Crass and Culture (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on 13 Aug 2017 @ 11:50am by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Ensign Mimi & Nesh Saalm

2,566 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Episode 15 - Emanation
Location: Earth - San Francisco
Timeline: MD 16, 1930 hrs

[ON]

The bus ride out to Lincoln Park had been swift and smooth, Nesh having gotten a fast route more by luck than judgement. The exhibition, one of several being hosted by the Gallery had attracted a modest crowd, and Nesh hauled Lirha along towards the entrance like she had hauled along Lirha's targ, not so long before. People stood in twos and threes admiring the works in the bright white rooms that took up the First floor of the New Annexe, a more modern extension built in the time of Kirk to expand the museums already impressive exhibition space.

Pausing only to collect another exhibit catalogue for Lirha, Nesh propelled her big sister to the first piece a large two dimensional work, with almost crude stick figures bowing down to three different space ships, that were parked on the bodies of more stick figures. "This is All Hail by ch'Razeen. He was foremost of the Andorian neo-primitives!" Nesh was genuinely excited, leaning as close as she could to the piece, set behind its protective field.

"They used the same materials and techniques found in Andorian neolithic arts to express modern fears and concerns. So he would have ground his own pigments from the minerals available to Andorian cavemen, and made his own tools. They also didn't go in for subtlety." She paused, "So in the style of the Andorian Primitives, who are you banging?"

Lirha was busy playing Space Trek Online on her PADD, but suddenly looked up when Nesh finished her sentence. "Oh. What?"

Nesh gasped that her sister wasn't paying attention to some of the most important art pieces in the last three hundred years. She snatched the PADD off her big sister. "Computer games?" she said in disbelief. "You are standing in front of a masterpiece, and you are are playing computer games!?" She couldn't believe it. "And you have the nerve to call me immature."

It only took a couple seconds for Lirha to snatch her PADD back, after which she admonished Nesh for her childish reaction. "I was just about to level up..." she fumed, then looked up to the pieces of work that her sister seemed to be obsessed with. "It looks..." she frowned and leaned closer, noting the simplicity of the piece and wondering why anyone could call such a thing 'art', "good?" she lied with a light shrug.

"You're a philistine." Nesh huffed. "This might be more up your street." she dragged Nesh a few pieces down, to a tryptych of traditional oil paintings titled Culture Clash. The paintings were of various individuals from the four founding nations, but with their own species distinguishers transplanted to other species. There was a Tellurian with pointy ears, a Human with Andorian antenna, a Vulcan with blue skin, and so on. A discreet white plaque next to it read Renata Parish, Earth, 2161. Painted to confront human concerns over sovereignty, distinctiveness and a fear of an alien hegemony being inflicted on Terran cultures, Culture Clash used traditional portraiture to show the absurdity of fears of identity loss in the new political times.

"What do you think?" Nesh asked.

Observing the new painting that Nesh had just introduced her to, Lirha found herself surprisingly impressed. It wasn't necessarily the style of paint or the brush strokes, or the choice of canvas. More so, it was the theme and the message of the work that gave her a pause for consideration. "I like it," she admitted. "The Federation was not formed so easily as outsiders believe. There was backlash within many of the founding governments that took decades to pacify."

"I don't find it particularly sophisticated." Nesh admitted. "It's not exactly complex, or technically difficult, or even challenging to understand. If it was me I would have worked it as an installation where you can see yourself with the same sort of changes. I think it would have made the point more."

"I agree.." Lirha mumbled, her attention once again diverted as she tapped away on her PADD. She pressed her finger to the screen and dragged her space ship across the asteroid field to the resource deposits that she needed to get to give her more credits for explorations tokens.

"Lirha, put it away!" Nesh snapped in their native tongue, though the Universal translator meant that anyone close enough to hear was close enough to understand. "You're acting, like, twelve." Nesh was getting annoyed. She'd brought Lirha out to see something interesting and she was ignoring her, as usual. How did she ever think that Nesh was the childish one? "I swear I will throw you off the bridge if i see it again." she hissed.

