by Mary E. Lowd
As long as there weren't any Heffen around to figure out Irohann's secret—that he wasn't really one of them—or worse, any Doraspians to discover where their Number One Most Wanted Traitor To The Queen had disappeared to, he was surprisingly fearless. It was inspirational, really. And a little bit contagious.
"Right," Clarity agreed. "You've got this under control. I'm going to check everyone's ready downstairs."
"Go ahead," Irohann said. He knew what she really wanted to do, even if she didn't say so.
Clarity climbed down the ladder and made a cursory check on each of their guests. Jeko and Am-lei had moved their biomatter crate into the corner of their borrowed room, behind the bed. It looked sufficiently secure. Jeko seemed to be napping, her nose curled tightly around Clarity's pillow, and Am-lei was watching the ships fly by outside her window.
Roscoe was camped out on the floor of the extra room, sitting on his rolled-out sleeping bag and dealing cards. Clarity didn't know if Wisper and Mazillion had actually agreed to play a game of cards with him, but he was dealing cards out at Wisper's feet and in the general direction of Mazillion, who had swarmed onto the back wall of the extra room, still clustered in their characteristic beard-shape.
"Would you like to be dealt in?" Roscoe asked when he saw her at the door, but Clarity demurred.
Like Am-lei, Clarity wanted to watch the stars as they debarked. She started descending the ladder to the cargo hold, but then paused. She should be kind. And it couldn't hurt to get to know these people she'd be spending the next week with in such close quarters. She returned to the open door to her own room, leaned in, and whispered, so as not to wake the sleeping elephant. It's better to let sleeping elephants lie. "Hey, Am-lei."
The giant insect crouching by the window startled at the sound of a voice. Her antennae waved, and she turned to stare at Clarity with her glittering dome eyes.
"If you want to watch the stars as we debark, there's a better window downstairs in the cargo hold." Clarity stood awkwardly in her own doorway, waiting for Am-lei to accept or refuse her invitation. Then she realized, she hadn't actually issued one. "I was heading down there... Do you want to come with me?"
Am-lei shifted her long angular legs, rearranging herself. She ran a talon over one of her antennae, bending it down toward her proboscis-mouth. She looked over at Jeko, snoring quietly on the bed. "Yes, I suppose I would." When Amlei let go of the antenna, it sprang back into place above her head.
Clarity led the way down to the cargo bay. It was the biggest room in the ship, large enough to hold all of the other rooms inside it several times over. In addition to housing the airlock on one side, it featured a small closet where they kept the spacesuits, jetpacks, and other necessities of space travel, and of course, the small bathroom.
Usually, the cargo hold itself was stacked full of crates and boxes. It had been only a few hours ago, this morning. But Clarity and Iroh had spent the small hours of the night and early morning unpacking their cargo, delivering it to the various merchants who'd met them in the docks, ready to receive their ordered goods.
Now the cargo hold was an empty cavern, and the large oval window built into the floor was completely uncovered. They'd paid extra for the Solar III model spaceship in order to get larger windows, including the oval in the cargo hold's floor. Clarity sat down on the floor beside the window's edge and gestured for Am-lei to join her.
Clarity sat cross-legged and leaned forward to rest her chin on her hands, staring straight down through the bottom of her spaceship. The Solar III style of spaceship was basically shaped like a classic rocket—cock-pit in the nose, cargo hold in the bottom, and each room inside oriented so the ship's primary acceleration would function like gravity, pushing passengers down toward the floor. Of course, the Solar III had powerful artificial gravity generators as well, but even with artificial gravity, there was no reason to make the generators fight against the natural orientation of the ship.
Am-lei folded her long, angular legs, lowered herself to the ground in a double cross-legged pose, and laid her long abdomen along the floor beside the window, a few feet away from Clarity.
For the first time, Clarity noticed that in addition to her long, curling proboscis, Am-lei had a variety of wiggling mouth parts and a pair of small mandibles. Her obsidian carapace, which had looked completely smooth to Clarity from a distance, was covered with a thin, velvety fuzz of hairs, and her six long limbs bent in several places each. Clarity wasn't sure if the middle pair was arms or legs; maybe it depended on the situation. She was a beautiful creature. Elegant.
