"Quit the drama, Joe," said Nat. "It was normal medical technology. Nothing unusual about it at all. I didn't see anything that we don't have on earth, nor did I see anything we wouldn't do on earth."
"Great, Nat, but how come we get to be scanned, weighed, measured and even x-rayed, for God's sake, while they haven't offered one strand of slick smooth hair for DNA analysis? Not a thing! We've given them everything from a comprehensive encyclopaedic summary of human knowledge and history to samples of our hair and saliva - everything but stool samples, for God's sake -"
"We have landed on their planet," pointed out Shams. Somehow, she felt no threat, even though Joe was right; the asymmetry was notable. And Nat hadn't known how to handle it. She hadn't asked for scans or DNA from any one of the Thetians. Nothing to compare.
"We shouldn't even discuss this here. This place could be bugged -"
"Joe, please! This is the only advanced earth we can see for ourselves without the threat of immediate annihilation! We cannot mess this up, ok? We have been trusted with doing this right, and I am not going to antagonise our hosts. We will gain their trust. Our main goal is to gather data. To gather data we need good relations -"
"We haven't managed gathering much yet, though, have we?" said Shams.
"We've gathered a decent amount of natural world specimens," replied Nat.
"We need to make a real start."
"No live insects or live animals. Only the naturally deceased, remember. And Shams, all the soil, plant and stone samples we already have can tell us an awful lot." Nat inhaled wearily.
"Wouldn't it be simpler to ask them for what we want and for them to tell us what we can take and what we can't?" asked Shams.
"No, it wouldn't. It would make it harder. I think it's wise we run our samples through Elegiac first in any case. We'll do that tomorrow."
Joe scowled. He paced around the living area, the communal area between his apartment and Eric's. A spiral staircase along the opposite wall to the entrance led to the women's living quarters.
"Could you stop going round and round the room, Joe, please?"
"What is it with all these roundhouses, anyway?"
"Why are our houses always rectangles or squares?" asked Shams.
Nat exhaled. "Extreme high speed windstorms from both continental plains and mega oceans, Joe. You know that. And I think we need to all calm down here. We need to get used to them and they need to get used to us. They're different to us, ok? They live differently. They will have totally different cultures. They don't seem to have the same structures and hierarchies as we do and we don't know what they have instead. That doesn't mean they're sinister. We'll find out what they're about, but it's going to take time. "
Eric leaned back on the long curved couch, carved from a rich wood and padded with hard cushions. Shams thought it wouldn't have looked so out of place on earth. She noticed Eric's hand in his beard, which was where it normally went whenever he was waiting to speak. He always managed to hold a relaxed and yet tentative pose in debates, adding his own ideas to others' words in some kind of Eric-annotated long division, no doubt.
"But agreeing to them doing the analyses, Nat -"
"What else could I say, Joe? We are on their planet."
"Conduct analyses with our technology?" the notes of Joe's voice climbed higher with incredulity and Shams grinned, wryly amused. On the long space flight, he had been unprepossessing and good-humoured. But then again, there hadn't been much to argue about once they'd safely climbed out of the orbit of earth and their spacesuits and adjusted to life with each other and Elegiac. Once they'd each taken turns in telling their stories, painting patterns of themselves in remarks, asides, jokes.
"Come on, Joe. They very evidently have quantum field theory already. They already know about quantum entanglement," said Shams.
"They don't have Faster Than Light Travel. And with what we have given them, they could work it out."
"I doubt it. Elegiac is pretty much locked down. They could devise the equations, it's true, but come on, it's wildly unlikely they'll get lucky the way we did."
"Wildly unlikely? Have you been in a cave all this time? Hey, let me tell you about this theory. It's called the Theory of Semi-coherent Chaos. It talks about how wildly unlikely everything is -"
"Piss off, Joe."
"I reckon Nat's right. But - we can't leave Elegiac. One of us has to be near her at all times." Eric's fingers finally left his beard.
"Agreed," said Nat. "Tomorrow we'll devise a schedule, after we find out the itinerary. We'll run all Thetis natural world samples through Elegiac, and send off the results to earth. Personal messages can be sent at the same time. After that, the FTLT module remains in lockdown no matter what, so no one will be able to steal our greatest asset. So that means no more contact with earth for a while, until we are certain of Elegiac's safety and only when all four of us are present. Now can we enjoy the Hera Mountains specialty they've given us before they come pick us up?"
"They're not human if they don't brew beer," said Eric.
"They have wheat, Eric. Of course they brew beer," said Shams.
The crew paused to taste the sweet Heran sunset wine.
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