My Last Post -- for now

By the time you read this, I'll probably be hopping gâ'axao stations (in suspended animation, of course) on my way to Earth, if I'm not there already. We've been having connection problems somewhere in the line, so I typed this up and asked that it be sent as soon as possible.

Anyway, I can't be long at this, so I'll just explain briefly. They're going to be suppressing my memory -- putting some false memories in. As far as anyone on Earth is concerned, I took a very long vacation around the world. And even if I do manage to regain memory, if the Xala decide not to start any serious trade relations with any nation on Earth, they've made sure there's nothing to prove they were ever there. "No verifiable evidence", they call it -- which I presume is their version of plausible denial.

Anyway, I'm sorry I couldn't do more. They tell me that they'll put a yela'kaja on to give some updates and such on whatever news there is. As for me, I'm just going to return to Earth, recuperate from all that crazy food and all the planet-hopping, and be a normal human being again -- at least until they decide to bring me back (if they do).

The Things You Can Learn from an Old Yela'kaja

Still stuck in a hospital. Such a pain this all is. I actually feel perfectly fine, but the Tzállö are keeping me in here for another day because of some test result or other. The yela'kaja apparently can't understand Tzállö medicalese nor translate it into English equivalents, so I really have no idea what the problem is.

However, when all you have to talk to is a yela'kaja who was basically ordered specifically to accompany you as a translator, you can learn things. We had a conversation recently -- not about the Tzállö or about their terrible dark planet -- but about yela'kaja, and about Xala in general.

Here's how it started: for some reason the yela'kaja here has nothing better to do than just sit here and keep me company. Now, on the other planets, my yela'kaja were always busy with something or other when I didn't specifically need them to guide me around or act as a translator. Most of the time they would have their own little screen handy and I'd see wierd characters all over it. But this one didn't, so I asked about it.

Me: Do you actually have nothing to do?

Yela'kaja: I am doing my job, looking after you and acting as a translator. That is what I was assigned to do.

Me: Yeah, but every other yela'kaja I've met always had something else to do when I didn't have a specific question or something. Come to think of it, every Xala I've met always looks extremely busy.

Yela'kaja: Well, that was on Jed and Kesata, both planets with lots of Xala everywhere.

Me: I don't understand.

Yela'kaja: Ah, of course. You're an alien -- and a new one at that ...

At that point, he informed me that, by volunteering to work on integrating worlds (his word), the worlds that were still being slowly incorporated into the Trade network, he was pretty much able to work at his own pace -- despite that he had to be moved around quite a bit due to some strange rotational scheme. "The Xala like to run things slowly on these worlds -- too much progress can mean collapse of governments, anti-Xala sentiments, and hostilities if allowed to form could mean war whether the Xala attempt to stay or simply pull out.

Anyway, on with the conversation:

Me: So, you have the lazy guy's job, right?

Yela'kaja: Right now, yes, dealing with you is the easiest job I've had as far as I can remember at the moment. Of course, what I was doing before was giving me some trouble. I was working with a race that I believe you know a little bit about, the Ŋasux [he said that as "NGHAH-sookh"]. You might know them as the Ŋãna

Me: Oh, yeah. So, they pulled you off negotiations with them to deal with me.

Yela'kaja: You might say I had to in order to keep the development of relations from dissolving

He didn't elaborate any more on that. I got the idea that I wasn't to know the details, so we went off on another set of questions regarding the difficulty of his work, and what all the yela'kaja do, when he comes out with this:

Yela'kaja are really among the shortest lived out of all Xala.

I did a double take on that, but he clarified it. Apparently its not the stresses of the job itself, but the sheer physical stress of the transformations -- especially if a given yela'kaja has to transform more than once in it's lifetime. Most Xala will live for well over 200 years, many nearly 300 -- but yela'kaja often only live to around 130, maybe 150 if they're lucky, and more like 90-110 if they're not so lucky. The only caste with a shorter lifespan?

That would be what you call "nurses" -- the roa'gogo. The stresses of laying so many eggs can shorten their lives to less than 80 of your years.

Now, granted, the baseline Xala lifespan is very long compared to us -- but it still must seem crazy to cut your life so short just so the Xala can have a little better communication with an alien race, or not:

The Xala do not wait for natural, physical death, as you and many of the cultures in the trade network do. A Xala is dead when he can no longer serve Jed Êdag and the race as a whole. I have lived for over sixty-four cycles, putting me at around 115 years old in your system -- and I'm already showing my age. This is probably my last transformation, and if I can't be made useful after you leave Lazga, I will be declared tyexala -- a dead being -- and will commit suicide. I think I'll do it right here, by poisonous fungus if I can find some -- I can't do the tyogex tyeg ko' without wings, and the tyogex caxol just won't do -- to painful and too much trouble getting someone to stick me with a poison spur.

Yes, that's all exact. I basically set up my machine to record that directly as it went into my ears and I understood it. I would post more, but this is getting very long, and the Tzállö doctors are coming in to do some more tests. I'll try to get more down on those death rites or whatever they are if I can stomach it. Of course, that's assuming the Tzállö don't kill me with all these tests.

Stuck in a Tzállö Hospital

Well, I'm feeling better, but once again the Tzállö have me quarantined and "under observation". they won't even clear me to get to the gâ'akaxaoda station. Anyway, I'm stuck here in this hospital sort of place. Of course, a Tzállö hospital is an entirely different experience from an Earth hospital. Obviously, there are no lights except for the ones that were put in my room for my benefit and my headlamp (which still has't drained its batteries! Quite impressive!) And rather than white, most of the walls are dull gray plastic, with very smooth black linoleum. Everything is very cool and smooth with a lot of metallic-looking textures, which I suspect conveys the same concept of sterility for Tzállö that stark white conveys for humans. The doctors wear very smooth clothing that almost looks like latex rather than fabric.

Anyway, I have a private room, as always, though it's smaller than hospital rooms I've seen on Earth. There's also nothing here for entertainment -- no window, no TV -- not even the Tzállö equivalents. The yela'kaja tells me that Tzállö usually entertain themselves in hospitals by reading, though obviously I couldn't read anything in their library -- It'd just be a bunch of raised squares to me. So, I'm stuck talking to the yela'kaja and surfing the Internet through this magical little device. Wish me well! I just hope I can get off this weird dark planet sometime soon.

Don't Eat the Black Sauce

Ah, I haven't been able to post for, what, a week or so? Why is that? Well, first of all, there's some sort of weird interference down in these tunnels that makes it difficult to get my Xala typing machine-thingy to work. Then, of course, you have the fact that I can't activate it around a Tzállö without drawing attention and probably at least seeing their nose and ears twitch a bit in anger (one time one of them just plain screamed at me to turn it off -- hurling some insults that the yela'kaja refused to translate).

But mainly, I've been sick for the past few days. The yela'kaja tells me that its some bug that I got in the tunnels that apparently affects humans more than it does Tzállö, but I don't know. All I know is that I've been in Tzállö hospitals for a few days recovering -- with a lot of that time spent in a Xala stasis chamber while they figured out what to do. I'm still a little woozy from all the drugs, but they tell me that I'm fine.

As for the cause, it may have been a bug, but I kind of think something I ate recently had something to do with it. I've graduated from mushrooms, moss, and insects to some of the meats -- some of which are served with this thick black sauce called kyadwö. Anyway, I didn't know when I was eating it, but afterward it was explained to me that the title ingredient, the kyadwö, is actually the Lazga equivalent of mildew. That's right, a sauce made from mildew. It actually tastes really good -- but I'm quite sure it was part of what made me sick.

Anyway, I'm going to be returning to Jed as soon as I'm good and recovered and they can make sure I don't have any diseases. The yela'kaja said that he thinks the stresses of traveling from planet to planet "contributed to the illness" (I'm still saying it's the sauce) and is going to recommend sending me back to Earth. That's fine with me, but I would like to see Kesata again before I go.

Anyway, the moral of this story: If the Xala make full contact with Earth, and you have an opportunity to go to Lazga -- don't eat the black sauce.

The Alien Symphony

We saw that concert today. The yela'kaja, who has much better hearing than I do, tells me that most of the Tzállö actually stopped clicking or at least slowed down and quieted their patterns during the piece. He told me it's the equivalent of a human closing his eyes while enjoying the music, "Maybe we should do the same. I have not heard much music before, besides the drum dances on Jed." I agreed, of course. It's not like there was much to see. We weren't in the front row by a long shot, more like a kind of balcony seat, and my light could just barely reach the orchestra. So I shut it off and closed my eyes.

Of course, as I've come to expect touring different planets with cultures that evolved completely independent of Earth, it was a very new experience. I could feel the rhythm of the music well, but the scales were really strange to me, like they just threw in a bunch of random in-between notes. But I got used to it, and the generally distinct sound of Tzállö music. I have no idea what the names of the songs are -- the signs are in Fbeki and I didn't ask the yela'kaja to translate. The biggest surprise to me is that the songs actually didn't hit many high notes, and the highest notes I heard were very clear so I'm sure there was none of the ultrasonic sound you hear. I asked my yela'kaja about this and he explained it this way:

The Tzállö don't think of all sound and hearing as equal. What you consider their sense of hearing they divide into two distinct senses: syfko -- which translates into English as echolocation or biosonar -- and ghuufly -- which translates as your concept of hearing. Since too much noise in the ultrasonic range can disrupt syfko, Tzállö universally attempt to avoid sounds in or near that range, to the point of designing their electronic and mechanical devices specifically for noise-reduction in the syfko frequencies. Naturally, then, no Tzállö culture has ever incorporated a significant amount of ultrasonic notes into their music.

