The Arm Shake

Greetings again, my dear readers. Lu'kifær Morkinstar, Journal Entry #2269, fifth of nine from the Killuga System.

Twenty-four entries ago, on Exxobar, I made a throwaway joke. I was describing a young woman waking up in the arms of a stranger and freaking out, and I wrote, in parentheses, that this would not have happened to her in the Killuga System, "where cuddling a stranger is their form of an arm shake."

That got more mail than the rest of the entry combined. Most of it was people asking whether it was true.

It is true. It is also not what I said it was, in any respect, and I have now been on Killuga Var for a momenta and I would like to walk it back with both hands.

First: "arm shake" is the Directory's term, not the Killugans'. The Directory's term comes from a survey report filed 40 clicks ago by an officer who was hugged on the landing pad, hugged again at customs, hugged a third time by a customs official's supervisor who had come out specially, and who then filed the whole business under Greetings, physical, handshake-equivalent and went to lunch.

(Regular readers will recognise the pattern from my Marlt correction two entries back. I am beginning to think the Galactic Directory is less a census than a very large pile of first impressions. I say this with love. They pay for the ship.)

And here, my dear readers, is another point for the Template Hypothesis, and I am going to enjoy this one. A surveyor panics on a landing pad, reaches for the nearest box on a form drawn up once and never revisited, and forty clicks of Killugans get filed under Greetings, physical. That is not a fact about Killuga Var, that is a fact about the paperwork, and I am adding it to the pile.

Second, and this is the entry: it is not a greeting.

Killuga Var is the fourth planet of Killuga, warm, dry, extremely orange, Category 3 with an unusually good handle on metallurgy. The Directory calls the people Killugans. They call themselves Ombri, and that is a possessive form, which the rig renders roughly as "Ombra's", the way you might say a dog is somebody's.

They run hot. Killugan resting surface temperature is well above the galactic median for bipeds, high enough that Directory medics assume fever on first contact and Killugan medics have a standing joke about it.

And when you meet one, they take hold of you. Both arms, full contact, chest to chest, and they hold, and they count. Eleven. Out loud, usually, under their breath, and if you know what you are listening for you can hear it: avn, dur, treskh... all the way up.

I assumed, as you would, that eleven was ceremonial. A lucky number. A liturgical thing.

Eleven is how long it takes.

Here is the legend.

Many milgalaxals ago, in the age the Ombri call the Wearing, the world of Killuga Var was held between 14 gods and 14 monsters.

(Fifth world. Third system. I have stopped counting out loud. The page at the back of my logbook is now most of a page.)

The god is Ombra, keeper of the hearth and of recognition, which on Killuga Var is a single portfolio and always has been. The monster is Grin.

Grin wore people.

Not possession, which I have reported from a dozen systems and which is frankly a tired genre. Grin made copies. If Grin could see you, Grin could be you: your face, your gait, the way you hold a cup, the specific bad joke you make when you are nervous. Every renditon is emphatic that Grin got the memories too. A worn Killugan would walk into their own home and greet their own children by name and know which one had been sick last winter.

And the original would be gone. Not killed anywhere the story can show you. Just no longer the one in the house.

So the Ombri did what any sensible people do. They built tests.

They built a lot of tests, and the legend goes through them one by one, and it is the most oddly modern passage in any myth I have collected in this system. Passwords: Grin heard them. Family questions: Grin had the memories. Tattoos and brands and marks: Grin copied the skin. Councils of elders convened to devise better questions: at least two of those councils, in the telling, turn out to have been mostly Grin, sitting there, helping to design the screening.

[Fun Killuga Var Fact #7- The Ombri word for "committee" and the Ombri word for "infested" are the same word. They are aware. They think it is extremely funny. They have a whole comedic tradition built on it and I did not understand a single joke in it until somebody explained this to me, at which point I understood all of them at once and laughed for about a minute. Which mostly just proves I am about four thousand clicks behind local humour at all times.]

