Speaker reached the comms panel embedded in the wall, and settled herself into one of the woven seating hammocks that hung before it. She gestured to the panel, and looked at the incoming call data. A local transmission, not an ansible call. Speaker took a breath and willed herself into a state of calm. Who knew? Maybe it would go well this time.
A Laru appeared on screen – her destination’s ground host, Speaker assumed, for the vowel-heavy name she’d previously noted when requesting a docking slot at the Five-Hop could be nothing but Laru. Most Akaraks found this species difficult to read, what with their thick fur obscuring so much of their facial musculature, but Speaker could interpret Laru expression and body language both, just as she could with most GC species. She had doggedly practised at this, and knew her skills in this regard to be sharp.
In any case, this particular Laru was nervous, a fact which made Speaker feel both exhausted and utterly unsurprised.
The Laru addressed her in laborious Hanto. ‘I am Ouloo, the ground host. Please state your business here.’ The lack of polite greeting or welcome was unmissable, especially in the flowery colonial tongue. One might have chalked that up to Ouloo’s obvious difficulty with speaking the language, but experience had taught its recipient better.
Speaker adopted a posture that she knew worked well on Laru: slumped shoulders, head extended farther forward than was natural for her. To a Laru, this would hit the approximate visual markers for a person at ease. ‘Hello, Ouloo,’ Speaker responded in polished Klip. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Speaker. You should have our shuttle reservation on file – the Melody.’
Ouloo’s clay-red fur fluffed in surprise, and Speaker didn’t have to guess at why. Akaraks were not known for conversing easily in Klip. ‘Oh, I, um …’ The Laru scrambled on her end, entering commands with her shaggy paws. ‘The …?’
‘The Melody,’ Speaker repeated. She doubted Ouloo had not seen the reservation before this point.
The Laru’s large eyes darted up and down as she read a file on an unseen screen. ‘Yes, I see,’ Ouloo said. Her voice remained uneasy, adrift. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise you were, um …’ She paused. ‘Could you … could you send over your ship’s travel registry permit?’
Speaker resisted the urge to snap her beak in annoyance, and kept her head soothingly extended. ‘My pilot’s licence should be there with our reservation,’ she said. ‘Is that not sufficient?’
‘Yes, um, it is. This is just for extra verification. Standard security policy.’
Speaker wondered if that policy had existed prior to this conversation. ‘One moment,’ she said. She called up the file and sent it forth.
There was a chirp on Ouloo’s end as the file was received. The Laru’s eyes went up and down, up and down, a few more times than one would assume was necessary to read such a short file. ‘Thanks very much,’ Ouloo said. ‘All seems in order.’ She was trying to sound friendly now, but there was still an edge to her voice. ‘Welcome to Gora. We’re looking forward to having you at the Five-Hop. I’ll be in the office upon your arrival to assess your needs and show you around our facilities.’ She paused again. ‘I’m sorry, but we haven’t had Akarak guests before. I make a point of offering something for every species, but I don’t have – I don’t know—’ She laughed awkwardly. ‘I mean – I suppose it’s an oversight on my part—’
‘Not to worry,’ Speaker said. ‘Our stop here will be short, and we’ll be most comfortable in our shuttle anyway. I just need a few supplies.’
‘Right,’ the Laru said. ‘Well, I hope it’s a pleasant stop all the same. Um … you saw in the docking reservation guide that we have a strict no-weapons policy, correct?’
Speaker let the mild insult slide, like so many others. ‘We don’t carry weapons,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ Ouloo said, surprised once more. She brightened, trying to salvage the conversation. ‘You’ll be less fuss than the Aeluon, then. We got a shuttle in from some border mess, and she definitely had to lock a few things up. You’ll see her around, I’m sure.’
‘I’m sure I will,’ Speaker said. ‘See you when we dock.’
The screen went black. Speaker exhaled, deeply. She glanced at the clock – an hour until they reached Gora. Time enough for a few creature comforts.
