In 2012, I wrote an SF story about a planet in the Gliese (gleesh) system, first identified in the early 2000s as an extra solar planetary system. Not long after, the first potentially inhabitable extra solar planet was identified – in the GLIESE system! OK, so my story, ‘Journey Home’, didn’t cut the mustard but surely there’s got to be points for being on the astronomical button! And where’s the silly-big-grin icon when you need it? Once at PopSci, here’s the story below. ‘Asimov’s‘, you could have had the story first – I know what these people look like!

The Journey Home

 

S.P. Conboy-Hill

Jenna recalled the day she first met Kasey Greear. She hadn’t been impressed. He’d made a somewhat unprepossessing appearance at the inaugural dinner, tutting and harrumphing and fiddling with his jacket as if it were infested with ants. When he had risen to give his speech, his trousers had slid down a notch so that he kept dragging them back into place and dropping the Reader with his translation software in it. This had led to moments of embarrassed silence as everyone sat waiting for the next utterance, a situation made worse by the fact that someone had installed the wrong dialect so that tracts of carefully constructed politicising were communicated as first degree gibberish.  Sabotage or stupidity, Jenna had wondered, relieved it hadn’t been any of her team. Human error, she thought, opting for benevolence. Albeit a major screw-up someone would be paying for until Judgement Day.

The establishment of an ambassadorial relationship with a new culture was a pretty significant event and there were elements of the public that had objected vehemently. Historical and ultimately invalid arguments had been rehearsed featuring fears about jobs, security, and whether or not small children would be safe. And there had even been xenophobic debates about dilution of the local gene pool if greater numbers arrived and began using shops and services.  Jenna had watched all this with amused detachment, knowing that it was too significant an exchange to fall by the racist wayside but slightly uneasy that, after all this time and supposed social advancement, there were people still stuck in an apartheid time-warp.

So here he was then, a larger than life, slightly shambolic figure whose dress sense owed nothing to their carefully prepared orientation programme.  No fashionistas where he came from evidently.  Well, she would sort him out. As newly appointed aide, PA, advisor and cultural mediator, her job would be to settle the ambassador into his position, filter his early appointments according to potential cock-up value, and stop him falling on his face in the comedy of manners that was dress-politics. First job, get the right language into the Reader. Second job – a good tailor! Jenna, a linguist and communications expert with some serious IT credentials, was nevertheless all girl when it came to appreciation of sartorial elegance and the finer details of high fashion. She rolled up her metaphorical sleeves and mentally dusted down a list of designers she could call on for a discrete consultation. This triggered her wetware implant that brought up a short list, projected it onto her retinal screen and asked if it should open a link.

‘Not yet’ she thought at it, ‘Save and bring back in an hour’. The list vanished, leaving a tiny icon in its place as a reminder. There were two others; one containing information about Greear and his requirements, the other with details of the names he needed to download for tomorrow.

The speech had ground to a halt as the end of the final sentence was lost to fluent idiot and the bemused audience was standing and applauding politely.  As Greear shuffled, tugged and tutted, presumably wondering what was supposed to happen next, Jenna took him by the arm and shepherded him out of the room to get him spruced up before the media got to have their bite.

‘Sraaark!’ Greear’s translator commented.

Jenna beamed at him and mimed running. He got it and they loped off down the corridor to the ambassadorial suite. Retinal ID, video recognition scan and iontophoretic breath analysis; sanctuary! Jenna eased him through the door, followed him in and surveyed the surroundings. The detritus of long distance travel was still distributed across the floor, and a good many other surfaces too it seemed. Greear’s staff, some of them regarding her with suspicion, were busy unpacking and finding places for their various accoutrements.

‘Let’s get your translator fixed’ she said to his uncomprehending face, relieving him of the Reader and looking for a comm-point.

There it was.  A few tweaks and a kick from her wetware; the Reader ditched its current language installation and picked up the new one she’d launched from the datasphere. He thumb-printed into it.

‘How’s this sounding?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Was I inappropriate before?’

‘No actual obscenities’ Jenna confirmed. ‘Just a little wacky. Try saying how privileged you are to be at the heart of humanity’s most ancient and revered government’

‘Didn’t I say that?’

‘Oh yes, mostly. Just wanted to hear it again!’

She eyed him playfully, waiting to see what his reaction would be to this early encounter with local humour. They had, after all, been ‘speaking’ on text-pulse for months and she felt, possibly without a great deal of justification, that she knew him.

