Travels

               The cart stopped when they arrived at their destination. They climbed out and Archer followed his companion up to the door. Using a keypad he pushed a few numbers and the door unlocked.

               “This is the man you wanted to see,” Kellam announced to the fellows inside the monitoring and regulating room. A man and a woman Akalli stood and came to greet them. Archer quickly took in the sights and sounds of the gigantic room. It was all but overwhelming compared to anything else in the city, or even in other parts areas of the facility.  Dozens of banks of computer terminals and monitors mounted on the walls displayed the dynamic conditions inside the fission reactor. He saw the Wolg scripts and wished he’d had a reader handy to decipher it all.

               Admiral Archer was in his element: the sheer number of monitors, terminals, noises and bleeping lights felt like home: the bridge of a starship. The only thing missing was his chair and a view screen of passing stars. He felt immediately comfortable and without thinking he stood a couple centimeters taller. This was it – the place he needed to find out answers to the very existence of the reactors on this formerly pre-industrial civilization. They all exchanged single names and simple titles.

               “Jon,” Kellam said reaching out to touch him, something Archer had come to expect frequently. At that moment a klaxon began to wail near one of the wall monitors. Everyone turned with a start to locate the blaring sound. The Akalli woman quickly stepped to a terminal and started pushing buttons. The sound stopped but some lights continued to flash a few moments longer.

               “Well, Jon, I know this must be quite a sight from your old country work making tools, but there’s no doubt in my mind you can master this in a short time. Truly, you are one of the more remarkable people ever to drop in on us here at Reactor Two.”

               “It looks very exciting, I must say. The hardest part will be reading all this,’ and he caught himself, “technical talk.”

               “Jon, if your progress reports are true, you’ll be running this place by the end of our year,” said the Akalli man. Introduced as Tuart, he was taller than Archer but not my much, and in good health, appearing to be about the same age as Kellam. He and the woman, Yaara, were the only ones running the control room this shift. She remained at the active computer terminal.

               “Tonight, after shifts are over, I want you to gather your children and come to my home for our evening meal. You may enjoy the trip to the country since you’ve been unable to get home for some time now.  I know it’s not customary for business friends to eat together, but I feel you are more than a business friend, at least to me,” he said gently. Jon waited for the punch but instead got a gentle touch to his shoulder.

               “We would really enjoy that, Kellam, I look forward to it.”

               “Well, Jon,” Yaara said, “Come with me. I’ll get you some working clothes and we will start on your training.”

              

               “I don’t quite understand these indicators,” Jon said to Yaara. “They appear to be two different kinds of writing,” he suggested, wondering if she might satisfy his curiosity, or if she even knew the answer. One was obviously Wolg, the other confirmed the Vulcans’ theory: Tellarite. Since Tellarites were among the founders of the Coalition of Planets, he was familiar with their alphabet, some syntax, and a small bit of vocabulary. It looked nothing like Wolg. They were as different to each other as English and Cuneiform.

               “Oh, yes, we have a translator for those,” Yaara told him. “That’s Linee, it’s the language of the machinists who built the machines. You’ll see it a lot. They come from the southern continent and don’t know Wolg.”

               “That seems odd, that they wouldn’t know Wolg but you know Linee.”

               “I’m told they are not good linguists, even though they obviously are good machinists.”

               “Have you ever met them?”

               Yaara smiled but frowned at the same time. “Why would we? It would take half an annual to get there.”

               It was starting to make a little sense. Some Akalli must be working with Tellarites to bring the power. But why? It’s not enough to build eight nuclear reactors to provide electric lights to people happy without them. The need didn’t drive the technology here.

               “Jon?” Yaara asked, snapping him out of his trance.

               “Yes, um, yes, I’d like to visit them one day. Does anyone go to the southern continent? How do they get there? How does the machinery get here?”

               “You ask so many questions! Maybe later we can talk to the supervisors and find out. I never had the desire to go, so I never inquired about it.”

               “Well, we should get back to this, then,” he said, turning his attention to the controls and computers so he’d not initiate a meltdown if left alone in an emergency! Running a nuclear reactor was easy. Reading Wolg and Tellarite: that was the challenge.

              

               The group of Jons gathered after work and had a few minutes to review their plan before they met up with Kellam.

