“I agree with you,” agreed the FL. “I’ve been trying to explain to my husband, that your being a woman is really what sticks in their craw.”
“All the people I talk to think the envoys are male,” said the president, sitting back and frowning. “Every domestic politico I talk to, every foreign diplomat who calls me, all of them, every damned one says ‘him’ when he refers to an envoy.”
“They aren’t male,” Benita said, turning to the FL. “That’s why they did that Indian woman business at dinner.”
“But with you,” she said, “what do they appear as?”
They appeared as different things, but she had to admit, Chiddy took his human male form more often than not. She said as much, and the president and FL looked at one another meaningfully.
“What?” she demanded.
“People say that you probably react to them as a woman would to a man. That your relationship with them is subtly different than it would be if they were female, or sexless.”
“People?”
He looked uncomfortable. The FL said, “Profilers. Think people. Analysts. FBI.”
“Chad’s been spying on me?” she said, glaring at him.
“No,” he said abruptly.
The FL said, “He refused to spy on you. He has only passed on what you’ve said about the Pistach. The people over at the FBI who attempt to make…”
“A sow’s ear out of a silk purse,” Benita interrupted angrily. “They’re trying to imply something sexual?”
The president leaned back in his chair. “Quite frankly, I don’t think they know what they’re trying to imply. They simply have a situation they don’t understand, one that won’t fit any pattern they’re accustomed to, and they can’t help me with the current problem!
“We need . . . we’re going to have to have something more than just the envoys’ word that they’re beneficent. You told Chad the Pistach have gone home at least once during their visit here. That means either that home is very close, which we don’t believe, or that they have a method of travel . . .”
“Polarized space,” she said.
All three of them looked at her in confusion.
“Chiddy told me about it,” she said, trying to remember what he’d said. “Space is full of these little tiny thingies, Chiddy calls them umquah, all spread out, evenly distributed, like layers of marbles in a tray, only marbles would have little spaces among them, and the umquah shape themselves to fill all the spaces, and they’re infinitely small. All together, they fill the universe, and they repel matter and energy, joining together to squeeze matter or energy out. Chiddy said I should think of it as though gravity wasn’t an attractive force but a repulsive force. It’s as though matter doesn’t attract other matter, it simply gets squeezed together by the umquah, and the more matter there is in one place, the more umquah are displaced to do the squeezing, so they can squeeze harder. When they squeeze out clumps of matter, they become compressed and curved around it, and they’re always trying to straighten out and spread out evenly.
“When an umquah gets touched by a photon, say, it and its neighbors squeeze it out, so it gets passed along. Each umquah touches more than one other, of course, so whenever one squeezes something out, it can start up a wave form. Sometimes it just squeezes around and around, in a tiny circle, sometimes it squeezes things across the universe.”
“I see,” said the president.
“I doubt it,” she said. “Because I don’t, and neither does Chiddy. He says it’s impossible to explain without the math, and he doesn’t do that kind of math.”
“And you know Chiddy was telling you the truth?”
“No. Of course not, though I can’t think why he would lie about it. It’s possible they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s possible I’m not quoting them correctly. I’m not a scientist and neither are they. They’re diplomats. Foreign Service types. Maybe Chiddy just made it up when I asked how they travel so quickly.”
“String physics?” murmured the FL.
Benita nodded. “Chiddy did mention string physics. He said it’s a move in the right direction, because the strings are just lined up, or maybe it was curled up umquah. Ai is very pleased with our progress.”