//------------------------------//
// Chapter 19 - The Inevitable Date 
// Story: The Children of Planet Earth 
// by Chicago Ted 
//------------------------------//

Adam was almost finished with breakfast when he heard a hoof knock on the lander’s window. The shutter slithered open, and he saw the gray wall-eyed mare, making her postal rounds. Usually she didn’t stop by until later in the day, since he lived so far outside of town – so this must’ve been important.

“Qapata!” she greeted him. She held up a manila-colored envelope to the window.

He nodded. “Wõ sehe þesơ cupavu,” he told her, pointing to the sterile locker. Ever since he got Ãtir’s books inside, the locker had been relegated to a makeshift mailbox. She knew to place items inside and to close the door, but never seemed to remember to sterilize them.

Such as now. As she flew away, Adam rolled his eyes and did the last step for her. He hit the switch for her inside, and stood by the window. Any minute now, he knew, Ãtir Ḷsapa would show up at the window as well. He couldn’t say precisely which time, but it was clearly scheduled.

Two minutes passed, and the locker was finished. Since Ãtir seemed to be running late, he decided to kill the time with. . . whatever this was. He pulled the envelope out and unsealed it. There weren’t any words that he could read – only mathematical definitions. But all these photographs were clearly biological in nature. Adam realized this was from the hospital in the fortress-city. They had completed what should be an initial analysis of the effects of breaching biosegregation.

While he couldn’t make heads or tails of it, he knew someone who could. “Zulu-Alfa, this is Tango-1,” he opened on the radio. “Is Dr. Weiss on station? Over.”

“This is Weiss,” her voice replied within the moment. “Receiving, over.”

“Just now I have received documents from the hospital laboratory,” he told her. “I will be transmitting scans of them to you at this time. Please acknowledge, over.”

“Copy Somerset, standing by.”

With that settled, he swung the camera over the document, and one by one started snapping photographs of the pages. Each of them was transmitted to Zodiac-Altair without delay. He worked quickly, yet neatly, to make sure she could see them all before Ãtir came to drag him away.

Speak of the Devil – right as he snapped the final page, he heard a pop! outside, and hooves hitting the scaffolding. “Hello, Adam,” she greeted him in accented English. “Are you ready?”

“Almost ready,” he replied. As he photographed the last page, he breathed a sigh of relief, then climbed into his suit. With this, he hoped he wouldn’t have to test any more samples with the probe. So far, they had tested a variety of fruits and vegetables – at least, all the ones that the Indigenous considered to be edible. They also tested other sources – things the equines could not eat, such as other plants and even meat. He remembered finding some tomato analogues here, and even though those had proved nonviable for human consumption, they were clearly cultivated by the ponies. He chuckled – he remembered Dr. Weiss’s fit from orbit; apparently Terrestrial horses could not handle nightshades like tomatoes. From what Adam remembered as well, between his initial findings and his subsequent studies with Ãtir, carnivorous sentients lived on Rhysling, and regularly interacted with the equines. However, he had yet to met a single one of them here in Ơhesti.

Ơhesti – that was the name of the large political body to which Ãtir, Sulfoyarqa, and all the other equines pledged their allegiance. Their rulers, Yere Kisữ and Yara Ariman, were testing him, seeing if he was fit to remain in Ơhesti. From what he noted, apparently all of Ơhesti revered them as living gods. I could see why, he remembered thinking at the time – I certainly haven’t found anyone quite like the two.

Not to mention, he further learned, they were sisters, and were the literal living embodiments of the Sun and Moon. He asked Ãtir how that worked – and she responded that they had direct control over the two celestial bodies. Adam sooner believed Yara Ariman’s control over the Moon than Yere Kisữ’s over the Sun. For one, that went directly against the heliocentric model they had apparently also adopted. For another, it also went directly against Kepler’s findings about gravity. Unless there’s something else at play here? Adam remembered masked skepticism, though he tried to respect Ơhesti’s belief system. Still, he wanted to see it happen firsthand.

She was surprisingly understanding of the whole thing, and decided to take Adam directly to the capitol city – which he learned also was called Kãtṛlat – even paying for the two tickets out of her own pocket. Adam wanted to pay her back for the convenience, but she refused. Is this her attempt at evangelizing me? he wondered. Still, he reserved his judgment until the train pulled into Kãtṛlat. It was early in the evening when he got there, and therefore the sun had not yet set. A perfect time, he supposed, to watch the two sisters at work.

