Chapter 4: Seven to One

Steven regaled them with stories of Ganymede and his journey to Valbara for a little while. It was mostly stuff that he had already told the women on the train that morning, but he was still happy to share, and the flock was attentive. Tilli especially seemed fascinated by his stories, always asking him to elaborate on small details that interested her.

It wasn’t more than fifteen or twenty minutes before Paza was pestering them to resume work again, and they climbed out of the padded bowl, heading back to their office.

“Mind putting these in the recycler?” Ezi asked, the flock handing Steven their empty cups one by one as they passed him.

“Uh, sure,” he replied. “Once you tell me what and where the recycler is.”

“It’s over by the vending machines,” Mima replied. “It just looks like a hole in the wall. They reduce waste items down to their base components and prepare them for recycling.”

He did as they asked, slowly building a mental map of the office complex with each excursion, finding his way back to the machines again. Beside them was a round hole in the wall that looked like it must lead to a garbage chute, so he popped the empty cups inside and left hoping that he didn’t have to push any buttons. As strange as the layout of the office seemed, its lack of uniformity made it a little easier to get his bearings. Each divider was curved a little differently, the abundant plants and vines were all distinct, and he was tall enough to get a view over most things that would block a Valbaran’s line of sight. It was like cheating in a video game.

The aliens were already back at their desks by the time he returned, hard at work doing whatever it was they did. They hadn’t really deigned to involve him that much yet. He sat down on his little stool, lifting his head to watch the procession of aliens on the catwalks above him. His jibe about them having no fear of heights might be closer to the truth than he had realized. They were quite content to walk along precarious bridges that were barely wide enough for two of them to pass one another, and they seemed to favor the window seats when they were relaxing, chatting to each other as they admired the stomach-churning view.

“You want to go up there and take a look around?” Ezi asked, leaning over the back of her chair.

“I’ll pass,” he replied. “What?” he added, learning to recognize the flutter of yellow in her feathers as amusement. “What do you weigh, like fifty pounds? If I fall from up there, I’m gonna explode like an overcooked ration packet when I hit the floor.”

“Why would you fall?”

“I guess I have a higher center of gravity than you do.”

“You are very tall,” she conceded. “You don’t need to be scared though. We’ll keep you safe.”

“I’m not scared – it’s just common sense.”

“Okay,” she chimed with a smile, turning back to her readout. Somehow, he didn’t get the impression that she believed him.

Everyone except Paza kept looking up from their tasks to glance over at him, sneaking curious looks whenever they found an opportunity. It was clear that none of them had interacted with humans very much, and it was almost cruel to put one in front of them and then expect them to carry on with their work like nothing was amiss.

“Here’s a task for you,” Paza said, Steven sitting up straighter. “As part of your responsibilities, you will be expected to help us save time and improve efficiency by taking dictations, sending and receiving messages, and sorting them by priority. I just received a message from a client. Take down my reply.”

“I can do that ... I think,” Steven replied as he hopped off his seat and joined her at her desk. “Am I going to get my own workstation at some point?”

“You’ll need your own terminal eventually, yes,” she said as she pulled up a new window for him and moved it closer with a swipe of her hand.

“I should mention that I can’t read Valbaran,” he added. “I don’t know the ins and outs of your file systems or OS yet, either.”

“You will learn,” she said. “We planned for your inclusion, and the company servers will now translate text into your native language. I am sure there will be some bugs and quirks, but I’m told that humans are very good at adapting to the unexpected.”

She gestured to an icon, and he tapped it, Steven smiling in the glow of the hologram as the readout changed from colorful squiggles to Latin characters.

“Well, how about that? This makes things a hell of a lot easier. You guys sure do talk a lot,” he added, noting that a few lines of squiggles had become large paragraphs of English text. Like Joseph had said, their language must have a very high degree of information density.

“Our messages are pooled in this inbox,” Paza continued, gesturing for him to open another icon. “Your task will be to sort them by priority and forward them to members of the team when appropriate.”

“Okay, this doesn’t look too different from what I’m used to,” he mused as he examined the window. Each new one that opened could be moved around independently in three dimensions, presumably limited only by the range of the projector.

The Valbarans were a very visual people, just like humans, and their software seemed intuitive enough. There weren’t all that many ways one could format a message inbox. The English text implementation wasn’t seamless, and it overran many of the borders in the graphical interface, but it was usable enough. He could already see options for setting flags, sorting by date, and reply and forwarding options. Everything was coded by color, and many icons that would be intuitive for Valbarans were unfamiliar to him, but he could get used to that.

“Alright,” he muttered, wiggling his fingers. “Hands are the pointing device – that works. How do I pull up the virtual keyboard?”

“Down here,” Paza replied, opening another menu with a gesture. For a species with such good memories, there must be a lot of very specific gestures and shortcuts that they used to speed the process along. He’d have to learn them. She opened up a QWERTY keyboard that hovered in front of him, likely copied from the same ones used on many human devices, and he noted that it included a few Valbaran symbols that must have no human equivalent.

“Are there going to be any issues with me converting text from Valbaran to English and back again?” he asked. “Automatic translation doesn’t always capture every nuance.”

“Your work will be reviewed while you learn,” Paza replied. “It will still save us time, and I believe Yemi’xal’otli was talking about personally tutoring you.”

