"I don't understand that phrase."
"Is he in another room close?"
The lady looked at the computer she carried and touched a couple places.
"Yes, he's two doors down the hall."
"Why don't you go peek in at him and everything will be clear."
When she came back she was chuckling, with a grin like a Great White and wasn't worried Lee would take it wrong. Neither did she hang back to avoid scaring her.
"Whatever 'step' means, that Derf is one fine looking hunk, in case you didn't know it. You put in a good word for doctor Shaborbroh if you get a chance."
"He's rich too," Lee told her and got another genuine laugh. She wandered if the doctor was what Derf considered good looking too? She'd have to ask Gordon how to tell. Maybe have him point out examples. She'd been away from people so long growing up she wasn't sure she even knew what was good looking or ugly for her own species. Sometimes the examples they put forth in movies and vid didn't make sense to her. Everything she'd read made it clear it was important to a lot of people. All of a sudden she realized she didn't know if she was pretty or plain. Unc' was right. This dealing with groups was going to be complicated.
When she was done Lee was probably cleaner than she'd ever been before, still slightly damp and terribly hungry because her entire digestive tract had been flushed out and examined. She smelled of antiseptic and even her ears had been swabbed for cultures and peered in and carefully cleaned. They'd decided she could keep her hair. She could have put up with losing it, but she wondered how Uncle Gordon would like being shaved?
The doctor returned and gave her two packets, one to be added to her next meal and the other a tube of gel to be rubbed all over her skin.
"You can start on the gel now if you want. You've had the bacteria stripped from you so thoroughly you need to restore the beneficial varieties and these are cultures of them."
Her clothing was not processed yet so she was waiting for them, sitting on the Derf idea of a blanket, on a Derf examination table about the size of a billiard table. The top was almost to her armpit level off the floor and she'd had to jump and throw a leg over the edge, to make it up there when she first came in. She started at her toes and rubbed little dabs of the gel all over. It seemed to be oil based instead of water, so it wasn't cold.
It helped that Derf kept the temperature at a very comfortable level for a human in skin, instead of freezing their patients in paper gowns like human doctors. It was quite different than the dimly remembered one time in her life she'd seen a human doctor. That had been when she was six years old and she'd had a physical and inoculations, the first time they returned to civilization after her birth.
* * *
Humans were common enough on the orbital station that there were plenty of restaurants with human scale chairs and silverware. The guide book said the port below was the same too. Out in the countryside though, humans had best have their own silverware and pillows, clothing and medicines, or do without. The guide suggested a folding step stool was a handy thing to have along too.
When released, they went straight to a restaurant. It was between usual meal times, so it wasn't crowded. Lee ordered like she'd never eat again. Most of the Derf items on the menu were things she'd tried, because Gordon had them along on the ship. She was offered a human menu and ordered off it and off the Derf menu too. A double cheeseburger with sweet onion relish didn't surprise the waiter, but a bowl of devil horn soup from the Derf sheet did. It was mixing bowl size and full of an egg drop broth with little black peppers, that rivaled habañeros for heat.
There were tables with Derf and tables with Humans. There were even a few tables with a mix. But there were no other children of either species in the restaurant and everybody was trying hard not to stare at the pair of them. They might as well have gone ahead and satisfied their curiosity, for all the success they were having.
While they waited they plotted. "While we're here you should see a few of the sights. You never really know when you'll get back. It's been fifteen years for me and that wasn't something I planned," Gordon told her.
"Does your family know we're coming?"
"I dropped them mail, said we'd be around. Things don't change very quickly in a Derf holding. I expect things will look much the same as when I left. We'll spend a week at least. Anything less would suggest we didn't really want to be there. Derf do things slower than humans. Some of that is probably because we live longer. You knew that didn't you?"
"Yes, I know that Derf can live over two hundred T-years. But I have no idea how old you are, Unc'."
"I'm coming up on seventy, sneaking up on middle age for a Derf. Not old enough they will try to get me to settle down back at home, but old enough to get a little respect from the youngsters who remember me from my last visit. There are some other places we should see while we're here. We should see the Richards' monument and graveyard."
"Who's he and when did he die?"
"Oh, nobody knows what happened to Richards. It's his monument, but the graveyard part is for some of his crewmates who died here. That's who is in the cemetery. He jumped out of Fargone twenty years or so ago on an explorer like us and the ship was never seen again. He was the commander on the ship that discovered Derf, discovered for humans that is, since we've been here all along of course. You haven't read the story?"
"No, I know it was about seventy years ago. I haven't read much modern history. Dad has been having me study lots of old stuff, pre-space stuff." Lee got her soup then, so Gordon told her the story while she ate.
"Our first contact we had with outsiders - humans - was with a big company ship. They located a group of Derf out on a hunt. It was as if an alien race surveyed a modern Earth and decided to contact a family of Mongol herders instead of setting down in Moscow. It might have seemed safer to them, but it was a slow way to initiate contact, because the people with real authority were in the clan keeps."
"The group was seasonal hunters and trappers and they appeared to have a pretty low level of tech to the humans, because they used mostly bronze for their axes and arrow points. They were clansmen sent to hunt in the fall and then returned to their keep to winter over. Not what humans think of as true nomads."
