PART IV
Tableaux Vivants
‘Face the unknown with curiosity, not fear,’ Joanni told herself as the shuttlecraft took off to rendezvous with the Oreanian scout vessel. She felt the Oreanians would not necessarily agree with that. Perfect your own world and be satisfied to live within it was more their style. Joanni wished there was some happy middle ground. Curiosity, when one didn’t know the outcome, as with her journey here, was one thing; but to have that outcome depend upon your actions, to have the outcome be your responsibility—that was quite another.
After some discussion back and forth over technical details, the Oreanian scout vessel was deemed by the Eridanus command to be too rudimentary for any sort of orbital docking or transfer procedure. (Just a large golf cart in an airtight bubble, Joanni later called it, rather ungraciously.) The Europa V shuttlecraft, therefore, was flown to a small TempiP45XS galaxy space station with a pressurized landing deck situated near Oreana, allowing Joanni to land, exit one ship, and walk across the tarmac to board the other. Two Oreanians were manning their vessel: the dark-haired pilot, who kept her back turned and her eyes on the control panel the entire trip, and the other, Joanni’s escort, a young woman called Xaeter.
Xaeter was excited to have been given this honor and thus spoke a little too freely; in truth, she appeared a bit of a gossip. During their three-hour trip, Joanni was told several things. Oreana was indeed a matriarchal society in which the heads of family and state were female. The one area of male renown was the Orean boys choirs.
“What about relationships? Men and women?” Joanni asked.
“Nobody does that. Why would anyone want to lower their status?” was her guide’s reply.
Their offspring were incubated in artificial wombs with nurturing birds trained to feed and look after them post-birth. Birds were deities to the Oreanians; killing or intentionally injuring one was punishable by death. The Oreanians believed they were descended from the great avian Sebu species of the distant past. Most inhabitants of the planet retained vestigial remnants of wings; some individuals possessed an actual pair. Small and stunted such a pair might be, but nevertheless, wings of any visibility were highly valued. Members of the Governing Council, Joanni was informed, had quite stunning ones, but some, Xaeter confided in a whispered aside, some were surgically enhanced. “How many, I’m not saying,” she cautioned, raising her hand in a very human-like gesture.
The Oreanians called aliens “kludders.” The closest approximation in translation was exactly as it sounded: clodhoppers. Quite fitting, as Joanni would be clodhopping around Oreana, her boots fitted with weighted soles to compensate for the differentiation in gravitational pull. This lesser gravitational force was evolutionarily fortuitous for the residents of the planet, one could say. They had to rely on their own bodies to produce the compounds necessary for maintaining their skeletal frames due to the darkness of their atmosphere. A sufficient level of calciferol was imperative, but difficult to maintain. A hard fall could shatter their fragile bones.
The scout vessel landed on the surface of Oreana. Joanni had reached the promised land. She closed her eyes. ‘Dad, we made it,’ she thought. Xaeter debarked with her, and, as the vessel took off and curved up and away from them in the sky, told Joanni to stay put. She then too departed to inform her superiors of the visitor’s arrival, running away quickly with a leaping, floating gazelle-like gait, leaving Joanni alone.
Oreana. Where the gravity is light and the air smells like “french fries." Once Joanni had become proficient in the language, this is how she jokingly translated the chorus of her song, the interstellar hit that had separated her from Jackie and had, ultimately, brought her here. “Here” was high on top a large plateau that stretched across to her right toward a large structure of thick, heavy rings of decreasing size placed one upon another—the largest on the bottom, the smallest on top—shrouded in shadow and resembling the stacking toy of primary-colored wooden pieces from one’s childhood. The ground was burgundy hardpan clay, and if you reached down and scraped at it, your hand then stank of iodine and iron.
To her left, the ground, void of vegetation, dropped off forming a large cliff overlooking an enormous amphitheater with a massive metropolis twinkling behind it. The drop off in the murky semi-darkness made the stretch of plateau she was standing on a stage, the ringed statue a backdrop, and the amphitheater and city her audience. High dark skies stretched off into the distance pierced with a serpentine network of long slender poles with sparks of electricity traveling through the wires connecting them, an electric snake or dragon, paraded on high. Walking was difficult; Joanni had fallen once or twice already, not harming the clesig, she made sure, but looking as if she herself had been badly beaten due to the burgundy clay now smudged over her pale traveling suit.
Steadying herself, Joanni took out her bottle of ocular drops from her hip bag, and after several tries, plonked drops into her eyes. Her dilated pupils, in addition to her bespoke contacts, made her eyes fully black, causing her to look slightly Oreanian. Just slightly. She hoped she could sing in this atmosphere. Why did they abandon her here? Was she supposed to be doing something? She bounced, stumbled to the side and almost fell down again. Taking the clesig out of its carrier, then straddling the case for safekeeping, she started playing, just to ensure the instrument was undamaged. Everything seemed in order. She played a little louder. Suddenly, her notes were answered. She played again and was answered again. At the back of her imagined stage, the statue, on some unknown impulse, resonated in reply, the rings lighting up in harmony with the notes from the clesig. Joanni recollected how the Oreanian spokeswoman’s crown had lit up as she lectured the officers on the bridge of the Eridanus, and wondered if all Oreanian communication was punctuated with light.
The human girl and the alien statue called and responded to each other through a medium which needed no translation. A third voice was added, and then another. Across the enormous plateau that served as Oreanian ceremonial grounds, the Governing Council emerged out of the darkness: a dozen beings, some winged, some wearing crowns of various sizes and ornamentation, four of them musicians, playing clesigs of a simpler design than the one being returned. The ensemble fanned out and formed a tableau with their wings outstretched, the sounds of their clesigs merging with Joanni’s. The Primora, with the largest crown and wingspan, occupied the center of this group. All remained motionless in this impressive tableau while the last chords faded into the darkness. Their skin had a luminescence about it. The tableau they formed was striking in its beauty and strangeness and completeness unto itself.
Image: Sound and status. Source: “The Shulamite” by Odilon Redon, France, 1897. The Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain. Edited by J. Weigley