‘Such things shouldn’t matter at all, regardless of what the sky is doing.’ Roveg swapped one tool for another, and continued his work. ‘So, do I correctly surmise that under normal circumstances, you and your sister offer something to your people that fits a particular need?’
‘We do,’ she said. ‘We offer me.’
‘You?’ He leaned his shelled torso back, and thought. ‘You speak Klip. You understand other customs. You’re … you’re their Speaker.’
Speaker warmed with the quiet joy of being understood. ‘Exactly.’
‘You can get access to things others can’t. Go into shops where they might get turned away, or …’
‘Help them finish the formwork to get an official pilot’s licence. Get a bunch of seedlings from the nursery that didn’t understand what they wanted. Track down a medical specialist for something particular. Set up a standing order with a fuel depot. Buy groceries for someone who’s too nervous to go to a big market stop.’
‘Are these imaginary examples, or …?’
‘My last five jobs.’
‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘That’s fascinating.’ He returned to the panel, twisting a wire here, loosening a clip there. ‘Right, let’s try that.’ He went once more to the interface panel and rebooted the system. ‘You still haven’t answered my question, though.’
‘Sorry, which?’
‘What does Tracker do?’
Again, Speaker gathered all the components this answer required, and tried to filter them down to the most necessary. ‘So: a ship is a family, and a ship is autonomous. We’re not an instinctively hierarchal species, like many of you are. We do best in groups, but each group is an entity unto itself. We don’t have any sort of larger government, or ship registry, or anything like that. We don’t log flight plans, we don’t submit travel routes. We just go where we need to, as we want to. That freedom is very important to us, but it also means—’
‘You’re hard to find.’
‘Right. But that’s also by design.’ She paused. ‘If I explain this, you have to understand it’s not intended as an insult.’
‘Now I’m dying to know what it is.’ His face was stone, but his voice was kind. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t take it personally.’
She continued, carefully. ‘Most Akarak ships go to great lengths to not show up on anybody else’s wake scan. Both in a navigational sense and a technological sense. We mask our ships’ signals. We make flight plans that look nonsensical to outsiders. By and large, we avoid contact with other species as much as possible, but the side effect of that is it’s hard for us to find each other as well. And that’s what Tracker does. When we take on a task for someone else, we know roundabout where they’re headed, and we know their data wake signature, but we don’t often make a hard and fast rendezvous plan. Plans change. Circumstances are unpredictable. And a ship that really wants to stay off the map might not even feel comfortable sharing their flight plan with us, beyond what system they’ll be in. That’s where Tracker comes in. Her speciality is tracking untrackable ships.’
‘How?’
‘You would have to ask her. I don’t understand it at all.’ Tracker had tried to explain, of course, many times, but Speaker had had as much luck understanding Tracker’s monitors filled with nav charts as Tracker had made purchase with syntax.
‘Well, hopefully, if we get this thing working, I’ll be able to say hello, at least.’ Roveg glanced at the monitor, watching the reboot progress. ‘That must be extraordinary difficult, treasure-hunting your peers across the galaxy.’
‘Depends on who it is and how seriously they take their privacy. Some ships don’t care at all. Aversion to other species isn’t a universal rule – we’re not all the same, obviously. But most of us prefer to travel incognito. And that’s because …’ She paused. ‘Again, please don’t take offence at this.’
‘You don’t trust the rest of us,’ Roveg said simply. ‘I understand that completely, and I don’t take offence.’ He gestured at himself. ‘My species’ reputation hardly makes me one to judge on that front.’
‘It’s … not quite the same.’
‘Isn’t it? Sure, we’re talking xenophobia on very different scales, but fear of outsiders is fear of outsiders all the same.’
Speaker disliked that categorisation, but in keeping with her own request, did not take it personally. ‘I’m not sure I’d call it xenophobia in our case. It’s just … experience.’
‘Hmm.’ Roveg considered that. ‘Yes, perhaps I’m not viewing it in the proper context. My peers would argue your situation and ours boil down to the same principle, but then, they’re wrong about most things.’
