On the other side of the hallway, two rows of automated dispensers were built into the wall, each labelled with a pixel frame. All manner of soaps and scrubs and oils were on offer, and Pei smiled as she imagined Ouloo tying herself in knots trying to narrow down the scale scrub scent that would appeal best to Aandrisks, or a tonic spray that most Harmagians would find suitable. The animated pictures on each dispenser did look tempting, but Pei decided to check out the facilities first.
Just as the crammed sign out front had advertised, the bathhouse offered a broad variety of culturally specific bathing fixtures, all of which were installed in a single, large room with waist-high dividing walls between. There were curtain rods circling each setup as well, and the intent of this was clear. If visitors wanted to chat with others, they could, but privacy was equally available. Do you, Ouloo’s handiwork said.
Pei walked around the room, enjoying the sensation of cool tile on bare soles. She stopped in front of a very familiar apparatus: an Aeluon douser. This was the traditional way of getting clean – a sustained blast of steamy mist to kill germs and loosen dirt, followed by a single splash of cold water emptied from a tank overhead. Pei had used one of these nearly every day of her life, but she wasn’t in the bathhouse because she needed to clean up. She was in the bathhouse to kill time and chill out, and if that was the goal, there was one species who had those things down better than most.
She turned her back on the douser and instead set her eye on the Aandrisk-style steam bath – a windowed, ovular container, made of stone and big enough for a single occupant to walk into. A gate was installed around this, for the sake of Harmagian safety. A Harmagian wouldn’t dare enter such a contraption anyway, but any steam that escaped when the door was opened would be unkind to their slimy skin. Pei herself was not built for the temperatures Aandrisks craved, but she knew from experience that a steam bath was a real treat if you used the button marked with the Reskitkish term for child’s setting (for years, she’d thought the button read low heat – a small but recoverable blow to her pride).
She returned to the dispensers in the hallway and found one containing scented steam tabs. She swiped her wrist over the patch scanner and a round capsule popped out, containing two powdery pucks flecked with dried herbs. She decided to be fully Aandrisk about it and bought a tiny pot of scale scrub as well – saltmoss-scented, a taste she’d acquired in her travels. Aandrisks had a much thicker, rougher exterior than her own, but scales were scales, and she’d found that just a tiny bit of scrub used lightly gave her a nice shine.
She returned to the steam bath, stepped in, closed the door behind her, popped the tabs into the receptacle on the wall, and entered her settings into the control panel. Her implant registered the instantaneous hiss of water being pumped through hot metal, and continued to let her know that the sound was present. She sat with that feeling for a few seconds, then did something she almost never did when away from the Mav Bre: she reached up to her forehead, and shut off her implant.
Pei had received implant and talkbox both when she was small, and it had been so long since she’d known life without them that turning the processor off was always jarring at first. She felt like when she’d reached for her locked-up gun two days prior – startled by the absence of something that wasn’t actually part of her but always came along for the ride.
After a few seconds, the weirdness wore off, and Pei allowed herself to be cradled by silence. Not silence in the way that other species spoke of silence. When hearing species said silence, they meant I can hear nothing but the wind and the leaves, or No one is speaking, but the sounds of the city are still present. That wasn’t true silence. Real silence. Her species’ natural state. The only time Pei realised how tiring it was for her brain to constantly process a type of input it wasn’t built for was when she made the decision to shut it out.
The silence wasn’t enough to fix the mental discomfort she’d awoken with, but it did make her care about it less, and right then, that would do.
A smooth lounging stone stood in the middle of the steam bath, its shape intended for the face-down posture of someone with strong haunches and a long tail. Pei had neither, but she lay on her belly anyway, wrapping her arms and legs around the stone, letting her shins and forearms settle into the grooves carved for that purpose. Scented steam began to billow from the tiny nozzles embedded throughout the walls and ceiling. She watched it swirl, felt it pull her airways wide. As her body let go, her mind took its cue to wander, and in doing so, pulled itself toward the inevitable topic of Ashby.
The man himself wasn’t the problem. He was what made problems bearable, what softened her angles and quieted her thoughts. They saw each other rarely – usually only a few days snatched here and there within the bulk of a standard year – but when she was with him, everything made sense. There was no work, no danger, no complications. There was only him, and her, and a bed beneath them. With him, there was a depth of conversation she couldn’t find with anyone else, an effortless surety that everything said between them was true and that nothing – no matter how messy or unflattering – would be judged. Not that all they did together was talk. Thinking of the way he moved when she touched him made the deepest part of her kick. She never stopped being intoxicated by the choreography they’d invented together, a dance made for two bodies that hadn’t evolved for each other. Everything fell into place when she locked herself away with him.
But then, inevitably, there was the other side of that door. There, she became someone else, and he loyally pretended not to know her even though she could see the sadness in his eyes as he did so. There, they fell into a different rhythm, one of secrets and denial. That reality was increasingly difficult for both of them to stomach, but she did stomach it, and had stomached it, because Ashby was Human. Ashby was Human, and Pei wasn’t ready to blow her life up.
