The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

by Becky Chambers

  ‘Anything for yourself?’ Ouloo asked. ‘I’m not trying to be pushy, I promise, I just want to make sure you’ve got everything you need.’

  ‘Actually, yes, I could use something,’ Pei said. ‘Though I don’t quite know what I’m looking for.’

  Ouloo was instantly attentive. She set her bun down and extended her neck with keen alertness. ‘Oh, I’m sure we can accommodate whatever it is.’

  Pei paused. How to explain a feeling she wasn’t sure of herself? ‘I’m not … feeling quite right.’

  Ouloo’s eyes widened. ‘Oh dear, are you sick?’ She started to get to her feet. ‘Come on, I’ve got a bot scanner over—’

  ‘No, I’m not sick,’ Pei said. ‘I just feel … off. Kind of sore. I was wondering if you have any painkillers? Maybe muscle rub?’

  ‘I have lots of things in those categories, but let’s narrow it down. Sore, like you hurt yourself?’

  ‘No.’ The twinge in her arm from the night before wasn’t bothering her now, and this was a different kind of discomfort entirely. ‘It’s not any one spot, and it’s mild. It’s my back and my belly and … I don’t know. Feels almost like I slept wrong.’

  ‘You might have, unless you’re in the habit of sleeping in your shuttle.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s not an issue with my kind of bed,’ Pei said.

  ‘Oh, right!’ Ouloo said. ‘You have those marvellous squishy things. I slept in one once, when I was young. Really ought to splash out and get one for myself one of these years. Maybe when Tupo stops eating so much. But … hmm, yes, I see your point.’ Her neck wiggled slightly as she thought. ‘Could just be stress, you know. I haven’t been sleeping well either.’

  Pei wasn’t about to tell Ouloo that the current disaster hadn’t gotten under her skin. But she did have a lot on her mind, and stubborn thoughts had a sneaky way of moving themselves into your body. She was accustomed to stress settling in her shoulders, not lower down, but bodies were anything but static.

  ‘You know, I can sell you some muscle rub if you like, but I think I have something even better.’ Ouloo’s eyes twinkled. ‘Have you seen the bathhouse yet?’

  ‘Oh,’ Pei said. She dimly remembered seeing something about it on the signage out front. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  Ouloo got out from behind her desk and began walking toward the door, her decision already made. ‘Not to brag, but it’s a real treat. I am sure it’ll put you right.’

  Pei had intended to come away from the office with a tube of this and a jar of that to take back to her shuttle, but Ouloo’s suggestion was tempting. Pei couldn’t remember the last time she’d bathed for something other than the sake of hygiene and habit. Honestly, disappointed as she was to lose a few precious days with Ashby, if bathhouses and cakes were what being grounded on Gora meant, being stuck there certainly didn’t suck. It did sound like a treat.

  She thought of Ouloo’s neighbours, and kept that thought to herself.

  ROVEG

  Sky full of space trash aside, it was a beautiful day. Gora’s thin atmosphere made for a strikingly crisp canvas, and the habitat dome’s dulling of this effect was minimal. Without water vapour to scatter its rays, the sunlight pierced down as cleanly as honed metal, leaving you with no illusion that it was anything but a star. And as for stars, they were out, too, despite the sun being high. The satellite debris hid most of them from view, but the boldest shone through anyway, peppering the morning with an elegant tease of night.

  Were the sky not full of space trash, Roveg would’ve assumed Tupo was simply enjoying the view. The child was on one of the lawns alongside the walking path, lying in a position impossible for any species but xyr own. Tupo was belly-down in the grass, limbs flopped every which way around xyr. This included xyr neck, which was folded back over xyr spine so that xyr head was fully rested against xyr lower back, face staring upward. It was a horrid configuration, but Roveg supposed that from Tupo’s perspective, it was incredibly comfortable.

  ‘Quite a mess up there, eh?’ Roveg said as he and Speaker approached.

  Tupo looked up, surprised to have been disturbed. ‘Yeah,’ xe said. ‘There’s no more explosions, though.’

  ‘That’s probably a good thing,’ Roveg said.

  ‘I guess.’ Tupo sighed.