Now it was Speaker’s turn to be curious about delicate matters. She hesitated, not sure how he’d take this question, but the ease of the conversation made her feel bold. ‘May I ask why the Quelin Protectorate … why it is like it is?’
All the holes along Roveg’s abdomen pulsed air at once. ‘We could sit here for days discussing that. Do you know anything about our history? What happened after contact?’
‘I know there was war, but not the specifics.’
‘Right.’ He idly rubbed one of his eyes with a toe as he thought. ‘When we first made contact with other sapients, there was an inevitable explosion of cultural evolution, as there always is. Technology, philosophy, art, all of it in flux. You know how it goes. And as is sadly common during periods of rapid change, things that had been simmering for my species for a long time came to a boil. There was war. You can read about it, if you must, but all you need to know is that it was horrific. Cloned soldiers became one of the weapons of choice, suffice it to say, and it was a hideous mess. People died, treaties were drawn, and so on and so forth, and when it came time to cast blame, the fact that we could point to people who weren’t even from our planet was deliciously convenient. It was their influence that had caused the fractures among us, you see, not centuries of our own inanity. It was their tech that fuelled our genetic wars, their ideas that had corrupted the sanctity of true Quelin civilisation.’
‘And what’s true Quelin civilisation?’
Roveg laughed ruefully. ‘Now that would take tendays. There are tomes upon tomes written on the subject, and they’re all equally stupid. Anyway, it became very fashionable very quickly to perform cultural purity for others, and that fashion became dogma, and dogma became law, and tada! Here we are.’
Speaker thought. ‘Yet you’re part of the GC. You trade. You’re in Parliament. Your borders aren’t closed.’
‘Oh, of course not,’ Roveg said. His frills bristled. ‘Perish the thought that we stop trade. It’s a relationship of greedy convenience, and everyone knows it. The fact that both the GC and the Protectorate are willing to quietly shelve their principles just so they can keep ore and ambi flowing is nothing short of disgusting.’ He had no muscles to tense, but his body had gone rigid anyway. Speaker wondered how it felt, being unaware of your own softness. Roveg shook from head to end, as if dusting himself off. ‘I cannot tell you what a constant relief it is, even decades after I left, to be in places where I can say something like that freely.’
Speaker had a word for how she felt right then: eerekere. A moment of vulnerable understanding between strangers. It did not translate into Klip, but it was a feeling she knew well from gatherings among her people. There was no need being expressed here, no barter or haggling or problems that required the assistance of a Speaker, but eerekere was what she felt all the same. She’d never felt it with an alien before. She embraced the new experience. Were Roveg an Akarak, were he linking wrist-hooks with her and opening himself in the radical way required if you truly wanted someone’s help, she would hold nothing back, couch nothing in pretence. And so, she said exactly what she wanted to say next: ‘May I ask what it was that led to your exile?’
Roveg was silent for a long time. Speaker feared she’d swung too far, but eventually, his motionless eyes glittered. ‘I told the wrong stories,’ he s
aid.
‘You said you make vacation sims.’
‘Nowadays, yes. But in my younger years, I designed narrative sims, and … well. My political subtext wasn’t as clever as I thought.’
That seemed a callous reason to drive someone out of an entire region of the galaxy, but such extremity matched what she’d been told of the Quelin, and why she and Tracker never flew through their space. ‘Why did you stop telling stories?’
‘I enjoy giving people templates in which they can make their own stories. Telling my own requires a mindset I just can’t return to.’ Roveg was quiet for several seconds. ‘Just because I was right doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.’ He stared off, past the garden, past the dome, all the way to the horizon. ‘But you’re correct. Our species – no, forgive me, our cultures – aren’t the same at all. Quelin fear outsiders because we use them as scapegoats for the things we fear about ourselves. We bar cultural exchange because change frightens us. Whereas your people …’ He looked at her. ‘You fear outsiders because they gave you no choice in the change they forced upon you.’
‘There’s more to it than that,’ Speaker said. ‘But that’s a piece, yes.’
The progress monitor chimed completion. Roveg leaned forward; Speaker did the same with her suit.
