After her meal, Chan returned to her quarters, where she was able to savour the cool, comfortable conditions without relying on the forcefield belt, which helped somewhat but was no substitute for having the air all around her at the right temperature. Her quarters were cool and comfortable, and at times, Chan felt that this was the only refuge she had on the Alexandria. This was the only place she felt that it was safe to remove her forcefield belt. Despite what she had said earlier, using the forcefield belt was physically demanding, and caused her body to run hotter than it normally would, which just made her feel more uncomfortable. On the Alexandria, and being around humans all the time, she thought that she could not fully trust them-or their ship. She had to wear the forcefield belt all the time, except in her quarters. Here, she could take it off and just relax in a more natural state.
The forcefield belt was worn over the one-piece jumpsuit-style uniform that was the flavour of this tour of duty. The modified form for Chan had a zipper in the right location to allow the small wires that led off the forcefield belt to her body. The wires were attached to a small metal plate, no more than a centimetre squared, that was connected to her skin by an organic glue. On one of the small tables in the room was a tube of solvent, used to loosen the glue. Chan squirted a tiny amount of the fluid onto the plate, and within a few seconds, the glue dissolved and the plate came free. Chan looked down at the point on her lower abdomen, where the skin was redder than normal. She ran a finger over that patch of skin, and could feel the hard nodules just under the skin. It was at this point where her primary and secondary nervous systems had been surgically altered to allow this contact point with the forcefield belt. The nerves of her body interfaced at this point with organic wiring cultured from her own nerve-cell tissue, so as a result, control of the belt was almost an automatic extension of her own body. She operated it like she would an extension of her body, and through extensive training and experience, could operate it on a subconscious level, like she could operate her legs to make her walk. It was, Chan thought at times, the ultimate piece of technology, but it still felt good to be able to take it off. When off duty, she liked to take it off, and not worry about it or the bioelectric current she was supplying or inadvertently doing something to it, such as shutting off the cooling function, or overusing her bodily reserves of energy.
Chan was not so sure what she could do with the remainder of the evening. She wanted to relax, and perhaps get some sleep. Her time on Alfe Kree had caused her to remain so wound up that sleep was difficult to come. Whenever she got the chance to leave Alfe Kree even briefly, she thought she could regain the renowned Odonan ability to sleep, but she never could. Even on Earth, in the Academy and here on the Alexandria, she was sure that sleep would not come easily.
Now, she took a sonic shower-something of a novelty among Odonans, who tended to favour the old-fashioned hot water shower-and then dressed in a comfortable outfit made of a faintly blue Juniaen silk. It was a one-piece jumpsuit style outfit, sleeveless and relatively loose-fitting. A sleeveless black pullover was worn underneath it, perhaps to preserve a sense of modesty, Chan thought. She sat down behind the desk in her quarters, propping up her feet on the desk like she had seen some long-ago Federation commander do. Right now, she just sat there, close enough to the air vents that she could feel the currents move among the long san on her exposed shoulders. Somehow, the sensation felt invigorating, even comforting. She took the final step in unwinding by removing the braiding in her hair. She savoured the way it fell loose around her shoulders, free of any restraint and typical of the way hair was worn by Suderai women.
When Chan decided to become an exchange officer, she also decided that once she was posted to a ship, she would keep a record of her times on the ship, stored in a self-contained memory unit she had brought along. Although not large, the device could record her voice in a compressed, digital format and could contain several thousand terabytes of data, which could store enough text that she could not possibly read it all in any reasonable amount of time. She brought the device onto the desk and flipped up the screen, which automatically powered up and presented to her a menu of options. She selected "open recording," and did the test to make sure the microphone input was working. The device picked up her set phrase and transcribed it exactly. She glanced at what she had entered already, and then realized quite a lot had happened in the meantime. That, she thought, was typical of spending any amount of time on a starship.
Chan had barely gotten a sentence out when she was disturbed by the sound of the door chime. She gave the command to shut off the recorder, and then reached over to the intercom switch on the desk. "Who's there?" she asked.
Over the speaker came the response, "Just Terry. Just coming for a visit, if you don't mind."
Chan looked down on herself and recalled the typical human male's reaction to Odonan women. She asked, "Are you prepared to see me the way I am now?"