Sisters. Right. Of course they would be. Two opposing celestial bodies, being so closely related to one another – one for day, one for night – one for light, one for dark – one for good, one for evil? He bit his tongue to avoid making the suggestion at the time. As the city’s clock struck the top digit – six, no, ten – he watched the events unfold before his eyes: first, Yere Kisữ flew up to the top of the sky, up to where she nearly left Adam’s field of vision. Then she lit her horn, and he started noticing the glimmers of the Sun start to shift to red, deeper and deeper as it descended over the western horizon. She kept descending with the sun, slowly yet surely, keeping pace with the celestial body itself. At the same time, meanwhile, Yara Ariman started ascending herself at the same pace as her sister, horn lit as well, bringing up the moon over the eastern horizon.

He couldn’t explain it, even now – he wasn’t a theoretical physicist. He was certain, however, that Zodiac-Altair had at least one packed away somewhere, meant likely to assist with reverse-engineering alien technology should the need arise. And judging by what he saw, that was surely going to be handy for them at some point. For the time being, however, Adam simply wrote off the entire experience as an elaborate ritual meant to legitimize the sisters’ reign.

The ride back home – to Ginzol, which he overheard from the conductor – was largely uneventful, even if they arrived at midnight. Adam knew Ãtir could easily have teleported him back to the lander – hell, even teleported him out of his suit and into the lander itself – but that posed a few problems. For one, he still didn’t know how the teleportation technology they used would affect human physiology. He noted no effect when they were nearby, but who could say the same for doing it at a considerable distance? For another, he was teleported while wearing a spacesuit. What if he was naked? These were the thoughts that kept him up at night, despite it not being his own department.

Time he spent all the same working on translating Ơhqer into English, despite Ãtir’s protests to the contrary. He would attempt to get another hour or two into the day, but she would always catch on, and always chastise him – in English, even – for staying up for so long. What are you, my mother? She meant well at least.

“Adam?” Ãtir asked him. “You’re quiet now. Is something wrong?”

“Hm?” He looked down at the violet unicorn. “No, nothing’s wrong, Ãtir.” He breathed into his suit deeply. “Will we go study now?” he asked her. He wasn’t worried about work – he’d checked the place early in the morning, only to find that it was closed for the day.

“Yes!”

With that, Adam disconnected from the suitport, and he and Ãtir started down the road, side-by-side with each other.

For most other equines, such a task seemed boring, dreary, something to be loathed as a necessary evil. Not Ãtir, for whatever reason. She reveled in such a task – it meant discovery, exploration, wonder. This attitude suited Adam quite well – she took to English like a champ, devouring all the words he could think of. She even took the time to memorize all the irregularities of its creolized grammar. Why, she even started developing an American accent, independent of his teaching. Is she trying to show off for me? he often wondered between his marveling.

Unfortunately, Adam was languishing in his studies of Ơhqer. He wanted to learn it, with just as much zeal as his equine colleague, but his approach was just far too methodical to immerse himself fully into the grammar. He wanted to learn not just which roots and affixes went together, which roots fitted which definitions, but why they did so. At the same time, he focused on drafting a practical phrasebook for the colony, ensuring colonists could survive in Ơhesti’s society. And even with Ãtir’s English lexicon as large and rapidly-growing as it was, even she couldn’t come up with a proper, fitting explanation for these roots and affixes.

It was a maddening issue, but one he had to tolerate.

As he entered Ginzol, he noticed that very few ponies were out and about in the streets – that was, until he approached the central square, where the residents of Ginzol were holding their weekly market. No thanks, he wanted to say, I don’t want any carrots; I’ve already tested those. Njeledirve, please, I’ve already tested a whole bushel of apples that you gifted me; they all returned the same results, or so Dr. Weiss said. It was a lot of offers to, and silent refusals from, the human – but it all did mean one thing: they had started accepting him as one of their own. It was as much as he could ask for – if they were willing to accept him, then surely they might be more willing to accept other human beings as well.

Not to mention that Ħṛylilufa managed to work past her initial bias and not knock him down again. Oh, yes, that was another thing – despite being united politically as one body, the three types of equines he had seen had developed their own specific dialects. Admittedly, he had also been influenced slightly by Ãtir’s specific dialect – if only because he came to learn that Yere Kisữ and Yara Ariman also had that same dialect, even with the latter’s broken speech, though a few mannerisms on their part all but convinced him that they had a personal dialect of their own. He would have to inquire at some point.

It was the unicorn dialect that had those tricky voiceless nasals and palatal laterals, and he was glad that he didn’t have to imitate those precisely for them to understand him. As he had suspected earlier, the voiceless nasals were nasal clicks in the other two dialects, to which he took quite easily. The palatal lateral was really an elision of the sequence [jl], though it took him a few days for that to click.

