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.