Record of a Spaceborn Few

Feed source: Reskit Institute of Interstellar Migration (Public News Feed)

Item name: The Modern Exodus – Entry #1

Author: Ghuh’loloan Mok Chutp

Encryption: 0

Translation path: [Hanto:Kliptorigan]

Transcription: 0

Node identifier: 2310-483-38, Isabel Itoh

[System message: The feed you have selected has been translated from written Hanto. As you may be aware, written Hanto includes gestural notations that do not have analogous symbols in any other GC language. Therefore, your scrib’s on-board translation software has not translated the following material directly. The content here is a modified translation, intended to be accessible to the average Kliptorigan reader.]

Greetings, dear guest, and welcome! I am Ghuh’loloan Mok Chutp, and these words are mine. I hope my communicative efforts will be sufficient to make any time you spend on this feed here worthwhile. I shall exercise my skills to the best of my ability, with the aim of educating and entertaining you. If I fail in these endeavours, please accept my sincere apologies and know that such failings are mine alone and are not reflective of my place of employment, my schooling, or my lineage.

If you are unfamiliar with my work, allow me to provide a brief introduction. I am an ethnographic researcher based at the Reskit Institute of Interstellar Migration. I have worked in this field for twenty-two standards, and my focus is on transitory and orbital communities in the modern era. I am proud of my work thus far, with a few exceptions. I am confident that I am qualified for the task I will describe momentarily. I hope you will agree.

What do you think of, dear guest, when I mention the Exodus Fleet? You could define the term literally: the collection of ships that carried the remnants of the Human species away from their failed planet. Perhaps the Fleet sparks some deeper association in you – a symbol of desperation, a symbol of poverty, a symbol of resilience. Do you live in a community where Humans are present? Do you know individuals born within one of these aged vessels? Or are you from a more homogeneous society, and therefore surprised to learn that the Fleet is still inhabited? Perhaps the entire concept of the Fleet baffles you. Perhaps it is mysterious, or exciting. Perhaps you yourself are Human, dear guest, and think of the Fleet as home – or, conversely, a place as alien to you as to the rest of us.

Whatever your background, the Fleet is a source of curiosity for all who do not have some personal connection to it. Unless you have a close Human friend or are a long-haul merchant, it is unlikely you have travelled there. While Humans living in GC territories and planetary colonies outnumber Exodans in aggregate, the Fleet is still where you will find the largest concentration of their kind outside the Sol system. Though many Humans have never set foot in the great homestead ships, the journey of the Fleet is a history they all consciously carry. That lineage has inextricably shaped every modern Human community, regardless of foundational philosophy. In one way or another, it affects how they think of themselves, and how the rest of us see them.

So what is the Fleet today? How do these people live? How do they view the GC? Why have they continued this way of life? These are the questions I will attempt to unravel in the time ahead. I, Ghuh’loloan, will likewise be a guest. As I write this, I am on my way to the Exodus Fleet, where I will be staying for eight tendays. I will be living aboard an Exodan homestead ship, interviewing Exodan citizens, and learning Exodan ways. Much was written about the state of the Exodan Fleet following first contact and leading up to GC membership, but little mainstream record has been made of them since. The assumption, I fear, is that their presence in multispecies communities means they have integrated into our varied societies and left their old ways behind. Nothing could be further from the truth. I cross the galaxy now in search of a more honest story.

It is my hope, dear guest, that you will join me.

Tessa

Received message

Encryption: 0

Translation: 0

From: Ashby Santoso (path: 7182-312-95)

To: Tessa Santoso (path: 6222-198-00)

Hey Tess,

I don’t know if you’ve seen the feeds, but if you have, I’m okay. If you haven’t, some bad stuff went down at Hedra Ka, but again: I’m okay. The ship’s suffered a lot of damage, but we’re stable and out of immediate danger. I’ve got my hands full with repairs and my crew, so I’ll get on the sib when I can. I’ll send a note to Dad, too.

More soon, promise. Hug the kids for me.

Ashby

In the grand tradition of siblings everywhere, Tessa wanted to kill her brother.

Not permanently kill him. Just a casual spacing to get her point across, followed by a quick resurrection and a hot cup of tea. That, she’d say, as he sat shivering on the floor, clutching his mug like he used to when he was little. That’s what you put us through every time you go off the map. We all stop breathing until you get back.

Tessa tossed her scrib across her desk and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. ‘Shit,’ she breathed, furious and relieved. She’d seen the feeds. Of course, they hadn’t said which civilian ship the Toremi had fired on, but Tessa had known where Ashby had been headed for the past standard, what he’d been hired to do. ‘You stupid . . .’ She exhaled, her eyes stinging. ‘He’s okay.’ She inhaled, her voice steadying. ‘He’s okay.’

She’d gone to the cargo bay immediately after the news feed had wrapped up, despite her shift not starting for another two hours, despite her father telling her to stay home until they knew whether to relax or plan a funeral. Tessa had no stomach for how Pop had decided to deal with it: holding vigil in front of the pixel projector, watching every feed over and over until something new uploaded, smoking and muttering and tossing out anxious theories. She saw no point in sitting around waiting for news, especially when you had no idea when it would arrive. She’d addressed the fist squeezing her heart in her own way. She’d dragged Aya out of bed, given Ky a cake bite to keep him from fussing at the change in schedule, given Aya a cake bite so she wouldn’t cry unfairness, and told Pop to get on the vox if anything changed.

You’d know if you stayed home, he’d grumbled, shoving fat pinches of redreed into his pipe. But she hadn’t budged, and he hadn’t pushed, for once. She’d patted his shoulder, and sent the kids across the way to the Parks’ – who, as Tessa had figured, had been asleep, but that’s what hexmates were for.

Aya had pestered her for an explanation every step toward the door. Why are we up so early? Why can’t I stay here? Do I have to go to school? Why was Grandpa mad at you? Is Dad okay?

Your dad’s fine, Tessa had said. That was the only question she’d answered directly. Every other query got a because I said so or an I’ll tell you later. There was no way to say your Uncle Ashby’s ship may have been blown up by aliens and this is my way of coping to a nine-year-old, and no way a nine-year-old would respond to that sentiment in a way that wouldn’t freak out the two-year-old as well. Let the kids have a quiet morning. The grown-ups could worry enough for everyone.

Tessa stretched back against her desk chair, cracking the tight points between ribs and spine. She turned her head toward the wall vox. ‘224-246,’ she said. The vox chirped in acknowledgement of a home address. ‘Pop, is your scrib on?’

‘No,’ her father shouted back. He’d never grasped the concept that even though the vox was on the other side of the room, he didn’t have to yell like he did with the old models. ‘Why?’

Tessa rolled her eyes. Why, asked the man who’d been looping feeds all morning. ‘Ashby wrote to us. He’s okay.’

The vox relayed a long sigh, followed by a softly spoken ‘shit.’ He started shouting again. ‘How’s his ship?’

‘He said stable. He didn’t have time to write much, just that he’s okay.’

‘Is he still on board? Stable can change fast.’

‘I’m sure Ashby knows whether or not his ship’s safe.’

‘These Toremi weapons they’re talking about on the feeds, those things can really—’

‘Pop, stop watching the feeds. Okay? They don’t know what’s going on either, they’re just filling time.’

‘I’m just saying—’

‘Pop.’ Tessa pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘I have to get back to work. Go to the gardens or something, yeah? Go to Jojo’s, get some lunch.’

‘When are you coming home?’

‘I don’t know. Depends on how the day goes.’

‘Okay.’ He paused. ‘I love you.’

Pop wasn’t withholding or anything, but he didn’t throw those three words around lightly. Tessa softened. ‘I love you, too.’

The vox switched off, and she took another opportunity to clear her lungs. She stared out the workroom window, out into the cargo bay. Rows of towering shelves stretched on and on, full to the brim with wires and junk, attended by the herd of heavy-duty liftbots following assignments Tessa had punched into her terminal. There were stacks of metal, too, the pieces too big for the shelves, the pieces nobody’d had time to cut down. This was her domain, her project. It was her job to track comings and goings, to make sure everything got logged and weighed and described, to keep track of stuff the merchants and foundries weren’t ready for yet, to wrangle the unintelligent machines who shuffled goods from where they had been to where they were needed. A complicated job, but not a taxing one, and one where you could count on most days going exactly the way you’d thought they’d go when you woke up. Compared to the constant familial chaos of home, she valued that.

When she’d first started working in cargo, way back in her twenties, Bay Eight had been a tidy place. She remembered the neatly packed bins of raw materials, the imported crates with exciting labels printed in multiple alien alphabets. Twenty years down the road, and you couldn’t find a one of those in her bay anymore. Imports and processed stock were elsewhere. Bay Eight was one of three on the Asteria dedicated to the remains of the Oxomoco. Every homestead ship was made the same: a massive central cylinder full of vital systems, a flat ring of thousands of homes anchored around it, a cluster of chunky engines at the back. The Oxomoco didn’t look like that anymore. Half of it was a ragged husk, dragged far from the Fleet’s orbit but still out there, still scaring the boots off anyone who saw it grimacing through a shuttle window. The other half was in pieces, gathered and shoved away in cargo bays like hers. So now, instead of alien crates, she dealt with a never-ending backlog of support trusses, floor panels, empty oxygen tanks. Things that had been vital. Things that had been viewed as permanent. All it had taken was one malfunctioning shuttle, one unlucky trajectory, one stretch of fatigued bulkhead. Just one combination of small things that led to the deaths of tens of thousands, and to cargo bays packed with what was left of the place that had carried them.

Pop’s words stuck in her head. Stable can change fast.

‘M Santoso, you okay?’

Tessa looked over. Kip was peeking around the doorway, his pockmarked face scrunched in concern. She sighed and gave her head a light shake. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ The scrunch persisted. Explanations that worked for a nine-year-old had no chance against a sixteen-year-old. Tessa gave an acknowledging smirk and waved him in. ‘Just family stuff. Would you pour me some mek?’ She paused. ‘You can have one, too, if you want.’

The boy raised his eyebrows. ‘My shift’s not over.’

Tessa gave him a wry smile. ‘You’ve got two days left with me, and we both know you’re not going to apprentice here.’

Kip smiled sheepishly as he poured two mugs of mek from the brewer in the corner. ‘Come on, M, I’m not that bad.’

‘You’re not,’ Tessa said. ‘You could be decent at managing inventory if you put in the practice. You’ve got the kind of logicky brain you need for sorting stuff. But we both know this isn’t for you.’ She accepted the mug with a nod, trying to brush away the lingering mental image of kicking Ashby in the shins. ‘But that’s the point of job trials, yeah? You’ve gotta find a good fit, and you won’t know what you like and what you don’t until you give everything a try. You worked hard for me, and you didn’t slack off.’ Much, she thought.

Kip sat down, a lanky assemblage of too-long limbs and patchy stubble. The kid would be handsome in a year or two, but puberty wasn’t going to let him get there without a fight. ‘What was your first trial?’ he asked.

‘Fish farms with my dad,’ Tessa said. ‘I lasted three whole days.’

‘Did you not like killing them, or what?’

‘No, that part was fine. It was more that Pop and I were gonna kill each other.’ She took a sip of mek and did not think about Ashby. ‘Have you thought about trying the food farms?’

‘I did bugs,’ Kip said.

‘And?’

‘I didn’t like killing them.’

This surprised her not a bit. ‘But you eat ’em, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, with the same goofy smile. ‘I’m just good letting somebody else . . . y’know. Do that.’

‘Fair enough,’ Tessa said. Inwardly, she found that mindset silly. If you were okay with eating something, you had to be okay with it being dead. But Kip was a nice kid, and she wasn’t about to make him feel bad for having a soft heart. ‘Any idea what you want to try next?’

‘I dunno. Not really.’

‘You’ve got plenty of time. And besides, there’s tons more for you to try. Always something to do in the Fleet, yeah?’

Kip’s mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I guess.’

Tessa took in the kid’s face. She knew that look – that restless, empty-handed look. She’d seen it on her baby brother’s face, just a standard or so before he packed his bags and tearfully promised them all he wouldn’t disappear. He’d made good on that. They got letters and sib calls regularly. He visited when he could. He sent them more credits than any of them knew how to thank him for. But there was a room in the Santoso home that was used for storage now. There were a lot of rooms like it in the Fleet. Empty rooms had been a luxury once, Pop often said. Nowadays . . . nowadays folks could spread out more, take longer showers, hear their voices echo a little louder in the public walkways. She looked at Kip, drinking his mek, probably bored out of his mind. She wondered if his room would end up empty, too.

Isabel

Isabel had worked in the Asteria’s Archives for forty-four years, but she never tired of days like this. These days were some of the best, and she’d prepared in kind. The assembly hall was most often used for lectures and workshops and so on, but today, it had been transformed. She and the other archivists had hauled out the decorations they’d long ago made for such occasions: hanging sunbursts made of scrap metal, bright streamers of recycled cloth. A long table stood waiting to the side, ready to receive home-cooked food and drink. Another table held new seedlings brought in from one of the nurseries, available for those present to bring home to their neighbourhood gardens. Floating globulbs hovered around the room’s upper edges, radiating yellows, greens, and blues. Life colours. Growth colours. At the front of the room, by the big screen that projected the view of the starry black beyond the bulkhead, there was a podium. It was covered with streamers and fully-grown plants and, at the top, held Isabel’s scrib. This was the most important piece of all.

The person being honoured there would not remember any of it, but the others present would, and they would relay the story one day. That, in a nutshell, was what Isabel’s profession was for. Making sure everybody was a link in a chain. Making sure they remembered.

Guests began to arrive, festively dressed, carrying containers dewy with steam and fragrant with spice, syrup, toasted dough. Isabel would not need dinner after this. One of the finer perks of her job.

A boy pleaded with a man to let him have just one of whatever they’d brought to the shared table. The man told the boy to be patient. The lack of patience in his own voice indicated that this was not the first time this conversation had been had that day. Isabel smiled. She’d been in both their shoes.

Two musicians set up near the podium. Isabel knew them both, and greeted them warmly. She remembered when they’d been kids begging at the table, too. The same was true for many of the people entering the room, except for the ones she’d shared a childhood with so long ago. There weren’t many faces here she didn’t know.

The room filled, and at last, two people entered, carrying a tiny third. This was Isabel’s cue. She walked to the podium, stepping with practised care in her formal robes. The hum of voices started to fade. She met eyes with one of the musicians and nodded. The musicians nodded to her, then to each other. One and two and . . . she saw them mouth. A sheet drum and a long flute leapt into merry action. The final voices disappeared, and the gathered bodies parted to allow the trio to make their way to Isabel.

The young couple stood before her, smiling, proud, perhaps a little shy. Their infant daughter wriggled in the woman’s arms, more interested in the glint of her mother’s necklace than anything else.

