“Yeah,” Nita said. She was nervous about admitting that her memories of the debrief were sketchy. Bad enough that Irina had been dissecting their performance, but the presence of an outer Planetary in the conversation, vast, massive, and old, had left her feeling very small, nervous, and ephemeral at the time.
“So that explains it,” Jupiter said. “The familiarity. At any rate, when all that was handled, I said to myself, ‘They did very well on little notice and in a situation they weren’t sure how to handle.’ So when the Invitational schedule was settled, I thought it might be wise to drop by.” He shifted his shoulders a bit. “Though the business of handling the visitation can be a bit complex in terms of the physics . . .”
Nita watched him stretch, with a slight air of discomfort that reminded her of someone wearing jeans that were a size too tight. “Does it hurt for you?”
“What? How do you mean?”
“You’re so big, usually. And . . . there are so many different kinds of matter involved in you. Does it hurt being crammed down so small?”
“Oh!” He laughed. “No, not at all! So much of my matter’s empty space anyway, after all . . . I’ve just packed things down tighter than usual, locally. And left the rest at home. I mean—” He pulled the striped sweater away from him again, looked at it. “Clothes, that’s what you call these?”
“That’s right.”
“And you have others.”
“Sure.”
“But you wouldn’t normally wear them all at once.”
“Uh, no!” Nita laughed. “No, that wouldn’t work too well.”
“This is like that,” Jupiter said. “You wear one thing at a time. If I’d worn all my monatomic hydrogen to this do, there wouldn’t be anyplace for anyone else to sit down . . .”
Nita had to work at controlling her laughter again. “You said Saturn said something to you about—” She waved her bottle at the shirt. “Are you buddies? Well, wait, of course you would be, you’re only an orbit away from each other . . .”
Jupiter smiled. “A bit more than that. We’re dating.”
“Really? Wow.” Nita let out a breath of amusement, because since she’d said the B word to Kit, the whole issue of relationships seemed to be stalking her most of the time. “What does that look like for planets?”
He blinked. “Look like?”
“I mean, when you’re close. When you . . .” I’m about to discuss sex with a planet. Yes, this is my life. But her curiosity was getting the better of her, as usual. Nita cleared her throat. “I don’t even know what I’m . . . When you want to express it. Do you, I don’t know, get physical somehow? Get together . . .”
Jupiter’s eyes went wide. “You mean . . . touch each other?” His mouth opened, and closed, and opened again, until Nita was reminded of one of Carl’s koi. “Oh no. No, no, no, we don’t do that.” And then he looked embarrassed. “I mean, forgive me, I didn’t mean to sound judgmental, I know it’s normal for a lot of you, of course I know that, but the whole, uh, reproduction thing . . .”
“Sorry,” Nita said, “sorry, Jovie, didn’t mean to put you on the spot!” She was blushing harder than he was.
It was almost as if he hadn’t heard. “And as for touching, physical touching, oh no, no that would be very problematic, if we—you know, if our orbits—started to, you know, coincide at all, it would get incredibly messy, the gravity and the tidal effects and the radiation and . . . No.”
“Okay,” Nita said. And then she had to laugh again, because it was the only way she could think of to break the tension. While she’d understood that putting an alien psychology inside a human form could be exciting, because the form inevitably invokes its own psychology and tries to impose that on the indwelling mind, she’d never seen such an emphatic version of it before. “Are you okay? I didn’t want to freak you out!”
“No,” Jupiter said, calming down. “No, it’s just . . . well.”
“You should have seen me the first time I was in another body,” Nita said. “I was a wreck half the time, it seems like. Maybe because I wasn’t paying enough attention to it.”
“What happened?”
She took a moment to think where to start the story, and told him about her first times in whaleshape while being involved with the Song of the Twelve. Nita stuck to the technicalities of running a new body in a crisis situation, but soon enough she had to at least mention the emotional contexts, the blood and the breath of a new body, the feelings that came with it, the different ways in which it reacted to excitement and dread and desire.
Jupiter shuddered a little, the kind of shiver you might get during the middle of a really good horror movie when you saw the Slimy Scary Thing From Wherever sneak up through the darkness on the scientists . . . especially when you were safely out of reach of its ickiness. “That’s so . . . biological.”
The way Jupiter used the word sounded like someone trying out an evil term for a particularly kinky physical act. “Well, okay,” Nita said, “guilty as charged. But you must have a way to go about it that’s less biological.”
“Well, yes.”
Her curiosity was up and running. “So what do you do, then?”
“We resonate.”
It was naturally a word in the Speech: nothing in English could have produced the huge shiver of force and meaning that ran down Nita’s spine as Jupiter pronounced it. The single word bore with it a terrible weight of meaning, a long harsh deep whisper of what would have been sound if there had been any medium besides interplanetary space to carry it. Even through that, attenuated, distant, it throbbed, far-separated molecules nudging one another as its message transmitted itself through them. Nita felt like a gong that had been struck: the vibration, the message, the meaning shaking her, flesh and bone and brain, the blood in her veins and the air in her lungs, all vibrating together.
But not just with the vibrations of that one note. There was another note, somebody else’s, huge and message-freighted like this one. Bandwidth, Nita thought, dazed. Huge bandwidth. Radiation at a distance, heat, light, gravity, color: it all communicated, it all . . .
Resonated. He’s not kidding. She was still trembling with it and couldn’t seem to stop, had to put her hands up to her ears, then over her eyes when covering the ears didn’t help. Inside the darkness behind closed eyes she could still feel it shaking her, immense, long, old. But how could something that had been going on for billions of years feel so young? There was laughter in it, so much laughter! The agreement was laid down in curtains of radiation and reaffirmed across hundreds of millions of miles in slight orbital aberrations and gravitational perturbations that not even the most eagle-eyed human astronomer (except for those who were wizards) would ever recognize for what they were—two planets delicately and immaterially poking each other, stroking each other, fields interlacing at the greatest possible distances. Surface patterns changed, features appeared and disappeared as the two worlds wrote each other notes in their upper atmospheres, joked broadly by copying spots and stripes from each other, announcing their relationship across vast distances, uncaring if other planets saw it and rolled their eyes. Some features—the Great Red Spot, the Hexagonal Jet Stream—hadn’t gone away since an initial early declaration of relationship, around the time humans first started paying close attention to the sky with instruments better than the naked eye. Now the features were more complex than they had been, true. The dance of hydrogen atmospheres and organic chemistries around the borders of the markings had grown fainter and more nuanced: but each of the two great planets was still more or less wearing a tattoo of the other one’s name on its forehead.