---Grains---
---Khr’kowan’s perspective---
The five Humans and I walk across the bridge over the mouth of the River Orkhat, beside my uncle’s palace.
It took some time to explain everything to his satisfaction and then explain it all again to an assembly of Wokhash’s citizens.
My uncle has agreed to ride in the sky ship to Khawekh, only asking until sunset to make the necessary arrangements.
He still seems rather dubious of the truth of such a thing as a ‘sky ship’, not that I can blame him for that…(!)
What I can blame him for, however, is the fact that he thought I was dead, that the capital was starving and under siege by Ver… by Twigg forces and was in the middle of attempting to price gouge us on the supplies necessary to survive!
It’s not as if it’s a surprise that he would act thusly.
His dissatisfaction with inheriting a realm my grandfather had subordinated to my father’s kingship isn’t exactly a secret(!)
Nevertheless, it was disheartening!
With the Warring States period having concluded (my entire lifetime ago), I would like to think that everyone would have come to see that we are one people… that ills that befall any of us affect all of us!
My uncle still has the bitter, acrimonious attitude of one raised in an era when every realm had to have its spears pointed at every other at all times!
An uprising wouldn’t have had any direct bearing on Wokhash, since it's located in a region without any significant numbers of Twigg and does not rely on the game of the land to survive.
Khravash could have sat back and let the other realms wither as the uprising spread, until we weren’t in any position to resist his realm asserting its overlordship upon us!
I suppose, I might feel the same if I weren’t the First Woman of Khawekh… If I were in his position, perhaps I would be resentful too, but… I would like to think I wouldn’t try to profiteer off of emergency famine relief!
As we step onto the sandy beach that my companions seemed strangely enthusiastic about visiting while we wait, I see a whaler emerge from the north and round the point to enter the bay.
It drags a medium sized [dunkleosteus whale] through the water, fastened to the starboard side of its hull, toothplates bared in a fearsome death grimace as three of its rigid, chitinous pectoral fins on its right side wave, limply, out of the water.
One of the crew spots the strange beings on the beach and alerts the sailor next to her.
Both women stand on the deck, the points of their feet buried in spongey wooden boatshoes, and stare at my companions.
I sigh and take a seat atop the masoned stone lip which forms the boundary of the beach sand.
[Dr] Miyazaki turns to look back at me, the flesh around her white and purple eyes creased in assessment.
“You guys go on ahead…” she says to the others “…I’m just going to have a seat for a sec.”
Ms Huntress is clearly uncomfortable from her bodylanguage (though her blank face betrays nothing) as she wavers.
The veteran smiles and leans over to have a brief, murmured conversation with her bodyguard.
I don’t hear anything said but Miyazaki’s face wears a kind, reassuring expression as she gestures vaguely in my direction with one hand and along the beach with the other.
The two women break and the taller one begins walking back toward me.
The shorter one stares after her for a few moments before turning to follow the other Humans.
The woman (who tells me her eye colour and the silver streak in her hair are battle scars, earned in the bloodiest war in the history of the known universe) takes a seat beside me.
She hooks her two legs over the ledge in a way similar enough to the arrangement of my pedipalps that I almost forget her lack of an entire hindbody for a moment(!)
“Hey… What’s up?” smiles the small woman, looking up at me from my left.
“Nothing…” I lie, quietly, staring out at the sea, feeling the breeze against my face.
“Giiirl…” she chuckles “…I know that’s not true!… Talk to me… That’s what I’m here for!”
“I can’t.” I state, simply.
“Oooo…Kaaay… Let me guess… Right now, the phrenetic [untranslatable term: ‘adrenaline’. Meaning: substance secreted by the brain in response to high stress or excitement] of the last few weeks is finally starting to ware off… The reality of all this is starting to set in and you’re beginning to think things like ‘Oh my god! What if everything goes wrong?! What if we’re just not ready for this and the galaxy eats us alive!?’ And then of course you’re thinking that you’ve got to keep all that to yourself, in case I respond to your doubts by saying something like ‘Oh, you’re not ready? That’s fine… We’ll try again in a thousand years and I’ll say hi to your however-many-greats-grandchildren for you!’… I’m near the mark?” she smirks, playfully.
I take a deep inhale through my nose and say “Somewhat… yes… I wasn’t particularly worried about being eaten alive until you suggested it(!)”
She gives a hearty laugh at the quip, which trails off into a contemplative silence.
When she speaks again, her tone is calm and reassuring as she says “It’s perfectly natural for you to be worried… In my language, there’s a saying; ‘It is easier to give birth than to worry about it’…”
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I consider that for a moment before saying “Yes… I suppose that a mother’s suffering does end quite quickly when you consider the length of time beforehand that she has to contemplate it…”
“Exactly!” says the woman, sweetly “It’s totally understandable that you would be feeling some apprehension right about now but I honestly swear to you that, when tomorrow’s winds blow, they won’t be half as bad as you think!… No one’s going to eat you alive(!)… Your species’ First Contact definitely won’t top mine for shittiness(!)”
“Yes… I’m glad of that!… From how it sounds, your nation was a match for all the rest… Mine would certainly not be!”
She gives a mirthless puff but otherwise does not respond.
I allow the silence to sit with us for some moments as we stare out at the lapping waves.
“I… have been… curious about something…” I say, eventually.
“Oh yes?” answers the purple eyed woman.
“Yes… You said, in the War, that so many people died that my language wouldn’t have words for numbers so large… How many people exactly?… How many people exactly are there out there in the [galaxy]?”
The woman exposes her square, white teeth as she sucks in a breath and answers “In total…? There are around 745 [untranslatable term: ‘trillion’. Number equal to 3.504938994813926×11^11] people in the GU, including those in the UTC…”
“Hmph… You were right…” I tap the coin at my head “…this thing just gave me the number ‘745’ followed by a maths equation that I don’t know how to resolve… I can’t picture that!”