There were a few more differences between dialects – for one, the pegasi never had a null onset, whereas other dialects did allow those. The pegasi insist on using [ɦ], a sound he had not anticipated from the textbook on that night. He had to improvise johnny-on-the-spot to use ħ for that sound. Naturally, he’d drop it from the colony language lessons, reserving it for those who truly needed to know.

After a brisk walk through town, they arrived at the tree-library. Elzơ, her dragon assistant, was waiting for them already, books already in hand. Adam took them into his own arms – “Thank you,” he said reflexively. Oops!

But it was such a common enough phrase spoken in English that he responded with “You’re welcome!” before leaving the room entirely, leaving him alone with Ãtir. As he sat down on the floor, she took her usual place in his lap. He couldn’t feel it, but these equines were apparently warm-blooded, just like humans. Even Elzơ, too – against all his expectations. His reptilian appearance made him assume he was cold-blooded. But then, he realized, I haven’t seen him spend a lot of time in the sun. I guess he doesn’t need it?

He opened the book, and saw it was all about time. He realized he could learn more about how Rhyslingers kept the time, and more importantly, the date. He flipped the book open, without her prompting, to the first few pages. They were all about how time was told within the day – hours, minutes, and half-days. Strangely, there weren’t anything on seconds. Adam raised an eyebrow. “Why not seconds?” he asked.

“What is ‘seconds’?” Ãtir of course would ask.

“Seconds is. . . .” How do I define it for her? After some thought, he remembered the pocketwatches in the shop at Kãtṛlat. “Fast hand, tick, tick, tick, tick. . . .” Please understand it.

“Ah!” She nodded. “Seconds! We do not use seconds usually. Only if one is strict about keeping time.” That, or the book was printed before those were adopted. “Most of us use. . . .” She tapped her hoof upon the smallest unit upon the page – what he knew to be minutes.

“Minutes,” he told her. Then he pointed out the next largest unit on the page with his finger. “. . . and hours.”

“Minute! Hour!” she echoed back to him. “Yes!” She cleared her throat and translated them: “Ayadal. . . izãdal.” Then she paused – and pointed at the remaining unit on the spread. “What is this?”

Adam didn’t have an answer. Sure, he had the words ‘day’ and ‘night,’ but no word to describe both of them as equal measures of time, not like what Rhysling had – or at least Ơhesti. “We don’t have the word,” he told her, in full honesty.

“Kãtṛtal,” Ãtir pronounced for him. “We call it the kãtṛtal.”

And indeed, when Adam looked more closely, he saw the neat alphasyllabary printing, void of any serifs, spelling out kã-tṛ-ta-l. As he had learned, there indeed were vowel and consonant harmonies, but they only needed to be marked on the first non-neutral syllable. So only ka took on the horizontal line inside the letter – and were the word kẽtṛtel instead, it would not have the moon-vowel marking above kã. Even with all the roots he knew, Adam couldn’t detect any obvious etymology – so either it was a loanword from a language he had not yet studied, or this division of time was so ancient in their culture it had its own dedicated root.

“Let’s turn the page!” Ãtir said – and in her telekinetic grip, she grabbed the leaf and turned it over. This one was about more divisions of time, containing days within a year.

A local calendar! Adam drank in the page. Using as many English terms as he could think of, he noted that Rhysling worked on nine months instead of twelve, each with thirty-six days spread across six weeks, each with six days. But he noticed an odd quirk – each day was indicated with a numeral. That in and of itself wasn’t unusual – that was how the modern Chinese calendar worked, for instance – but the numerals were different. They were like dice pips, but instead of being arranged like on dice, as he had seen before, here they were stacked up into triangles. It was one pip for the first day, then two pips, one pip on top of two, then three pips with a fourth stacked atop on the left side, two pips on top of three – then where he expected one pip on two on three, there instead was another symbol – one he never seen before. This was the symbol for their money, or dege. It looked like a de and ge nested within each other, in an S-like configuration. This marked the last day of each week, which were also indicated in green. The sabbath, he wanted to say, but that would be too Christian, not to mention it might not actually be a day of rest for them per se. Regardless, it was a significant day – although Adam did not know its nature quite yet.

What better way than to ask? He tapped his finger on the green day. “What is this day used for?” he asked Ãtir.

“That is xurakisũ,” she explained. “It is the day when we sell at market.”

Market-day, he realized – though that might not be the most literal translation; he recognized the root for ‘sell,’ xura, added onto the root for ‘day,’ kisữ. “Is it also the day for rest?” he asked. Just want to be sure.

“Yes, for some of us,” she replied. “But not for all of us. Some of us sell. Some of us buy. Some of us rest.”