“Oh, really? That would certainly be helpful.”

“Sort the messages by time code and open the most recent one,” she said, Steven doing as she requested. “Tap the text field to begin, and write down what I say.”

He took her dictation as she spoke, still working at her display the whole while. Whether Paza was especially good at multitasking or it was a trait shared by all Valbarans, he couldn’t say. Steven was an experienced typist, and he didn’t have trouble keeping up, his fingers dancing across the virtual keyboard as she gave an update on the progress of some software add-on module. He found himself wondering if he could obtain a physical keyboard on Valbara, or if such a thing would even be able to interface with their computer systems. It wasn’t something that he had thought to bring with him.

When he was finished, Paza reached out to slide the window back over to her side of the desk, the text changing back into its original Valbaran. She made a few corrections, her own virtual keyboard taking the form of tiles arranged in a fan shape around her three-fingered hand. The characters blended together on-screen to form more complex strings in a way that actually reminded him of how Mandarin keyboards worked, where combinations of key presses would generate different characters, rather than each key corresponding to a single letter.

“Acceptable,” she said, closing the window with a downward swipe of her hand. “A few grammatical errors due to the machine translation, but it’s nothing that won’t improve with practice. We intend to start serving Earth’nay clients soon, and your insights will be doubly valuable.”

“You mind if I have a poke around in your file system?” Steven asked. “I won’t modify anything – set it to read-only or whatever your equivalent is. I just want to start getting a feel for how it’s structured.”

“Very well,” she replied, sending another window sliding through the air in his direction. “These are the company files that our team is responsible for. These mostly pertain to current projects.”

“Very meticulous,” he muttered as he scanned through them. They were certainly fastidious about keeping a record of all their versions and iterations, almost to the point that the list of nested files became cumbersome to navigate. He dragged his little chair a bit closer, sitting behind and to the left of Paza so as not to distract her. It seemed that the projector could reach him just fine.

“Hey,” Ezi said, glancing up at him through the ring of translucent displays. “What do you like to do for fun?”

“Me?” Steven asked, focusing his eyes on her through the wavering holograms.

“Who else?” she replied with a flutter of yellow.

“I suppose I enjoy the usual pastimes for someone living on Ganymede. I spent a lot of time at the local bar with my friends from work, I played VR games in my hab, I watched movies on the intranet. We didn’t have all that much free time, and when you’re cutting ice on the surface, all you really want to do when you get home is peel off the suit and get in the shower. Why do you ask?”

“If we’re going to be working together closely from now on, we should get to know each other better, don’t you think?” Ezi chimed. “It’s Val’ba’ra’nay custom.”

“That makes sense,” he replied. “You are kind of my bosses, after all. All five of you, however that works. Gotta say, the tone has been more ... familiar than I was expecting.”

“Must be strange, being alone all the time,” she added as she twirled one of head sheaths between her fingers idly. “Earth’nay don’t have flocks, so what do you have?”

“I’m still not totally sure what a flock is,” he admitted, turning his attention back to the files. “I read about them on my way here, and they’re kind of self-explanatory, but I can’t imagine how living your life as one unit works. Who owns your house? Is it split five ways? What happens if one of you wants to do something and the other four don’t? Humans usually pair up ... after a fashion.”

“Is it really so foreign to you?” Ezi asked. “Maybe you should try it – you might find that you prefer having some extra company.”

“I’ve seen other males who were alone,” Steven replied. “Yemi is staffing the front desk all on his lonesome. I don’t know his relationship status, of course. He could be going home to a wife and kids for all I know – I didn’t ask.”

“Yemi remains stubbornly unattached,” Ipal added, joining their conversation. “A guy his age should have found a nice flock to settle down with and start siring children by now.”

“He’s not bad looking,” Ezi chuckled, shooting her friend a sly look across the workstation. “I like boys who take good care of their scales.”

“It’s unusual for males to live alone, then?” Steven pressed as he glanced between the two women. “Even if they’re not in a relationship?”

“Traditionally, it was customary for them to marry off rather early,” Ipal explained. “Bachelors are more of a modern phenomenon. It’s much easier for a male to support themselves in a technological society, so they sometimes choose to delay marriage and pursue a career instead.”

“Mostly just part-time lounge dancers trying to find themselves,” Ezi scoffed with a flutter of yellow feathers.

“An unkind generalization,” Ipal corrected, giving her a quick flush of red that seemed to say – be quiet. “Based on what I know about Earth’nay, they have a much more even distribution of genders in their society. Birth rates are almost one for one.”

“Drowning in males,” Ezi sighed.

“And that’s not the case on Valbara?” Steven asked. “I haven’t been here long, but I’ve already noticed a discrepancy between the numbers of males and females.”

“For us, it’s roughly a ratio of seven to one,” Mima replied.

“Seven females are born for every male?” he marveled. “That’s insane.”

“Females flock,” Ipal confirmed. “Usually between five and seven or thereabouts. We meet in our early lives – often during schooling or our first jobs. Males live with their families until they get engaged, or they go it alone as a bachelor for a while.”

“And, they get engaged to one flock?” Steven asked as he raised an incredulous eyebrow. It was hard to keep a conversation going with all of them at once, and he was unsure of who he should be looking at, his eyes wandering between all three of them. “Let’s say Yemi married into your flock – you would all be his wives?”