"What do you mean?"
"Hairy arms and all of that?"
"Yes," he said, without any hesitation in his voice.
Chan touched the adjacent switch on her desk, causing the door to slide open. The man entered the room, which was dimly light, and heard the door close behind him. Looking around in the faint light, Clemsen remarked, "Do Odonans favour low light like they favour the cold, or-"
Terry saw the woman stand up behind the desk. To him, she looked so impossibly different that he was not sure she was the same person he had been with earlier. On the bridge, she had efficiently and coldly plotted the destruction of the Klingon ship, and now, she looked so... Terry had trouble forming the words. He had been repeatedly told that terms useful for Terran woman could not necessarily be applied to Odonan women.
Chi was out of uniform, Clemsen thought, which was only natural since this was her quarters and she was off duty. What she had on was perhaps simple Odonan clothing. It was sleeveless, giving the man a full glance at one aspect of Odonan women that made them so unappealing to many Terran men. All along the outer sides of her arms, from the wrist to the edges of her clothes, were black hairs, not thick, but long, and at the density of about four per square centimetre where the hair was most concentrated. The longest hairs were on her shoulders, about five centimetres long and thicker than the others. They also stood up somewhat straight, and seemed to wave in response to unseen air currents-or so he liked to believe. He also focused on the more conventional head hair, which was long and only slightly wavy and very dark. Unbraided and loose, the hair was also quite long, longer than he figured.
Clemsen, now that he was focusing on the hair, was seeing it all. He noticed something on Chan that he had heard about but had not really noticed before. Some had called them derisively "eye whiskers," but the term the Odonans used was phyyza, seven to ten-centimetre long strands of hair similar to the san hair. They also served the same function. Normally, Odonans in the presence of non-Odonans tend to comb them into the ordinary head hair, making them almost unnoticeable, but now Chan had hers in their more natural positions, curving out from their roots to the outside of each eye, and partially looping towards the ears. The phyyza were not really whiskers, but were sensitive to air currents and even to electromagnetic fields and modulations within those fields. And of course, stroking the phyyza produced very warm, very comforting feelings in the Odonans.
Clemsen approached the woman slowly, saying, almost nervously, "You don't mind that I'm here, do you? If you have other things to do, I can-"
Chan cut him off, saying, "No, that's alright. I was just planning on going to sleep, but I'll just lie in bed, knowing that sleep won't come for another half-eyoyn or so. That can wait. Are you kind of cold?"
"Well... that's okay. I can withstand it."
"I can turn the heat up to human-normal levels. Considering how I am dressed, I can endure a little warmer conditions." Using the desk terminal, she called up the environmental controls for her quarters and adjusted the temperature from thirteen degrees to eighteen. Humans might like twenty degrees at least, but above eighteen, Odonans tended to become uncomfortable, and this was her quarters afterall. She could only compromise so much.
Clemsen looked at the woman carefully, while trying not to make it obvious. When she wore the Starfleet uniform and had her hair in the regulation styles, she looked almost human. The forcefield belt and the hair on the top of her hands and on the fingers did take a little getting used to, but it was fairly easy for Chan to pass as a human. Now he was seeing her in a more natural state, and could get a greater sense of-and appreciation of-her alien nature. Seeing her like this, he could see something exotic in her, the grace of her movement, the strength and intellect that was obvious, and even her accent, which sounded high-pitched and yet authoritative. Clemsen again thought about the rush of feelings he had when she first beamed on board. Human males, the man knew, generally found Odonan women unappealing, but a small number were extremely enamored with them. Clemsen, perhaps surprisingly, found himself in the latter group.
"Do you want anything to drink?" Chan asked, was she walked towards the replicator.
"Yeah, I guess so," the young security officer replied, his voice revealing a touch of nervousness that remained. "Can you get that osij juice?"
"Sure," the woman said, "but this time, it's the real thing, well, real in the sense that it has Odonan nutrients and Odonan organic molecules."
"But it should taste the same?"
