A Walk Between Stars by Tyler Parsons

Author:Tyler Parsons
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Published: 2015-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next several weeks passed easily along.

I incorporated isometric exercise into my daily routine. It wasn’t easy, but I knew that my daily laps weren’t cutting it—I could feel my strength deteriorating.

Slowly, all of the games I played to pass the time dropped off my daily routine. If I wasn’t exercising, or chatting with Steward, I was watching the Manti. I occasionally pulled out the dice, but just as something to do with my hands while I watched.

Most of the Manti went along with completely ordinary lives—ordinary for aliens. Once I recognized the patterns of their daily minutia, they quickly became nothing special to me. The outliers were the ones I gravitated towards.

The Clean Freak of course; I couldn’t go more than a day or two without having to swing in and see how she was getting along. She was fun to watch because it didn’t matter that she wasn’t human. The thoughts running through her head were as transparent as if she had subtitled thought bubbles.

Crazy OCD behavior was universal I guess.

The Ambassador was another favorite. He was always entertaining various individuals, or throwing parties.

About a week to ten days after my first encounter with the Ambassador, I stumbled upon him polishing his fancy dagger again. I had almost forgotten about it. As it turned out, it wasn’t the last time I would see the dagger. I caught a glimpse of him polishing it or just admiring it every other visit it seemed. I liked it when he pulled it out. It made me think of my father and that old 1911. I swore when I made it back, I’d pull it out of storage and clean it up.

The secretaries were still doing secretarially stuff I suppose. I’d watch them on occasion despite nothing really ever happening there. For all I knew they could be planning to colonize Jupiter or some nonsense. But they still looked like secretaries to me.

I did have an incident last week that I wished to never repeat.

I watched a couple lounge about in private quarters. They had two beanbags pulled close, and as they relaxed they held arms, doing that tapping thing. After a while they stood and gripped each other in what appeared to be a dancing stance. There was some wiggling—not a dance I was familiar with.

A fleeting thought entered my mind. What if this was how they did it?

Once that thought flittered through, it took hold on me. And I could no longer look at these two and think that they were dancing. What I first thought was just a funny joke, quickly became the reality of the situation. They were copulating, I was sure of it. My first instinct was to reject the thought—after all, who was I to be watching this? But I could not deny it.

I froze. No longer wanting anything to do with this, but unable to move away in fear of being spotted. Steward said they didn’t care, but I just couldn’t believe they would be ok with THIS.

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