“You know, I enjoy having woodglass splinters shoved under my fingernails. I love it so much that I actually enjoy it more than having my ambitions deferred.”
-Fallow Srid
“The Estuesse-ModKrtAktMdm, please,” said the voice attached to the human hand that was pointed at the wine in question.
“Excellent taste,” said the roving waiter. He gave an up-sign.
The vessel whose contents had just been selected for execution by consumption was extracted from its placement on the waiter’s tray and put in front of the customer. The customer glanced at it, gave the waiter a gesture of thanks, and the transaction concluded. The one left, the other slid the wine closer to his seat.
Being told that one had excellent taste when one’s tongue possessed no working sensory components was the kind of irony that one learned to appreciate. Especially when one was feeling a bit tense.
There was the beginning of a giggle worming its way up the customer’s throat as he constructed an alternate scene in which he put the whole allocation of wine straight down his gullet, smacked his lips, and replied with something that made the waiter step back and-
No. Not here. Not now. Focus.
A sigh, and a fair portion of the wine left for stomach country. A fair portion remained encased in the safe place that was its unsealed captivity. He swallowed once more for good measure.
The Broken Ship had much in common with most other pubs, and pub-like establishments, throughout Rhaagm. It was a business whose primary attraction came not through the peddling of physical culinary wares or happy juice, but the services of connecting people. The art of giving them a stable nourishing environment to which they could regularly return. For most patrons, the fees inherent to getting a barrel of the good stuff and a massively indulgent feast constituted a nominal proportion of the money being surrendered. Oh, sure - eating, drinking, gambling, the works: those social observances were in long supply, but mostly because they were incidental to the industry of unifying individuals into a collective organism.
Another swig, and the man looked aside at the adjacent table. The table’s holojector was showing a very familiar scene, of a water-bearing world labeled with a numbing amount of information. He found it almost as amusing as disappointing that all the information in question was made of sterile, purely metric data. That obvious (to him at least) doctoring said some very telling things. It also didn’t say some very telling things.
He saw the incarnate form of Gegaunli, Beautiful One of Bones, as she writhed in the containment Rhaagmini peacekeeping forces had enacted. The deity occupied an unfortunate position in the public relations arena. “Woe to her,” was the tut-tutting broad consensus.
He saw the tallies counting up some seven million innocents whose involvement with the affair was “incidental,” as the euphemism went.
He saw a few hundred little indicators on a facsimile of the globe that pointed out where the necessary equipment for setting up the simplex connection would go. Need a method to get that planet from there to here, after all.
He saw a hundred or so images of the natives - the wildlife, the flora… oh, and the PEOPLE, of course. Can’t forget about the people; that would just be mean.
The human smiled faintly as he saw an outline of some fairly high-profile territory in the city’s nicer areas being allocated to the new arrivals, and the way their globe had been integrated with public transit hooks. It displayed a positively staggering amount of real estate that had been bought up at a premium by deep-pocketed politicians with the grudging acquiescence of the area’s more localized officialdom. A high price tag, that purchase.
His smile died when he did not see anything such as “We screwed up” or “We are taking responsibility” or, most important of all, “We’re sorry for having caused this unblemished society such upheaval” anywhere.
No, it was her fault that she’d been given the opportunity to reach out and grab hold of the inquisitive minds of foreigners. It was her fault that safety measures had grown lax on the ripe research frontier her home represented.
The man sighed again, and this time it was the sort which, when one gave it, cost a measure of patience and goodwill to all men.
His attention fluttered and moved to another nearby table, where a different kind of media played. He watched, slightly bemused despite his train of turbulent thought.
“So, we’ve come this far up the mountainside,” a person was saying through the table’s sound system. “It means we can tell a few things about the area that are fairly important. Now, this impacts how we go about exploring everything else in the region - and on the whole planet, to some extent.”
The sensory being depicted was a climbing view of a ridge. The slope was covered in scree and a lot of larger polygonal rocks. Skylining themselves against the other side of the ridge, the recording individual ascended to the top, and looked down the side of a heavily-slanted crag, over what one might call a valley. On the periphery, layers of stone accrued and rose to enclose the valley; a simple entrapment of air by not-air. Around the table playing the media, a small platoon of aaneds gave little appreciative body-noise signals, one of them nudging the other with a little flute-shaped delicacy and giving a down-turned aaned smile.
“Like this!” said the sensory’s narrator, who swept out his hand to indicate the layered rock; here, and here, and there, and there. “Plutons. Not big ones, but lots of them. What we have is surface deformity that’s probably caused by interactions on the upper planetary layers almost as much as aeolian activity. That in turn suggests that we’re stuck in the middle of a zone where tectonic events aren’t precisely rare.”
A pause, timed for human comic sensibilities.
“Yes, ignore the fact that we’re currently on a small mountain.”
A few aaned laughs.
The person making the sensory swung around to look back down the opposite direction from the valley. On the other side of the breathless-high ridge was either an incredibly massive lake or a small sea, judging by depth. In the middle of the body of water, a dead caldera rose. A circular island formed the pupil of its eye.
“Excuse me, sir,” said a waiter, coming up to the human customer. It was conjugated from… he couldn’t tell what, except that there were probably at least three or four major physiologies in there. He wasn’t planning to ask. Bipedal, no-armed, used one mouth to hold its empty serving tray while the other took up the torch of speech. It knew he was human, and it surely had the professional aptitude to mind what was or was not good for human health.
Or at least for the health of most humans, the man reflected.
“Yes?” he responded.
“Are there any other patrons you’d like to meet?” it asked. A sly sideways indication of the aaned collective. “Or do you want to become better acquainted with one particular entity or industry?”
Surreptitiously, the human glanced up and down the venue’s long premises. Many people speaking, a few throwing game pieces, a small crowd dancing in the far corner in a hallucination of different discordant styles. One Allah’s Witness by the entrance was trying to preach to the people coming and going; one or two slowed to listen to her.
He consulted his chronometer.
“No, though I thank you,” he replied. “Must be going soon - I’ve got obligations elsewhere.”
He smiled faintly.
“I’ll make sure to stop by again, though, when I get a chance.”
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