Roxanne's translator was named Ivri[click] Tsveö, and he turned out to be a great help in spite of the fact that he knew English only from Earth broadcasts, so there were some gaps in his vocabulary. He was very helpful with medical and health terms, which she hadn't gotten to during her five weeks of studying Tseri[gulp]uu on Earth. She didn't know the words for 'groggy' or 'nausea', although she could say 'dry mouth' and 'no energy'. She was also able to assure the doctor, in Tseri[gulp]uu, that these were all familiar aftereffects of the drug she'd taken and that they normally passed after half an hour to an hour. (Actually, she said between one and three nwÿeh, which were intervals of about twenty-three minutes. A standard day in Me Weä [Squish]iyey (as opposed to the local day on any given planet) was divided into sixty-four nwÿeh.) Then the doctor, whose name was Anyöp Lei, did some of the things doctors did on Earth (looking in her ear and her eye, having her take a few deep breaths) and some they didn't (having her drink water and watching the screen above her head while she did it). The mechanical hands were blue, rubbery and, except for the lack of things like creases and fingernails, looked and worked like natural Yi[gulp]vi hands. The water was in a hose with a nipple on the end, in a reel on the side of the bed where she could get at it any time. It was a good thing to remember the next time she was in a bed in the medical area, but by the time the exam was over, she was feeling recovered enough that she didn't want to stay in that one. When Tsveö asked her if she had any questions, she started with two:
"Is my husband all right?"
"He's still sleeping."
"Can I go to him?"
"Sure. I'll take you." The doctor started removing all the little sensors stuck to her. (They were transparent except for tiny embedded silver wires and had been put on while she was asleep, so she hadn't noticed them.)
"What about Menang?"
"He's fine. He's with Amnang." The Yi[gulp]vi opened a cabinet and brought out a bag about the size of an Earth bed pillow but lumpier.
"And the cyborg cores?"
"All three thousand one hundred twenty-four are fine, according to Menang, and the eight that came with full equipment are already active."
"Great. And what about the, ah, other person on board with us?"
"The Glau is also still asleep. We're building a prison for him." The doctor finished and stepped back. Tsveö brought her the bag. It contained her clothes and shoes.
"How do you keep somebody with his powers in prison?" she asked as she dressed.
"The prison will be a fragile bubble in space. If he tries to move it, it will burst. The Glau need to breathe just like we do."
"Are we in space or on a planet?"
"We're in Harolup High Orbit. Your starship is in our docking bay, being unloaded. We've prepared a cabin for the three of you, for the adjustment period while we all figure out what role you're going to play here."
"Great." Fully dressed, she stood up. The doctor had apparently just stood there the whole time, but Roxanne learned later that all the Opuulu suits had little computers built in, allowing their users to take notes by sending the words directly from their brains via the antennae on top of their heads. Now the ichthyoid in the blue mechanical suit stepped forward again.
"Roxanne Ritchi," the doctor said, then continued in Tseri[gulp]uu, with Tsveö interpreting. "[It has been a privilege to be the first to examine you. When you are feeling well, please arrange for a more complete examination.]"
"I will, and thank you, Anyöp Lei."
Just outside the door, she asked Tsveö to take her to a bathroom. He led her down the hallway to a door marked with an abstract graphic that made no sense to her.
"This is a sampling toilet," he said. "I'd better come in and make sure it's set to Dispose." He led her inside. What she saw there resembled no toilet she'd ever seen. It looked like a rather large person had sat down in wet clay with their legs together and the print of their thighs and buttocks had been smoothed out to a stylized generic shape, sealed and coated with shiny gray enamel. There was no hole, only a seam between the right and left halves. On the wall behind it were two dials with settings that she knew just enough of the Tseri[gulp]uu writing system to read. The one on the left was labeled Urine and its settings were Full Collection, Center Sample and Dispose. The one on the right was labeled Feces and its settings were Full Collection and Dispose. Tsveö set them both to Dispose.
"There you go," he said and turned to leave.
"Wait a minute," she said. "You have to explain to me how this thing works."
"The toilet?"
"Earth toilets aren't like this."
"Oh. Right. Well, you sit down on it and it scans you to determine how wide to open. I'm going to open it all the way so you can see." He opened a panel on the wall, pushed a dark spot and the strange seat split down the seam, the left and right halves sliding apart to display the mechanism beneath. "Normally it would only be open this wide for maintenance. Then it scans from below to find out exactly where your orifices are. Then it brings up two receptacles. A normal toilet would only have these two." He pointed to a pair of little round cylinders. "Those are the disposal tubes. The covers retract and the tubes collect your waste as you release it. But if you were providing a sample for diagnosis, these little containers would come out and catch it and send it to the lab. In either case, when you're done, there's a spray arm that comes out and sprays you with a cleaning solution and then a wiping arm that cleans you and then the spray arm comes back and sprays you with disinfectant. Then you're done. You put your hands in that slot in the far wall to clean them." He pushed the same dark spot and it closed up.
"Wow," she said as he was shutting the panel. "So what does it do with menstrual blood?"
"With what kind of blood? I don't know that word."