Isabel raised her head to the room as the song reached its end. Faces looked back at her, smiling, waiting. Everyone there knew exactly what would come next. She’d said the words hundreds of times. Thousands, maybe. Every archivist knew how to say them, and every Exodan knew their sound by heart. But still, they needed to be said.

Isabel’s body was old – a fact it constantly reminded her of – but her voice remained strong and clear. ‘We destroyed our world,’ she said, ‘and left it for the skies. Our numbers were few. Our species had scattered. We were the last to leave. We left the ground behind. We left the oceans. We left the air. We watched these things grow small. We watched them shrink into a point of light. As we watched, we understood. We understood what we were. We understood what we had lost. We understood what we would need to do to survive. We abandoned more than our ancestors’ world. We abandoned our short sight. We abandoned our bloody ways. We made ourselves anew.’ She spread her hands, encompassing the gathered. Mouths in the crowd silently mirrored her words. ‘We are the Exodus Fleet. We are those that wandered, that wander still. We are the homesteaders that shelter our families. We are the miners and foragers in the open. We are the ships that ferry between. We are the explorers who carry our names. We are the parents who lead the way. We are the children who continue on.’ She picked up her scrib and addressed the couple. ‘What is her name?’

‘Robin,’ the man said.

‘And what name does your home carry?’

‘Garcia,’ said the woman.

‘Robin Garcia,’ Isabel spoke to the scrib. The scrib chirped in response, and retrieved the citizen registry file she had created that morning. A blue square appeared on screen. Isabel gestured for the mother to step forward. The baby frowned as they manoeuvred one of her bare feet onto the square, pressing tiny toes and heel against it. The scrib chirped again, indicating that a new file had been added to the mighty towers of data nodes that stood vigil a deck below. Isabel read the record to the room. ‘Robin Garcia,’ she said. ‘Born aboard the Asteria. Forty Solar days of age as of GC standard day 158/307. She is now, and always, a member of our Fleet. By our laws, she is assured shelter and passage here. If we have food, she will eat. If we have air, she will breathe. If we have fuel, she will fly. She is daughter to all grown, sister to all still growing. We will care for her, protect her, guide her. We welcome you, Robin, to the decks of the Asteria, and to the journey we take together.’ She cupped the baby’s head with her palm, weathered skin cradling new. She spoke the final words now, and the room spoke with her. ‘From the ground, we stand. From our ships, we live. By the stars, we hope.’

Sawyer

He stood at the railing outside the dockside bioscans, luggage in hand, breathing in the recycled air. It was different than the air he knew, for sure. It wasn’t what he’d call good air, not like what you’d get around a forest or a field. There was a slight metallic edge to it, and though the walkways were lined with healthy planters exhaling oxygen back his way, something about each breath just felt artificial. There was no wind here, no rain. The air moved because Humans told it to, and maybe in that, it had lost something along the way.

But Sawyer smiled. Different was what he was after, and everything he’d encountered in the twenty minutes since coming aboard was as different as could be. What struck him was the practicality of the architecture, the intense economy. On Mushtullo, people embellished. There were mouldings on the tops of walls. Roofs twisted and fences spiralled. Even the ships were filigreed. Not here. Nothing in the foundation of this vessel had been wasted on sentiment.

But while the ship’s skeleton was simple, the people within had spent centuries fleshing it out. The metal walls were disguised with inviting paint: warm tan, soft orange, living green. On his way to the railing, he’d come upon an enormous mural that had stopped him in his tracks. He’d stood for a minute there, as other travellers split their busy stream around him. The mural was vibrant, almost gaudy, a spree of colour and curves depicting dancing Exodans with a benignly burning sun beneath their feet and a starry sky above. Myriad professions were on display – a farmer, a doctor, a tech, a musician, a pilot, a teacher leading children. It was an ordinary sort of theme, and yet there was something about it – the lack of actual ground, perhaps, or something in the sweeping style – that was undeniably foreign. You’d never see a mural like that on Mushtullo.

Sawyer let his reality sink in: he was in the Fleet. The Fleet! He was finally, actually there, not just reading reference files or pestering elderly folks for any scraps they could remember about what their parents had told them about the ships they’d left behind. He’d made it. He’d made it, and now, everything was right there for him to explore.

There were no other species in the crowd, and it left him both giddy and jarred. The only times he’d seen anything close to this many Humans in one place was on holidays or at parties, and even then, you’d be sure to see other sapients in the mix. There’d been merchants from elsewhere on the transport with him, but as soon as they reached a branching sign that read Cargo Bays on the right and Central Plaza on the left, all the scales and claws went right. Everyone around him now had two hands, two feet, soft skin, hairy heads. He’d never blended into a public group like this, and yet, he felt like he stuck out more than he ever had.

Sawyer had thought perhaps some part of him would recognise this place, that he’d feel himself reversing the steps his great-great-grandparents had taken. He’d read accounts of other grounders visiting the Fleet. They’d written about how connected they felt to their ancestors, how they felt immediate kinship with the people there. Sawyer hadn’t felt that yet, and part of him was a touch disappointed. But no matter. He’d been there for all of twenty minutes, and the only person he’d talked to was the patch scan attendant. So far, he’d dipped a toe in the water. It was time to dive in.

He took an elevator down to the market floor, an expansive grid of shop fronts and service centres. It wasn’t like other marketplaces he’d been to, where everything sprawled and piled as if it were alive. The Fleet, as he’d read and as had already proven true, was a place of orderly geometry. Every corner had been considered, measured, and considered again. Space efficiency was the top order of business, so the original architects had provided future generations of shopkeepers with defined lots that could be assigned and repurposed as needed. The end result was, on the surface, the tidiest trading hub Sawyer had ever seen. But once he got past the neat exteriors, the underlying business was bewildering. Dozens of signs, dozens of displays, hundreds of customers, and he had no idea where anything was.

He eyed the places that served food – all open-air (if that was the right term to use inside a ship), with shared eating tables corralled behind the waist-high metal walls that defined each lot’s edges. Sawyer found himself drawn toward a cheery, clean cafe called My Favourite. The menu posted outside was in both Klip and Ensk, and the fare was things he recognised – beansteak skewers, hoppers, jam cakes. It looked like a respectable spot for a non-threatening meal. Sawyer pointed his feet elsewhere. That was a place meant for merchants and visitors. Tourists. He wasn’t here to be a tourist. He was after something real.

He spied another eatery of the same size and shape. Jojo’s, the sign read. Or it would have, if the pixels on the second. hadn’t been twitching themselves nearly illegible. There was no posted menu. The only other signage displayed the hours of business, which were in Ensk numerals and Ensk numerals only. (Standard time, though. They only used Solar for age, or so he’d been told.) Behind the corral, some folks in algae-stained coveralls wolfed down whatever was for lunch. A group of five or six elderly folks were arguing over a game taking place on an old pixel board. Nobody had any luggage.

Perfect.

No one greeted Sawyer as he walked in. Few looked up. There were two people behind the counter: a wiry young man chopping something, and an imposing middle-aged woman peeling shells off steamed red coaster bugs. The woman was absorbed in a loud vid on a nearby projector – a Martian period drama, it looked like. She cracked each shell segment with speedy precision, without so much as a glance down at her work. Sawyer had no real way of knowing, but he got the unshakable sense that this was her place.

The woman gave a short, mocking laugh. ‘This Solan shit,’ she said in Ensk, shaking her head at the projector. The vid music hit a melodramatic crescendo as a character in a clunky exosuit succumbed to a sandstorm. ‘Why does anybody watch this?’

‘You watch it,’ an old woman piped up from the board game table.

‘It’s like a shipwreck,’ the shell-cracker replied. ‘Once it starts, I can’t look away.’

The scene changed. A tearful group of terraformers sat huddled in their dome. ‘This damned planet,’ one actor cried. He wasn’t about to win any awards for this, but stars, he was trying. ‘This damned planet!’

‘This damned planet!’ the woman repeated, laughing again. Her eyes snapped over as she noticed Sawyer at last. ‘Hey,’ she said, glancing at his bag. ‘What can I get ya?’

Sawyer walked up to the counter. He was more or less fluent in Ensk, having crammed Linking language lessons hard over the past few years, but the only person he’d been able to practise speaking with had been the lady at the shoe shop back home, and her slang was about twenty years out of date. He screwed up his courage, and asked: ‘Do you have a menu?’

Every person in Jojo’s looked up. It took Sawyer a moment to realise – accent. His accent. He didn’t have the distinctive snap of an Exodan, the silky smoothness of a Martian, the muddle of someone who did a lot of bouncing around. His face said Human. His vowels said Harmagian.

The woman blinked. ‘No menu,’ she said. She jerked a thumb back toward the wiry man, still chopping away. ‘It’s ninth day. That means we’ve got twice-round pickle on a quickbun and red coaster stew. Only, we’re out of red coaster stew.’ Exoskeleton crunched between her hands. ‘I gotta make more, and that’s gonna be at least an hour.’

‘Okay,’ Sawyer said. ‘I’ll have the other one.’

‘The pickle?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You ever had twice-round pickle?’

Sawyer grinned. ‘Nope.’

The woman grinned back, but it wasn’t a good grin, not the kind of grin that shook hands with his own. This was a different look, a look that knew something he didn’t. Sawyer felt his mood slip a bit. He was pretty sure the board game crew was still watching him.

‘Okay,’ the woman said. ‘One pickle bun. Comes with tea.’

It took him a second to realise she was asking him a question. ‘Tea would be great.’ She searched for a mug by way of reply. Sawyer took a chance, trying to coax more conversation. ‘Are you Jojo?’

‘No,’ the woman said flatly. ‘Jojo was my mom.’

‘And she was a lot nicer than this one,’ an old man with a pipe added from the back.

‘Ch,’ the woman said, rolling her eyes. ‘You only say that ’cause she slept with you once.’

‘I would’ve thought she was nice even if we hadn’t.’

‘Yeah, well. She always was a sucker for ugly things.’

The board game crew cracked up – the old man in particular – and the woman grinned, a real grin this time. She filled a mug from a large decanter and set it on the counter as the wiry man silently assembled Sawyer’s lunch. Sawyer tried to see what was going into what he’d just ordered, but the man’s body blocked his view. Something was chopped, something was ladled, a few bottles were shaken. Twice-round pickle looked . . . involved.

The woman stared at Sawyer. ‘Oh,’ he said, understanding. He hadn’t paid. He pushed back his wristwrap. ‘Where should I, ah . . .’ He looked around for a scanner.

The woman pursed her lips. ‘Don’t take creds,’ she said.

Sawyer was elated. He’d heard about this – Exodan merchants who operated on barter and barter only. But there was a problem: that was as far as his knowledge of the practice went, and he didn’t know what the protocol was. He waited for her to suggest an acceptable trade. Nothing came. ‘What would be good?’ he asked.

Another short laugh, like the one the sandstorm victim received. ‘I dunno. I dunno what you’ve got.’

Sawyer thought. He’d only brought one bag of essentials and didn’t have much he was willing to part with, not for the sake of a sandwich. He scolded himself for not planning for this with a bag of circuit chips or something. ‘Do you need some help in the kitchen? I could wash dishes.’

Now everyone laughed. Sawyer had no idea what the joke was, but he was starting to wonder if the tourist cafe would’ve been the better option.

The woman leaned against the counter. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Mushtullo.’

‘What now?’

‘Mushtullo.’ No response. ‘Central space.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Huh. You got family here?’

‘No,’ Sawyer said. ‘But my family came from here.’

‘Oh,’ the woman said, as if she understood everything now. ‘I see. Okay. You got a place to stay?’

‘I figured I’d sort that out once I got here.’

‘Oh boy,’ the woman said under her breath. The wiry man handed her a plate, which she pushed across the counter. ‘Here. On the house. The food of your ancestors.’

‘Wow, you sure?’ Sawyer said.

‘Well, now I’m not.’

‘Sorry, um . . . thank you.’ He took both plate and mug. ‘That’s really kind.’

The woman resumed her shell cracking without another word. Sawyer looked around, hoping one of the groups might wave him over. None did. The algaeists were stacking up their thoroughly cleaned dishes, and the old folks had resumed their board game. Sawyer dropped his bag in an empty chair and sat in another alongside it. He studied his food – a large mound of wet, shredded vegetables, piled on top of two halves of a nondescript bun, dressed with whatever Jojo’s daughter’s assistant had dashed on top of it. He lifted one of the halves. It leaked, sending purple liquid running down his forearm. He paused before opening his mouth. There was a smell, fetid and sharp, maybe a bit fishy. He thought of the other customers, chowing down with satisfaction. He took a bite. His throat tightened, his sinuses shot open, and his bravery died. The stuff tasted exactly as it smelled, only now it was inescapable, mingling with a bitter, tangy undercurrent he wasn’t sure he wanted to identify. He couldn’t taste the bread, but despite the sour liquid now dripping all over his hands, the texture was distractingly dry. The pickle didn’t crunch, as he’d expected. It just softly surrendered.

It was, without a doubt, the worst thing he’d ever eaten.

Okay, he thought. This is okay. It’s an adventure. Not the start he’d been hoping for, but it was a start, and that was something. He forced another bite of pickle, washing it down with a huge swig of tea (the tea, at least, was good). There was no way he wasn’t going to finish his meal. This was a test. The locals were watching, his ancestors were watching, everybody back home who thought this plan of his was bonkers was watching. He would clean his plate, and find a place to stay, and everything would be great.

Sawyer heard the woman laugh again. He thought for a moment it was directed at him, but no. Another Martian terraformer had died.

Kip

Lunch breaks were the best part of Kip’s day. No teachers, no job trials, no parents. Nothing that needed doing or that he might screw up. Kip savoured every second. This was his time, and he always did the same thing with it: get a choko and a hopper at Grub Grub, park himself on the bench facing the oxygen garden, and try to stretch out his brief bit of freedom as long as possible. Chane in biology class said Sianat Pairs could slow time with their brains, and Kip didn’t think that was true, but if it was, he’d seriously trade an arm or something if it meant he could do that. Both arms, maybe. Maybe even his eyes. Okay, not his eyes. But limbs, definitely.

Somebody jumped him from behind, pulling his shirt up over the back of his head. ‘Tek tem, fucko!’

Kip had his shirt back down and a hand swinging before he could get a look at where it would land. Not a mean fist or anything – he’d never punched anybody for reals. Just a soft slap that wouldn’t even hurt, much less bruise.

His hand landed in Ras’ ribs. Ras shoved the slap away with one hand and grabbed for Kip’s choko with the other. ‘Gimme.’

‘Dosh,’ said Kip, stretching his drink out of reach. ‘Fuck off.’ In one fast move, he reached out and mussed Ras’ hair.

Ras withdrew at that, as he always did. ‘Aw, come on,’ he said, combing away the minimal damage with his fingers. ‘Uncalled for.’

Kip chuckled into his drink, scrunching his eyes tight. He wiped his hand on his pants, trying to get rid of the hair glue remnants he’d picked up. Ras always put too much shit in his hair.