He had walked out without a word at that point, leaving Jenna alone with his retinue, even more of whom were regarding her with suspicion. No humour it seemed. She directed her eSistant to make a note and review the cultural background they had received to see if a particular taboo had been violated but apparently not. Personalised tantrum then, she concluded. Right, let’s get him booted and suited.

A moment later, he was back. In his hand an empty case with a tiny depression at its centre and from behind his ear, an even tinier trailing cable.

‘Just need to find an upstream for this and – ah!’

For a moment, his eyes lost their focus and he stood, head slightly tilted, frozen there as several terabytes of information lodged in the datasphere were streamed to his fronto-temporal access chip.

‘That’s more like it! I was missing the idiomatic contextual mapping components. We didn’t have much idea of how you actually use the language or interpret non-verbal communication. It’s like knowing the words but not the music?’ he offered, raising an eyebrow. ‘How’s that for applied linguistics!’

Jenna detected a measure of ill-disguised triumph. Well, let him have it, he’d earned it! Interesting to know they could plug directly into the datasphere though. She wondered if security had anticipated that or if somebody else was about to find themselves on the business end of a major grilling.

Over the next few weeks, Jenna had choreographed the diplomatic and cultural dance that was liaison politics; occasionally rescuing Kayse, as he soon became disoriented, and allowing him to paddle his own canoe as his familiarity with local customs grew. Most evenings, after a long day of intense negotiation interspersed with episodes of ceremonial pantomime, she would steer him home, adjust his environmental controls and leave him crashed on his bed to haul herself off to her own suite along the corridor. One night though, on impulse and for goodness knows what reason, she had kissed him. Nothing outrageous; a light kiss on the forehead as he slept, in the manner of a parent kissing a child. Or that’s what she told herself afterwards, sitting there in the dark on the end of her bed contemplating the implications, the possible consequences and the limited options she would have for alternative employment if he made a complaint.

‘He was asleep!’ she reminded herself.

‘So? It’s even more of an assault then! No consent, what were you thinking?!’

‘Oh goodness me!’

The next day, she had barely been able to face him, making excuses to leave him in the charge of her assistant while she escaped to ‘review schedules’ or ‘update language support’. When she got home that night, late after spending a good two hours in consultation with her eTherapist and scrubbing the data record right down to its bio-fragments afterwards, she found him in her kitchen.

‘I know this breaches etiquette’ he said without looking round ‘but you didn’t exactly follow protocol yourself last night’.

‘Oh my god!’ Jenna thought. ‘I wonder what his folk do to people who commit violations of a sexual nature (even entirely innocent ones) against their senior diplomats!’ She recalled some of her own culture’s historic unpleasantaries and winced.

‘I’ve learned that flowers and assorted pointless items of frippery – most of it pink – is the way to a woman’s heart round these parts’ he said, initiating a holographic sequence of tiny lights, floating, iridescent balloons and a minute orchestra that hovered above the low touch-table.

He turned and eyed her over a glass filled with clear liquid that bubbled slightly and gave off a faint glow, offering it with unexpected grace. She accepted and gave it an exploratory sniff. One of his, she thought, no alcohol. Strange that she felt slightly intoxicated then – what had he done to the environmentals? She glanced over at the panel and he followed her gaze.

‘System set too high for you?’ he enquired ‘I can drop it a little if you like’

‘No, it’s fine, I’m used to it now’ Jenna replied, squinting at the atmospherics to see if the oxygen content had been upped. Nope, so what was it then?

He moved closer and Jenna stood, still as the night, every atom of her being alive to him as he gently touched her face with his fingers, exploring the rise of her cheekbones, the dip of her chin, the smooth dark skin under the blackbird-black hair that flopped across her forehead. Oh the scent of him! Dark, earthy, old as the hills, new as tomorrow. Her knees began to give way and he caught her, stopping her fall with one arm and depositing her gently on the sofa. Jenna had never been a fan of romantic fiction but she imagined the words ‘masculine’, ‘powerful’, and ‘surprising strength’ might be creeping in about now. Along with ‘swooning faint’, and ‘she surrendered to him completely’.

There was to be  no surrendering on this occasion, at least not completely, but breaking rules and making unimagined history, they had kissed; the warmth, the joy, the home-coming of that exquisite moment knitting together the beginnings of a bond that would eventually demand the freedom of public acknowledgment.

But Kayse’s cultural references and code of conduct proscribed fraternisation with the locals at this sort of level, although in reality no-one had actually anticipated any need to be specific. It wouldn’t happen. Not a chance. No. But then there had been Jenna and she had made the directive suddenly relevant. So, after spending all night talking and picking over the protocols, they had consulted, somewhat blearily, with the datasphere and Kayse’s senior staff back home. The verdict was clear, their professional relationship took precedence and could not be allowed to mutate into something uncontrollable, potentially leaky, and emotionally messy.  Never mind the hoo-ha that would ensue once the wider world got going on it.