Anyway, after the concert I was allowed on the stage to look at the different instruments. The general types that humans have are there: wind, string, brass, percussion. But they're all just a bit different. A few of the Tzállö musicians stayed around to show me how their instruments work. They have a couple of different instruments that look kind of like flutes or clarinets, a bunch of instruments that are apparently played like brass instruments -- which a Tzállö's big lips come in handy for -- a didgeridoo-like instrument with about three keys for different pitches (it's called a ghuubhuu), a few big drums and a couple of mallet instruments that work like xylophones and marimbas (though the arrangement of the bars isn't recognizable at all).

So, I guess this'll be the thing that'll bring me back to this planet if I get the chance to come. Kesatans have good food, Tzállö have good music. Not sure if its worth the quarantine, though.

Protected Fossils and Windowless Train Cars

Well, I've finally been cleared to ride the train. Apparently there were a lot of medical tests and such they had to do before I left the first city, but now after a few doctor visits and some navigating through the tunnels I'm sitting in a windowless subway car with a bunch of Tzállö pointing their ears at me -- I think their trying to get a better look at my little "computer". The yela'kaja was telling me they have difficulty seeing force-field screens.

The train station seems a lot like a subway station, except the platform is a lot smaller and what little graffiti I see is engraved instead of spray painted. Oh, and of course there's the fact that it's completely dark except for my own light and all the signs are engraved in Fbeki with the time and destination of various trains as they arrive are displayed with little mechanical squares that move in and out.

One of the squares on the middle display seemed kinda stuck halfway, which the yela'kaja complained about at the time. Before he went off cursing the incompetence of the Tzállö in Xala, he said something like, "I got here two days before you did and had to sgêkajec two languages. It's hard enough for me to read the signs without them malfunctioning ..." I'm really not sure what he's talking about, but I think I'll wait until he cools off.

On the way onto the platform, I saw a random force-field screen on a side wall. It was sort of a strange sight, since I hadn't seen any Xala force-fields other than on my own little writing device until that point, so I asked about it and, surprisingly, the yela'kaja immediately signaled to a guard and said something in Fbeki. The next thing I knew, the guard passed his hand over a control crystal on the big square field generator or whatever you call it and there was a fossil of some sort of ancient animal there. I'm not sure what it was exactly, or whether it was mammal or reptile or what, but it had a long tail sort of curved around, some decent claws, and it looked like it had eye sockets--which seems strange when the only creature you know of on the planet has no eye sockets and nothing to put in them. The guard didn't know much about it.

The yela'kaja explained to me later that the Tzállö have a custom of incorporation any fossils they find when digging a tunnel into the actual structure--after it's cataloged and studied a bit and moved into a better spot. He tells me that since Xala forcefields can be made transparent to Tzállö echolocation (though this one apparently wasn't transparent to light), it was a natural move to put up electrified force fields to keep too many passers-by from touching them. "It keeps the oils of Tzállö fingers from damaging the old rock. The same system is currently used for older works of art where some of the original textures have been lost for too long to repair. The newer works you saw in the gallery are specially treated to prevent such degradation, and regularly inspected and repaired when everyday damage occurs." I think someone asked about that on the last post -- there's your answer.

Anyway, the force-field went back up pretty quickly once my train came in, and now I'm sitting here, with no indication of how fast we're going with a bunch of Tzállö looking at me. It's really quiet here, too. The yela'kaja has an explanation for that, too. "The Tzállö have found many ways to reduce or block the sounds in their machinery, as certain electronic and mechanical devices can emit ultrasonic or near-ultrasonic frequencies that sometimes disrupt their echolocation systems." He went on to talk to me about how the initial startup of Xala force-fields bothers them, which I already know first hand -- nearly got me busted lip. He also said that if Earth were to enter the Trade network, then from his research he would suggest that any Tzállö visitors be kept away from active TV screens. Not sure why, but I figure it has something to do with sound.

Welcome, and Please Touch the Sculptures

We went on a little art tour today. The yela'kaja heard how I seemed to like Kesatan art, but Lazga art is entirely different. Kesatan art was all bright colors, mimicking their language -- but Lazga can't see color, or even light. Their art galleries are as dark as any other place in the tunnels, and rather than arranging their art where it would get the best light the way artists on Earth and Kesata do, I'm told that the art and the gallery itself are designed for very good acoustic properties, allowing a Tzállö to pick out individual pieces easily with minimal noise in the background.

The arrangement is actually good for me, too, since getting good echolocation acoustics also seems to involve putting stuff in big wide rooms with enough space that various sculptures and pedestals don't block each other, and with my light as good as it is, it lights up a decent portion of the room with almost none of the little exhibits in the shadows. And I don't know about up in ultrasonic, but it's very quiet in the range I can hear. I get a weird feeling sometimes when one of the Tzállö is nearby or if they "look" at me, which I'm told might be a reaction to their clicking that I can't actually hear but can still register somehow.

It's actually kind of interesting what's in the gallery. With my little lamp I see lots of sculptures and such, but also big canvasses with textures on them. You're allowed to touch just about everything in a Tzállö gallery, and they encourage me to do it. Everything has textures and different materials to it. Some of the statues use real hair or fur for a realistic feel, and some of these canvases use lots of different materials that are simply intended to be felt. I've been told that Tzállö fingers are a bit more sensitive than mine, and that I might not even be able to feel some of the subtle differences in the textures.

They have some other interesting things, too. Some places there are thousands of little pins that move to make a Tzállö face that begins giving a lecture in Fbeki about the pieces around it, and one little room where I saw five Tzállö wearing this big contraption on their noses and ears that distorts their echolocation patterns to show them virtual images (naturally, it was useless for me to try that one).

Anyway, we're going to a concert sometime on the itinerary. I figure that a race that has so much of its world defined by sound should have good music. I like the art too, but it's a lot harder to relate to the "visual" arts of a race that can't even see.

Dark, Gloomy, Boring Planet -- but at least I saw a Moon

Well, I'm still on Lazga. Hasn't been a whole lot to talk about lately. This whole place is strange to me. My own little room is well lit -- it even has little sun-lamps for me -- but everywhere else is just so dark. There's no color and no light in any of the corridors outside my little room and some of the Xala-occupied areas near the gâ'axao.

I did get to go outside recently. I'm not allowed to go out during the day -- apparently the reason the Tzállö live in caves is the surface has wild temperature swings. I wouldn't be able to tolerate the heat of the day without strong protection, but the yela'kaja was able to arrange to get me some well-insulated clothing for outdoors, though it was still a bit cold for the few minutes they had me there. Lazga has a rather large moon. Kesata had a good size moon, too, but I didn't notice it as much since I was usually out more in the daytime there. Seeing planets with moons reminds me of Earth, and also of the complete weirdness of my first few hours on Jed (I didn't even count days there, they just don't work) when I looked up in the sky to see that great massive planet, staying always in the same spot forever.

Its still kind of strange, though. On Kesata, I learned to get used to a day/night cycle again, though it was a good bit shorter than on Earth. But on Lazga, I have to program the lights in my room to get any kind of cycle. Lazga does have days, of course, and the Tzállö even follow them in their calendar, but they really aren't paying much attention to the sky. They can't really see it. Some of them can "feel" the light of their moon, but from what I've gathered from talking to them, it just seems strange to them, unless they're into astronomy. There's no air to carry the sound up there -- and even if there were, that big object I see so clearly in the sky would be much too far away for them to detect.

So, what do Tzállö do? The stay in their tunnels, going back and forth. They have a huge network of tunnels connecting different parts of this city, plus larger tunnels that carry trains to other cities. I'm going to get to ride one of those trains eventually, but they've still got my travel restricted for now. The officials here told me that there were a number of big epidemics when Lazga first got connected to the rest of the trade network, so they now quarantine all travelers who come in. Apparently the close quarters in these tunnels was a blessing and a curse during that time -- he said they were able to seal off affected areas quickly, but that close quarters and communal living made the diseases spread faster.

Anyway, I don't know about their history with disease, but I'd really like to be getting somewhere. But, well, I suppose they have good reason to keep me here -- me being a new species and all. Damn inconvenient for me, but I'll deal with it.

Communal Living and Fungus Food

So far Lazga is a bit boring, though that might be just because I have a tough time seeing in the corridors as we tour through. I think I do have to share some of things. The Tzállö seem to be rather communal. They all live in these underground tunnels and caves in big groups. I've seen some of their little barracks, there are quite a few people in there. They also have a big communal mess hall where they all go to eat. In fact, though I've been given a special room that has electric lights and some special accommodations to keep me comfortable, I'm still required to go to the public mess hall for two meals a day.

Going to the mess hall is a bit of a strange thing for me. Tzállö can't see, but some of them can detect light on their skin somehow (the yela'kaja told me something about light-sensitive cells or some such). Now, me and the yela'kaja both have very bright lights strapped to our heads--which are very good, by the way. They don't penetrate the corridors as well, but they throw light all around the mess hall, and my batteries haven't worn out yet despite the amount of use this thing gets. Anyway, since light isn't a very common down in a Tállö mess hall deep underground where you can't even get sunlight through the ventilation shaft, whenever one of them "feels" our lights, suddenly about thirty pairs of ears start shifting in our direction and some heads turn to get a better "look" at the aliens.