The scuffle ended as fast as it had started. He and his friend sat in an easy slump, watching the crowd for the unlikely chance of something interesting happening. Kip passed the choko bottle to Ras. Ras took a long pull of the sweet fizz and passed it back. It was a rhythm they fell into without any thought. There’d been a lot of shared snacks over the years. That was what had eventually led to them getting assigned work day and school day schedules that didn’t overlap – too many passed-between packs of cake bites in class. A persistent disruption to other students, M Rebane had called him and Ras. Whatever. At least they still had lunch at the same time.

‘You know Amira, at the tech shop?’ Ras said.

‘Yeah.’

‘I think she likes me.’

Kip almost got choko up his nose. ‘Okay.’

‘Seriously,’ Ras said. ‘I saw her looking at me.’

Kip kept laughing. ‘Okay.’

‘What? I did!’

‘Amira. From the tech shop.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘She’s, like, twenty-five or something.’

‘So?’

‘So she probably just thought your hair looks stupid and couldn’t stop staring.’

‘Remmet telli toh.’ Ras cuffed him, but grinned. ‘Your hair looks stupid.’

‘Yeah,’ Kip agreed. No argument there. Had he combed it this morning? He couldn’t remember.

The crowd went back and forth, back and forth. Same faces, same patterns as every other day. ‘What do you wanna do after work?’ Ras asked.

‘Don’t you have history this afternoon?’

Ras shook his head with an expression that said he did have that class lined up, but there was no chance of him being there for it. ‘Wanna go to the hub?’

‘Nah,’ Kip said. There weren’t any new sims out, and they’d played all the ones worth playing. Ras was always down for Battle Wizards, but Kip was kind of sick of it.

‘Wanna go look at the new transport pods?’

‘We did that yesterday.’

‘So? They’re cool.’

Kip shrugged. New pods were the kind of thing that were cool only when you’d never seen them before.

‘Okay,’ Ras said. ‘What do you want to do?’

Kip shrugged again. ‘I dunno.’

Ras took ownership of the choko. ‘You have a bad day or something?’

‘It was fine. M Santoso kind of just let me hang out. Let me have mek during my shift.’

‘That’s cool.’

‘Yeah,’ Kip said, taking the choko back. ‘She’s all right.’

‘I dunno why you’re doing job trials anyway. Exams are coming up.’

This was Ras’ grand plan, unchanged since they were twelve: take the qualification exams and get into university (the fastest ticket out of the Fleet – all there was at home were trade classes and apprenticeships). After that, get a cool job, get on a big ship, and make lots of creds. That was as good of a plan as any for Kip – and more than he’d ever been able to come up with on his own – but he wasn’t as sure as Ras that he’d be able to come along.

‘When I don’t pass, I’m gonna need a job,’ Kip said.

‘You’ll pass,’ Ras said.

‘I suck at tests.’

‘Everyone sucks at tests.’

‘You don’t suck at tests.’

Ras didn’t say anything, because he didn’t suck at tests, just like he wasn’t doing job trials because he knew he wouldn’t need them. When Ras said he was gonna do a thing, the thing happened. Sometimes Kip was jealous of that. He wished he could be more like Ras. Ras always knew what to say, what to do, what was happening. Kip was real glad they were friends, but sometimes he didn’t know what Ras got out of the arrangement.

‘Hey, M Aksoy,’ Ras called out. The grocery seller was walking past them, followed by an autocart carrying . . . ? ‘What is that?’

M Aksoy turned his head, gestured at the cart to stop, and waved them toward him. ‘Come on and see.’

Kip and Ras ambled over. Among the recognisable boxes – mek powder, root sugar, bottles of kick – there were three plex tanks full of water, like jellyfish tanks. But whatever was inside wasn’t jellyfish, no way. They were long and wispy, covered in soft spines. They shivered their way through the water.

‘Special order from the Archives,’ M Aksoy said.

‘Are they pets or something?’ Ras asked. ‘Some kind of science thing?’

‘Nope,’ M Aksoy said. ‘They’re called—’

‘Pokpok,’ Kip said, saying the word before he realised he knew it.

Ras turned his head. ‘The hell’d you know that?’

Kip had no idea. Something from when he was little? Like something in a learning sim, or a Linking book, or . . . he couldn’t say. He’d been a dork about that kind of stuff as a kid, and it had been a long time since that was his thing. But wherever pokpok had come from, the dusty old memory remained active. He could feel Ras looking at him, though, so he just shrugged and didn’t say anything about the bit where he was pretty sure the swimming things were Harmagian food. Ras was real smart, and Kip didn’t want to look stupid by saying something wrong.

‘You’re right, pokpok,’ M Aksoy said. ‘M Itoh has a Harmagian guest arriving today. These, apparently, are one of their favourite things to eat.’

Kip watched the pokpok wriggle around the tank, looking like spiky snot brought to life. He felt his nose pull into itself.

Ras mirrored his expression. ‘Do they fry them or—’

The grocer’s eyes crinkled at the edges. ‘You know, I don’t know if they cook them at all.’

Kip groaned with disgust. Ras looked at him. ‘Give you twenty creds if you eat one.’

‘You don’t have twenty creds.’

The grocer laughed. ‘One of these’d cost you well more than twenty creds, and they’re not for you anyway. But here.’ He reached into one of the crates on the cart, and pulled out two snack bags. ‘Free sample, all the way from the independent colonies.’

Kip accepted the bag and looked at the label. The One and Only Fire Shrimp, it read in Klip. There was another line that ended in the word hot, but the word before it he didn’t know. He pointed it out to Ras. They both used Klip all the time, but Ras was super good at it – real Klip, classroom Klip, not just a few words stuck into Ensk like everybody did (everybody who wasn’t old, anyway). Ras was definitely going to university.

‘Soolat,’ Ras read. ‘That’s like, uh . . . horribly.’

‘Devastatingly,’ M Aksoy said. ‘That’s a better translation. Devastatingly hot. I don’t know if they’re any good, but if you like them, you know where to trade for more.’

‘Thanks, M,’ Ras said.

‘Yeah, thanks, M,’ said Kip.

The grocer gave them a nod and started back on his way. ‘Hey, M,’ Ras called after him. ‘You said the Harmagian’s gonna be at the Archives?’

‘Far as I know,’ M Aksoy called back as he disappeared into the crowd.

Ras looked at Kip. ‘Ever seen a Harmagian before?’

Kip shook his head. ‘Just in sims.’

‘When you gotta be back at work?’

Kip shrugged. M Santoso hadn’t given him a specific time that he needed to be back, and given their conversation that morning, he didn’t think she’d care too much if he was gone a while.

‘Well, then, let’s go.’ Ras headed for the elevator to the transport deck.

Kip followed. Going all the way to the Archives just to look at an alien seemed like a stupid thing to do, but then, everything seemed like a stupid thing to do, and at least this stupid thing was a stupid thing that didn’t happen every stupid day. He sighed.

Ras noticed. ‘Yeah, I know, man.’ He shook his head as they weaved through the crowd. ‘The Fleet sucks.’

Eyas

A bot could have carried Eyas’ load easily, but some things needed to be moved by hand. Not that it made any difference to the things being carried. Bots could’ve got them to the same place, and probably faster, too. That wasn’t the point. The point was that some weights needed to be felt, and that hands convey a respect bots never could.

She pulled her wagon along, the canisters inside rattling slightly. The people she walked past recognised the sound, no question. Her cargo was unmistakable. Eyas sometimes wondered what it was like for merchants to carry boxes that passersby didn’t know the contents of. Perhaps it felt a bit like a birthday, like having a good secret wrapped away. Eyas’ canisters were no secret, but they were good all the same. They were undeniably good, even though some of the glances they received took a moment to sort themselves out.

‘Thank you, M,’ a woman said as she passed her. The woman was grey-haired, at least twice her age, and yet, still, ‘M.’ She had long grown used to that.

Eyas was tired, and not in the best of moods. She’d awoken with a headache and had skipped breakfast, which she’d regretted after a mere hour at work. She smiled and nodded at the woman anyway. That was part of her job, too. To smile. To be the opposite of fear.

She continued down the thruway, heading into the buzz of a neighbourhood market. The smells of crispy fish, warm starches, and fresh-cut veggies greeted her. Her stomach growled.

The environment shifted slightly as she moved through it, as it always did. She passed through the familiar blanket of long glances, murmured thanks, the occasional exhale. Someone appeared in her periphery – an older man, coming right toward her. ‘M Parata,’ the man said. He opened his arms wide.

Eyas didn’t remember the man when she went in for the hug, but an image surfaced as she was squeezed tight. A face at a ceremony two – no, three – tendays prior. ‘M Tucker,’ she said. ‘Please, call me Eyas.’ She pulled back, leaving a friendly hand on the man’s arm. ‘How are you?’ It was a difficult question, she knew, but simply saying I care was awkward.

‘Oh, well,’ M Tucker said. His face struggled. ‘You know.’

‘I do,’ Eyas said. She did.

M Tucker looked at the cart. He swallowed hard. ‘Is that Ari?’

Eyas raced through some math. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not for at least four tendays yet. If you’d like to come by then, I can prepare a canister for you myself.’

The man’s eyes watered. He squeezed Eyas’ upper arm. ‘Do you like bean cakes?’ he asked, gesturing back at his stall. ‘I’ve got both sweet and savoury, fresh out of the oven.’

Eyas wasn’t huge on bean cakes, but she had never, ever turned down a gift under these circumstances, and her stomach was willing to accept anything at this point. ‘I’d love a sweet one.’

M Tucker smiled and scurried back to his workspace. He lifted a fat bean cake off a teetering stack and wrapped one end of it in a thin piece of throw-cloth. ‘You have a good day now, M Eyas,’ he said, handing over the bundle.

Eyas thanked him and continued on. She received more handouts before she reached her destination – a pack of vegetable seeds, which she had no use for but would keep for trade, and a mug of strong tea, which she desperately needed. She paused in her walk, sat on a bench, and consumed her gifted meal. The bean cake was fine, as far as bean cakes went, and the tea soothed a tightness she hadn’t known was there. She found a nearby recycling station and put the mug and the throw-cloth in their respective bins, from which they would be collected, washed, and reused. She resumed her walk, dragging her own recycling along behind her.

Her destination was the oxygen garden, the central hub of any neighbourhood, a curved green assemblage of places to play and places to sit and plenty of room to think. She parked her wagon in its usual spot, put on her apron and gloves, and selected a canister. She stepped over a plex barrier into one of the planters, treading carefully around all that grew there. The grasses couldn’t be easily avoided, but she did her best to not trample the flowering shrubs and broad leaves. She crouched down near a bush and unlocked the canister lid. The heady smell of compost greeted her, a smell she spent so much time alongside it was a wonder she noticed it anymore. She spread the stuff around the roots with her gloved hands, laying down handful after handful of rich black nutrients. She wouldn’t have minded getting compost on her bare skin but, much like pulling the wagon, it was a matter of respect. Compost was too precious to be wasted by washing it from her hands. She was meticulous about brushing off her gloves before folding them back up, about doing the same with her apron, about shaking every last crumb out of the canister. Each bit had to make its way to where it had been promised it would go.

Eyas emptied every canister in turn, tending the recipient plants carefully. She made sure not to walk where she’d worked, and took care not to touch her face. She stuck a small green flag in each planter as she finished, letting others know the area had recently been fertilised. There was nothing about the compost that could harm a person, but it wasn’t the sort of thing most would be comfortable accidentally sticking their hand in. It didn’t matter that compost was just compost – nitrogen, carbon, various minerals. People got so hung up on what a thing had been, rather than what it was now. That was why publicly distributed compost was reserved for oxygen gardens and fibre farms, the only public places in the Fleet that used soil. You could use compost tea in aeroponics, sure, but the food farms got different fertiliser blends, ones that came from plant scraps, bug husks, fish meal. Some families did indeed use their personal compost canisters on food gardens at home; others recoiled from that practice. Eyas understood both sides. Clear divisions between right and wrong were rare in her work.

As she neared the end of her batch, she felt the shapeless tingle of someone’s gaze. Eyas turned to see a little boy – maybe five or so – watching her with intense focus. A young man was with him – a father or uncle, who could say – crouched down to the child’s height, explaining something quietly. Eyas didn’t have to guess what the topic was.

‘Hello,’ Eyas said with a friendly wave.

The man waved back. ‘Hi,’ he said. He turned to the boy. ‘Can you say hi?’

The boy presumably could, but did not.

Eyas smiled. ‘Would you like to come see?’ The boy shifted his weight from foot to foot, then nodded. Eyas waved him over. She spread some compost on her gloved palm. ‘Did M here tell you what this is?’

The boy rubbed his lips together before speaking. ‘People.’

‘Mmm, not anymore. It’s called compost. It used to be people, yes, but it’s changed into something else. See, what I’m doing here is putting this onto the plants, so they grow strong and healthy.’ She demonstrated. ‘The people that turned into compost now get to be part of these plants. The plants give us clean air to breathe and beautiful things to look at, which keeps us healthy. Eventually, these plants will die, and they’ll get composted, too. Then that compost gets used to grow food, and the food becomes part of us again. So, even when we lose people we love, they don’t leave us.’ She pressed her palm flat against her chest. ‘We’re made out of our ancestors. They’re what keep us alive.’

‘That’s pretty neat, huh?’ the man said, crouching down beside the boy.

The boy looked undecided. ‘Can I see in the tube?’ he asked.

Eyas made sure there wasn’t any compost on the outside of the cylinder before handing it over. ‘Careful not to spill,’ she said.

The boy took the cylinder with two hands and a studious frown. ‘It looks like dirt,’ he said.

‘It basically is dirt,’ Eyas said. ‘It’s dirt with superpowers.’

The boy rotated the cylinder, watching the compost tumble inside. ‘How many people are in this?’ he asked.

The man raised an eyebrow. Eyas threw him a reassuring glance. It was not the weirdest thing she’d ever been asked, by far. ‘That’s a good question, but I don’t know,’ Eyas said. ‘Once the compost reaches this stage, the . . . the stuff that makes it gets jumbled together.’

The boy absorbed that. He handed the canister back.

Eyas reached into her hip pouch and pulled out a flag. ‘Would you like to put this in the dirt? It lets people know I’ve been working here.’

The boy took the flag, still not smiling. Eyas understood. It was a lot to think about. ‘Where can I put it?’

‘Anywhere you like,’ Eyas said, gesturing to the dirt around them.

The boy considered, and chose a spot near a bush. He stuck the flag down. ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked.

‘Does what hurt?’

The boy tugged at the edge of his shirt. ‘When you get turned into dirt.’

‘Oh, no, buddy,’ the man said. He put a reassuring hand on the boy’s back and kissed the top of his head. ‘No, it doesn’t hurt at all.’

