“How long would it take for us to get back without that canal?” Flur asks the air in front of her nose.
“We calculate walking would add another hour to the journey,” answers Winin, the desk officer assigned to her earpiece. “That’s with no obstacles or disruptions of the sort that might come from visitors from outer space walking through a major city.”
“So about two and a half hours total,” Flur muses.
“You’ve still got some time,” Winin assures her.
“Yeah, but we’re coming up on the limit we gave them.” Flur lowers her voice, wondering how sound travels among these cubicles.
“Well, you can find an excuse to extend that, if you have to. How does it look?” Winin asks, as though she hadn’t seen and heard everything that happened herself.
“Can you patch me in to Tsongwa?” A moment later she hears his voice.
“…very interesting, how many things we did not foresee.”
“It is, it’s fascinating. I think we can consider that alone a success, a complete validation of the need for this expensive face-to-face visit in addition to all the other communication.”
Flur is a little surprised to hear the Mission Director. So Tsongwa went straight to the top during his break. She clears her throat. “Hey Tsongwa, how’s the food on your side?”
He lets loose his surprisingly relaxed chuckle. “We’ll have to ask the lab techs later,” he says.
The Mission Director is not interested in small talk at this juncture. “Now that I’ve got you two together, what do you think? Can we get the agreement signed today?”
There is a moment of silence, and Flur realizes that, through the layers of alien building material and empty alien atmosphere that separate them, she and Tsongwa are feeling exactly the same thing.
“It seems unlikely,” she offers, at the same time as he says, “I doubt it.”
The Mission Director lets out a whoosh of breath. “Well. That’s a shame.”
“It’s not a no,” Tsongwa clarifies. “They need more time.”
“Maybe if we could talk to someone else,” Flur says, looking for some hope. “The president doesn’t seem up for it right now, with all she’s been through.”
She’s hoping that Tsongwa did not get the full tragic history and will have to ask what she means. Instead he says, “Actually…” He pauses to order his thoughts and in that pause Flur hears a rustling and then her name called, very softly, from the other side of the curtain.
“Gotta go,” she whispers, and then slides out of the cubbyhole.
Irnv is reclining in a hammock-harness outside the cushioned wall of nests, still within the women’s area. Her face covering is loosened and hanging down below her chin, and although Flur is careful not to stare at the dark purple, circular mouth, she finds she is already acclimatized enough to be shocked. The orifice seems to be veiled on the inside by a membrane of some kind, and doesn’t fully close. Struck by the curiosity of the forbidden, Flur wishes she could see how they eat.
“Do we have to get back now?” she asks, wondering too late if she should thank her host for the food she couldn’t ingest.
“We have some time still,” Irnv says. “I don’t know how you do it, but here we usually relax and socialize after eating.”
“It is… like that for us too,” Flur says, wondering if she is right about the translation for ‘socialize.’ Following Irnv’s graceful nod, she climbs into the hammock next to her and tries to put a relaxed expression on her face. Where is everyone else? They must have designated special eating rooms for the aliens and their handlers.
“Flur,” Irnv says, and Flur snaps out of it. “What does your name mean?”
Rather than try to define a general noun, Flur takes out her palm screen and presses a combination she had pre-loaded. “Like this,” she says, holding it out to Irnv as the screen runs through hyperphotos of flowers, all different kinds.
“Ahhh,” Irnv strokes the screen appreciatively, stopping the montage on a close-up of a wisteria cluster.
“And you?” Flur asks, trying to keep up her end of the socializing.
Irnv looks up, her head tilted at an angle that is so clearly questioning that Flur begins to trust her body language interpretation again. “Your name,” she says. “What does it mean?”
“Star,” Irnv replies, with a curious sort of bow.
“Oh, I thought star was ‘trenu,’” Flur says.
“Yes, trenu, star. Irnv is one trenu. A certain trenu.”
Flur finds herself tilting her head exactly the way that Irnv did a few minutes ago, and Irnv obligingly explains.
“Irnv is the name of your star. Your… planet? We tried to pronounce it like you, but this is our version.”
Terre. Earth. Irnv. But “pronounce it like you?” They have only been in contact for a few years. How old is Irnv?
“And your family?” Irnv asks, while Flur is still turning that over. “Where are you from?”
“An island,” Flur says, one of the first words she learned in Cyclopan. She takes her palm screen back and brings up globes, maps, Ayiti. She hadn’t prepared anything about her family, though. “Many brothers and sisters,” she says. She thinks of the video that was made for the launch party, presenting a highly sanitized version of her backstory, and wonders why nobody thought to load that into her drive. Maybe it wouldn’t translate well; their research has not pinned down the alien version of the heartwarming, life-affirming family unit. “We used to raise chickens,” she says, unexpectedly, and quickly pulls up a picture of a chicken on the screen, and in her mind, the memory of chasing one with her brothers.
Irnv blinks her single eye. “They are all well? Your brothers and sisters?”
“Well?” It’s a hard concept to define. The pause feels like it’s stretching out too long. “They’re fine. We’re just fine.”
A beat. “And how were you chosen for this?”
“Oh,” Flur says. These are all questions they should have prepared for. She can’t imagine, now, why they thought the conversation would be all business all the time. “Well, I went to school, and there were… competitions.” She can’t remember the word for tests. “And then more school.”
Irnv is nodding, but Flur reads it as more polite than comprehending, and she’s trying to remember the words, find the right phrase to explain it, how it’s not just written tests, but also character, leadership qualities, sacrifices, observations by instructors and mentors, toughness, drills…
“…happy to have you here,” the alien is saying, with seeming earnestness.
Flur rouses herself back to her job. “We are very happy to be here too,” she manages. “But we will have to go home soon, and we would really like to complete this agreement. For the future.”
Irnv leans back in her hammock. “We hope so. But it is a very short time.”
“It is,” Flur agrees, with as regretful a tone as she can summon. “The president…” she trails off, delicately.
“The president is a great woman,” Irnv says, in a tone that sounds to Flur very close to reverence.
“She is,” Flur agrees, disingenuously. Pause, effort at patience. “Perhaps it’s not the best time, though, with all she’s been through recently.”
Irnv looks confused, then understands. “You mean the loss of her family? But that wasn’t recent, that was many years ago.”
Years ago?
It takes Flur a moment to recover from that, and when she does Irnv is looking at her curiously. She puts out her hand, and the supple, red-purple fingers curl around Flur’s arm. Flur is shocked to feel their warmth, faintly, through the protective space suit.