Antaska swayed, and the motion jolted her back to awareness. She saw a Verdante female about a foot shorter than M. Hoyvil approach, accompanied by two elderly Earthlings. The young female Verdante put a supportive arm around Antaska’s shoulders.
She spoke kindly to Antaska. “You poor thing! M. Hoyvil doesn’t understand that it’s all too much for you.”
Then she turned toward M. Hoyvil and spoke to him in a sterner telepathic voice. “Can’t you see she isn’t feeling well? It’s a big shock for Earthlings to suddenly be on an alien planet in alien surroundings. You should have prepared her better, but the damage is done. Can I take her to her room to rest?” she asked hopefully.
M. Hoyvil looked confused for a moment. Potat’s head stuck out of his jacket, watching but not speaking.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” M. Hoyvil apologized out loud to Antaska. “I thought that because you were used to the space ship, the residence wouldn’t be that much different. I’ll take you to your room now. This is my younger gene sibling, Ms. Chiiz, by the way.”
Then M. Hoyvil spoke to his sibling. “Ms. Chiiz, this is Antaska. And if she’s experiencing some kind of culture shock, I think it would be best if I take her because she’s more familiar with me. Also, I’ve got her small cat in my jacket, and she’s even more frightened right now. I’ll take them both to their room and then come right back.”
“Okay. I’ll see you later, then,” said Ms. Chiiz to Antaska.
Antaska noticed that Ms. Chiiz seemed more interested in M. Hoyvil’s new companion than in M. Hoyvil himself.
M. Hoyvil took Antaska’s arm and walked with her across the deeply cushioned red floor to the far side of the large family room. They entered a long, curved hallway lined with open doorways. The loud sound of many people talking at once was behind them now, and Antaska was able to walk steadily. But she was still overwhelmed by a feeling of smallness—like a midget in a giant’s castle.
After a month living on the spaceship, Antaska had adjusted to living in large, high-ceilinged Verdante-sized rooms. But the rooms in the spacious underground home of M. Hoyvil’s primary gene contributors, Master Meeepp and his mate Mistress Bawbaw, were several times larger than those in the space ship.
“This residence houses my entire family unit,” M. Hoyvil explained as they walked along. “It has rooms for my primary gene contributors and all their twenty offspring—whether they’re home or not—and more rooms for more than thirty Earthlings.”
It was impossible for Antaska to image how large the residence really was because it was built underground. There was no visible outside structure to gage its size by.
After a long walk, M. Hoyvil stopped and indicated two doorways across the hall from each other with a wave of one green hand.
“These are our rooms,” he said. “They’re like the rooms in the space ship but much bigger. Your room is right across the hall from mine. It’s an Earthling-size room for you and Potat. You’ll notice that unlike on the ship, there are no doors on the rooms–just doorways. That’s because there’s no possible danger here of alien attack.”
Antaska thought it would still be nice to have a door for privacy, but she didn’t complain.
We’ll only be here for a week, and I can adjust to their alien ways while I’m here, she told herself.
M. Hoyvil led Antaska to the door of her room. The top of the doorway was about a foot shorter than his head. He reached a hand inside his pocket, lifted Potat out, and held her up near his gigantic green face.
“Are you OK?” he asked the little cat. “I’m really sorry about what happened outside with that bird. I’ve never heard of a bird acting like that before on this planet, although they’re carnivores, and they eat insects. I’d have brought you in the carrier, or we could have taken a tube straight to the door, but I wanted to show you the park. Not many cats come to this planet, so I didn’t know that would happen. But you’ll be perfectly safe inside the residence,” he promised.
“I’m fine. Thank you for protecting me,” Antaska heard Potat answer him telepathically, but she pretended not to since she knew that the Verdantes didn’t allow telepathic females to travel in outer space.
Antaska walked inside the room and sat down on a cushioned Earthling-sized chair. M. Hoyvil ducked his head under the door to follow her in with Potat in his hand. He placed the small cat on the large circular bed. Potat’s head swiveled to look around at her new temporary living space. Then she dashed under the bed.
The corners of M. Hoyvil’s were lowered. Antaska knew that meant he was unhappy or worried about something.
“I’m feeling better now,” she said to M. Hoyvil. “I guess it was kind of a shock to see everything so big and so different. It’s the same way I felt on the first day on the space ship. I’m sure I’ll be fine soon, but maybe I should stay in the room with Potat for a while. She seems to need some time too.”
A soft, low growl came from under the bed, but whether it was a sign of agreement or of irritation was unclear.