  Not the take Roveg had expected, but he let it slide. ‘We’re looking for your mother,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’d like to make some minor adjustments to your ansible tower, with her permission.’ He nodded reassuringly at Speaker. ‘We’re trying to get a call out.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, that’s fine,’ Tupo said. Xe got to xyr feet all at once, like some kind of cloth puppet whose performer had returned. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Uh,’ Roveg said. ‘We should ask your mother, shouldn’t we?’

  Speaker looked at him quizzically from within her suit. ‘Why?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ Tupo said again. The child was already trotting down the path. ‘Come on.’

  Roveg did not immediately follow Tupo, as Speaker did. The adjustments he was planning were as minor as advertised, but the tower in question was Ouloo’s, not Tupo’s, and … and, dammit, they were already around the corner ahead of him. He hurried after, still unsure about this.

  The path that led behind the office was as tidy as the others, but less decorative. There were no signs here, no lawns, no flowers. A small dwelling came into view, and unlike the drab grey buildings that comprised the rest of the Five-Hop, this one was painted in patterns of vibrant yellow and seashore blue. ‘Is this your home, Tupo?’ Roveg asked.

  ‘Yep,’ Tupo said.

  ‘Must be nice to have all that space just for two,’ Speaker said.

  Tupo looked at her sceptically. ‘I guess,’ xe said. Xyr tone did not suggest agreement.

  The sib tower stood right by the Laru house – a standard model, nothing flashy. Roveg opened his mouth as Tupo approached the tower, beginning to ask if xe was sure they shouldn’t check with Ouloo first, but the child had already pried off the access panel. ‘Do you need any tools?’ Tupo asked.

  Roveg raised the tool bag he carried by way of answer. ‘I believe I’m set,’ he said. He approached the tower and got to work.

  Speaker sat the suit down beside him at a courteous distance that still allowed her to get a good look. ‘What exactly are you attempting here?’

  Roveg reached into the tower and pulled out a bundle of wires. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘with a few adjustments, we might be able to boost the signal enough to get at least a text message through. We might even get voice, if we’re lucky, but let’s see how we get along.’

  ‘I don’t understand why the sibs aren’t working at all,’ she said. ‘If they can get signal from one system to another with all the dust and planets in between, why can’t I reach my ship that’s right up there?’

  Roveg began to answer, but Tupo beat him to it. ‘Sibs need sublayer buoys to work, and you, um, still need a satellite network to connect to them if you’re calling from the ground. You can’t have buoys inside a planet. That wouldn’t even work.’

  Roveg stared at this completely accurate technical summary from a youngster who appeared to have some kind of custard on xyr chin, but Speaker seemed nonplussed. If anything, she seemed to warm to it. ‘I didn’t know you were a tech,’ she said approvingly.

  Tupo laughed. ‘I’m not a tech,’ Tupo said. ‘I just … know some stuff.’

  ‘You sound like you could be a good tech,’ Speaker said.

  ‘I dunno,’ the kid said, shuffling xyr feet.

  Roveg was concentrating on not knocking circuitry out of place, but out of the corner of his eye, he could see Speaker readjusting herself in her cockpit, taking an interest in the child. ‘So how old will you be, when you decide on a profession?’ she asked. ‘Round about?’

  ‘I dunno,’ the kid said again. ‘When I’m grown up.’

  ‘And when would that be, for you?’

  ‘Um … I
guess … well, I can get my shuttle licence when I’m twenty-six.’ Tupo delivered this information with authority, as if this were a number they were keenly aware of and eager to reach.

  ‘Twenty-six,’ the Akarak mused. There was a subtle awe in her tone.

  ‘And how old were you, Speaker?’ Roveg asked. ‘When you got your shuttle licence?’

  Her eyes crinkled. ‘Very subtle of you,’ she said.

  He waved a pair of pliers at her in acknowledgement. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I was three and a half,’ she said.

  Tupo’s head rushed right up to Speaker’s cockpit window, propelled in a spring-like manner by xyr neck. ‘Three and a half?!’ the kid exclaimed.

  Roveg did not stick his face straight into Speaker’s, but he shared the sentiment. He lowered his pliers. ‘Forgive my ignorance,’ he said, throwing subtlety to the wind, ‘but how old are you?’

  ‘I’m eight,’ Speaker said.