Clarity blushed and looked back down through the window, realizing that Am-lei's huge dome-shaped eyes meant she must have almost 360-degree vision and could certainly see Clarity staring at her.
Am-lei said, "We will we be departing soon, won't we?"
"Any minute," Clarity answered.
Moments later, she felt the kathunking rumble in the floor of the station's docking clamps releasing The Serendipity. Without the clamps holding The Serendipity in place, the angular momentum of Crossroads Station's spinning rings caused the ship to drift away from the station.
The farther they drifted from the station, the more of the docking ring could be seen through the oval window. At first, all they'd been able to see was the rear of the spaceship docked beside them. As they pulled away, Clarity saw other ships clamped to the ring at semi-regular intervals, like a mismatched litter of electric space babies nursing on their mother. Some of the ships were rocket-shaped like The Serendipity; others were built out of more complicated curves or boxier shapes, and they came in all shades of silver and gold. Altogether, they reminded Clarity of the carousel in the zero-gee playground, chasing each other around in a circle as the station spun.
"Goodbye little carousel ships," she said, wiggling her fingers in a friendly wave.
The gravity shifted subtly, pushing sideways first and then settling into a stronger downward pull as the ship's rear thrusters kicked in, maneuvering them away from the crowded zone right around the station, filled with other ships coming and going.
The curve of the docking ring rounded out as they pulled away, and as they left the plane of the station's rings, the other rings became visible behind it. Spinning wheels within spinning wheels, and the globe of the arboretum spinning in the middle. From the outside, the green globe of the arboretum was nothing more than a gray ball. The other parts of the station—the concentric rings—sparkled with windows, showing glimpses of the the busy lives inside.
"So, where are you and Jeko flying to?" Clarity asked. "What's so important that you've spent months trying to charter a ship?"
Am-lei shifted in subtle ways—antennae and mouth parts moving slightly—but she didn't answer right away, not fast enough to stop Clarity from getting nervous she'd overstepped her bounds.
"If you don't mind me asking, that is," Clarity added, trying to sound casual.
"I don't mind," Am-lei said. "It's my homeworld."
"Where you grew up?" Clarity asked.
"No," Am-lei answered. "I've never been there."
"Really?" Clarity asked, intrigued. That's what homeworld meant to her.
Am-lei's antennae waved, and she continued staring at the space station receding into the darkness of space behind them. Clarity had almost given up hope of learning more about her story, when she finally said, "My clone-mother was rescued from a crashed vessel when she was still in an early larval stage. The woman who rescued her, a human, raised her on Crossroads Station. The computers on the crashed vessel were so damaged... There was no information. No flight records. My grandmother was never able to figure out where the ship had come from, not until many years later, after my mother was an adult. After I was born. By then, well, Crossroads Station is my home."
"So it's a pilgrimage," Clarity said.
"Yes," Am-lei said. "Of sorts."
Clarity wanted to ask what was in the bio-matter crate, but it seemed like prying. Am-lei would te
ll Clarity if she wanted.
Crossroads Station receded into the distance, growing smaller steadily, exponentially, until it shrank to a point and disappeared. The bright yellow star Crossroads Station orbited flashed past, and they were in the depths of space, traveling in a warped field of the three-dimensional space continuum. The stars danced and flickered through the warp field. It was pretty, but it would look the same, essentially, through any of The Serendipity's windows.
The rear window only mattered as they flew away from the station.
"I love watching that," Clarity said.
"I've never traveled even this far away from Crossroads Station, except for one time before." Am-lei preened her antennae, bending one and then the other down toward her complicated cluster of proboscis and mouth parts.
Clarity supposed her own face must look complicated to Am-lei too... All of the funny shapes—eyes, mouth, nose, eyebrows, mashed together onto one mostly flat plane of skin. Or maybe not. If Am-lei had lived on Crossroads Station most of her life, then she'd have seen a lot more humans than other members of her own species. There were other insectoid aliens on Crossroads Station, but not as many as the different kinds of mammals like her and Irohann. And Roscoe, and Jeko.