Then we get special attention from the cooks. The Xala have cleared a few Tzállö foods for me to eat, so when I go to get my food one of the servers pulls out this little sheet of paper with the list in Fbeki and starts running his fingers along each little entry, making suggestions as he finds up with stuff he particularly likes. Note that, while he's reading the paper on the table with his fingers, his nose and ears are firmly aimed at me -- he apparently can read and stare at the funny alien at the same time.

Most of what they serve is fungus and maybe some small animals. In fact, as I'm writing this, I'm sitting in the mess hall eating a big plate of mushrooms with some moss harvested from the tunnel entrance, along with a Xala protein bar, of course -- none of the meats are cleared, yet. Apparently Lazga has dozens of varieties of edible mushrooms. The one's I'm having are called zbugy (something like ZHBOO-gyu), and they're not so bad, for mushrooms. The food's not quite as good as on Kesata, but it's definitely not as nasty as the protein bars the Xala give me.

Out of Quarantine

They've let me out of the quarantine cell, finally. We had a guided tour of the little underground city where I'll be staying. Of course, there wasn't much for me to grab hold of, since the only light I had was from my own flashlight strapped to my head. The flashlight itself isn't even that interesting, it looks just like a regular electric light, possibly a bit more advanced as the bulb is very bright and the batteries haven't burnt out in the hours that I've had it.

One thing that I notice is the walls. After Kesata with its sculptures and brightly colored rooms this place seems dull and grim. We did see some statues of some historical figures, but most of them are not nearly as detailed as Kesatan sculptures. They do have some very good textures on a few of the statues, but they seem to be smoothed out over all, and of course none of them are painted. The more important statues are made with granite, while some others are made with some gray rock, maybe shale, and a few are made from what looks like coal.

The signs on the walls are interesting. The yela'kaja pointed them out to me. The letters are all big blocky shapes cut out of the walls. He tells me that this type of lettering is easier to read by echolocation, and he's also going to bring me a Fbeki book (the Tzállö language is called Fbeki) so I can see their other alphabet, which from what he describes is similar to what's on the walls but is felt with your fingers like Braille. I definitely won't be staying here long.

By the way, I only got one yela'kaja, in human form, as humans can apparently pronounce all the sounds in the Tzállö language. That's what they tell me, at least. From the sound of it, I have my doubts as to whether I could do it myself.

Quarantine

Sorry I was absent, I was just now allowed to have my stuff. I'm here on Lazga ("LAHZH gah") to meet a race that the yela'kaja here calls the Tzállö (which sounds something like "CHAWL yer" with a British accent). Once again, they give me the spellings, they don't let me make them up. Anyway, the Tzállö (which I'm sure would be harder to type than it is to make this gadget type) are apparently a bit neurotic about germs, so when I got here (which, according to what I'm told, took a couple days anyway, though to me it was all instantaneous) I was sent immediately to this little quarantine cell, despite assurances from the yela'kaja that all proper the proper precautions had already been taken -- which I'm quite sure of from all the vaccines and antibiotics and whatever-all drugs the Xala gave me before they took me to the gâ'axao station.

Anyway, at least they gave my cell some lights and found something I can eat. Outside my cell in the corridor is pitch black -- from the looks of it the Tzállö don't even have eyes. They find their way around through echolocation. Luckily, my hearing isn't good enough to hear their constant clicking, which I was warned about before I came, but I think I can kind of feel it -- every time one of those things comes in here I feel really uneasy. Of course, that could be just the fact that they look like tall gray-skinned people with no eyes and some serious ear lobes (thing giant raggedy elf ears). Hopefully I'll be out of this cell soon and the tour can get underway. There is no way that the whole planet is as dark and cold and gloomy as this quarantine cell.

Action Plays and Power Players

Just came back from that ballet. It was quite a bit different from the one I went to when I first got to Kesata. It started out with the Storyteller like the other one, but once we got into the play there were a lot of holographic images and lights and even fireworks (in the underwater stages, no less). I'm didn't get the story very well, the dancing was quite fast and confused and the yela'kaja couldn't keep up with the translation -- something about a group of terrorists trying to sink one of those big Kesatan deep-sea cities. Meanwhile, I was surrounded by Kesatan diplomats who seemed to be enjoying themselves a bit, though most of them were quite old. Their feelers kept twitching and their hands would slap at the walls.

The yela'kaja later explained to me that there were two major modes to Kesatan ballet, traditional mode and modern mode. Traditional was what I saw when I first got to the planet, with set pieces of all natural materials and very few big effects. Modern is what would describe the play I just came from, lots of lights and pyrotechnics and some applications of Xala technology that I hadn't yet seen, like force-fields formed into giant holograms.

Anyway, the Kesatan diplomats went for a soak after the ballet (they'd started to dry out spending the whole play in the air-breather areas with me), and then they came back and started talking to me. I'd already had the introductions before the play, but apparently they wanted to do small talk. I think there were some Kesatan reporters there with something that looked like a camera along with a little Xala device that puts writing up on a force-field screen in front of you (though I couldn't read the writing, of course. I think it was Kesatan.) They asked me a couple of stupid questions like "Do you like it here on Kesata?" (something every one of the diplomats asked me, as well.) and "Do you thing your planet will soon join the trade network?" How am I supposed to know whether my planet is going to join the trade network? I don't even know if the most powerful leader. But I guess that's how things go.

Pretty soon I'll be heading out for the next planet. The Xala call it Lasga. All I know about it is it's cool and dark and it's possible I might be incessantly annoyed by clicking sounds if my hearing goes up high enough to hear it (the Xala haven't tested that part of my anatomy completely). Anyway, my next blog is likely to be from there, if I can get a light to work.

Anyway, after the ballet was over

One Last Little Trip

They're preparing me to go to the next planet on my tour. Today we went out on the speedboat for a quick ride around the city and some nearby islands. The yela'kaja says it could be a while, as it seems they're negotiating with some of the leadership (apparently its tricky arranging a tour in this planet).

Frankly, I've grown to like Kesata quite a bit. In fact, I might ask to be brought back here before I get sent back to Earth. The other day I went to see some of those giant eels the Kesatans ride, and I actually learned to ride a little. They gave me an older one, easier to control, though I found it hard to keep it from diving. Kesatans can survive for nearly an hour underwater, sometimes more, so they don't do much to break these things' habit of going underwater for extended periods when it cruises. I was pulling the reins so hard to pull it up that its nose is sore from the harness tugging at it and the poor things gills are almost bleeding. Now the Kesatans won't let me ride it anymore, at least not until they can get one trained for "land people". I hear some of the tourists resorts have mounts that will stay above water most of the time.

Anyway, I haven't been told much about the next stop. For one, they say it'll be just a little lighter gravity (my muscles have adapted to the high Kesatan gravity, so they wanted to warn me that I may end up putting in just a bit more force than necessary once I enter the next world). The other thing they said is that it's dark there, so they're preparing a light for me (they're engineering a special one for human eyes, though I didn't know Xala eyes were any different).

Anyway, there's another ballet on the itinerary before I leave. Frankly, I'm not quite sure I want to go, but I was told that there would be some people there that wanted to meet me, the kaja ga' Erta ("alien from Earth", I'm picking up some Xala, as well as some Kesatan Sign), so I'm guessing that some diplomats want a meeting or something and that skipping isn't really an option.

Anyway, it'll be sad leaving Kesata, and I'm not sure I'm going to like the place I'm going better than here, but I guess that, being the alien here, I'll have to follow the schedule.

Still Floating in the Ocean

I've been relaxing a bit and I seem to have been neglecting this blog. I've been exploring the city here a bit. I even go swimming once in a while. A few of the buildings here reserve the big area in the center of the cylinder, what the Xala call the jôseta (DJO-sheh-tah), or the "access shaft", for a recreational area where I'm allowed to take a swim any time I please. I've also picked up enough Kesatan Sign Language to know that they are quite amused at the "alien" swimming with them. Adult Kesatans can hold their breath for over an hour, and the younger ones for even longer until they lose their gills.

It's the little ones that find it funniest. Some of them haven't even lost their gills yet, so they're more comfortable in water than on land. I've watched some of the nursery areas (I'm not allowed in there myself, but many of them are also in jôseta as well, so I can look at it from the windows). The adults seem to have a million ways to get xasedê, or little Kesatans that are just growing limbs and lungs, out of the water. The yela'kaja tells me that Kesatans do that because they believe that a young Kesatan has to be out of the water for a certain portion of the time once they can walk on land, or they won't develop right. According to him, there are dozens of horror stories of Kesatans who had difficulty walking or whose lungs are malformed and had trouble breathing because they started leaving the pool too late or didn't spend enough time on land. Wait a minute, he wants to add to that:

It is true that these stories exist. Whether they are justified is another matter. Kesatans can, indeed, have trouble walking if they do not practice enough as their limbs develop, but I have never seen any Kesatan die or develop any serious disability from this.

Unfortunately, Xala scientists can't study Kesatan development in much detail. While the Kesatans do raise their young in communal nursery pools and all responsible Kesatan adults in the community will care for them, regardless of relationship, there is a strong cultural taboo universal among Kesatans that does not allow non-Kesatans to approach these nursery pools or the protected cave-nests where the eggs are laid.