Isabel

Aliens did not make Isabel uncomfortable. In her youth – a period of her life she was sure her grandkids didn’t truly believe had taken place – she’d spent three standards hopping tunnels, crashing in spaceport hostels, gobbling up every strange sky and unknown city until homesickness finally won the day. She’d bunked with a Laru for one leg of a trip, become the drinking buddy of a quartet of Aandrisks on another. That was a long time ago, to be sure, but she’d had contact with aliens since – merchants, mostly, when she ordered something special for import. But in recent years, she’d found herself in the odd, delightful position of being a person of interest to certain individuals from the Reskit Institute of Interstellar Migration. The Exodus Fleet had drifted back into academic fashion, and, as the head archivist of the Asteria, Isabel did not have to ask why they’d sought her out. Every homesteader had its Archives and archivists, but Isabel was the current oldest of her profession, and even among aliens, that counted for something.

She was biased, of course, having worked in the Archives for most of her adult life, but the files she kept watch over were nothing short of magic. The first Exodans had crammed old-timey server racks full to bursting with records of Earth and personal stories, and every generation since had added to their work. What is it you’re looking for? she asked anyone who made the trip to the spiralling chamber of data nodes (the server racks had been retired well before her time). Art? Literature? Family history? Earthen history? Earthen life? Whatever topic you needed, if Humans deemed it worth remembering, the Archives kept it safe.

Her life spent in service to the past was why she now found herself doing a rather-out-of-the-ordinary task, something other than helping students or doing node maintenance or conducting record ceremonies. Today, she was meeting with an alien, and as transgalactic as her correspondence was, it had been a long time since she’d shared a room with one.

Ghuh’loloan had come straight from the shuttledocks to the Archives, and given what Isabel knew of her, she doubted she’d checked into her guest quarters yet. The Harmagian was the most enthusiastic of Isabel’s Reskit Institute pen pals, and they’d been friendly colleagues for years. But this was their first time meeting in person, and, as was to be expected, Isabel found herself reconciling the person she knew from letters with the person now sitting before her. The dog-sized, speckled-yellow, wet-skinned person, lying legless on a motorised cart, with no feet and no bones and no real shape at all until you got to the wreath of grasping tentacles and smaller tendrils centred around a toothless maw, crowned with a pair of retracting eyestalks that made Isabel stare despite her best efforts.

Stars, it really had been a long time.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at the dock,’ Isabel said. ‘Today’s ceremony took a long time to clear out.’ They were in her office now, at her meeting table, away from the towering technology and busy staff. Well, ostensibly busy. Isabel had seen more than a few of her peers undertaking tasks of dubious value that steered them conveniently past her office windows. Everyone wanted a glimpse of the visitor.

Ghuh’loloan flexed her facial dactyli. Isabel knew Harmagian facial gestures were important communicative cues, but they were lost on her. She could follow only her colleague’s words, which dripped with a deliciously-burred accent. ‘Nonsense,’ Ghuh’loloan said. ‘You have work, and I am the one disrupting it! I feel nothing but joy in sharing your company, for however much time you can spare.’

Harmagians, Isabel knew, had a tendency to lay it on thick. ‘I’m looking forward to working together as well. Was your journey all right?’

‘Yes, yes, entirely adequate. I’ve had better, but then, I’ve had plenty worse.’ Ghuh’loloan laughed with a wavering coo. Her eyestalks studied something. ‘Do you have trouble understanding me?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘But then—’ Ghuh’loloan pointed a tentacle toward Isabel’s face.

It took Isabel a moment to understand. ‘Oh,’ she chuckled, removing her hud. A faint border disappeared from her field of vision, an edge she barely noticed until it was gone. ‘Sorry, I’m so used to having it on I often forget to take it off. I’ve even worn it to sleep, once or twice.’

‘Ah,’ Ghuh’loloan said. ‘For filing, then, not translating?’

‘For everything, really,’ Isabel said, looking at the clear lens set in a well-worn frame. ‘It’s much faster than my scrib, and it keeps my hands free.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Ghuh’loloan said in a good-humoured tone. She pointed at her delicate, swaying eyes, incapable of wearing Isabel’s favoured gadget. ‘But it sounds very useful.’

Isabel smiled. ‘Well, I envy that a bit,’ she said, nodding at Ghuh’loloan’s cart. ‘My knees aren’t what they used to be.’

‘I wouldn’t know about knees, either.’

They both laughed. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ Isabel asked.

‘Mek, if you have it.’

Isabel knew that she did, as the other archivists hadn’t rioted. ‘You take it cold, I assume?’ She’d learned to do a Harmagian-style flash cold brew in the tenday before her colleague arrived.

But Isabel’s new skill was to be untested. ‘I do,’ Ghuh’loloan said, ‘but if I wanted cold mek, I would’ve stayed home. Please, make it for me as you’d make it for yourself.’ She paused. ‘Although, perhaps not too hot.’

Isabel nodded with understanding as she opened the tin of mek powder. Introducing scalding hot liquid to mollusk-like skin would not end well. She glanced over and laughed, seeing that Ghuh’loloan had opened a storage compartment on her cart and removed both scrib and stylus. ‘Are we getting started?’

Ghuh’loloan curled the tentacles around her mouth. ‘I had questions before I arrived, but after seeing these wonderful ships of yours with my own eyes – oh, I hardly know where to start! Everything. I want to know everything. Let’s begin with the ships. I saw so many things on my way here that I wish to understand better.’

‘You’ll have to tell me what you already know about them, so I don’t walk the same corridors twice.’

‘No. My understanding may be flawed, and if I assume that I already know something, you won’t know to correct my mistakes. Besides, it is such a rare opportunity to get information that is not filtered through a screen. Tell me of the ships as if I know nothing of them. Tell me as if I were a child.’

‘All right then.’ Isabel gathered her thoughts as the mek brewer rumbled. ‘The original architects based everything around three basic principles: longevity, stability, and well-being. They knew that for the Fleet to have any chance of survival, the ships had to be something that could withstand both distance and time, something that the spacers within could always rely on, and something that would foster both physical and mental health. Survival alone wasn’t enough. Couldn’t be enough. If there were disputes over food, resources, living space—’

‘That’d be the end of it.’

‘That’d be the end of it. These had to be places Humans would want to live in. In that long stretch between leaving Earth and GC contact, we were utterly alone. Those who lived and died during that time only knew planets from stories. This’ – she gestured at the walls – ‘was everything. It had to feel like a home, rather than a prison. Otherwise, we were doomed.’

‘Longevity, stability, well-being,’ Ghuh’loloan repeated, writing on her scrib in her strange boxy alphabet. ‘Please, go on.’

Isabel put her own scrib on the table between them and launched a sketch programme. Floating pixels followed her stylus as she drew in the air. ‘Architecturally, every homesteader is the same. At the centre, you have the main cylinder, which is essentially life support storage. It houses the water tanks, the air tanks, and the batteries.’

‘Now, the batteries,’ Ghuh’loloan said, still taking notes. ‘Those store kinetically harvested energy, yes?’

‘Originally, yes, mostly. Well . . . right, let me back up. When the Exodans first left Earth, they burned chemical fuels to get going, just to tide them over until enough kinetic energy had been generated through the floors. They also had hydro-generators.’

‘Water-powered?’

‘Yes, using waste water.’ The brewer dinged, and Isabel filled two mugs. ‘As it flows back to the processing facilities, it runs through a series of generators. That system’s still in use. It’s not our primary power source, but it’s a good supplement.’ She placed the mugs between them, and considered bringing out the tin of cookies stashed away in her desk. She decided against it. Harmagians had famously finicky stomachs, and she didn’t want to hospitalise her colleague over ginger bites.

Ghuh’loloan reached for the mug closest to her, eying the tiny wisps of steam. She gave the surface of the drink a few tentative raps with the tip of her tentacle – one, two, three. Apparently finding the temperature suitable, she wrapped a portion of her limb around the handle and brought the mug aloft. ‘See, this is why I wanted to start with the basics. How fascinating. Might we be able to visit the water generators?’

‘Absolutely,’ Isabel said. Not a place she would’ve been excited to visit on her own, but Ghuh’loloan’s enthusiasm was catching.

‘Wonderful. But I’m getting you off-track. Do I correctly glean that kinetic energy is no longer your primary power source?’

‘That’s right. Once the GC gave us this sun, we started collecting solar power.’

‘Yes, I saw the satellites as I flew in. Those were provided by . . . ?’

‘The Aeluons.’ Isabel’s tone was matter-of-fact, but she felt a slump in pride. Her colleague had assumed correctly that the Exodans couldn’t have built such tech on their own.

Lacking lips, Ghuh’loloan held the Human-style mug up, flattened her face back into her body so that it lay almost horizontally, and poured a little waterfall into her wide mouth. Her whole body shivered. ‘Ho! Oh ho!’

‘Too hot?’ Isabel asked with dread.

‘No— no, I’m just unaccustomed. What a feeling!’ She executed a longer pour. ‘Ho! That’s . . . stars, that’s thrilling. I may never take mek cold again.’ She shivered once more, then cradled her mug between two tentacles. ‘Oh dear, where was I?’

‘Satellites.’

‘Yes, and Aeluons. They provided you with artigrav, too, yes?’

‘That’s right.’

‘A generous people,’ Ghuh’loloan said. ‘I wish I could say the same of mine.’ She laughed. ‘I suppose it is in your best interest that we did not win their war against us, eh?’

Isabel chuckled, but took that as a sign to steer the conversation back to the topic at hand. The war invoked was very old, very ugly history. Clearly, Ghuh’loloan didn’t mind a bit of self-deprecation, but Isabel didn’t want to cross the line from cultural ribbing into insult. ‘Indeed. So, the main cylinder.’

‘The main cylinder.’

‘Unlike the habitat ring – which I’ll get to – the cylinder interior was never designed for gravity, so you won’t find artigrav nets there. Everything is arranged in a circle, around a central core.’

Ghuh’loloan set down her cup. ‘Do you mean that when you go in there—’

‘We have to work in zero-g, yes.’

‘Incredible! I had no idea there were still species doing that. Not within the hull, at least!’

‘Tamsin worked there, until some years back,’ Isabel said, knowing her colleague knew her wife’s name even though they hadn’t properly met yet. ‘I’m sure she’d be happy to talk to you about it.’

‘Oh! Yes. Yes, that would be marvellous.’ Ghuh’loloan scribbled furiously. ‘Please, please, go on.’

‘At the aft end of the cylinder – as much as anything can be aft in space – we have the engines. They’re . . . they’re engines.’ She shrugged and laughed. ‘Not my area of expertise.’

‘And they don’t get much use anymore.’

‘We use them to correct orbital issues, but no, nothing like they did back in our wandering days. Now, the ring – that I can talk on for days.’ She directed the pixels into shapes she walked through every day. ‘Six hexagons, each joined to another around the main cylinder.’

‘And this used to spin, before artigrav.’

‘Right. It was a big centrifuge.’

‘Was that not unpleasant?’

Isabel shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve only ever lived in artigrav. I’m sure there’s an account of how centrifugal gravity felt.’ She made a mental note to go searching for that.

Ghuh’loloan made a note as well, on her scrib. ‘So, six hexagons comprise the ring.’

‘Six hexagons. And within those, you find more hexagons. Let’s start small and work our way up.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Ah, I have just the thing.’ She accessed an animated image file intended for young kids. A lone hexagon appeared. ‘Okay, so we start with a single room. A bedroom, let’s say.’ She gestured. The hexagon shrank, and was joined by six others, creating a mathematical flower. ‘Six rooms, surrounding a seventh room. This is a home.’ The geometry expanded again. ‘Now you have six homes, surrounding a common area. We call this, predictably, a hex. You’ll hear this term a lot. Somebody’s hex is their primary address.’ Another expansion. ‘Six hexes surround a hub. This forms a neighbourhood.’

‘And in a hub, you will find . . . ?’

‘Everyday services. Grocery stands, a medical clinic, tech swaps, cafes, playgrounds, that kind of thing.’ She gestured again. ‘All right, here’s where it starts to get big. Six neighbourhoods to a district. The space in the centre is the plaza. The amenities here vary from district to district, but in general, this is where you find your big stuff: schools, recycling centres, entertainment, long-term medical facilities, council offices, marketplaces, big gardens.’

‘We are in a plaza now, yes?’

‘Yes. And from there . . .’ The image blossomed into one final shape – six triangles comprised of six districts each, arranged around a final colossal hexagon. ‘So, all of this’ – she circled it with her hands – ‘is a deck.’ The middle area is the nucleus. That’s where you get farms and manufacturing. At the centre of everything is, well, the Centre.’

‘Where you dispose of your dead.’

‘I . . .’ Isabel chose her words carefully, knowing her colleague hadn’t meant any offence. ‘I’m not sure we’d use the word “dispose”, but yes.’

‘And then above and below the residential deck, you have . . . ?’

‘Directly above, the transport deck, where you can hop from district to district in a pod. Below, waste processing. And below that, observation.’

‘Yes, I’m very excited to see your viewing cupolas. I don’t know of any other ship architecture quite like that. Most have windows on walls, not the floor.’

‘That goes right back to the need to prevent fighting over living space. If some people have rooms with a view and others don’t, you’re going to have problems. And if centrifugal gravity is pulling our feet toward the stars, then you can’t have windows on most walls. The only people who could would be the ones with homes on the edges of each deck, and that . . . well, that would invite trouble.’

‘Ahhhhh. Yes, I see. I see.’ Ghuh’loloan’s eyestalks traced over her notes. ‘Six homes to a hex, six hexes to a neighbourhood, six neighbourhoods to a district, thirty-six districts to a deck, four decks to a . . . ?

‘Segment.’

‘A segment. And six segments to a homesteader.’

‘You’ve got it.’

The Harmagian studied the children’s images again. ‘It’s rather beautiful, in a way. Nothing wasted, nothing frivolous. Simple exponents.’

Isabel smiled. ‘It’s like a . . . oh dear, I only know the word in Ensk.’ She shifted linguistic gears. ‘Honeycomb.’

Ghuh’loloan flicked her mouth tendrils. ‘I don’t know that word. My Ensk is poor enough that I’d call it non-existent.’

Isabel gestured at her scrib and accessed another image file. ‘Honeycomb. It’s a structure made of interlocking hexagons. Incredibly strong and space-efficient.’

‘Ahhhh. I’ve seen configurations like this, but I don’t know that there is an easy word for them in Klip. Or Hanto, for that matter. Honeycomb.’ She stretched her face forward toward the image. ‘Wait, is this . . . organic? What is this?’

‘A relic from Earth. A communal insect species built nests with walls of this shape out of . . . spit, I think. I don’t know off-hand.’

‘How strange. Well, I am looking forward to seeing your own honeycomb nest.’ Her tendrils changed, taking on a slight slackness. ‘Will my presence be intrusive for the families there? I am not overly familiar with Human social custom when it comes to the home.’

‘They know you’re coming, so it won’t be any trouble. In fact, I was hoping you’d join me for a meal at my home tonight. I had originally thought of taking you to a restaurant, but—’

‘Bah, restaurants! At some point, yes, I would enjoy that, but on my first day here, I would much rather be your guest than someone else’s.’

