“So this is your ship?” Grace asked. Two locks of her bangs were curling up and waving in the air toward the shuttle like the antennae of the full-blooded Uryuoms. Tess nudged that fascinating phenomenon aside for later investigation and replied,
“No, it’s just a ship’s longboat.” That was the closest concept Uryuomoco had to shuttle. “Good for going up and down between a planet and an orbiting ship, but it would have a hard time going just as far as the next planet in your solar system, and coudn’t go to another solar system at all. Our real ship is up in orbit. If we stayed until... um... around an hour after dark, you could see it overhead looking like a fast-moving star.”
“Neat!”
“Well, come aboard, everyone,” Tess added as the shuttle hatch opened and the stairs extended to the ground. “Our pilot, Justin, will explain the safety features and we’ll help make sure you’re all buckled in before he starts the takeoff checklist.” (The word she used in Uryuomoco to describe Justin’s pilot role normally referred to a ship’s helmsman; she tacked on an augmentative suffix, more to be impressive than because she thought it was really needed for clarity.)
Tess wound up, not by a conscious effort, sitting next to Grace. Her grandfather, whose untreated aging required extra precautions to go through takeoff acceleration safely, was immersed in an acceleration gel pod (usually used for the severely injured), with Susan, the survey team’s medic, next to him. Co-mayor Levolg and Grace’s mother Decokfymo sat with with Sarah and Nanase. When Justin took off, Tess watched Grace’s face for her reaction. Grace’s hair-antennae quivered excitedly and her face took on a look of shock followed quickly by glee as the ship rose through the atmosphere. (There were no windows, but while Justin was going through the checklist, Tess had shown Grace how to bring up a hologram view of the exterior.)
“This is so neat!” Grace enthused. “How fast are we going?”
“Here,” Tess said, and manipulated the holo-display to show the shuttle’s velocity and acceleration. “We’re going a kilometer and a half per second and constantly going faster. By the time we get free of your planet’s gravity...”
Tess had promised Grace, Levolg, and Decokfymo a tour of the ship (after clearing it with Captain Dunkel), but their first stop after decontamination was the nanite tanks.
“You’re sure you just want a simple rejuvenation?” asked Dr. Raven.
Dr. Sciuridae nodded. “I experimented enough with different body types when I was young. A young, healthy version of this is all I need.”
Susan set up a privacy screen for Dr. Sciuridae to undress behind, and Dr. Raven began programming the tank.
“What else can you do with the nanite tanks besides make someone young or heal them when they get hurt or sick?” Grace asked.
“You can change your body in all kinds of ways. If you’re staying the same size and changing only a little, like making your hair or skin a different color, you can be in and out in an hour. If you want to change something that affects every part of your body, like your sex, it can take almost a day, again assuming you’re not making yourself bigger or smaller. If you want to get bigger or smaller... well, I think the record is ninety-eight days when someone used a specially built tank to change themselves into a blue whale.”
Levolg made a gesture with their antennae that Grace’s language implant interpreted as the equivalent of a nod. “If we want to get bigger or smaller, it takes longer than regular shapeshifting, and we have to eat or poop extra for a time.”
Tess reflected that a shapeshifting species might have a head start on discovering the law of conservation of mass. One more item on the long list of topics to investigate...
Grace looked speculatively at the other nanite tanks. “Could I maybe use the tank while I’m up here, too? See, I can’t shapeshift as much as my Uryuom parents and siblings. I only have about three forms I can shift between, and it’s harder for me to shift than for them, so I don’t shift all that much.”
“Of course,” Captain Dunkel said as she walked into the room. Tess figured she’d been listening to the converation through her ear implant while she walked here; she’d evidently gotten the Uryuomoco language patch for her language implant. “Just let Dr. Raven know what you want.”
“I’ll think about it,” Grace said. “There’s so many things I’d like to try!”
They continued the tour, Captain Dunkel leading the way and doing most of the talking for a while. Tess again found herself distracted, this time by thoughts of Grace taking on various forms. Lighter or darker, heavier or more muscular or leaner, different hair colors and lengths, other sexes, different sizes...
The tour finished up on the bridge.
“And there you have it,” said Captain Dunkel, gesturing dramatically. “Any more questions?”