I don't know if anyone really cared to read that, but ever since I got my new machine, that yela'kaja can cut in whenever he wants, though he generally asks permission.

Also, the yela'kaja is helping me revise my tags. Hopefully this'll help people navigate around here and find the information they want. He said that there's some council on Jed trying to work up a site with more info on it, too. I don't know what that's about, but they want to set it up, though from the amount of hits this blog gets, I really don't think they're reaching many people back there on Earth, anyway.

My Little Entourage

As I guess you might expect, any time I get to walking around in a lot of the areas on this planet, I tend to get a trail of little Kesatans, lots of them barely xasedê following me like and entourage. The older ones sometimes get a bit curious, too, though most have them have seen an alien at at least once before (not a human, of course, but the Xala use the same routes whenever they take a new alien delegation to Kesata or just about any other planet in their network).

Kesata's a big contrast from what I experienced on Jed. There, the most curious of anyone were the Ŋãna, and I travelled long enough with them that they eventually just got used to me. Xala, on Kesata and on Jed, usually don't seem to care about me, unless they're yela'kaja. Even the Kesatans I met while touring Jed seemed to see me more as an annoyance than as an interesting new alien. Of course I can explain that last part, as the Kesatans that come to talk to me that have any experience with Kesatan diplomats describe them as kind of stuffy, upper-class types that live away from the other Kesatans either on islands closer to the Xala gâ'axao stations or in the central parts of some of these deep-ocean cities (like Kesatan City 32, in fact, where I'm told the central cylinder houses the offices of some regional council or something, despite the fact that, as I understand, this place only houses a few thousand people).

Anyway, to get back to what I was talking about, I've developed a bit of an entourage here, as well. All these little Kesatans, most of them really young, ask me all sorts of silly questions, via interpreter of course. One of them asked me about "villages" on Earth, and when I said that lots of humans live far away from the ocean on the interiors of the continents, he croaked and backed away, signing something that the yela'kaja told me meant "How do you not dry up?" Needless to say, I figure that whenever he visits the larger islands, that's what the adults tell him to keep him from going far from the shore, for good reason. Kesatans really can "dry up" and die if they don't have seawater.

Anyway, I do enjoy the attention, though my bodyguards often seem nervous about it. And of course, I can get away from the group if I wish, my quarters here are isolated and secured so no one can get in -- not that I think the Xala's security precautions are really needed in the first place.

Three Angry Fish-Men

Seeing all the boats come in and out of here I remember a little incident we had as we were going in to land at an island, just after my laptop exploded. Some of the waters off the Kesatan islands get pretty crowded. In fact, it can get so bad that they commissioned these force-field barriers and with little floating docks out away from the shore to keep the boats from getting too close to the reef communities on some of the larger islands.

Anyway, we were headed for one of these bigger islands as a stopping place, when another speedboat a lot like ours came blazing out of the docks and hit us from the side. Of course immediately, both boats stopped. The one that had just hit us filled with Kesatans of various age and appearance, and most of them were sort of cowering in the back while the two boat pilots stood up and started croaking and flailing at each other, signing furiously and violently with their colors flashing brightly and quickly to the point of strobing. I saw one small Kesatan in the other boat attempting (unsuccessfully) to blend into a corner (these boats aren't easy for Kesatans to use their camouflage against, but I'm pretty sure the kid was giving it his best shot).

Meanwhile, another Kesatan comes up riding one of these tame giant fish (or eels or whatever-they are), stands up, with reins still in hand, and joins in the whole thing. About this time I asked my yela'kaja about what they are saying and, if memory serves, I believe he said something like, "Oh, these fish-men do this all the time."

About that time, the other yela'kaja (the one in the form of a Kesatan) croaked for attention and said something to the pilot that I presume was along the lines of "Get us to shore before we sink," (we were starting to take on water from the crash) and we started heading in to port. Needless to say, that was a very interesting experience.

From Kesatan City 32

Recently we've come out to a settlement out in the middle of the ocean for a bit of a rest. It's called Kesatan City 32. The yela'kaja tells me that these "cities" are pretty recent. Apparently Xala technology is extending the Kesatans live and making it so more of the eggs survive, so the coasts are nearly full.

I'll let him explain that further whenever he's around to contribute, but I'm just up on top of this big settlement and remembering those big Xala cities we flew past back on Jed. It's basically the same big cylindrical housing units, except that instead of floating way up in the air on some sort of anti-gravity, these are sunk half into the water. We did a little tour of it when I got here, both above and below water, and I keep remembering that weird walk-through theater where we saw that Kesatan ballet. It's the same sort of deal with Xala technology and Kesatan art, though there seems to be more metal than coral on these settlements.

They evacuated the water from some of the lower levels (a lot of them are flooded at least halfway up most of the time, as Kesatans need to be in salt water most of the time). From down there you can see that the Kesatans use the big hollow core for something other than an access shaft. I recognized lots of different fish and squid and plants from the underwater farms we saw on some of the islands. Apparently they don't need pens as much here, either, as most of the stuff they farm never dives below the level of the bottom of these cylinders and really couldn't leave if it could. There's a good deal of coral on the inside to anchor mussels and seaweed and such.

Anyway I'm going to be on about the third level up from the water for a while, resting, so I might be able to catch up with some of the stuff I missed blogging when my computer exploded, especially know that I think I've got the hang of using this Xala Internet-access typing whatchamajigger. So, look out for some stories about Kesata.

Kesatan Life Cycle

Now that I have this thing working for me (It's still a little weird for me thinking words and seeing them pop up on the screen, but at least its not so painful anymore.) I'm going to go on to that post about the Kesatan life cycle. And to open it up, I've got my human-form yela'kaja with all his information laid out (and by that I mean he has stuff laid out in what looks like the Xala language and a couple other languages I don't recognize up on screens) and is ready to start us out, so handing it to the man:

The life cycle of a xala kesata, or "Kesatan", as Vinceon calls them, starts when the females eggs, after being laid in an underwater cave-like structure, is fertilized by a male Kesatan's sperm. The embryo develops one Kesatan month, which is about half of one of your Gregorian months, into a small creature similar to what you call tadpoles, though it seems from what I've found that they are much larger than any tadpoles on Earth or on Jed. In Yeltax we often call these gaxesê, which roughly translates as "little fish" and refers to any tadpole-like amphibious offspring.

This "tadpole" will gradually evolve into the adult. The most immediately apparent part of this process is usually the growth of limbs, which are often present within one of your months and continue to grow very rapidly throughout the growth period. Kesatans divide the stages of the metamorphosis differently, depending upon the local culture. The most common division is as follows (using Yeltax names for lack of an effective way of transliterating the Kesatan sign language):

1. gogo: egg
   
2. gaxesê: "tadpole"
   
3. xasedê: "little salamander", which begins with the first appearance of the limbs
   
4. tôkoxe: "tailless", which begins when half the tail is lost. Also by this stage, the gills have generally been totally replaced by lungs
5. xala êdag: "full adult", which is marked by the growth of two large maxillary barbels.
   

The entire process takes many of your years to complete. The first three stages are usually last a matter of weeks or months and during that time the young are under constant supervision, either by their own parents or by the community. In most Kesatan cultures, the young are cared for communally by an entire village of mostly related individuals, which we think is responsible for the sign corresponding most closely to your word mother is usually extended to all females of the previous generation in one's home village, and the same occurs for the sign corresponding to father. This, of course, is dependent on the local language and dialect.

The later two take years to complete on their own, during which time they are gradually given more freedom and more responsibility as they are more thoroughly socialized by the community. It should be noted that it is very difficult for Kesatans to learn the various sign languages on this planet until the limbs are fairly well developed and the chromatophores are fully functional. The entire process is usually complete in ten to twelve of your Gregorian years, at which time the young adult Kesatan is free to either stay in it's home village or move to some other village or even to other islands.

Kesatans will become sexually potent and produce new offspring upon reaching or sometimes before reaching adulthood, and will usually continue to be fertile for their entire lives, which is incredibly short at an average of around fifty-three of your Gregorian years.

So, that's it in a nutshell, I stopped him for now, as I didn't really want to make this post too long. I'll let him get into some more about fertility and such next time. By the way, just so you know, Xala live for two hundred to three hundred years, so the Kesatan lifespan looks a lot shorter to him than it does to us (though you have to admit that fifty years is pretty short compared to us, too). Personally, I seem to recall meeting a Kesatan here that was about sixty, but I was told that she was a rarity and is revered in her community for her incredible age.

Some Stuff about My New "Laptop"

OK, I've been working with this thing for a while now, I think I can handle it.

Just to give you some background, the new machine is completely different from the old modified laptop. I'm told it'll be easier to maintain a connection because there isn't so much jury-rigging to get things working. Once the data is converted into whatever the crystals communicate with, it doesn't need to be converted back. It's just filtered through the crystal and some unused parts of my brain and then appears on the screen. Of course, it looks kind of strange, as I just see the website itself, no programs or anything. All the commands I get with a browser work though, I just have to "think" them. At first I thought it would be really chaotic, but it really goes pretty easy.

Anyway, writing is a bit more difficult. In fact that's the bit that was giving me headaches. Here's what the technician said to me about it (yela'kaja translating):

When typing, it takes a little bit more effort. There are two ways you can do it. The first is to visualize exactly what you wish to write. This is not as easy as it might sound. The device will read letters and formatting straight from your head and attempt to convert it into something that can be transmitted. If you're not good at visualization, it might not come out looking exactly as you expected.
The other route is to simply form the words in your head as if you're about to say them. You've already figured out how to work this strange arrow control [the cursor], so other tasks related to writing shouldn't be difficult.

