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.