She had no idea when exactly the Aeluon taboo against interspecies relationships had taken root in mainstream society, only that it was older than the GC and as much of a given as rain on a winter’s day. She knew there were accepting communities in the more socially liberal places of the galaxy – neutral worlds and modder hubs and the like. She’d once seen three Aandrisks and an Aeluon joyfully fucking in an open-air park on Port Coriol in the middle of the afternoon, uncaring about the fact that they were on broad display to anybody walking through the street below. She’d been jealous as she passed their revels by – not for their public display, which she did not share the Aandrisk ambivalence for, but for the fact that the Aeluon getting railed by an alien simply didn’t care who knew. She, on the other hand, went through endless acrobatics to keep Ashby safely quarantined from the rest of her life. They had elaborate protocols for how to meet at hotels and guesthouses without anybody knowing they were staying in the same room, and how to communicate when apart so that her crewmates wouldn’t notice messages between them. She’d gone to the absurd length of writing to him on paper and sending it via mail drone, and while he apparently saw a certain romance in that, she saw only how ridiculous things had become.
Ashby was a piece of her life she would grieve if he were gone. Every time she pretended he didn’t exist, every time she dodged her crewmates’ good-natured questions about why it’d been so long since they’d seen her take a lover, it felt as though she were throwing mud in his face. Such deception was disrespectful to who he was and all he’d given her. He followed every rule of hers to the letter, even though no one else in his life would’ve minded in the slightest. He hid and lied and kept her quiet, for her sake. She hated it, fervently.
… and yet.
It was one thing for some modder or artist or crunchy bohemian on Coriol to cast tradition to the wind. It was entirely another for someone like Pei, who was not politically radical and had never been and for whom reputation was the framework everything else in her life clung to. She didn’t have a clear map for what would happen if her relationship with Ashby became public knowledge, but she could guess.
She wouldn’t lose her ship over it – that was hers, bought and paid for. But her job as she knew it would be over, once word got around. Military contracts would evaporate, and the big businesses most worth hauling for would probably vanish as well. She could go elsewhere, pursue more work in multispecies space, maybe focus on Aandrisk or Harmagian clients instead. But those weren’t the networks her best contacts were in, and rebuilding a list of people who would work with her would be all the harder while looking for a new crew. Some of hers would leave, no question. Most, probably. She’d confided in her pilot and her algaeist about Ashby and they hadn’t abandoned her for it, but then, she was friends with them to a degree that she wasn’t with the rest. She didn’t know how the others would react. She wouldn’t bet on a positive outcome.
Pei was nothing if not resourceful. If push came to shove, she could start from scratch. What it came down to was … she didn’t want to. But she didn’t want to keep playing in the shadows, either. She wanted to keep her job. She wanted to fuck in a park (metaphorically). She could not see a reality in which those two desires might coexist.
And around and around it went.
She hadn’t told Ashby that this was tearing at her as it was. On the contrary, she’d written to him and told him she didn’t care who knew anymore, that if someone found out, oh well. She’d meant it, at the time. The last drop had been dangerous, one of the worst Pei’d ever taken part in. It had rattled her, but not half as much as when she’d seen the news from Hedra Ka and known exactly which civilian ship the Toremi had fired upon. Ashby was the farthest thing in the universe from a soldier. He had no business finding himself in a situation like that. But as she’d sat there alone in her quarters, clutching her scrib so hard she bruised the screen, she wondered how many times those tables had been turned. How many times it had been him reading the news, sifting between the lines and trying to determine if she was okay?
In that moment, she’d had enough of pretending.
In the moments that followed, the tangle returned.
She thought about what she’d written to him then, scribbled onto a piece of dead tree and shot across the void. I won’t say anything to my crew one way or another, but they might piece it together. If they do, I’ll deal with it. I don’t care anymore. To some extent, that was true. It was a risky thing, for her to spend shore leave on the Wayfarer. She knew some of her crew had found her destination odd, given that they’d been there themselves and seen nothing but a homely tunnelling ship that had lent them a hand. Part of Pei wanted her crew to figure it out, put the pieces together, hit the detonator for her. She normally hated things being outside of her control, but in a twisted way, that felt like the best possible outcome. She’d spent standards trying to determine the right course of action, the right words to say. Having somebody else erase all of those decisions sounded like a relief, of sorts.
She didn’t want it to happen.
But she likewise did.
She began to pant softly, her body’s unconscious way of trying to cool down. The nameless ache in her belly began to ease. She turned her head and pressed her cheek hard against the stone, plunging into the dizzying warmth, trying to sear away the unsolvable.
SPEAKER
Speaker assumed that Roveg could read her about as well as she could read him, but even so, she did her best to mask her sadness as the sib tower let them know that it could not, in fact, establish a transmission path.
‘Damn,’ Roveg said. He returned to the access panel, picking up his tools. Speaker was fascinated by both components of this action: the bifurcated ends of his legs, which could do nothing more than grasp objects between them like pairs of tweezers, and the tools designed for such appendages, which were so slim they seemed fragile. But Roveg wielded these with far more dexterity than Speaker would’ve thought his toes could manage, and he dove back into the access panel to tinker further. ‘All right, let’s give it another go.’