Maybe I’ve earned my day off from the clerk. Adam could already hear the colonists start to complain of only getting one day of the week off. But hey, he thought, better that than to have to work all six days of the week. Plus, it’s actually compatible with the five-day working week we have. Always gotta see the bright side of things.

Adam spotted some specific dates on the calendars, likely indicating holidays, festivals, and the like – but he wasn’t thinking about those at the moment. Seasons – what about those on Rhysling? Do the equines observe them? Surely they must, if they can farm crops of plants. “What do you do during the months?” he asked her.

“Kipþaq, we plant seeds. Ṛljiman, we let the rain come and go. Silaþaq, the crops start to green.” Strange verb, but I can visualize it all the same. “Djugaman, the flowers open. Gegemen, we harvest the crops. Xaþaþaq – ” a word heavy with clicks – “we burn what we cannot harvest. It will make the ground good for next Kipþaq. Izazaman, we celebrate the harvest, as the first. . . .” Stuck on a word, Ãtir? “Snow comes. When the first snow comes. Ariman, the days are short and the nights are long.” Ah, so even the days and nights vary somewhat, just as we do on Earth. Wait, isn’t that the name of one of their leaders!? “Kṛsjãþaq, the ground is still too cold to green any crops. It goes back to Kipþaq after.”

Adam could easily guess the literal meaning of each of the words. He knew enough roots for all these words. A kip was a seed, ṛlji was rain – though he would prefer ṛyli, as ṛlji was highly dialectal – sila was the color green, and all things associated with it, djuga was a flower, blossom, and all other similar structures, gege was a verb ‘to harvest,’ xaþa was fire, izaza was a party or a festival – the word made no distinction as to scale, as he found out from Njilidi Njibi – ari was night, and kṛsjã was snow. All of them, invariably, were attached to the root for ‘moon,’ man – implying this was a lunar calendar.

Seasonal divisions were strange – there were either three seasons lasting three months each, or four seasons lasting two months each, except for winter, which lasted three either way. But hey, at least the calendar is perennial, he thought. And there’s no ‘Thirty Days Hath September’ nonsense. But what if they have leap days? “Are the months always the same every year?” he asked her.

“Yes, every year!” she confirmed.

“Do you not have another day some years?”

“I don’t understand.” She looked back at him, tilting her head. “The months are always the same every year. Why would we have another day some years?”

Adam was about to launch into a lecture about the rotation of the planets not being precisely whichever number of days they had calculated – 324 in decimal, 1300 in senary – but even he would have to admit, with all the quirks the Julian and Gregorian calendars had to ensure they lined up with Earth’s tropical year, they both did their jobs. If, as she asserted, Rhysling’s orbital period was so perfect that one could construct a calendar that did not need any intercalation, then that much could help him, and the rest of the crew, adjust to Rhysling with few issues. After all, if NASA had already calculated a calendar for working on Mars, then adopting Rhysling’s calendar shouldn’t be too much of a hassle for them.

Speaking of years. . . . Adam’s eyes darted up to a five-figure digit printed at the top of the calendar. So they do number years, just like in the west, he noticed, but from what event? Regardless, it was the eighteenth day of Djugaman, year thirty-one thousand, two hundred thirty-two. Converted to decimal, it was the year 4196. They must’ve been counting for a while, he concluded.

They continued exploring the book in the meantime. The next page spread was about the seasons. To answer that question, it was the latter hypothesis – they had a spring, summer, and autumn of two months each, and a winter with three. At least, that would be true in the northern hemisphere, he reminded himself. “‘Seasons,’” he pronounced for her. Then, pointing them out one by one, “‘Spring’. . . ‘summer’. . . ‘fall’. . . ‘winter.’” Going off the order Ãtir introduced the seasons, they must observe the new year with the start of spring.

“Es-pring – ” she had trouble with English consonant clusters, which were much more complex than Ơhqer’s – “summer, fall, winter,” she repeated back to Adam. But then she asked, “But isn’t ‘fall’ for. . . ?” Then she demonstrated the verb, collapsing herself on the floor.

Adam burst out laughing. “Fall of the leaf,” he clarified.

“Oh.” After righting herself in his lap, she recited in the same order, “Sḷsẽqele, fasḷqala, azlanala, ẽrenele.” Literally, ‘wet sky,’ ‘hot sky,’ ‘dry sky,’ and ‘cold sky.’ To him, they made logical sense, but the words themselves didn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily as the English equivalents, which had only one or two syllables each. Then again, English’s phonotactics allowed those words to exist – Ơhqer didn’t have that luxury. “What’s your favorite season?” she then asked Adam.

Haven’t lived here for long enough to answer for Rhysling, but I can answer for Earth at least. “Summer,” he replied. “Fasḷqala.”

