Through the window Bartleby could see the houses of the town glaring white in the light of two suns, set amidst a bleak winter-scarred landscape just surrendering to the first wave of bursting green vitality which would soon consume it. Beyond rose the high sand hills, their gaunt profiles silhouetted against a golden red sky. Beyond them, he knew from memory, lay miles of flat arid plain, becoming moister and more fertile until they turned into the great southern swamps, near-endless, stewing and stinking with unfettered life. And beyond them, thousands and thousands of miles beyond, was Her.
"Now
that's
a view," exclaimed K'ar-Eek, standing beside him. "This is more like it! I'll take this one."
Bartleby turned back to him. "But I told you, this is
my
room."
"And
it's bigger than that shoebox next door you tried to fob me off with."
He sighed. "Well... I don't expect to be here much longer than a few more nights, just until the air changes. Alright. You take this one if you want it, I'll stay in the other."
"Brilliant!" He threw one of his two huge suitcases onto the bed and began to unpack lavishly. Bartleby gathered together his things; it didn't take long.
"Let me know when you've settled in," he called as he walked out the door. "I'll give you the tour."
* * *
The Earthrise Institute occupied a small pyramid of concrete and glass in a quiet backwater of a remote, agreeable and highly multicultural little planet. In the first year of its existence, it had employed people of no less than seventeen different species, all hard at work on one problem regarding one species living on one planet, only discovered so few decades ago. Soon, likely enough, the inhabitants of planet Earth would discover they weren't alone. And when that happened, they would need to be able to communicate.
Bartleby was one of the few employees ever to have lived on or even visited Earth. He reflected that if the friends he'd known there had been shown the Institute, the first thing they'd ask about (after the inevitable surprise about the existence of civilisations beyond their own thin atmosphere) would be how people of different species managed to work and get along with each other, given the diverse opinions regarding manners, communication, hygiene, ethics and the like. The only answer he'd be able to give was that it was all a big muddle, and most people somehow managed to find a way.
The way he'd found was to keep himself as far removed from the noise and confusion as possible. A square viewing platform ran around the top floor of the building, and it was one of a number of places he knew where he was almost assured solitude. But not today. He sighed inwardly as he stepped out to see a nonhuman figure leaning against the rail, gazing out across the valley.
"Bartleby?" she said without turning around. His consternation melted away as he recognised K'er-Sekla the sydian, probably the only alien he knew who he actually enjoyed talking with.
"Enjoying the view, K'er-Sekla?"
She glanced round at him, her eyes gleaming blue in what Bartleby knew to be the close equivalent of a human smile. "It gets better every day. Shouldn't you be showing the new fellow around? Swapping Earthish gossip?"
They spoke in English, which had emerged as a surprising Esperanto among assorted races united only by an interest in Earthish culture and linguistics. K'er-Sekla's was unusually fluent; if he didn't look at her he could almost forget she wasn't human herself. Not that a sydian was so very different from a human; that is, if you didn't count the tail. Or the dense, even coat of short golden fur covering the whole body, or the unearthly face with its colour-changing eyes. Or the nimble four-fingered hands or handlike feet, or the clicking-singing voice, or the proportions of the limbs, or the way they moved... but they had two legs, two arms, were about five feet tall and wore clothes, and that made them close to human compared to most of the other species at the Institute. Compared to the far, for example.
"I was giving him the tour, but it's on hold while he unpacks twice his own weight in baggage."
In my room,
he thought, but didn't say.
"Really that much?"
"Definitely. He persuaded me to volunteer to carry it all up the stairs."
Her eyes flashed in amusement as he came to stand beside her, hands on the railing, staring out at the view.
"And no sign of a change in the air yet?" she asked.
He took a deep breath to be sure, but he well knew the answer. "No. Nothing yet."
"Good."
Bartleby looked at her, puzzled.
"I mean," she said quickly, "I like having you around. I'll miss you."
He nodded. "I'll miss you too, K'er-Sekla, but I have to go."
It was then that she moved her hand over to rest on his. He felt the warm tickle of her furred fingers interleaved between his own, in sharp contrast with the cold metal railing beneath his palm, not knowing what to make of the unprecedented gesture. Sydians, in his experience, didn't go in for casual personal contact. Should he say something, do something? No, better just to accept it and enjoy it. Even if he wasn't sure what she meant by it, it felt right.
"Bartleby, we know each other fairly well now. You can just call me Sekla if you want to."
