A Closed and Common Orbit

by Becky Chambers

Sidra regrouped. She was off-script now. A quick adjustment of the intro, and: ‘I’ve done a lot of research, and I think this could be accomplished rather easily. You’ve already got cable columns throughout the walls, so you could run the physical pathways alongside. My room could remain just that – my room. With some extra hardware and a cooling system, it would be an absolutely suitable spot for a core.’ She gestured at the scrib, and a new set of images appeared. ‘I could have cameras in all the rooms we share now – excluding your room and the bathroom, of course – and even’ – she gestured again – ‘a few outside.’ Another gesture brought up a table of numbers. ‘According to what I’ve found, I could buy all the supplies for the equivalent of eleven tendays on my current wages. If you’d be agreeable to starting on this project soon, I could work off the cost, no problem.’

  Pepper tapped her finger over her lips as she thought. ‘You want to install yourself in my house.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. How does this setup benefit me?’

  ‘For starters, increased security. I know you’ve got an alarmbot hive in case somebody breaks in, but it’s a very basic model. With me, you’d have a way of preventing trouble before it starts. If something was wrong, I could wake you up, call the authorities, and have all the lights in the house on in the blink of an eye. Same goes for medical emergencies. If something happened to you or Blue and the other wasn’t home, I’d be there to help.’

  ‘Interesting. What else?’

  ‘Enhanced communications and convenience. Want to order dinner? I can take care of it. Want to have all the newest sims downloaded to your hub before you come home? Give me a list of what you want, and I’ll have it done. Want me to read you your messages while you get ready for work? That’s a good twenty minutes I can shave off of your morning.’

  Pepper laced her fingers together under her chin. ‘And what do you get out of this?’

  ‘I just . . . think this arrangement would be better for everyone.’

  ‘I’m asking why.’

  Sidra looked at her friend for a moment. How was Pepper not getting this? ‘I don’t belong out here. I’m going to get someone in trouble – you, or Blue, or Tak. All three of you, maybe. There are too many variables, and I don’t know how this’ – she pointed at the kit – ‘is going to react to any of them.’

  ‘Is this about the thing that happened at the Vortex?’

  The kit froze. ‘In part. How do you know about that?’

  ‘Tak told me, after he brought you home.’

  Sidra’s pathways crackled with indignation. ‘He told you?’

  ‘He was just worried about you. Wanted to make sure your kit wasn’t malfunctioning.’

  Sidra tried to squash the petty sense of betrayal. If anything, whatever exchange had happened between Pepper and Tak further bolstered her point. ‘Well, that’s exactly what I mean. I don’t belong out there with Tak, and I’m just going to get you in trouble. One day, someone’s going to ask me a question that I shouldn’t answer—’

  ‘I’m working on that, Sidra. I’m sorry, Lattice is a beast—’

  ‘You shouldn’t have to be learning it. You shouldn’t have to be rearranging your life for me. I know you’re not going out as much as you used to. I see your calendar, I know things were different before I got here. I’m a hindrance to you. I’m a danger.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘I am! And I’m not getting used to this. To life out here. I know you don’t understand that, but I am tired. I am tired of going outside every single day and having to fight my vision and my movement and everything else that’s boxed up inside this fucking thing. I’m tired of every day being a chore.’

  ‘Sidra, I understand—’

  ‘You don’t! You have no idea what it’s like.’ The kit tugged at its hair. ‘I have a form that doesn’t suit me right now. Tak gets it, but you don’t.’

  ‘What, because he’s shon?’

  ‘Because he’s Aeluon. They all have to get implants in order to fit in.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s it right there – they do it to fit in. We live in a society, Sidra. Societies have rules.’

  ‘You break rules all the time.’

  ‘I break laws. That’s different. Social rules have their place. It’s how we all get along. It’s how we trust each other and work together. And yeah, there is a big stupid law that keeps you from getting the same deal as everybody else. That’s bullshit, and if I could change it, I would’ve done so a long time ago. But that isn’t the world we live in, and there are some things we have to step carefully around. That is all I am trying to help you do: to help you to fit in so that you don’t attract the wrong attention.’ Pepper pointed at the schematic. ‘This is not going to help you the way you think it will. You want to sit in a house – a house with nothing happening inside – alone, for most of the day, every day.’