She nodded in understanding.

But before she could turn the page, there was still one question left on his mind. “What is today?”

Ãtir had to pop out of his lap for a moment to check the calendar. “It is the firsty-eighth day of Djugaman.”

“Eighteenth,” he corrected.

She grumbled. “Eighteenth.” She followed up with a sigh. “Why can it not be firsty-eighth?”

“I don’t know, Ãtir. I don’t know.” The last day of the third week, he figured – which was why he ran into the market on his way to the library.

Then she turned the page – to show the times of day: morning, midday, afternoon, evening, and nighttime. Well, those were the English distinctions. Here, they had just the four, combining midday and afternoon. Pick one, pick one, pick one. . . noon! “Morning, noon, evening, night,” he indicated, pointing to each one in succession.

“Morning, noon, evening, night,” she copied him. Then: “Welze, gele, ãtir, ari.”

Wait, isn’t that her name!? “But you are Ãtir,” he said.

She giggled. “So is that!” She pointed at the picture of the evening scene again. “My mother named me that, because that was the time I was born.”

That’s adorable. “Does everyone have that name?” he followed up. “From the time they are born?”

She shook her head. “No.” Must be a special case for her, then. Then she asked something he didn’t anticipate: “Any other words?”

Um. . . . “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Welze is morning. Welze is also dawn. Are they the same?”

Wait, I taught her both of those words? he realized. Oh boy. . . . “Yes,” he would admit eventually. I’m sure there are finer nuances, but those would have their own synonyms, and then we’d be here all day!

“What about for ãtir?” she followed up with. “Other words like ‘evening’?”

Let me see. . . gotta be a bunch of synonyms for the sight of the sun going down at the end of the day. . . “Sunset, dusk, twilight, nightfall – why do you ask?”

But Ãtir was busying herself with sounding out each of those words to herself – softly, so he couldn’t hear her. Eventually, he thought he could hear her repeat one word in particular. “Twilight,” she finally said aloud. “I like that word.” She turned around to face Adam. “Will you call me Twilight?”

I mean, it is a suitably-artistic calque. . . . “Sure, Twilight,” he said.


·–


“. . . scheiss, chuum z glaube,” Elena voiced to herself. “Das chan ächt nöd sii.” She nudged herself away from her terminal, pinching the bridge of her nose. She took a deep breath in, then let it out calmly, as she tried to recollect her sanity. She took another look at the screen, just to make sure what she saw was indeed correct. Once she understood them, she called down the ship, “Commander!”

“What?” she heard his voice echo up through the ship.

“Come to the bridge at once!” she shouted. “I have great news!”

“What sort of news?” Anton’s voice chimed in. “Is it something I have to see as well?”

She giggled. “You may as well; come here also!”

She didn’t have very long to wait until both Dr. Konstantinov, and then Commander Darcy, leapfrogged off the wall and into the bridge. “Over here!” she further said, gesturing them to the screen.

“Have you found something, Weiss?” the commander asked. “These just look like biological charts. Did Somerset send those?”

“He did,” she confirmed. “Apparently the equines at the hospital laboratory have been working on the same solution that I have – they simply have the advantage of physical testing.”

“At the cost of possible contamination,” added Dr. Konstantinov. “Still, what did they find?”

“As it turns out,” she explained, “many Rhyslinger proteins and nutrients are compatible with us human beings.” She sighed. “It’s not ideal, and it would need selective breeding for us, so we should stick to what we’ve brought with us for the time being.”

He nodded. “Understood.”

“Pardon my thoughts, but how do we know this for sure?” Dr. Konstantinov asked. “We haven’t done any of the work ourselves – only taking it from their word, whom,” he hastily added, “we do not know for sure are telling the truth. To say nothing on how fast they came to such a conclusion.”

She snapped her fingers. “They appear to understand as well as we do that, if contamination should prove harmful, they should take every measure to prevent it. Lying about it being safe is the very last thing they’d want to do – if anything, they’d lie about it being unsafe.”

“Bacteria? Fungus? Anything that could attack us on a larger scale?” The Russian started sounding flustered.

“That was towards the end of the document, but it appears that Rhyslinger bacteria do not recognize Terrestrial biology as. . . well, anything.” She rubbed her eye – fatigue was starting to overcome her, despite her initial excitement. “As for fungus, they pose no greater threat than ours do – or to them. Just wash up when coming inside, and that would be that.”

The commander nodded, a smile playing across his face. “I knew the labcoats made the right call recruiting you,” he said – “never thought we’d use their labcoats as well!” He snapped his fingers. “So, putting that all together, does that mean – ”

“Yes, sir – yet!” She held her finger up. “Even with all this knowledge of Rhyslinger life, there is still a risk of disembarking, even from causes none of us know about.”

