Let me just freshen your glass, Lera darling, and we\u2019ll go into the garden to see my latest treasure! But can I trust you with a secret?<\/p>\n
You remember how, just before the last time I went back to being a girl, I went on the Grand Tour for seven months? With Teldon? <\/p>\n
No, not a whisper from him, not since Ringwinter. And my spies tell me <\/p>\n
I\u2019m the one who should be asking you, darling, anyway! Well, I booked us a sinfully luxurious suite on the Andromeda<\/em>, and we went everywhere: Valirette, Holalasha, Nuevo Per\u00fa, Yeldi, all the most exotic worlds you can imagine.<\/p>\n Yes, darling, it really is true about the night life on Valirette. Teldon went quite wild in the clubs – you know what he can be like! Of course, at our age, we\u2019ve seen it all, haven\u2019t we? And done it.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s go out through the herb garden. Watch your step! Do try one of these leaves. It\u2019s stensiga, just a nice buzz, hardly addictive at all. No? Well, maybe later? <\/p>\n Anyhow, as I was saying, Holalasha was an utter disappointment. We\u2019d looked forward to seeing the Ice Caverns \u2013 well, doesn\u2019t everyone? But after we landed, they told us that they were four hundred kilometers away, and no heliport! We\u2019d have had to take a bus, and spend a night in a nasty local hotel. They showed us a stereo of the rooms, just so shuddersomely primitive: no sensies or even gravbeds! So I told Teldon, if he wanted to go he could, but I was going to stay on board in the suite I\u2019d paid for. In the end he stayed: I think the silly boy thought I was angry with him about that birdgirl in the mud pit at the Casino Valirette. <\/p>\n Well, I may be a century-and-who\u2019s-counting, but I\u2019m not a prude. And besides, the last time this girl got seriously jealous over anything, Teldon wasn\u2019t even born. After all, if I was the jealous type, we wouldn’t still be such good friends, would we, darling?<\/p>\n But Yeldi, now! You\u2019ve seen stereocasts of the Yeldian Flower Jungle, haven\u2019t you? That was one thing I was absolutely not going to miss. Even though the uncouth natives who run the so-called tourist agency there put us through the most absurd nonsense. (Do watch the thorns on that one! Very nasty.)<\/p>\n Before we even got off the ship, we got this idiotic lecture about not touching anything, and had to put on bodysuits with helmets \u2013 like space suits. No air tanks, just filters, but utterly, utterly uncomfortable, especially as my hair was right down to my derriere then, and it all had to fit into my helmet. And the stink \u2013 my dear! I don\u2019t suppose they ever bother cleaning them, and I think they use the same ones for tourist class passengers. They said the suits were to keep the insectoids away from our skin. Apparently their venom puts you in a coma, and then they inject their larvae and \u2013 you don\u2019t want to hear the rest. Trust me.<\/p>\n And after all that, the guide wasn\u2019t even a botanist. Just an enormous Yeldian native, two meters tall, and she didn\u2019t even speak System! Fortunately we had a crewman along to translate.<\/p>\n But the jungle itself? Lera, the stereocasts don\u2019t show you the half of it. All the leaves are dark, dark reds, blues, and purples, like velvet. Even darker than these hexaploid coleus over here. We went at dusk, after Kinna, that\u2019s the bigger sun, had set, so they looked even darker. And you have never, ever seen so many flowers! They came in every size, from huge flowers on the trees a meter across to shrubs with tiny flowerets you need a magnifier to see. And all in more colors than you can begin to imagine. Then Merax set too, and the flowers started to glow, pulsing slowly. And the scent! I was in heaven, darling. Heaven. Even Teldon was impressed.<\/p>\n There was one kind of flower, trumpet-shaped and the most perfect robin\u2019s-egg blue. Each one was about half a meter long, only the narrow part was coiled up in a shape that made your eyes go all funny if you tried to follow it, like one of those clever exhibits in the Topology Room in the Imperial Museum. The guide took out a pocket light, and showed us insectoids, like flying jewels, as big as a fingernail, flying in and out. The odd thing was, if you watched some flowers, one insectoid after another would fly in, as if the flower was sucking them up and destroying them. Quite sinister. And other flowers were just the opposite; the bugs kept flying out, as if the flower was spawning them. <\/p>\n Teldon asked about that. He\u2019s quite clever. About some things, anyway. The guide said something, very low and rumbly, and the translator said these insectoids were the ones that \u2013 well, you know. And then she said something else, and the translator said some nonsense about these flowers, all over the planet, being joined together in the fourth dimension. But maybe he hadn\u2019t understood properly. Probably some local superstition or other.<\/p>\n Here we are, Lera! My prize! Yes, you guessed, didn\u2019t you? I was very naughty, and smuggled back a few seeds from that gorgeous blue corkscrew-flower plant. They actually searched us, can you believe it? I planted the seeds this spring. Only one germinated, but isn\u2019t it wonderful? And it\u2019s flowering this week for the first time ever. Doesn\u2019t it smell marvelous? <\/p>\n A bee? Bees aren\u2019t green. No, of course I don\u2019t know, angel. I\u2019m a gardener, not an entomologist. How many legs does it have? Can you see?<\/p>\n Lera! Did it sting you? You really shouldn\u2019t have got so close. You will understand if I stay over here, won\u2019t you?<\/p>\n No, darling, I don\u2019t think there\u2019d be much point calling them. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any treatment. And, do you know, I think I may have told you a fib. Maybe I was just the tiniest bit jealous about Teldon after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let me just freshen your glass, Lera darling, and we\u2019ll go into the garden to see my latest treasure! But can I trust you with a secret? You remember how, just before the last time I went back to being a girl, I went on the Grand Tour for seven months? With Teldon? No, not …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2718,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1262],"tags":[1263],"class_list":["post-17624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-tcl-15-spring-2015","tag-the-colored-lens-15-spring-2015","entry entry-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2718"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17624"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139581,"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17624\/revisions\/139581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}