Isabel took serious note of that term – guest. She’d done research on that front before Ghuh’loloan’s arrival, spurred by a slight shift in her colleague’s letters. Once arrangements for the visit to the Fleet had been made, Isabel found herself no longer being addressed as dear associate but dear host, and Ghuh’loloan’s phrasing had become deferential. This was an important thing, Isabel had learned, as was the entire concept of hosts and guests in Harmagian culture. By anybody’s definition, hosts were expected to be accommodating and guests to be gracious, but Harmagians put considerable stock into everyone performing those roles well. A bad host would be shunned – or, as the rules extended to merchants as well, bankrupt – and a bad guest was on par with a petty thief (which made an odd sense, Isabel decided: guests did eat your food and take your time). There were entire books written on host/guest etiquette, the most seminal of which – Rules for Guests of Good Lineage – had been the go-to for over a hundred standards. Isabel had skimmed a few opening paragraphs and left the rest of the tedious tome unread. Using her own alienness as a social buffer, she figured her Good Host status was assured by providing a non-poisonous meal on clean plates in friendly company.

She hoped so, anyway.

Tessa

Tessa approached the playground, a box of piping hot cricket crunch in hand. ‘Aya!’ she called. No heads turned on the swings, nobody paused on the obstacle course. She looked over to the scrap heap, where a pack of youngsters were hauling otherwise-unusable sheets of fatigued metal – edges sanded smooth, of course – in an attempt to assemble . . . something. A shelter, maybe? In any case, her daughter wasn’t there, either. ‘Hey, Rafee,’ she said to a kid running toward the construction project with a bucket of pixel paint.

The boy stopped. ‘Hey, M Santoso,’ he said, glancing at his comrades. This crew was on a tight schedule.

‘You seen Aya around?’

He turned and pointed. ‘I saw her in the tank,’ he said before running off, hauling his cargo two-handed in front of his chest.

Tessa made her way to the small plex dome. Inside, about a dozen or so kids of varying ages enjoyed the freedom of disabled artigrav nets. The tank was, in concept, intended as a place where kids could learn how to do tasks in zero-g. There was a panel on the wall covered with buttons, knobs, and blocks that needed to be placed in similarly shaped holes. A tiny girl was attentively working on the block problem. A slightly older boy was running at break-neck speed over the tank’s inner walls with a pair of cling boots, looping upside down and sideways and backwards, over and over and over. The rest of the kids were engaged in a classic – the only thing you really used the tank for – seeing who could kick off the wall and do the most flips in a row. Tessa’s personal best had been four.

She watched as a familiar head of choppy black hair launched forward, curled inward, and flipped, flipped, flipped. Tessa counted. One. Two. Three. Four. She grinned. Five.

That’s my kid.

Tessa stepped forward and knocked on the plex. Aya displayed the surprise all kids did when they saw an adult outside their expected context. Teachers lived in schools, doctors lived in clinics, parents could be found at work or home. Why are you here? Aya’s expression said. It wasn’t an accusation, just genuine enquiry.

Tessa held up the box of cricket crunch and gave it a tempting shake. She couldn’t hear the kids behind the plex, but Aya’s mouth formed the words: ‘What? Yes!’

With a quickness Tessa could barely remember having, Aya made her way to the tank exit, grabbing soft support poles to pull herself along. She worked her way down to the floor, then stepped out the airlock, tripping over herself as gravity took hold again. Tessa had never gotten the hang of that, either.

Aya fetched her shoes from a nearby cubby, slipped her socked feet inside, and began to tie them with dogged concentration. As she did, Tessa watched unsurprised as the cling boot kid paused in his circuit and casually threw up. The other kids’ faces contorted in laughter, disgust, and unheard shouts. A cleanerbot undocked itself from an upper corner, its gentle boosters propelling it through the air toward the floating mess. Tessa rapped on the plex again. ‘You okay?’ she called to the kid, mouthing the words as clearly as possible.

The kid gave a weak nod, holding the sides of his head.

Tessa flashed him a thumbs-up. They’d all been there.

Aya ran over as soon as the shoe-tying was complete. She put out both hands with a broad smile, her twin rows of teeth checkered with empty spaces. ‘Yes, please.’

Tessa gave her the box. ‘Careful, it’s hot.’

Aya tucked into the sugar-fried bugs without hesitation. Tessa caught a wince as her daughter burned her tongue. Neither commented on it.

‘Come on, it’s our family’s night to cook,’ Tessa said. They began to walk together.

‘I know,’ Aya said. She frowned. ‘I’m not late, right?’

‘No, you’re not late.’

‘Then how come you came to get me?’ She looked at the snack box in her hands, the realisation dawning that she’d been given a sweet treat before dinner. ‘How come I get cricket crunch?’

‘Just ’cause,’ Tessa said. ‘I guess I’m feeling sentimental.’

Aya tucked a mouthful into her cheek. ‘What’s sentimental?’

‘It’s . . . caught up in your feelings. The way you feel when you’re thinking a lot about the people or things you care about.’

Tessa had stopped looking at her daughter, but she could feel her staring back. ‘You’ve been weird today,’ Aya said.

Tessa didn’t want to have the conversation, and she knew there were parts she’d have to tread extra carefully around for Aya’s sake. But Pop would bring it up the second they were home, so: ‘You’re right, I have been. I’m sorry. Something happened you should know about. Everything’s okay. That’s the first thing you should know.’

Aya listened intently, still chewing.

‘You know how Uncle Ashby went to build a new tunnel?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, there were some sapients there who weren’t very nice’ – she wasn’t sure Aya was ready for Ashby was on the business end of the first shot in what looks like a territory war – ‘and they damaged his ship.’

Aya’s face went rigid. ‘Are the bulkheads okay?’

Tessa put her hand on Aya’s shoulder. She knew why the question was being asked. Despite counselling, despite patience, despite everybody’s best efforts and five more years of growing up, Aya still crumbled at the idea of any breach between in here and out there. She remained uncomfortable around airlocks, she avoided cupolas as if they were on fire, and bulkheads were a matter she fixated on to a concerning degree. ‘His ship’s stable,’ Tessa said. ‘He wrote to me this morning, and he’s okay. There are a lot of repairs to do, but everyone is safe.’

Aya processed that. ‘Is he coming here?’

‘Why would he come here?’

‘For repairs.’

‘There are plenty of spaceports he can do that in. But you should know, before we get home, your grandpa’s pretty shook up.’

‘How come?’

‘Because Ashby’s his kid, and parents can’t help but worry about their kids.’ She tousled Aya’s hair. ‘So be extra nice to Grandpa tonight, okay?’

‘Did they use a gun on Ashby’s ship?’

Guns were another subject of fixation – an exotic, abstract danger Aya knew of from sims and news feeds and whatever kids talked about among themselves. ‘Yes,’ Tessa said.

‘What kind?’

‘I don’t know.’

Aya crunched and crunched. ‘Was it Aeluons?’

Tessa blinked. ‘Was what Aeluons?’

‘The aliens who broke his ship.’

‘No. Why would it be Aeluons?’

Crunch crunch crunch. ‘They have the biggest guns and go to war all the time.’

‘That’s—’ Tessa struggled to unpack that technically accurate statement. ‘The Aeluons have a big military, that’s true. But they’re our friends. They’ve done a lot of good things for us in the Fleet, and they wouldn’t hurt Ashby.’

‘Have you ever met one?’

‘An Aeluon? Yes. I’ve done work with a few Aeluon merchants, a long time ago. They were all very nice. Well, except one. You gotta remember, baby, other sapients are people just like us. There are good people and bad people and everything in between.’

Crunch crunch. ‘Then who shot at Uncle Ashby?’

‘A species called the Toremi.’

‘What do they look like?’

‘I don’t actually know. I don’t know much about them. We can look it up on the Linkings when we get home.’

‘Have you met one?’

‘No. How could I have met one if I don’t know what they look like?’

‘Why were they mad at Uncle Ashby?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think it was about him, just the GC in general.’

‘Why—’

‘I don’t know, honey. Sometimes . . . sometimes bad things just happen.’

The crunching had stopped. ‘Will they come here?’

‘No,’ Tessa said with a firm voice and a reassuring smile. ‘They’re very far away. The Fleet’s a safe place. It’s one of the safest places you can be.’

Aya said nothing. Her mother was sure she was thinking of bulkheads and damaged hulls.

Sawyer

Everybody had a home, and nobody went hungry.

That was one of the foundational ideas that had first drawn Sawyer in when he’d started reading about the Fleet. Everybody had a home, and nobody went hungry. There was a practical necessity in that, he knew. A ship full of people fighting over food and space wouldn’t last long. But there was compassion, too, a commitment to basic decency. Too many people back on Earth had been hungry and cold. It was one of the copious problems the first Exodans had vowed not to take with them.

Sawyer stood in a home now – one of the empties left behind by a family that had gone planetside, now opened to travellers like himself. The grass was always greener, he supposed, but he couldn’t understand why anyone would travel in the opposite direction he had. Colonies had hungry people. They had people without homes. He’d seen both plenty of times back in Central space – sapients picking through trash or carrying everything they owned. The GC tried, they really did, but planets were big and settlements were vast and taking care of everyone was hard. Things were better in sovereign territories, but in neutral colonies like Mushtullo, where trade was the primary drive and nobody could agree on whose rules they should follow . . . well, it was easy for people to fall through the cracks. Sawyer had been mugged twice in the past standard, once by some messed-up woman with a badly installed headjack, then again by someone he never even saw. Just a pistol in his back and a hand he couldn’t identify twisting his arm around to scan his patch and drain his credits. The bank got the creds back, but that wasn’t the point. Someone had been willing to kill for the sake of . . . what? Some new clothes? A few tendays of groceries? That had been the last straw for Sawyer. That had been the moment he decided he was leaving.

He set his bag on the floor and looked around. An entry-and-storage room, a common room, a bathing room, and four more bedrooms, all the same size and shape as the others, all windowless, all spread out around the circular hatch that led down to the family cupola. The home was tidy and filled with basic furniture, all signs of previous ownership erased by cleanerbots. There were tables and chairs, a couple of couches. Cupboards for food and belongings. Empty planters waiting for seedlings and a guiding hand. It looked like a package home, like something that popped out of a box. There was no sign that anyone else had ever lived there – except one. Sawyer walked with reverence toward the wall in the common room, the one the cleanerbots had known to leave alone. It was covered with handprints, pressed in paint of every colour. Big handprints, little handprints, smudged infant feet. Belkin, someone had painted above it – the name of the first family that had lived here, and the name that every other family who lived there after had taken, regardless of genetics. This was one of the many Exodan customs he admired. When born, you took your parents’ name. When you grew up and started a family of your own, you took the name of the home you settled in. In a lot of cases, your name didn’t change at all, not if you kept living with your parents and grandparents and so on. If you settled in the home of your partner, you took your partner’s family name. If you both decided to live in a separate home entirely, apart from both of your families, you’d both get the name of whoever’d taken care of that home before you. Sawyer liked that.

He looked up at the bold, painted letters above his head. He wasn’t a Belkin. It wasn’t his custom yet, and this placement was temporary. He ran his hand along where others had been. ‘Wow,’ he whispered. He didn’t need to count the prints to know that there were at least nine generations represented here, all the way back to the first. He crouched down, looking toward where the wall joined the floor. The prints there were faded, and covered with others, but their shapes were clear as day: six adults, three children, one baby. He tried to imagine what they must have felt, watching their planet fade away through a window in the floor, pressing painted hands to an empty wall with the hope that one day the wall would be full.

Sawyer put his hand over the tiny footprint. That kid had grown up never having known the ground. That kid had grown old and died in this ship, and all xyr kids besides. The enormity of it almost made him dizzy.

He straightened back up and looked around the room. The wall was full, but the home was empty. So empty. It was a space meant to house three generations at least, where kids could run around and adults could relax and everyone would be together. But right then, it held only him. Just him in a big room full of ghosts. There were families outside, in the homes the Belkins had shared a hex with. Sawyer knew the kitchen was for his use as well, and the digestive punishment of Jojo’s ninth day special had faded enough for him to be hungry again. But he wasn’t sure about going out there. When he’d gone to the housing office, he’d hoped to be put in a home with another family – a spare room, like he’d read about. When he’d gone to the hex number he’d been given, he’d hoped for a big welcome, with shaken hands and big smiles, introductions all around. Granted, he’d gotten his hand shook and a few names and nods, but the smiles had been hit or miss and mostly confused, and everybody seemed too busy for him. There were kids to chase, vegetables to chop. They all looked at him, though, with questioning eyes and words whispered out of earshot. He got it. He was a stranger, the new neighbour, the guy who’d just moved in. They had their own days to get about, and ice-breaking would come soon enough. And truth be told, Sawyer was tired. It had been a long haul, and a long day. One adventure at a time.

He stuck his head in each of the bedrooms, trying to determine a favourite. Each was the same as the last. He settled on the middle-left, and sat on the edge of the bed. The air filter whirred quietly. He could hear a faint rushing in the pipes below the floor, the odd click in the walls. But other than that, nothing. No drunk idiots out on the street, no skiffs zipping past at every hour, no delivery vehicles rumbling along. It was nice. It was odd. It would take getting used to.

His stomach growled. He reached into his bag and pulled out the bean cake he’d bought on his way. He was used to wrappers that crunched and rustled, but even the throw-cloth was silent. He took a bite. It was just a cheap sweet, but his taste buds bloomed with gratitude for something sugary. Take that, pickle bun.

Sawyer sat alone and ate his snack. Okay, so it wasn’t the first day he’d imagined, but hey, the sentiment held true. Everybody had a home, and nobody went hungry.

Kip

There was a delicate balance to getting the dishes done fast. Do it too quick, and a parent or a hexmate would make him do it over. Too slow, though, and . . . well, then you were still cleaning dishes. Nobody wanted to be in those shoes.

He picked up a plate from the eternal stack and scraped the food remnants into the compost bucket. Crumbs, flecks, whatever oil and sauce hadn’t been soaked up by quickbread. Kinda gross, but he supposed it could be worse. He remembered one time watching this crime-solving vid set on Titan – Murder on the Silver Sea – where some characters were at a fancy restaurant having this crazy smart conversation where the investigator and the informant both think the other one’s the killer and they were saying it but they’re not really saying it – and also they kind of wanted to bang each other? That scene had layers, seriously – and when the conversation was done, they just . . . left their food. Like, let the server come get it while they walked out of the place. The scene would’ve made sense if one of them wasn’t hungry or had a stomach ache or something, but if that were the case, then the other one would’ve reached over and eaten the leftovers. But no. Both of them left. They left half-plates of food on the table. It was the weirdest shit. He couldn’t imagine what cleaning dishes was like in a place like that. Dealing with half-eaten food sounded disgusting.