By the way, you'll see more of that. This new system allows me to jack in the yela'kaja at any time and let him write something himself. Neither he nor my previous two yela'kaja had much patience trying to type, so they left the laptop alone, but they seem extremely adept at this stuff. Anyway, I ended up going with a little of both systems. The only issue with either of the writing techniques the machine has to, in the words of the technician, "tap into higher systems" in the brain, especially when I'm just forming words like I'm going to say them, which apparently activates a lot of little pathways that have to be tracked through.

Anyway, that about covers my new machine. We're coming up on another stop. It's a big Kesatan settlement out in the middle of the ocean. I've been to a couple of those. I'll talk about it a bit later, but my next post I'll be doing that bit on the Kesatan life-cycle like I promised before. Right now I've got to go to some sort of reception thingy. Seeya.

New "Computer", Bad Headache

The crystal on my laptop blew (making the yela'kaja here curse, of course, that the people on Jed were incompetent enough not to send me with a spare). By the way, when a crystal blows in your face it's not fun. The thing literally melted into energy in front of my eyes and then exploded. Luckily it didn't do any serious damage, but the blast left purple dye everywhere! My face will be purple for a month, and I'll never get the clothes I was wearing clean, not to mention the fact that despite all our efforts to clean it up, the laptop is pretty well ruined. The Xala can't use their special solvents to clean it, as it would damage the laptop. Besides that, not only is the screen all purpled-out, they told me that the dye's gotten into the keyboard and may have screwed the whole thing over.

Luckily, the Xala had a new device in the works for me back on Jed. It just got in a couple hours ago. It took it a while to catch up with our island hopping on top of the amount of time it took to get it together. (It's always kinda strange when the longest "distance" in a trip takes the least amount of time, but I guarantee it took thousands of times longer to get the thing from the nearest gâ'akao here than it really took entering itself.)

Anyway, I'm still breaking this thing in, so my stuff will be spotty for a while. The control crystal needs to rearrange itself to respond to my thoughts, and I have to learn how to make it write without giving myself a great big headache. The machine's basically just a force-field screen and a control crystal. I'll give more detail later, as I feel a headache coming on right now.

Before I leave, I'll say I promise to get that thing on the Kesatan life cycle and family together soon. They've given me all the information, and the yela'kaja is going to help me write it up. Right now, I can't write much more for a while. See ya!

Little Kesatan Punk

I was more than a little startled today when a young Kesatan decided to sneak up on me while I was down in a little observation ship looking out underwater through force fields. First of all, you must understand, I've grown very wary of Xala force-fields. I'm always afraid they're going to fail when they should be protecting me from an energy blast, explosive decompression, or in this case, a great massive flood of the entire building. The Xala are always reassuring me that the second a crystal fails, there will be a metal barrier put up so the shield can be taken down for repairs.

All that aside, I was still nervous when I looked out on a little coral reef that some Kesatans were tending to. (The Kesatans sometimes cut chunks of coral for materials, but these guys seemed to be working on herding some schools of fish and harvesting snales, mussels, and starfish for some of that Kesatan food I mentioned in the last post.) Anyway, out of the blue, this huge, oddly-shaped chunk of rock I'm looking at suddenly flashes all colors of the rainbow and turns into, what else, a young Kesatan staring me in the face.

My interpreter, ever helpful, pointed out his lack of feelers (adult Kesatans have little catfish feelers on their upper jaws), so I knew he was young. That very useful yela'kaja also told me that the posture and color patterns on the Kesatan I was staring at "indicate amusement" -- his words, not mine. Somehow Xala have the weirdest way of stating everything as an interesting scientific observation, even when some young Kesatan punk that is probably barely out of metamorphosis from a tadpole (giving him the mentality of about a two-year-old) is making fun of the stupid human!

Anyway, the yela'kaja went on an on about Kesatan camouflage ability. Somewhere somebody told him about squid and octopus camouflage, so he brought up the similarities. "Of course, Xasedla* can't take the wide variety of shapes that your cephelopods can. Xasedla are limited by their skeletal structure, so if you have their basic body shape in your head you can usually identify a camouflaged Xasedla about forty percent of the time."

To that, I said, "That's nice," keeping from him the fact that I didn't know what a 'cephelopod' was until now.

*Xasedla (kha - shez - la) is another term the Xala use for Kesatans. The yela'kaja here uses it a good bit, but I forgot it in my original list of names for Kesatans. It basically means "salamander man". Would you believe that that's actually a very acceptable term for them?

Real Food

The Xala have tested some Kesatan food and managed to find some stuff I can eat. Now granted, they eat a lot of raw fish and sea food dressed with various seaweeds and such, but all that's better than those Xala powerbars every day. In fact it's really not so bad. Apparently the Kesatans are very good at cultivating and breeding. They serve everything with a combination of sea plants and spices they get from the land, even some fruit they grow on the coasts. The seaweed is a bit salty, usually, but they actually grow some mushrooms that are quite sweet. Besides that, I always liked crab a good bit, and they have some crustaceans that taste pretty much exactly like it.

Kesatans are apparently quite famous for their food. They've developed various recipes that are keyed to different species' tastes and physiology, but my yela'kajas tell me that they all have the same kinds of flavors (and their strong stomachs can handle most varieties, so they've tried a few). Yes, the Xala here eat the Kesatan stuff once in a while. Apparently they've grown accustomed to the stuff, though they usually have a Xala variety that goes light on the veggies and heavy on the fish -- yela'kaja can learn to like vegetables and fruit, but regular Xala are all carnivores. From what I hear, the fact that Xala even tolerate spices once in a while is a departure from the culture on Jed.

All this said, the Xala are watching me pretty closely after I eat Kesatan food. They assure me that they've found nothing in the stuff that they're giving me that would poison me, but they want to be cautious. As far as I'm concerned, nothing has had an ill effect so far. Kesatan food's probably good for any human that doesn't have a seafood allergy.

Touring Kesata on a Serious Speedboat

We've been touring around Kesata for a few days now. In fact, as I'm writing this I'm sitting on a boat headed for my next island. These Kesatan boats are much better than the big slow Xala transports I travelled in on Jed. They're pretty compact and lightweight, so they can get up to some pretty fast speeds. They barely touch the water when their cruising, there's just a couple of "feet" under the water with the back just barely in the water. When you get up like that, I could swear the thing can speed at over a hundred miles per hour.

Not that the Kesatans really have a mad desire for speed. Along the way we often pass Kesatans riding on big, serpentine fish, kind of like giant eels. They have special harnesses so they can lay on top of the thing and guide it with something like the reigns. I'm told that they raise those things like we do horses, and they ride them a lot more than humans ride a horse in modern times.

But to get back to the boat, I've been asking the operator (through a Xala translator team, since the operator is a Kesatan) how everything on it works and where it comes from. According to him, it's a sort of hodge-podge of stuff from several different planets. The body of the boat is made up of lightweight metals provided by the Xala. It uses a small jet engine for propulsion, which is set up to run on an fuel cell brought in from another world. (He tells me the best engines come from a planet that my translator is calling Gojat.)

Anyway, looking at his controls, I see a few manual levers as well as a big purple crystal, definitely from Jed. The levers kinda move by themselves, which I'm told is because they're only a backup in case the crystal blows unexpectedly. The front windshield is a Xala force-field, which actually extends itself all the way to the back when we get up to full speed. whenever a bug hits the force-field it kinda sticks to it, thoroughly squashed, and drifts toward the rear before it falls off into the sea.

Meanwhile, there's a little screen by the controls that shows where we are on a map with a line to show our planned course. The location information comes from a network of satellites. Jed has a similar system, which I figure is a lot like a GPS, but I never got to see the control room of any of my transports there. The whole system is actually based on one they found on another planet, though neither the ship pilot nor my translators knew which one offhand.

I think the most "Kesatan" thing about this ship is that it's shaped kind of decoratively. There are some little decorative figures built into the inner walls of it, and the whole thing is painted with line designs and such. I've seen this kind of artwork everywhere I go on Kesata. All of their buildings are partially underwater and are filled with statues and little figurines as well as some wall paintings and such. They also like to make some decorative plant arrangements for both above and below water. I haven't seen the underwater areas much, but most of the above-water parts of their buildings have interesting arrangements of different colored ferns and some flowers and such. They even use some imported plants.

Kesatan Ballet

Been a while since my last post, and there are reasons for that. My laptop has been doing strange things, so I had to get that fixed. Plus, we've been very busy touring all the little islands that dot this planet. It's a very interesting place, no doubt. I saw that dance a little while ago, but it didn't tell me anything new. I took some notes so I could describe it:

Kesatan "ballets", as the yela'kaja called them, begin regularly at sunset in an outdoor theater above water with a single dancer, who the yela'kaja calls the Storyteller. (The Kesatan sign for him, I'm told, comes from a sign meaning "to tell" or "to teach".) He basically does a long dance that invokes some sort of water spirit and then sets up the whole story for us. This particular story follows a young Kesatan who witnessed the first contact with the Xala and went to warn the elders about it.

