Chapter 13 – Christmas for Humans
A feeling of belonging and contentment filled Rhona as she took a long shower and then dressed in a new blouse and slacks her mother had purchased. The festive colors of the blouse went well with the black slacks. She ran her hands down the side of her legs, wondering if the Abantu had fabric that didn’t wear out quickly. She hadn’t even asked them about clothing.
She moved around the room, checking that everything was in place. Keene had helped her get ready for the party. His expression when he was helping with the decorations was nearly as cheerful as his expression when they spent time snuggling on the couch.
“Come in, come in,” Rhona called when she saw her parents in the hall through the open door of her apartment. “I’m about ready.”
“You look ready,” Judith responded. She looked around and then back at her daughter. “Where did you get all of the decorations?”
“It was Dulcis, although Keene had a number of suggestions.” Rhona gestured at the eight-foot Christmas tree standing at one side of the room. Streamers and traditional ornaments transformed the tree into a thing of beauty that blended with the other decorations and banished all thoughts of anxiety. The room was a sanctuary of warmth and safety. “I’ve been studying the instructions for making furnishings in my spare time. It’s actually quite easy to request a new item or recycle an old item.”
“It looks real,” Charles said while he knelt and placed an armload of small packages under the tree one at a time. They were covered in festive wrapping and adorned with a bow in Judith’s time-honored manner.
Rhona smiled when she stepped over beside her father. She placed one hand on his shoulder as he continued to kneel and gestured at a tree branch. “Dulcis can render an object so it looks like something else down to the cellular level. It looks like a tree and has the flexibility and feel of a freshly-cut tree. However, it doesn’t smell. I requested no fragrances.”
Charles chuckled and rose smoothly to his feet. “Some of the pine Christmas trees we used when you were small smelled like disinfectant.”
“Pine-sol.” Rhona laughed. “I haven’t smelled that odor in years.”
“I don’t miss using it either,” Judith said when she stepped between Rhona and Charles and wrapped an arm around each of them. “The room service here is wonderful.”
“Does it pick up after kids too?” Charles asked. “There aren’t any Abantu children underfoot.”
“I saw several children on Mars and Ceres,” Rhona responded as her mind kicked into gear. “Are you hinting that you want grandkids?” she demanded.
His eyes twinkled while Charles shook his head. “That was actually a pragmatic comment about housekeeping. But, you can take it any way you want.”
“Hello,” Keene called from the doorway. “Did I break up a somber moment?” He walked across the room also carrying a couple of packages.
Rhona hugged Keene. “It wasn’t somber until Dad said something about kids.”
“You’d think I dropped a bomb,” Charles joshed. “I was actually thinking about the room service when the topic came up.”
“No KP is great,” Keene responded. His face indicated he was willing to focus on any topic other than children.
The private moment faded when other people arrived. Soon, all ten humans living in the facility were there. In addition, Trixie accompanied Sam and Geena accompanied Wade and Sheryl.
Rhona greeted everyone and then gestured at a small table laden with food. “We’re skipping dinner, so we’ll eat first. I made the mistake of asking Dulcis if she had any recipes for Christmas.”
“How many did she have?” Elaine asked.
“About two thousand distinct ideas and at least a dozen variations on each of them.” Rhona laughed. “I narrowed it to a few festive snacks, two main dishes, and two side dishes. I really like the little snowmen made out of strawberries and cream cheese.”
The casual conversation and festive mood caused time to pass quickly. Even though Rhona sipped two glasses of wine, she didn’t feel like she had imbibed any alcohol. Finally, she remembered Nanda’s description of DNA changes that brought a higher tolerance for alcohol–about ten times the normal tolerance. However, Nanda had been describing the changes an Abantu endured to adopt a human-like appearance. Was Nanda tinkering with alcohol tolerance along with the other things she was changing in Rhona?
Finally, Rhona sought out Geena. “Would you and Sheryl like to hand out the gifts? We’re ready to open them.”
Wade was close enough to overhear the conversation. He had met Geena just after Christmas the previous year, not knowing that Christmas celebrations were not part of her heritage. “Sheryl would love to help,” he said in response to Geena’s glance.
Everyone found a place to sit, and several, including Rhona, choose to sit on the floor. The floor felt like the responsive mat gymnasts used in the floor exercise.
Sheryl ran each gift to the proper recipient as Wade and Geena read the names and handed them to her. She then settled on the floor and tore into a gift. It was a doll and accessories from her parents. She looked up at her stepmother and spoke with all of the seriousness of an adult. “What toys did you play with when you were a little girl, Mother?”
“That was a long time ago,” replied Geena with a smile and a pat.
“How long?” Sheryl asked.
Wade smiled when Geena looked at him. “I don’t think you’ve told me either. Why not today?”
Geena shrugged. “After accounting for time spent at relativistic velocities, I was born on October 9.”
“Which one?” Rhona prompted when Geena paused again.
Geena wiggled one finger in the air. “Let’s make it a guessing game. Consulting Dulcis, at least tonight, is considered cheating.”
“Go ahead.” Rhona was the first of several responses by the smallest of margins.
“Was it a Saturday?” Charles asked.
