Settling in at the frontier outpost for Kirk and Dixon Shipping on Ventana 5 was quite an adjustment – I THOUGHT I was used to the frontier life because my partner Rufus Dixon and I had been shipping to it and through it for decades.
Dix did warn me, though.
“Mark, get ready. Not even your Cousin J.T. gets this to the extent you're going to have to get it. It's one thing to explore the frontier, and one thing to ship to it. It is a totally different thing to live where humans and humanoids are by no means the majority or even a plurality. Because I have been a bachelor all this time up to meeting Khadijah, my life is not as human-humanoid centered as yours, because you have a family and a family circle on Earth that you live around – so it is going to be an adjustment. Get ready.”
As usual, Rufus Dixon knew what he was talking about.
Now, being a Captain Kirk – if not THE Captain Kirk, but a younger cousin to J.T. – means that you roll with the punches. I talked with and worked with every sentient being that came to me, keeping in mind that as a human I was more of an honored guest because of the value Kirk and Dixon Shipping brought to the frontier for everyone – a compensation for having humans where they naturally did not belong.
Space is big and there are plenty of planets humans want to live on that others don't, and planets are big too, but still: Kirk and Dixon Shipping and Kirk, Dixon, and Oahuapedal Solutions are goodwill ambassadors that play a necessary role in the other races of the galaxy simply not running us humans all back home. By the time I was 43 years old, and had been in business 25 years, I understood that.
Yet this is why I could not tell anyone I was meeting how often I prayed for just bipedals – not even humanoids – but bipedal sentient beings to work with. I felt that alone and outnumbered on Ventana 5 during the workday.
Fortunately for me, Dix's friends among the native Ventanans sort of adopted me – Vivaleshoom and his family and friends were giants by human scale, but still roughly humanoid, although from their perspective, humans were small Ventanoids. On the frontier one did not argue such points, of course. I was glad for the company, and to be in a family setting, because after 19 years of faithful marriage, that was all I was used to.
Giants know giants, and there were a lot of them on the frontier – such as Buddiin, the 60-foot individual you see above. I got a referral from Vivaleshoom to Buddiin for a shipping job, and I liked him immediately – a giant with two apparent smiles and a gem of a personality, earnest, straightforward, pleasant, and hilarious.
Owing to Buddiin's prepossessing size and coloring and correspondingly impressive voice, I of course assumed he was male, but was careful not to assume it, because the diversity of how life continued itself on the frontier often did not break down across those lines. Case in point: Buddin's bigger smile was actually giant gemettes sitting in the parental skull matrix, just as they were growing on other parts of that immense semi-crystalline body:
My new friend was pregnant, but that was just a time of life issue: at maturity, Buddiin's race just starts growing new life crystals that at the appropriate time would use up all the matrix their parents' body provided them and grow on to maturity while their parent would return home to die and become part of the Great Matrix material of their homeworld.
One can see that Buddiin's children were formed with their little gemette buds already part of their features, waiting for them to reach mature age.
Buddiin was in early middle age, still with about thirty or so years to live and nourish those gemettes, and was glad to tell me all about how it all worked by comparison to human-humanoid gestation processes. I sat there and I thought about how I carried my family in my head too … at least in my mind.
I was so homesick I was depressed, actually.
Buddiin helped me snap out of it, without knowing.
“All good parents are alike, no matter how far we travel. It would be far easier for me to return to the Great Crystal Matrix and live out my life with my children, but the galaxy is changing, and we have to do what we have to do so our gemettes live the best and most righteous life possible.”
Me shirking my responsibility would of course not provide the best and most righteous life for my “gemettes,” so I had to Kirk on up at that point.
Buddiin became my friend from the frontier in the same way Vivaleshoom had become Dix's friend – I looked at the gemettes on Buddiin's head, thought of my family, and realized I was not alone. Anywhere that parents loved and wanted the best for their offspring, and could work toward that in a way that brought benefit to all creatures fairly and squarely, I would never be alone. Some things were not matters of the form of the being: some things were matters of the soul, and the spirit. When I settled in with that fact, I made the adjustment I needed to in order to hold my responsibility on the frontier down.
This is another pure fractal, made in Apophysis 2.09, with clear smaller versions of the original that are just "buddin" out all over...