“If you don’t mind,” Levolg said, “we’d like a quiet place to rest, eat and discuss what we’ve seen. I understand it will take a few hours for David to be rejuvenated, and we can’t return home until after that?”
“Circe, how long is Dr. Sciuridae’s rejuvenation going to last?” Captain Dunkel asked.
“Another sixteen and a half hours,” Circe replied in Uruomoco, popping up a hologram of her face and startling Grace and the other guests. “He’s six kilograms underweight, and suffering from several mineral deficiencies, probably due to different amounts of various elements in Gollu’s crust compared to Earth’s. Not a large difference, but over thirty-one years, it adds up to several serious health issues. Grace, Dr. Raven wants to see you soon to figure out if you have the same deficiencies or if your partial Uryuom heritage has protected you from that.”
“Oh!” Grace said. “I haven’t ever been very sick. Not like Grandpa.”
“Then you’re probably okay, but Dr. Raven wants to check you out anyway. There’s no hurry; you can rest and eat with your mother and Levolg first if you want.”
“Okay,” Grace said, glancing at her mother. “I guess I’ll do that.”
After showing the guests to a room where they could have some privacy to eat and talk, Tess returned to her work, analyzing the data they’d collected in Grace’s village and collating it with the data Circe’s drone swarm had been gathering in various places around Gollu. At first she was distracted by thoughts of Grace, but after fifteen minutes of looking over Circe’s chemical and genetic analyses of some of the more common plants and animals, she got engrossed in the science and became sharply focused. Some hours later, she was startled when Circe popped up and said, “Tess, Grace is outside your quarters and would like to talk with you.”
“Oh! Open the door, please.” Her heart was pounding, she realized. It slid open as Circe’s face disappeared, and Tess said to Grace, “Come on in,” in Uryuomoco.
Grace stepped in and said, “Hi. I, um, I wanted to ask your advice about what to change into when I go in the nanite tank. What do you usually use it for?”
“Well,” Tess said, “when I’m using it for fun, I usually just change my sex without changing my mass or height very much. I figure I’m female about sixty percent of the time, male about twenty-five percent and various designer sexes, or a mix of different sexes, around thirty-five percent.”
Circe’s voice sounded in her ear, but her hologram didn’t appear. “Do you want updated statistics to give her?”
“No, thanks,” Tess subvocalized, and added aloud to Grace, “And then for work, I’m usually changing into a tougher-skinned form with nicitating membranes that is less likely to suffer injuries from lab experiments going wrong. Although I still wear protective gear. Belt and suspenders,” she added in English, realizing too late that Uryuomoco didn’t have a close equivalent idiom. “I mean, I like to take extra precautions... uh, like using two different tethers tied to different trees to keep your felco from wandering off.” She realized she was babbling on irrelevantly and added quickly: “And sometimes I take on a form that can breathe water to explore lakes or oceans on different planets we’re surveying.”
“That would be so cool!” Grace said. “Can you explain more about the different sexes? I know Mama was female, and so am I, when I’m in this form, and Grandpa is male, but you mentioned something about designer sexes?”
“Oh, right. Well, before the nanite tanks, humans basically came in three types, with the first two about equally common and the third a lot rarer: male, female, and intersex. But after the nanite tanks came along, and especially after using them to modify yourself in unusual ways became more socially acceptable, people started inventing new sex organs or configurations of the traditional ones, and designing body and facial types to go with them, and new ways to combine both the new and traditional ones that didn’t occur in naturally-born intersex people. Dr. Raven can tell you more about how that happened, I mean about how it gradually became acceptable and then became a popular fad for a decade or so and then dropped off again to where only people who aren’t satisfied with male or female bodies and variations and combinations of them use designer sexes. All that was before I was born.
“Anyway, I like being gative fairly often, or a mix of gative and female, and I have a special fondness for prash, which I invented myself, although after wearing that kind of body almost half the time in the first couple of years after I invented it, I found I usually prefer female, male or gative. And in my teens, I tried over fifty sexes at least once, but most of them only for a day or two; there are another three sexes that I liked enough to come back to once in a while.”
“Okay,” Grace said, after silently processing that for a few moments. “I want to be prash.”
“But — I haven’t even explained what prash is yet —!” Tess felt her face getting hot.
“It must be interesting,” she said. “Maybe you can tell me more about it on the way to the clinic?”
“S-sure,” Tess said, getting up and leading the way.