Shadows Chapter IV: New Friends

Author's note: the Ng'chrit'kee are a genderless species, as such, the pronouns "he" and "she" are inappropriate for them, as is "it," which is a gender neutral word, not genderless. So I have elected to take from the Turkish their third person pronoun "o" which also has no gender. I will use it for referring to any Ng'chrit'kee, and its possessive "onun" in place of "it" or "its."

My lungs burned and I sputtered, coughed, and hacked choking water, heaving as though I were attempting to expel every organ in my body, all at once. I was on my side, and in my throes, my body curled into a fetal position. Then gaining more control of my senses, though still in complete agony, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and heaved what remaining salt water I had in my lungs, accompanied by whatever bile I had remaining in my guts.

It took several minutes of these spasmodic expulsions before I was able to realize that I was on my hands and knees - that I could be. Slowly, I became aware of a harshly perforated metallic surface beneath my palms, cutting into my skin.

Focusing on the floor to drive away the pain in my chest, I saw it was a muted grey, and was divided in even squares, each across the height of a man. It was cold to the touch, and slightly damp. The smell of salt water hung in the air. Against a background of an occasional drip of water into some vast unseen reservoir, accompanied by a nigh inaudible impression of gentle waves lapping against distant walls, hushed voices nearby clamored in a barely suppressed argument.

I raised my head in the direction of the debaters just in time to catch a glimpse of one of the flooring panels slamming closed a tremendous clang, followed after some time by a muted echo. Standing around the grate’s edges, no more than a few arms breadths from me, stood three rather diminutive individuals. They stood perhaps half my height, or so I estimated from my position on the floor, and were remarkably slight of build. They were, in fact, quite lanky, like some tiny putty people pulled into long strings of their former selves. The effect, with their short stature, was quite unsettling, and made it difficult to confirm they were really as close as I had initially assumed – my mind wanted to place them much further away to make more sense of their proportions. Dressed in besmudgeded, silver-grey, form fitting clothing with a few a bulging pocket on either thigh, I could discern no hint of sexual organs, leaving a distinct impression of androgyny.

Both their hands and their craniums truly appeared out of place, completely oversized to their spaghetti frames. Large and bulbous, with virtually no neck, their heads presented twin bulging eyes closely centered above oddly spherical noses and flat, thin mouths. In their spindly, yet clearly dexterous giant hands, one held a flashlight which o aimed through the holes of the flooring while another tapped excitedly upon a clipboard like tablet upon which glowing images crawled. The latter pointed towards me, said something unintelligible, and all three pairs of oversized eyes gazed in my direction.

Seeing that I’d (mostly) ceased my heaving and hacking, the three, in near unison, took one, then two steps towards me, confirming they were indeed as close and as short as I’d initially guessed. The one with the tablet again said something I failed to comprehend, this time directed at me, onun language a garble of guttural syllables interspersed with birdlike twittering.

I shook my head and furled my eyebrows, “I don’t understand.”

O repeated the incomprehensible phrase, tapping at onun device, across which scrolled archaic glowing green characters. In one corner I spied a diagram in three dimensions, slowly rotating, of what I assumed from onun elongated tear-drop shape was a starship, one tiny compartment highlighted in blue. Below that, a video feed played, showing a human (me?) thrashing about in frothing waters while a giant hose lowered from above into that same sea. O touched the video (which paused), then the diagram, then pointed at me. My goodness, that really was me! And were we aboard the vessel displayed? In the tiny room so softly lit in blue? If so, the ship must be enormous, for I could not see this chamber’s walls, though its ceiling was low, and still held a definite impression of its vastness. And how had they gotten me aboard? Was I sucked up in that massive tube? Was it intentional, or quite by accident?

As these questions flooded my mind, o said something else, more gibberish, then touched one of the floating symbols, and my own voice echoed from the tablet: “I don’t understand.”

Clearly, o was trying to communicate with me. I stood there, drenched to the bone (and noticed that their form-fitting, dingy silver outfits were also spotted with dampness), and pondered what it was the creature might want.

Once again, o spoke, this time pointing first to onun own mouth, then touching the tablet, which promptly repeated what o had just uttered. Then o aimed a spindly finger in my direction and thrust the device towards me. Now I got it.

“I’m not sure exactly what you want me to say. Do you just wish to record my voice, or does your computer somehow manage translation?”

In my bedraggled state, I wasn’t thinking too clearly – I’d dealt with similar devices before on other worlds that could accomplish such, and even some magics could do the same, I knew. Certainly my oxygen deprivation must have fogged my head enough to cause a momentary forgetfulness. I decided to go along with this and see how their little computer worked in this vein – I was already exhausted, so why waste more energy in attempting to do something these creatures had already started?