"Assuming that human taste buds respond to the same tastes the same way as Odonan taste buds do, then yes." Chan got two glasses of osij juice from the replicator and returned to where Clemsen was sitting. The sitting area of her quarters had comfortable couches, but she just felt more comfortable sitting at the desk. Maybe it was because most of her conversations, off and on duty, were conducted from such a position. As she returned, she noticed that the glasses were not quite right, as if the replicator had substituted standard human juice glasses for the proper Odonan ones. It did not seem right drinking osij juice out of the wrong type of glass, but one thing she was having to do was to adjust. She could not expect perfect Odonan conditions here.
After taking a sip from this glass and noticing the taste was as good as it had been earlier, Clemsen started, "I heard about what you did on the bridge, and what you did with the mass sensors to find a cloaked Klingon ship. That's pretty impressive."
"I discovered it almost by accident."
"You mean you came up with that, and it's not a standard Odonan technique?" The man sounded surprised at what Chan had just said.
"A standard Odonan technique now, but, yeah, it came about by accident. At first, I was not sure it would work on the Alexandria because the Federation's mass sensors and mass-density profilers are not up to... are different." Chan caught herself just before she was about to say that the Federation sensor systems were inferior-which they were-but she decided that saying that would be too condescending on her hosts. "With some manipulation, getting the right ranges and frequency sweeps, I was able to produce the same result."
"Okay, then, how were you able to find it out, accidentally, originally?"
Chan had told the story to interested people, mostly on the bridge, earlier, but Clemsen had not been around to hear it. She would tell it again, not simply because she liked the man, but because she liked the story. "Well," she began, "I was on the orbital station at Alfe Kree when three of those Klingon raiders suddenly appeared and hit us. We got two of them, but in the process lost most of our weapons' capability, and most of our shields as well."
"Oh wow," Clemsen said softly, "with one Klingon left?"
"Yeah. He was out there, but cloaked. We knew he would make one last run at us, perhaps going after the reactor core on the station. We had to find him first, and all we had was a communications laser, which with some adjustments and circuit overrides, was a bit like a phaser. The beam was weak and would only last did-I mean seconds-and would only work when the ship was close and unshielded, which it was when cloaked. All we knew was that we had to find him quickly, and while he was still cloaked. In the attack, the Klingon ships had damaged the station's inertial control units, so we were wobbling like a top-an exaggerated saying, I'm sure, but that's what the human advisor called it, 'wobbling like a top.' What that meant was that the mass-density profilers were moving in an irregular, sinusoidal pattern. We noticed some strange readings on the sensors, and saw how they were coming and going. We looked at individual sensor ports to try to determine the cause of the anomalies, since we did not want to use our precious firepower targeting anomalies. When we combined the readings, and applied some processing to it, we had this ghostly apparition, if you will, something that was about the size and mass of a Klingon bird-of-prey and moving like one would. He was moving around the station-I suspect making repairs to systems we had damaged-and that gave us time to refine the approach. By precisely knowing the wobbling of the station-equations governing tops and gyroscopes came in handy-we were able to enhance the image until we had a schematic of the ship. Just then, it turned in to make the run at the station. We fired-the beam lasted a second before the assembly blew-and hit it in that vulnerable spot above and in front of the rear decks, where the antimatter conduits feed into the warp core. It blew up. I bet that was one surprised Klingon commander when he suddenly saw that weak beam coming for him and knew how vulnerable he was at that instant."
"Yeah, I can imagine," Clemsen replied, adding a little laughter as he thought of the misfortune of the Klingon commander who dared tangle with the quick-thinking Odonans. He already knew that Chan could think quick on her feet, and that just added to the charms he felt towards the woman. The story she told was almost typical of her. She was different, and exotic, and exciting in her own way. He really wanted to get to know her better, but wondered if she would let him-or if he could.
"A lot of technological discoveries come about because of accidents, or using what you have in new and unexpected ways to exploit a weakness or strength you did not even know was there. We studied what we had learned that day, and applied it to our ships, introducing mass-shift techniques to locate cloaked vessels."
"I heard," the man remarked, "that the Klingons no longer use cloaked ships when harassing Odonans. Soon, they will come to the same conclusion with the Federation. It was... surprising."
Chan was not yet familiar with all of the human customs, or at least she could not readily identify various emotions when a person displayed them. To her, the man's apparent discomfort in being in the room with her could only have a physical cause. "Is something wrong?"
"No, not really," Clemsen replied, but not in a way that alleviated Chan's concerns.