She swung from pole to pole, out of the bedroom and into the washroom, where she drank some water, relieved herself, and put a pack of meadowmelt dentbots to work. Meadowmelt was her preferred flavour, not Tracker’s, but Tracker had been the one to put in the grocery order at the last market stop. Knowing this made Speaker smile as she spat the last of the cleansing froth out of her mouth. Her sister had a knack for unspoken kindnesses.
Feeling more herself, Speaker made her way down the corridor, peeking in each room as she passed by. The Harmony would’ve been far too cramped for a typical Akarak family of ten or more, but this ship was home to Speaker and Tracker alone. The unlived-in rooms were far from empty, however. Each was stuffed to the brim with tech, medicine, shelf-stable food, bedding, air tanks – whatever leftovers they’d scrounged or gifts they’d accepted. Speaker and Tracker did not carry this cargo for themselves, but for those they encountered in their work. There was no way of knowing who would need what, and so it was best to carry everything.
Tracker was, predictably, in one of the only two rooms on the Harmony that the sisters had set aside for something other than practical use. One of the rooms belonged to Speaker, who was in the slow process of kitting it out to be an acoustic paradise for listening to music. Tracker’s room – the one Speaker entered now – was a garden, in a way. Tracker had an affinity for growing crystals, and she’d developed the room solely for this purpose. The lower part of the room was stuffed with shelves holding beakers, burners, jars of powders and salts. The walls were decked in coloured lights, affixed here and there at asymmetrical angles. Tracker’s inorganic creations filled the remainder of the space, hanging from twine-supported bowls and cups in the open air between ambulation poles. Some of the crystals were fuzzy, others chunky and smooth. Some looked like water ice, or engine char, or melted glass. Their colours were varied as could be, and every movement Speaker made, no matter how minute, resulted in the room shifting into a new arrangement of kaleidoscopic glitter born out of the play between the character of minerals and the wavelengths of light.
Tracker hung by her feet from the ceiling netting, her hands arranging the contents of a likewise hanging bowl. ‘This batch is turning out beautifully,’ she said in their native Ihreet.
Speaker climbed toward the bowl in question, but halfway up, the maze of poles and jars that Tracker had configured around her own motions no longer worked for someone with legs of different make. Tracker noted Speaker’s difficulty, and without a word from either sister, shimmied down to help. Tracker turned horizontal, vertical, back limbs flipping her body in ways Speaker’s could not. She linked wrist-hooks with Speaker. She supported, boosted, guided. Speaker leaned, followed, trusted. This was a dance they knew well.
Pressed close against Tracker’s torso, Speaker could hear the rattle of her sister’s lungs. ‘Bad day?’ Speaker asked.
‘Not the best,’ Tracker said. Irirek syndrome had passed her by, but she had challenges of her own. It had been Speaker who had noticed the first signs of brittle lung in Tracker, three full years after the improperly filtered air they’d breathed as egglings had kicked off a slow-burn mutative revolt. Speaker hadn’t known what was wrong, only that at night, when she rested her ear near her sister’s nostrils or against her heart, sometimes she could hear those sleeping breaths catch and stumble. If she hadn’t dragged Tracker to a doctor, Speaker would’ve become a sibling alone – the worst thing an Akarak could bear.
‘Did you take your medicine?’ Speaker asked.
‘I will,’ Tracker said. She gave Speaker one last gentle tug, up to the seating hammock by the bowl she’d been working on.
‘Take your damn medicine,’ Speaker said calml
y as she sat. She leaned forward and peered into the bowl. The mineral spires within were a bottomless blue, mysterious and pacifying, branching outward in beguiling geometry. She picked one up and admired it, turning it this way and that in the coloured light. ‘Is this why you didn’t pick up the call?’
‘No,’ Tracker said, reclining on a hammock below. ‘I just didn’t want to deal with it.’
Speaker flicked her eyes toward her sister. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
Tracker spread her arms out to the side in congenial argument. ‘Tell me it wasn’t some bullshit.’
‘Oh, it absolutely was some bullshit,’ Speaker said.
‘Mmm-hmm,’ Tracker said. ‘And nothing makes bullshit worse than someone with an accent like mine.’