M. Hoyvil crouched, lifted up the edge of the blanket, and bent his large head down to look under the bed. Antaska bent down to look too. She knew that M. Hoyvil’s powerful vision allowed him to see Potat clearly even though the tiny cat was trying to hide her gray and white body in the dark shadows of the far wall.
Potat was mesmerized by the phosphorescent glow from M. Hoyvil’s eyes, like big green leaves shining soft in her dim-lit under-the-bed hiding place. Now that she’d calmed down from her brush with the large bird, her fear was gone. But she was angry, and she felt a strong urge to sharpen her claws on something or someone.
He’s my new pet, so I’ll have to fight that animal urge, Potat told herself.
Instead of lunging for M. Hoyvil’s face, Potat rolled over and lifted up her paws to vigorously scratch the lab-created wood frame of the bed above her. After she got that out of her system, Potat tried to communicate with him telepathically.
“Stop doing that! You’ll ruin his furniture!” said Antaska, just as Potat was about to speak.
Potat knew that Antaska wasn’t surprised by her behavior after what had happened, but she felt responsible and guilty that her cat was already destroying her employer’s property so soon after their arrival.
M. Hoyvil lifted his head back up and answered Antaska.
“Don’t worry about it. All the furniture in the residence is self-repairing, just like everything on the space ship. Besides, this isn’t my furniture, it’s yours. This room is yours now, and Potat’s,” he added.
Well, in that case, … , thought Potat.
Her tiny claws resumed their rapid and furious scratching under the bed. M. Hoyvil dropped his head back down and looked in at Potat.
“Are you going to be OK? I know it’s a big change, but we’ll be back on the space ship in just a week,” M. Hoyvil promised.
“I’m fine,” Potat answered him telepathically without pausing from her destructive work. “I just need some time alone in a new place. You may go, . . . , please,” she added in an attempt at politeness.
Antaska still felt somewhat shocked when she heard the voice of Potat speaking in her mind. But after her experience on the trip from Earth, Antaska knew that she could no longer remain in denial about her telepathic abilities.
But I can’t let M. Hoyvil find out that I’m telepathic, or I won’t be allowed to go with him to outer space, she reminded herself.
M. Hoyvil had explained to Antaska that the reason Earthlings were valued as companions for space travel was their lack of mental telepathy. The Verdantes could be around them without having to maintain the mental barriers they used to prevent others of their kind from reading their innermost thoughts and to prevent themselves from hearing the deepest secrets of others.
These protective mental walls were helpful, but they had drawbacks. The walls took great effort to hold up. And when they were up, emotional coldness was felt by the holder and others close by. The presence of non-telepathic Earthlings reduced that coldness, which made them valuable as companions on long journeys of a hundred years of more. It took at least that long to travel to the far reaches of outer space.
So even though Antaska had understood everything Potato had just said, she acted as if she hadn’t heard anything. She began arranging her belongings in a cabinet built into a wall on the side of the room.
M. Hoyvil crouched back down and looked under the bed again. He could understand Potat’s telepathic speech but not as well as Antaska could. When Potat spoke, M. Hoyvil heard, “I fine, go, please.”
Because the Verdantes had only a limited ability to understand cats’ telepathic communication, they assumed that cats had the intelligence of two-year-old humans. But after Potat’s help in warning him that Antaska was in danger during their last voyage, M. Hoyvil suspected that there was more to cats than the Verdantes realized. He understood Potat’s message, at least part of it, and he stood back up.
Antaska turned and looked up at him towering in the Earthling-sized room at his full height of over eight feet tall. He could feel his hair brushing against the ceiling. M. Hoyvil could tell Antaska was suppressing a giggle.
Will I grow so tall that I won’t even fit in this room when we come back here after the hundred-year journey? he wondered.
Now that M. Hoyvil’s worries about Potat were relieved, he remembered something else he needed to tell Antaska.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but the human rooms in this residence don’t have their own bathrooms. There are large shared bathrooms at the end of the hallways—separate ones for males and females,” he said.
“No. I didn’t notice,” said Antaska.
“All the residences on the Verdante planet are built like that because one of our architects studied the habits of humans and concluded that you prefer to use the bathroom with others. He found that it’s some type of social custom when there are large groups of humans living or working together in the same building. I never thought much about it till now, but will that be OK for you?” M. Hoyvil asked her.
Antaska laughed. Then she said, “It’s not really what I prefer, but I don’t mind. It’s no problem, but can you show me where the bathroom is now?”
“I’ll take you over there. Then you can come back here and rest with Potat before dinner if you want,” said M. Hoyvil.
M. Hoyvil guessed that Antaska didn’t want to go back right away to the crowded family room.
“That sounds great,” said Antaska.