Error
Connection lost
Cause: unknown
‘Agh,’ Roveg moaned. ‘Stars, I don’t know what’s wrong, that should’ve—’
‘It’s all right,’ Speaker said. She was disappointed, of course, but the beak-snapping anxiety she’d felt in the shuttle had ebbed. The feeling remained as a background hum, still imagining the same horrors, still desperately wanting solutions. But she’d tamed it, for the moment. She, and the stranger who had attempted to help. ‘It’s enough that you tried,’ she said. ‘Really.’
His frills drooped with defeat, but he turned his inscrutable face to hers once more. ‘I am sorry it didn’t work. But thank you for the rekree, Speaker. Am I saying that correctly?’
‘Rakree,’ she said.
‘Rakree,’ he repeated.
‘That’s right. And yes. Thank you, as well.’
Day 237, GC Standard 307
YOUR CONTINUED PATIENCE
ROVEG
The building was the same shape as the other pre-fab bubbles that comprised the Five-Hop, but that was where the similarity ended. The outside had been painted – in amateur fashion and drab monochrome – with images of erupting volcanoes, careening meteorites, glittering gems, and … and … some shapes. The shapes had meaning, Roveg was sure, but whatever their artist’s intent had been, it was lost in the execution. He stood pondering one lopsided blob that was probably a cliff. Maybe a rock. Could also be a water tank, if you turned your head to the side. There was no way to be sure.
A sign hung above the entrance to the building, its style quite unlike that of its prodigious cousins. This sign was engraved, not printed, and embellished with thick lacquer and faux-metal highlights. A custom order, commissioned by someone who wanted it to look elegant but without the means for heavy expense.
The sign read:
THE GORAN NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
ESTABLISHED GC STANDARD 304
HEAD CURATOR: OOLI OHT TUPO
A beaded curtain hung beneath the sign. Roveg passed through it, taking a moment to disentangle a few of the strings from where they’d caught in the ridges of his shell. He took in his surroundings, and his heart melted. ‘Oh, stars,’ he chuckled to himself.
The Goran Natural History Museum consisted of a single room crammed with tables, and atop the tables lay … well, rocks, mostly. There were big rocks and small rocks, rocks in boxes, rocks in stacks, rocks atop sagging pedestals, shards and pebbles and vials of dirt. The ostensible exhibits were marked with placards made from the same printer as the rest of the Five-Hop’s signage, and proclaimed titles like ‘Planetary Formation’, ‘Early Eras’, and ‘Anthropological Relics’. This last sign was posted above the only table in the Goran Natural History Museum which did not contain rocks, but rather, everyday bits and bobs that appeared to have fallen out of the pockets of dozens of travellers. Every cheap gadget and forgotten trinket was displayed and labelled as though it were precious treasure. Roveg thought that perhaps, to the curator, that’s exactly what they were.
Outside, someone came running – four paws, hitting the path hard. The sound grew closer and closer until at last Tupo burst through the curtain with a loud clatter, nearly getting xyr feet tangled in the beaded strings as xe skidded to a halt.
‘Welcome to my museum,’ Tupo gasped. There was glee in xyr voice, a sound that had been completely absent when Tupo had greeted Roveg at the airlock, or offered him cakes in the garden, or recited anything that had been xyr mother’s idea. But said glee was somewhat smothered, as the child was out of breath. (Lungs were limited in that respect, Roveg had learned; he was grateful for the much more sensible layout of his multiple abdominal airways.) ‘If you have – if you have any quest— whew, hang on.’ Tupo rested xyr head against the back of xyr lower neck and tried to catch xyr breath. ‘I was in the kitchen when I saw you come in.’
‘Sorry, should I have found you before entering?’ Roveg asked. He hadn’t seen any signage out front about checking in or buying a ticket or anything like that. If there was one thing he was sure of about the Five-Hop, it was that there was a sign for everything.
‘Yeah, no, it’s always – it’s always open.’ Tupo’s breaths were beginning to steady. ‘It’s just … not a lot of people come in here, so I got excited.’ Xe pulled xyr head back to a respectable angle and looked at Roveg with huge, eager eyes. ‘Can I give you the tour?’
