Page 35 of Scales of Time

He looked at her closely, wiped her tears, and nodded. “Yes, but I want to hear about your family.”

She nodded. “Sure.”

Essan kissed her cheek and whispered, “It’s important for the archive. Any characteristics that our children have that are not Hmrain must be explained. So, we need to know everything about you.”

She nodded. “Got it. It isn’t a very interesting history.”

“Interesting or not, we need to know about your people, your history, and your traditions.”

“Oh, um, they are different from Kifessan.”

“Obviously. I am eager to hear points of commonality.”

“Oh, there are gifting events, celebrations of the change of seasons.”

“We have some of those.”

“I would say birthdays, but my years differed from those here, so they don’t line up.”

“We will work that out.” He smiled. “I will find your information in your file.”

“It’s not a big deal. If you want to mark the day, you can use the day I landed here.”

He nodded. “I will consider it. Are you really interested in farming?”

“Yeah. My family has a history of farming, and I did a genealogy project. For every five farmers, there was one dancer.”

He smiled. “You do move very well and are surprisingly limber.”

Kris wrinkled her nose. “We have a room full of people watching.”

He raised his brows. “Do we?”

She turned her head and blinked. The room was empty. “You have to show me that hand signal.”

Essan kissed her and got to his feet. “Come on. We are going to go for some exercise, and then, we will return to Yorness’s house for dinner.”

Before she could comment, he picked her up in his arms and walked out the front door of the palace. He kissed her and launched skyward.

“Where are we going?”

“We are going to investigate agriculture, and you will learn how things are done here. We use techniques from many worlds, from manual labour, where the practitioners are meditative, to automated planting and harvesting. We have a few hours, and I thought it would be a nice change of pace for you.”

“As opposed to you trying to drain me and being sadly unable to?”

He chuckled. “Yes. Your bottomless capacity for pleasure explains quite a bit. Your species contains treasures that we haven’t experienced before.”

“We just increased the odds. Now, we are being used as planet fillers because we are astonishingly prolific as long as complete and caring medical assistance is available for the pregnant females. For some of my kind, that is a first.”

His wings beat slowly, and he nodded. “That is a manual farm. It is to teach children where food comes from and how it has been in the past and on other worlds.”

She looked and blinked at all the demonstrated types of farming that she could imagine.

“First, we have aquaculture. The Kif were originally semi-aquatic.”

He settled next to a massive tank that was being fed by a small waterfall through a series of tiers that the fish were swimming in. The smallest were at the bottom, climbing when they were larger.

“That is so neat.” She smiled and looked at the tiny rainbow-coloured fish in the lower pond area of the container. It was the size of a skating rink and about twenty feet high. There were stairs up inside the enclosure to reach the levels she had seen as Essan descended.

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