Of course if Jenna were to resign her commission….

What a choice! Give up the best job in the world or lose the most enticing, electric and intriguing relationship she had ever experienced. After such a short time, Jenna had no idea if this was love or not but, if she could not be with Kayse in this new and dizzying way, she may never find out. She knew though that his presence had begun to scramble her brain, melt her knees and her will and narrow her focus from an all-encompassing global reference to the nature of their next meeting.

Bound by duty for what seemed like leaden eternity, they had kept the decision and their relationship on hold while the politicians chewed over the legal and ethical implications but it had not been easy. Jenna found herself increasingly drawn to his side in the manner of a lover, not an aide. His touch, carefully casual, caused both of them to halt in a frozen moment of shared anticipation, broken as their situation dictated neutrality.  They studiously contained their feelings but glances – some mutual, some not – punctuated their encounters and, despite never having been together in any other than that first intoxicatingly brief moment, a growing sense of partnership was beginning to assert itself.

Oblivious to all this, the diplomatic circus paraded along, dragging the two of them in its wake and pitching them into the kinds of exotic situations meant for artists and lovers.  Together but not together, they viewed glorious vistas from the ramparts of ancient castles, swam in tropical waters with fish as colourful as some of their preening entourage, and travelled in high earth orbit to follow sunrise and then sunset around the world.  Every encounter became a torture of restraint and the angst that each trailed with them on formal occasions when they could not dance together for fear their growing affection would betray them began to take its toll.

‘It’s as if you were made for each other – how lucky is that!’ people remarked, seeing them together and not realising the fragility of the emotional dam their comments were piercing.

Jenna had stopped accompanying Kayse on official duties; miserable in attendance, desolate at home alone and almost distraught at having to work so closely with him on the day to day scheduling of his diplomatic life. She narrowed her focus to language updates and modifications, changes to technological support equipment, mediation in culturally dense negotiations but there seemed to be no way out that made sense.  Jenna began delegating what she referred to as ‘the baby-sitting duties’ to some of her staff team.

Competent and willing, they had taken up this new challenge with enthusiasm and Kayse found himself as a result in many an environment Jenna would never have considered. Strip clubs for instance. That had been an eye-opener! He had come back to the suite both horrified and fascinated but, as he put it, with a rather better understanding of – ahem – female attributes.

What? 

Jenna had wanted to explore this curious admission in some detail but it became rapidly apparent that even the most superficial of discussions was going to lead to breaches of protocol and so they had retreated. It was her decision, not his. Her choice, her balancing of an exceptional career against this love that was easing its way into her heart and her soul; comfortably, unobtrusively, finding places that seemed made for it and settling there like soft new snow.

Her eTherapist had been useless.  Lots of reflective empathic mutterings but no advice.

‘Therapists don’t give advice’

‘Like I hadn’t noticed!’

‘You seem upset’

‘Astute observation!’

‘Want to think about what’s driving that? I can run a semantic analysis on your sessions so far if you wish’

That would pick out and parade before her all the negative thoughts and arguments she had presented over recent months. And nowhere would there be mention of the reality of her predicament, just oblique and hypothetical references to ‘difficult relationships’ and ‘cross cultural protocols’. A security requirement meant that Jenna’s eTherapist was as anonymous to her as she was to him/her/it so no context could be applied and no intuitive links made. She was on her own.

Scrubbing the data files, Jenna had made her way back to the suite, distracted by consideration of the futility of the session and so not aware of the tiny icon projected onto her retina. A message. It grew and began to bump the two other icons parked there as its timestamp triggered the animation designed to draw her attention.  By the time Jenna noticed it though, safely home and sitting in the dark miserably considering her options again, the message was twice its size and pulsing red. She grabbed it.

‘Open!’ she thought at it and brought up a comm. channel in case she needed it. What disaster of syntax, grammar or sentence construction would need resolving now, she wondered.

‘Greear in hospital. Transport waiting…’

Jenna was up and out, paging the transport and grappling with the details as she ran. When had the message come in for goodness sake? And how could she possibly have missed it? And was he ok? Oh please was he ok?

The flight to the hospital, snappy as it was, seemed an eternity but she was able to review the thread that had landed eventually in her inbox.  Kayse had gone for routine upgrading of his wetware implant in the company of one of the commission’s retinue. It should have been low risk and uneventful but the assistant had forgotten about Kayse’s allergy to the implant’s immersion bath and he had gone into anaphylactic shock. At first, the surgical team had been paralysed; unprepared for this catastrophic effect and seemingly witless in formulating any action. It had been the negligent assistant who, herself traumatised by the event, had yelled at them to flush the area with plain water and get going with resuscitation ‘quick as you like’.