‘Are either of you hungry?’ Tupo asked. Xe paused. ‘Right, you can’t have snacks.’
Speaker clicked her beak kindly. ‘I can have snacks, just not out here. But no, thank you, I’m not hungry.’
‘Me neither,’ Roveg said.
‘Okay,’ Tupo said. Xe paused again. ‘Well, I’m hungry.’
Roveg laughed. ‘You go on, Tupo, we might be a while out here.’
Tupo made an awkward exit without another word, padding up the path to the house.
‘Xe’s a funny one,’ Roveg said once Tupo was inside.
‘I don’t really understand kids,’ Speaker said. ‘Ours are in that state so briefly that it doesn’t make much of an impression. A few tens of tendays of chaos, and then they’re on their way.’
‘You don’t have any of your own, I take it.’
‘No.’
‘And your sister?’
‘No.’
Roveg continued his work, using four pairs of feet at once, and nearly as many tools. Speaker had initially thought all those legs must be a bother to keep track of, but she was starting to see the benefit. He sat back and dug through his tool bag. ‘Speaker and Tracker,’ he mused. ‘You speak. What does she track?’
‘Other Akaraks,’ Speaker said. ‘Or, more specifically, their ships.’
‘To what end?’
‘So we can help them.’
‘Yes, you made mention of that work last night. Acquiring supplies, I believe you said.’ He paused. ‘Forgive me, I still don’t understand.’
Speaker considered how best to answer. She had no qualms about sharing the shape of her life with others, but had so little opportunity to do so that she wasn’t sure which pieces to include and which to skip. This had gone beyond small talk, now, and Roveg’s interest seemed as sincere as her fascination with his feet. Given that she could contribute nothing to his work – which he was doing as a favour to her, after all – she saw no reason not to explain in full. ‘Once a standard, all – or, well, most – Akaraks gather for an event we call rakree. Literally, it means exchange. Or sharing, I guess. That’s a better fit. Anybody who wants to gather with other ships does so. We all go to the same coordinates and we link our ships together with these … oh, I don’t know the word. They’re essentially portable airlocks. A big, airtight tube that links two ships together.’
‘And you use these to link … all of them?’
‘Right. Imagine … imagine if there was one tenday a standard in which every house in a city opened its doors, and everybody was free to go in and out of wherever they wanted.’
Roveg’s frills rippled. ‘That sounds a bit hellish to me, to be honest. But I’m getting the impression you feel the opposite.’
‘It’s wonderful,’ Speaker said honestly. ‘It’s my favourite thing.’
‘And what’s the purpose?’ Roveg asked. ‘Trading, politics, partying, sex?’
‘Akaraks don’t have sex.’
Roveg’s tools froze in place. ‘What?’
‘We reproduce sexually, but we don’t have social sex. I’m fully aware of how that works in other species, but we … physically don’t have the capability for what you’re referring to, or the need. We can’t. We don’t.’
The Quelin absorbed this information. ‘I’m not sure whether that’s tragic or whether you’ve been spared a lot of bother. Anyway, sorry, continue.’
‘You got two of the activities right: trading, primarily, and partying, second. We don’t do politics, or at least not in the way you mean. We don’t have a government. Each ship makes its own decisions. But I’m getting sidetracked: you wanted to know about my job, not my culture.’
‘Well, now I’m interested in both.’
Speaker crinkled her eyes at him. ‘The point of rakree is to be open with others. You tell people what you need, and you give others whatever you can provide. Maybe you’ve got a big crop of food, and there’s surplus to share. Maybe you need a compressor coil, and there’s someone three ships over who’s got a spare. Maybe your ship needs a doctor, or
a pilot, and you find someone with those skills who’s been looking for a new home. Or maybe it’s as simple as needing to sleep in a different place for a few nights, or talk with people you don’t live with all day every day. A change of pace. That’s the thing about rakree. Needs can be big or small, but they all matter.’
‘So it’s not a barter, then. It’s a truly open exchange.’
‘It can be a barter, but yes, you’ve got it. There’s no expectation of receiving something in return for what you give, and no guilt about taking what you need.’
Roveg’s hard-surfaced eyes rotated in their sockets with an almost mechanical quickness. ‘Is that why you came to my ship and quizzed me on my skills? Because that’s what you do among yourselves?’
‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘Did you find it unusual?’
‘Yes, I admit I did. Not in a bad way. It’s just not what I would’ve done.’
Speaker clicked her beak contemplatively. ‘It would’ve felt odd not to, especially in an emergency,’ she said.
‘Even though we’re different species?’
Speaker considered that. She had been apprehensive about approaching a group of sapient strangers one by one, but as she reflected on it now, she understood that her fear of their hostility had been lesser than that of facing danger alone. ‘I was operating on the hope that such things wouldn’t matter when the sky is falling apart.’
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within Page 11