"If it is too cold for you, I could turn the heat up-" As she spoke, Chan stood up, and was walking around the table. At the same time, Clemsen stood up too, and faced the woman. He was surprised somewhat to see that she was almost his height. By instinct, perhaps, he had put his hands on her upper arms, not grabbing her tightly, but enough to feel the warmth of her skin.
"No, no," Clemsen said urgently. "It is warm, warm enough in here." Chan could see the beads of sweat form on his forehead, indicating that perhaps he was being truthful. "It's just that... that." Still, he could not get the words out.
"What?"
"Oh," he mumbled, still looking down at how his hands touched her bare skin. He could feel the hairs. Chan was not really reacting to his physical touch, and did not seem concerned by it.
Almost mumbling now, Clemsen started, "I always thought Odonans had cold skin. Whenever I had touched you before, I felt the coldness, but that just had to be the forcefield belt working. You don't have it on now, do you?"
"No," Chan replied, almost involuntarily glancing at the small table by the partition with the sleeping section, where the belt lie. Like most Odonans, Chan could feel weak and vulnerable without the belt on, but this was not one of those moments. The man did follow her glance to the table.
"It's not so hard to explain," the man started, as his hands slowly moved down her arms, until he had one of her surprisingly soft, smooth hands in his.
"What?"
"These are things that are hard to explain, differences between Odonans and humans, things that one side cannot understand about the other."
"What are you talking about?" Chan asked, looking down at the man's hand and how he held hers. Despite being aware of her gaze, he did not let go.
"If you were a woman from Earth," Clemsen started, still mumbling and avoiding eye contact with the Odonan woman, "then it would be easy to tell you. Surely you've noticed, or heard about, or know, how some men feel about a... woman."
Chan knew very well what Clemsen was getting at, and now she had this distinctive feeling of being uncomfortable. How some human men reacted to Odonan women had been covered in the briefings she had undergone before joining the officer exchange program. She liked Clemsen, and would like to consider him a good friend, but he seemed to be implying something that was not in her upbringing, or a part of Odonan culture. "You feel that way about me?"
"Yes," the mans aid, almost spitting out the words since they were jammed in his throat. He found it very hard to express his innermost feelings to this woman, mostly because she was an alien who had an alien upbringing, but also because he had never been very good at this, even with women of his own kind. Just the way she was looking at him, reacting to his words with facial expressions, told him a lot. "You don't feel the same way about me, do you?"
Chan now forcefully removed her hand from Clemsen's grip, but did so in as friendly a manner as possible. "Maybe we should sit down."
"Okay," the man replied, still sounding nervous and subdued.
Chan led him over to the couches, where the two small couches, by a viewport, were joined at right angles, with a small table between them. She gestured for him to sit down on one of the couches, and then sat down on the other one. "I guess your reaction is one of the risks of serving on a ship filled with another race, in this case, humans. I had heard about this, so perhaps it's my good fortune I did not get on a ship filled with Deltans."
The snickering laugh at the comment did not adequately hide the small degree of panic in his voice, as Clemsen asked, "Are you offended by this?"
"No, not at all. You like me, enough to get... intimate with me, no?"
Now it was the man's turn to blush. Even though he had already fantasized about getting "intimate" with Chan, he knew that he could not simply admit it, and it would be a long and difficult process to actually make it happen. "Well," he started, again stumbling on his words. "What I mean, well, I know."
"Not right away, no?"
"Yes-no! I mean, no. Oh, I'm so confused. Here I am, trying to say I feel a certain way about an alien woman, although I know she would not fully understand what I was talking about." Chan did lean a bit closer-tantalizingly close, he thought. "Odonans do not know what love is, or how to feel love."
"Oh," Chan sighed. She had heard on several occasions that her kind were incapable of understanding and even feeling love.
Clemsen quickly elaborated, "I mean, Odonans do not know how to feel love, because love-the human concept of love-is not in their culture. Your people do things differently."
"I assume that by what you mean by 'love,' you are talking about something that would lead to the mate-taking process and reproduction."
Clemsen managed to crack a faint smile. In the most blunt terms, that was what "love" really was. It seemed understandable for the practical Odonans that they would skip the stage and go straight to the "mate-taking process and reproduction." After some hesitation, he continued, "Yes, it leads to that. It doesn't happen to Odonans, does it?"
