Kit headed out to the Throne Rock again, plopped himself down next to Cheleb and showed haem the box. “See these?”
And he took Cheleb’s clawed hand, turned it palm-upwards and poured a bunch of candy hearts out into it.
Cheleb poked them with a claw, saw that they had words written on them, and started examining them closely, one by one, reading the English-language sentiments via the Speech. “Oh my,” hae said, actually sounding shocked. “Quite intense.”
Kit was surprised. He’d been hoping for a reaction that would make Cheleb back off a little, but this was beyond what he had in mind. “Um, well,” he said, “this is sort of an important event.” Which was true enough.
But Cheleb’s long eyes went way wider as hae turned the hearts over one by one, gazing at them with some trepidation, as if they might explode if mishandled. “Seriously. Look at these! ‘Be Mine.’” Hae looked at Kit with an expression that suggested hae too was considering the ramifications of Speech-possessives as they applied to other sentient beings, and finding them as daunting as Kit had. And if hae’s projecting those concepts onto English words, Kit thought, that’s hardly my fault, is it? “And this. ‘You’re Cute.’ —And this!” And Cheleb sucked in his breath. “‘Text Me’!”
Kit was about to ask what was so dangerous about that sentiment, and then changed his mind. Don’t make haem tell you! Just go with it.
“And this one. ‘Be Good!’” Cheleb looked at Kit in a strange combination of approval and nervousness. “Most profound commitment to wizardly principles…!”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “And what these are for is to be… internalized.”
And he picked that heart up from Cheleb’s hand, flipped it up in the air, tilted his head back, caught it in his mouth and crunched it up.
Cheleb’s jaw dropped: not in his usual smile, which didn’t normally involve allowing his slightly forked tongue to hang out. This was astonishment. For his own part, Kit was simply relieved that he’d caught the heart without choking himself.
But Cheleb was still struggling for words. “And all must be internalized before…”
Don’t let haem go any further! Hae might just mean ‘before the use-by date’! Which would be true! “Yes.”
Cheleb’s jaw just worked for a moment. “Amazing,” he said at last. “Unique mindsets of other species never cease to astonish.”
“Cousin, that is so true,” Kit said, and had rarely meant it more.
“When finish internalizing them?” Cheleb said.
Kit concentrated on looking thoughtful. “Might take a while,” he said. “Can’t rush these things, after all— every one of them has to be given proper consideration. They have to be mulled over. The emotional context has to be right. And in a situation like this—” He spread his hands, glancing around them; the gates, the refugees, Thesba. Kit shook his head. “It can’t always happen as fast as you wanted to.” He kept his face very straight, very somber. This was something of a challenge, since he’d reached a point in the conversation where he wasn’t entirely sure what “it” was any more. And maybe that’s just as well!
Cheleb glanced at Kit for permission, picked up the box and poured the rest of the hearts it held into haes hand, reading through every one. After a while hae found one that said LOVE YOU and examined it thoughtfully. “Considering yesterday,” hae said, nodding one of haes sideways nods at the streaming-video display, “strange there isn’t one of these saying ‘I KNOW.’ Seems an omission.”
Kit nodded gravely. “I should write to the company about that,” he said. “I’ll make a note in the manual.”
Between them they managed to maneuver the hearts back into the box without dropping more than a few in the grass. Kit recovered them and ate them one by one, pausing over each for Cheleb’s benefit. One by one they vanished: ‘Rock On,” “Hold Hands,” and “Boogie.”
Cheleb looked bemused over that last one, apparently pausing to consult his wizardly Knowledge. “Part of nose?” hae said, looking a bit dubious.
“What?” At that point Kit was beyond being able to suppress the laughter. “No!” he said, when he was able to find enough spare breath to gasp the word out. “No, no. It’s dancing, something to do with dancing…”
“Oh. Relieved,” Cheleb said. “Know some species do go in for post-conjunction cannibalism, but seemed like unusual behavior for humanoids.”
It occurred to Kit that there were some well-known Earth movies it might be smarter to make sure Cheleb didn’t find out about. “Never mind,” he said, closing the box. “Let’s get this show started, yeah? I’ll put these away.”
Kit popped back to his puptent with the box full of hearts. And now I’ve got a problem. If I eat all of these, Cheleb’ll start thinking Neets and I are going to go ahead with the— He could hardly even think it with a straight face. The Impregnation Ritual. But if I don’t keep eating them, Cheleb might get suspicious. Hae might think I’m stalling on purpose.
He thought about that as he sealed the puptent up again. Well, I can make it take a long time to eat these. A really long time. If I’m smart…
Kit got back to the Stone Throne to find that Djam already had the frozen frame of the LucasFilms logo cued up and waiting on the floating screen. Moments later, under the blazingly starry sky of a world that (while in the same galaxy) was still far, far away from its birthplace, a great orchestra cried out the single triumphant opening chord of a defiant fanfare into an alien night, and the three of them settled in to watch the tale unfold.
For Kit there was something surprisingly comforting about this in the wake of the day he’d had—watching something much loved and reliable that had a known happy ending; and watching it with new friends who knew absolutely nothing about it in advance. It was like seeing it for the first time all over again. There were cries of shock and shouts of laughter and gasps of excitement and fear and groans of pain and anticipation and yells of delight (“Told you about ‘I Know!’ Told you!”). And then came the lines that always made Kit’s hair stand up on end: “You’ve failed, your Highness! I am a Jedi—like my father before me!”—and everything that followed: the destruction and the redemption and the final joy.
After the singing and dancing and the final glimpse into “a larger world” had blackscreened into the end titles, Djam and Cheleb sat babbling to each other and to Kit about what they’d seen for a good while afterwards. Favorite lines were repeated, disliked characters dissected. Cheleb got surprisingly heavily into the politics of it (“Empire apparently inherently unstable,” he said, “would have fallen to Rebel Alliance eventually regardless of Jedi intervention!”), while Djam remained most interested in Chewbacca, and became repeatedly and cheerfully scornful about the Ewoks (“What adorable dolts. Plainly the Powers have a soft spot for fools and fuzzy creatures”).
The long discussion pleased Kit for another reason besides his shiftmates’ evident enjoyment. He’d been half afraid that they’d immediately want to start another movie after that, and he couldn’t really get into it, which both annoyed and saddened him. But with the adrenaline fading down now after the film’s end, he was starting to feel wasted. Even though it’s not like today’s been all that strenuous… Still, there’s more than one kind of strain.
Kit wasn’t alone, though: Cheleb kept yawning. His gatewatch shift was more than over when they finished, and Djam took Cheleb’s report—not that he really needed to, for they’d all been keeping an eye on the complex-monitoring readouts while watching the film, and the gates been perfectly quiet and well-behaved all evening. “Go on, cousin, I see you’re tired,” Djam said, as Cheleb yawned yet again, more cavernously than ever and displaying teeth Kit hadn’t seen before. “This world’s day is closer to mine in length than yours, and I can tell how this is starting to wear on you.”