Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sometimes when you want to think big, it is necessary to begin with the very small.
—Scienscroll, Commentaries 8:55
After completing their outdoor survival training and a battery of preliminary classes, Tesh Kori and Anton Glavine were promoted to the School of Galactic Ecology on the orbital EcoStation. There they began more advanced studies, including Correlated Astronomy, Planetary Reclamation, and Eco-Activism. Tesh excelled in her studies, while Anton did acceptable, but not outstanding, work. Both of them were still only probationary Guardians, and could not become full-fledged members until they graduated.
During a lunch break inside EcoStation’s crowded automatic cafeteria, they sat at a small table by a window that afforded a distant view of Canopa, beyond wind-sculpted clouds below them. One of the cloud formations made Tesh giggle, since it resembled a corpulent Mutati, with a small head and a lumpy body.
Upon hearing her, Anton looked up from an electronic book that he had been reading. His eyes were bloodshot from staying up late the night before, studying for his first examination in Eco-Activism. He had been pushing himself, trying to prove to Tesh that he could keep up with her. She smiled gently at the thought of this mere humanus ordinaire trying to match her own performance levels, an utter and complete impossibility. Perhaps she should diminish her accomplishments, as a kindness to him. Human males, so competitive with everyone in their spheres, didn’t like to be shown up by females, and especially not by females with whom they were having relationships.
Several tables away, the scaly-skinned, reptilian Eshaz was deep in conversation with Noah Watanabe. On a cart beside them, Noah had brought along the nearly extinct alien he had rescued from Jaggem, the amorphous creature he called Lumey. Surprising everyone, and Noah more than anyone, Lumey no longer needed to be kept inside the sealed container. Perhaps in response to Noah’s loving attention, the creature had healed, and was now living off a variety of foods. At the moment, Noah had the case open, and was tossing occasional scraps of food inside. As each morsel arrived, Lumey slithered his body over it and absorbed it into his skin, glowing luminescent white for a few moments at a time during the digestive process. But Tesh was more interested in another, much larger creature. Eshaz.
The Tulyan, while an ancient rival of her own Parvii race, had not appeared to recognize her true self … the tiny person hiding inside. She had never heard of a Tulyan seeing through a Parvii magnification system, but it was said that they knew such devices existed. Although Tesh did not go out of her way to talk with Eshaz, she did not attempt to avoid him, either. She was not overly worried, since the energy field around her worked to conceal her identity from all galactic races, even defeating the most sophisticated scanners.
As she gazed at him now, he glanced suddenly in her direction, but only for a moment before continuing his discussion. He placed a hand gently on Noah’s shoulder, leading her to believe that he might be expressing his condolences to the Guardian leader over the death of his father.
This Tulyan was unlike others that Tesh had observed in her seven hundred years of life, in that he socialized easily with Humans and even ate their food in large portions. Normally Tulyans were insular, sticking to their own kind and the ways of their own people. Considering the cuisine of alien races far inferior to their own, they were fussy about what they ate and drank, too. Curiously, though, Eshaz seemed to actually prefer Human food—even the barely adequate fare of this school cafeteria. As for Tesh, she didn’t concern herself with taste in the least; she was capable of experiencing it, but enjoyed other senses more. She simply ate what was nutritious.
Based upon her miniature racial physique, one might think that she could only consume half a thimbleful of lunch. But this was not the case at all: she ate (or seemed to eat) as much as any other woman. In reality, however, almost all of her food was being diverted by the magnification system into a concealed food chamber that she could dump later, at her convenience. The chamber was much larger than she was in her natural Parvii state, and it occupied a space below the location of her true form.
Unknown to anyone gazing upon her, Tesh (like any magnified Parvii) floated inside the brain section of the image, with the shimmering light of the enlargement mechanism all around her. Her secret, comparatively immense food chamber became only a sac with the thinnest of membranes after she emptied it—so that whenever she wished to return to her normal size, the sac compressed to an object as small as a Parvii marble, which she could carry about in a pocket. Thus she could easily exist in two realms, and was able to shift quickly between them.
In recent days she and Anton had begun to make love again. After their passionate first encounter, he had refused to do it again for a time, telling her that they should develop their relationship more first. Assuming it was some misguided Human sense of guilt combined with gallantry, she had not argued. Gradually her seductive methods worked anyway, and his resistance melted away like an ice sculpture in the tropics. Human men, even if they tried, could not resist a beautiful woman forever. He had been a challenge—she had to admit that—but only for awhile.
Thinking of this, and of the sexuality of Human men in general, her gaze wandered over to the table where Noah Watanabe sat with the Tulyan. Engrossed in conversation, the Guardian leader didn’t appear to notice her at all. In fact, whenever they encountered one another in the corridors or classrooms of the space station he seemed to make a point of avoiding her. It was not simply disinterest on his part, either. To her it looked like considerably more than that, as if he had a strong emotional feeling about her—either attraction or loathing—which he tried to manifest as detachment. Whatever he felt toward her, he was not concealing it entirely, though, and she intended to pursue the matter further.
Another challenge.…