"Oh, right, that wouldn't be explained in a broadcast. Look, in the Adventure, there's a medical terminology database. Go look up menstruation." She spelled it out for him, then hustled him out the door. Once she was alone, she turned back to the gray seat. Well, I guess I"m going to try this thing. She peeled her jumpsuit down to her thighs and sat down on the thing. For two seconds, nothing happened. Then the halves slid apart until they were holding her open a couple of inches. There was another brief pause and then a humming noise under her. She wasn't sure it was ready for her yet, so she did nothing. A sentence in Tseri[gulp]uu appeared on the far wall at about eye level: Release Your Waste Now. So she did. When she was done, there was more humming and she felt herself being sprayed with a warm, wet liquid. Then, well, the wiping arm turned out to have many tiny fingers. She laughed out loud at the sensation. After three or four seconds, it withdrew. She felt a squirt of some cooling liquid and then the toilet closed up. Man, they'd sell this thing as a sex toy on Earth, she thought as she pulled her jumpsuit up. She put her hands in the wall slot. They were sprayed with the same cooling liquid. When she took them out and sniffed them, she recognized the smell of alcohol disinfectant.
Tsveö was waiting outside the door, looking at a little handheld screen. "Menstruation is going to be the talk of Harolup," he said as he put it away. "Everybody pays attention to biology, so a new biological phenomenon is always of interest." They started walking back the way they came.
"Yi[gulp]vi women don't menstruate?"
"Never. If a woman has blood coming out of her vagina, it's a sign that something's wrong, probably a tumor on the uterus."
"And if a human woman doesn't menstruate, and she's not pregnant or in menopause, that's a sign that something's wrong, probably that she's not getting enough to eat." He stopped and opened a door only two down from the one she'd been in.
Her blue beloved was lying naked in a shallow transparent bathtub at table height on top of a low cabinet. Two brainbots hovered around him. They turned their eyestalks to her and bowged, but they didn't move. Minion's suit stood at the foot of the tub, bent as though to get a closer look at its contents, with the lid open. The fish himself was in the tub, resting between the blue chest and right biceps.
"Hi, Roxanne," he said as she came close. Megamind slept chest deep in the water. He had a day's growth of beard. Now that she knew to look for them, she could see several of the transparent sensors on his head, neck and torso.
"Hi, Minion. How is he?"
"Good. Remember the human medical database you got for us? I looked up the ingredients in Allerquil and when I showed the doctors here the molecular diagrams, it turned out they use all that stuff here, too. They say he's having a normal reaction and the best thing to do is just let him sleep it off. Hi, Tsveö."
"Hi, Menang," said the interpreter. "You know how to reach me if you need me?"
"Sure, and thanks."
"Yeah, thanks, Tsveö," Roxanne said. "You're welcome," he replied, and went out.
"One other thing the doctors said," the fish continued. "They have a lot of confidence in the healing effects of skin contact with someone the patient loves. That's why I'm in here, and they said if you were up before him, you should get in, too."
"Um, okay." She looked around. There was a row of hooks on the wall with a small stool next to it. One of the hooks held Megamind's costume; his boots were on the floor under it. She sat there and began to unlace her shoes. To cover her discomfort at taking off her clothes in Minion's presence, she said, "These people really don't have any nudity taboos at all, do they?"
"No, and I don't get the ones humans have, even after all the years I spent on Earth. They asked me to explain why humans wear bathing suits to swim and I couldn't. Don't be surprised if they ask you."
"Huh. You know, I'm not sure whether I could explain it, either. I know it's not universal on Earth, or even in Western Civilization. The ancient Greeks didn't have it. Let me think about it."
"Well, don't think too hard right now. You're supposed to be focusing on loving thoughts."
"That's not too hard. I'm so grateful that we're all alive. Even the cyborgs made it." She had her shoes and socks off. The time had come to unbutton her jumpsuit. She had an impulse to turn her back on Minion to do it, but fought it down, knowing that it was not just about the nudity taboo, but about not having her falsie-stuffed bra on. She had gone through the same thing on her wedding night; letting a new person see her real breasts was always hard. Still, in this society she figured that everyone would see them sooner or later. She'd just have to stiffen up her spine and get through it.
"Yeah, even Wayne made it, the jerk," said Minion, oblivious to her discomfort. "One of the people I talked to while you were asleep was Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa. You know, the narrator of the message that started all this. He's a pilot, and he said I showed great forbearance in not stuffing Wayne out the airlock when we came out of Wormhole Space and he was still out. He said that's what he would have done." While he spoke, she got out of her jumpsuit and panties and hung them up.
"I might have done the same thing," she said, moving the stool over to the tub opposite Minion. "But afterward I think I'd regret it. Wayne has so much to give, and if he really gets how big a mistake he made and really wants to atone, I think he should get a chance." She was kind of surprised at hearing herself say this. Her last thought about Wayne onboard the Adventure had been If we live, I'm gonna kick his ass into the Sun. Maybe the instruction to focus on loving thoughts was working. She climbed in and settled herself in under Megamind's arm. The water was warm but not quite as warm as she expected. She slid one hand under her husband's back, the other across his chest, and kissed his blue neck just below the hinge of his jaw. He looked so vulnerable. She wanted to do everything, marshal all her resources to make sure he was all right. It struck her as ironic that the best thing she could be doing for him was reclining in warm water with her arms around him and her mind on her love for him.
