ABC’s of Okal Rel – A is for Amel. A main character. The ‘Prince raised as a commoner’.
“A is for Amel, one of the last Purebloods, a main character who was raised as a commoner and was very traumatized as a child.” – Angela
“And he’s really cute.” – Lynda
Source: ABC’s of Okal Rel on youtube (Feb 2013) by Angela Lott
In Feb 2013, for Lynda’s birthday, daughter Angela created the ABC’s of Okal Rel on youtube.
For my birthday in 2013, my daughter Angela Lott created the ABC’s of Okal Rel on youtube. So starting on my birthday this year, I’m using the video for a series of short reference articles about the ORU as part of the serialization re-reading project with Jeff Doten. Look for one a day, here, until we’ve made it through the alphabet.
What Angela is saying here is:
“I am going to use every letter of the alphabet and define one thing in the Okal Rel Universe for you, because it’s freakishly complicated universe and this is all you’re going to be able to handle in four minutes, I promise you.” — Angela
Ann waits alone for word from Ranar and Thomas.
Thomas hailed Ann on the radio as soon as they stabilized in normal space. “Are we sane?” he asked.
“I am,” she told him curtly. “How’s your passenger, Ranar?”
“Out cold!” Thomas sounded merry about it. “Our boy genius doesn’t have as much grip as he thought. But don’t worry. He isn’t comatose. Just not laying down memories. He’ll come around. I’m going in to dock.”
“Stay in touch,” Ann threatened.
“Or you’ll what? Report me to Space Service?” He sounded smug.
“Damn right I’ll report you if you screw this up,” said Ann. “You got an amnesty deal for this. That must mean something to you.”
“Maybe,” he drawled. “Or maybe I want to settle down on this side of the jump.”
Ann absorbed this possibility with a cold little shock, but he sent her the frequency he could be reached on, so she decided he was just trying to shake her up.
“Don’t talk to me to pass the time of day, okay, yellow buns,” said Thomas, taking charge. “Hearing us talk to each other in Reetion might freak them out.”
“You don’t want me asking questions,” she told him grimly, “you make sure I don’t have any to ask.”
The ensuing silence tried her sanity more than the jump had done. Thomas’ ship reached the station and was quickly swallowed up. Presumably, he had docked without incident. She continued to watch the station, but there was no energy transmissions. She switched from pop music to old Earth vintage and played “The Rite of Spring” by Stravinsky from twentieth century Earth, watching for signals from the silent mission box. The longer she waited the more the waiting nagged at her. She scanned for the expected transmission from the mission box, cursing Thomas under her breath, but the station proved impenetrable.
Reetion ship approaches Gelack space station in Killing Reach.
Ann’s rel-ship was a blunt-nosed exploration vessel known as a scout, with a built-in cocoon affectionately known to pilots as the slug, a device that distributed G forces under acceleration and boasted built-in life support.
She had to take her stretch pants off to benefit from all the hook ups. Her slug irised around her body, sealing her into a cushioned and monitored environment while her onboard crystronics downloaded a flight persona.
Ann launched and waited, listening to pop songs as she drifted away from the station.
“Thomas is go for launch,” a voice from the station hailed her by radio. “He has Ranar on board.”
The next communication was from Thomas. “Okay yellow buns,” he referred to her clothing preference, “we’re doing it for real the first time.”
“Let me talk to Ranar,” she asked when they had settled into their distancing run from the station.
“Here,” the anthropologist’s voice came back.
“When’s the last time you flew with your eyes open?” Ann asked.
“Never,” he admitted. They both knew it was necessary this time, because they could not count on there being revival facilities on Trinket Ring Station, but it surprised Ann to know it was Ranar’s first time.
Thomas chimed in. “I’ll hold his hand. Listen, once we bite—” one of many euphemisms for transition to reality skimming— “we’re only minutes from the jump, so stay close. If you don’t make it through with me I won’t pop back to find out if it was just because you chickened out.”
“Just kick up a wide wake, big mouth,” Ann gave him back.
“That’s my girl!” said Thomas.
“Fat chance,” said Ann.
Their ships did some last minute communicating to make sure their splicing fields were synchronized, then both pierced the skin of the space-time continuum. The transition hit like the insult it always was.
