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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seeing the Planet with the Monkey Cats

These transports are much slower than I expected. Apparently, the Xala don't really care to go any faster than is necessary, so their transports often float along slower than a Xala on the wing! My yela'kaja has assured me that we could go much faster in case of an emergency, but that otherwise we'll be keeping a very steady pace. Apparently Xala have infinite patience, and continually overestimate my own patience. He tells me, "We have chosen this route so that you and the other delegations can see some of the planet as you make your way to the next port."

We're certainly "seeing the planet". So far we've mostly been over forests. Though we have seen lots of housing units floating around. And we saw a crystal mine up in the hills here. It's a ground unit, massive chink of metal sitting over what the Xala call a "fountain", collecting raw crystals to be refined and processed. We're going to visit one later on -- one that's not actively working. Apparently it's too dangerous to take kaja down there while the crystals are being taken out. Something about radiation and that.

We take little swoops now and then to see interesting bits of wildlife, like a creature in the trees that looks like a giant flower. My yela'kaja tells me it's some sort of carnivorous plant that lures scavengers with the scent of carrion. This one apparently wasn't hungry that day, as it was laying out flat, with bright red petals. Not exactly the least conspicuous thing here.

Though the trees themselves are taking a reddish hue. The yela'kaja tells me that they go through a cycle every coaxrota where they get redder and redder until sunrise, and then go back to a sort of green-yellow after it sets. He says it protects them from the sudden increase in light.

Anyway, I've been hanging out with the Ŋãna most of the time. Really friendly people. I kinda enjoy being around them, even with the language barrier. Our yela'kajas take care of that. They work as a team, the one in human form translating Ŋãna to English and the one in Ŋãna form translating English to Ŋãna. I don't know how the other yela'kaja learned English so quick, though I suppose they have some special device for that. I won't ask for that thing; my brain might explode.

Ŋãna laugh a lot. They seem to enjoy the same kinds of jokes as humans. When they asked what my planet was called and I replied "Earth", there was a great hoopla. After a few moments confusion the human-form yela'kaja seemed to figure things out and tried to explain. "It seems that the name of your planet sounds similar to a Ŋãna word. I'm not sure how to translate it." Then he got into about a five minute discussion with the other yela'kaja in Xala, after which he must have been searching through the dictionary in his earpiece for the right word. "It is a reproductive process. I believe the word is . . . 'sex'?"

I laughed then, but not just at the Ŋãna. I fired right back at the yela'kaja. "Man, if I were to learn another language, that would be one of the first words I'd learn. How'd it take you so long to translate it?"

That, of course, was the wrong question to ask. It led to a thirty minute discussion about how Xala, most of them anyway, don't have sex, and don't reproduce naturally. They're all genetically-engineered clones, grown in special centers and all designed for their specific jobs; which explains why yela'kajas can just take some hair off your head and transform into your species. Then came an offer to detour the trip to one of the hatching centers. I didn't want to go, but Ŋãna are all for it, so we're taking a little detour.

Departure

I'm finally going to go somewhere! My special transport just arrived and I'm settling myself in right as we speak. Since I'm the only one of my kind around, I get a level all to myself, though they're having to furnish it on the fly since it was so unexpected. They put a little desk in first, on my own request, since I wanted to get this blog written up. Right now there's a couple of the more muscular kind of Xala slowly descending with that little bed in their talons, and another with a little refrigerator stocked with water and that nasty protein stuff (what's in my backpack is just for when I'm out exploring the various areas) and yet another has a box of my clothes they must have stolen from my house back on Earth. Don't ask me how a bunch of flying lizards got into my house without being noticed. I don't know and I don't want to know.

Oh, and they're not carrying all that heavy stuff on their own, believe me. The bed and the fridge are set on little levitating pallets, the bed on its side because the shaft in this transport is kinda small. That's how they move heavy stuff, but apparently it still takes some hefty wing muscles to haul the pallets around.

Getting onto the transport was the fun part. I'm the only one here of my kind, but the transport itself has several alien delegations in it. When the little cylindrical transport docked in the shaft, a couple of Xala had already taken me and my stuff on a few pallets up to the highest level so I could enter through the top level of the transport. (Xala always enter from the top. Their floors are even numbered going down instead of up.)

Anyway, we didn't really enter from the tippy-top -- that's reserved for the pilot and crew -- but from the first level of the transport, which had a delegation of these odd looking creatures with faces a little like a cross between a cat and a teddy bear and long limbs and tail like a monkey and wearing little loincloths and some sort of fancy cape with a high collar. They were pretty small, and kept leaping around these special branched columns that had been installed (I think they were supposed to be like trees) and talking whatever weird language they speak, which sounds like more than half of it comes through your nose. One of them that was a little bigger and not quite so hairy talked to the yela'kaja a bit in the Xala's squawking language, both with odd accents because of their strange forms. Then the yela'kaja turned to me, "It seems that the Ŋãna are interested in the new alien." -- (The yela'kaja typed the name for me. According to him they pronounce their name as NGAH-nuh; but that for some reason the Xala actually call them something like gah-zah) -- "Their yela'kaja has informed me that they invite you up to this level later for a little chat. Would you like to do so?"

I though a minute, looking around at those fake metal trees with the little plastic hand-holds. "I'll see. Let me get settled in first, then I'll see about it."

The yela'kaja relayed my message to the Ŋãna yela'kaja and then lead me to a special little elevator next to the shaft. On my way down to the third level I saw a delegation of creatures that looked kinda like the man from the black lagoon, except as they talked to each other they did really big movements with their webbed hands and would change colors and patterns really quick. I asked who they were and the yela'kaja's answer was, "Those are the xala Kesata. They are one of the first races we contacted through the gâ'akaxaoda. Very interesting people, they don't speak with sound, but instead use gestures and changes of skin color to communicate." His earpiece glowed while he paused and seemed to be searching for some information. "I believe you would call that a sign-language."

"Well, I guess that's close." We got to my level and I got off to settle in. I could smell a bit of a fishy smell coming from the artificial pools on the level above me. Hopefully those won't leak. I don't know what Kesata do in those pools. So here I am, eating a Xala powerbar and looking out a little window as my transport slowly rises out of the shaft and into the sky. Maybe I'll go upstairs later and talk to the Ŋãna once everything is in its place. Or maybe I'll go and see who's on the level below me, if anybody -- these transports have four levels. Might even go see the Kesata for a minute if I can stand the smell up there. Or maybe I'll take a nap first, The time is so off here I don't even know when to sleep.