"There were no radio emissions, so they assumed Derf had no electronics. Truth was, even then, most clan seats were connected by shielded telephone lines, radio was slow to be adapted because our star interferes with it so much. Derf made good steel too, but it was expensive and limited in use to such things as better knives and surgical instruments. In fairness some of that was the fact we have some really exceptional bronze alloys that substitute well for steel. We even had firearms, although they were very expensive and rare."
"Derf can pull a stiff bow and we're the biggest thing in the woods, so we don't need guns for protection. We killed off the few predators who could challenge us in our prehistory. And it's been about twelve hundred years since we had a clan war, so there isn't any big market for military weapons."
"The humans sent a shuttle down, spread blankets and put out some trade goods near the clansmen. The Derf came in cautiously. That was just smart if you consider they had never seen anything before that was clearly a flying artifact. We have no history of UFO sightings in popular culture like you people. After three days of feeling each other out, most of both sides felt safe to visit."
"They traded a few words and were starting to trade a few trinkets. They were getting a feel for relative value. Some things there was no interest in, and they would be withdrawn by the side that offered them. The Humans ran a camera on the shuttle recording it all and the Derf sent a junior member of their party as a runner to inform their clan."
"On the third day one of the shuttle crew made a mistake. One felt intimidated and took a step back and put her hand on her gun. They might have been country folk, but the Derf weren't stupid. They knew what weapons were, just by how they were carried and they knew what firearms were, even if they didn't hav
e such a luxury."
"The Derf was a female, like the crew-person and pointed at the hand on pistol and used one of the few words they knew. She said quite clearly on the video - 'No.' Second mistake the Earthies made was another of the crew, misreading the confrontation between the crew woman and Derf, grabbed his weapon too. But he made the fatal error of trying to draw it. Derf custom is crystal clear; if you draw a weapon, it's assumed you intend to use it."
"The poor fellow had a bronze ax in his breast bone, before he even fully cleared leather. Once it goes bad like that, with everybody drawing weapons, there's no recovering and the shuttle video showed it was over in three seconds. Final score was Derf: 7, Humans: 0, bronze against modern weapons."
"Ouch."
"Indeed. Here my people are, with a bunch of dead aliens on their hands and they didn't know what to do with them. I mean they were obviously people, so they couldn't just let them lay exposed, but they didn't know if they buried their dead, or cremated them, or what. They didn't know if any more they met would be hostile or not and didn't want to further antagonize them.
"So the Derf did what they'd do for their own. They cut wood and built great stacked funeral pyres and laid the bodies on top in as good an order as they could. All this was in front of the camera on the shuttle, although they didn't know that it was watching them. But they didn't light the pyres; they left one male to guard them against scavengers and withdrew."
"Now because the humans had a big ship, they had a second shuttle. They could have been stupid and wiped the Derf party out from the air. Or they could have tried a new contact somewhere else, thinking word would not get out, since they didn't know we had phones."
"Fortunately for everybody Commander Richards had a brain, just like our male who made the funeral pyres and he watched the video off the grounded shuttle several times. The Derf treated his dead with respect and stole nothing of the trade goods laid out. He related later, that made him decide to land a crew to recover the first shuttle and he went down too."
"He did something that was quite brave. He tossed his gun belt in the airlock and walked down to meet the Derf unarmed. The male there reciprocated by lodging his ax in a tree, before walking up to Richards. Not that he needed it given his mass and claws, but it was a nice gesture. Once they were talking again the Derf called in his eldest female of the hunters, to be principal voice. They made especially sure the humans understood Derf custom about drawing a weapon."
"The basic agreement they held out for was that Derf be treated exactly equal to Humans. Now remember, this is a work party they contacted at random. Not some clan elders who were used to negotiating with their peers. And hunters, not some city folk, or traders who are used to doing business deals. So they did a hell of a job of representing for our whole race with the first aliens we'd ever seen."
"Commander Richards agreed to equality eventually, although it took some days. I'm sure, now that I know humans well, that he knew it would not go over well at home. Final version was - Humans would follow Derf law on Derfhome and Derf would follow Human law on Earth. They also established right there at the start that Humans and Derf could buy and sell land outside of clan territories as individuals, but there would be no extraterritoriality. Derf would not be forced onto reservations, or concede tracts of land to Humans."
"When word got back to Earth a lot of people were unhappy with Commander Richards. But it was within his authority to negotiate and it was affirmed by a Congress who accepted his word that his people were in error and worried about creating enemies. It's certainly better than the treaties anyone else has gotten from Man. As far as we're concerned he was a great statesman. It wasn't Humans that put up a monument to him, it was we Derf."
"I'd like to see that," Lee agreed. "Did they honor your people on the monument too?"
"That's not our way of doing things. It would be an embarrassment to anyone still alive. That was only seventy years ago. Maybe later after they have died we might add them. This was so soon after I was born I was too young to remember it, so they still count me in the generation born before contact. And you know, I bet maybe one in ten thousand humans have ever actually seen a Derf still. There's just too damn many of you."