Every test failed, and they all failed the same way: they tested things that can be observed. And Grin is a thing that copies whatever can be observed.

Ombra's answer was to stop looking.

Ombra told them: do not ask. Do not check the face. Take hold of the person and hold them, skin to skin, and count to eleven, and if they are still warm at eleven then they are yours.

Because Grin is cold. A worn body is a worn coat, and a coat does not make heat, it only keeps it, and eleven seconds is how long a Killugan-sized volume of borrowed flesh takes to start giving itself away against a living chest.

That is the whole test. That is the entire greeting protocol of a planet.

The legend does name one ordinary Ombri from that very first count: Ædri, who held a neighbour at the hearth and felt the cold arrive at eleven, and who did not let go. She was nobody's hero, just the one who happened to be holding on when it happened. And she had the presence of mind, afterwards, to write it down on the same hearth-stone, which is now the first line of the public ledger of cold holds.

And the cost, because there is always a cost, and by now you know the shape of it if you have been reading these entries in order: Ombra split himself in two.

One half he put into the blood of every Ombri alive, which is why they run hot, which is why the test works at all. Every Killugan walking around today is carrying half a god at about four degrees above the median, for the sole purpose of being detectable as themselves.

The other half went after Grin.

And here is where this legend does something that the four before it did not do, and it is the reason I told you at the end of my last entry that this was not going to be funny.

Ombra lost.

There is no triumph in the Wearing. The second half of Ombra went out and did not come back and Grin was not killed, sealed, bound, banished, or diminished. The legend says so plainly, in the flat way these things are said when nobody involved has the energy to dress it up: and the other half of him did not return, and the cold thing was not caught.

Which means the greeting on Killuga Var is not a memorial.

It is a screening protocol, and it has been running continuously, on every individual, at every meeting, for four thousand clicks, because it was never switched off, because the thing it screens for was never found.

Every hug you get on that planet is a live security check. They hugged me at the pad. They hugged me at customs. The customs supervisor came out specially, exactly as she did for that surveyor 40 clicks ago, and I understand now that this was not enthusiasm, it was a second opinion.

I have not been able to stop thinking about the fact that they smile while they do it.

Because that is the part I actually came away with, my dear readers, and it is the part the Directory has had 40 clicks to notice and has not.

A culture that discovered there is something walking among them wearing their neighbours' faces had, at that point, two available cultures to become. They could have become the one you are imagining. Sealed doors, papers, suspicion as a civic virtue, a species that never touches anyone again.

They went the other way so hard that their word for stranger is a compliment.

I asked a woman at a food stall what happens if you hold someone and they are cold at eleven.

She said it has happened. There is a ledger. It is public, it is kept in the capital, it is not a large number but it is emphatically not zero, and anyone can go and read it.

I asked what the procedure is.

She said: you keep holding.

I said, I am sorry, what.

And she explained it to me the way you explain something obvious to a foreigner who is trying, which was very kind of her. Half of Ombra is in her blood. Half of Ombra is heat. If the thing in your arms is cold, then what you are holding is a thing that has no heat in it, and you are a person who is carrying some. So you hold on, and you count past eleven, and you keep counting, for as long as you can stand.

Has it ever worked?

Not yet.

Four thousand clicks, a public ledger, an unbroken run of failures, and they are still doing it, and they are still teaching it to their children as the first thing a child learns after walking.

I asked her, since I ask everyone now, to name the fourteen monsters.

She got to thirteen and stopped, like they always do.

Her son, who was about six and who had been listening the way children listen, when they are not supposed to be, said the thing that I am going to be carrying around for a while. He said, and the rig is confident about this rendering:

"You don't name that one. You just check."

I did notice, and then filed under local colour rather faster than I would like to admit, that a template does not produce a child who talks like that.

Is there truth in their legend? No one knows. My aim is never to prove or disprove the tales I come across. Just to report them.

This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar concluding Journal Entry #2269, Series 5 of 9 from the Killuga System.

I let them hug me at the pad on the way out. All three of them. I counted along.