The psychological adjustment was the worst part. The whole concept of existing seemed ridiculous. Ann’s ornery streak came to her rescue — there was no way she was going to lose that leering idiot Thomas. He churned up a froth on high shimmer — the physical component of reality skimming — as he screamed toward the jump. Ann pulled ahead, then let him match her mix of gap and shimmer and was enveloped.
Ann inhaled like a kid at the top of a joyride as layers of reality tumbled about, reduced in her mind’s eye to the transparent skin of drifting jellyfish. It was definitely jellyfish this time, not dolphins. Then they were out on the other side.
According to prevailing wisdom, jump hallucinations were something the conscious mind slapped over the hole left by gap exposure. But they were very real to pilots who made jumps by clinging to their personal internalizations of them. Ann was eager to commit hers to memory. As she snatched at fading impressions, however, she was interrupted by an alarm.
Her flat stage confirmed that her ship’s flight persona had been wiped out by the potent dose of gap.
“Oh great, just great!” Ann moaned.
She called up algorithmic software, irritated by how fiddly it was, although she could still rely on voice commands.
Thomas barrelled heedlessly on.
“Will you stop!” she shouted, pointlessly. Communication was impossible at faster than light displacements. All she could do was observe his wake signature. At least it was distinct from her own, now. The two ships had slid harmlessly out of the wake-lock necessary to learn a jump. She buckled down to follow.
Seventeen minutes into Killing Reach, Ann was getting worried. According to the star map Thomas had put on record, they were about to run over the little Gelack station if they didn’t cut out soon, and even a near miss could quake it apart.
Not a polite way, Ann thought, to open a diplomatic dialog. Her nerves were on edge by the time Thomas dropped out of skim and she gratefully followed.
Ann’s jump hallucinations tend to feature aquatic scenes and creatures. She wonders what the Killing Jump will be like for her. Art by Jeff Doten.
En route to the docks, the next day, Ann was itching to ask Thomas about how he experienced the jump but knew it was a pilot superstition not to ask. To her, jumps were like plunging through water, sometimes churned by angry currents, sometimes packed with playful dolphins out to get her lost. Thomas’ impressions would be his own.
“You checked out my roster entry last night,” Thomas remarked. “What put you off?”
“Apart from it being you?” Ann asked tartly, and walked on.
“The record says you’ve got a high libido,” Thomas went straight to the point.
“But discriminating,” said Ann.
He lifted a hand and waggled it side to side.
“Looked up all my relationships too, huh?” she asked.
“That what you call your one night stands?”
“The answer is still no,” said Ann. Thomas looked exactly like what she didn’t want to imagine as a pilot’s future: prematurely old at twenty-five with signs of palsy in his hands.
“When we’re in that jump together,” he predicted, “you’ll appreciate my finer points.”
To make it through the jump Ann knew she had to surrender herself to his guidance. Some pilots even claimed they could sense each other’s feelings through the gap dimensions when their wakes merged, but Ann never had.
At the station’s zero-G hub, Ann enjoyed watching a handler fail to convince Thomas to put on a pearly white flight suit. Thomas preferred his embroidered vest, insisting it was good luck. He also refused to let them put an arbiter persona on his ship. He was still flying the ship he had stolen when he turned renegade, and he had painstakingly overhauled it to rely on algorithmic software alone.
“I let you put a persona in there,” Thomas told the handler, “and it won’t be my ship anymore. Besides, no arbiter nav-persona is going to make it whole through the Killing Jump. No AI has the grip for it.”
Ann checks out the casual sex roster for the ship but isn’t interested in what’s available.
Alone in her quarters, Ann considered resorting to a mood lifter, but taking drugs felt like admitting her emotional existence was no more than a by-product of biochemistry. She preferred to feel she had every right to be miserable.
Instead she invoked her stage. “Has this station got a casual sex roster?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
There were only two entries, both male heterosexuals.
The first was a bit of a production. He had a great body and gave her ample data to prove it. His medical record came complete with links to everyone he had slept with for years. A trophy collector if she had ever seen one.
The second was Thomas. “Needed,” his notice read beside a simple picture, “a willing woman.” His medical record was provided by default. The collection of anti-bodies suggested he hadn’t been celibate, but her own list of minor risk factors was half as bad. The shock was discovering Thomas was only twenty-five.