“Even so, I’m sure our dear Somerset would be glad to hear the news. Damned thing must be getting stuffy for him, not to mention the joints might be wearing out as well.” He pushed himself off the wall and to the radio, grabbing it as he arrived. “Somerset, this is Zulu-Alfa,” he opened. “Dr. Weiss has determined at last that the surface of Rhysling may be safe for human exploration after all, even without suits. You can breathe its air, its microörganisms appear impossible to interact with, and now, it’s likely we can rely on some local consumables.” He smirked, even though he knew Dr. Somerset would never see it. “What do you say, Adam – want to step out of that suit one last time? Please acknowledge so I can transmit the isolation override, over.”


·–·––


Adam had only progressed a bit in his studies. For one, he also learned that Twilight’s last name, Ḷsapa, implied a shower of stars. English equivalents were aplenty, thanks to its poëtic traditions, but she ultimately settled on ‘sparkle.’ Something about the sp consonant cluster pleased her, despite being difficult to pronounce for her at first – she kept pronouncing it ‘asparkle’ a few times – but she kept it all the same.

“Why?” he had to ask.

“‘Sp’ – it’s very English,” she simply explained.

Adam wanted to object – that such consonant clusters were common to the Indo-European family – but that would be another all-day lecture, and he was simply not in the mood for that. And then there’s the Kartvelian family. . . .

And then he remembered a question he had earlier, but had neglected to ask until now. “I know you say ‘ãtir,’” he said. “But do you also say ‘antir’?”

Twilight burst out laughing. “Yes, yes we do!” She kept at it for a good moment, before she tried catching her breath. “Both words are in Ơhqer – and they mean two different things.”

Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. . . . “Is that bad?” he cautiously followed up.

She tilted her head. “No? Why would it be? You simply didn’t know the difference.”

“Not really.” He shrugged. “So if ‘ãtir’ means ‘twilight,’ what does ‘antir’ mean?” Please don’t be vulgar. . . .

Instead of speaking, Twilight decided to show him instead. She lit her horn, and a book’s spine also developed a similar glow. It slid out of the shelf and opened itself in front of her, pages fluttering by at a blinding pace – until it suddenly stopped at one particular spread. She turned around to show him a group of animals – clearly ones the Indigenous had domesticated. A small wooden pointer also introduced itself in a violet glow, and tapped the page. “This is andir,” she announced – while also correcting his pronunciation.

Wait. . . all this time, I’ve been calling her – !? As that thought sank into his mind, he found himself speechless – before he too burst out laughing. She must’ve been thinking I was blind or something! “I’m so sorry, Twilight!” he briefly got out. “I didn’t realize!”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she reässured him. “I just thought it was a silly mistake. I don’t mind it at all!” And once he got over his jollies, she followed up with “But what is andir in English?”

He cleared his throat. “Cat.”

“Cat,” she echoed back. “Cat, cat, cat.”

Suddenly the two were interrupted out of the blue with another transmission from the skies. “Somerset, this is Zulu-Alfa,” Commander Darcy opened the broadcast. “Dr. Weiss has determined at last that the surface of Rhysling may be safe for human exploration, even without suits. You can breathe its air, its microörganisms appear to be impossible to interact with, and now, it’s likely we can rely on local consumables.”

As he was saying this, both Adam and Twilight could clearly hear his words – the latter suddenly dropping the book, startled by the vocal interruption from the suit. As more news trickled in from orbit, Adam started to feel his heartbeat start to rise from a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Twilight had to put her ear up to his helmet to get a better idea of what Louis was saying – Adam had long since gotten used to staring down her ear canal. Even so, he could hear her quake in giddiness in his lap, tapping her shod hooves upon the titanium exterior, and he had to scoot her onto the floor so he could hear the call.

“What do you say, Adam,” the commander concluded – “want to step out of that suit one last time? Please acknowledge so I can transmit the isolation override, over.”

Adam looked down at Twilight. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this moment,” he said. “Seeing if it was possible to survive here. Now? Now we know we can.” He sighed. “Still, it leaves the question about surviving with you – but that is for another day.”

“Let’s go to Sulfoyarqa’s house,” Twilight suggested. “She would like to see you outside of your suit.”

A shame she couldn’t be there at the hospital in Kãtṛlat, he mused. Still, I think this is a suitable makeup – abandoning the Strauss is not something she would want to miss.

“Sure,” he said. “But first, let me get my clothes, please.”