By the time Jenna had been told, third in line after his far-away family and his diplomatic corps, Kayse was emerging from the incident with only a slight headache but that was it, she thought, that was the turning point. Never again would he be alone in such a situation. Never again would she leave him without both of them knowing they would be the first to hear if either needed the other. Never again would she put her career before this extraordinary man who loved her more than anyone ever had before and whose life she wanted to share, wherever that would be and whatever other sacrifice she would have to make.

When they had left the hospital together it was to a meeting destined to be the most momentous in history, marking the end of Jenna’s professional place in formal diplomacy and politics and instantly making her a household name. They had emerged with a license to form a personal partnership and an unwritten mandate to shape a future many had speculated upon but few had seriously considered.

So now here she was with her own packing.  His term of office had come to an end, he was going home and Jenna was going with him. Their partnership, formalised by their governments in an amalgamation of rituals, had taken some getting used to at both ends and there had been a great deal of debate from top down to bottom up, the more seedy speculations to be found in the global media. Had they considered the possible consequences?  Would his people accept her (or eat her alive in some bizarre ritual, went the unspoken alternative option).  And talking of bizarre – didn’t they have some extremely unusual sexual practices?

Jenna and Kayse had chuckled over that one. There had indeed been some practical considerations but fewer, in fact, than Jenna had encountered on home ground. At barely three feet six inches, Jenna’s options had been somewhat limited and, although sex with a six-footer was clearly not out of the question, being closer to his navel than his face put a few constraints on the more social aspects of the relationship. And she had become tired of the freak-o-philes; men who were drawn to women with disabilities or unusual physical conformations. Admittedly, society had become rather more accepting of difference over the years and it was far more common to find people such as herself in the mainstream rather than relegated to niche circles. However, diversity meant difference and difference still stirred up in a significant minority the paranoid rhetoric of discriminatory argument that amounted to pulling up the drawbridge and chucking anyone who looked out of place off the ramparts into the moat. That much had been evident when Kayse’s people had first arrived. Despite being the most socially and technologically momentous event in recent history, the doomsayers had been out on the streets, in the media and all over the datasphere with their isolationist message. Expressing fears about economics, immigration, loss of cultural identity and degradation of ‘our way of life’, they encapsulated nothing more than fear of the unknown.

And to be fair, this was about as unknown as it got. As a child, Jenna had read about early 21^st century discoveries of earth-like planets outside the solar system and had been first out of the trap with her application to join the team of exo-linguists translating messages received from one of these – Gliese 581c. The people there had somehow piggybacked their communications onto earth’s deep space telemetry and phased them into real time, opening up tiny wormholes alongside the images and pulsing through the astonishingly direct evidence of their existence.

Then they had turned up. No warning, no fanfare, no ‘Do you mind if….?’ Just WHOOMPH and a fleet of extraordinary vehicles had assembled in high orbit alongside the various utility, scientific and tourist complexes already parked there.

Jenna, who had been developing translation and speech applications in the expectation that voice files might be the next stage in their communication, was suddenly precipitated into the front line of first contact at which point science came smack up against protocol. She should be a politician. She should be military. She should be, well, more representative. Of what, no one was quite able to articulate but it was clear that Jenna was not exactly what people had imagined as their universal, face-on-cereal-boxes, icon of the human race.

Of course, nobody had actually said that she should be taller but, once all the other straws were picked out of the mud, that was pretty much all that was left. Inevitably though, like it or not, as she had possibly the best grasp of their verbal communication and the only plugware capable of learning on the job by growing its own translation network, Jenna, the tiny woman with the stocky legs and stumpy arms, would be forever associated with this epic event as her image appeared alongside those of the first ever representatives of an intelligent non-human species.

And so she had been recruited and the world held its collective breath, its expectations of new possibilities and fears of imminent annihilation placed in her politically inexperienced hands. To say that she had a most abbreviated induction into inter-galactic politics, much of it being written on the hoof and drawing noticeably on lines from science fiction films sent in by the watching millions, would be to understate the situation somewhat but here they were, honest-to-god aliens with who-the-heck-knew-what sort of an agenda, so someone had better front this up and quickly. Get your best man on it. Or woman. Very small woman, if you must. And so the hastily assembled party comprising varied racial and cultural representatives, a military cohort and Jenna, had shuttled up to the space station, headed for the conference room and waited.