Before I go on, I need to tell you a little bit about this theater. You see, the whole building, which seems to be a combination of the dull metallic architecture of the Xala with the incorporation of some very artistic structures made of stone and some sort of coral that most definitely comes from the Kesatans, is built both above and below water. The audience is actually expected to follow the action both above and below water by circling around when it moves from one location to another. That, of course, means that there are actually very few seats in the entire building, and to get a good view you often have to jostle around in the crowd. Luckily, there weren't a whole lot of other land-dwellers watching, just a few Xala and a couple delegations from some other planets that I unfortunately don't know much about yet, one species that looked a bit like an upright-walking feathered lizard and some really pale creatures with some fuzzy hair and no visible eyes (they didn't go underwater as much, and I don't think they appreciated the play to much, either).

As you've probably guessed, the underwater section is separated between a truly underwater experience for the Kesatans and any other species that has gills and can deal with the Kesatan ocean, and an upper section that is protected by force-fields and pressurized for those of us who rely only on our lungs. I don't know how they keep the water clear as it is, as a lot of the underwater dances get pretty vigorous and involve quite a few performers.

I was very surprised by how well the show was done. I couldn't understand a single thing without my yela'kaja interpreter there beside me, but I did like some of the numbers. The only music in these dances comes from some various sizes of drums, all tuned specially so that they can be played with certain pitches in and out of water. I think there was actually one drum that was partially filled with water, and they'd turn it really quick to make a "thump" of water rushing from one end to the other.

Kesatans are good with costumes, too. Their Xala costumes were kind of artsy, but they definitely didn't look like the Kesatans inside them. For a while I wondered if there were Xala in the play, but they only "flew" in the underwater dances, so I really doubt it. There were also a lot of set pieces that I think are supposed to be Xala war machines, with lighting effects and some sounds from the drums. The yela'kaja actually showed me one afterward and showed me how it was made. All of the props are made from that coral material, with some metal plating and some dyes added where necessary. The lighting effects were the real interesting part. they use trained bio-luminescent fish that can actually swim out fast enough to look like an energy bolt firing at someone. The only thing the Xala provide for most of the props is the metal and some levitation crystals for easier transportation (which probably isn't all that necessary, as the coral stuff is pretty light underwater.

Anyway, as I said, the play followed a young, and probably fictional, Kesatan who saw the Xala coming and went to warn the elders, but they ignored him, thinking it was just a fantasy. Then it goes all the way up through the Xala civil war, showing mostly battles fought on Kesata, and a few on Jed, which seemed to be thousands of cloned Xala against a smaller number of the Je'e Edag group with some powerful bombs and weapons. Eventually the cloned Xala kill the leader of Je'e Edag and apparently annihilate or banish the rest of the group, liberating protecting the Kesatans from certain extinction. I figure the whole story has been pretty romanticized, but its still another view on it.

I can see that I've already got a really long post here, so I'll save a little bit about my little island-hopping here for the next one.

A Little Bit of History

As I adjust to the sweltering heat, high gravity, short days, and unbearable insects of Kesata, I've decided to distract myself by getting back on my digging into the history here. Of course, suddenly it's not that hard to get at it. The yela'kaja here gave me a good rundown of it in his original briefing, and my talks with the Kesatans seem to tell pretty much the same story that the Xala tell.

Basically it goes like this:

When the Xala first began experimenting with their new gâ'axao, they found quite a few uninhabited worlds. In fact, they even claimed quite a few of them for themselves and build remote bases, most requiring their own life-support. There were a few of what they call "living worlds", but no indication of intelligent life . . . until they met the Kesata.

This was all happening about four thousand years ago, very soon after the discovery of the gâ'axao, and apparently there were differences among the various factions of the Xala in how to use the technology and the resources they were finding. Jed itself had only been unified a few years previously, and the first cloning experiments were just gaining enough acceptance that the eggs were allowed to hatch. In this environment there were some tensions between the traditionalists who opposed genetic engineering and a younger, more liberal group that had grown out of an idea that genetic engineering could aid the species.

The traditionalists, who were called je'e edag (xala ga' je'e edag, "people for true life"), wanted to expand Jed's territory at all costs, and often proposed completely razing life-bearing planets to exterminate native wildlife so that they could reseed it with Jed's life, which they believed was created by their god, do'kajex ("the Mind") to rule over all of existence. Meanwhile, the genetic engineering promoters, who called themselves xala ga' kajex ta' ka'xao (roughly "people for knowledge")*, wanted to study these worlds and look for new medicines, genes, what have you to experiment with to improve the Xala.

Anyway, to get back to Kesata, It didn't take long after finding the planet that the Xala discovered the Kesatans. The reports coming back from the planet initially mentioned them as an interesting animal species that communicated with color and gestures. It wasn't until later that several explorers recognized the signs as a form of language and began to learn it.

This of course, inflamed the whole conflict. The Kajex ta' Ka'xao people wanted to accelerate their genetic engineering program and create an "intermediary" species to communicate with the Kesatans, while the Je'e Edag crowd condemned them as lexala, or "false intelligence", and considered them vermin to be exterminated.

Anyway, as luck would have it, the Kesatans were spared the deadly fate that many human civilizations faced when the Xala turned against each other in a bloody civil war. The Kajex ta' Ka'xao people pulled together and the capital and the gâ'axao stations on several colony worlds, effectively cutting off the Je'e Edag crowd from the rest of the multiverse. The Je'e Edag tried to fight back, but within a period of several coaxrorol, Kajex ta' Ka'xao had taken over government. The war apparently lasted long enough through terrorism and sabotage for them to continue genetics research and apply it to the war effort, eventually overrunning Jed with clones.

Here's where the whole story gets fuzzier. My yela'kaja admits that the story of how Kadjex ta' Ka'xao took over is unclear, and how they were able to advance their cloning technology so quickly is a complete mystery. There is even a legend that spirits from Coaxta gave them the knowledge and the power to do all this. Plus, when I talk to the Kesatans they seem to be very insistent that there was actually a third species involved that actually did attack them, while the Xala insist that any attacks on the Kesatans were committed by Je'e Edag terrorists that slipped through the cracks somehow.

Whatever the case, the Xala that exist today seem to be the descendants (in a weird, genetically-engineered sort of way) of the Kajex ta' Ka'xao. Wherever the Je'e Edag went, I wouldn't expect that they're around anymore. I don't expect to get much more on this subject. After all, it happened four thousand years ago. I am told that the play I'm going to see here has a bit of the war history from the Kesatan point-of-view worked into it. Of course, that'll all be in the Kesatan sign language. I certainly hope my interpreter can understand their dancing better than I can understand some people singing.

Welcome to Water World

Yes, as I came off the platform here I was informed by the yela'kaja that Kesata is a Xala word meaning "Water-world", referencing the enormous amount of ocean on this planet. By they way, if you haven't figured it our from my rearrangement of the tabs, I've decided to start calling the people from this planet "Kesatans", because I was getting myself confused all the time. The Xala call them xala kesata, or "people of Kesata"--at least, when they're being polite. It took me some amount of coaxing to get the yela'kaja to give me the name that the Xala often call them amongst themselves, which turned up a few terms: xala gaxes, gaxes, de'gaxes; which all seem to be labeling them as intelligent fish.

I half listened to his big speech about how the Xala discovered this planet, but I'm going to let that information wait a while as I talk to some Kesatans. I think it's much more important that I talk about my trip through the portal.

In my last post, I detailed the four major safety rules they tell you. Here they are again to refresh your memory:

1) Keep to the center of the crystal platform.
2) Don't touch the security field.
3) Remain as still as possible.
4) Wait until the security field is taken down before leaving the platform.

Those rules were repeated to us at the platform, but I only half listened this time, being distracted by the Kesatan-form yela'kaja giving the same spiel while the Kesatan delegation generally half-listened to him. They didn't talk among themselves like humans would, though. I imagine that a sign language takes a lot more eye contact and attention to the speaker, so you probably can't split your attention between two people as easily. Either that or Kesatans are just generally more polite than humans.

Anyway, we all stepped onto the platform, which fit us all quite nicely even if I felt like a sardine and probably smelled like one too being stuck in with all those fishy Kesatans. The security field came up with that terrible screech you always get from Xala force-fields as they harden. There weren't any arcs of electricity as they'd been shown in the diagram, but I didn't test my luck on being electrocuted. After all, the field did look a bit different than the window force-fields I've seen before -- a bit less transparent, it seems like, and sort of bluish.

Anyway, now came the fun part. I decided not to close my eyes so I could describe the whole experience. The crystal below us started to glow and then melted away into a wave of energy that washed over us. It was quick, but I was able to notice my body numbing as the energy came up, and then eventually disappearing from all consciousness, like those body parts weren't even there in the first place. Of course the worst part was when it got to my head. The energy invaded my ears, taking my hearing, and washed over my eyes, which actually completely blinded me for a second before it was all over. That said, I'll never do this with my eyes open ever again.

Anyway, after that split second of blindness, the energy receded again and recrystallized under our feet. When the security field went down I thought something was wrong. The room was identical to the one we left from, right down to the technician at the console. The only indication that I'd actually left Jed at that point was the fact that everything: me, my backpack, my computer case; felt just a little heavier. So I staggered out of the station to find myself in a very hot little Xala structure. I was informed later that the transport room of every gâ'axao station is laid out identically to mitigate initial disorientation.