Bartleby glowed inside. Permission to address a sydian by name without the formal prefix was a more intimate gesture of trust and friendship than any slight physical contact.
"I'd be honoured, K'er-Sekla. I mean, Sekla."
She flashed him another blue-eyed smile. "I'm going to get something to eat." A finger gestured between him and the landscape. "You two enjoy yourselves."
She gave him a fond pat on the hand before sliding away towards the mess hall, leaving Bartleby feeling for once entirely at peace with himself and the world, if only for a few minutes.
* * *
"The mess hall," Bartleby said, hurrying through the doors after K'ar-Eek, "most important room in the Institute."
The other man wrinkled his nose in affected distaste as his eyes swept the room. "I can see how it gets its name."
Like any space occupied by people from a wide assortment of species, the air carried a potent mix of strange odours, some pleasant and some less so. Chatter from a dozen different tongues echoed through the big square room, chief amongst them a unique form of pidgin English.
The hall was intended principally as a place to eat, laid out in long tables, but had been broadly adopted as a communal office and general living space, littered with papers, books and interfaces interspersed with plates, bowls and bulbs of food. People came here to work, eat, gossip, play, hold meetings, or all at the same time.
"If you don't want to work in here, and I won't blame you, I certainly don't, then you can..."
"One moment, Bartles."
"Bartleby," he corrected automatically, but K'ar-Eek was already strutting towards a nearby table, his eyes locked on the sydian sat there.
Sekla was eating from a bowl of nuts, removing the thin shells with the incredibly dextrous fingers of one hand without looking. Her eyes, brown with concentration, were fixed on a sheet of paper, on which she was scribbling something illegible with her other hand, using the inimitable sydian scrawl requiring the use of two pens held like chopsticks between her long fingers.
She glanced up as K'ar-Eek approached, and smiled. "Hey there, Bartleby, come sit down here. I'd appreciate some good company while I work."
A frown of indignation shot across Bartleby's face. How could she possibly think the other man was him? Just when he thought they'd drawn so close! They didn't even look alike! But... no. He thought more carefully. They were both tallish, thickly built, clean-shaven men with short dark hair. To his eye they were little alike perhaps, but to a sydian, without his advantage of a good chunk of the brain dedicated solely to processing human faces, there was probably little to tell them apart. He'd made similar mistakes himself and they were always embarrassing, but quickly forgiven.
Of course, technically, there
were
no humans in the Institute...
K'ar-Eek rectified her confusion by dropping his human visage. There was a strange jolting sensation as the man disappeared and a sydian materialised in the same space. Bartleby always found it disconcerting to watch. It gave the impression that nothing had really changed, that you were just seeing the same thing from a different angle, and the knowledge that this was actually a quite accurate description didn't help at all.
"K'ar-Eek, new anthropologist." He made a strange contortion of his limbs that Bartleby recognised as the sydian equivalent of a formal bow, and in doing so skilfully contrived to get entangled in the sensors and transmitters of his visage generator strapped liberally around his body.
The visage generator, a device allowing a person to simulate the form of another so well as to require special instruments even to detect, was arguably the pinnacle of technological achievement to date. It was so high-end that only a few thousand existed across all known space. When Earth's civilisations had been discovered years ago, a plethora of races had hurried to send down visage-wearing researchers to investigate humanity. The payback was not immediate. It takes years for a person to learn how to walk, to talk, to think, and the same is just as true with a virtual body as a real one. Subjects were sent as young children with their memories blocked, growing up never suspecting they were anything but human, until one day, as young adults, the two halves of their minds came snapping back together. Bartleby tried not to think about that day. It still gave him headaches.
And so about twenty years after the discovery of Earth, those who had survived the mental recombination came back, telling of the planet's wonders and horrors. Every one of them half human, half something else. It was some of them who had founded the Earthrise Institute, and more had joined later, Bartleby amongst them. Looking around the mess hall, he could see half a dozen apparently human figures, going by Earthish or alien names as they chose, and he knew them all: there was Seul-Ki the antoran, Grey-Eye the hyeloki, Georgina the greater ilk, Anatarikietti the plentilalius... and Bartleby the far, of course.
Sekla rushed over with exaggerated concern to extract K'ar-Eek from his visage generator, pretending not to have noticed the deliberate nature of the entanglement. Bartleby watched her, wishing not for the first time that he could move with the same kind of sweeping grace that she managed to put into every motion.