“Just a moment.” She lit her horn again, charging up a great amount of energy. He recognized it as a teleportation spell, but something about it was different. But what? A moment later, he had his answer: she was seeking out the very thing he wanted, and yanked it out of his lander. His international-orange jumpsuit floated in front of him, fully encased in violet sparkling light. “It is clean-clean, don’t worry,” she told him – using a term she had coined to mean ‘sterile.’ “Let’s go!”


··


The trip through town was relatively calm – what with the residents trading at the market, or simply resting on such a fine Xurakisũ. Even though Adam had his jumpsuit draped over his shoulder, noöne they ran into even batted an eye – perhaps they were just too used to whatever strange things he had brought with him.

What did catch their attention, truth be told, was the two conversing in English – done in public for the first time. Adam wanted to practice his Ơhqer, but Twilight was much too eager to speak anything other than English. The two went back and forth about various things about Ơhqer, so it wasn’t time wasted for him per se.

Eventually they settled on a story – more specifically, the story about the origin of the script. It was a simple one, almost like a myth, although Adam had long learned not to discount such stories as mere myth and legend. As he listened, he started to visualize the scene unfold, and could conclude that all of it was plausible.

There once was a normal equine, a gardener named Zenedjưge – after Twilight described what the word meant, he chose to translate the name as Wisteria. Apparently Rhysling’s biology did boast such plants, which the equines cultivated – not for food, but for ornamentation. They were difficult to maintain, due to their parasitic nature.

One day, Wisteria got caught in a sudden and rather heavy thunderstorm, and she had to run and stay indoors during the ordeal. Adam noted she used the word ‘unforeseen’ instead of ‘unplanned’ – even when he explained the difference, she insisted. Must be before they harnessed the weather, he surmised.

When the storm started to clear, Wisteria got back to work. As she had noted, the ground was soaking wet and muddy, with all the insects and worms crawling out and around – more parallels with his native Earth. She forgot to wear her boots, having taken them off indoors while she waited out the storm, so she got her hooves and legs muddy.

Those boots also had another purpose: protecting the sensitive parts of their hooves from stray twigs, thorns, and the like. Adam knew there was a word for that part of the hoof, but it just didn’t come to mind. Putting that thought aside, he listened as the story continued – just as he had feared, she got poked by a stray twig on the ground. She lifted it away to check for damage – of which there was none, thankfully. But as she looked down, she saw her hoofprint, framing the twig, now pressed as well into the mud.

And something clicked.

Twilight had to stop and clarify something. Before this moment, Ơhqer was not united by a single writing system – two of the three member tribes, the pegasi and unicorns, each had their own unique writing system. Adam knew this was something to look into when he had a moment, but was not top priority at this time. Each one was adapted to the chief defining feature of these tribes – the pegasi wrote with their wings, and the unicorns wrote with long metal rods, held in place with their telekinesis. And yes, she answered his question, some unicorns did write with molted pegasi feathers.

And as for the regular equines? They never did develop their own script. Certainly some of them were trained to read the pegasi or unicorn scripts, but they themselves never wrote anything. And why not? All they had were their hooves, and their mouth – the latter they took full advantage of, developing a rich oral history instead of writing. Now that would be something to see, Adam thought – assuming they wrote down their history after the fact. Likely the first thing they did with their brand-new tool.

With those clarification out of the way, Twilight continued. Wisteria saw the pattern of twigs in the mud, framed in her hoofprint, and got the idea for writing with hooves. She took another stick in her mouth, stamped on the ground in another patch of mud, and tried to replicate the pattern. After several tries, she found she could do it reliably – so she started exploring other, more complex patterns, to see what would stand out the most. As it turned out, simple lines and shapes stood out the best, while twists and turns and sharp angles did not.

As she experimented, Wisteria found that all the sounds in Ơhqer could be represented with just a few basic shapes, easily reproduced with a rod held in the mouth and a hoof stuck in the mud. Literally any equine could do this – regulars, pegasi, and unicorns alike could all write with a common script. However, even though the regular equines were quick to adopt Wisteria’s writings, there was a great deal of resistance from the other two tribes. Neither of them wanted to adopt the ‘lowly’ writing system, a word Adam had to suggest when Twilight struggled to find the right word in English. Both of them were merely content with their feathered script, and saw no cause to go along with what the regulars had made for themselves. The key phrase here was ‘for themselves’ – for they were adamant that the three write their own ways.

It wasn’t until Wisteria herself demonstrated the ease of writing her way to the other two tribes, and adding that a single script was easier to learn than three, that slowly yet surely, they started to adopt hers, abandoning the ones they had made for themselves. Not least of which was Yere Kisữ and Yara Ariman, who had been consolidating their power in an Ơhesti in its infancy. It wasn’t until they proved their divine control over the Sun and Moon that their rule was legitimized – and when it was, it was Wisteria’s script that outlined their laws and proclamations.