“Yes,” Geena replied with an amused look. “Does that help?”
“Of course. There’s a simple rule defining which years have that day on a Saturday.”
“Aren’t you assuming I was born relatively recently?”
“Sort of,” Charles admitted.
“It was the year William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello was performed for the first time at Whitehall Palace in London.”
“Hmm,” Rhona muttered while she thought. “That puts it in the first part of the 1600s.”
“We’re getting close,” Charles said with a smile. “That gives us 1604, 1611, 1618, 1625, and 1632 as possibilities.”
“Not good enough.” Geena waved her hands. “Do you need another clue?”
“It was the same day Johannes Kepler first observed a supernova.”
Rhona looked around the room. No one present had ever taken an astronomy class. She shrugged. “Do you have another clue?”
“How about a more obscure clue?” Geena leaned against Wade, obviously enjoying the evening. “It was the same year the first known English dictionary organized alphabetically was published. The small dictionary only contained 2,543 words with very brief definitions. The short name is “Table Alphabeticall.”
The looks on the faces of the humans showed they were still engaged in the game, so Rhona spoke again. “We’re still clueless.”
“That year, Samuel de Champlain discovered the Saint John River and landed where the city of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, sits.”
“That was 1604!” Wade shouted. “I remember that obscure fact from a history class.”
“Right.” Geena turned and smothered Wade’s next words with a kiss.
Sheryl gave her parents a serious look. “Are you old, Mother?”
“I’m 413. That’s not considered old among my people.” Geena looked around the room and her words were much quieter, n
early inaudible. “And not among you.”
At first, Rhona didn’t think everyone in the room heard Geena’s words, but she was positive from Keene’s expression that he did. She laid her hand on his knee. “Let’s open the rest of the gifts.”
“Sure.” He gestured at the pile of packages beside Rhona. “You have quite the haul.”
Rhona picked up a small package, about 1 inch by 1 inch in size, with a miniscule tag saying it was from Nanda. She squeezed it slightly in the process and a lid retracted. She tilted the box and dumped the small item in her palm. “What is this?” she asked in puzzlement.
“That’s a data transfer pod,” Trixie said. “You can put it in your control panel.”
Rhona raised one eyebrow. “My control panel?”
“Of course. There’s one in every room.”
“I didn’t get to that part of the instruction manual,” Rhona said with a hint of amusement. She held up the pod between her thumb and forefinger. “Can you help me?”
“Sure.” Trixie got to her feet and took the pod from Rhona. Sam followed close behind while she walked towards the far wall murmuring commands in Abantu. One section of the wall covering seemed to slide back and revealed a number of components and a patchwork of small openings. Trixie turned back to Rhona. “Nanda knows you love photography. She gave you a smattering of photographs she has taken.”
Although Rhona was thinking the words, Charles spoke them first. “How do we view them?”
“Dulcis can do it all, but you can use a remote control with a screen.” Moments later a screen appeared. It extended floor to ceiling and was about ten feet wide.
“To use your words, there are still images and movies.” Trixie fingered the control. “There are images from Polaris, 59 Eridani, Ceres, and Earth. I know you like wild animal pictures.”
A perfectly sharp picture of a cat filled the screen. It had a short tail, powerful legs, a muscular neck, and canines about 30 cm in length. Trixie smiled, “This is a smilodon, the largest feline to ever live on Earth. This adult weighed 450 kg. It was a carnivore and used its powerful forepaws to pull down large prey. It usually bit the neck of its prey to cut off the supply of blood and air.”
“Wow,” Rhona said. “It looks like some of the artist renderings I have seen.”
Geena chuckled. “Nanda funded several of the artists.”
Trixie thumbed the control and the picture changed to show a triceratops browsing in a grove of banana trees. It had a horn on the snout above the nostrils and another horn above each eye. Trixie continued. “This specimen is 25 feet long, 8 feet tall at the shoulder, and weighs about 24,000 pounds.”
“That’s a wonderful present,” Rhona said.
“There are about 10,000 images here,” Trixie explained. “But, I thought you would like this one.”
The picture of a man and woman appeared on the screen. The man had brown hair and a full beard. There were reddish tints to his beard, but also a few grey hairs along his chin line. The woman and the man were the same height and she was good looking with dark auburn hair. Both of them had light brown skin.
“Interesting,” Rhona said while her eyes moved from the people to the stone building in the distance. “Who are they?”
“Methuselah and his wife, Rayna. Nanda took this picture at his 900th birthday celebration. Rayna is about ten years younger than Methuselah.”
Elaine leaned forward with an interested expression. “What was his viewpoint on who God was?”
“He lived near Adam for nearly 240 years. He considered God to be the creator of the universe; a creator who was also interested in humans. Adam and Eve had walked and talked with God before they disobeyed his commands.”
“Did God walk and talk with any other people?”
“Yes, but especially with Enoch. Enoch went away with him.”
“Interesting,” Elaine said as she leaned back again. “Did Nanda ever meet God?”
Trixie looked uncomfortable. “You need to ask Nanda rather than me. I didn’t visit Earth back then. I was born in the year 4948 of the Hebrew calendar.”
