Chapter Forty-Five

There’s so much I have to leave out of my journals that whole volumes of speculation have been written since my first edition, about just what I left out. Some of them are flattering, some of them not so much. But the truth is that most of what was left out, was left out because it contained nothing of interest.

In the immediate aftermath of the first game of Ballyball, we cleaned up. That’s it. My back wasn’t too badly injured of course, though the table had to be replaced, a fact Lisa apologized for repeatedly, and the respective teams were fairly well bonded.

I gathered copious notes that would take me days to sort through, and I had to wait patiently while Captain Bonny gave her crew directions.

I will relay only one relevant part about what she had to say, she was a very active speaker, strutting around in front of the handful she chose from her crewmembers, and saying, “...Now ye know why I say we come here. There be fame and fortune to be had, and good mates what see things like we do. All them systems we went to, anyone ever have a time like this one?!”

“No!” Was resoundingly shouted back.

“Ye wanna do it again tomorrow?!” She demanded an answer in a long trilling voice.

“Aye!” They answered with vigor and wagging tails.

“Then when that’n,” she stopped in her tracks and pointed to me, “tells ye to jump, even if it be off a plank, ye jump. Yer mates get outta hand, grab’m by the tail and ye drag’m back to me or ye be as guilty as they! Anyone what makes trouble fer anyone on this voyage, I strand on an asteroid with not but yer tail to chase. Anyone what don’t report trouble, they can be on the next asteroid over. Any riddles to throw at me, lads?”

“No, Cap’n!” They shouted back, each of them clutching their souvenirs like treasured objects and awaiting their next orders.

I noticed that the two security teams were watching the ship captain with mutual approval, I could only suppose that ship discipline had to be particularly strong for a ship to survive in the great gulf between systems. That wasn’t much of a shock, really.

It takes a rare breed of any species to make the leap into the darkness and sail the void. It was no place for the faint of heart, so it was no wonder that the ship Captain with her strange blend of panache and charisma would be found in a place like that, or with a crew to match.

“Then get yer hides back on the shuttle, ther be rum aplenty to be had when all is said and done, but fer now, we go back to the ship!” She ordered, and the raggedy band disassembled and trotted toward the exit, a handful of humans were still in the stands watching the closeout of events from the day, and I couldn’t blame them.

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The Captain approached me and clapped me on the shoulder. “Translator, off.” She said, and I reflexively did the same.

I hadn’t spoken my native tongue since I got to Earth, there was no point, with only two lungs and their limited mouths, humans couldn’t hope to manage my language. Dlamisan is unique, our airsacs are asynchronous, meaning we can inhale and exhale at the same time, as such when we expel gasses for noise making, such as language, we do it in a fashion that is, not to be too proud, but musical. You have to be able to sing a range of notes in an asynchronous fashion that blends all three airsacs at once.

Our pitch can be very low or high enough that it is inaudible to humans, and similar to the whistling language spoken in some parts of the human world, we can be heard for kilometers away in the right situations.

“Thank you for your support, researcher… Bailey.” She said, I was rather surprised to hear someone so newly come to Earth expressing gratitude like a human, and had to remind myself that she’d met their species before.

“You’re… welcome.” I said, I had to look up at her up close, even with her left eye swelling a little, she seemed to be in good spirits.

“Right, now that’s out of the way, listen, my sailors are good ones, but they’re rowdy, if you can get some of those big ones to help mind them, I’d feel a lot better. Even better if you can set up somewhere for them to,” she paused and licked her chops, “drink at least until they get their tolerance up, it’d be safer. They’ve been in the darkness a long time, they need to cut loose, but not too quickly or they’ll be like we were on that field.”

It was strange not to hear her piratish words, but even common enkati does not allow for words to be used quite like that.

Still, with the musical formalness of enkati, she was precise in what she wanted and I was able to quickly shift my thinking. “We can arrange an offsite place, and arrange for more physical games here. Things that will tire them out before they get too enthusiastic and too drunk.”

The strange thing about hearing and using the enkati language when including the english language is that their concepts did not mold exceptionally well. They created hard stops to the steady flow of our words as if we were unfamiliar with its use even though it was quite literally ours. Words like ‘drunk’ were blunt and harsh compared to our lyrical tongue.

Though I never did tell her I believed this, I think that roughness of tongue is what Captain Bonny liked, the thick meaty swear words of human languages appealed to her outlandish nature.

However, the more important thing to keep in mind here was why she chose to use enkanti to speak with me. She hadn’t said it, but the long silence and the stiff tail told me plenty.

‘Not everybody on her crew is without mud in their fur.’ I realized. Crime on dlamias is and has been fairly rare for a long time. I would not say our society is perfect, but we are so well ordered that few are out of work or devoid of purpose. Still, we do have a kind of criminal class, ones who gave in to their predatory natures, most of that sort are routed early into military service, often given dangerous jobs, and few survive the void of space for more than a few decades.

Captain Bonny might have taken to her pirate persona for more reasons than mere personality and a desire for panache. I understood the subtext of her words in the context she spoke them, and I curled my tail to the left where she could see it. “If no one here is harmed, it will be fine. But tell me the truth, the other ship lives?”