  Tupo was agape. ‘You’re eight standards old.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The child looked at Roveg with sheer bewilderment, then back to Speaker. ‘You’re a kid?’

  Speaker shifted her beak, amused. ‘No. I reached adulthood before the end of my first standard. By my species’ rubric, I’m approaching middle age. We live to be about twenty, twenty-five, or so.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  Roveg intervened. He shared the child’s surprise, but gawking at another’s relatively imminent mortality felt uncouth. ‘Lifespans vary as much as our bodies,’ he said. He looked away from his work to address Tupo directly. ‘And your species lives much longer than the rest of us, so your childhood is equally lengthy – as I’m sure you’re aware. Remind me how long it takes a Laru to leave xyr mother’s pouch and start walking?’

  ‘Um … like four years.’

  ‘Stars,’ Speaker said with a laugh.

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ Roveg said, returning to his work. ‘And how old are you now?’

  ‘I’m seventeen,’ Tupo said, still agog. Xe pointed a shaggy paw at Speaker. ‘I’m more than twice as old as you.’ Xe frowned mightily. ‘Wait, if you can have a shuttle licence, why can’t I?’

  Speaker laughed again. ‘That’s a good question, actually. Shuttle licences are based on whatever age your species independently determines marks the cognitive maturity needed to fly a ship. Roveg, when did you get yours?’

  Roveg tied off a bit of cable and reached for his glue gun. ‘Twelve,’ he said.

  ‘See?’ Speaker said to Tupo.

  Roveg looked to Speaker, more questions on his mind. He understood, conceptually, everything that he’d just explained to Tupo about the relativity of aging, but the ramifications of a twenty-standard lifespan were beginning to dawn on him. ‘I spent twenty standards in school before I was a barely competent adult,’ he said. ‘And here you are, fully educated and well cultured at eight. How?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Speaker said. ‘We don’t have the opportunity to be as broadly educated as the rest of you. In a person’s first year, we carefully scrutinise what skills xe’s got the most aptitude for, and then that’s what xe learns. So, if a kid demonstrates a knack for wiring panels together, xe’ll be an engineer. If xe shows an interest in plants, xe’ll be trained for food gardening, and so on. The time in which we exist is enough to learn one subject really, really well. We’re specialists, not generalists. That’s what our names reflect. We don’t have abstract names like you do. Your identity is what you do for your community. So, for example, my mother is Kreiek – water maker. She manages her ship’s life support systems. Every big ship has a Kreiek; I simply know which one is mine.’

  ‘So what is your name, then?’ Roveg asked.

  ‘You know my name.’

  ‘I mean in your own language.’

  ‘I don’t have a name in Ihreet,’ Speaker said. ‘My name is Speaker, just as it is in Klip.’

  ‘Because you speak Klip,’ Roveg said. ‘That’s your speciality.’

  ‘It’s not the only language I speak, but it’s the one that benefits my community most, yes.’

  Several pieces began to click into place. ‘Is that why so many of your species don’t speak Klip? Because there isn’t time to learn? It took me … oh, let’s see … would’ve been about nine years of Klip lessons before I was fluent.’

  ‘That’s part of it. The other piece is that Klip is a challenging language for most of us. Hanto comes more easily, but that’s because modern Ihreet is largely based on it. It’s essentially a Hanto skeleton with a hodgepodge of whatever remnants of our pre-colonial languages we managed to retain.’

  Roveg could hear her skimming past a painful history there – not her own, not something she’d lived, but something burned black into her shell (or her bones, he supposed – the Quelin idiom didn’t work well for vertebrates). He followed her lead, and did not press that subject further. ‘But you can pronounce Klip,’ he said. ‘You do so beautifully.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. Speaker appeared to be done with that line of conversation, and instead turned her attention to his work. ‘I have no idea what you’re doing, but it looks like you’re doing it well.’

  He laughed. ‘We’ll see. This isn’t the kind of thing I do every day.’ It had, in fact, been a long time since he’d delved into the guts of a machine like this. He was a designer, not a mechanic, and he usually deployed fixbots when things went awry. But basic mech tech skills had been part of that schooling he’d mentioned, an essential foundation for anyone who wished to play intimately with software. He remembered the common plaza at his university, where he and his peers would race robots and do mild hacker pranks and dazzle onlookers with elaborate pixel animations. It was an old memory, a nothing memory, but one made painful by the simple context of what life had once been. He knotted it up tightly and sealed it away.

