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marlynnofmany · 1 year ago

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Shore Leave

I didn’t think I was homesick until I caught the unexpected sound of a toddler’s wild laughter from the spaceship bridge. Out in the hall, I whipped around to stick my head through the door with some very unprofessional curiosity. That hadn’t been an alien noise.

Up on screen was our new client who the captain was negotiating with, and also the client’s young daughter. She’d apparently come into Daddy’s room to show the nice aliens on the video call her favorite noisemaker.

“Okay honey, they think it’s great. Go on back to—” the patient father was interrupted by an electronic fart sound on high volume, and even louder peals of laughter from his child. “I’m sorry,” he said to the captain as he scooped up the wiggly youngster and carried her out of frame.

Captain Sunlight waited patiently, every inch the dignified yellow lizard alien who wasn’t about to let someone’s gleeful offspring ruffle her calm.

The human came back, minus the child but with a new food smear on the shoulder of his crisp uniform shirt. Nobody told him. The conversation resumed with nary a giggle, and with me waiting in the hall.

“…By that timeframe or sooner,” Captain Sunlight concluded. “We can’t have your colony going without the comforts of home for long! Farewell.” She held her position as Wio flicked a button with one blue-ringed tentacle, and the screen clicked off.

“I volunteer,” I said.

A lesser captain might have twitched, but she probably knew I was there. “That saves me the trouble of finding you to ask,” she said smoothly, turning her chair. “It’s a big delivery, with multiple cases, so we’ll get a couple others to go along too.”

“Sure, sure,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll love to visit a human colony.”

“Though we won’t need too much lifting power,” she continued, “Because it’s a lower-gravity world.”

“Yay!” I said with an honest grin. “That’s even better.”

***

Getting the shipment down the ramp was surprisingly difficult, because the hoversled was calibrated for the artificial gravity inside our ship. Even with Mimi clinging to the control panel as it passed the barrier, the dang thing bounced.

I leaped to pull it down; Paint shrieked and leapt out of the way; Zhee yelled at both of us; Mimi cranked the controls and overcorrected, almost crushing my feet. I leapt back next to Paint, who had already stumbled in the low gravity and fallen on orange sand that was actually a decent match for her scales. I managed not to land on top of her.

“Got it,” Mimi grumbled in that rough voice that always seemed out of place on a guy who looked like an octopus the color of mint chip ice cream. He scrambled off the back of the sled. “Don’t touch the controls until you get back.”

“Understood,” Zhee said, clicking forward to follow the sled. He made the best exit of all of us, only springing upward a little. All those legs probably helped. Bug aliens weren’t known for tripping over their own feet — something that Zhee was insufferably smug about, and something that I would never let him live down if it actually happened. Not today, though.

The minor excitement had made it obvious that the air on this low-grav world was indeed as thin as the scans had said, and there was no point in toughing it out until we got indoors. The three of us got our feet under us and put on the vaguely-uncomfortable breathing masks, then began maneuvering the sled as a team. Really Zhee was doing all of the work while Paint and I held onto the sides and calibrated our own relationships with gravity, but we could pretend. And the long walk across the landing pad gave me a chance to take in the sights.

The landing pad itself was pretty boring; a couple silver-gray ships on one side and a wide stone building on the other. No sign of our contact yet, but the instructions had been to meet at the sun-shelter. So that’s where we went. At a hoppity-bouncy pace that probably would have looked very silly to any local humans if they were out to see us yet.

As we got closer to the big sun-shelter, I could better appreciate the way its shape seemed built to funnel cool air in and warm air out. Also the view off the cliff. I got a good look at that too, over the edges of the flat hilltop that the landing pad covered.

My first impression was: weird desert. Sandy hillsides in reds and oranges, with a sun that was just above those hills, and already hot. A bunch of alien trees scattered around that looked like they wanted to be cacti. They were almost familiar, as if they’d been designed by someone who only had third-hand descriptions of Earth plants to work with.

The low gravity let them get wild in ways that would collapse back home. The tallest ones spread up into the sky in cylinders that bent and quested out in every direction like curious snakes, but at a vast scale. Others spiraled straight up like unicorn horns, or twisted together like lumpy brains the size of a house, or feathered out like thick fan blades with fractal patterns. A couple were probably star-shaped if you cut a cross section, and the sides reached out to make dividers that were probably handy to hide behind in a sandstorm.