"Where were you traveling the other time?" Clarity asked.
"Wespirtech," Am-lei said.
Clarity felt excitement rise in her chest. With all the fabulous places she'd been in the universe, she'd never been to Wespirtech. Yet, she saw the effects of the notorious science institute everywhere. Her own spaceship had even been designed there.
"Why were you at Wespirtech?" Clarity asked. "Can you tell me about it?"
"I studied there."
"Oh, that's right. You're a physicist. What was it, gravity waves? That's what you studied?"
"That's right." Am-lei shifted from her double cross-legged pose into a single cross-legged pose with a double pair of arms crossed over her thorax. "I handle gravity field harmonics for Crossroads Station now."
"But what was Wespirtech like?" Clarity pressed. "I've always been curious about it. It seems like all the best technology comes from there. You know, Wisper's body is even designed by a Wespirtech roboticist—I was in her shop this morning. Maradia's Robot Emporium."
"I've heard of her," Am-lei said. "Maradia attended Wespirtech before me. She was gone before my time. So, I don't really know her. What do you mean—Wisper's body?"
Suddenly, Clarity was nervous. She didn't trust Wisper and felt almost sure the robot had been somehow lying or, at least, telling different stories to each of them. However, Clarity wasn't sure she wanted to uncover those lies. It felt safer to leave the situation alone, ferry Wisper's team to Eridani 7, collect her money, and move on.
Yet, she'd already opened the Pandora's Box. She couldn't completely avoid the topic. "I don't know what Wisper told you," Clarity said cautiously, "but she's the AI from a science mission to study some black hole and pulsar..."
"Yes, I know that." There was a prim, impatient quality to Am-lei's response.
"Well, she kind of stole—" Clarity felt flustered. "No, she didn't steal... She had me buy this body for her, but with her own money from the science mission's grant. Do you know much about AI?" Clarity asked, realizing maybe Am-lei, another Wespirtech scientist, could help her figure out what exactly had been going on with those two roboticists.
"Not a lot," Am-lei said. "My studies focused more on abstract physics, astrophysics—large events that fold space and time."
"Time?" Clarity asked. She'd learned a lot traveling the universe with Irohann, but she'd never had the kind of formal training a place like Wespirtech offered. She'd gotten off the dirt ball she grew up on as soon as she finished high school. These days, you didn't have to know much science to be surrounded by the magic it could work. Her life, her breath, everything depended on the wizardry of the type of scientists who trained at Wespirtech, and yet she didn't have to understand any of it.
But that didn't mean she didn't want to.
"Time folds too?" Clarity asked.
"Space and time are the same thing," Am-lei answered. "The passage of time is only an illusion caused by the uni-directionality of our own consciousness."
That sounded less like an answer to Clarity than some sort of zen koan. "Why didn't you stay at Wespirtech?" Clarity asked, trying to bring the conversation back to something more concrete. Something she could understand.
"It's all humans there," Am-lei said, matter of fact, no sharpness to her fluting tone. "I'm used to humans, but they weren't used to me. Most of them are from human colony worlds, not places like Crossroads Station. It got tiresome being... exotic." She unfolded her double pair of arms and held them out to either side. In that pose, she reminded Clarity of the blue story-telling robot back in the All Alien Cafe.
"I can see how that would get old," Clarity said. "Even so... It must be magical there." As soon as the words left her mouth, Clarity could hear how foolish they sounded. She hadn't felt more keenly aware of her dirtball background and lack of education in a long time.
Am-lei's antennae waved in an inscrutable way. Her face was nearly as unreadable as Wisper's, though Clarity supposed that would change if she spent more time with the giant insectoid. She certainly had a complicated enough face—with all those mouth-parts and the antennae—to convey a lot of emotion.
Eventually, Am-lei's proboscis unfurled, and she fluted, "It is magical, I suppose. In its own way."
"We've got six days, and this is a very small ship," Clarity said. "Not a lot to do and not a lot of space to escape from each other. I'd love to hear some stories."