“Just as her flowers took root in the gardens,” Twilight concluded, “so too did her writing take root in Ơhqer, and Ơhesti itself.”

How àpropos, he thought.

By the time Twilight finished recounting the story, they were just a stone’s throw away from Sulfoyarqa’s cottage. It was unmistakable who would live here – it was frankly more zoo than house. Adam noticed something odd about the place – usually it would be a lot noisier than this. But here? Now? It was rather quiet – almost like something was wrong here. Or they’re just entirely unfamiliar with my presence, he thought.

Twilight knocked on the front door – gently, to avoid sounding forceful. Adam made no further movement once he arrived on her porch.

Sulfoyarqa opened up within the moment. “Hõ Ħãtir, hõ Ħedem, qapata,” she greeted. “Riwe ħalnjamu?”

“Edemley sơhơgjemư ala almu kokoiñka mưlzḷ siapa,” Twilight explained in her native tongue. “Ṛsiþẽ ilenzevư?”

Sulfoyarqa sharply drew a breath, taken aback by what her friend had just said – even though he could only recognize the roots for speaking, helping, and a clever way of calling his suit literally ‘hard-clothes.’ I guess that’s also the word for ‘armor,’ he assumed. But she was enthusiastic all the same. “Ħem! Ħem! Pise þesơ ħezebưvimẽ!” She gestured them both inside.

Adam had never seen the inside of Sulfoyarqa’s home before – even so long ago, when he, they, and the rest of their friends entered the Kala-Uha Silasa. So now that he was here, he was surprised to see, despite what she was known for, how neat and orderly it was. The floors were swept, the upholstery was spotless, and even the pots in front of the fireplace were serviceable. Second only to the cleanroom in Kãtṛlat, I’ll bet. But then, right now, it doesn’t make a difference.

Yet even so, the three were not alone inside. Here and there were various animal habitats – mice within the walls, birds in gilded cages, and he could have sworn he saw a bear disappear around the corner into the next room when he peeked at her furniture. That would be amazing if Sulfoyarqa could have tamed such a dangerous creature as a bear, he thought. So why didn’t she try with that other bear in the Kala-Uha? Or the wolves, for that matter?

“Ħama bḷd ħalmu Ħedem kṛsja kokoħixka mưlzḷ teþel,” Sulfoyarqa commented.

“Ilteþelvư,” Twilight insisted. Then, facing Adam, she switched back to English. “Do you want me to hold your suit in place?”

“Yes, please.” He nodded.

Without another word, she lit her horn and glided her telekinetic grip over the shoulders and chest on his suit. Try as he might, he found he couldn’t move those pieces. Just as he trusted her when he climbed out of the suit in the Kãtṛlat hospital, now he was trusting her to help him emerge from the suit – for the last time.

But before I forget. . . . “Zulu-Alfa, this is Somerset,” he radioed above. “I am disembarking from my EVA suit at this time. Be advised, I may be out of contact once this is complete, until I return to the lander. Somerset out.” I hope they understand.

He turned back to Twilight. “Let’s do this.”

She nodded, once but with vigor. “Let’s!”

Adam slithered his arms out of the suit’s. He felt along the pectoral cavity, searching out for the lever that controlled the lock in the life-support backpack. “Here it is. . . .” He gripped it, as firmly as he could with just his fingertips, and pushed it straight down as far as it would go. When it hit the bottom of the slot, he felt the pressure of the equipment release from his back as the suit hinged open, followed by a rush of cool air caressing his sweating skin. As good as the cooling garment was, it wasn’t perfect, and did not hold a candle to genuinely fresh air.

He couldn’t easily worm out of the suit all the way without something to grip above him. Twilight had to tilt him forward, bending the suit over by its waist – and she and Sulfoyarqa watched as this being from beyond the stars emerged from his metallic chrysalis. With that, the biological barrier between Earth and Rhysling had been broken – hopefully to no meaningful consequence.

He didn’t know what Sulfoyarqa was expecting to see beneath the suit, though he knew Twilight had seen everything about him. Everything – whether he liked it or not. One thing was sure, however – both of them reäcted as though they had smelled something so rank, so profoundly foul, that they could not breathe the same air as him. His waste garment was completely dry – which meant that what they were smelling was the stench of sweat, sweat that had built up not just on his body, but inside the suit as well. He felt around its interior – Jesus Christ, this is grimy. I really should have taken the time to scrub this thing out.

“Outside!” Twilight coughed, sputtering for air. “Go outside, Adam! We will wash you!”