In the meantime, while I’d made these ponderously slow conclusions, the being was again pointing at onun tablet, triggering a procession of images which replaced the previously slowly spinning diagram.

Sentient beings with largely similar external anatomies – limbs, grasping appendages, means of food intake and respiration – will tend to develop tools with amazingly convergent designs. For those with hands like ours, brooms will look like brooms, buckets like buckets, and most other things that need grasping and digital manipulation will be constructed along similar shapes and configurations. Such things appeared upon the screen, one at a time, each lingering for a few seconds before disappearing to be immediately replaced by the next.

After a few such images passed, and I failed to say anything, the bobble-headed alien (it’s difficult not to think of strange beings as anything but alien, even when you’re not on your own world, and it is *you* who is the visitor from afar, especially when you’re on a spaceship) said a single (I think) word, heavily emphasizing it in an almost grunt, paused a second, then repeated it. Then another image came on screen and o uttered another single (again, I surmised) word and nodded at me.

Catching on, I said my own word naming the picture: “bucket.” The image changed: “star.” This went on for several minutes, first flashing through depictions of simple objects. As time progressed, and more things were named by me, the illustrations began to become more complex, and soon could only be described by verbs or adjectives. At one point, the screen changed to solid colours, which I identified one by one.

* * *

I felt vaguely like the school marm, or, more aptly, one of her students, who once traveled with me for a time. I remember distinctly when I met her – she was definitely one to leave an impression. It was some time after I’d (largely) finished grieving for Deirdre. I was moving through life, and worlds, somewhat listlessly, just making motions and moving through veil after veil out of sheer habit, looking for I know not what. Having just pulled aside one of those curtains, I stepped into her reality, directly into her classroom. And class was in session. Students lept from their seats and their voices raised in a great panic at the sudden appearance of this strange man in their midst. But Shanima, oh Shanima, she was never one to ever be flustered, and, in the calm and collected manner I would come to admire in her, she regained control of her classroom with a loud slap of a ruler on her desk followed by the single level sentence:

“Children, do quiet down and takes your seats, and I’m quite sure our kind visitor will take his at the back of the room where he will patiently observe the remainder of our class.”

And as simple as that, just by retaining her own bearing, she quelled the commotion of the early school-aged children, who sat back down as directed. Likewise, I took my seat at the back of the classroom.

Resuming instruction, she laid down flat a flash card from a deck I now noticed she was holding upright, revealing the one behind it, bearing and avian depiction.

“Duck,” she said, “duck.”

“Duck,” the class echoed, almost in unison, though one or two stuttered their “d.”

She dropped that one, uncovering an amphibian.

“Frog,” she stated.”

“Frog,” they parroted.

She repeated this until there were no more cards to lay down. She then congratulated her students on a job well done, neatly stacked the cards and slid them inside their box, which had been lying beside the face-down stack. Just as she was placing that box inside her desk drawer, the bell rang and she dismissed her class.

“Don’t forget your permission slips for Friday,” she reminded them as they excitedly gathered their belongings and hurried out of the room.

* * *

The lanky being hold the tablet held up a hand as if to stop me, then pressed the tip of a digit on the changing images and dragged it away. More grunts and chirps issued from onun mouth, then, from the handheld, in my voice, a succinct:

“Work.”

Though we hadn’t gone over any pronouns, adverbs, or more abstract adjectives and gerunds, and certainly had no way to deal with conjugation, I imagined the translation routine would learn as we spoke, and so would pick them up eventually. I nodded my understanding.

“Okay, what now?” I questioned.

Silence from the device.

I smacked my forehead – too abstract, silly. I‘d have to try to keep my sentences simple and concrete, at least for a start.

“We go not here?” I asked, trying to craft in in a useful way the tablet might understand already, while making a gesture to encompass all of us.

The device chirped.

Onun head bobbled and one of onun companions, the one without the flashlight, turned and began walking away. Leader, as I was coming to think of the one with the computer, stepped aside to make way for me and extended onun spindly arm in the direction in which the other was heading. Getting the hint, I followed, with Leader staying by my side and Flashlight falling in behind.