  ‘I’d have the Linkings. I’d have—’

  ‘You would be alone. Intelligent sapients like you and me don’t do well that way. I don’t care if we’re organic or synthetic or whatever.’ Something pained and angry bled into her voice. ‘AIs aren’t supposed to be left alone. They need people. You need people.’

  ‘I can’t exist like this.’

  ‘You can. The rest of us do. You can, too, if you try.’

  ‘I am trying! You want me to do something I’m not made for! I can’t change what I am, Pepper! I can’t think like you or react like you just because I’m stuck behind the same kind of face right now. This face, stars – you have no idea what it’s like to walk past that mirror by the door every morning, and to see a face that belongs to someone else. You have no idea what it’s like to be stuck in a body someone else—’ Sidra stopped as she realised what she was saying.

  Pepper was not a large woman, but even seated, she seemed tall. ‘Are you going to finish that sentence?’ she said. Her tone was quiet, final.

  Sidra said nothing. She shook the kit’s head.

  Pepper stared at her for a few seconds, her face like stone. ‘I need some air,’ she said. She stood and walked toward the door. She paused before she left. ‘I’m on your side, Sidra, but don’t you ever say that to me again.’

  JANE, AGE 15

  It had been a pretty good morning. The sun wasn’t too hot, there hadn’t been any dogs, she’d found some promising scrap already, and best of all, there was a huge mess of mushrooms spilling out around the fuel drum in front of her. Jane sat on the ground with her pocket knife, talking to herself as she cut.

  ‘Aeluons,’ she said. ‘Aeluons are a bipedal species with silver scaled skin and cheeks that change colour. They don’t have a natural ability to speak or hear, so they talk through an implant stuck in their throat.’ She reached down and sliced a thick strip of fungus into nice food-sized pieces. It would’ve been faster to just carve hunks off, but then she’d just have to cut them up again at home. ‘When you meet Aeluons, press your palm into theirs to say hello. Don’t be scared when they talk to you without opening their mouths.’ She brushed clots of dirt from the slices of fungus, then tossed them into her gathering bag (she was pretty proud of that one – it hung well, and the red and yellow fabric she’d found for it was fun, though pretty faded). ‘Harmagians. Harmagians are really weird.’ Owl had told her saying species looked weird wasn’t a nice thing to do, but there weren’t any other species around, were there? She crawled forward into the fuel drum, cutting and cutting. ‘Harmagians are squishy, soft, and have tentacles. They use carts to get around because the rest of us walk faster than them. Don’t touch a Harmagian without permission, ’cause they have sensitive skin. Harmagians usually speak Hanto as a first language, but only the jerkface ones won’t speak Klip to you. They used to own a lot of planets, but then the Aeluons came along and—’

  Her knife hit something hard. She wiggled the tip around, trying to get a feel for whatever was beneath. Not metal – too thick. She pried the fungus aside. She blinked. Bone. She’d hit bone.
<
br />   She used her fingers to pull the fungus away, then grabbed the piece her knife had hit. Jane frowned. A rib, but not a dog rib, and too big to be a— She froze, remembering Owl’s anatomy lessons. No way.

  Jane cleared out the mushrooms fast as she could, no longer worrying about nice, kitchen-friendly sizes. She grabbed handfuls, tearing and tearing until the picture became more clear. There was a whole heap of bones, tangled and messy. She reached out a hand, a little afraid, though she didn’t know why. She pulled a skull from the pile – one of two. She sat back, cupping it in her palms. A Human skull, no joke. It was dirty, and had thin scarring lines where the fungus had grown around it. There were other lines in it, too, lines she didn’t have to think too hard about to understand. A dog – or many dogs, who knew – had run its teeth over this skull once. She thought about how it sized up compared to her own head. Not tiny, but smaller than her, for sure. She stared into the eye sockets, empty except for clumps of dirt and stray roots.

  The skull had belonged to a little girl.

