The Beaded Tapestry

Dear Annalis,

Such lovely visions you have of my world.  The heat, dust and poncho are accurate, but sadly the clouds and breeze are absent over the last weeks.  I would welcome even a whisper of cloud cover during my frequent traverses through the desert; daily excursions in search of the elusive alternative materials to add to the constituents I imported from Earth.  I am now down to only two essential materials in my search for replacements, but the shale stone and clove oil will be the hardest to source locally.  I have searched all the reference material I have access to and completed a local search of the desert for alternatives, but there seems to be no native choices here.  Since the clove oil was one of the essential cross functional sense materials, I will need to use the imported stock I brought with me.  It may end up as one of the ten percent non-native material I will have to incorporate into the piece.  The Shale will be easier.  I am already working on some ideas.

Thank you for the information you shared about the ten year minimum exposure.  It was something I already suspected, but it confirms my decision to limit the additions of my Earth imports and use as much native material as possible.  It would have been nice to know this information when we were making the preparation on Earth, but that cannot be helped.  This information was probably only known to the researchers in the vicinity of the Equine.  It is such a new area of study.  I wish again that the secrecy that surrounds the Equine exploration was not so well kept.  Competition and security risks lead to all types of roadblocks in discovery when information is not shared freely.  How many people have spent years scrutinizing something that has already been discovered, but kept secret for financial gain?  How many people have died due to this subterfuge? I guess the nature of humanity will never change. 

On the subject of subterfuge, I do remember our codex carved within the secret tree of knowledge.  I brought a facsimile with me that I had long ago engraved myself as a memento of that summer we spent in the black forest with our family.  I had forgotten all about it.  Let us try and revitalize our secret language and see how it goes.  Then you can explain the cryptic three months of your journey.

I know you are not sure what was real or what was induced by your illness from the stasis, but just describe your experience.  I discern from your letters that a whole different chain of events occurred during those lost months.  Sometimes events during an illness can be enlightening.  Remember my Equine journal during my bout with desert fever.  Without these written mementos I could never have discovered the true origin of our anomaly.  I believe what happened to you actually occurred, but maybe they haven’t transpired yet.  See, I can also be cryptic and mysterious with my messages. After you send me an overview of your adventures, I will explain this comment and my theory about out of time experiences and their relationship to the Equine.

I hope you can decipher the last paragraph.  It is my first attempt to write in our archaic language after twenty years.

Love Always,

Victoria

The dragon is finished. Now I need to think how to display it.

Shadows traverse across the desert, bringing fleeting relief from the heat.  The clouds sojourn is brief, as the full blaze of the solar body returns to bake the sand and body.  The figure shades her eyes to gaze out at the treeless plain, dotted here and there with browning vegetation and spindly succulents. The hot breeze kicks up dust as the shadow of the cloud moves down the desert valley, lifting the edges of the light poncho draped over the solitary figure, coating her exposed skin with grit.  Drying the dust and perspiration off her forehead with a delicate handkerchief, the figure starts her descent into the arid lands in search of inspiration.

Dear Victoria,

Here I share a beautiful vision of you in your current environment.  I spend many hours imagining what your world is like.  The blazing sun, warm star filled nights and desert thunderstorms fill my waking dreams as I sit day in and day out in the sterile, never changing environment of the space station.  Granted there are many benefits to my close proximity to the Equine, but I so miss the touch of nature and the changing of the elements.  Only even if it is in my dreams and imagination,  a visit with you is always welcomed.

I have approached the Louvre representative on the possibility of accelerating my schedule to visit New London.  The initial response is negative, but this was expected, since my reasoning for this request was not completed argumentative. This is logical since I myself am not completely clear on the full reason for my request.  I also hesitate to disclose the exact nature of my concern, since I question now the legitimacy of my experience over the last months and who exactly was responsible; And even if it happened! This led to a not very convincing argument to visit the planet almost a year ahead of schedule. With the denial of the accelerated planet visit in mind, I will try and discover another way to share my current concerns with you. There must be a secure way we can communicate without risk of even corporate interference.  Let me think how creative I can get without needing your cryptic methods. We might even utilize something as insane as our childhood archaic language which even father could not decipher. 

On another note, I have news from the material lab about Equine influenced substances.  Although not related to bees and their product, the lab is very involved in all things silk.  Specifically from silk worms and their New London counterparts, the Britannia silk spider. Arachnids are not my favorite subject,  but a discussion I had with one of the lab technicians over dinner shed some light, not only on his fascination with this native of the planet,  but also on how a migrant population responds to exposure to the Equine.  The immigrant silk worm population, he told me, was established ten years ago.  At this point, their produced material is approaching the same level of Equine remnants as the native arachnid silk. This gives an indication of how long some species need to be on New London before their produced material molecularly matches the material from the native population.  Of course there are deviations in this time frame from species to species, but spiders and bees are closer genetically than say ants and bovine.  Not totally good news seeing as we need new material immediately under the full influence of the Equine, but this does support your hypothesis that the new rendition must be completed with a majority of native planet based material.  I am still very hopeful for the future success of my traveling companions and Simona’s project, but with the two year cap on our project, we will need to consider this.  I will keep you posted on anything else I “overhear” as I dine among my fellow Phycodurians.  I will also let you know as soon as my brain figures out our cryptic communication puzzle. Do you still remember the key to our language?  Think it over. It was carved somewhere in the journeys of our childhood.  

Love Annalis