I’ll spare you the majority of the details of our walk through the colossal vessel, whose design was utilitarian, pragmatic, and efficient. Corridors were sufficiently large to allow multiple bipeds to pass in each direction without hindering each other in any way – enough so that hovering sleds the size of small cars passed in the other direction without us having to give way. I took the opportunity to point out and identify passing objects in the hopes of improving the translation routine. We didn’t walk long before we mounted one of those sleds, which we found in a broad intersection of corridors largely occupied by numerous such conveyances. From there I was rapidly taken before a being who turned out to be the captain of this ship, whose name I couldn’t begin to pronounce, so I’ll just call o “Captain.”

We talked at some length, our exchanges initially short, simple, and childish, but grew in complexity over time as the translation program adapted as I’d predicted.

It turned out the three who found me were just a maintenance crew, and my appearance in their water cistern came as quite a shock as, though their syphon had indeed captured many creatures in the past, part of why they collected water at this particular planet was that no creatures of a size to fit inside the collection tube had ever been seen. And judging from my anatomy and their previous experience, they quite correctly surmised that I wasn’t exactly native to these parts. So finding a floating body during inspection caught them somewhat off guard.

The creatures proved to be quite friendly – they were resource collectors who travelled a well established route of star systems gathering various basic resources such as water, ores, gases from gas giants, and even oils and woods from largely uninhabited planets where they could do so without causing much ecological damage. That certainly explained the massive size of the vessel, though I was curious about how the dimensions of its architecture seemed at odds with their small stature. After a time in the conversation, when I felt it appropriate and not necessarily rude to inquire about such, I did so. I was rewarded with an excited, animated, and quite deliciously proud retelling of their race’s history.

* * *

The Ng’chrit’kee had once been a squat, stout race of burrowers. Herbivorous creatures, they were nowhere near the top of their homeworld’s food chain, and survived, and prospered, through a combination of social cooperation, rudimentary tool use, and clever tunnel designs. Before their discovery, though quite intelligent as their large cranial capacity would indicate, they were limited in the manufacture of tools by their pawlike hands which were better adapted for digging than fine manipulation. But those paws did allow for sufficient ability to grasp that they had been able to go so far as to master fire, and discover the smelting of ores such as copper, tine, and even iron, which they uncovered in their burrowings.

This was the state they were in – an early, crude iron age – when they were discovered by a spacefaring species whose name Captain either could not or would not (I’m not sure which) pronounce. Seeing the usefulness of their adaptations to survive in narrow tunnels, they captured and enslaved the Ng’chrit’kee, forcibly removing them from their homeworld.

That was many, many thousands of years ago, so I gathered.

Not satisfied with their original forms, their captors genetically engineered the tunnel-dwellers to better suit them to service in space, in the tight, narrow Jeffrey’s Tubes that spider webbed the slavers’ ships. Formerly heavy, thick bones were lightened and elongated, the musculature adapted to make use of the increased leverage without straining the now more fragile skeletal structure. Hands were likewise lengthened, the diamond-sharp claws eliminated, the digits’ dexterity refined for manipulation of delicate equipment. While the cranial capacity was retained, the eyes were shifted from the sides of their heads to the central, forward-facing positions they now occupied, eliminating their herbivorous ability to see to the rear, and thus making them more manageable. To remove certain urges, and thus better control their population, their means of sexual reproduction were removed and replaced with an alternate method. When I asked just how that was accomplished, Captain dissembled and made it quite clear that the topic was quite an uncomfortable one for them. I didn’t press.

These modifications, plus their already somewhat docile herbivorous nature, made the ng’chrit’kee quite manageable for thousands of years. Their homeworld was all but forgotten, merely an entry hidden in their captives’ databanks. They were ideal engineers and maintenance crew, able to fit where the slavers could not, to manipulate the finest of instruments, and ultimately were expendable as the subservient race.

Quite suddenly, over ten thousand years ago, something changed. I wasn’t quite clear what. Perhaps one of their captors decided to experiment in instilling more independence in them. Perhaps just a more awnry Ng’chrit’kee was born (created?). Whatever it was, the Ng’chrit’kee of one warship rebelled against the slavers, and with their deftness of movement about the vessel, and facility with its inner workings, they were able to easily overwhelm their hated masters. One after one they approached other craft and liberated their people within, casting their former captors out the airlocks into the cold, dead vacuum of space.

They found a part of space free of their oppressors where they could establish a bubble of safety for their people. And despite their traumatic history, they were willing to give new races encountered the benefit of the doubt and welcome them with open arms – though they did keep an open eye towards potential treachery.

The slaver race was still out there, some of their vessels still crewed with Ng’chrit’kee slaves. Of them, they were very wary, and though their preferred solution was capture, that they might free whatever captives might be held within, every ship of theirs encountered was destroyed on sight if such proved impossible.

The story continues in Chapter V: Spread.