"To become in love?"
"To fall in love is the correct expression," the man said, giving another nervous giggle. "You know, to become more than friends with a member of the opposite sex, to seek to touch that person, to feel the presence, to simply share... something-kind of like we saw with those two engineers the other day."
"Oh," Chan mumbled, thinking back to what the man was talking about. While going around the ship, they noticed a young man and a young woman, both wearing the colours of engineering, leaned against a corridor frame in a remote part of the ship. They were kissing and holding on to each other and whispering suggestive ideas, unaware that Chan's sensitive hearing heard every word spoken. Upon hearing the two security officers approach, they quickly separated and tried to explain away their indiscretions. They seemed quite embarrassed by having been spotted by an Odonan doing what came naturally to humans.
"You've never experienced anything like that, have you?"
"No," Chan admitted, although she knew of experiences that were vaguely related to that incident occurring on Alfe Kree. "It's not the way that it is done among my people."
"You just have to take the mate that is assigned to you?"
"You make it sound so cold, so mechanical."
"But it is!" Clemsen protested. Just like Chan, his opinions on alien mating customs were clouded by his own customs and practices. "I mean, to have a man arbitrarily selected to be your mate, to be the father of your children. Your customs do require you to have children?" Clemsen had heard vaguely of a "requirement" among Odonans to have children, but he realized that he was not really that knowledgeable on Odonans. He had been hoping to study in the computer reading room and learn something about Chan's people, but he had yet to find the time. He was hoping to be able to understand her and her kind better.
"Yes, the customs require that we have a mate, and have children. However, the process of selecting a mate is not cold and mechanical." In a way, Chan found herself in the awkward position of having to defend a custom that she was not always in full agreement with. Now that she was serving as an Odonan exchange officer on a Federation starship, she almost felt obliged to defend that custom, and anything else about the Odonans. "The process is very ancient, and involved. The only mechanical part of it is that each person's genetic structure is analyzed and mapped, to make sure that no defective genes could become dominant in our children, and Odonans have a lot of bad genes in them. If the genetic scans of the selected mate indicate that our children could get dominant bad genes, then the mating cannot go through."
"How is the mate selected? By whom?"
"You really don't know much of this, do you?" Chan asked, looking at the man in the eyes. It was a natural reaction among Odonans, but it unnerved Clemsen. Chan found it hard to adjust her own subconscious actions to make it more comfortable for the man.
"No."
"The mate-selection process is very involved," the Odonan woman started, hoping that she would not bore the man. Most humans found objections to virtually every aspect of this important Odonan cultural activity. "It starts when the Odonan child is very young, like around twelve."
"You do start young."
"Actually, it's younger than you think. You must remember that for an Odonan, the first sixty years of life are roughly equivalent to a human who is half that old. After sixty years, the Odonan stays at the equivalent of a human thirty-year old person essentially indefinitely. You understand that?"
"Yes," Clemsen admitted. That idea caused another concern to cross the man's mind. He had no idea how old this woman really was, and was now thinking that she could be several multiples of his age.
"Okay, now within all the various Odonan cultural groups, there are variations, but the basic process is the same everywhere. It is very ancient, going back to the time Odonans left Kroos and settled on Odona. There is an old profession among my people, yasuembahn, and those that practice this, the yasuembanan, are involved with the mate selection. The young girl spends time with the yasuembanan-the position is almost invariably filled by a woman-learning various things and talking to this person. It is usually quite private, and quite a special time in a girl's life."
"What about the boy?"
"He's involved too, separately. This time is usually considered the first rite of adulthood among Odonans. When I was involved with this, the yasuembanan learned a lot about me, and I learned a lot about myself too. She had her contacts, and her long experience, and had this almost instinctive ability to decide which of the men she knew would make the best mate for me. Of course, the yasuembanan all get together and compare notes, if you will, so that the matches they arrange are the ones that have the best chance to work."
"And then these yasuembanan combine their efforts and pick a mate for somebody?"