‘Your accent is fine,’ Speaker said. ‘It’s not like you’re the only person in the galaxy with a thick accent.’
‘Okay, well, I don’t know half as many words as you. Not even half. Like … an eighth. A sixteenth.’
‘It’s still good enough for a docking call.’
Tracker linked her wrist-hooks together behind her head, lounging in a manner that said she was not going to concede this point. ‘You’re Speaker, not me.’
Speaker put the crystal back in the bowl. ‘Do you want to come with me this time?’
‘No,’ Tracker said. This was of no surprise. She rarely left the ship unless there was good reason to. This was a common trait for their kind, but Tracker had fostered it with aplomb. She was a master of not going anywhere. Still, something occurred to her after her initial answer. ‘How much bullshit was that call?’
Speaker understood the underlying question: is it safe for you to go alone? ‘Not the dangerous kind,’ she said. ‘She seemed fussy, not violent. Besides, she doesn’t allow weapons.’
‘Okay. You’re sure?’ Tracker said.
‘I’m sure.’ Speaker began to make her way down, carefully. Tracker moved to help, but Speaker waved her off. ‘I’m fine.’ She swung herself to Tracker’s hammock, and her sister made room. They arranged themselves around each other in familiar choreography, taking on a configuration that came as naturally to them as the shapes the crystals formed. Tracker started to cough, and Speaker held her sister’s hands as the short fit peaked and passed. ‘Hey, while I’m gone?’ she said.
Tracker took a few slow, deliberate breaths, making sure everything within her chest was working as intended. ‘Yeah?’ she said at last.
Speaker looked Tracker dead in the eye. ‘Take your medicine.’
ROVEG
The ocean beach was as beautiful as it was every time. The sky above was the pale amethyst of noon. The water below lapped at the shimmering black sand with a tender, rhythmic caress. People of all species milled about, some napping, some swimming, some collecting shells. The beach was lively, but not raucous; peaceful without being dull. A place where a person had ample space to stretch one’s own thoughts while still benefiting from the reassuring company of others at a distance.
Roveg sat in the middle of the tableau, his abdominal legs folded properly beneath him while his thoracic legs engaged with the serious business of finishing a lengthy breakfast. A variety of foods were spread across the table in front of him, all carefully selected from the stasie that morning. He’d arranged a somewhat Aandrisk-influenced spread: grain crackers with snapfruit preserves, spicy fermented fungus paste rolled in fresh saab tesh, and a few choice slices of hot smoked river eel (this was an Aeluon addition, but it complimented the other offerings well). A bowl of tea tied the arrangement together – a delicate Laru blend, as it happened – along with a small glass of seagrass juice. The latter beverage was the only part of the meal that originated with Roveg’s own species, and though he’d had many sorts of breakfasts on many different worlds, he still swore by that hard-shelled Quelin tradition of starting the morning with a cleansing shot of the stuff. Some habits, he could never break.
Roveg spread preserves onto the last of the crackers with a lower set of legs while holding a fungus roll in the set nearest to his mouth. He nibbled as he watched a school of fur fish jump playfully in the water beyond the waves. A breeze rustled in the sandy scrub a short distance behind him, and the sound of chorus beetles rose in accompaniment, their haunting song low and sweet.
‘Friend,’ Roveg said clearly. He angled his head toward the place where he knew the wall vox lay camouflaged. ‘Turn off the beetles.’
Friend chirped in acknowledgement from the speakers, and the chorus beetles ceased.
Roveg liked beetles just fine, but today, he wanted something else, something … ‘Play Relaxation Mix #6,’ he said. ‘On random.’
Friend chirped again, and the music began to play.
‘That’s better,’ Roveg said. He continued to eat, humming softly as he chewed. ‘How long until descent?’
‘Twenty minutes,’ Friend replied.