Roveg’s initial intent upon entering the building had been to simply take a peek at the place, and his impression once he’d come through the door had not given him any desire to stay long. But the situation had changed. Now, he had but one goal, and that was to give his full, undivided attention to the head curator. He’d have been a monster to do otherwise.
‘Tupo,’ he said, ‘I would love to see your tour.’
The child nearly began to glow. ‘Cool,’ Tupo said. ‘Have you been to a natural history museum before?’
‘I have indeed.’
‘It’s really hard running a natural history museum on Gora.’
‘Because visitors are so unpredictable?’
‘No, because there’s no life here.’
‘Ah,’ Roveg said. ‘Yes, I can see how that might affect the study of natural history.’
The little Laru looked at xyr displays and huffed. ‘Everybody has such high expectations,’ xe said, delivering this opinion with the gravity of someone far more mature. ‘They think natural history museums have to have fossils or plants or bugs and stuff, and I’m here to tell you that no, they don’t.’ Xe gestured proudly at xyr displays. ‘Rocks are natural, and they have a history, and they’re awesome.’
‘I quite agree. But … I do have a question.’
‘Okay.’
‘And you’ll have to forgive me, as I’m not a scientist.’ Roveg said this with all the courtesy he would utilise in a professional setting. ‘If your study is primarily rocks, is your field not … geology?’
Tupo waggled xyr neck in acknowledgement. ‘That’s what Mom said at first, but listen. I’ve done a lot of sims of natural history museums, and they all have the same story.’ Tupo rose up and walked on xyr back legs, so as to be able to gesture with both forepaws. ‘You start with planetary formation. How the planet got here.’ Xe pointed to the first table, which held a stick-and-ball model of the Tren system – an easy thing to make when you only had two orbital bodies – plus an ancient scrib that was playing a pop-up pixel projection of planetary disk formation on loop. Tupo nodded at the scrib apologetically. ‘I couldn’t find a vid of Tren, so that’s a vid of Hagarem. But planets all happen the same way.’
‘Yes, I see,’ Roveg said. ‘And there’s no shame in using a different vid. This
one gets the message across. I’d say that was a good educational instinct.’
Tupo beamed and continued on. ‘Okay, so then, there’s rocks.’
Stars, yes, there were rocks, all tagged and dated diligently. Slate, 158/306, found by Tupo. Gneiss, 6/305, found by Tupo. Calcite, 184/307, present from the Aashikset feather family. ‘Who’s the Aashikset family?’ Roveg asked.
‘They own the tet house north of here,’ Tupo said. ‘We’re neighbours, I guess. Mom gives them a discount on fuel and they give her a discount on … um … I don’t know. I’m not allowed to go there yet.’
‘I would imagine not.’
‘Because there’s sex there.’
‘Yes, I’m aware of what a tet house is, thank you.’
‘It’s usually Hirikk who comes to buy fuel, and he always brings me cool rocks they find if they go outside their dome. He’s nice. Anyway, you can learn a lot from rocks.’ Tupo paused again as xe stared at xyr massive collection, seemingly overwhelmed by choice. ‘Do you know what an igneous rock is?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about a sedimentary rock?’
‘Yes, I know those, too.’
‘Okay.’ Tupo paused again, at a loss. ‘Well, you can just read the labels, then.’
‘I will,’ Roveg said. By this, he meant he would skim them, but he kept that to himself.
‘Oh, and also—’ Tupo ran over to a table off to the side that held an old-fashioned portable data server and an access monitor, both of which looked like well-loved hand-me-downs. ‘You can access the GC reference files here, if you want to look up something you don’t know about.’
‘Ah, you run a storage node!’ Roveg said approvingly. ‘Excellent. I have a number of friends who volunteer for the reference files, and they’re always on the prowl to find people willing to maintain nodes. Keeps the whole network more robust, as I’m sure you know.’
‘Yeah. I mean, I know I could just go on my scrib and access it through the Linkings, but I think this is cooler.’
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within Page 12