"No, that's just the first stage. Of course, there's no substitute for actually arranging a meeting between the boy and the girl. We meet. We spend some time together, to get to know each other. We also realize that the yasuembanan, with all their experience and accumulated knowledge and wisdom, seem to know the inner nature of people. Their selections are usually good ones. Of course, we continue to meet with the yasuembanan, to discuss what we feel and to get more advice. We learn to understand what we're going through, what's happening to us, why these things are happening. It gets pretty complicated."
"But I get the picture," Clemsen finally said. "When you find this 'best' mate, do you fall in love with one?"
"Well, I'm not exactly sure what 'love' is. I'm not familiar with that."
"But it sounds like these yasuembanan are advising the young women who to fall in love with, as if they have the answers on what makes a relationship work, and then they advise them on how to do it."
"To put it crudely," Chan said, with a bit of contempt in her voice. Her friend was constantly trying to put Odonan customs into human terms with human vocabulary, which was perhaps the best way Clemsen had for understanding this. "Anyway, the young woman is advised and guided to make the right choice, for her and for the young man. Once the gene scans check out and the parents of both families give their approvals, then the bonding ceremony takes place."
"The wedding?"
"Oh, geez, Terry," Chan interrupted, with a bit more bluntness in her voice. "The term 'wedding' does not really apply here. You are always trying to put Odonan things in human terms. Odonans do not use the term 'wedding' since it is so different. The whole process actually has three steps, the third of which creates the bonding between the husband and wife. The first stage really just introduces the two prospective mates, and the second stage is a more formal ceremony in which the first elements of the bonding are applied. The two then start spending more time together. I guess you could call that the Odonan equivalent of 'dating,' although the result is more or less pre-ordained. The third stage is the final ceremony. It's a unique ceremony, done at special sites in the more remote regions of our planets. The actual ceremony is presided over by the yasuembanan, and the only two people there are the two going through the ceremony, and it climaxes right at dawn, with a special... event."
"Event?"
"What that is," Chan started, "is not something that I reveal. That particular ceremony is the most private thing in a person's life. It's as if two individuals become one. The bond-links with our parents and siblings weaken, and are replaced by the strongest bond-link we'll ever know, stronger than with our parents, and with our children. How they do it, why they do it, is all somewhat mystical, not typical behaviour among us high-technology Odonans, but it's our heritage, and we're proud of it."
"And when this bonding ceremony is complete, the Odonan woman has a husband?"
"Yes."
"Even if you don't like him?"
Chan shook her head just slightly, enough so that Clemsen would notice. "The whole purpose of the yasuembanan, the intermediate stages, the bonding ceremony and the rest is to match people who will like each other, who will grow to like each other and trust each other intimately. They do their duties very well. The matings are good ones. They have to be since Odonans do not divorce."
"But what if you eventually grow to dislike the person?"
"Then you live apart."
"But you're still married to him?"
"Yes, you could say 'married,' but the proper term is 'bonded to.' The telepathic bonding, at various strengths, is there. These bond-links are created to the people most important in our lives. How this bonding occurs, why it occurs, is a little mystical to us all. The yasuembanan control it all, from birth to death. They're almost like the priestly class without a religion to minister to. Anyway, the whole purpose of the bonding and the mating procedure is to produce compatible pairs of people to have and raise children."
"It still sounds so clinical and mechanical," Clemsen said, feeling uncomfortable at the mere thought of having to go through a process like that. "Maybe it's just the way you describe it." As he spoke, as what Chan had told him sunk in, he remembered one thing he had learned about Odonans. Of all the known races, Odonans probably had the highest rate of marriage among its population. Among humans, about eighty percent of males married at least once at some point in their lives, but among Odonans, the percentage was so close to one hundred that exceptions were hard to find. The only obvious exceptions were for those people who were incapable of producing children. That implied that the person sitting with him in these starship quarters was part of that overwhelming percentage of had married-and if they had married, they would still be married. "You have undergone that bonding ceremony?"
"Yes."
"What is his name?"
"Chung Hanh."
"How do you feel about him?"
"A great deal," Chan admitted, as she remembered her last meeting with the man. It was not all that long ago. She had explained to him that she was going to take a tour of duty as an exchange officer on a Federation ship, and he was not happy at all about it. Mostly, his objections were centered on the common Odonan conception that Federation starship commanders were reckless and incompetent, and that it was much more dangerous to serve on a Federation ship than on an Odonan ship conducting the same kind of missions. He was worried that something might happen to Chan, although he, as he had stated, was not too concerned about the relationships that might be taking place on the Alexandria. He would always be there.