"Vit o[squish] Amnang öu," she whispered, settling her head on his shoulder.
"[Click]at o[squish] Amnang öu," Minion whispered from his other shoulder. "You're gonna be okay, Boss."
###
When Wayne woke up, he was still weightless. He was in a sort of wraparound hammock in a perfectly spherical room only a little longer than he was tall. There were furnishings of various sorts protruding into the room, most with labels in English. One said "Airlock. Do not open. This door is only usable by persons with respiration gear." Another said "Zero-gravity Toilet. Follow the directions or clean up the mess yourself." There was a sheet of metal with many squeeze bottles stuck to it by their bottoms, pointing their nipple tops at him. Along one edge was a label that said "These bottles contain liquid food and drink. Their bases are magnetic. This is the only place you can set them down where they'll stay. Squeeze carefully while sucking the tip." The implication behind these labels was clear even to his codeine-befogged brain: they didn't think he was capable of figuring anything out for himself. Considering the circumstances of his arrival, he couldn't blame them. Worst of all was the one directly overhead. It said "You are in a self-contained fragile habitat. The force needed to move it from its mooring is greater than the force that will cause you to break through the wall and lose all your air." In other words, this was a prison and any attempt to escape would be fatal. He looked through the wall and out into the stars. To his right was a yellow-white glowing sun. Directly below him, a pole about a foot in diameter extended from his habitat maybe a quarter-mile to a cluster of metal bulbs. Inside them, he could see people, mostly Megamind's and Minion's people, tiny with distance, going about their lives. Other poles extended from it and along all of them, including the one he was attached to, were slightly curved disks facing the sun; solar panels, he guessed. Beyond it and slightly to one side was the planet, about three-quarters lit, looking very Earthlike. A large moon was peeping out from behind it.
His mouth was bone dry. Flying over to the bottles, he studied their labels. Most of them were long and vague. "Fresh water shellfish broth". "Puree of aromatic lowland herbs". "Fermented river delta thatch seed sprouts." That last one sounded like it might be kind of like beer, but the next row said "Water" and at the moment, that sounded better. He pulled one off the steel, sucked it dry, slid the empty through the elasticized hole below the sign that said "Insert used containers through this hole," pulled another one and finished half of it. Sticking it back in its place, he used the toilet, following the instructions to the letter, including the one that said "When you finish, you are expected to disinfect both your hands and your organs of elimination." There were wall dispensers with cleaning solution (slightly slippery, it smelled of iodine), wipes and disinfectant that turned out to be good old familiar alcohol gel, the kind sold as hand sanitizer back home. Did I just think of Earth as home? Am I already homesick? I just got here. But he hadn't expected to arrive with "Fuck-up" stamped on his forehead. He'd planned on remaining undetected through the journey and slipping out of the cargo carrier after it was unloaded from the ship. Then he'd hide, watching and listening until someone was in danger, and he'd rescue them. That was how heroes appeared on Earth, and he had planned to be a hero in his new environment. He still hoped to redeem himself somehow by the use of his powers, but that could only happen if someone trusted him enough to let him out of here. There was a screen, but it seemed to be the only thing in the cell with no instructions posted on it. No visible controls, either. He touched it. Nothing. Voice controls, maybe? "Computer on," he said. No response. "System on." Nothing. "Screen on." It blinked to life, showing him white text on a black background. "I'm an automatic response system," the text read. "I can answer a range of questions, transmit communication and summon a live person if appropriate."
"Where am I?" he asked.
"You are in a confining habitat attached to Harolup High Orbit, an artificial satellite in orbit around the planet Harolup, which is in orbit around Iota Delphinus, a G-type star nine point seven three light years from Earth."
"Where is Roxanne Ritchi?"
"In Harolup High Orbit."
"Is she all right?"
"She is in good health."
"What about Megamind and Minion?"
"The individuals known by those names in broadcasts from Earth are both in Harolup High Orbit and in good health." He sighed with relief. I'm not a murderer. Unless they count brainbots.
"What about the other living things that were aboard the Adventure?"
"All cyborgs and living cyborg components are intact. The complete cyborgs are functional and two of them are in space near Harolup High Orbit. The rest are in Harolup High Orbit." Great. So I'm down to property damage and reckless endangerment, or whatever the terms are here. Now how do I ask about my case? What terms would this machine understand? He thought about it for a moment.
"Have any official decisions been made about me?"
"The current orders of the Commander of Harolup High Orbit are to hold you in this confining habitat. From your awakening, you will be left alone for six hours to ensure that your mind is no longer affected by the drugs you took aboard the Adventure. After that, you will be available for questioning until the Commander concludes that enough information has been collected to make a decision about your future status on Harolup."
"How long have I been awake?"
"Approximately seventeen minutes."
"What is the name of my species?"
"Your species is called the Glau, singular and plural."
"What can you tell me about the Glau?"
A table of contents in very small letters filled the screen. For the first time since his arrival, Wayne smiled.