Chapter 5

Well, they settled in the next morning to hunt for raw materials. In order to do that they needed to be closer to the mountains, apparently, so they moved their shuttles to another location. That location was close to the Melian Clan of the Mountains. Their matriarch conversed with Meriah and they jointly decided to just keep a watch on human activities, but not interfere. I was asked to arrange for the ‘access’ to the humans so that the people could understand all about space and space travel.

I thought to scan all of them -- one at a time, of course. I would scan them all, put together a cogent song for the hexapuma clans and then sing it to all. That proved to be difficult, since none of them had the same understanding of what was really going on.

At that point, I knew of Ship simply as a disembodied voice that humans heard. I’ll call him Merlin in this accounting, so you won’t be confused, but that name wasn’t given him until later. He didn’t have a ‘mind’ that I could latch on to, so I couldn’t read him at all. That was strange to me, and I sought to investigate further. Unbeknownst to me, Merlin couldn’t pick up any of my ‘transmissions’ to the humans either, and it perplexed him greatly.

I started with Robinson Hawthorne, the ship’s engineer, who had a great rapport with Merlin. His mind, though somewhat orderly, was crammed with data. Not information, mind you, but something he called ‘data.’ It was all numbers and ‘schematic drawings’ (which I didn’t understand at all) and ‘interface protocols’ and such like. It made no sense to me. I cut off my scan when it got to the technical data that explained hyperdrive. I did understand the images in another part of his mind: they were very detailed images of his encounters with his intended mate. Despite the fact that he did indeed mate with her, they were not a mated pair -- something that baffled me, until I later learned more about human society. He remembered her as a combination of parts: face, breasts, genitals, legs and so on. These I understood: they were so like the images that Meriah had of me. My images of Meriah were more general and diffuse and tended to focus on qualities rather than body parts. I digress.

Alexis Hume was an officer in their Space Marines, attached to the Destiny. That was a branch of the human military, which was a group of people who were assigned to defensive and offensive fighting encounters. As such, her thoughts concerning space were mostly of assignments and missions and various planets upon which she led groups of men and women who did the fighting. She had a strong attachment of loyalty to her superiors, but that could be and was replaced frequently as the makeup of ‘her superiors’ changed. Currently, she would follow Justice Nelson to the extent of her physical abilities -- even unto death, if that became necessary. Her world was rather black and white with just a touch of grey. There were targets, potential targets, and friendlies. We hexapumas had been moved from the target category to potential targets, at the order of her superior, Justice. Emotionally, she was attracted to the ship’s doctor, Nicolevna Reston. At first, I thought this was something akin to the feelings that Meriah shared with her sisters -- Merhnah, Meryawl, and Meronar -- and I set it aside as sororal affection. It was not until I scanned the doctor that I discovered that this relationship was more like a mated pair: they thought of themselves as mated. The erotic encounters they had were thought of as ‘mating,’ though they, obviously as two females, could not physically mate -- even in human terms. I put this irregularity down as something strange within the humans, and gave it no further thought.

Nicolevna Reston was the ship’s doctor on the Destiny. In this much smaller crew, she maintained that posture, and also adopted the role of science officer. However, a goodly portion of the scientific information that was needed was supplied by the ship’s AI, Merlin. From her mind, I gained an understanding of human anatomy, Scorelian anatomy (an ocean-based life form, which had formed the basis of her doctorial studies), and the Draconian anatomy (a life form similar to humans, but the Draconians were cold-blooded). She had a great desire to find a dead hexapuma and cut it apart -- to find out where the telepathic thought center was located. (That was never going to happen!)

Sunny Li was the Destiny’s assistant navigator. From him I learned that there were uncountable suns which we called stars. Each star had the possibility of planets, some of which were hospitable to life. Humans had settled on a mere handful of such planets, and Destiny’s assignment had been to explore new star systems. I also learned far too much about the technicalities of astrogation and the complexity of the formulas that supported that discipline. The surface thoughts in his mind were filled with bleak despair and depression; feelings so black that I had to stop examining them further.

Gabriella Sturman was Justice Nelson’s aide and also functioned as head of security. Her job as head of security was similar to Alexis’ job as head of the Marines, but on a smaller scale. Gabby was tasked only with the security of the ship and its personnel. She gave no thought to the business of going to other stars or what space meant. Her world was Justice Nelson and, oh yes, by the way, the other crew onboard the Destiny. She thought of herself as very competent and there had been no incidents in the two years of the Destiny’s mission, prior to the accident. She had spent seven years and worked her way through the ranks to get herself assigned to Justice Nelson. She’d been with Nelson for five years now, and had no intentions of ever leaving.

Twelve years ago, when Gabby was only 17, Justice had saved a transport that had gotten too close to the sun. The details I put together from Gabby’s and later Jay’s mind. Jay was in charge of an intra-system corvette, a small space-going ship that was not equipped for interstellar travel. The transport was incapable of escaping from the sun’s gravitational field and Nelson had calculated (with the help of the ship’s AI) a glancing shot through the gravity field to attach a tractor beam to the trapped transport, and had pulled them free. Gabby’s father and brother had been on that transport. It was later learned that the AI had not computed the trajectory accurately, but that Justice had overruled the suggested course at the last moment. Half the Navy brass (I have subsequently learned that ‘brass’ in this context meant ‘superior officers’) wanted to throw her out of the service for correcting an AI; half the brass wanted to throw her out for undertaking a dangerous maneuver when it was ‘only’ going to save a few colonists; and half (Gabby’s mind had no trouble with the cognitive dissonance of more than two halves) wanted to give her a medal. In his summation at Nelson’s Court Martial -- at which all charges against Nelson were dismissed -- Admiral Chen quoted an ancient philosopher of the late 1900s E.R., one Casey Stengel, who was manager of the ‘Yankees’ (whatever that was): “Casey said that he didn’t care how often a player caught a fly ball one handed, but if he ever dropped one, he’d give him hell. Case dismissed.” Although I had no idea what a ‘fly ball’ was, I understood the meaning of the quote.

That brings me to Carolyn Justice “Jay” Nelson. This mind was amazing. It was compartmentalized to a degree I had not sensed in any but my old teacher Grahhll’s mind and the senior ninGrahhlls of today. She could accurately access facts in detail that she had merely heard or seen in the past. By human standards, that happened only rarely. It was a pleasure to access her memories of space and the USN’s stories and hierarchy. Almost all the stories of what could happen in space, that made up my subsequent songs to the matriarchs and ninGrahhlls, came from her.

The most terrifying, to me, were stories of a species which the humans called only ‘Bugs.’ They apparently consumed carbon and hydrocarbon on a planetary scale. If or when they came upon a planet that contained life, they would bombard it from afar with asteroids until the life would cease. Then they would pounce on the planet with the dead life form and gorge themselves. The entire species traveled in a vast fleet of space ships with an advance fleet to identify and conquer target planets. The humans feared them, because they (the humans) were not numerous enough to stop the Bugs. The information on the Bug methodology came from a single sighting from an unmanned probe into a system that had a life form -- ‘had’ before the Bugs showed up. No one knew what sort of life form the Bug species was.

Jay also had two traits -- at least -- that I could identify easily. One: she could determine, almost instantly, what course to follow to achieve any intermediate goal in space, and/or what coordinates to head for. She didn’t calculate that, from what I could sense; she just ‘knew.’ And two, she could sense my scan.