Distant Atmospheres Daily 1000

Heather Had Managed to Slip Away from Her Assigne... (1115#)

Heather had managed to slip away from her assigned table; she pushed the door to what she deduced from the diagram painted on it was the Ladies Room—the one for humans—and stepped inside.

It was empty. There was a line of sinks against one mirrored wall, and a row of stalls along the wall on the other side. Heather stepped in front of the mirror and inspected her face. Behind her, a toilet flushed and then a young woman pushed the stall door open and took a place at one of the sinks.

“You managed to get away too?” she said to Heather’s image in the mirror.

“Yes.” Heather didn’t recognize her, but she could read the large letters NC on the woman’s blue-rimmed tag, which she wore on her blouse, just as Heather’s tag said DE. “I’m Heather Rouse, from Delaware.”

“Jody Simmons, North Carolina. How are you liking it so far?”

Heather shrugged. “It’s not what I expected.”

“Oh, I know,” Jody said. “How about those whatever-they-ares from Ganymede? Did you see them?”

Heather had done more than just see them; she knew most of them, had spoken to them, and had even visited one of the Ganymedeans, the one who was called Kim, in her home in Dover, Delaware. Heather volunteered at a relocation agency in Dover and had been assigned to help Kim and her family integrate into the human population. Kim had been eager to adapt, and she had done well, quickly learning how to interact with humans without drawing excessive attention to the rather extreme physical, chemical, and cultural differences between them.

She had invited Heather for a home visit, and Heather had accepted. Ganymedean culture did not allow for the sharing of meals with strangers, or even with members of the otherwise close Ganymedean family units—it would be like asking a friend to join you in the bathroom while you defecate. So Heather arrived at Kim’s house late in the evening, well after the dinner hour. She parked her car and walked up the walk, but as she was climbing the steps to the porch, Kim opened the door. Kim’s mouthparts moved, and the yellow box attached to her breastplate activated. “Ah. Thank you for coming, please come on in,” it said in a pleasant, computer-generated voice.

“Thank you,” Heather had replied, and she stepped inside.

From the outside, the house looked like any other upper-middle-class mini-mansion that populated the lone exclusive suburb west of Dover. This one was a Cape Cod model, with steep gables that jutted forward and back. Inside, it did not resemble any house interior that Heather had ever seen or was likely to see. There were no interior walls at all. Inside, a packed-dirt ramp led down to a pit that occupied the entire area of the house; it was as if the shell of a house had been built over an open hole, which is exactly what had been done. The ramp descended quite steeply, and at its bottom, the dirt floor was peppered with holes at random intervals. To the side of the pit, pushed up against the dirt wall, was a small table, completely empty, and a single chair. Kim gestured at the table. “I set that up for you. Please have a seat.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” Heather said. She crossed the dirt floor, gracefully avoiding the holes, pulled out the chair, and sat down.
Kim followed her and assumed a posture on the dirt floor that was roughly equivalent to the posture that Heather had taken on the chair. Ganymedean anatomy did not allow for sitting on chairs, of course, and the posture that Kim took didn’t look very comfortable, but Heather knew it was a mistake to attribute human characteristics or expectations to her host. “It’s a pleasure to have you here. As soon as the Sun is fully down, the children should be waking up, and perhaps one of them will make an appearance.”

“That would be fine,” Heather responded, although she hoped that she would be gone before any of the juveniles awoke.

Ganymedeans were insectoid, and so their young pupated, but before that occurred, they were generally nocturnal, and generally did not become active until well into the night. Juvenile Ganymedeans were only marginally sentient, and so they didn’t always behave carefully around humans. Kim had brought some of her young into the relocation center, and did seem to have good control over their behavior, and so Heather hadn’t worried about it much, but now that she was in the home and now that she saw the number of gestation holes in the floor—there were literally dozens of them—she found herself wondering of Kim could control that many juveniles at once if they all woke up and started crawling around.

As if on cue, from one of the holes in the floor, a juvenile Ganymedean raised its sensing tentacle and peered at Heather; as soon as Heather noticed, the tentacle jerked back into the hole, but Kim noticed. There was a series of gentle grinding sounds as her mouthparts moved, sounds which the translation box didn’t translate. Unknown to Heather, there was a register that Kim used with her brood that the translator circuitry could recognize and which it had been instructed not to translate, which was just as well, because generally there would have been no translation for what Kim would be saying to her children, or even what she might say to other adult Ganymedeans. In the four years since the Ganymedeans had arrived on Earth, their language had proved to be completely impenetrable to humans—only by virtue of the Ganymedeans efforts to adapt to human ideas of communication and with the help of the translation boxes, which nearly every adult Ganymedean wore on her breastplate while in public, could communication take place at all. Then Kim switched registers to something that the box would translate. “No, the brood will not come out tonight. They’ll pass the night in their holes.”

“Oh, are you sure?” Heather asked. She was secretly relieved; she really didn’t know how to engage with the mostly unresponsive juveniles, and she generally ignored them when they were in the center.

“Yes,” Kim said. “They must follow my directions, and I said no peeping.”

After Heather replayed this scene in her mind, she returned her attention to the delegate from North Carolina. “I have some experience with them. I’m a volunteer at one of our relocation centers.”

“Oh,” the delegate said, her face communicating her disgust. “Well, see you out there.” She turned and strode out of the bathroom door.

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