The gryphe's flight

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. And they are right since the sound is the vibration of molecules and can travel only in mediums dense enough so the molecules can interact” the teacher said and sat at his tablet desk.

Young Hermy was bored. He already read the entire block on physics for this study period. He impatiently clicked his beak, wiggled his tail tip, and shrugged his wings.

“Hermy! I guess you want to step forward and write the equation for the sound velocity?” – the old gryphe pierced the clamorsome pupil with his bright blue eyes.

Hermy castigated himself for not being less noisy. But there was nothing he could do but be agreeable. “No problem, teacher Belbu”. The pupil stood on his four legs and trotted to the holographic projector where he quickly depicted the equation.

“You forgot the quantum uncertainty variable!”

“Of course, I know the quantum equation. I thought I was supposed to write it for the normal conditions, teacher Belbu…”

“Get back to your desk, Hermy. You get a point for not being properly prepared today.”

The Nasty Girl Pack in the last row giggled. Some other pupils hissed quietly cheered by his failure. Hermy tottered back, ashamed, and the lesson continued as usual.

On the way back, depressed Hermy soared over the busy prospects in the mountains. He passed a big metallic building located over a canyon - a shopping center. A lot of gryphes swarmed around it. The jetpack on his back buzzed steadily. The reddish light of the everlasting dusk glittered on his ink-black feathers. “They all hate me just because I know a lot. But I love physics and I need to get a recommendation to enter the spaceship engineering program. It’s impossible while I have teacher Belbu”. Hermy thought a lot and tried to figure out why the old gryphe hated him. Probably, because Belbu, when he was younger and before he became a teacher, lost the competition to become a spaceship pilot. But that was thousands of decades ago when gryphes only started to build spaceship prototypes and few talented individuals were admitted each decade. Now, it was different, a lot of specialists were needed in this field to develop a functional transportation net in their star system. But Belbu was too old.

The home was close. Hermy turned the jetpack off and landed on the platform of a round metallic building on the cliff’s edge. He proceeded inside, removed his jetpack and fly suit in the hall, put them in an automatic cabinet, took and put on a light blue robe, and entered round common room lit with soft white light.

Four adult gryphs clothed in black robes laid on soft puffy cushions located around a holographic teletranslator that aired some soap opera. Several fountains spread mist and a light pleasant odor around the room.

Hermy greeted his primary parents Kiku and Bishy, then each of the secondary, Qeel and Chak. He had three secondary parents, but Leleeu was at work.

A robot came out of the preparation room. It approached each of the adult gryphes and gave them drinks in glasses with tall stems and wide bowls. Then it turned to Hermy asking if he wanted anything. The young gryphe asked it to bring him a sleeping drink. The robot went back to the preparation room.

“How was the school, Hermy?” – mom Kiku asked.

“Not great. Teacher Belbu asked me to write the sound velocity equation and he didn’t say he wanted the quantum form… He gave me a point. He hates me, mom Kiku”.

“I’m sure he doesn’t, Hermy. Just tell everything you know next time”

“I would take it seriously, Kiku”- said Chak. – “Hermy wants to become a spaceship engineer and he needs a perfect physics record.”

“Hermy can take online courses any time, and you know, there is no way to avoid the school”

“They always look at school record first, and these points will be the problem, they don’t care they just rather take someone without the points, no matter how many courses they had”

“Well. Teacher Belbu is well respected. I don’t think they’ll do anything”

“I gotta go, see you later, moms, pops” – Hermy started to feel sick of this conversation. He took the sleeping drink with his beak from the robot that approached him again and went to the door leading to a common kid room. He lingered near it to watch the holographic teletranslator that switched to the news.

Riots in the Trabalzot colony continued. The first colonists settled on the next planet after Uma, gryphes’ homeland, thirty centuries ago. With time, they became more distant and started to demand better supplies in exchange for what they mined on Trabalzot. The main resource was water ice. Uma became too dry and might have lost all the water in several million centuries. In recent decades, colonists spoke about absolute independence from Uma more and more often.

Trabalzot’s colonists seemed quirky and alien to Hermy. They developed strange customs. For example, gryphes there could not have more than one partner, they also had only a few gryphes who spoke for them and controlled their life. There was nothing like this on Uma. There were some respected gryphes, but no one controlled everyone.

The news gave an anxiety to Hermy. He clicked and the door slid.

Two other kids were not home. They were on a different school schedule. Hermy had a half-primary sister, they shared the biological father, and her biological mom was Leelu, and a secondary sibling, a kid adopted by Chak and Qeel. He was abandoned by someone likely because he was hermaphroditic. Probably, the temperature was unstable while he developed in the egg. This rarely happened since the incubators were usually highly reliable.

Hermy passed an empty playground and went to his room, where he curled on a cushion. He sipped the sleeping drink, Ah! That bitter spicy taste. No relaxing time ritual went without this dark black drink that reduced stress and instilled calmness. Soon after, sleep readily overtook Hermy's mind.

Waking up after a refreshing nap, Hermy stretched. Time to learn some engineering! He activated his multipurpose projector. But once the system loaded, Hermy froze in astonishment. “Is it a prank?” – was his first thought.

“Alien ships entered the space near Uma”

“First contact in the history of our civilization”

“Intelligent beings from the depths of space arrived. What’s now?”

“Call for linguists and specialists in communication”

Hermy surfed through news and finally turned a reportage on.

“The aliens do not seem hostile. Right now, our best communication specialists and scientists try to establish good contact and learn as much as possible. What we know so far…

They arrived from the system CP2033 which is 40.7 light years away from our star. They used a technology considered highly speculative among our physicists – a hyperdrive-like engine. However, this technology does not work as well as our fiction creators predicted. They still needed several decades to arrive in our system.

Their system was known before, because we received strange signals from that direction, and we also found a planet in a habitable zone there, the size comparable to Uma. However, the star is much bigger and brighter than ours, which cast some doubts on the ability of the planet to sustain life. We were not sure that it could develop on a constantly rotating planet that was not tide-locked. As we know, the plants on Uma need to be constantly lighted and highly irradiated.

But let’s move to the aliens themselves. They have only four limbs and use only two for walking. They look somewhat flat and vertical. Their faces are soft, and their eyes are small. It’s interesting, though, that their body plan is not dramatically different. We have a lot to learn about their biology.

The latest communications report that the aliens arrived in our system seeking planets suitable for life since their homeland deteriorated. All the gryphes are called to participate in the forum to decide what land we can give to our new friends.”