"Hm?" mumbled the older Saalm as she finished her collecting mission and logged out. She discretely slipped her PADD back into her handbag before looking up at Nesh with a frown. "Do what? Throw me off the bridge? Do you even know the way to the bridge?" she countered with a narrow-eyed grin.

Nesh's mouth compressed into a thin line that made the younger woman look the very image of their mother. "I think I can find a giant bridge, even in this city. Now are you done? This was supposed to be fun and your ruining it!"

"I'm done. You can continue," Lirha replied. She cast a green hand out in front of them motioning for Nesh to continue the tour and 'enlighten' her as to the significance of each work.

Nesh moved on, sulking. There was more Andorian Caveman art nouveau, an installation where old 35mm film had been used to take pictures in cameras made from converted torpedoes scavenged after the Babel Crisis, one of the key incidents that had lead to the founding of the Federation, and the cameras used to take strange multi angle time lapse footage of spaceships arriving at the signing ceremony, entitled Swords into Ploughshares. There was another installation, a highly engineered pieces that was constantly juggling balls through a complex series of traps and drops and lifts and elevators, going around in a huge circle, which Nesh indicated was a Tellerite Rebus, and you needed to be fluent in pre-millennial southern hemisphere Tellerite street slang to understand it. Or read the plaque on a pedestal at its centre.

Then she paused before a large archway "The Vulcan Mandala is in the next room. Do not embarrass me by acting like a moron. Just....appreciate it. Okay?"

Lirha frowned. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around? Nesh embarrassing her? Without contemplating the dichotomy of their ever-changing relation, she simply shrugged. "Of course. I would never embarrass you. That was mother's job."

Nesh glowered at her older sister. She did not get on with their mother, who was even more boring and uptight than Lirha. Which was saying something. "Watch where you put your feet." Nesh went in first, keeping to the outside of the room. In the centre was a tile that had trails of fine coloured sands running all over it. Looking down, it was a series of Mandelbrots nested within coils that sat inside a symbol that was clearly the IDIC glyph.

"This was poured by hand over a period of six standard months." Nesh whispered in tones of awe and reverence Then fixed in place with a molecular bond. It is a miracle of patience and precision. Look at it." It was a thing of technical brilliance, and deep artistry, the way the coloured sands led the eye, but still provided tones and definition to make the different levels of the work all stand out clearly, from the macro level of the IDIC logo, to the tiniest bud of the smallest Mandelbrot.

So this was what Nesh had quit Starfleet for. To study sand. It took every ounce of self control for Lirha to not roll her eyes and walk out of the room. Instead, she chewed on the side of her inner cheek while attempting to study it and find some semblance of 'beauty' within it.

"Why didn't they just pour it out all at once and then configure it?" she finally blurted out, unable to help herself.

"Philistine." Nesh muttered. "For the same reason you don't just dump a bunch of paint out on a canvas and push it around. You end up with mud." Nesh crouched down at the edge of it. As well as the Molecular bond it was surrounded by a force field to stop sticky fingers being dragged over it. "You can just... fall into it. Spiralling on forever, infinite, really held in a grain of sand. Huge potential, multiplying exponentially. Like the Federation."

Having been told the art display at Lincoln park would be an interesting place for her to explore other cultures Mimi had gone for a look, while she did not have an inkling for art she understood that a lot of cultures did. Walking into a section called the Vulcan Mandala she saw two Orions deep in discussion, it took her a minute to figure out that it was Lirha and her sister, they looked so different out of uniform. Gingerly she approached them "Hello Admiral."

The unmistakable sight of a familiar feline woman has hard to miss, let along forget. Within the art exhibit's large crowd, the Operations ensign Lirha remembered from Galileo had somehow found her way into the chamber and had approached both she and her sister. It was good to see her off duty for a change.

"Hello, ensign," the older Saalm greeted with a smile. At least now that someone had arrived who she could casually talk to, the onus of actually paying attention to and evaluating the art was lessened.

Nesh looked at Mimi with narrowed eyes. She didn't really know the felinoid beyond saying good morning. She wondered what the cat girl was doing here. She didn't put it past Lirha to have used her game as a cover for sending out an SOS. If Mimi came out with a reason to drag Lirha away, Nesh was going to go nuts. Lirha had dragged her into Starfleet, made her give up almost a year of her life, and Lirha can't take an hour in a gallery? Hypocritical cow. "How are you finding the post-Sarek psuedo-impressionism?" she asked with suspicion.

