(Me) We were given a few smaller houses
at various places around the planet to use as posts. They weren't too spaceous;
they could classify as modest. Still they were more comfortable than the
crews used to [have] at home. Why am I recording this in third person plural,
I wish I knew. Alright, let it stay for now, I'll fix that easily later,
if I feel like.
Food wasn't bad either. They expected to be forced to feed on their dry remanufactured
garbage, diluted in cleansed water of their own production, or that they
may just starve if the first few get poisoned or ill. Instead, some mysterious
tekhne understood their wishes better than they would be capable of expressing
them, and served them the delicatesse of choice. The quantities were minutely
medically calculated, so there was never too much of anything, not a crumb,
but then they never missed that crumb. The mysterious rays, or whatever was
it that the cooks used to calculate the lunch, did not neglect changed moods
either. Each good appetite was rewarded, and so was the grumpiness. Aw, I'll
kill me of style. I composed better in school. Maybe the keyboard was better
indeed, this dicowrite thing... requires thinking up a sentence first, makes
you think more of how will it look, and less of what you will say. With keyboard
you always say it somehow, and look at how will it look later. Alright, let's
go on.
It was alike with washers, beds, talking with other posts. The apparata...
resisted the experience. There were, though, some levers to press, some tiny
wheels to turn, and that's where the similarity with the known ended. They
were in-wall, most of them, and there was no visible trace of nuts, locks,
hinges or any other way to open them. They either never broke, or were replaced
- there was no way to clarify where would it open if it needed
fixing. Even the sound emiting apparata had no visible speakers, and
the sound was not subdued as it happens when the speaker is somewhere inside.
Simply knocking fingers on the front (and the only reachable) board spoke
of accousticity, in the manner of the ancient wooden strings. Image transport
was similar - in some crevice there was a finely honed crystal, size of a
fist, which emanated a clear picture onto a spanned cloth. The cloth was,
then, a story for itself. We never saw such a way of weaving.
There was just no paper. We even gave them a sample from one of the small
notebooks from the ship, but the hosts nodded their heads away, mildly bewildered.
They didn nod rather strangely in the beginning ("like donkeys",
Hinema said),until they managed to have it look humanely. It's really
strange how gestures get different from planet to planet, even between different
places on the same planet.
The paper was thus given up; tried with cloth but it didn't take any sort
of ink. Eventually a stock of magnetic monofiber thread was found; that was
enough to record anything that may be important.