Chapter Thirty-Six
“You an me, we got words to trade later, bucko.” She promised, and gave me a very human ‘wink’ before she let the tide carry her through the rest of the moment.
It was a wild, heady time, and I didn’t get a chance to make notes about what happened, I had to piece it together. I suppose bringing Fauve this far was needless, but I was so used to her being close by that it never occurred for me to leave her watching with the others.
“I had planned for you to address the crowd, to say something to mark the occasion. But…?” My people’s ambassador looked the bizarre and frankly outlandish dlamisan female up and down. She couldn’t properly rest her hands on her hips, at least not as humans could. Our mobility in our arms was a little less than them. However, the way she seemed to preen with pride, tilting her head up, fairly daring him to level too great a criticism at her, he let the statement come to a close, left hanging where it was.
Her eyes went to the podium standing nearby and the array of drones hovering and bobbing beside one another. The hum of her ship was gone and up on the ramp there were the many furry members of her dlamisan crew, at a glance I could tell they had picked up bits and pieces of their Captain’s habit, a few had gold earrings in their ears, others wore eyepatches, it was a motley band if ever there was one. But none of them came down, they only watched.
I suppose it’s fair of me to say that they were more dlamisan than Bonny Red, since they chose to refrain from the lot of strangers where Bonny seemed eager to mix.
“I'd be 'appy, right pleased even. Bein' the first one to land a ship on their world an' sayin' nothin' just doesn't seem too neighborly.” Having said that, she brushed past the body of still confounded dignitaries and over to the podium.
The cameras opted for a wider shot for her, such was her oddity I think, that her face alone would simply not do, so they caught everything about her, not zooming in until she was mostly obscured by the brown polished podium.
“Ahoy 'umans, I be guessin' I be not quite what ye expected. Course, I be not what me folk expected either. But that be all part o' the fun o’ livin, gettin' what ye don't expect. I be a simple Cap'n in a jolly big void, so maybe I be not the fine formal female that there 'istory loves to tell stories about. But since I be the first, I want to say a bit'.”
She kept her voice slow and steady, odd as it was the way she was speaking, her mannerisms and echoing voice captured the crowd’s attention and kept silent even the elements that might have been disruptive. I recalled the words of Percival about appearance.
‘She might not know what he did, but she sure nailed it anyway.’ I thought as she took a deep breath before continuing.
“Me first meetin' with 'umans been yer soldiers, me crew an' I owe yer people our lives. They intervened durin' a Zenti attack that there should 'ave killed us all.” She drew her sword, no easy thing for us to do, unsurprisingly given her appearance, it was a cutlass… and then drew it to the center of her body in a kind of military salute.
“I salute ye! It be because o' yer fighters I learned yer language... from yer gentleman o' fortune movies, I think you call em ‘pirate movies’. An because o' them I became a jolly admirer o' man. Other people who love the void like me an' mine? 'ow could I not want to come say ‘ello!”
I wondered if, in any city in the world, her appearance had not caused silence to fall as her words were translated into the many popular languages of the world.
She certainly had me spellbound as she wrapped up, “So let me just say to ye what one o' yer folk said to me over rum after blowin up them what tried to blow me up first, “The universe be full o' danger, but it ain't full o' strangers, just mates ye 'aven't met. You can call me Bonny Red, like he did, an I hope I can call you ‘friends’!”
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I’m sure that there were still the hateful ones there, ones who loathed us and were small hearted and narrow minded. But among the great big body of man, when Bonny finished saying that and her big bushy tail wagged back and forth with the same energy of a human child on Christmas day, and her sword went back into place only for her hand to go up and start waving like she was seeing an old friend for the first time in a long time…
She captured their imaginations in a way I never could have, and when I compared Bonny Red to the alternative, a stuffy by the books dlamisan Captain with the dour professionalism of our ambassador… I can’t help but think that we couldn’t have had better luck than we did with her arrival.
I leaned over toward my people’s representative and whispered, “We have to run with it, she’s perfect. Look.” I inclined my head toward the mob of humans who were ready to embrace their new celebrity.
The mob was waving back at her like she was a family member that just landed from a long flight after a trip took them far from home. Any hostility was drowned out completely, my ambassador opened up his datapad as if to confirm my words and began flipping through various reports from around Earth. In New Kyoto, Berlin, New Mecca, and a dozen other cities, there were humans waving at giant screens as if Bonny Red could see them too.
I don’t know if she learned to cock her head and flop her russet colored ears from the last humans she met, or if she did it intuitively, or completely by accident. But the reaction to her was instant. I could only hear where I was. But the ‘awwws’ were audible even from where I stood. I tapped my ambassador on the arm and indicated as subtly as I could, my human who remained just behind me.
“She’s so… cute… and so cooooool!” Fauve wasn’t shouting it, what she said was, if anything, barely a whisper. But she was antsy, almost dancing the way she shifted around on her feet like she was starstruck.
“I can work with this. Trust me, ambassador. Remember the ball incident?” I asked, and he reached up and touched his head as if recalling his own hangover.
Our night of drunken revelry returning to his mind, I think, lent me for the first time in my life, more credibility even than the professor had.
He gave a subtle nod, “I’ll handle things with the next ship myself. After I arrange housing, you will be responsible for assisting our fellow citizens with how to function here while on shore leave.”
“Me? Not Professor Sxlith? Not someone from the embassy?” I asked, my hearts all seized up in my chest.
“You said you could work with this, I’m taking you at your word. You wanted my help to stay, did you not? Prove your worth, or you have none. Whatever budget you need, I will grant, but keep them out of trouble.” He said, and I could do nothing but accept his words.
Many humans after my first edition, were of divided opinions about our ambassador’s approach to the matter, some humans praised him as a hard nosed professional. Others called him callous or cruel for laying so much on my shoulders. But I have to defend him. Bonny Red was clearly an outlier among outliers, and anyone who would work for her had to be at least somewhat the same.
The consequences of their bad behavior, the stakes for us… were high. In retrospect after the release of my work, people learned much more. But in these early days, there was rumor, speculation, injured humans and an arrested dlamisa. Humans were still an enigma to the galaxy at large, and from the history we did have, humans were even more prone to war than my species. The possibility of war breaking out, however remote, was there in the minds of planners from precogs to my people’s high command. The experience with humans just wasn’t broad enough yet. Even their assistance with the Mixiki looked to some races like we were seeing a new apex threat on the galactic stage.
So putting it on me with an unlimited budget, and by extension, my fellow students, since there was no way a savvy instructor like Professor Sxlith would leave me to handle all this by myself… well, there is a Dlamisan expression: ‘The one you put in charge, is the one who has the most to lose if they fail, followed by the one who has the most to gain if it succeeds.’
I was both. Failure here would mean I would almost certainly be pulled off world, but success meant I would dramatically increase my odds of staying. And if I’m being fair… I think he believed I was more of an outlier than I was. Between getting drunk in the park, inventing a game on the fly, and that incident with [Wolfbeard] he probably felt I too was a rogue element.
In retrospect, maybe he was right?