I was so busy looking at the cactus trees and trying to decide if they had spines or not that I was surprised when the hoversled stopped. We’d reached the shelter.

Zhee rapped on the door with his pincher arm. It was stone too, and would have hurt my knuckles.

Where is everybody? I thought, looking around at the sun-bright area. It sure is getting hot out.

The door slid wide to the welcome sight of another human, who immediately ushered us inside.

“Come come, bring it in!” she said, waving both hands and bounding aside. Her skin was dark and her clothes were drapey, and she seemed to consider the matter urgent. Given how much the top of my head was starting to cook, I didn’t blame her.

The door wasn’t big enough for the sled. So we unloaded it through the doorway, as quickly as possible, with me sliding close to the human and Zhee standing on the sled and Paint standing behind it to push boxes forward and comment that the extreme heat was kind of nice, actually.

But even she, coldblooded though she was, had to admit that shade was nicer by the time we got everything unloaded. She helped turn the hoversled on its side at the recommendation of the human, who still hadn’t introduced herself. Flipping it around was weirdly easy in the low-grav. Once we got even the sled inside the room — very spacious, that — the human closed the door and greeted us properly.

Yes, she was the contact we were supposed to meet. Taeya, how-do-you-do. Yes, the weather here did get shockingly hot quickly. No, it wouldn’t be pleasant to go back out into that, even for the short jaunt to the ship. Did we have to rush off, or was there time for a cooling beverage or two?

“There is!” I told her. “The captain said we have two hours of wiggle room in our schedule — usually there’s more, but we have some urgent deliveries — anyway, two hours, three tops, because she wanted to, uh, ‘give me time among my own herd.’” I made finger quotes.

Taeya beamed. “Then let me give you a tour! This stuff will keep; the people coming to unpack it won’t need any help from me. C’mon downstairs.”

“Downstairs?” I asked.

She hopped behind the boxes and disappeared, waving a hand to follow. “Downstairs!”

With a glance at the others, I moved forward and floated down the red stone stairs, one hopping step at a time.

And there I found civilization.

Stairs led to streets and storefronts and vast, cavernous halls, all carved out of the rock. It was built mostly around the edges of the mesa from what I could tell, a curving, circular city with lots of air flow that left the central core solid and untouched. It didn’t quite feel like home to me, but it was so impressive that I didn’t mind.

Every boulevard had high ceilings, and even high benches, out of the way of foot traffic. Most of the surfaces were either painted or carved. And everywhere I looked, humans bounced instead of walking — which did look silly no matter how they approached it.

With the drapey, flowing, colorful clothes that everyone wore, it all looked like a society of cheerful wizards. I laughed behind my breathing mask, then asked Taeya if she thought I could take it off. She wasn’t wearing one, but then her lungs were used to thin air.

“Oh yes, I should have said,” she told me with a wave of gold-and-red sleeves. “We have oxygen generators lower down, to keep things comfortable. Along with the top-notch medical suites for keeping an eye on any low-grav degradation. Offworlders tend to ask about that.” She had a distinct twinkle in her eye as she said it.

“How handy,” I said.

Zhee peered judgmentally at the lightfooted humans. “Is that how you handle muscle atrophy? With medical adjustments?”

“Partly,” Taeya said.

“Mushers!” Paint exclaimed at the same time, pointing.

I turned, looking for sled dogs and thinking back to the time Paint had gotten to ride a hoversled while I pulled. I saw no dogs now, but a cluster of rickshaws pulled by people huffing like suburban joggers. They didn’t bounce, weighted down as they were. And their passengers looked like workout buddies urging them on until they got their own turns.

“Partly things like that,” Taeya finished smoothly.

I removed my breathing mask, eyeing a nearby restaurant and a closer flower display, then took a deep lungful of body odor and broke up laughing. When the nearest passersby had moved on, hopefully toward showers, I explained to my nonhuman crewmates that sometimes our own natural smell was unpleasant to us, with insufficient hygiene. Surely I’d told them that before.

“Right, you did,” Zhee said. “I still say it’s a deeply maladaptive trait.”