Ann shut the stage off without adding herself to the roster or contacting either man. “Show me historical images of Gelacks,” she ordered. “Specifically Liege Monitum and Ameron.” Both appeared wearing swords.
Ameron, the ruler of the Gelacks at the time of the Killing War, was a pale, lean man with sharp, pronounced features and gray eyes. He was dressed in an embroidered vest laced tightly closed over a white shirt and slacks. The Liege Monitum of his time was a woman, although you had to look twice to be sure because she was so lean and muscular. She had a darker complexion than Ameron, but was still light-skinned by Reetion standards.
Ann listened to one of the few extant recordings which was no more than a snatch of small talk captured, at random, in a corridor. The language spoken was English: one both sides had in common, if only as a heritage language. Ann’s stage provided a Reetion translation on a ribbon of streaming text.
Ameron said, “Have you no decent food?”
“Decent?” sputtered an unidentified Reetion of the old, pre-arbiter era. “We’re starving and you dare to complain when we provide you with the best we have?”
There was a thud accompanied by sudden movement and Liege Monitum’s alto voice ground out, “Speak to him with disrespect again and you will eat your tongue.”
Nice people, Ann thought.
Ann is into Ranar. But focuses on the embroidery studies when embarrassed to discover he’s not available.
“I don’t like the idea of you risking your life on the strength of that one’s grip,” Lurol told Ranar when Thomas had strutted off to entertain himself, “let alone his good intentions. He’s a dozen trips shy of a medical discharge.”
“I know,” said Ranar. “But he won’t be psych profiled or evaluated.”
“Part of your agreement,” Lurol muttered. She thrust her big hands in the pockets of her silly lab coat.
“It is my life to risk,” Ranar said. He turned to Ann, “And yours.”
Creamy hot chocolate, Ann thought, gazing appreciatively at Ranar. Well, maybe a little cooled off, but still rich and warm.
“Let’s find somewhere more congenial to talk,” Ranar said, suddenly, to Ann.
Ann thought, I’m all yours!
They picked up refreshments from a self-serve bar on Second Contact’s promenade and sat down together at a table with morph seating that conformed to their respective preferences. Ranar talked about Gelackology’s unfortunate tendency to be dramatised in shoddy synthdramas. He blamed romanticised ideas about Sevolites, in particular, for the dismissal of his work by serious-minded Reetions.
“Whereas real, ordinary, human Gelacks,” he insisted, “must be what’s left of Earth’s population. A beta colony that explored in another direction after our jump to Earth collapsed a thousand years ago.”
“I thought Earth got trashed in the collapse,” Ann said, hoping to sound knowledgeable.
“We don’t really know for sure,” said Ranar. “In the absence of reliable observations it is impossible to know which maths apply, let alone compute the range of the space-time disturbance on the other side.” He went on about the difficulties while Ann listened with her chin propped in her palms.
“I thought you were an anthropologist,” she said, during a pause. “You sound more like you study space science.”
“I did.” He smiled, self-consciously. “When I was a boy.”
Ann scowled. “If you are so smart, how come you took up a subject as obscure as Gelackology?”
“Ah.” He sat back, loosening up for the first time since she had met him, as if he was laughing at himself now. “If you really must know, I think I had a crush on Ameron, the Gelack’s Ava.”
“Ameron?” cried Ann. “But he’s a man!”
“Is something wrong?” asked Ranar.
“No! No, I, uh — are you homosexual?” Ann asked.
“Is that a problem?” Ranar asked, puzzled.
“No. I, uh, no! Of course not.” She scowled. “Do you think I’m some sort of retro nut case or something?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You just seemed…” he lifted a hand in a gesture of uncertainty, “upset,” he concluded.
“You’re the genius,” she told him narrowly. “You figure it out.”
He did, but it took a moment. Then he said, blandly, “Oh. I’m sorry. I hope a, uh, romantic interest in me wasn’t a factor in your acceptance of the mission.”
“Hell, no! You think meeting sword-wielding Sevolites isn’t more exciting than doing time in a group home?”