Anyway, they showed me to the quarters they've prepared for me and I'm acclimatizing myself to the environment before I go outside. This structure is built pretty high up and a good ways from the coast, but you can see the ocean from the window. They tell me they brought me to a favorite recreation spot for several other species the Xala have contacted, so it's apparently built for tourism, though most Xala really don't understand the concept all that much.

The Gâ'axao Safety Briefing

It's going to be time to head for another planet in a few hours. The Kesata are finishing up with their meetings, so we'll be heading out soon.

The yela'kaja gave me a big safety talk, sort of like what you're told before boarding an airplane -- only this ain't no airplane ride I'm taking. He was showing me this little holographic diagram of the gâ'axao (that's the short form of gâ'akaxaoda) while he said it. The apparatus itself is kinda strange, though I wouldn't think much about it if I saw it in a big city. I'd probably figure it was some sort of art piece or something.

The whole thing consists of a giant, emerald-green crystal held into a circular frame on the floor with metal braces, kind of like a gemstone setting in a ring, though if there's a creature with a ring big enough to mount this setting on, I don't want to meet it.. The frame holds the crystal into the floor, and the travellers are actually supposed to climb up on top of the crystal. (I'm told that while the crystal is often big enough to transport a small pickup with the upper range being able to support a whole housing unit, it's never more than a step or two above the ground.) Here's where the first safety tip comes in:

1) Try to keep to the center of the crystal.

Here the yela'kaja generated a number of Kesata models, and one human model. When he moved them in there, he pushed us all in tight in the middle, and then caused a little force field to come up around the apparatus. This led to the next warning, which is related to the one I just stated:

2) Under no circumstances is the security field to be touched. It is electrified for your safety.

To illustrate this, he had the little human figure walk up to the force field and touch it. With a little animated lightning bolt running up his arm, he fell backward unconscious. By this time I had it figured that his was his version of the little safety cards you get in an airplane, so I kept on paying attention. His final rule on departure:

3) Remain as still as possible while the entrance is in progress.

That was simple enough to show. All the figures stayed quite still as a little wave of energy passed up and down over us. He also recommended I close my eyes before activation. I'll see how that works. He didn't show what would happen if I moved too much.

Anyway, there's one final rule before you disembark:

4) Wait until the security field is taken down before leaving the platform.

Sensible enough. If you try to walk through it, not only will you be electrocuted, but you'll probably get a nasty bruise, seeing as how solid these force fields usually are.

Anyway, I'm going to make sure I know all this before we "enter" Kesata. I've never been through this thing while conscious before, so I'd better keep this stuff in mind. The yela'kaja tells me that there'll be another yela'kaja waiting for me on the other side to show me to a place where I can wait a bit and adjust to the new environment, which the yela'kaja on Kesata is presumably doing right now. I'll be sure to describe the trip to you as soon as I'm on Kesata and have a chance to sit down.

Big Cities, Big Plans

We've been touring around some of the cities now. When I say "city" I'm referring to little clusters of those Xala floating buildings linked together with some cables and little bridges. Some of them are small, two or four units put together. Others can have dozens of units all lashed together and bridged -- especially as we near the coastline. Usually they're all just housing units, and just as boring in their architecture as the unit I stayed in just as I arrived here, but as you get into bigger cities you see specialized units.

Some of these cities serve as manufacturing centers, building parts for whatever projects need done. Raw materials are ferried in on floating transports and put into manufacturing units, which are basically cylindrical floating buildings not to different in looks from a housing unit except they have no windows and the top and bottom have sealed hatches. We toured a factory making parts for transports. All the raw materials are lowered into the top hatch to be sorted and prepped on the first level. Then as they filter down through they're shaped, molded, and tested many times, until on the last level the crystals are installed and calibrated and the finished parts are lowered into a transport at the lower level, where they're whisked away to be assembled into new transports or stored as spare parts.

The way they work with the materials is crazy. They actually build a frame in the general shape they want and set up force fields as molds. Then somehow they can break whatever material they want down into microscopic pieces and the whole apparatus practically assembles itself, the only thing left to do is to fit the parts together and fuse them (not bolt, not weld, but fuse). I'm told it's done with nanotechnology -- little microscopic machines ferrying the materials atom by atom onto the force-field mold, or molecularly bonding to pieces together.

Right now I'm resting a bit. One of the nicer cities on our route is built just for entertaining kaja diplomats, and they were able to work up a nice, comfortable room for me -- nice big bed, carpeting, sheetrock walls -- all just like Earth if you ignore the giant force-field window with a view of Coaxta and a nearby Xala city. We're to rest here while they run some maintenance on the transport and prepare us for some trips to other planets. The Ŋãna are going to be going back to their home planet with a diplomatic team to do some sort of tribal council or whatnot. Meanwhile, I hear the Kesata have been taken to the capital to talk to some high council of Jed. I think the name the yela'kaja gave me was "the Council of Jed Proper and All Things Here", which makes no sense to me at all.

Anyway, when the Kesata are done the yela'kaja is going to take me to them and we're going to Kesata (their planet) with them. And of course that dance thing is the first thing on his list of things to do.

Moving Again, with some Education on the Way

Apparently our pilot refused to set off until the sun actually set, but he did agree to get the ship warmed up so we could take off quickly, so we're up in the air once more. We're getting into some of the more populated areas -- as I can see from the cylinders floating around us. We're starting to come across some that are linked together to house larger numbers. Xala hunting parties seem more frequent than ever -- which leads me to correct myself yet again. I had been under the assumption that every pack hunted for itself all across the planet, but no. When I talked the the yela'kaja (the old one, woken up from his hibernation) about the numbers of hunting parties we've been seeing recently he corrected me.

"In the more populated areas, there are specialized packs that harvest food, clean it, and prepare it," he told me. "This is necessary with larger population areas, though it does allow their instincts to dull a bit."

Naturally I had another question in an instant. "How is it you have so much wildlife that's suitable for eating? On Earth, we have so many people to feed that it's hard to find enough farmland to catch up, let alone living off the wild!"

His smile was a bit awkward, but I think he really was amused at that. He can't really laugh, though, so he didn't try. "We stock the forests with genetically-engineered game, designed to have a high nutritional content and to be reasonably challenging to catch." He gestured at the window. "The entire spirit side of the planet is 'farmland': continents, oceans, various volcanic islands."

"Spirit side?"

He pointed up at a familiar object in the sky. "The side that faces Coaxta is lôxe coax, the spirit side. The side facing away from it is lôxe tyeg, the side of death, as it is barren wasteland alternately scorched and frozen every coaxrorol."

I guess I'm learning something new here every day. Well, I'm going to have a talk with the Kesata in a minute if they will speak with me. Pray for my poor eyes.

Still Stuck

We're still waiting to get going here. I'm told they're going to try waking up our pilot a little early to see if we can get things rolling before sunset. The yela'kaja keeps apologizing profusely for the delays. Apparently the people who set up this trip for me were going very fast and didn't go through all the protocols, so the route and preparations couldn't be adjusted in time. He seems very angry that my original yela'kaja and the council that advised him came up with this idea and carried it out so badly.

I seem to see a pattern of one Xala cursing the incompetence of another Xala, especially when they depend on each other to do their jobs. It started when my first yela'kaja was just a little pissed at the location of his entrance on Earth and the problems it gave him (which likely included me). Most of the time Xala run things smoothly with machine precision, but whenever one of them seems to be slacking or makes a mistake, somebody's in his face screeching -- and sometimes a whole pack comes down on him. Laziness and incompetence seem to be the very worst sins for a Xala.

Ah, well. I'm not that bad off. The Ngana keep me company. I seem to have made a friend of one of them. I can't remember his name, but he likes to follow me around. They're all a bit curious about me, always asking why I'm alone on the ship, and how I got here. When I told them my little story of getting knocked out in the middle of the street they all laughed at me.

Their own ka'kaja had some problems, but they had all been taken care of quietly. They tell me that the yela'kaja apparently entered below a remote village (I say below because all Ngana live high in the trees) with a huge blast that nearly knocked everyone out of the trees and could have started a forest fire if the place had been drier. They didn't find out about that until later, though, after a mysterious and strange-looking Ngana climbed up from the forest floor. The people of the village swore he was a ghost come back from the spirit world the entire time he was observing and living with them until he went to one of big clan leaders and showed some fancy technology.

I can't go into much more detail, as the Xala don't want me to put down information that could give away their yela'kaja back on Earth (they told me they sent a new one, but they won't tell me where he entered or anything else), but lets just say it's a very funny story and I hope I can put the whole thing down when this is all done with.

Finally, a Break

We've been having some issues. First of all, I got cut off. Apparently the crystal rigged up to that router back on Earth blew, which explains my silence. It's taken a heap of trouble to get that fixed, as they had to send people in covertly. I don't know how they got it done, but I know I'm back online now.

Turns out you didn't miss all that much, though. Shortly after sunrise we docked at a housing unit to change crew to find out that they weren't all ready. The yela'kaja explained that most Xala are not built for working during daylight -- which I can understand. They don't use artificial light here and I just recently learned how dark it was outside until the sun came up. It gets really bright for days and days until the sun gets high enough and goes behind Coaxta. Then it's normal for a while until the sun comes out again. I've completely lost track of time here. The only way I know what time and day it is on Earth is through this computer's clock.