"But almost everybody has seen pictures," Lee pointed out. "Not that they do you justice." She decided to share what the doctor told her about his being a 'hunk'. Just then his food came and no matter how she prodded him he wouldn't discuss it pretending to have his mouth full and ignoring that topic. She gave up and worked on an apple-caramel confection with vanilla ice cream, until one more bite and she'd need to be carried away.
"Oh my, that's so much better than ration packs," Lee told him.
"Your days of eating ration packs are over," Gordon said laughing. "Just don't expect everything to be this fancy in the back country, when you meet my family. This is a five star restaurant. Just having a live waiter tells you it's ritzy. There might be half a dozen places in the system that can cook like this and three of them are probably on station. My family cooks simple, peasant style, humans would say. But it's fresh and in season, even if it isn't all fancy sauces and garnishes."
"Can we afford this?" Lee asked, really looking around for the first time.
"We have enough cash to live very well for some months and once we reveal some of our claim we'll have a letter of credit before we go to Earth, that will let you buy this place if you want on a whim."
"I'm so stuffed I'd take a low G hotel room if they have them here."
"I already got us rooms at the Lunar Suites. It's about seventy percent G, but the restaurant is about ten percent over because that's Derf standard. In a half hour you'll be complaining you're hungry anyway."
It was a nasty lie. It took over an hour.
* * *
Lee woke up in the dark and strained to see something. There was a pale blue glow of a night light shining out of the bathroom door. A couple sparks of color that glowed here and there where LEDs, marking the location of electronics in the dark. The hotel smelled different than their ship and despite sound deadening, faint strange noises and thumps bothered her sleep.
Gordon was curled up backed into the corner of the room and she was in his arms where she'd been sleeping every night for the last month. She felt safe there and neither of them could see any reason she should be all alone in a cold bed. In fact they had taken a Derf room that didn't have a human bed, just a padded sleeping mat.
Chapter 4
It might be awhile before she felt safe again. There had been a couple times she'd woke her Uncle Gordon with a bad dream and she was afraid he would make her sleep alone if she kept waking him up. Somehow, being held safe by seven hundred kilos of ferocious personal protector eased the dreams.
It did bother her she had to leave her pistol on the ship, right when she felt so vulnerable. She'd had it just the last six months while they explored Providence, long enough she'd grown used to having it on her belt. Her mom had delivered one of those, "We have to talk about this," discussions with her and impressed her with how it was a big, adult responsibility, a notable step in growing up.
After instructing her several sessions she'd given Lee the translucent plastic pistol to keep with her. You could see the cream colored slim rounds packed inside, thirty-six of them in a magazine. She'd practiced a lot with it on Providence, assured they had lots of ammunition. It was semi-suppressed, the muzzle blast attenuated. Nothing could entirely mitigate the shock wave the hypervelocity projectiles created.
The little three millimeter weapon didn't have the punch of the ones the adults carried, but it had been more than enough to stop a predator trying to chew its way into her sleeping bag. All that target practice hadn't meant much. Every time one had started chewing at the bag, she jammed the little pistol against its prodding head and fired through the bag.
Sometimes it took two or three shots before it stopped thrashing, but eventually she had been buried in a mound of dead dinos. At one point she was
worried she'd be squashed under the weight of corpses, instead of eaten. It was no wonder she had dreams. But despite the comfort it brought, Uncle Gordon explained by law you simply don't carry on a habitat.
After awhile the lights came up, as Gordon had asked the house computer to do last night. He was breathing slow one second and then there was that little pause when he woke, where he was even stiller than in his sleep for an instant, listening and looking around him.
"Good morning my little morsel. Would you like to go out to breakfast, or shall I just eat you right here?"
"Like to see you try. I'm tough," she informed him and gave him a little thump on the chest.
"Yes and probably stringy and too salty as well. Perhaps instead, some pancakes with berries and whipped cream and a side of eggs and sausage?" He knew her tastes well.
"And some bagels with cream cheese and lox. But none for you," she remembered quickly. "Otherwise they'd have to evacuate the station."
"But you will sit and eat it in front of me, knowing I can't partake?"
"I'll tell you how good it is so you can, uh, enjoy me enjoying it."
"Vicariously is the word you are looking for. I want to hear you find opportunity to use it three times today, as your language lesson. That doesn't get you out of your Japanese lesson though. After breakfast we have to buy you some clothes. We have an appointment with the bank this afternoon and you should wear something nicer than shorts and a t-shirt."
"Why? You'll be wearing fur and maybe some boots. Or are you going to buy some pants?" she started giggling picturing him in pants. "Maybe some lederhosen and a cute pair of suspenders with flowers on them," she suggested, laughing harder the more she got into it.
"Oh I'm going to buy something to wear," he agreed solemnly, "but it's a surprise. You'll be getting one too. But it would serve you right if I did the lederhosen. I've been reading about raising human children. My understanding is it's a vital part of socialization for parents to play the buffoon, so their children are humiliated and shamed by being seen in public with them. Walking along with me in lederhosen should fill the bill nicely."
Family Law Page 3
