FIELD NOTES: The Wedding
On rocket fuel, roses, and learning to stay in the room. Love is strange.
I texted Thool first.
This is an emergency, I wrote. I need your help. Cousin landed in a senator’s garden. Diplomatic incident. Family is asking me to fix it. Don’t know why, because I have no qualifications for this.
I didn’t expect an answer, I never do anymore. At this point the messages are less about getting help and more about being the noisy neighbor who dumps trash over the fence out of principle.
What I did not expect was for Thool to forward the entire message, untouched, directly to Director Kross, with a note attached: Venn, get this off my desk. She won’t stop. I blocked the first number, she found a new one. I blocked that one, she sent a dollar with a message attached to it. Please. Solve her problem. I want the messages to stop.
This is how, after nearly ten years as a researcher at the IRD, I was introduced to Director Kross. A man most people in this organization describe with a specific mixture of awe and genuine fear.
He responded within the hour. Professionally. Efficiently, with a touch of military precision that made me understand immediately why everyone is afraid of him.
To everyone’s surprise, he flew out himself. Which could not have been standard protocol. Senator’s garden, diplomatic incident, someone of sufficient rank needed to be present, I thought. I was half right. The other half, which I found out later, was that he was curious. Apparently I’m the only person who has ever made Dr. Thool lose his composure in writing, repeatedly, on record, after Director Kross himself.
The fact that I also published a book without authorization, which prompted the IRD legal department to send very angry emails, nineteen official warnings, and apparently made the head of compliance cry, though that’s office gossip so I’m not putting it in the official record.
He’d read the book. He wanted to meet whoever was capable of all of it, and most probably wanted to punish me himself.
Kross is terrifying in the specific way that makes everyone in the room want to finish their sentence faster. Meetings wrap up. Governments cooperate. The diplomatic situation was handled before I fully understood what was happening.
Nobody warned me about the wedding.
My cousin, it turns out, fell in love with the senator. The actual senator, the one whose garden he crashed into.
They bonded over roses, which is the last thing I would have predicted given the circumstances. When he landed, he destroyed most of the garden. In a state of panic, in an attempt to conceal what he’d done before anyone noticed, he poured rocket fuel over what remained and set it on fire. I know. I mentioned he was an idiot.
What nobody predicted, least of all him, was that these particular roses respond extraordinarily well to rocket fuel combustion; a one-in-a-million chemical reaction. They didn’t burn, they flourished. They became, by all accounts, the most spectacular roses anyone on that planet has ever seen.
He also forgot to move the ship first. Which means there is now, on the grounds of a sitting senator’s estate, a rose garden in the shape of a spacecraft. It is considered a landmark. There are tours.
The senator found this charming. Love is strange.
The wedding happened on Theraxzhrta. My mother came. My aunt came. Assorted cousins, second cousins, one great-uncle nobody fully trusts, all came. Director Kross came too, and unlike most of the guests, he stayed well past the point where protocol required his presence.
I want to describe what it’s like to watch your aunt request a dance with the most feared man in your organization, but I don’t think I can do it justice. She asked. He said yes. They danced. I almost fainted at the very sight, and I have no further comment.
My mother, separately, told the Director he should bring me home more often. “What even is this Earth thing,” she said, directly to him, “she doesn’t want to visit.” He nodded like this was a completely reasonable diplomatic concern requiring his attention.
My aunt, having recovered from the dance, asked him whether the IRD’s dating regulations permit office romance. I genuinely don’t know if she was considering a career change or if she’d simply decided Director Kross was a candidate for something, on my behalf or otherwise. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Director Kross answered it anyway, calmly, as if this were a normal thing to be asked at a wedding by someone’s aunt.
Everyone wanted to know about Earth. What’s the food like. Do they really not know about us. Is there someone special. Every single relative asked some version of the last question, in different phrasing, with different levels of subtlety, none of it actually subtle.
I sat with a glass of something blue in hand, which is a Theraxzhrta specialty, slightly sweet, and about as close to a pina colada as a distant galactic cousin can get. There was no clean exit. I looked for one. So I just stayed, and the questions kept coming.
I’ve spent a long time learning how to set boundaries on a different planet. Apparently the harder lesson was different: sometimes there’s no boundary to set. Sometimes you just sit in the uncomfortable thing, and you don’t fix it, and you don’t leave, and you don’t pretend you’re fine either. You just stay.
Learning to feel comfortable about feeling uncomfortable: nobody tells you that’s a skill until you’re at a wedding on a planet you didn’t plan to visit, fielding questions about your love life from a woman who just finished dancing with your boss.
The wedding was, despite everything, genuinely lovely.
My cousin is still an idiot. He is now an idiot who is also a senator’s spouse, which feels like an outcome nobody could have predicted and everybody will mention at every family gathering for the rest of my life.
I made it back. Eventually. The Edinburgh ticket is long gone.
I came back with a new appreciation for Director Kross. And with the slow, slightly unwelcome realization that sitting in discomfort without trying to escape it might be the thing I’ve been worst at, on any planet I’ve visited.
Some things don’t need solving. They just need time, and a blue drink, and enough stubbornness to stay in the room.
— Kira
P.S. The dollar Thool received with the angry note attached has been reimbursed. I checked. He cashed it. The visa situation, and why getting back took as long as it did, is next week’s story.
I suppose it all sort of worked out. I am curious about the exchange rate for this dollar you sent though? What value did it have when it was received?