“More trivia,” Sam muttered.
Trixie moved over beside Sam and tousled his hair. “You only know the Gregorian calendar. That was the year 1188.”
“I was born in 1965,” he responded with a grin.
“Baby,” Trixie retorted.
“I don’t think anyone can top that gift,” Rhona said into the buzz of conversation. She raised her voice. “Mother, could you open the gift from me?”
Judith was already holding the small box in her hands. She opened it and held up a pair of earrings. “Thank you.”
“You probably noticed the Abantu don’t wear jewelry. However, several of them collect gemstones. The metal is platinum. The gems came from Ceres. We would use the word chrysoberyl.”
“Thank you.”
Keene stayed behind after the party to help clean up. The gesture was nice, but the housekeeping functions did everything, including taking care of the small amount of food that was left. Thus, Rhona and Keene ended up snuggling on the couch.
Rhona laid her head on Keene’s shoulder. “I noticed a couple of things tonight.”
“Yes?”
“I think Nanda is increasing our tolerance for alcohol. I drank two glasses of wine and I’m still stone-cold sober.”
“I agree,” he responded. “What else did you notice?”
“Geena’s comment.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “She said, ‘And not among you.’ There are a few things they’re not telling us. I don’t expect them to tell us everything, but what do they really want here on earth? We would have never known they visited if they had just moved on.”
“What are you worried about?”
He rubbed both sides of his face. “I feel the same as I used to, at least, I think I do. Will I really be human when Nanda gets through?”
Rhona pulled back and stared at Keene while she considered new ideas. “Do you distrust her?”
“Let’s say I don’t have any strong reasons to trust her. I’m extremely grateful she brought me back from the brink of death, but you need to keep an eye on me.”
“I’ll do that.” The intimacy of the moment superseded serious thoughts, but she knew she would return to them. She tipped her face up towards Keene and all lucid conversation dribbled away.
Chapter 14 – Italian Villa
A few days later, Sam looked out through the transparent canopy of his chariot with an immense sense of satisfaction. He was still learning the nuances of the onboard surveillance and weapons systems. The satisfaction was due to the fact he had passed the piloting test before Keene, the former jet pilot.
The chariot piloted by Trixie was just off his port side and the cloaking function was so good he couldn’t see it visually. His sensors easily followed the magnetic field given off by her main drive. They had just crossed the coast of Portugal and initiated their descent into Italy. Sam had spent much of the two-hour trip chatting with Trixie, but now he switched the com to a different setting. “Keene, this is Sam. We’re getting close. Do you think anyone saw us?”
“We’re not seeing anyone doing active tracking, but Dulcis is too busy to tinker with all of the sensors collecting magnetic data. Someone may tease out accurate course information.”
“I was worried about that,” Sam replied. “We may simply be pointing a big finger at the Abantu in Italy. You and Rhona need to recruit a couple of good mathematicians.”
“What? Why do we need a mathematician?”
“Trixie says they should be able to improve the strength of the shields against lasers by a couple of orders of magnitude, but she needs someone good to tackle the math. Dulcis can solve almost any problem, but she doesn’t have any intuition.”
Keene’s mouth twisted. “How long has Trixie
been studying math?”
“Oh, yeah. About 800 years.”
“I don’t think one college class in multi-variate calculus would be much preparation,” Keene responded. “However, I’ll bring it up with Rhona and Laura. You’d better focus on landing that bucket of bolts. It would be embarrassing to crash on your first long solo flight.”
“I’ve got it covered,” Sam replied sarcastically. The inertial dampers worked perfectly and Sam didn’t feel the massive acceleration when he slowed from Mach 12 to a subsonic speed in less than 30 seconds. He followed Trixie when they swooped down and landed on a long driveway of a large villa located on a street named Via Castello. The three-story brick and stucco structure sat on an eastward facing slope overlooking Lake Garda in the distance.
Trixie kept the communications link open to Sam when she contacted Marlee. “We’re here in the driveway. Can you open the gate?”
“Sure,” replied the Abantu. “We knew when you would get here, and we have been watching, but we didn’t see you arrive.”
The sun had already set and security lights provided enough illumination for Sam to see the metal gate. The pieces were at least an inch in diameter and he suspected the material was stronger than ordinary wrought iron. A charging 18-wheeler might bounce off the gate. However, the curved winding drive was so narrow no large truck could make the climb up the hill.
Sam looked out at his chariot and smiled. No Roman Emperor ever had a chariot like this. They had flown, silently except for the small sonic boom, at high altitude at many multiples of the speed of sound. When they landed, the chariot changed from a flat spear-like look to a thin car-like configuration about twenty feet long. However, the metal itself flowed into different shapes rather than folding or bending. The chariot extended wheels to move on the pavement. He knew from experience it could extrude eight stubby legs and walk up and down stairs.
The eight-foot-high security gate moved sideways. Sam waited for Trixie to drive through the opening and then followed her. They came to a stop, partly under an overhanging roof and partly under two large evergreen trees. They were hidden from visual observation, although Sam suspected they might appear on thermal sensors after they powered down the chariots.
Variations on Humanity Page 11