Mimi slowly cocked her head to the side, only about half of what Nesh had said made sense to her. "I am sorry Nesh but I have no idea what you just said, art is not my.... strong point?" she said a little sheepishly.

No idea about art? What was she doing here then? She gave Lirha a suspicious look. "If you don't do art, why are you here?" And then she remembered what Lirha had said about getting to meet the new paramour. "Oh by all that's holy, Lirha, tell me its not her!"

Lirha glanced over at Mimi, then to Nesh, and then back between the two of them. The young Nekomi wasn't an unattractive woman by any means, but she didn't happen to be Lirha's type. Her fur and slender feline body seemed enticing, however, and she was never one to rule out any possible future relationships. But for now, the Orion rear admiral was quite content with her present girlfriend and had no intentions of leaving her or betraying their feelings for each other.

A wry grin graced Lirha's lips which was accompanied by a shake of her head. "No, I am not dating one of my own ensigns. But if I was?" She wondered what Nesh's initial objection had been after just looking at her.

"You really need me to spell it out?" Nesh muttered in her native tongue. "She's what? Two years older than me? Try cradle snatching. And if that isn't reason enough, bestiality."

The older Saalm smiled back at her sister and gave the youth a devious look that was only betrayed by the most subtle of glints in her light green eyes. Then she turned to Mimi and stepped closer to the Nekomi woman. "Nesh thinks you are beautiful," she translated in an soft and private voice. "And she is wondering if you would be...interested in dating her? She can be shy and doesn't like when I'm around to 'interfere' with her affairs."

Listening to Lirha and Nesh talking in Orion Mimi wished she was wearing her UT as it seemed heated. When Lirha explained she was extremely unsure what to say.

Nesh looked at the cat-girls's frankly petrified reaction. "You're so full of shit" Nesh told her sister. "You're not screwing that one," she snorted, turning away. "Try harder next time, lets find something else to look at." She scanned the room. "Oooh." Her eyes hit on something pretty. "Look at the jaw on that one."

"Admiral, may I ask what that was all about?" Mimi asked still very confused, there certainly seemed to be discontent between the two of them.

With a shake of her head and a light laugh, Lirha just shook her head and shrugged. "I wish I knew. One moment we are looking at art together, and the next, she thinks you're my lover. I suppose sometimes children will be children."

"Sometimes they will, I was." Mimi said with a little shrug of her own. "But thinking you are in love with me is.... odd."

"Well, Nesh herself can be odd at times. Just like any other Orion teenage, I suppose," Lirha replied with a casual shrug. "She seems to have regained her interest in art very fast." Which wasn't necessarily terrible, all things considered.

"Art is an unusual thing, I remember us having pictures on the walls on Kemi, but they were all of family and garian left behind. But no one created pictures of their own to show off to everyone else," Mimi told Lirha. "Dancing, stories and songs we were good at."

The mention of the most liberal of arts suddenly piqued the older Orion's interests. "Do you remember any of them?" Lirha proceeded to ask. Static visual history was not something she'd ever enjoyed, but the performing arts...they could be a latinum mine into her heart.

"I do, I have a few songs on a data chip in the things I had with me when I left Kemi, they would not sound the same if translated to English though." Mimi remarked.

"Most songs don't," Saalm agreed. "Besides, why would you want to translate them anyway? They are from your culture -- made by your people for your people, not outsiders."

"Maybe." Mimi pondered for a few seconds, out of the corner of her eye she saw Nesh staring to disappear around a corner. "I should let you catch up to your sister. It has been good to see you Admiral."

Saalm smiled and nodded, then took her leave from the ensign. It wasn't often that she had the chance to socialize with members of her crew in an off duty setting. It felt...a bit strange.

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--


RADM Lirha Saalm
Commanding Officer
USS Galileo

Nesh Saalm
Civilian
[PNPC Derani]

Ensign Mimi
Operations Officer
USS Galileo

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