The Sea is Full of Stars

“Grandmother! I swear to you that you need not ever fear me!”

“That is not the kind of fear I mean. Well, we will see, and so will you. I do wonder, though, if we are not jeopardizing the most wonderful and wondrous thing ever to happen to our race by having you here, threat or no threat.” She sighed. “Well, I suppose we must discover soon enough which is stronger.”

Jaysu still didn’t understand much of what the Grand High Priestess was saying, but she did understand that it was supposed to be something good in a world clearly heading into nastiness, and she was happy for that even if it did seem misplaced.

Standing before the mirror in the old ambassador’s quarters, though, she did see the physical changes. Those couldn’t be denied. The snow-white wings were so much grander than her old ones, but they did not fold as neatly because of that which was an irritation. The hair, too, was billowing white, but her skin was a golden color that was, literally, radiant, and without any sort of blemish. She did not realize and could not think of herself this way, but to others of her race she was the absolute epitome of beauty, grace, and form.

In fact, she looked like a real angel…

Jaysu walked out into the main offices and down to the small gathering hall where they’d set up a large screen to show the proceedings from the larger but still very limited auditorium. There were many other Amborans about, mostly High Priestess ranks but even a couple of males who were there as trade and political attaches, and she felt their gaze and saw them shrink back a bit from her. She was sad about that; she wanted to be their friend. (This glow of hers was an off-putting attribute, she thought, not realizing that this wasn’t what was causing the reaction to her.)

The Ambassador was at the front, standing before a podium and staring at the screen. She had a cup of golden wine for her possible thirst, but at the moment was watching what flashed on the screen and making notes on a pad in front of her on the podium.

Jaysu looked over the old one’s shoulder, wishing she could read the notes, not to eavesdrop but to have the ability.

And, almost as soon as the thought came to her, she could! It wasn’t as if the notes assembled themselves into understandable words and phrases, she just knew what was written. She looked up at the screen, and at the scratches beneath the person who was talking, who resembled a large humanoid weed with a giant leaf on its head, and the scratches were gone, replaced with Doctor Varada 237A, Political Science, Czill Center.

She knew after arriving here of the strange little devices called translators that were implanted in a chosen few, including all the ambassadors, but she didn’t think they worked with writing, and she didn’t have one anyway.

But she could understand what was being said. Well, she could hear the words as if they were spoken in Amboran, anyway. The sense of it was something else again, and that didn’t come intuitively, at least not yet.

“… Just how Josich was able to integrate so completely and so quickly with just the right warlord at just the right moment we may never know, but we are faced with the fact of it. Since we have had few conquerors in the recorded history of the Well World, we have little to go on in any event, but the others were all apparently home grown, although some reprocessed individuals have become involved in various movements in the past as advisers or even warriors. Never before as a leader and catalyst, though. As to what sort of conqueror we have here, we do not need to extrapolate from Chalidangian history and sociology, nor would it be totally appropriate when dealing with this sort of individual. Fortunately, we’ve had others arrive from the same sector of the same galaxy who had quite specific knowledge of this very Josich and his family. We can, therefore, extrapolate a pattern from a previous attempt to do the same thing on a more, er, interstellar scale.”

Jaysu turned away, marveling at being able to read and understand such things, but finding him both confusing and boring. She knew there was someone of pure evil who was killing and enslaving many somewhere, and that this was a gathering of all the races in the region that might come face-to-face with it at some time, but that was about it, and it was all she wanted to know. Evil was present to test the mortal for worthiness and to allow for mortals to freely choose the correct or the incorrect path to immortality. Warriors fought wars, and priestesses fought on a different plane, against the evil spirits behind it all.

She still wasn’t sure what she was doing here. “Requested,” Grandmother had said, but requested by whom? Nobody in the embassy, that was for sure. Nobody here seemed comfortable around her. She longed to be back in Ambora among her own clan and with her own priestesses. This was an ordeal; until now she’d never realized just how horrible an existence this was, and she had new respect for the Grand High Priestess and the others who lived and worked here all or most of the time. No fresh air, no mountains or sea, no birds and insects and gentle breezes and great storms that freshened the air and watered the soil. This city and its gathering places might be necessary, but it was no way to live.

She wanted to go home!

Kalindan Embassy, South Zone

Inspector Shissik. was only there for a few hours, space being what it was, but he was fascinated by this mob scene and appreciated the chance to get this one look at a place he’d long heard of but had never before seen.

Psychologist Mellik had summoned him, and he’d wasted no time in answering, although the required passes took a while.

It was like swimming in lava tubes, he decided. Wall-to-wall water-breathing races, none of them familiar, going to and fro along long, dark tubular halls. Fortunately, they had set up internally lit signs with the national symbols, along with small kiosks where you could state your hex and get a detailed map to where its embassy might be. He needed it.

The embassy was a hybrid one, which was very useful when your race had even limited air breathing capacity. Most of the offices and such were underwater at optimal pressure, but signs indicated an upper level that was in air and dry. He didn’t like being in air much; you crawled on your belly or rode in a stupid wheelchair gizmo and you felt like your head was about to blow up and you were always short of breath, but sometimes it was necessary. One of the aides checked his credentials and told him, “You are required up top, Inspector. Psychologist Mellik is already there and is expecting you.”

He followed the arrows and soon felt the pressure cease, then broke the surface. The gills struggled for a moment, then his autonomic reflexes kicked in and he felt like a giant hand squeezed every bit of water out of him and that it all squirted out of the back of his head. Then that area opened again and took in a huge gulp of air and his small lungs inflated rather painfully. The sensation ceased fairly quickly, though, and he made his way to the ramp and railing and pulled himself up onto the dry tile floor. He was breathing okay now, but it never felt right.

He looked around, saw more bureaucrats, mostly in those sidesaddle wheelchairs, but nobody seemed interested in him. “Excuse me!” he called, his voice echoing irritatingly against the tile floor and walls. He never did get used to how sound acted in air. “I’m here to see Psychologist Mellik!”

There was no particular interest from the couple nearest him, but someone came out of somewhere and he heard a woman call, “Sorry about that, Shissik! I’m afraid all the chairs are in use, but you can use the wire and posts setup to come up or just do a hand walk. We’ll wait for you!”

Grumbling about bureaucrats and amenities and the fact that seven of the thirteen Hells had to be filled with air, he turned on his belly and pulled himself along a wire stretched for this purpose along the floor until he was on the main level, then went hand over hand, dragging his long tail, toward the familiar figure in the chair.

“In here,” Mellik invited him. “You’ll be more comfortable in the conference room, I think.”

In fact, it was very nice at that, he saw, consisting of both dry areas and shallow rectangular pools made for the Kalindan form. He’d expected to see one or both of the strange dual personalities there as well, but Mellik had somehow managed to keep things private.