“Swords?” Ranar echoed, in a disappointed tone. And pinched his nose. “We know Gelack politics are — or at least were — neo-feudal,” he admitted. “Fencing might be an elite sport, or swords may be religious symbols. There are ample explanations that fall well short of dueling from horseback in hard vacuum!”
Ann blinked at his vehemence.
He exhaled with force. “I am sorry. But I am sick of people fixating on the damned swords. If the Gelacks are a threat to us, it won’t be because of the swords.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know!” Ranar lost his temper, which upset him more than it did Ann. “If I knew,” Ranar told her stiffly, “I could write it up for the record and go home.” He excused himself.
Ann sat alone a moment, then went back to her quarters to brood.
Thomas says Sevolites are just space-chewed, marginal spacers. Ranar has other opinions.
“I take the Second Contact mission seriously,” Ranar explained to Ann. “It ought to be self-evident that the black market is an ill-advised way to reopen relations with another human culture. Especially a potentially dangerous one.”
“Gelacks aren’t dangerous.” Thomas lit a cigarette. “They’re pathetic.”
If he is going to smoke, Ann thought, he could at least offer me one. But Thomas did not.
Ranar ignored the rudeness of Thomas lighting up, although his nostrils seemed inclined to pinch closed. “Have you considered,” he proposed, “that the Gelacks you’ve met may be living on the fringe of their society, no more representative of their kind than you are?”
Thomas blew smoke at him. “I understand Gelacks better than you. I’ve traded with them. They’re spacers, like me. Without arbiters to make up rules they’ve got to live by.”
“Arbiters only implement our rules,” Ranar corrected.
“Whatever,” Thomas answered him languidly. Then he perked up and grinned at Ranar as if he had caught him out. “Hoping to find Sevolites, aren’t you? Real, live super-pilots who don’t wear out flying.” He let smoke drift past his stained teeth. “You’re dreaming.” He gave Ann a meaningful look. “Like some kid hooked on a synthdrama.”
Thomas paused to cough. “Sevolite is just some dumb title. I’ve met one and he looked worse than I do.”
“You met a Sevolite?” Ranar cross-examined him. “Why haven’t you mentioned it?”
“I did. He’s the Trinket Ring station master. My contact. I just didn’t tell you how he goes on about being ten percent Sevolite like I should be blown-away awed.”
“Ah, yes,” said Ranar. “This would be man who agreed to arrange for me to meet with Liege Monitum.”
“Yeah,” said Thomas. “After he stopped looking at me like I’d asked him for directions to Earth. I tell you, this Monitum character’s mythical.” He blew smoke. “Gelacks are always going on about their gods. There’s a whole pantheon of ‘em from some never-never land called Fountain Court. ‘Cept Gelacks don’t pray to them. They pray for them to leave ‘em alone.”
“Including Liege Monitum?”
“Yeah, well, they’ll tell you there’s been a Liege Monitum, lives on Fountain Court, since the world began.” Thomas extinguished his cigarette against a callused pad on his left palm. “Gelacks call themselves Sevolites to make out they’re related to these so-called highborns way, way back. You know, like Hercules being the son of Allah.”
“Zeus,” Ranar corrected.
“Whatever.” Thomas dropped his cigarette on the spotless floor and turned to Ann. “I hear this station’s got a recreational pool, and Reetion women have taken to swimming nude since I was last hanging around lawful citizens.”
“Only if they’re nudists,” Ann told him, still put out because he hadn’t offered her a smoke.
“I’ll go see if I can convince some of ‘em to take it up,” said Thomas and strolled out.
The 2nd Contact mission’s team includes its leader, Anthropologist Ranar, and “brain mechanic” Lurol, who has history with Ann.
When she walked into the briefing, the next morning, Ann was greeted by an urbane young man. “Ann of New Beach, I am gratified that you accepted our offer. You are the best pilot Rire has on record!”
“Ranar, right?” said Ann, feeling better about the mission.
“Yes,” said Ranar.
He was handsome in an understated way, like an Oxford-educated Raja in a British Empire drama from the 20th century Earth repertoire of feature films that Ann indulged in for entertainment. His tunic fell from neck to thigh over matching slacks, a conservative style for Rire redeemed — in Ann’s opinion — by the exotic addition of a twisted braid motif for decoration. The pattern of the braid never repeated, but tumbled down his body worked in browns and reds evolving through a white phase into solid green dominance.