  Jane nearly threw up, but she didn’t want to waste the food. She stared at the bright sky until her eyes burned. She breathed slow and angry. She spat a few times, fighting to keep her stomach down. It listened.

  She collected all the pieces she could find. She emptied her bag of scrap onto the wagon – if she lost some of it, fine – and put the bones in instead. It would’ve been more practical to carry it all together, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t put girls in with scrap.

  She went home. There was still a lot of day left, but home was the only thing that made sense right then.

  Owl didn’t say anything once Jane took the skulls out of the bag. Jane sat cross-legged in the middle of the living room, bag of bones by her side, skulls on the floor in front of her. They were about the same size, those skulls. ‘I bet they were bunkmates,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, honey,’ Owl said. Her cameras clicked and whirred. ‘What do you want to do with them? What do you think we should do?’

  Jane frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, struggling. ‘I don’t know why I brought them back. I just . . . I couldn’t leave them.’

  ‘Well,’ Owl said with a sigh. ‘Let me see if I have any reference files about funerals.’

  Jane knew the word from sims, but she had never really understood the idea. It was a party for dead people, as far as she could tell. ‘Can you explain a funeral?’

  ‘It’s a gathering to honour the life of someone who’s died. It also serves as a way for a family or a community to share grief.’ Owl made a face and sighed. ‘I don’t have any extensive references on this, but I know some things from memory. I know different Human cultures have different customs. Exodans compost their bodies and use the nutrients to fertilise their oxygen gardens. A lot of colonists do that, too. Launching remains into the sun is popular among Solans, though some practise cremation – burning bodies down to ash. Some of the communities in the Outer Planet orbiters freeze and pulverise remains, then distribute the dust among Saturn’s rings. And then there’s burial, but only grounders and Gaiists do that.’

  ‘That’s putting a body in the ground, right?’

  ‘Yes. The body decomposes, and the nutrients go back into the soil. I heard one of the brothers talk about that once. He liked the cyclical nature of it.’

  Jane picked up one of the skulls and cradled it in her hands, trying to imagine a little girl’s face looking back at her. What would you have wanted? What would I want? She’d never thought about that before. What did they do with bodies back at the factory? She imagined that whatever it was, there wasn’t any honour or grief involved. Dead girls were just junk, probably, like all the rest of it.

  She pressed her palm against where the little girl’s scalp would’ve been. Something heavy and cold formed in her chest. You weren’t junk, she thought, fingers tracing bone, carving white lines through the dirt. You were good and brave and you tried.

  ‘What do living people do at funerals?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure what the procedure is. I know they talk about the person who died. They clean up the bodies, too. They make them look as good as they can. There’s music. People share their memories of the person. And there’s food, usually.’

  ‘Food? For the living people, right?’

  ‘For both, I think, in some cases. I can’t say for sure, honey, my memory files on this are very limited. This isn’t something I thought I’d need to know off-hand.’

  ‘Wait, why both? Why would dead people need food?’

  ‘They don’t. It’s an expression of love, as I understand it.’

  ‘But the dead person doesn’t know the food’s there.’

  ‘The living people do. Just because someone goes away doesn’t mean you stop loving them.’

  Jane thought about that. ‘I’m not going to waste food,’ she said. ‘But we should do something.’

  ‘I think that’s a wonderful idea,’ said Owl.

  They came up with a good plan together. First, Jane washed the bones, but not in the cargo bay sink. That was where she cleaned dogs, and that didn’t feel right. She washed what was left of the girls in the bathroom, the same place where she cleaned herself.

  She laid the bones out on a length of fabric she’d scavenged from a bench in a wrecked skiff. It was clean and in good shape, but too rough for clothes. She was glad to have found a use for it.

  Owl pulled up her medical files and helped Jane arrange the pieces in the right way. Some bones were missing. Jane felt bad about that, but she’d tried her best to find them all. There was only so much she could do.

  Jane cleaned the scrap off the wagon and laid the bones on it. She thought about it more, and started rearranging their fingers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Owl said.

  ‘They’re bunkmates,’ Jane said. ‘They should be holding hands.’