Scraps bucketed, he picked up the compressed air canister you could find in any kitchen and blasted away everything that wasn’t plate. He’d kind of liked that part when he was little. He remembered it being satisfying. But that had been about, oh, eleven billion dishes ago, and blasting away food bits had long since lost its charm. He looked over at Xia, who was helping him that night. She was seven, and hadn’t yet realised that getting to do grown-up things like dishes and pruning and floor cleaning was super boring. She stood attentively at his side, waiting for each plate he handed her, placing each one just so in the sanitiser. He had to admit, it was kind of cute.

He handed off the blasted dish to Xia, then picked up another dirty one, and scraped, and blasted, and handed off, and started again. Beyond the kitchen counter, everybody else from his hex was sitting in the same spots at the same tables, as they always did, having the same conversations they always had.

‘The new algae pumps everybody’s using, they’re no good,’ Grandma Ko said. ‘You can feel it on the ferry. Anytime we push past the slow zone, there’s this hum that starts up . . .’ Grandma Ko – Kip’s great-grandma, but that took too long to say – had been a freighter pilot back in the day and thought any tech that had been invented past, like, thirty standards ago was garbage.

‘I’m telling you, we’re going about the water budget all wrong,’ M Nguyen said, on a tear about some political thing like always. ‘If the other guilds got together and unanimously pushed for the growers to overhaul the farms, the growers would have to give in, and the council would have to fund it. But that’d mean the guilds doing something efficiently together, and we all know that’s not going to happen.’ Seriously, there was nothing more boring than politics.

‘Did you see that new planter they’ve set up over in 612?’ M Marino said. Kip took a wild guess that the next sentence would include the word imports or creds. ‘Imported seedlings, all of it.’ Bingo. ‘They’ve even got jorujola in there. It’s incredible – have you seen it? Those bio-luminescent leaves? But I don’t know where they get the creds—’ Double bingo.

‘I hear Sarah’s moved back in with the Zhangs,’ M Sousa said in an excited hush to Kip’s mom. ‘Now, it’s none of my business, but this isn’t exactly the first time she’s had things go south with a partner, and you have to wonder—’ Kip’s mom gave a nod that didn’t really confirm anything, and she threw in an ‘mmm’ here and there for good measure. Kip knew she didn’t care, and she didn’t even like M Sousa much, but she pretended to, because that’s how hexes worked.

‘That reminds me of the time me and Buster let a whole tank of hoppers out,’ laughed Kip’s dad, talking to the Mullers. ‘Have I told you this one before?’ Stars, Dad. Yes, everybody had heard this one before. Everybody had heard this story twelve thousand times.

Kip thought about Solan restaurants, where people talked about murder and sex and left dishes full of food for someone else to deal with. He thought about the university exams looming on the horizon. He thought about his score on the last practice exam. Ras had told him it was no worries, that he’d do better next time. But Kip knew what was what. He was going to fail, and he’d live here in the same hex forever, cleaning dishes and listening to his dad tell the same jokes over and over until one of them died.

Stars, he was stuck. He was so, so stuck.

Kip scraped and blasted faster now, knowing he’d left bits less than clean but hoping the heat of the sanitiser would burn away the evidence.

‘You missed some,’ Xia said, holding up the dish she’d been handed, pointing at a swatch of oily crumbs.

Kip sighed and took the plate back. ‘Guess I did,’ he said, giving the plate another scrape. How come lunch breaks never lasted this long?

At last, at fucking last, the stack of dishes ended. Xia looked satisfied; Kip was relieved. They both washed their hands. As they did so, a few bubbles appeared in the big clear cistern by the herb planters. Kip remembered one time when he was really little letting the water run and run because he liked the bubbles so much. His mom had given him a strong talking-to for that.

He looked at Xia, counting the seconds under her breath as she washed up, hurriedly turning off the faucet once she hit fifteen. Looked like somebody’d given her the same talking-to.

Kip started to head for home, but his mom stopped him, dead interrupting M Sousa. ‘Kip?’ she called, leaning away from the table. ‘Did you empty the bucket?’

Kip shut his eyes. ‘No.’

‘Well?’

Kip sighed again, trudged back to the kitchen, picked up the forgotten bucket of crumbs and bug husks and veggie stems, lugged it to the garden, and dumped it into the hot box. He could feel Mom watching him the whole way.

‘I don’t understand why he can’t come sit with us,’ he heard Dad mumble. Dad never mumbled as quiet as he thought.

‘He will when he wants to,’ Mom said.

Kip did not want to. He wanted to go home, so he did just that. The front door slid closed behind him, and he exhaled. He kicked off his shoes and headed to his room, letting that door close behind him, too. A double barrier. He flopped down on his bed and shut his eyes. Finally.

He heard the sound of his scrib dinging, muffled under . . . something. He sat up and looked around his bed. Nothing. He rolled over, found his satchel on the floor, and dug around. Nothing. He rolled over the other way. There it was – on the floor, sticking out from the jacket he’d been wearing earlier. He picked it up, and found a blinking alert from Ras.

Ras (17:20): do you have any tethering cable

Kip (18:68): uh no

Kip (18:68): why

Ras (18:69): I have something really cool for us to do

Kip (18:70): what

Ras (18:70): it’s a surprise

Kip (18:70): what kind of surprise

Ras (18:71): a tech project

Ras (18:71): trust me, it’s going to be awesome

Ras (18:71): I can get the parts in a few tendays

Ras (18:72): so long as you’re not studying

This was code. Kip’s parents didn’t read his scrib, as far as he knew, but Ras’ had once, and they’d found out he and Rosie Lee snuck a couple bottles of kick out of Bay Twelve and got shitfaced together, and it had been a ridiculous mess. Like, completely ballistic. So now, if there was something Ras wanted to talk about but didn’t want to put in writing, he said ‘so long as you’re not studying’ instead of ‘it’s a secret, I’ll tell you in person.’ Studying was the perfect cover for anything. What was that if not responsible? What parent would read that and worry?

Okay, maybe Ras’ parents. Ras never studied.

Eyas

Hopping between homesteaders was a beautiful thing. She’d taken the ferry more times in her life than she could count, and yet every time, she looked forward to those twenty minutes or so spent in transit. She could view the space outside anytime she pleased from a cupola, but it was easy to lose track of the fact that reality did not end with a bulkhead, that the starry black outside was not just a pretty picture framed below your feet. It was in passing beyond the hull, in travelling through the gap, that she was reminded of the true scope of things. The view out the window beside her passenger seat was a busy one (the window beside her, that was important – the confirmation that space existed not just below but above and beside). She could see public ferries, family shuttles, cargo ships, mail drones, nav markers, harvesting satellites. There were spacewalkers, out doing repairs or for the sheer joy of it, separated from the ship lanes by rows of self-correcting buoys. Behind it all was their adoptive sun, Risheth – a white sphere that deceptively looked to be about the size of a melon, shining softly through the ferry’s filtered windows, scattering light among the dense plane of floating rock that gravity would gather up in time. No planets to speak of, though. Risheth didn’t have any orbital bodies big enough to build on (hence why the Aandrisks hadn’t felt much loss in shrugging off their claim to the system). Eyas had been planetside twice in her life, both times on short vacations, both times wonderful, yet nothing she needed to repeat. Planets were imposing. Impressive. Intimidating. Eyas preferred the open. It was easier for her to wrap her brain around. Even though it was dangerous. Even though she’d seen it at its worst. But that wasn’t something she needed to dwell on right then. No point in spoiling the view.

The ferry docked at the Ratri, and Eyas took her place in the exiting shuffle. Most people had made the trip for trade or friendly visits, and carried goods or luggage accordingly. Eyas was there for neither, and so carried neither. She had only a satchel of personal effects and the clothes on her back – the latter of which she wouldn’t need for long.

Eyas hadn’t had sex on her home ship since her thirtieth birthday, two standards prior. It had been even longer since she’d done so with anyone who wasn’t a professional. The combination of those decisions was the best thing she’d ever done for herself (well, second maybe to moving out of her mother’s home and in with friends). People got weird around caretakers. That was part and parcel of the job, and she’d long been accustomed to it. But it did get in the way of relationships, especially the kind where clothing was optional. Whenever she told a potential partner what she spent her days doing, the reaction was either one of stumbling deference – which invariably led to the exhausting business of guiding them to the conclusion that she was just an ordinary person who wanted an honest, uncomplicated hookup – or discomfort, which shut the whole thing down. Her choices were then either her peers – and yes, the caretaking profession was pretty incestuous that way, but she didn’t have any workmates she thought of in those terms – or the tryst clubs. She’d learned that her use of the latter benefited from a bit of distance. The last time she’d visited a club on her own homesteader, the host whose room she’d been sent to had been one of the family members present at a laying-in she’d conducted the tenday prior. He’d realised who she was before they’d gotten much of anywhere, and she’d spent the next two hours helping him tearfully talk through the death of his uncle. Not an activity she minded, but definitely not the one she’d been after. Since then, she visited clubs off-ship, where nobody knew her face or what she spent her days doing, and nobody would start crying when she took her pants off (she knew the crying hadn’t been in response to her lack of pants, but still).

She took the exit ramp to the dockway, the dockway to the transport deck, and the transport deck to the plaza, which led her, at last, to the club. All clubs had fanciful names – Daydream, Top to Bottom, the Escape Hatch. The establishment she entered now was called the White Door; she’d never been to this one before (she was pleased to note the door matched the name). She left the dimming artificial light of the plaza for a very different kind of illumination: dim, yes, but with a welcoming warmth as opposed to a sleepy absence. The decor was classy and simple, like the others. She’d noticed supposedly similar establishments on her one teenage trip to Mars, but she hadn’t been able to get past their appearance: windowless shop fronts that popped up around bars and shuttledocks, painted slippery red and emblazoned with disembodied mouths and muscles. She had a hard time imagining anybody finding such a place appealing, let alone paying creds for it. Creds weren’t part of the exchange in the tryst clubs, nor was barter. They provided a service, not goods, and their hosts fell into the same broad vocational category she did: Health and Wellness. The clubs were an old tradition, a part of the Fleet practically since launch, one of many ways to keep everybody sane during a lifelong voyage. Hosts took that tradition seriously, as seriously as Eyas did her own. Plus, they were often some of the loveliest folks she’d ever met. It went without saying that to work in a club, you had to really like people.

The hallway opened into a large lounge, filled with flowering vines, hovering globulbs, and comfortable furniture. A welcome desk stood at the entrance, staffed by a friendly-looking woman with ornately braided, electric blue hair. Eyas approached the desk, feeling a crackle against her skin as she passed through the privacy shield that blocked any conversation from those outside its radius. One of the many touches Eyas appreciated.

‘Welcome,’ the woman said with a kind smile. ‘I haven’t seen you here before, have I?’

‘No,’ Eyas said. ‘I’m from the Asteria.’

‘Oh, well then, doubly welcome, neighbour!’ She gestured at the discreetly shielded pixel projector in front of her. ‘You’ll be in your ship’s system, then?’ The woman nodded toward the patch scanner bolted to the edge of the desk. ‘Do the thing, and I’ll get your info transferred over. Just needed a change of pace?’

Eyas swiped her wrist. ‘Yes.’

‘I hear that,’ the woman said as she assessed the new pixels conjured up by Eyas’ patch. Some of the information there Eyas had submitted herself – what she liked, what she didn’t, that kind of thing – but she imagined there was more in her file than that. Health records, probably. Maybe some kind of note that she’d always followed the rules. ‘All right. Are you looking to take a chance, or for a sure thing?’ This was the option always given at the entrance. Were you interested in meeting a fellow visiting stranger and seeing where the night took you, or . . .

‘The latter,’ Eyas said. Not that it was a sure thing. The host could decline service, for any reason, and she could leave at any time. Neither party was pressured to do anything, and mutual comfort was paramount. But being matched with another walk-in would’ve defeated the entire purpose of her being there.

A polite nod, a bit of gesturing. ‘Are you interested in a single partner, or multiples?’

‘Single.’

‘Any changes to your usual preferences?’

‘No.’

‘And how long of a visit would you like? Overnight, a few hours . . . ?’

‘I’ll take a half night.’ Long enough to make the trip worth it, but with plenty of time to get back home and sleep in her own bed. And that, right there, in addition to everything else she’d been asked, was why the sure thing was the better option by far. She saw so many similarities between this kind of work and her own, polar opposites of the life experiences spectrum though they were. She, too, had strangers’ bodies placed in her care. They couldn’t speak, but they’d been assured their whole lives that when the time came, they’d be treated with gentleness and respect. Nobody would find them odd or ugly. Nobody would do anything unkind. They’d be handled by someone who understood what a body was, how important, how singular. Eyas undressed those bodies. She washed them. She saw their flaws, their folds, the spots they kept hidden. For the short time they had together, she gave them the whole of her training, the whole of her self. It was an intimate thing, preparing a body. An intimacy matched only by one other. So when she placed her own body in someone else’s hands, she wanted to know that her respect would be matched. You couldn’t make guarantees like that with a stranger at a bar. You couldn’t know from a bit of conversation and a drink or two whether they understood in their heart of hearts that bodies should always be left in a better way than when you found them. With a professional, you could. And you’d know, too, that their imubots were up to date, that the kind of sex that could lead to pregnancy carried no such risk, that there wouldn’t be any dancing around whether or not to stay the night or see each other again or if it meant something. Of course it always meant something. But you couldn’t know if that something was the same. In Eyas’ opinion, going to a club was the safest way to have sex, both physically and emotionally. The alternative was a minefield.

The pixels behind the counter filtered themselves as the blue-haired woman entered Eyas’ answers. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ve got eight guys free this evening who fit the bill. Would you like to go through the list, or—’

Eyas realised, in that moment, that she didn’t want to make any more decisions. She hadn’t thought about it when she’d headed out for the Ratri, but she was tired, tired in a quiet way that had become an everyday thing for reasons she couldn’t point to. The tenday hadn’t been bad, but it had been long, and she’d grown weary of decisions. ‘Surprise me,’ she said. She paused in thought. ‘Whoever you think the nicest of them is.’

‘Ha! You’re going to get me in trouble.’ The woman tapped her lips, then made a definitive gesture at the pixels. ‘All right, you’ll be in room fourteen. Your host will be there in about twenty minutes. You’re welcome to wait in there, or you can relax in the lounge. If you feel the need to clean up, there are showers to the right of the bar. You’re welcome to go there with your host as well. If you don’t go straight to your room, we’ll call you when it’s time.’ She gave Eyas an amused smile. ‘And do not tell him how I picked him, or I will never hear the end of it.’ Eyas thanked her, and walked on through. The lounge was inviting, and the aforementioned bar was laden with colourful bottles of kick, a menu of snacks, and short, clear jars displaying varieties of redreed and smash. Another time, she would’ve treated herself to something spicy to snack on and something sweet to drink. She would’ve chatted with the bartender, contemplated the clientele (which, as always, was as varied as varied could be), maybe played a round of flash with someone else waiting their turn. But Eyas looked at the crowd, and all she wanted was to be behind a door.