               “I found out something I’d learned in exo-biology but never considered much before,” Laskin said. “Although the Akalli are in a similar evolutionary stage as humans, there’s a fundamental similarity in their anatomy at the cellular level. Get this! Their chiral molecules are also right handed, the same as Earth’s.” Archer and Samuels looked at each other, then at Laskin.

               “I took biology but I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” Samuels said.

               “Molecules have handedness. A molecule of water is water. But two centuries ago on Earth, there’s a famous example. They were still using chemicals to treat depression. A synthetic drug used to treat depression was effective, but with a different manufacturing process, the atoms actually connected differently and you got something that caused horrible birth defects – “

               “You’ve already lost me, crewman.”

               “Sir, the atoms are the same, but they are put together differently. Earth is left handed. Akal is also left handed. This is a significant finding of chemistry and physics, not just biology.”

               “I never thought about it,” Samuels said, “but had it not been the same, we probably couldn’t even eat here. Sugar is chiral, lactate too. This world is strikingly similar to Earth in geology, too. It’s remarkable.”

               “We’ll talk about it more later,” Archer said suddenly. “Kellam,” Archer called when he spotted the big man crossing the street towards their rendezvous in front of the library. Kellam jogged the last few steps, and Jon braced for the customary slug in the arm.

               “Jon, I’m so glad you’re here. I want you and your family to have a meal cooked at home instead of in a café night after night. I know my home is far out from the city, but I think you’ll like the fact that we don’t have electricity.”

               “Really? I thought you young people are all for it?” Jon smiled, puzzled.

               “It’s not available where I live. And my wife doesn’t believe in it. My son, however, wishes we’d move into the city.”

               “We’re happy to come out and meet your family,” Jon said. The four of them walked towards the new electric transport station. Poles in the ground carried electric wires about 4 meters off the ground. A long metal arm stretched from the wires to a small omnibus with an electric motor. It looked like it might hold 20 people. “Did you work out of the city before you took a job at Reactor Two?”

               “Ha, no one worked far out of their own city because there was no means, and no need. Just like you, stayed in the country to work on simple machines. Now look at you!”

               “So how far do these go?” Laskin asked as they boarded the omnibus transport. “Not like we can fly, and I’m not sure walking is practical.”

               “Fly. You’re funny, Laskin! Transports! Electric transports! They are connecting the world! Better than walking or using konji carts. But at the edge of the city that is what we’ll have to do. The bus only travels so far.” Konji was a word the team hadn’t heard before. Archer had spent most of his space travel time, as did Samuels and Laskin, studying Wolg from the limited data contained in the translators collected 12 years earlier. It had allowed them to study the syntax and grammar, but vocabulary was another matter.

               “The economy seems to be revolving around the new electricity plants. It’s very different from the last time I was in the city.”

               “When was that, Jon?”

               “Many years ago,” he answered, racking his brain to calculate 12 earth years to Akal years. “It was maybe 7-8 annuals.”

               “How did you get here then?”

               Hmm, Kellam, well, I took a shuttle from my warp five ship in orbit.  Archer thought dryly that might not be well received.

               “Didn’t you take a konji cart then, Jon?” Samuels offered.

               “I’m sure of it,” he added, giving a wink to Samuels when Kellam turned his head.

               The trip to the end of the line was less than half an hour, whereas it had taken than more than half a day to walk it the few weeks prior when they’d come in. It was quiet transportation but for the wheels on the ground and the primitive road. Archer didn’t think it would stay primitive much longer the way the city was growing and people were working. The city flourished around this single industry.

               At the end of the line, the bus would simply switch into reverse to return. It was perhaps an hour before sunset, and the natural light was diminished behind the trees and mountains in the west. They all donned capes to protect themselves from the cool breeze and dampness of the air that quickly shrouded the landscape. Kellam led the way to a small que of konji carts, and now the three off worlders could add the word to their vocabulary. A konji was not quite a horse, not quite an ox, but something in between with the body of a horse and the tail and horns of an ox. It was smooth-skinned and dark colored. The feet were actually scaled with dull short claws. If Jon didn’t know better he might have called it a cousin of a two-horned unicorn.

               The quartet of people climbed on board and the Akalli driver took them the last several kilometers to an intersection just a few minutes from Kellam’s home.