Roveg flexed his abdominal plates in mild surprise. ‘Is that all? Well.’ He looked down at the last of the morning delicacies. ‘Damn.’ He thought briefly about bolting the remainder of his meal, but eating food without savouring it was almost as bad as throwing it out. He gathered the remnants with care, drank the seagrass juice with an appreciative shudder, and got to his feet. ‘Friend, please continue music playback throughout the main sound system.’ He gestured at a panel and the beach disappeared, leaving only projection hardware and smooth walls in its stead. He passed through the doors and into the hallways of his ship.
The Korrigoch Hrut had been Roveg’s shuttle for standards, and he loved it well. It wasn’t his home – that, he had left back on Chalice, a charming dwelling built into a cliff overlooking the city centre. But space travel suited him best when embarked upon in a ship that felt like home, and he had decorated the interior of the Korrigoch Hrut accordingly. There was not a wall outside of the engine core that didn’t have art hanging from it. There were abstract Aandrisk paintings, Aeluon colour-opera masks, exquisite baubles made of Harmagian glass, some gifts, some memories, some passing fancies stumbled upon during a marketplace stroll. He patted a Human-made landscape painting with a leg as he walked into the kitchen. He was particularly fond of that piece.
He packed away his leftovers with meticulous care, placing them on the stasie shelves just so, then headed for the control room, still humming along to the music that followed.
The planet Gora dominated the viewscreen; he’d not abandoned his breakfast a moment too soon. He’d never travelled by way of Gora before, and his first impression was of a very orderly mess. The other transit hubs he’d been through were all situated around living planetary systems, where life happened down on the ground and traffic stuck to the orbiters above. But here, where the planet served no other purpose than to cater to the temporary needs of those in passing, where every dome was individually owned and the only shared territory were the traffic lanes guiding ships to and fro, everything smacked of utilitarian artificiality. There were no seas, no forests, no great cities. This was a place to be used, not lived in.
Roveg’s compound eyes were capable of tracking many objects in motion at once, but even he struggled to parse the scene before him. The open space he flew through was thick with ships of all sorts: sleek cruisers with polished white hulls, colourful teardrops made for going fast and looking good doing it, hefty haulers fat with cargo, luxurious vacation skiffs, cheap-ride deepods, and shuttles that appeared held together with nothing more than a welding torch and hope. The vessels moved as though they were following a pheromone trail, each marching along, one after the next, docking here and turning there, waiting patiently in the wormhole queue for their turn to hop through the space between space. Heavy as the traffic was, Roveg took comfort in the tidy streams of ships and the calculated rows of buoys. Roveg liked space travel just fine, and he rather relished any opportunity to take his shuttle out for a few tendays, but he didn’t do it particularly often. Space was not his life. He wasn’t the sort to enjoy an unplotted jaunt through the
off-road sections of the galactic map, and he certainly didn’t like landing in places where travel law was approached as more of a suggestion than a rule – especially not given the course he was on now. The task at hand was fraught enough without adding traffic violations to the mix.
As Roveg waited for Friend to guide the Korrigoch Hrut into a proper entry angle, he noticed a second dance of machinery occurring in the space below the ship traffic – or, at least, inasmuch as ‘below’ had any sort of meaning in three-dimensional space. The orbital layer cocooning Gora was as thick with satellites as any world he’d ever seen. He noted comms tech, and solar harvesters as well. The latter’s distinctive shape was unmistakable – huge photosynthetic panels blooming among the weeds of the comms dishes. Their panels glittered as they soaked up raw sunlight undiluted by atmosphere, and he took care not to look too long at the concentrated beams making their way down to collection stations on the surface. Solar was the only sort of power that made sense on a windless, waterless world, and he was glad that this portion of infrastructure seemed to be communally distributed. He didn’t much fancy the idea of each dome being a bubble unto itself, powered by whatever generator the owner could manage. Roveg was nothing if not a champion of playing one’s own tune, but there were some areas in which individuality stopped being a virtue and became more of a game of chance.
‘We’re ready for entry, Roveg,’ Friend said. The AI was neither sapient nor sentient, as Roveg detested the use of their soulful kind. Even so, he had made a point to tweak Friend’s linguistic files into something companionable – in Klip, of course, never Tellerain. Roveg was sparing about the contexts in which he welcomed his mother tongue.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within Page 2