Varian was a good narrator and her tales of planetary adventures, both as a youngster trailing after xenob-vet parents and as junior in the same specialty, had fascinated Kai. He’d had the usual planetary tours to combat ship-conditioned agoraphobia, and indeed had spent a whole galactic year with his mother’s parents on her birthworld, but he felt his must have been dull worlds in comparison to those generating Varian’s wild and amusing experiences.
Another way in which Varian excelled Geril was in her ability to argue pleasantly and effectively without losing her temper or wit. Geril had always been oppressively serious and too eager to denigrate anything of which she did not unconditionally approve. In fact, long before Kai heard that Varian was to be his co-leader, he had realized that she must have had Discipline, young as she appeared to be. He’d gone as far as to tap for a print-out of her public history from the EV’s data banks. Her list of assignments had been impressive even if the public record did not give any assessment of her value on those expeditions. However, he noticed she had been promoted rapidly: this, combined with the number of assignments, indicated a young woman slated for increasing responsibility and more difficult assignments. Granted her addition to the Iretan expedition had been made almost at the last minute when life-form readings had registered on the preliminary probe, but, with her background, Ireta ought not to pose too many problems. Yet it was, as she’d said, rampant with anomalies.
“I suppose,” she was saying, “if one has a third-generation sun with planets, one must expect oddities: like Ireta with poles hotter than its equator stinking of–I’ll remember the name of that plant yet …”
“Plant?”
“Yes. There’s a small plant, hardy enough to be grown practically anywhere on temperate Earth-type worlds, which is used in cooking. In judicious quantities, let me add,” she said with a wry grin. “Too much of it tastes like this planet smells. Sorry, I digress. What did the Theks say?”
Kai frowned. “Only the first reports have been picked up by our wandering Exploratory Vessel.”
Busy moping off the worst of her wetness, Varian turned to stare at him, towel suspended. “Fardles!” She sat slowly down in the chair next to him. “That’s unnerving! Just the first?”
“That’s what the Theks said …”
“Did you allow time enough for them to manage a reply? Scrub that question.” Varian slumped against the backrest as she added, “Of course, you did,” giving him full credit for his ability to deal with the slowest moving and speaking species in the Federated System. “That’s unlike EV. They’re usually so desperately greedy for initial reports, not just for the all-safe-down.”
“My explanation is that spatial interference …”
“Of course,” and Varian’s face cleared of anxiety. “That cosmic storm the next system over … the one the astronomers were so hairy anxious to get to …”
“That’s what the Theks say.”
“In how many words?” asked Varian, her wry humour reasserting itself.
The Theks were a silicate life form, like rock, extremely durable and while not immortal, certainly the closest a species had evolved towards that goal. The irreverent said that it was difficult to know a Thek elder from a rock until it spoke, but a human could perish of old age waiting for the word. Certainly the older a Thek grew and the more knowledge he acquired, the longer it took to elicit an answer from him. Fortunately for Kai, there were two young Theks on the team sent to the seventh planet of this system. One of them, Tor, Kai had known all his life. In fact, though Tor was considered young in relation to the lifespan of his species he had been on the ARCT-10 since the exploratory vessel had been commissioned one hundred and fifty galactic standard years before. Tor constantly confused Kai with his great-great-grandfather who had been an engineering officer on the ARCT-10 and whom Kai was said to resemble. It gave Kai a feeling of curious satisfaction to be on the same mission, and a planetary co-leader, with Tor. His conversation with Tor, while lengthened by space distance and Thek speech habits, was comparatively brisk.