She found room fourteen, waved her wristwrap over the lock, and entered. Just the sight of the room felt like she’d taken a sip of water after several hours without. Everything looked soft – the bed, the couch, even the table, somehow. There was a thumpbox for music, a chill box for drinks, a storage compartment full of other things the host could introduce if desired. All clean, all inviting. All for her.

She sat down on the couch, closed her eyes, and let twenty minutes slip by. She barely felt them.

There was a soft chime at the door before it opened. A man entered, carrying a bottle of something amber brown. He was tall, but not too tall. Fit, but not too fit. His hair was thick and his eyes were kind. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I’m Sunny.’

Of course you are, Eyas thought. ‘I’m Eyas.’

‘Eyas,’ he repeated, the door closing behind him. ‘I haven’t heard that one before.’

Her mouth gave a scrunch as it prepared to offer an explanation given a million times. ‘It’s an old word for a hawk.’

Sunny leaned against the bedframe. ‘What’s a hawk?’

‘Earthen bird. Bird of prey, apparently. Very striking, very fast. My mother’ – she tried to find a tactful way to explain the most incongruous person in her life – ‘she’s a romantic.’

‘Clearly. That’s a poetic name.’

‘Yes. Granted, she didn’t dig deep enough into the language files to figure out that an eyas is a baby hawk, not a hawk hawk. So, I’m a scruffy baby bird that hasn’t learned to fly. Not the best sentiment to carry around as an adult.’

Sunny laughed. ‘You’re not the only one with a name like that. I know a guy named Walrus.’

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘You know what a wolf is?’

Eyas thought back to school trips to the Archives. ‘It’s a . . . oh, I know this.’ She frowned, rifling through neurons that hadn’t been needed in a while. ‘Some kind of carnivore, right? Or am I thinking of something else?’

‘No, you’re right. Like a wild dog. Beautiful, powerful, all that good stuff. That’s what his parents were going for. Only, they got mixed up and didn’t double-check, and went with Walrus.’

‘And what’s a walrus?’

Sunny raised a finger and pulled his scrib from his belt holster. He gestured at the screen, then turned it her way. The Archives helpfully displayed his friend’s namesake – a sack-like water beast with ludicrous tusks and unfortunate whiskers.

Eyas laughed. ‘Okay, that’s worse than mine.’

The host chuckled as he set his scrib on the table. ‘Hey, if it’s any consolation, I don’t like my given name, either.’

‘You mean it’s not Sunny?’ Eyas said with a smirk.

The host winked. ‘So, I heard you’ve had a long day.’

Eyas raised her eyebrows. ‘Did you?’

‘That was Iana’s guess, at least. Did she get that wrong?’

Assuming Iana was the blue-haired woman, Eyas mentally gave her a few points for perception. ‘No. It has been a long day.’

Sunny held up the bottle. ‘Do you like sintalin?’

‘I’ve never had it.’ She considered the name. ‘Aeluon?’

‘Laru. It’s . . . well, it’s what I pour myself on long days.’ He picked up two glasses, asking her a silent question. She nodded. He poured.

Eyas examined the glass placed in her hand. The liquid within had a caramel warmth, and the colour got darker and darker the deeper the glass went. It smelled unlike anything she’d ever had. A good smell, at least. A rich, spiced smell. She took a sip, and shut her eyes. ‘Wow.’

‘It’s something, right?’ Sunny sat next to her on the couch – close, but not too close. Close as good friends might sit, and just as easy. He took a sip from his own glass.

‘That’s . . . wow.’ She laughed.

‘I’ve got a friend who’s a cargo runner, makes a lot of stops in Laru space. She always brings me a case of this when she’s back home.’

‘This isn’t from the bar?’

‘Nah, this is my stash.’

Another point to Iana. It was entirely possible Sunny pulled this bit with everybody who came to room fourteen, but even if it was fiction, it was very nice.

Sunny looked at her seriously. ‘Eyas, I’m here to give you a good night, and that can be whatever you need it to be. If you need to just talk, have some drinks, chill out – that’s fine. I’m happy with that.’

Eyas was sure he’d said those words before, but she also got the sense that he meant them. She studied his face. His lips looked soft. His beard was perfect, almost annoyingly so. ‘No,’ she said. She put her hand on his chest. She set her glass down, ran her palm up his throat, over his neck, into his hair. Stars, it felt good in her fingers. ‘If it’s okay by you,’ she said, as his hand greeted her thigh, ‘I’d rather not talk much at all.’

Isabel

Dinner had been chaos, as per usual, and at one time in Isabel’s life, this would have aggravated her. She would’ve wanted to put on a good face for an academic guest, particularly an alien one. But Isabel loved the nightly feeding frenzy, and at this point, she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. They hadn’t done anything special, not even shifted the cooking order. Ninth day was her cousin’s family’s night to cook, and cook they did (albeit with some quiet instruction from Isabel, who’d sent them a list of common ingredients Harmagians could not digest – heavy salt being the trickiest one). There had been kids running around everywhere, a misunderstanding about how gravy worked (namely: not as a drink), a broken dish, a few translation errors, a bombardment of questions in both directions, and three dozen people tripping over themselves to look good in front of a fancy visitor. It was real. It was honest. It was so very Exodan.

Her hex was quiet now. Ghuh’loloan had departed for her guest quarters – not for sleep, as her species did not have that need, but to take comfort in a space designed for Harmagian merchants and diplomats, rather than incompatible Human physiology. The kids, in contrast, were (mostly) sleeping, and the grown-ups had retreated to the sanctuary of their homes. It was always such a sharp change, the switch between daytime and night-time. Not that the view outside changed. But the lights did, and the clocks did, and as much as Isabel seized upon the bright energy of the bustling hours, she always cherished restful dark.

She made her way through the courtyard, a mug of tea in each hand as she passed through her well-worn environment. In structure, every hex was the same, but once you got past the standard kitchen-garden-cistern setup, the hex was whatever you made of it. Isabel and her neighbours liked plants and they liked kids, so their shared space was a haven for both. They had an herb garden, where her wife’s parents and their neighbours had grown vegetables once. The current eldest generation was content to leave farming to farmers, though there was a patch of climbing beans studiously tended by her grand-nephew Ollie, age six. He was much more at ease tending his tiny crop and whispering secret stories to his toys than joining in with the rest of the roaring, shrieking, giggling pack. Whenever his harvest was ready, he went from home to home, hand-delivering bundles tied with bits of string – usually no more than ten beans in a bunch. Isabel always treated this occasion with the same seriousness he did. She would unwrap each bundle, snap a bean between her teeth, chew thoughtfully, and after a moment of consideration, inform Ollie that this was, without a doubt, his best batch yet. This was not always true, but what kind of monster would say otherwise?

Aside from the herbs and Ollie’s bean farm, the other greenery in the hex was decorative, from the blankets of vines encasing the walkways, to the orderly flower pots arranged around front doors. Isabel never had time for gardening, but Tamsin’s brother did enough of that for everyone. That was the best thing about having hexmates. Everybody had tasks they were good at and ones they weren’t, chores they didn’t mind and chores they loathed. More often than not, it balanced out. Everybody pitched in, leaving plenty of time for rest and play. Humans were, after all, a social species – even the quiet Ollies, or the thoughtful, shy types that gravitated toward work in the Archives. There was a difference between being shy and being sequestered. Rarely in history had things turned out well for people who chose to lock themselves away.

Beyond the plants was the workshop – a three-sided area framed by workbenches and filled with larger shared tools. Isabel knew without asking that she’d find Tamsin there. She was seated in the back corner, at ease in the big soft chair their hexmates had jointly given her for her birthday. The years had been hard on Tamsin’s body, and workstools didn’t suit her like they used to. She’d been a zero-g mech tech once – life support maintenance, specifically – and like so many of her profession, the cumulative decades spent in a different realm of physics had played hell with her skeleton. She walked with a cane now, and had left her previous career to younger bones. Her days were now spent leading classes at the neighbourhood tech shop, where she taught basic everyday systems repair, or at home, where she’d make metal art or fix too-loved toys – anything that kept her hands occupied. Like Isabel, she was happiest when busy. It was why they’d hit it off so well, over fifty years before.

‘What’ve you got there?’ Isabel asked, entering the inner sanctum.

Tamsin had a box of fabric at her feet and a sewing kit perched on the closest shelf. She held up a small pair of trousers. ‘Sasha wore the knees out.’

‘Again?’

‘Again.’ Tamsin picked up her needle and resumed patching. ‘She’s an active kid.’

There was no argument there – of their five grandkids, Sasha was the biggest handful, always bruised or bleeding or stuck in a storage cabinet somewhere. Menace wasn’t the right word for her. She was too agreeable for that. Scamp. That fit the bill. Sasha was an absolute scamp, and though Tamsin showered all the grandkids and hex kids with equal amounts of teasing and candy, Isabel knew she had a special soft spot for the little cabinet explorer. Tamsin had never said so, but she didn’t need to. Isabel knew.

She set Tamsin’s mug of tea within easy reach, pulled up a workstool facing her, and sat. ‘You should’ve made Benjy do it. He’s started stitching, he could use the practice.’

‘Yeah, but then she’d be running around with lame practise patches.’ Tamsin spoke, as always, flat and factual, the kind of voice that hid its owner’s perpetual good humour beneath a dry disguise. ‘You get patched-up duds from me, you’re gonna look real cool.’

Isabel laughed into her tea. ‘So, tonight went well.’

‘It did.’

Tamsin said the words in a neutral tone, but there was a line between her eyes that made Isabel ask: ‘But?’

‘No buts. Tonight went well.’

‘But?’

Tamsin rolled her eyes. ‘Why are you pushing?’

‘Because I can tell.’

‘You can tell what?’

Isabel poked the spot in question. ‘You’ve got that crease.’

‘Oh, stars, you and your magical crease. I don’t have a crease.’

‘Yes, you do. You’re not the one who looks at you every day.’

Tamsin squinted at Isabel as she knotted a thread. ‘And what does the magical crease tell you?’

‘That there’s something you want to say.’

‘If I wanted to say something, I would’ve said it.’

‘Something that you’re not saying, then.’

‘You’re such a pain,’ Tamsin sighed. ‘It just . . . felt kind of . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. It was fine, you’re right.’

Isabel sipped her tea, watching, waiting.

Tamsin set down her stitching. ‘She’s condescending.’

‘You thought so?’ This came as a genuine surprise.

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No, I—’ Isabel replayed the events of the evening as quickly as she could. Ghuh’loloan had been delighted to meet the hex. She’d brought gifts and stories and a wealth of patience. Isabel had thought it a rousing success on both sides of the exchange, right up until now. ‘I had a really good time. It felt like we got things off to a great start.’

‘See, and that’s why I didn’t want to say anything. This is your work, your friend. I don’t know her like you do, and I don’t want to ruin this for you.’

‘You’re not. This is your home – our home – and if something in it bothers you, you have to say.’

‘Can I tell our neighbours to knock off their brewing experiments then? That scrub fuel they cooked up last time was awful.’

‘Tamsin.’

Tamsin picked up her tea. ‘She just came across so . . . so sugary. Everything was wonderful and fascinating and incredible.’

‘That’s just how Harmagians are. Everything’s couched in hyperbole.’

‘Yeah, but it makes it hard to trust them, y’know? If everything is wonderful and fascinating . . . I mean, everything can’t be those all the time.’

‘But it is to her. This is her . . . her passion. She’s curious. She wants to learn about us.’

‘I get that, I do. And I don’t want this to sound like a bigger deal than it is. It’s . . . I just felt like I was on display. Like some kind of exhibit she’s visiting.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’m probably being unfair.’ She paused. ‘I know this isn’t a nice thing to admit,’ she added slowly, ‘but it’s hard to have her here saying these sugary things, poking our tech, touching our kids, and not remember how it was.’

Isabel didn’t need to ask what she meant. She remembered. She remembered being not much older than Sasha and hearing the adults in her hex talking about the growing push for GC membership. She remembered the news feeds, the public forums, the pixel posters with their catchy slogans. She remembered being a little older, when the Fleet and the Martian government were in the thick of smoothing out relations so as to join as a unified species, and everything felt like it was one spark away from a flash fire. She remembered being in her teens and watching the parliamentary hearings, listening to the galaxy’s most powerful debate whether her species had merit enough to go from tolerated refugees to equal citizens. She remembered the hopes everybody had pinned on it – Grandpa Teyo, with his medical clinic badly in need of new tech and proper vaccines, Aunt Su, with her merchant crew hungry for new trade routes. Everybody who had ever been to a spaceport and felt like they were a subcategory, a separate queue, an other. And she remembered the Harmagian delegation in those hearings, fully split on the issue of whether Humans were worth the bother, unable to vote in consensus. They hadn’t been the only species with objections, but that wasn’t the point. Every voice that got up there and spoke against Humanity stung as if the words were being said for the first time.

Isabel laid her hand on her wife’s knee. ‘That was such a long time ago,’ she said. ‘So much has changed.’

‘I know.’

‘Ghuh’loloan wasn’t around for any of that. She wasn’t even born yet.’

‘I know.’ Tamsin thought. ‘They’re born underwater, right?’

‘Yes.’ Isabel smirked. ‘I’m sure she’d be happy to answer your questions about it. Seeing as how you’re curious about her species.’

Tamsin stuck out her tongue. ‘It’s not that I don’t understand curiosity. It’s that . . . it’s like you said. She wasn’t even born yet. She missed out on all of that ugliness, and yet we’re kind of quaint to her, it feels like. Yeah, it was forever ago, but those Harmagians who said those things are still around, right? They had kids, and those kids would’ve learned—’

‘They don’t raise kids like we do.’

‘Well, somebody’s raising them, right? Somebody’s teaching them, somebody’s telling them how the galaxy works. So what was your pal Ghuh taught about us? What do they say about us when we’re not around? In some ways, they were right. We don’t have much to offer. We build off their tech, and we get the planets they’ve decided are too crummy to live on. And our kids see that. They all want to go to Central space and mod their bodies and get rich. Did you hear Terra at dinner tonight?’

‘You’ll have to be more specific.’

‘She was talking about the ferry ride she went on last tenday, and she said, “we flew past a big yelekam”. I asked her what the word was in Ensk. She didn’t know. She didn’t know the word for comet.’

Isabel blinked. The younger generation, she knew, was mixing Klip and Ensk in ways hers never had, and they tended to lean heavily on the galactic language when speaking among themselves. But Terra was five years old. She would’ve barely started being taught Klip at school. Clearly, she’d been learning elsewhere. ‘Languages adapt.’ Isabel exhaled. ‘That’s the way of it.’

‘Stars, you are the worst person to sympathise with about change being scary,’ Tamsin said with a crooked smile. She set both stitching and mug aside, and leaned in to Isabel, lacing the hand on her knee into her own. ‘I’m not saying I hated it tonight, or that I don’t want her here. I’m saying I felt like I was on display, and it was weird. I expect that if I’m elsewhere. I don’t expect that here. That’s all.’

