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.