Then it is Flur’s turn. She had expected to stand up to give her presentation, and it feels odd to speak from the balanced suspension of the hammock, without much preamble except the turning of expectant, one-eyed faces towards her. She takes out the small projector they brought, and aims a three-dimensional frame of the rotating Earth into the middle of the room, slightly closer to the president’s seat. Her presentation is brief and colorfuclass="underline" a short introduction to the history and cultures of Earth, glossing over war, poverty, and environmental degradation and focusing on the beauty and hope integral to human and other biodiversity, with subtle nods to technological and, even more subtly, military power. The aliens seem impressed by the projection, although there is too much light in the room for it to come through at its full sparkling vividness. Flur wonders if they hear her spiel at all.
She nods at Tsongwa, and he takes over, describing their proposed agreement, or framework. Leaning back in her hammock as he steps through the template, explaining why each section is important and the degrees of flexibility on each point, Flur has to admit he’s quite good: understated, yes, but that seems to fit the mood better than she had expected. Before they left she had, privately, suggested to the Mission Director that they switch roles, so that she could take on the key task of persuasion, but although he seemed to consider it, he had not made the change. Flur knows she would have been good, and her Cyclopean is slightly better than Tsongwa’s, but he has learned his piece down to the last inflection. He even seems to have taken on the president’s mannerisms, looking down and to the side and only occasionally, at key points, making eye contact.
There is a pause after he finishes, then the president sways, signaling her intention to speak. “For such a momentous occasion,” she croons, “we will need to discuss with the high council.”
During the pause while the council is called, Flur cannot help fretting about their deadline. Why wasn’t the council there from the beginning, if they are needed? Will she and Tsongwa need to make their presentations again? At least her political diagrams have been partially validated, although she is still not clear on the relationship between the president and the high council, or either of them and what Mission Control has been calling the Senate. Apparently the president does not have as much direct decision-making power as they thought.
There is further singing to cover, or emphasize, the entrance of the high council, and under it Irnv points out some of the more important council members. She seems to have a tragic tale about each of them. There is a woman who lost most of her family in a storm, another whose parents abandoned her as a child. The leader of the council, surprisingly, is male; his wife drowned two days after their wedding. Unable to continue murmuring about how sorry she is, Flur is reduced to nodding along and trying not to wince. She wonders if Tsongwa, a few feet away, is getting the same liner notes from Slanks. Looking at them she guesses he is, but between the oxygen mask and the face covering, it is impossible to read his expression.
Extensive discussion follows. Flur loses concentration in the middle of hour two, and can no longer follow the foreign syllables except for occasional words: “haste,” “formality,” “foreign,” “caution.” Dazed and unable to recapture the thread, Flur shifts her attention to body language instead, trying to figure out who is on their side. The president doesn’t seem engaged, putting a few words in now and then but otherwise looking at the pool in the floor or at the walls. Then again, no one else is showing fire or passion either. The discussion takes place in a muted, gentle tone, councillors lounging in their hammocks, occasionally dismounting to dip their lower extremities in the shallow lavender pool. She wonders if they are showing respect for the president’s tragedy. It is when she catches the president actually wiping a tear away from the corner of her large eye that she leans over to Irnv.
“Maybe the president is, um, a little distracted?” she asks.
Irnv looks back at her but says nothing, and Flur hesitates to interpret her facial expression.
“She seems quite…” Flur notices another tear slip down the furrows in the president’s faded-leaf face. Thinking of her lost family, she is wrung by an unexpected vibration of sympathy. “Maybe she could use a break?” What Flur could use now is a moment to talk to Tsongwa in private, to strategize some way of moving this along.
She wasn’t expecting her comment to have any immediate effect, but Irnv leans forward and says something to someone, who says something to someone else, and a moment later everyone is getting up from their swings. Flur cringes, but maybe it’s for the best; they certainly weren’t getting anywhere as it was.
“We will take a short refreshment break,” Irnv tells her. “Come, I will show you the place.”
They file into a corridor beside Tsongwa and Slanks. Flur tries to exchange glances with Tsongwa, hoping that however the refreshment is served, it will allow them some tiny degree of privacy to talk, even if only in their limited sign language. Food would be nice too, but since the breathing apparatuses they are wearing make eating impractical, their suits are fitted with intravenous nutrition systems. They won’t get hungry until they’re long dead of oxygen deprivation. Flur is wondering how to explain this to Irnv in some way that will make their refusal of refreshments less impolite when Tsongwa and Slanks turn off the corridor through a small opening draped in purple. Flur starts to follow but Irnv catches her arm with her three serpentine fingers.
“Not in there,” she whispers. “That’s the men’s side.”
They take a few more steps forward and then slide through an opening with crimson curtains on the opposite side of the corridor. The space is smaller than Flur expected, and there is no one else there, but in the far wall is a row of curtained, circular passages, like portholes. Irnv gestures Flur toward one, then wriggles into the cubbyhole beside it. After a moment of hesitation, Flur pokes her head into the hole. Inside is a low space, a small nest with cloth and cushions everywhere and a shelf with several small jars holding different items: violet straw, green powder, ivory slivers the size of a thumbnail. Flur pulls her head out, but the drape has already fallen in front of the Irnv’s opening. Flur crawls into her own nook, lets the curtain down behind her, and leans her head back against the unsettlingly soft wall.
It is so obvious she doesn’t even want to whisper it into her comms (although Tsongwa is probably doing just that at this same moment, on the men’s side), because surely they’ve figured it out by now: Eating is a social taboo. That’s why they cover their mouths all the time. Of course they hadn’t mentioned this during the previous discussions, any more than earthlings would have said, “By the way, we don’t discuss defecation.” Fortunately, because of the intravenous nutrition and the assumption that they wouldn’t be able to eat alien food, no one at Mission Control brought the matter up during protocol discussions for the trip. Flur wonders what the reaction would have been. Embarrassed silence? A quick, mature resolution of the question and no more said about it? Giggles?
Even though she’s not going to eat (she does take samples from each of the jars for her specimen cases), Flur finds the isolation soothing. She would like to sit in this cozy womb, silently, for at least ten or twenty minutes, breathing slowly and remembering why she’s here. Instead she talks to Mission Control.