Isabel cupped Tamsin’s face with her free hand and leaned forward to kiss her. ‘I’m sorry you felt that way,’ she said after their lips parted. ‘That isn’t fair to you.’

Tamsin rested her forehead against Isabel’s for a long moment, the kind of moment that made everything else hold still. She pulled back just a touch. ‘So since I’ve been so emotionally wounded in my own home—’

‘Oh, stars.’ Isabel sat back, letting the roll of her eyes lead the way.

‘Can you go fetch the leftover custard out of the stasie?’ She gave her lashes an out-of-character flutter.

Isabel sighed in acquiescence. ‘Did you not get any at dinner?’

Her wife looked at her seriously. ‘I am seventy-nine years old. If I want dessert twice . . . I get dessert twice.’

Tessa

This was a battle of wills, and Tessa was going to win. She was sure of that, sure in her bones, even though the scene before her was a daunting one.

‘Ky,’ she said. ‘You need to lie down now.’

Her toddling son stood atop his cot in her room, all tummy and gravity-defying curls. He was the cutest thing in the universe, and she would’ve given anything for him to be someone else’s kid right then.

‘No,’ Ky said with simple conviction. ‘Up now.’

‘It’s not time to be up,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s time for sleep.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’ His knees wobbled, but they held steady. Ky presented his argument: ‘Mama up now. Aya up now.’ He raised his voice. ‘Ky up now! All fixed!’

‘Your sister is not up, either. She’s asleep.’

‘No!’

Tessa looked over her shoulder, across the living room toward Aya’s door. It was closed, but . . . but. A new uncertainty needled at her. She wondered what little ears could hear that hers couldn’t. Tessa ran her hand through her hair and let out a terse sigh. She looked Ky in the eye as she started to exit the room. ‘When I come back, you need to be lying down.’

‘No!’

Tessa crossed the living room, trading one battle for another. She opened Aya’s door, and – well, she had to give the kid credit. She was tented under her blanket, which would have hidden the light of her scrib were it not for one traitorous hole created by an errant foot.

‘Hey,’ Tessa said sternly.

Her daughter froze, an oh shit rigor that might’ve been funny if Tessa hadn’t been so sick of this. ‘I was just—’ Aya began.

‘Bed,’ Tessa said. That would’ve been that, were it not for a creeping suspicion. She pulled the blanket up and away. Aya scrambled to shut off her scrib, but she was too slow. An image of neon weapon blasts and campy explosions lingered in the empty air.

Tessa frowned. ‘What were you watching?’

Her daughter pouted at the bed.

‘Aya.’

‘. . . Cosmic Crusade.’

‘Are you allowed to watch Cosmic Crusade?’

‘No,’ Aya said, mumbling so low her lips barely moved.

‘No,’ Tessa said. Stars, but she was over fighting to keep that Martian trash out of her kid’s head. She took the scrib.

The protest was immediate and indignant. ‘Mom! That’s not fair!’

‘It’s totally fair.’

‘When do I get it back?’

‘You’re not really in a negotiating position here, kiddo.’

‘When?’

‘When I say so.’ She pointed. ‘Bed.’

She heard her daughter let out a long-suffering sigh as the door closed. One down. Tessa forged ahead, back to her room. She walked through the open door and . . . she blinked. ‘Ky, where are your pajamas?’

Her naked son slapped his torso with twin palms. ‘All fixed!’

Everything was all fixed! with him these days, and she had no idea where he’d picked it up from, no more so than she could figure out where his pajamas had gone. She looked around the bed, beside it, under it, under blankets, under pillows, feeling ridiculous at being outwitted by a two-year-old who was placidly watching her with a finger up his nose. This was one single room. How many places could there . . . she paused. It wasn’t one room, technically. She walked the short distance to the attached lavatory, and opened the door. The light switched on. Tessa closed her eyes. ‘Come here, please.’

Silence.

‘Ky, come here.’

Ky padded over. He looked at her with his lips pulled inward, rocking slightly as he stood in place. It was an expression that would have been the same on any person of any age – the unmistakable dread of someone who knew they’d fucked up but wanted to see how it would play out.

Tessa put her hands on her hips. ‘Why are your pajamas in the toilet?’ she asked.

‘Don’ know.’

‘You don’t know? Who put them there?’

‘Daddy.’

Tessa bit back a laugh. ‘Your daddy’s not here.’

‘Yes, he – he put ’jamas. And – and then bye. Bye Ky, bye Aya, bye Mama.’ He put his hand on his mouth and made kissing sounds. ‘No ’jamas. No way.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Tessa said, tugging the discarded footies away from the vacuum pulling them toward the sewage line. ‘I think you put them here.’

‘No, I don’ think so,’ he repeated while giggling. ‘You – you put them here.’

Tessa imagined, as she put her kicking, now-crying boy back into another pair of pajamas, this same script playing out in this same room with herself and her parents. It had been their room once, and their parents’ before that, and their parents’ before that, and on and on. Generation after generation of wriggling toddlers and weary adults. She remembered waking in what was now Aya’s room and hearing tiny, tubby Ashby shriek with laughter across the way. It was fair, she supposed, this cycle of aggravation. Payback for the days when you threw your own jammies in the toilet.

After two more false starts, three sung rounds of ‘Five Baby Bluefish’, and ten minutes of hand holding and hair stroking, the kid was down. Tessa tiptoed out of the room, holding her breath. She didn’t exhale until the door closed behind her and she had waited long enough to confirm that the sound had fallen on unconscious ears. Whew.

Usually, she didn’t fly solo for bedtime. But Pop was out that evening – off at the waterball game with his cronies, like he did every pair of tendays. He’d be home in a few hours, tipsy and ornery and no help whatsoever. She could’ve asked the Parks for a hand. They didn’t have any kids, and they often helped out around the hex in terms of bathing and bedtime stories, but both Paola and Jules were going through that temporary period of punkiness everyone went through after bot upgrades, and Neil had had a rough shift at work – yet another water main was about to bust, he’d said at dinner – so Tessa hadn’t wanted to bother any of them. No, better to brave bedtime alone and savour the reward of a few sweet, sweet moments all to herself.

She surveyed the living room. It was a wreck, as always, a carnage of toys and laundry and stained furniture even the cleanerbots couldn’t keep up with. She considered the nearly-full bottle of kick sitting on the shelf, a gift from her workmates the standard prior. A few warm sips before bed sounded awfully nice, but . . . nah. If Ky woke up, she wanted to be clear-headed, and these days, even one drink was enough to make her start the next day with a headache.

Somewhere within, her teenage self was screaming in horror.

She poured herself a glass of water instead, and sat on the sofa, letting her body fall back like a bot that’d had its signal cut. Her head sank blissfully into the balding fabric. She closed her eyes. She listened. Quiet. Beautiful, sweet quiet. Nobody crying, nobody complaining, nobody needing her for anything. Just air filters sighing from above and the distant whoosh of greywater pipes below. She’d go to bed before long, but first, she was going to just sit. She was going to sit and do n—

Her scrib pinged. Somebody was making a sib call. If it had been anybody else, she would’ve thrown the thing across the room, but when she saw the name, she relented. With a sigh, she hauled herself up, sat back down at the ansible desk, and answered.

‘You just missed ’em,’ she said.

On screen, George sighed. ‘Yeah, I thought I might’ve. Damn.’ He was unsurprised, but still disappointed. Tessa couldn’t help but smile. His skewed frown looked just like Ky’s.

If you’d told eighteen-year-old Tessa that she’d have kids with George one day, she would’ve thought you were insane. George had been the friendly guy, the low-key guy, the guy you might trade a word or two with at a party before you each went off with your respective friends. George was nothing like gorgeous Ely, with a body straight out of a sim and the emotional intelligence of fish spawn, or charismatic Skeet, whose ambitious dreams were so easy to become smitten with until you realised there was no work ethic to back them up. It wasn’t until she and George were both in their thirties that something clicked. He was on leave from his latest mining tour, Tessa was the bay worker who noticed the discrepancy on his formwork. Not exactly the most romantic of reunions, but it had led to drinks, which led to bed, which led to days of more of the same, which led to a fond and noncommittal farewell, which led to two idiots having a panicked sib call – ‘Wait, did you not get dosed?’ ‘I figured you had!’ – which led, in turn, to Aya.

At first, George had talked about leaving his job for something that would keep him around, but asteroid mining was valuable work, and Tessa hadn’t seen any reason to disrupt things more than a kid already would. George made sure he was around the first half-standard of Aya’s life, then went off again to the rocky orbital edges, with the baby in Tessa’s care and the hex looking after both. Mining tours were long hauls, so Tessa and George conducted themselves how they liked during the interim, each keeping their own schedules and having the occasional fling (the highs and lows of which were always shared with the other). They were, in most ways, their own people with their own lives. But whenever George’s ship came home with a haul of ice and metal, he stayed in the Santoso home, wrestling with Aya, chatting with the neighbours, sharing Tessa’s bed. They always got their doses now, except for that one time three years prior, when they’d decided the first accident was worth repeating. They’d also decided, without much fuss, that since the whole arrangement suited them both fine, they might as well get married – nothing fancy, no big party or anything. Just ten minutes with an archivist and a nice dinner at the hex. None of it was love as her younger self had imagined. It was so much better. There was nothing frantic or all-consuming about her and George. They were grounded, sensible, comfy. What more could you ask for?

George’s on-screen image crackled with distance. ‘Well, if they’re down, that means more time for us,’ he said. ‘Though you look pretty tired.’

‘I am pretty tired. But I’ve always got time for you.’

‘Aww,’ he simpered.

‘Aww,’ she repeated, making a face. ‘So? How’s the edge?’ This was always her first question.

George shrugged, looking around his cabin. ‘Y’know. Rocks. Dark. The usual. We’ve got a big ol’ ore ball we’re headed for now. Take us about two tendays to get there. Should be a good haul.’

‘Teracite?’

‘Iron, mostly, looks to be. Why? You going into comp tech?’

‘Not me. Everybody else, though. I can’t tell you how many queries we get about teracite stores.’ She leaned her jaw on her palm. ‘How’s the ship?’ This was always her second question, the one spacers were forever asking each other.

‘Fine, fine,’ he said. His eyes shifted away from the screen. ‘Still kicking.’

Tessa squinted. ‘Don’t bullshit me, George.’

‘It’s nothing, and definitely nothing you need to worry about.’

‘You know that’s a great way to make someone worry, right?’

‘We had a minor – minor, Tess – hiccup in life support today. Air not filtering right, CO₂ got a little high for a couple hours.’

That was minor, in the grand scheme of things. But the Rockhound was an old ship even by Exodan standards, and this wasn’t the first time there’d been ‘hiccups’ in their patched-up life support. ‘Did Garren get it fixed?’ Their mech tech.

George gestured to his door. ‘Would you like me to get him up here?’ he asked with a teasing look. ‘Have him walk you through it?’

Tessa eyed the screen flatly. ‘I’m just saying, Lela’ – his captain – ‘should talk to the mining guild about replacing it already.’

‘You know as much as anyone there’s a list as long as my leg for ships that need upgrades, and we are not at the top, I assure you.’ He smiled in a way that was meant to soothe. ‘Worst case, we’ll head home if we start coughing.’ His smile went wistful, and Tessa could see the tangent at work. An unexpected trip home meant he could hug the kids sooner, which meant they’d have grown a little less since the last time he saw them. ‘How’re they doin’?’ he asked.

‘Your son—’

‘Uh oh.’

‘—stuffed his pajamas down the toilet and told me you did it.’

George guffawed. ‘No! I’m innocent, I swear!’

‘Don’t worry. You have a solid alibi.’

‘That’s a relief. My own son, throwing me out the hatch like that.’

Tessa shook her head. ‘It’s like family means nothing.’ She paused. ‘He’s on this kick lately – “all fixed”. He says it constantly. Any idea where he got it?’

George stroked his thick beard. ‘I dunno.’ He squinted at the ceiling. ‘Isn’t that a Big Bug thing?’

Tessa had never been into The Big Bug Crew as a kid, and she hadn’t played any of the new ones with her daughter. ‘Is it?’

‘Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but I swear it’s Big Bug. Whenever something on the ship breaks down and you repair it, there’s this, like . . . fanfare and confetti, and the kids yell, “All fixed!”’

‘But he hasn’t—’ Tessa stopped. Ky wasn’t old enough to be playing sims yet, not by a long shot. Anybody who’d only figured out his knees a standard ago didn’t yet have the mental chops to distinguish between virtual reality and reality reality. She knew this. Aya knew this. Aya had been told this. And yet, Aya had also recently been deemed responsible enough to look after her brother unsupervised for a few hours. There’d been a few of those afternoons where Tessa had come home to find Ky wound up like she’d never seen. She’d chalked it up to his sister’s overly liberal forays into the cookie box, or him just being excited about time spent playing with the coolest person in his little world. But Tessa put herself back in her childhood big sister shoes. She remembered the times her parents left her alone with Ashby. She remembered how annoying he’d been sometimes, how impossible to please. She remembered trying to find something, anything that would keep him occupied for more than ten minutes. She wondered, if they’d had a sim hub at home then, if she might’ve stuck a slap patch on his head, leaned him into a corner of the couch, and pumped sims into his brain while she did whatever she fancied. Watched forbidden Martian vids, maybe.

‘Uh oh,’ George said again.

‘What?’

‘Your face.’ He made a circular hand motion around his own. ‘It went super scary.’

She glared at him. ‘I don’t have a scary face.’

‘You do. You do, sometimes, have a scary face.’

‘If I have a scary face, it’s because your daughter—’

‘Ohhhh, boy.’

‘—is in big trouble.’ And stars, was she ever. Tessa had half a mind to wake her up right then. She would’ve, too, if getting her to sleep hadn’t been such an odyssey.

‘Sounds like everybody’s in trouble. Am I in trouble? I swear to you, Tess, I didn’t have anything to do with the toilet thing.’

She rubbed one of her temples and gave half a laugh. ‘I still have to review the evidence on that. You’re not out of the open yet.’

‘Shit,’ George said, with a sad shake of his head. ‘Maybe it’d be best if I didn’t come home early.’

Tessa looked at him – his broad chest, his big beard, his perpetually sleepy eyes. He was greyer than he’d been once, and fuller, too. He was a kind-looking man. A normal-looking man. George wasn’t the sort of guy she’d once dreamed about. George was just George, and George never changed.

She knew that wasn’t true. Nothing was permanent, especially out in the open. But when she was with George, even just on opposite ends of a sib call, it was nice to pretend, for a little bit, that this one thing would never end. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t perfect, or wasn’t always exciting. It was hers. There was one thing in this universe that was wholly, truly hers, and always would be.

It was the cosiest lie she knew, and she saw no reason to stop telling it.