Thousand+ Words for Nov. 22, 2025

"Try her again," Savos Said. "It's been Three Minutew," said the Creature Curled Up....

Try her again," Savos said.

"It's been three minutes," said the creature curled up in a corner of the ship's navigation room. "Not time enough."

Her voice was light and full of breath; the lack of vocal cords made it difficult for her to speak in the English language. As often as not, she made the humming noises of her own language, but as often as not, the human crew members' poor ability to distinguish between her native sounds resulted in a belief that she had said x when she had said y. And of course, the humans could not answer back in Ghat. When they tried, it hurt Ahoda's ears to hear it; humans speaking Ghat sounded to her like the screaming of her planet's native jumping plants feeding--and this was not a pleasant sound.

"Ahoda, try her," the navigator said again. "The window for insertion is closing. If we don't make it on this go around, we'll have to wait fifteen days for the next opportunity."

"Fifteen days," Ahoda breathed. She uncoiled and extended her long thin body upward. She didn't really have a head; her brain and a concentration of sense organs--eyes, nose, ears--were inside her torso. Above it, where a head might be if Ghati had a head, was a sort of elbow with a tentacle-like limb extending down from it on each side. These limbs contained nerves that were able to function as an antenna-- and through which she could contact what she called, for the benefit of the humans, the Muse.

"Window close in seventeen minutes," Savos said, peering at his instruments. "Subtract fuel warmup and transfer, that gives us just about eleven minutes," he said, his voice rising in alarm. "Ahoda!"

The creature moved out to the center of the crowded room. "All right," she breathed. She started spinning her top limbs in a horizontal circle; they connected to her body through a seal and an exterior umbilical cord evolved specifically for the purpose of permitting the arms to spin in the way that Ahoda was spinning them. Inside each arm, organs made of nervous tissue were feeling themselves to be thrown to the circumference of the circle the arms were making, becoming compressed in that direction, and the green fluid that Ahoda's body used for blood was flowing toward the tips of her arms.

They rotated faster, and at a critical moment, the compression inside the nerve-tissue organs caused fluid within them to become magnetically superconductive. The magnetic field around the ship began to churn around her spinning arms. Ahoda perceived this as a spatial sensation, and as her consciousness extended past the hull of the ship and into the local group of stars, quark-pairs in the Muse's artificial brain responded.

In a moment or two, a communication was established across the gulf that separated the ship from the Muse, in orbit around Ahoda's planet, almost seven thousand light years away, without the bother of transmission time. "Plot...seven...four...seven...zero...seven...nine," Ahoda's breathy voice said. She hummed a tone loudly, a full-second burst, then the tone went up a perfect fifth for about an eighth of a second and down a major third for about a fourth of a second.

"Don't give it to me in Ghat," Savos said. "I can't distinguish--"

"I know," Ahoda interrupted. Her eyes were closed, sphincters holding thick doors of tissue over them from left to right on one side and right to left on the other. "Power...two...two, six, four," she was speaking faster now. "Duration is five, seven, seven, zero, and offset is eight, one, three, seven," she said. Her eyes opened as the arms started to slow down. "That's it."

"Excellent," Savos said as he pushed buttons to set the numbers Ahoda had dictated. "That's Plot 74707, Power 2264, Duration 5770, and Offset 8137."

"Correct," Ahoda said.

Savos double checked the numbers and then sat down in a highly padded, form-fitting chair and, reaching for a lever underneath it, extended it backwards so that he was reclined. Ahoda curled up as she had been before, in a corner of the floor of the navigation room. Savos began pulling straps from underneath his chair, pulling them across his body and fastening them to the other side. "So we'll burn for about ten minutes and then we'll take a look."

"That's right," Ahoda wheezed from her corner. She was not preparing herself for the launch; she didn't need to. Organs in her body would act to compensate for the acceleration that was about to occur. Savos, of course, would have to use the chair; if he didn't, he'd probably live through it, but almost certainly would break bones, depending on how he fell and onto what.

The duration number that the Muse had provided was the length of time, in seconds, that the engines would be on. The other numbers held no particular meaning for Savos, or even for Ahoda; they were simply preset codes entered into the ship's computers by the Ghati engineers who had built the ship and to whom Savos paid a hefty initial fee and continued to pay a monthly retainer for its use. He had finished strapping himself in and he reached up with his free arm to toggle some switches on the ceiling panel, which was now right in his field of vision as he lay on the chair. He read the numbers on the adjacent display. "Burn in five seconds!" He slipped his mouthguard into place, moved his arms to the armrest, and paused, preparing himself for the launch. "Two, one..." and he bit down on the mouthpiece. Ahoda looked up casually; she didn't have to concern herself with it, but merely had to wait it out.

Nothing happened.

Savos sat still, his eyes on the monitor, watching it as the colors inverted and the numbers started counting up. The inverted colors were supposed to be an indication of the activation of the engine; the count up was supposed to be engine burn time. He had preset it to 577 seconds, as Ahoda had said the Muse had directed. But--nothing. Savos waited; if there was some mistake, he didn't want himself to be half out of his chair and have the engine start up. Good way to get killed, that.

At twenty-one seconds in the count, the engine ignited and Savos' vision swam red with the acceleration. His last thought as he browned out was that he was glad he hadn't tried to climb out of the chair. Sometime later, the engine cut off, and Savos felt himself no longer pressed into the chair, although he was not yet fully conscious. He came to slowly, and finally opened his eyes. His immediate concern, even before he determined his own physical condition, was to check the engine burn time; if that hadn't been right, he would not be where the Muse had instructed him to be, where the Muse said he should be. He looked--the timer said 598. Not 577. Savos felt his heart rate increase, and then he had a thought: the timer had read 21 when the engines ignited. Five hundred seventy seven plus 21 was 598. Perhaps things weren't as bad as all that, then. A delay before engine burn might have been as a result of temperature problems in the fuel or nozzle pressurization or--

As this was running through Savos' mind, he heard a whirring noise and realized that Ahora was spinning her limbs. He slowly turned his head to look, and saw her there, body extended, her eyes closed. Then she started humming to herself in a complicated pattern, with whistles and clicks that he had never heard her make before.

After a few minutes of this, her arms spun down and her eyes opened.

"What is it?" he croaked.

"We're not where we should be," she breathed. "The Muse is very upset."