  ‘I love sims,’ Tupo interjected with a blunt absence of segue. Roveg’s profession had been established at the garden gathering the night before, and it sounded as though Tupo had been feverishly waiting since then to discuss the matter further. ‘The last one I played was Scorch Squad 19 and it was really, really good.’

  ‘I haven’t tried that one,’ Roveg said, and he wouldn’t, because you didn’t need to see anything beyond the previews to know that series was the purest of trash. ‘If that’s your sort of taste, my sims might not be for you. I make vacation sims.’

  ‘What’s a vacation sim?’ Speaker asked.

  ‘You know, the sort where there’s no story, it’s just a lovely blank-slate environment for you to enjoy for as long as you please.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Not your cup of tea, either?’

  ‘No, it’s just … I’ve never played a sim before.’

  Roveg and Tupo turned in tandem to stare at her. ‘You’ve never played a sim?’ Tupo said. It was the exact same tone xe’d confirmed her age with.

  ‘No,’ Speaker said simply. ‘I haven’t.’

  Roveg continued to stare, then laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘When something’s your whole life, and you meet somebody outside of that bubble … do you know the feeling I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ Speaker said. ‘I do.’

  ‘How have you never played a sim?’ Tupo said.

  Speaker gave a nonchalant gesture. ‘They don’t make them for Akaraks,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  The answer came to Roveg immediately, and he didn’t like it at all. ‘Sims have to be tailored to the nervous system of the player,’ he said. ‘An Aandrisk and a Harmagian can enter the same sim, and it’ll behave identically from both of their perspectives, but they’re accessing different versions of the software. A designer like me will build the base world or story, then port it to different species-specific templates. Brain maps, we call them.’

  Tupo frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, if one player has arms and one player has tentacles, the—’ he reached for a kid-friendly word ‘—the ru
les that make the sim work behave differently for each of them. Otherwise it won’t feel like the players are actually touching something.’ He looked back at Speaker. ‘And nobody’s ever bothered mapping Akaraks, it would seem. I’d never thought of it before, but you’re … you’re not an option in the design tools I use.’ His words came out quiet, bothered.

  ‘I guess nobody expects us to buy them,’ Speaker said.

  ‘Yes, well, you can’t buy them if they don’t exist, can you?’ He huffed air through his spiracles, and rattled his mouthparts in disapproval. Carefully, he replaced the machine’s innards, and closed the panel back up. ‘All right. There. Let’s give that a try.’ He moved to the control terminal and started to gesture commands, but immediately ran into a problem. ‘I … can’t read this,’ he said, facing an unfamiliar alphabet. Laru, presumably, but he’d never seen their language written before. ‘Where are the translation settings?’

  ‘Oh, uh …’ Tupo came over and swung xyr neck under Roveg’s thoracic legs so as to get a better look at the screen. ‘Um … that one that looks like a square. Here, lemme.’ Xe entered in some quick commands, and the screen transformed into Klip.

  ‘Ah,’ Roveg said with relief. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is it working?’ Speaker said.

  ‘Can’t say yet. We’ll need to reboot in order for the changes I made to be recognised. It’ll take several minutes, at least.’

  Speaker shifted in her suit. It was evident she did not want to sit by even one minute more, but she accepted the situation and leaned back into her seat. ‘So we wait?’

  Roveg bent his legs affirmatively. ‘We wait.’

  PEI

  The bathhouse, it turned out, was pretty nice.

  It wasn’t huge, like the spas and saunas you’d find in a big city, and it wasn’t plush, like some of the places she’d treated her crew to after a long haul. From the outside, the Five-Hop’s bathhouse looked like it had room for maybe six people; inside, it was quiet, inviting, and sparkling clean. The walls were tiled with affordable faux silicate (it looked decently close to the real thing), and across these, decorative trails of pillowy moss had been coaxed to grow in spiralling lines. The floor was so polished that Pei could almost make out her reflection in it, and upon seeing this, she wasted no time in removing her boots. She placed them in one of the large cubbies by the entryway intended for this purpose, and her clothing followed in short order.