The trip to Los Angeles is short and painless, with only one change of plane, in Las Vegas. It was uneventful, for you and Kali both kept to your phones during the flight.
As the plane taxied to the gate, though, Kali came alive with a deep breath. "Is this your first time in California?"
"Um, technically my second. I had a connecting flight through here."
"We must take you sightseeing. It is true what they say about all work and no play. By the way, I apologize if I seemed distant, but I had to attend to some things for my job, and conversation is always difficult on an airplane."
This is the second time since you've met her that Kali has alluded to a job. "You said something back in Olympia about being a decorator or designer. Is that what you do in your spare time?"
Her eyebrows arch. "Spare time from what?"
"From ... Um ... Well, your design work. Do you get paid for it?"
"Certainly!" Her surprise deepens.
You're finding it very hard to ask what you want to ask, in public, with people possibly eavesdropping. "Is it ... like ... " You lean in close. "A cover story?" you whisper to her. "For the stuff you do for Charles?"
She stares at you, open-mouthed, then bursts out laughing.
"I do it because I love it, child!" she exclaims. "But it is also how I make my living!"
"You don't get any money from ... Charles? Or from—?"
"Certainly not! Oh!" She leans back to study you. "Now I understand what you are asking. If it is the financial dimensions of this career you are wanting to discuss," she continues, and her accent becomes deeply Scotch, "we shall have opportunity later. For now, I will only say that while you will not be required to pay for your own room and board by getting a part-time job, I however do work for a living, and depend upon no one but myself to put food on the table."
You feel yourself blush. "I didn't mean—!"
"You didn't mean what?" she asks with some severity. But there's a twinkle of amusement in her eye.
"I just didn't think you'd have to work!"
"And just who do you think you're apprenticing for? A bunch of ... alchemists?"
--
In fact, she tells you afterward, alchemy is more true than false, and if "alchemist" is a bad word with the Stellae it's only on account of the charlatans and cranks who gave that ancient science a bad name by practicing fraud through pretended "metallic transmutations."
So by the time you are driving back to her place, you are expecting to arrive in a modest tract house much like the one Charles lives in. Instead, however, she takes you to a sleek tower in the Hollywood Hills. Her apartment spreads out to occupy up most of one of the top floors, and from its balcony you can see the Hollywood sign and the Hollywood Bowl, as well as a corner of what she tells you is Universal City. She also points you in the direction of Grauman's Chinese Theater and the Walk of Fame, which are relatively close.
The apartment itself is spacious and decorated with a spare but intelligent taste, with lots of blonde wood and glass, and walls and corners decorated with paintings and sculptures that dominate by their beauty rather than by their size or profusion. She shows you to your bedroom—a fair-sized larger one than the one you had in Saratoga Falls—where you offload your luggage, then gives you a quick tour. Besides the living room (which looks onto the balcony), kitchen and dining room, there are two other bedrooms, a laundry room, and a spacious office that occupies a corner of the building. She then sets you on one of her low but comfortable sofas and brings you a tall glass of orange with a napkin wrapped about it. She settles into a chair opposite you with crossed legs.
"This is a beautiful place," you tell her.
"Why thank you, child," she says. "That is sweet of you to say."
"And you decorated and designed it yourself?"
"I hope so," she says with some small asperity. "That being my profession."
"Who do you work for? Can I ask?"
"I hoped you might. We must be comfortable with each other." She smiles. "If you mean, by whom am I employed, I am self-employed. If you mean, for whom do I perform my services, well, to anyone who can afford them. And I suppose this is the point to make one small caution. You are here to study the stars. However, there are stars and there are ... stars. And if you chance to see me with a client whom you recognize—" She allows herself the trace of an amused smirk. "Pray do not embarrass them by asking for their autograph."
--
Despite that caution, she is not shy about telling you the names of some of her clients, and she does tell you stories (some slightly shocking) about them. The air-headed actress who actually possesses an advanced engineering degree. A filmmaker who keeps donkeys in a special stable built into an upper floor of his condominium. A retired musician infamous decades ago for his "Satanic rock" albums, but who now happily spends nights at home, knitting and watching cooking shows.
