window; she had just time to see a yellow haze over a mountainous landscape before she was forced to hurry away.

The next room was filled with rolled up tapes of the sort Eva had seen on the first level, papers, plastic film, small metal devices, and a large box that looked suspiciously like a television screen.  This room had another door as well as a ramp leading downward.  It was down this ramp that Gomeo led Eva.

Eva had found that taking these ramps in a downward direction was something she could handle reasonably well.  When she reached the bottom, she encountered a room of the standard size and shape which was dominated by a large, bulbous form in the center of the floor, taupe in color and probably metal underneath its coating, with dozens of circles on its surface.  The room also contained several curved ramps, ranging in height around about a meter, whose purpose Eva could not fathom.  In the corners there were two rectangular bins, and two doors led off in different directions.

Gomeo took her out of here and through one of the doors.  It was a half-size room.  Eva was not able at first to parse what she saw.  A soft-looking patch of something foamy, a trench behind it, a set of simple controls on the wall.  A large machine mounted on the wall beside a nozzle of some sort.  A row of brown straps fastened to one side.  A roll of some fibrous material.  A shelf of strange implements.  After a moment, however, she realized that she was looking at a lavatory.  For this she was grateful.

In response to tactful questioning, Eva got Gomeo to reveal the room’s secrets.  He told her that she could secure herself against further upsets of the ship by putting her arms through a pair of straps, which were adjustable.  Eva thanked him and discreetly asked him to leave her alone, which he did.

She cautiously went over to the door and figured out how to lock it.  Having managed this, Eva went to the shelf of implements and discovered among them a mirror, a comb, a selection of sponges, and two contained bins of water and something like water, but with the smell of pumice.  Taking care not to poison herself inadverently, Eva was brave enough to wet a sponge and wash herself on her face and where she needed attention.  She made use of the lavatory and locked herself into the straps without trouble, except for one unfortunate lurch of the ship which she was glad no one was around to watch.

It had all been just about too much for her.  In addition to the various bumps she had suffered in the last hour that she still feared would become bruises, Eva was incredibly grateful to be alone at last.  In the actual presence of these creatures, these bizarre extraterrestrials that had bucked her expectations, it was hard to treat them with less than respect, or to question their...existence.  Alone, Eva was able to reflect on what she had discovered—without the distraction of her discovery staring her in the face and asking silly questions.  It was something she would take a long time to interalize, she knew.  She wondered if even Geoff and Stuart back at the music store would believe her account.  These beings were a far cry from the little grays they were used to “documenting.”  Would they be disappointed...or enthralled?

And to think that her account had only just begun!

It was fortunate that Eva was in this mental peak when she heard a rap at the door.  She might have resisted the need to interact further had her thoughts taken a darker turn—for example, whether she was guaranteed ever to return home again.  As it was, she unstrapped herself happily and headed for the door.

“Tell me if you are there, human!” announced a gay voice behind the door.  While it was unmistakably a pommit’s voice, Eva did not remember hearing it before.  It was even more removed from the familiar than the others, more fluid.  She called out, “Coming!” and unfastened the latch.  On the other side of the door was a pommit of what Eva took to be average build.  It was black, with a highly marked underlayer of mottled scarlet.  Its eyes were direct and tinted with green.  Even while it was still, Eva got the impression of great vitality in its body, great health, great spirit.  She smiled for no reason she could name, and bowed her head.

“You must be Prywroth.”

“An’ You mus’ be Eva D’rant!!”

The beast—she could think of it no other way, though the identification was not a bad one—stepped forward, lifted up its arms, and hugged her.  Eva was taken off guard.  While she had touched Angorim briefly during their tumbles, she had not yet consciously felt the texture of a pommit.  None of them had taken it upon themselves to touch her.  This one had its arms around her shoulders in a firm, very sincere, very real grasp.  Its head rested beside her own.  She felt the surface of the pommit’s body, and just as with the sense of sight, she felt neither fur nor feathers, but something in between.  She could not describe it, but found it to be a delightful sensation.  She belatedly put up her own arms and hugged the pommit back in return.

Prywroth released her and stepped back gracefully onto all fours.  “I am Glad you are here.  An’ in good health.  How do you Like us so Far?”

Eva’s answer came before she could weigh it.  “I find you all supremely amusing.”

“AMUSing?”  Prywoth turned his head halfway sideways.  “Is you easily aMUSed?”

“I...Not particularly!”  She faced him directly, continuing to smile.  (She knew it was ‘him’ because the first syllable in his name was accented.)   “I would imagine my impression would be shared by the majority of my people!”

“Then tha’ is all to the good,” decided Prywroth.  “We will ge’ along Splendid with you!  An’ to think tha’at home they were WORRiiied about meeting you!”  His wings spread out and did not stop, as the others’ had always checked theirs, but extended to their full breadth.  His wings were scarlet with smudges of black, like his coat but colored the opposite way.  Eva was for a second mystified by their size.

“Is this the first time that any of your species have contacted ours?” asked Eva in a murmur.

“You know I think tha’at is,” answered Prywroth.  “Tha’is why I was worried Too.  ‘Cause we may ge’in trouble for Talking to you!”

“Really?”  Eva was puzzled.  “I thought this was the...er, the FriendShip.  On a diplomatic mission.”

“Yes, that it is.  But our mission is not to Talk to Youu.  It is to Talk to the CaraPacians!”

Eva nodded dimly.  “The inhabitants of this planet.  Who you’ve interacted with before.”

“Yes, and that did not—”

“—go so well,” Eva finished with him.  “Why not?  What happened?”

Prywroth shrugged his mighty wings.  It was quite the confession of ignorance.  “We do not so much Know.  It was Mostly another crew, but there were Some of us there as Well.  We were Speaking to them and let them reLax a while just like Youu, and when we found them again they were all Killed!!”

Eva’s expression was grim.  “Perhaps you didn’t offer them the proper life support.  The needs of a living thing can be subtle, you know.”

Prywroth’s wings sagged.  He looked distraught by the memory.

“Who was charge of life support in the old crew, anyway?” she asked.

“I was,” said Prywroth.  His wings touched the floor.  His head sank.

“Oh,” said Eva.  “Mm.”  Impusively, she stepped forward and set her hands upon his forehead, between his ears.  Even if these deaths—and pivotal deaths they were—were the fault of the creature before her, she felt the need to comfort him.  “There, there.  You’ll have a chance to make it right, won’t you?  You’ll be more careful this time?”

“I was careful Last time,” said Prywroth.  “I do no’ Know what more I can Do.”

“Well, and...and do I understand you correctly in that...in that the reason you brought me here was to see if I am somehow able to help?  You think that I have some understanding to bear on this problem?”

The pommit met her eyes and folded his wings.  “I have Confidence that you doo.”

Eva closed her eyes and stove off the pain.  She didn’t want the weight of this responsibility, however flattering it was to be offered it.  “I hope you will reconsider.  I...I’m just a person.  I have no special skills in dealing with the unknown.  With visitors, or strange life forms.  I know less about this situation than you do.  Prywroth—from what I understand, this is a very important meeting between races!  Please don’t hang all your hopes on me!”

Prywroth was about to answer when the sound of humming stopped.  The edge to the air that Eva had felt arise at the ship’s first movement after her arrival, and had unconsciously felt ever since then, suddenly fell away, leaving the air somehow...empty.  Prywroth’s body came up tautly, his nerves bringing him back to his full attention.

“We are going to have to,” he replied plainly.  “Our guest is here.”

Chapter 6

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