Serial, Kherishdar's Exception, Episode 12: An Ai-Naidari Universe

      The following morning, leading the jevi out of the stable…that was when I felt the Gate wind for the first time on this particular journey, cooling the fur on my face and ruffling the edges of my robes. I glanced toward the Gate, squinting into the sun. It was easily visible, of course; one could see it from the capital on a clear day. I think Farren must have told you its size? That each of its pylons was the length of several city blocks? And that it rises so high sometimes clouds obscure its arch?
      The Gates are an inextricable part of our society. Hearing my mother repeat ‘The Gates saved Civilization’ is one of my few clear memories of childhood. Dressing me for a day spent sitting with her at the receiving office where she conducted business: “Remember, Daughter, the Gates saved Civilization.” Every day, day after day, like a prayer. The Gates saved Civilization. Daughter, they still do.
      She would have cleaved to such a sentiment. Among us we say ‘everywhere is local,’ an idea we express in a single word: toverash. The idea being that no Ai-Naidari should be unable to obtain the goods and services available elsewhere, or speak a different language, or find themselves disoriented no matter where they travel. Many segments of our society are dedicated to enforcing toverash, from the linguists who carry language changes and accents across the empire to the Public Servants who ensure we have consistent naming and building practices. There are also Merchants specifically employed to find what is particular to different locations and enable their sale elsewhere, and my parents had been among these toverashi Merchants.
      I hadn’t thought of them in years. My evaluation had removed me from their care as a child, and I had not been sad to leave their world of things. I had been poorly suited to the meticulous record-keeping required by their work, and had been uninterested in their finds: what did I care if the pottery in some Second World city was especially lovely because of some local clay that gave it unusual properties? Such details felt trivial to me. All I noticed, or cared about, was the look in someone’s eyes when they looked at you. The way they moved. How that changed when they were aggrieved, or joyous. I could understand my mother’s insistence that the Gates had saved Civilization by giving us a unified culture while finding the particulars banal.
      And then, of course, the Gates had brought us you. Somehow I doubt you were what we had in mind when we spoke of that salvation.
      By the afternoon I’d reached the Gate and given my pass over to the Guardians. All was in order, and they waved me through, and for the first time I passed between worlds as an osulkedi, permitted and expected, rather than as a Decoration bending the rules to see to her lord, who had broken them. Just the air of the colony world brought an unwelcome rush of emotions, prickling the skin beneath my pelt. The heavier world-weight, the color of the sunlight, the alien smells in the air… this was where I’d become unmoored. Where ij Qenain had found his aunera, the ones so important to him he could abandon Kherishdar to love them. I wanted to hate all of you for it, but this was also the world where I’d seen Ajan saved from the inexorability of his death by your handiwork. Where Farren had first held me. Where I’d found myself comforting Lenore because, much as I hated to admit it, we had both loved the same man to the tragic end of those affairs: me, to his loss, and hers, to the loss of everything else.
      But I had survived. Farren had named me Courage. I could do anything.
      I could have sought lodgings. I supposed someone else might have. I wanted to confront my work immediately, so instead I rode boldly into the aunerai half of town.
      Even now, it still strikes me as strange that you should look so much like us. I doubt it ever occurred to the average Ai-Naidari that there might be intelligent species populating the universe, because obviously the universe exists that we might put our stamp on it. We are the pinnacle of civilization, evolving always toward perfection—how not? So to discover that other intelligences might exist, and that they might look like a shorter, furless version of us? It is bizarre. You should have been more beastlike, maybe. Or had more limbs, or two heads. Something. Instead, you look like oddly incomplete versions of us, like a child’s crude clay sculpture. Some people say that of course you do, because you, too, are evolving toward perfection. You are just further back in the process. Me, I think it unlikely, some kind of cosmic prank. You are enough like us to love, aunera, and unlike enough to never be enough.
      I’m told you think this about us, by the way. That it stretches credulity that we should resemble you so closely, because you existed first and so assume that everything else is a copy of you. Do you find this as humorous as I do? Because I do. And I wonder which of us is right.
      As before, the aunera I passed reacted to me each in their own particular fashion. Some stared. Some glanced and kept moving. Some didn’t pay any note at all. No one stopped me as I rode down the central road to the large building at its end. (You call this the ‘town hall,’ I learned later. But also ‘the administration building’. And ‘admin’, and ‘the front office’, and so many other terms that it took me a while to realize they all referred to the same space.) This time, however, I didn’t enter through some side door. Dismounting before its façade, I led my beast to the two aunera standing alongside the door and spoke the most relevant words.
      “Don’t you have a hitching post?”