Gradually, as though her stories have reminded you of stories you could tell, the conversation shifts to your life, and you tell her of Saratoga Falls, and of your friends, your classes, and what experiences you have had. You talk about your family, and her skill at conversation, and at picking up threads you let go slack, is such that you never become lost in morbid thoughts about what you have lost. At the end, you feel you have simply been talking with a new friend of a life that has been unsettled but has not fundamentally changed.
But the talk shifts again, to a light, almost introductory conversation about that which has brought you to Los Angeles: The Stars.
It begins when you mention often feeling invisible in school, and how Charles suggested that might have been related to your planets. "He's told me they're Sulva and—" The other one is always hard to keep straight on your tongue. "Kendradanar?"
"Kenandandra," she corrects you. "The Smith."
"Why do they have such weird names?"
"Weird?" She arches her eyebrows. "Every people give their own names to the stars. 'Fam al-huut', 'bei lu oh shi men', 'Pisces Meridianis', 'Alpha Piscis Austrinus'. Which of these is 'weird'?"
You blush but acknowledge her point. "So who named them Sulva and ... the others?"
She steeples her fingers.
"That is a complicated question. If you are asking an etymological question, no one is certain. They have been our names for them for millennia. But they may not even be of terrestrial origin."
"You mean they came from aliens?" You boggle a little, but she gives you a look.
"I mean they might originate from deeps that are not of this world, and by devious paths they may even come from the planets themselves." She looks at you very severely, and you understand she is cautioning you against assumptions, because her accent goes very Scotch again—it hasn't taken you long to pick up on that mannerism of hers! "If I drop the words 'Atlantis', 'Lemuria', 'Mu' and 'Gog' into the conversation, or if I refer to 'elves', 'gorgons', 'Jadisites', and 'Nephilim,' I pray you will fight yourself free of the immediate associations that they bring."
"Yes, ma'am."
Your answer seems to catch her off guard, for she looks startled. Then she smiles again, and there's a shadow of apology within it.
"You will have a chance to learn of such things, even you never make a deep study of them," she says in a much more kindly tone. "But you asked where the words came from, and I wish to answer without misleading you. For now, let us say that they belong to a language only fragments of which we still possess, and whose relationship to other human languages is entirely obscure, and perhaps nonexistent. Certainly the meanings of the ousiarchs' names cannot be explained etymologically or philologically by reference to any terrestrial language."
"The meanings of their names?" you ask, puzzled. "You mean like definitions? I didn't know names had meanings."
"Didn't you? Didn't you know that 'Jeffrey' means 'peaceful gift' in Anglo-Saxon?"
You blink. "Well, my dad wouldn't have called me 'peaceful gift', I'm pretty sure."
She laughs. "Well, these such meanings are only etymological, and proper names like 'Jeffrey' have no proper connection to those so named. You gain no insight into a person named 'Jeffrey' by knowing that 'Jeffrey' means 'peaceful gift.' But there are other names—or, I should say, linguistic constructions that look like names—that do in fact convey such knowledge, for they are in fact descriptions of what a particular thing is. The name 'Jeffrey' could refer to anyone. But 'the man in the polka-dotted dicky' had better refer to a man who is wearing a polka-dotted dicky, and if he is called 'the man in the polka-dotted dicky' it is because that is what he is. So it is with the names that we Stellae have for the planets. 'Kenandandra' is so called, because 'Kenandandra' is what he is, and there is no other."
"'Who he is'?" you echo, feeling confused. "What is that?"
"'He Who Toils in the Service of Others' seems be one translation, though it is inexact. Dndr in Primordial Solar—that is our name for the language these names exist in—seems to mean 'the giving to others of what they need,' rather than 'servitude' or 'compensated slavery', which, when you wash the euphemistic slime off it, seems to be the contemporary English meaning for it. But, just as one best understands 'the man in the polka-dotted dicky' by meeting and seeing him, so you will understand 'Sulva' and 'Kenandandra' by meeting them."
"Meeting them?" You feel like a parrot, repeating back words and phrases that you don't comprehend. "Are they ... people?"
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