"Where is he now?" Clemsen asked.
"He's in the Odonan Space Service too. Right now, he's posted Rembase Four, one of the outposts defining our border with Ksassan space. He is, however, requesting reassignment to a ship. Hanh's been static too long, as he likes to say."
"When was the last time you saw him?"
"Just before I came to Earth for my Starfleet-specific training. We were able to get some leave together and spent some time on Uma, which can be considered the vacation paradise world in the Odonan Empire. It's a wonderful place, and we had a great time together. Oh, we have our disagreements and so on, and at times, we have opposite views on how we want to proceed, but we work it out. For us, it's the only solution, and something usually does work out between us." Chan, of course, was greatly oversimplifying the situation, since the "something usually does work out" can take a period of time that even an Odonan would consider long. However, she saw no need for Clemsen to know more.
The man was beginning to realize that with each question he was asking, he was testing the limits of the patience in the woman, but he was always risking one more. He simply wanted to know. "How often do you see him?"
"When I get the chance. I was once in the Space Service, but then moved over to planet-based operations on Alfe Kree. Hanh stayed in the service. I don't know why I went to Alfe Kree, took that assignment. Maybe it was because the first time I went there, it was such a nice place, the original settlement, the people... oh, I digress. Alfe Kree is now, by no means, a nice place. We have the place on Odona that is in my family, and can spend time there when my mother and father are elsewhere, but we rarely get the chance. I was on Alfe Kree, and he was on a ship for awhile. Once in awhile, his ship came to Alfe Kree, but sometimes... not enough. He really hated Alfe Kree, and never agreed to join me there."
"Do you have children?"
"No, not yet. We have not arranged for that. It's a major commitment in time and effort. It takes a good fourty years out of your life, out of your career-out of you-to raise a child. Even for us, fourty years is a long time. It's something that we have to eventually do, although it can be done over a long period of time. My parents, for example, have never given me a brother or sister."
"You're an only child, the oldest?"
"Yes. Most Odonan children grow up as only children. Usual practice is to have one, raise that one to adulthood, re-establish your life and then have another. The only exception is twins."
Clemsen did not want the subject to get too far away from the feelings he was experiencing, feelings that were on his mind but he dare not let them find their way to his tongue. Listening to the Odonan perspective on love, marriage and reproduction left him feeling a little cold. It all seemed so cold, so cynical, so planned. Other things he had noticed about Odonans, or heard about them, included their emotionally cold, stoic nature. He simply could not visualize Odonan couples hugging or kissing-although he heard that this particular form of affection did not exist among Odonans-or doing any of the other signs of affection that had arisen independently on many diverse worlds. Clemsen had even seen Vulcan couples touching to each other, and talking among themselves in special ways, but Odonans did not even go that far. Seeing them walking together side by side was almost surprising in itself. It had been said that while Vulcans controlled and suppressed all their emotions, the Odonans only suppressed the positive ones. They could display anger, hatred, jealousy and others like those so easily, but they could not feel happiness or joy or love. It made for a strange and even unsettling race. At times, Clemsen had thought that Odonans simply needed somebody to bring out those repressed emotions. Of course, he had seen an Odonan up close for the first time only when Chan came on board, and he had seen the other side. He had seen her happy, and laughing and doing her best to fit in with a crew that was alien to her, but he had seen the darker side too, and it seemed much more pronounced, and it seemed to come much more easily. He recalled a sociology professor who taught at the Academy, and who said that now, the Odonans were peaceful, reliable allies and not an immediate threat, but they were capable of turning very quickly to a much darker side, at which time they could become a very dangerous adversary. Seeing Chan, Clemsen began to increasingly believe what that professor had said, although he could not be fully sure.
That Chan was married, and her husband's name was Hanh-he did not think too much about the different surnames, since that was likely an Odonan thing-bothered him a little bit. By his upbringing, that meant that he would have no position with Chan other than as a friend. He was not fully sure that was all that he wanted, or not. But whatever he wanted, it likely would never be forthcoming.
(End of Part 6)