So, Am-lei told her stories.
Clarity listened to tales of scientists playing like children, running through the hallways of Wespirtech's Daedalus Complex, literally playing games. She'd never imagined the spaceship engines and robot bodies, algae-pack atmo-scrubbers and gene-mod technologies that day-to-day life in the galaxy depended upon were invented by young women and men more interested in competing with each other and showing off than in changing the universe. At least, that's how they sounded in Am-lei's stories. She wasn't sure how much to believe, versus how much to chalk up to Am-lei's bitterness at not quite fitting in.
Eventually, Irohann came down to the cargo hold looking for Clarity. "The ship's in auto-pilot," he said. "We should be set until we reach the outskirts of Eridani 7's gravity well."
"Glad to hear it," Clarity said. "Am-lei's been telling me about Wespirtech. One of the few places we've never been. You know, they have scientists there who think stars are sentient? A whole laboratory of biologists, trying to talk to celestial bodies by translating solar flares or reading patterns in the minuscule fluctuations of their gravity waves." Clarity looked at Am-lei and asked, "Did I get that right? That's what you said?"
"Yes, that's right," Am-lei agreed. "Though, I think the solar biologists are wrong. And even if stars are sentient, I don't think they'll ever prove it. They'd be living at such a slower speed than us, it would take centuries to even hear one of them saying, 'Hello.'"
Clarity couldn't help breaking into a big grin. She didn't care if Am-lei thought it was impossible. It was still delightful, and she intended to believe the solar biologists from now on. If none of the scientists could prove star-sentience one way or the other, then what could it hurt for her to believe it?
And it did make the universe—already a magical place—seem even more magical.
"Should we put some sort of dinner together?" Irohann said. "Have everybody eat together?"
"I don't think Wisper eats," Clarity said. "And I'm not sure what to expect from Mazillion. What about you?" she asked Am-lei.
Am-lei fluted, "I generally drink a floral nectar. I'm sure your food synthesizer can whip up something appropriate."
"And what does Jeko eat?" Clarity asked.
"Any and every type of plant matter," Am-lei said. "And a lot of it."
"Got it; big salad," Irohann said. "I can work
with that."
"I'll come help get the sugar balances right for my nectar," Am-lei said.
Irohann climbed back up the ladder, tail wagging. Apparently, he was enjoying playing host, in spite of his original objections. Am-lei clambered up the ladder after him, her six twiggy limbs a little too long to not be awkward. Even though she stood shorter than Clarity, her limbs were much longer, just folded and angled. The gray fabric over her abdomen shimmered as she moved.
Clarity stayed beside the oval window a while longer, watching the stars dance. She heard the echoes of Irohann and Am-lei talking in the kitchen. She could make out their different voices, but not what they were saying. There was a friendly quality to hearing conversation filling her home while she listened quietly, away in her own space. It reminded her of decades ago when she'd been a child, waking up to hear her parents making pancakes and talking in the kitchen. The clatter of silverware and dishes; the smell of pancake batter and bacon. She hadn't thought about those mornings in a long time.
Clarity's parents had told her not to bother contacting them again when she'd left. They didn't want her bringing home any toxic other-worlder ideas. She'd often thought her parents would have been happier if they'd been born a thousand years ago, when humans were confined to a single planet and hadn't met any other sentient species in the universe yet. Most of the people she'd known on her dirtball of a homeworld had seemed that way. She didn't miss it, usually. She could go years at a time without thinking about those days. That dirtball had never been as much her home as The Serendipity had become.
Right now, though, she kind of wanted some pancakes.
Clarity began up the ladder to the mid-ship level when she noticed a buzzing behind her. She looked over her shoulder, around the cargo hold. The buzzing came closer, and a tiny black speck flew past her, up through the hatch to the kitchen. It had to be one of Mazillion's component bodies. Had it been down there, with her and Am-lei all along? Could it have been listening to them? Would a single component body of a creature made up out of thousands be smart enough to understand anything they'd been saying? Or even language at all?