Ann snapped her fingers and pointed. “A Gelack motif!” she said. “Green is House Monitum’s color.”
“Uh, yes,” Ranar admitted. “This was copied from images we have of Liege Monitum’s vest braid. Of course, fashions may have changed in two hundred years,” he added, sounding wistful.
Lurol stood across from Ranar, dressed in the ridiculous white lab coat that was her hallmark affectation. Thomas sat curled up in a morph chair. The room’s central stage displayed an idle blue diamond interface.
“The first thing I want to know, Ann,” said Ranar, “is whether you can work with Lurol.”
Lurol stuck her hands in her pockets. She had a wide nose, thick lips and a lanky build with short, brittle hair that was perennially uncombed.
“My partner, N’Goni, did not give consent to be visitor probed,” Ann trotted out her prepared acceptance. “Therefore Lurol was right to withhold treatment.”
“But,” Lurol was ruthless, as usual, “I could have ruled N’Goni incompetent on the grounds of advanced spacer’s syndrome. I had the authority. But I truly believe he was of sound mind when he declined the visitor probe option. I had to respect his wishes.”
“And I did my best to break your face for it,” said Ann. “For my part, we’re done. You?”
Lurol shrugged. “You work with pilots, now and then you expect the odd assault.”
“Good enough,” Ranar decided.
“I like this guy,” Thomas told Ann, hooking a thumb towards Ranar. “He’s driven.”
Thomas, the renegade pilot, is premature aged by reality skimming.
As a pilot, Ann disliked flying cargo. But it was the regulation way to cope with reality skimming if you weren’t actually flying.
She came around in the sick bay of Second Contact Station still feeling grumpy over discovering Second Contact’s chief medic was the same one who’d treated her ex-partner. The same doctor she’d attacked, leading to her stint of Supervision. Dr. Lurol the brain mechanic, who had refused to listen to her when she begged her to revive N’Goni with her experimental visitor probe.
But it wasn’t Lurol who was with her when she woke up.
“I don’t know why you let them fly you cargo,” said a bizarre-looking man, seated on the pallet beside her. “Any ship I fly in, I pilot.”
Ann ignored the comment beyond registering he must be a pilot. “Be useful,” she grumbled, “and help me up.”
His grasp was both strong and frail at once, trembling despite a bite that hurt her arm. He was dressed in stained beige pants with a vest worn over a narrow, naked chest and had piercing eyes set in a face that looked prematurely lined. His hands reeked of stale smoke.
“Thanks,” she said, when she was sitting up, and scared up some professional camaraderie. “My name’s Ann.”
He nodded. “Thomas. Thought I’d tell you in case you haven’t looked me up. Gather you don’t do your prep work.” He grinned. His teeth were stained and the gums had shrunk back.
Ann, whose many faults included an inclination towards physical beauty, was repulsed.
“You’re in pretty good shape for a pilot,” he concluded, looking her up and down.
“Can’t say the same for you,” said Ann. “Who the hell are you, anyhow?”
Thomas whistled. “You really are info resistant.”
The smell of stale smoke he left in his wake was enough to make her think about quitting, which reminded her she had not packed her cigarettes and the station wasn’t going to supply them. Piloting was life-threatening enough. Maybe the greater risks inherent in their occupation was why most pilots smoked, in defiance of a lifetime’s health education.
As Thomas walked away, she got a good look at the back of his vest and realized the embroidery was Gelack — the term First Contact people used for the everyone beyond Killing Reach, Sevolite or otherwise. The needlework depicted a sword in the grasp of a well-muscled arm.
At the door, Thomas turned back. “See you at the briefing tomorrow,” he said, with a grin. “I’m the one who will be teaching you the jump.”
Ann felt as if she’d been slapped. Learning how to navigate a jump was a very nearly mystical experience, or in space psychiatry terms a function of dream-like self-consciousness. In either case, it called for sufficient trust to let your guide take over your rel-ship’s phase-splicing envelope and essentially pilot for you. Not something a girl wanted to do with just any guy.
Thomas didn’t inspire confidence.
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The Story of Okal Rel 