She frowns and pouts her lips, thinking.
Then, I see an idea strike her clearly enough that I think I would have been able to discern the expression without the translator!
“Hang on… Let me just make a call!” she says, excitedly withdrawing her glowing slab from her pocket.
She presses it with her finger a few times before raising it to her ear.
“Hey, Twila…” she greets the machine woman not present in a way that would have me questioning her soundness of mind if she weren’t a woman from beyond the stars… With everything they can apparently do, they may as well be able to talk to people not located within shouting distance(!) “Yes, everything’s fine. We should be able to leave around sundown… Quick question…… I was just wondering, how many grains of sand are in a handful?”
She pauses for a moment before reaching down to the ground and scooping up a handful of dry, powdery sand.
She scrutinises as she lets streams of it run through her fingers.
“I don’t know… Not super fine but I wouldn’t say it was coarse… Oh, err… maybe, like a millimetre?”
Another pause.
“OK, great! And how many per cubic metre?… Oh, right! Duh!… OK, thanks Twila!”
She removes the device from her ear and stands to face me from the front.
“Alright, so you think there are about 70,000-80,000 Vrakhand on the planet, right?” she smiles, her eyes sparkling.
“Yes… 73,205-80,526… I would say so.” I answer.
She crouches and takes another scoop of sand in each hand.
Proffering me a hand to examine, she says “That’s about 10,000 grains of sand…”
She moves to where she sat before and pours around a third of that hand onto the stone, making a tiny heap.
“That’s Khawekh…”
She tips the remainder of both handfuls onto the existing ‘Khawekh’ pile, then goes down for two more handfuls to add, then another two, then another two.
She points to the 8 handful heap of sand “That’s all the Vrakhand… Now… We don’t know exactly how many Twigg there are. They don’t have any kind of centralised state like you do and only know about other settlements up to a certain distance away from their own, so we can only guestimate, but we think it’s roughly between 3-6 million… So, just imagine a pile that’s 40-80 times that much…”
"Al…right…” I say, frowning apprehensively.
She gives me a nod and turns her back, deliberately pacing away.
She walks around twice my length away from me and stops.
She bends down to stick her finger into the sand and draws a line all the way back to her start point.
Then, she turns 90° and begins pacing again.
This time, she travels around one and a half times my length, to my right, and draws a line back to her start point.
I do not like where this is going!
She draws two more lines to form a gigantic rectangle in the sand.
Then, she strides back to me, standing just inside her rectangle.
“This…” she gestures behind herself “…is around 70m2. So, if you imagine this to a depth of a metre…” she gestures to her waist to let me understand how deep that is “…that’s 70m3 and that’s…”
“That’s how many people there are in the galaxy?!” I ask, dismayed at my race’s insignificance in the face of such a volume.
“…Ah… I’m afraid not, sweetie!…” she grimaces slightly “…You see, me and Twila are saying this sand is around a [untranslatable term: ‘billion’. Number equal to 4.665073802097334×11^8] grains per cubic metre… that makes this only 70 [billion] grains, right here… That’s just the population of Earth… The planet Mr Taylor over there is from, the planet my father was born on, the most populous planet in the galaxy… This is, coincidentally, around the same number of people we lost in the Terran First Contact War… and, when I say ‘we’, I mean just the UTC… The GU’s losses were considerably more substantial!… If you imagine around thirty of these squares, each 10m×7m×1m, that gets you to the current population of just the UTC…”
“THIRTY!” I shriek (in a slightly unwomanly fashion).
She bobs her head up and down in a ‘yes’ and continues “About three hundred of them takes you to the Galactic Union's losses in the War… aaand…” her face twists in mental calculation “…around eleven thousand of them takes you to the total population of the galaxy.”
I’m stunned… Breathless!
Lamely, I turn my head and raise my arm to point.
“That’s… that’s the entire beach!… More, probably!”
“Yes… It’s overwhelming, I know… People really aren’t good at thinking about numbers so large… no matter what species they are!” she answers.
I turn to look at the tiny Vrakhand pile… then out at the beach, imagining each and every grain of sand as a person… each. and every. single. one!
“Why didn’t you lie?” I mutter, defeatedly.
She gives a crooked smile and answers “Would you have wanted me to lie?”
“No! But…!” I gesture to the entire beach and ask “…how am I suppose to react to that! I was feeling uneasy before… and now I understand just how insignificant my people truly are!… One planet has all of that!” I indicate the rectangle “How am I meant to feel! We’re just… a few handfuls of it!”
She thinks.
Eventually, she responds “I… I can’t tell you how you’re meant to feel… but I can tell you how… I feel when I look at all of that sand.”
“How’s that?” I ask, miserably.
“I… feel awe!… Each and every grain of sand a person. Each and every one, one with a story, a life! Hopes and dreams and aspirations! Things they want, things they need, things they sigh exasperatedly at!… A few of them love me… a few of them hate me… the overwhelming majority have no idea I even exist… but a few of those grains out there will know me at some point. They’re the friends I’m yet to make… Right now though, the ones I’m most interested in are right here!” she jabs her forefinger at the first pile she made “You and the Twigg are not insignificant to me!… I mean, quite apart from your being the second and third deathworld species ever discovered, you are two fascinatingly vibrant species and, honestly, I thoroughly enjoy spending time with you! So, I would say, don’t waste energy thinking about what every single grain of sand out there may or may not think about you. Do your best to find those you care about and look after them!”
I sigh “You have the fire of a young woman… and the wisdom of an old man, [Dr] Miyazaki…”
She chuckles “Thanks… I think?… Oh, and ‘Emiko’ is fine…”