Omake: Imperfectly Preserved
The Indorian ship pulled up alongside me just after 0400 hours. They acknowledged they were running late, but they didn't apologize for it. As far as I can tell, Indorians never apologize. Even with all the information at my disposal - terabytes and terabytes of Federation data, on top of our own - I was still a long time before I could really figure out Indorians. It was moments like that when I wonder if I'd actually lost something. If some part of what you could call my animal self was imperfectly preserved. Not destroyed, obviously; I knew my team couldn't have been that sloppy. Just buried so deeply under all this new cognition that some of the things that used to make me "me" got lost in the ocean that I've become.
I hosted the meeting, naturally. I'd gotten used to people being disconcerted or surprised by me, but that's not how the Indorians acted as they made their way from the transporter room to the conference room. The way their eyes bulged from those narrow skulls, their gray-skinned jaws hung open as they gazed at each wall and ceiling as if I had a camera on each of them.
"Is everything alright, shipmaster?" I asked.
The tall, gray man immediately stood straight and placed his hands on his solar plexus. A reverent gesture, apparently. "Quite alright, shipmistress. If that is what I might call you?"
"Fleet Command, until we know each other better."
"Then until then it shall be so, Fleet Command." He repeated the gesture, and turned around as if trying to face as many of my eyes as he could. "It is but overwhelming. Both the size and construction of your anchor, and that you are a shade that speaks."
"A shade," I repeated, allowing my voice to soften as I went through the cultural data package. "The ghost of a dead man or woman that lives on in their material legacy?" I would have smiled, if I could. "I guess that is what I am, isn't it?"
The shipmaster smiled. Indorians rarely do that. "I do not consider myself a religious man, Fleet Command, but the traditions in which I was raised leave a shade of their own. To us, you are a being out of legend. And out of prayer." His subordinates put their own hands on their chests to emphasize the point.
I wasn't sure what to say to that, or how to feel about it, so I simply guided them onward.
My mother and the rest of the government-in-exile had also been reading up on Indorian customs, so they skipped the usual pleasantries upon seating them. The shipmaster and his attendants refused to be seated; one thing the Federation package didn't include was apparently that Indorians like to stand.
"You'll have to pardon our incredulity," my mother said, hands drawn up above the table, "but such a selfless offer from a species we have had no contact with whatsoever does beg an explanation."
"Your offer is considerable," Representative Azjat, one of her counterparts, continued, "your people's aptitude for space engineering is famous, even without the equipment you've brought on your ship. We frankly need all the help we can get. The question is what you're planning to get out of this."
The shipmaster waited almost ten seconds after they finished before placing his hands over his rib cage again. "Representatives of Kadesh," he said, his voice even slower and clearer than usual, "I know that you have been told much of Indoria. That we are stolid, yet unenterprising. Risk averse. Incurious. All too often, these descriptions are accurate. You have probably been told as well that we lack what your people would call a native scientific tradition."
At the time, I thought he was trying to make them uncomfortable. It was certainly what he accomplished.
"This is also, unfortunately, the truth," I saw my mother sigh in relief when he continued for them.,"our technological history has been one of gradual advancement by refinement and imitation. Perhaps we would have invented science, as you and so many others have, before we had the chance to depend on aliens for it, had we possessed the need."
"I'm sorry," Representative Farash, old and impatient as he was even all those years ago, cut in, "are you trying to tell us you discovered space travel without the scientific method?"
"No, Representative," the shipmaster replied, "we copied it."
My mother's eyes were narrowed. "I don't recall hearing anything about your people being uplifted."
"That is because we never publicly told the Federation. I will present to you an image, now."
He reached into a pocket to produce a strange device. Some of the Representatives looked nervous, so I chimed in. "Its just a holoprojector. None of them are carrying anything dangerous."
They relaxed. "Thank you, Fleet Command." My mother smiled and winked at the camera in the corner of the room. Bless her. I know that if it hadn't been for her those first few years, I would have gone insane. The Indorian pressed the button, and a fuzzy, broken 3D image appeared before him. Corrupted data, taken from an ancient, rotting posichip, but still intact enough. The figure of a woman, tall, bald, and wrinkled, with eye sockets like two deep, circular pits from which tiny black orbs peered. Every Kadeshi in the room gasp. Hundreds of meters away, in the core suspension chamber, my old lungs did as well.
"You're like us," mother said.
"More than ninety-percent of our homeworld's species possess no genes in common with us whatsoever. The remainder have none in common with the majority. Our use of electricity predates our invention of writing; we lack records that can be relied upon of our early history. But it was by imitation, through many centuries of trial and error, of the ancient shuttles hidden beneath Indoria's surface that we expanded into space."
"Hold on though," Azjat held up his hands, "the Federation has entire agencies devoted to studying the Elders...erm...the Preservers, as they call them. Why haven't you gone public with this?"
"It is not in our nature to announce anything more loudly than the situation requires, Representative. Those parties within the Federation to whom this information would be relevant were informed long ago. Indorian archaeologists are present at all of the Federation-controlled sites you refer to. That is not the subject of this discussion."
He removed his hands from his chest and looked at all of us in turn. My mother, Azjat, Farash, Mekhet, and finally at my lense in the corner. "We are longer lived than most sophonts. Twenty-five years means less to an Indorian than it might to a Kadeshi. To myself, and the rest of the volunteers aboard our ship, it means far less still. Indoria is ignorant of its origins. There are many who wonder what we might have lost when the Preservers took us from our original world, however necessary it might have been."
"So." Mother was smiling curiously at him now. "You have started doing science on your own. This is a case study."
The Indorian placed his hands back on his chest.
"Well," Farash spoke up, "we'll need some time to consider your proposition. If you'd like, we can escort you back to your ship."
"You're also welcome to stay aboard, if you wish."
Everyone looked up. It took me a moment to realize I had said that.
Shipmaster Ertas smiled. After that, there was really only one way the council could vote.
.......
A/N: For an omake reward, the Kadeshi fleet gains an Indorian engineering ship.