Anyway, we didn't have the crew together back at sunrise and now it looks like we're not going to be going back out until sunset. The Kesata have gone into stasis pods to wait it out. The Xala offered to put me into stasis, but I didn't really like the idea of being locked in a solid crystal. The Ngana didn't want that either, they seem a bit suspicious of it because of their spiritual beliefs. So I've basically been hanging with them all this time (they managed to find two new yela'kaja and give them some quick language training and transformation). Really fun little guys, though. They're pretty good at breaking the boredom.

I've also been trying to get more information about the Xala while I'm at it. My biggest problem is that they seem to be holding back on me. I ask about their history and they just give me the brief "We discovered the portal four thousand of your years ago and currently operate a trade network."

Yes, they really are that general. When I asked the yela'kaja whether their new contacts are not always friendly, he said, "It is our policy to avoid the possibility of armed conflict when possible. Since we have access to an entire multiverse, it is not uncommon to find several planets that have resources we need, and a conflict on one world is usually not in our interests." Now, that's all well and good, but when I asked for a specific example, they wouldn't give me anything.

The only thing I've gotten really specifically was from a Kesata diplomat that had come out of stasis for a swim. (They don't keep you in more than a few days at a time unless they have to. Something about certain species developing psychological problems -- which is why I refuse to go under.) We talked a bit using two yela'kaja interpreters and he explained to me that there was a conflict when the Xala discovered Kesata involving a third intelligent race that was trying to take over the planet. The Xala loaned their weapons and men to the Kesata to repel the attack and received free access to parts of the planet in return. Apparently there's not much land there, but the Kesata only really use the coastlines and just a little bit inland. (They like salt water -- which explains the briny pools on their level.)

I'm going to see if I can find out a little more about this stuff when we get back underway, which I'm sure will mean talking to more Kesata -- the yela'kaja is dodging it with general statements about alliances and ethics and all that crap. I'm glad I'm not epileptic, otherwise I think the light show would kill me when I get back to looking into this.

Meanwhile I'll pass some time hanging with theŊãna. They can't tell me anything about the Xala -- this being their first trip in -- but they're quite fun to hang with. Might even learn some Ngana while I'm at it.

No Sunrise Yet?

I'm slightly disappointed. I though we were going to see a sunrise a couple hours ago, but it turns out that this time of day is just called "sunrise" (cex keltax) because this is about the time that the sun (or rather, Cex, hyekh, Jed's "sun") usually rises at their sort of prime meridian, which on Jed is actually the point on the planet where Coaxta appears directly overhead -- Xala don't believe in time zones. We're a few degrees off, and with the incredible slowness of this damp planet those few degrees of latitude translate to the sun rising a couple of Earth days later.

But, we are going to be going east later on, so the yela'kaja suggested we might run into the sun a little early if we get the tour going a little quicker. The Ngana don't seem to mind so much, though they were looking forward to sunrise two. As far as I know, the Kesata are completely indifferent. The yela'kaja said this particular delegation had been here before and they are no longer very impressed by some of the natural phenomena on the planet. I keep saying planet, even though Jed is a moon -- but its so hard to call the place a moon when its just as solid under your feet as the Earth is. And I mean that in a very literal way -- I have detected no difference in gravity here. The yela'kaja says it's very slightly lower than Earth-normal, but I don't feel it at all.

Mining the Crystal Fountains

We've seen the mine now, apparently the detour wasn't very far or it would have taken much longer. Our transport docked in a cylindrical station off the main part of the mine and we were ferried around on levitating pallets. (The mines aren't very accessible to what the Xala call tôkleka, or "wingless kaja", so they usually improvise for tours.)

The whole facility is controlled from a large ring that is built onto this giant chamber where they collect the crystals. There are dozens of little stations all around the ring. According to the yela'kaja, the raw "crystal" is actually some sort of gas or plasma that breaks out of the ground and spews up like a geyser, which is why they translate their term for the effect, tyaxad (kyah-khaz), as "fountain". Dozens of control stations are used to regulate the flow of the raw crystal.

The Ŋãna were all over the control stations. Since the station wasn't active at the moment (the fountain wasn't "erupting") we were allowed to get up close to the control system, even activate them to see the displays (with the help of my earpiece for myself, and a special collar for each of the Ngana). According to the Yela'kaja, there are a number of packs maintaining the mines that move around as different fountains erupt, so this one was mostly empty with just a skeleton crew to monitor the whole thing encase something happened unexpectedly.

The Kesata didn't seem much interested in all that. They kept up talking amongst themselves with their wild motions and all those bright colors. I think that some humans would have seizures if they had to watch Kesata talk all day. While their waving their arms around singing to each other, all these patterns and colors just wash over their bodies. Sometimes it looks really psychedelic. My yela'kaja seems to like it, though. He said he once saw a Kesata play while he was getting some "language and culture" training on their planet. Apparently on their homeworld they have massive ampitheatres underwater where they perform these odd dancing plays -- like a ballet without music. He told me he'd show me one when we're done with the tour of Jed. I didn't want to refuse, so I just took a bite out of one of those Jed powerbars and nodded. That's a while in the future, so maybe travelling with the Kesata will get me used to the flashing colors.

Anyway, after a quick pass through the ring, we entered the collection chamber through a maintenance hole. We hovered a while on pallets while the yela'kaja showed us the deep, narrow shaft, and the light at the bottom of it where the fountain is warming up for its next eruption. I was a bit woozy looking down there, and it looked like a couple Kesata were about to fall off the pallet. The Ngana didn't mind though, but then they live in tall trees.

Finally, the Kesata were taken to see the specific equipment that they were there to look at. Their yela'kaja offered to take me and the Ngana along, but I decided I'd go back to the transport, and the Ngana were in agreement, though for different reasons. I needed to recover from hanging in midair over a nearly bottomless pit, while they were more concerned about getting to their poles and swinging around and exercise their muscles that had fallen asleep while they stood so long on the little pallets being hauled around, according to my yela'kaja.

Ah, well. I'm not sure where we'll be going next. I think the Jed sunrise is coming up soon, and the yela'kaja told me a lot of kaja like to watch a sunrise or an eclipse while they're here. Me, I'm not so sentimental, but it'll be good to have some change in the sky. It's still a bit unnerving the way that great massive planet takes up so much of it.

How the Xala Make Chicks -- Without Making Love

We just came back from touring the hatching center. Such a crazy place! Hatching centers come in two parts. The important part, where the little Xala chicks go from mini cell to egg to hatchling is underground. According to my yela'kaja (and I assume the Ngana yela'kaja is saying the same) it's a security precaution. Eggs and hatchlings are very vulnerable, and an underground facility is easier to lock down than a flying one. We never actually got to see the flying part of the place, which is mostly just for training the older chicks in basic skills, especially flight. We were told that there was some training going on up there and it would be best not to disturb the young ones.

The first level (that is the top one) has the actual hatchlings running around. They're kinda cute little chicks, but you've got to be careful. One of the Ngana didn't pay much attention to the warnings he was given and started playing with one of the chicks. He had fun for a while, letting the chick bluster and spread its wings, but when he tried to catch the little guy he got a nasty bite. Some of the Xala working there -- the ones that look over the hatchlings are called roa'gogo, egg-tenders -- took him away to get fixed up. We were told that a hatchling's bite wasn't as bad as an adult's, but all Xala pack some serious bacteria in their mouths that some other races can't handle, so it's best to avoid getting bit, or to clean it up real good if you do.

The next level has the incubators. They don't actually look all that remarkable. Little metal boxes, heated from underneath by a little electrical heater. It's probably the first device here I've seen that wasn't entirely operated with crystals.

According to the yela'kaja, incubators are kept at different temperatures to promote different traits. Apparently, when Xala still did things the natural way, their sex was determined by the temperature of the egg. But now most don't have genitalia, so they are just going for masculine or feminine traits. It's kinda odd what's "masculine" and what's "feminine" to a Xala. The feminine traits include higher intelligence, greater agility, and more physical strength. The big burly guys that hauled the pallets of my equipment were "feminine", and so are the yela'kajas and the roa'gogos. "Masculine" Xala are usually weak and take submissive roles that don't require great strength or a wide range of knowledge. The "janitors" and the pilots on our transport are "masculine".

Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that. Obviously the guys hauling those pallets around don't need to be so smart, so they're engineered so that their brains don't develop as quickly. Yela'kajas don't need lots of muscle (in fact, they tell me it can be a liability) so their engineered not to grow as bulky a build?

Understand so far? I hope so. It took me a lot to get that much figured out to write on paper, but I'm a reporter here. I gotta do these things.

The biggest question, of course, is where the eggs come from in the first place. According to the yela'kaja, there are two more levels -- where kaja aren't allowed -- with samples of all the cloning lines (or castes, as they sometimes call them) in storage, ready for DNA to be transferred and embryos to be produced. Roa'gogo are rare among Xala in that they really do have a sex, or at least the necessary organs. They are designed to have active ovaries, where other Xala have ineffective sex organs if they have any at all, so that embryos can be implanted and grow into eggs, which are later laid either directly into an incubator or into one of the stasis chambers on one of the lower levels. Don't ask me why they store eggs in stasis -- sounds like trouble to me -- but the fact that they won't let us down there makes me suspect that there's some stuff going on with the genetic engineering and those suspended eggs that they'd rather not let us know about.

Anyway, we're headed out to the crystal mine next. The Kesata opted out of this tour, but I hear that their fishy smell will be with us in the next one. I hear that the mine we're going to has some new equipment that the Kesata want to check out before they agree to let Xala use it on their planet. I don't know what that is, but apparently we'll find out.