‘You’re not going to believe this!’  It was the internal heads-up detail on closed circuit to Jenna’s personal security. Before she could ask what, her internal reader announced

‘Ty Karcher and Nakisha Gorrel of Gliese Shostak’, then ‘We are your friends’. 

Jenna stood, doors opened, and she greeted them, passing her prepared script on its flexi screen over to the outstretched hands of their representative. She did not have to reach up.

They should have known. Any idiot, an exo-biological post-grad idiot anyway, would have guessed. But not only had they not guessed, they had not asked the question and neither, to be fair, had their visitors. The datasphere would be beside itself with recriminations, jokes, claims of psychic predictions and a raft of political harrumphings that amounted to a collective ‘Well anyway…..’

What should they have known, guessed, anticipated? Gliese was a dense, heavy planet orbiting in ‘the goldilocks zone’ around its large red sun.  Its greater gravity had caused the indigenous life forms to develop solid, squat conformations with deeply pigmented skins that gave protection against the heavier radiation. Their visitors were a deep burnished mahogany,  muscular and powerful, not one exceeding three feet ten inches in height and for the first time in her life, in the company of this extraordinary crew, Jenna had felt dainty and normal.

As they had disembarked and the formalities undergone, Jenna became increasingly identified with their group, finding common ground in the suddenly inappropriate accoutrements of their environment. Chairs too high, feet dangling. Tables too high, can’t see anything on them. Bathroom fittings, visualisation equipment, windows, domestic appliances, the access activators on doorways, the drop on each step of a stairway. All arranged for the convenience of the average adult human (male human, many would argue still) and out of reach to people like Jenna at her genetically restricted height.

Ok, so most of it had adjustment features built in but that meant someone had to adjust it and to do that, they had to appreciate the problem.  More often than not, Jenna had sat through long meetings with her legs folded under her to avoid the ache of leaving them unsupported. Or she had been given a seat so low she could not participate effectively. Once, at a conference, they had provided her with a special seat that could be adjusted according to her needs but then they had left her to drag it round from room to room, up and down floors, navigating crowds who could not see her and were not looking. She had finally given up on it in the ‘market place’ area where, after leaving it to one side while she engaged the attention of an exo-linguistics researcher, she saw it being hauled away by an event organiser who evidently viewed it as a fire hazard.

At least now it was possible to install follow software in some of these items so that, once imprinted on their lead, they would chug along happily behind and stop when required for use. Luggage, sports equipment, storage containers and an assortment of shopping trolleys had been upgraded in this way, usually by commercially invested organisations, and hotels were picking up on the idea fast. Not so government agencies. Always at the front of telling others what they should be doing, they lagged behind when it came to implementation of their own advice and so Jenna had resigned herself to lugging her own adjustments – a foldaway stool and a grabber – wherever she went.

These people, of course, had not arrived so equipped and, suddenly part of a majority in this strange halfway house in near-space, Jenna found she had a new and unexpected area of expertise upon which she could be consulted. This probably, even more than her linguistic skills, gave her a connection with their visitors that could not have been anticipated.  They wanted to know if her whole planet was populated by insipid, stringy creatures such as those they had just met and howled with laughter as she provided the statistics. How did they not fall over, collapse under their own weight, they had wanted to know. Didn’t their elevated centre of gravity militate against good balance?  And surely they were physically weak with all that extra surface area and organ distribution to perfuse and maintain?

Jenna had done her best to accommodate their queries, aware that they were probably not as sensitively phrased as might be expected and moderating them in her translations. These were explorers, military rather than political and so a tad less cautious about their expressions.  Some of her colleagues suspected her of a little diplomatic censorship and raised eyebrows, to which she had raised an eyebrow or two of her own and kept her counsel.

As the party with its new guests had waited to shuttle back to Earth, an advance guard had been despatched to give the reception area a major make-over. Never had tacticians, diplomats and multi-starred generals been directed by such an army as this: designers, disability experts, ergonomics specialists and media personnel assembled, examined, consulted and then demolished and re-constructed the interior of the facility to accommodate their visitors. Jenna had allowed herself a wry smile

‘Come-uppance time, Earthlings!’

Now, five years later, about to leave on a momentous journey with Kayse to his home, a staggering 20.2 light years yet only a heartbeat away, Jenna could anticipate a world where everything would be at her height. No more adjustments. No more apologetic offers to ‘find a box’ of some sort. A man she could love face to face, eye to eye who did not regard her as a politically correct trophy or an extension of his own disturbed psychology.

Even better; toilets she could actually sit on! Life was going to be good good GOOD!