“I won’t argue with you on that count,” I told him, trying to fan the air casually.

Thankfully the rest of the crowd sported a more pleasant range of scents, and we hopped on down the road.

Taeya had something else to show us before nightfall.

“Nightfall?” I asked with some concern. “We’ve only got two hours, less now. Probably closer to one.”

Taeya responded by making a sharp turn toward a row of window slits, just a few inches wide by several times my height. Outside, the sun was already getting low.

“Oh,” I said eloquently.

“It’s the perfect time to see the flitters come out,” Taeya said with another hand wave. “Come on.”

More bouncing steps, another beautiful hallway full of murals, and another curving stairway down. Then we were, surprisingly, outside.

A sprawling garden of alien succulents covered the ground, with low burrows that I noticed moments before brilliantly-colored creatures began scampering out of them. These took to the sky in flashes of movement, flitting about as the name suggested, for all the world like tiny flying carpets that had been ferrets once.

Paint wanted to know if they bit. Zhee asked if they were food. I shook my head while Taeya told them both no. They were a lovely sight, and that’s all they needed to be. Plus they ate some local pests. Always a bonus.

The air was getting chilly already, to my surprise. Taeya did something deft with her clothes, pinning the drapey bits in a way that looked suddenly much warmer, with all that cloth wrapped around her.

“If you were staying longer, I’d suggest you get a local outfit,” she told me.

I nodded. “If I was staying longer, I’d take you up on that. Looks like a good design.” Clever and foreign, in a way that looked like several familiar things at once while managing to be none of them. And certainly nothing I’d ever worn.

Staring up at the whirling flitters as the light left the sky, I felt oddly sad. So much of this was halfway familiar, not the whole-hearted taste of home that I’d hoped for. But before I could get too maudlin, Taeya waved us back toward the carved-out city.

“C’mon, back into the good air,” she said. “One last thing before we get you back up to your ship.”

I hopped quietly after her. Zhee muttered about the theoretical taste of flitter meat while Paint made stiff-legged lizard hops out of the nighttime chill.

We were only a little ways down this new hallway before I heard music.

I bounded faster.

The great hall that Taeya led us into was lined with people around the edges, standing in rows and sitting on ledges, their voices echoing as they sang toward the center. I spotted instruments at some of the higher seats. People at the bottom swayed in time.

I didn’t know the words. But I knew the sound. A crowd of humans singing together; it was a glorious thing.

This is what I’ve been missing, I thought, breathing deeply. The air here smelled like flowers and spices and laundry detergent, and it was full of the sound of home. A vast roomful of people singing the same song, voices rebounding off the walls and bodies moving in joy.

I glanced back at Zhee and Paint. They both looked a little baffled. I asked over the music, “Do your people do much singing?”

“A bit? I guess?” Paint said. “But not all together like this.”

Zhee shook his head. “Why would you use your voice for music?” he asked. “How barbaric.”

I laughed and turned to Taeya, who was happy to teach me the words. There was even a bit of dancing with the next song, and that was an adventure in low gravity. So was the next. Zhee and Paint patiently observed from the doorway.

Then when one song ended, and a fast drumbeat paved the way for the next, I was surprised to see a number of people vacate the dance floor. I started to do the same, ready to say something about getting to the ship on time.

I didn’t realize that Taeya had left until she returned. She appeared at my elbow with two padded helmets and a smile.

“We’ve moved on to quick-beat time!” she told me over the rising music. “Does your captain need you back right now, or can you stay long enough to try a low-grav mosh pit?”

Our two hours were up and I knew it. I looked to Zhee and Paint, who were close enough to hear the conversation. Paint was sitting on one of the head-height benches. She looked down at Zhee.

He turned his head away, which meant nothing with his range of vision. He harrumphed. “Don’t break anything the medsystem can’t fix.”

“I’ll do my best!” I told him with a grin as I accepted a helmet. “Besides, I hear they have good ones here.”

Surrounded by a mix of old and new, I joined my people in the time-honored tradition of dancing more far vigorously than common sense dictated. The captain had said three hours tops.

~~~

The ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book. More to come!

#my writing #The Token Human #humans are weird #haso #hfy #colony worlds #writeblr #science fiction #humans are space orcs #low gravity

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