  Owl closed her eyes and bowed her head. Music started playing, a song Jane hadn’t heard before. It was weird music, but cheerful, too, all bouncing flutes and drums.

  ‘What is this?’

  Owl smiled sad. ‘It’s an album Max liked when he was small. Aandrisk music. This one’s called “A Prayer for Iset the Eldest”. It’s tied to a folk legend about an elder who lived five hundred years.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I highly doubt it. But the song is supposed to have been played after her death. A celebration of a long life well lived.’

  Jane looked at the fingerbones, now intertwined. ‘They didn’t have that.’

  ‘No. But they should have.’ Owl paused. ‘And you still could.’ The music danced gently. An Aandrisk voice hummed along with the drums. Another joined it, then another, and another, a group blending together. Jane and Owl listened, saying nothing. The song eventually faded away. ‘Do you want to say something to them?’ Owl said.

  Jane licked her lips, feeling nervous for no reason. The dead girls couldn’t hear her. Even if she said the wrong thing, they wouldn’t care . . . right? ‘I don’t know who you were,’ she said. ‘I don’t know your names or numbers, or . . . or what your task was.’ She frowned. This was already all wrong. ‘I don’t care about your task. That’s not what’s important. That should never have been the most important thing. What’s important is that you were good girls who – who found out how wrong things are. And you died, and you were probably scared when it happened. That’s so unfair, and I am so, so angry about it. I wish you had been here so we could’ve helped each other. I wish we could’ve been friends. Maybe we could’ve gotten out of here together.’ She rubbed the back of her head. ‘I don’t know who you were. But I remember others. I remember my bunkmate Jane 64, who said’ – she smiled – ‘that I was the “most good” at fixing little stuff. She slept without moving and she was . . . kind. She was a kind friend, and I remember her. I remember Jane 6, who could sort cables super fast. I remember Janes 56, 9, 21, 44, 14, and 19, who died in the explosion. I remember Jane 25, who asked too many q
uestions – and was probably the smartest of all of us, now that I think about it. I remember the Janes, the Lucys, the Sarahs, the Jennys, the Claires. The Marys. The Beths.’ She wiped her face on her forearm, eyes stinging. ‘And I’ll remember you, too.’

  Owl couldn’t be with Jane for the next part of the funeral plan. Jane wished she could be. The walk to the waterhole was way too quiet. All she could hear was the rattle of the wagon of bones in tow. She needed to make some noise. The music back at the shuttle had felt like the right sort of thing to do for a funeral, but she didn’t know any songs like that.

  ‘Engines on,’ Jane sang softly. ‘Fuel pumps, go. Grab your gear, there’s lots to know. The galaxy is where we play, come with us, we know the way . . .’ It wasn’t nearly as good as the song Owl had picked, but the bones had been little girls once, and Jane bet they’d have liked Big Bug.

  After she got to the waterhole, she put on the pair of huge rubber boots that had been in the cargo bay from day one. They were enormous on her, but they went up past her knees, which was what she needed. She picked up the fabric that the bones rested on, holding it wide as she could between her arms. The bones shifted together. Some of the lizard-birds near the bank looked up.

  ‘I hope this is okay with you,’ Jane said to the bones. She stepped carefully into the water, trying not to jostle the bones any more than she had to. ‘I can’t launch you to space, and you don’t have any nutrients I can make anything out of.’ She walked forward. The water was dirty and polluted, but it gave life, too. It gave life to the lizard-birds and the fungus and the bugs, and even the dogs, the bastard dogs who’d made a meal out of these kids. The water gave her life, too. ‘So, um, in sims, sometimes they talk about fossils. Fossils are great, because they mean there’s a chance somebody will find you a long long time from now and what’s left of you can teach them things about who you were. I don’t know if this will work, but I know you need water and mud for fossils, and this is the best I’ve got.’ She stopped in the middle of the pond. The lizard-birds chirped. The water lapped at her huge boots. She felt like she should say something more, but what else was there? The bones couldn’t hear her anyway. She didn’t know why she was talking. She didn’t have any more words left, just a heavy chest and a whole lot of tired. She laid the fabric into the water. The water reached up, bleeding through, tugging it down. The bones sank and vanished.