The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4)

by Becky Chambers

He thought briefly about bolting the remainder of his meal, but eating food without savouring it was almost as bad as throwing it out.

Someone had worked hard on this place, someone who substituted love for money whenever the latter ran short.

One of the first things Aeluon children learned after they mastered the complicated matters of walking and eating and using their colours with intention was that the world around them did not use the same language people did. People, of course, communicated via the swirling chromatophore patches covering both cheeks. Their plant-and-animal neighbours, however, did not. The purplish fur of lumae did not mean they were angry. Nectarwings, with their orange spots, were not sad. Shiver fish were not friends, no matter how kind their blue scales might look. Pei had a hazy memory of struggling with this concept, of feeling like the natural world was untrustworthy, that it was lying to her in some way. Colour was colour, and colour meant things, and if it was obvious to her that laughter was green and annoyance was yellow, surely other creatures must know this, too. From the vantage point of her middle years, she could not pinpoint the moment in which that errant conception had faded, but once she crossed that threshold, she understood that every aspect of life had layers. There was the colour on the surface, and the meaning underneath. Yellow, when not seen swimming through a person’s face, was often nothing more than yellow, full stop. You had to pause in the face of reflex, ask yourself if the narrative you attached to the knee-jerk was accurate. Once she’d grasped this, she could never again see life as a static thing, something with one immutable definition. The universe was...

Her pulse pounded and her hands shook, but she locked her fingers together and shut her beak tight, waiting for whatever came next. Nothing came next. The shuttle and the world beyond were as quiet as they’d been minutes before. This should have been a relief, but Speaker didn’t trust it. How could anyone find comfort in silence that could end without warning?

‘When we first made contact with other sapients, there was an inevitable explosion of cultural evolution, as there always is. Technology, philosophy, art, all of it in flux. You know how it goes. And as is sadly common during periods of rapid change, things that had been simmering for my species for a long time came to a boil. There was war. You can read about it, if you must, but all you need to know is that it was horrific. Cloned soldiers became one of the weapons of choice, suffice it to say, and it was a hideous mess. People died, treaties were drawn, and so on and so forth, and when it came time to cast blame, the fact that we could point to people who weren’t even from our planet was deliciously convenient. It was their influence that had caused the fractures among us, you see, not centuries of our own inanity. It was their tech that fuelled our genetic wars, their ideas that had corrupted the sanctity of true Quelin civilisation.’ ‘And what’s true Quelin civilisation?’ Roveg laughed ruefully. ‘Now that would take tendays. There are tomes upon tomes written on the subject, and they’re all equally stupid. Anyway, it became very fashionable very quickly to perform cultural purity for others, and that fashion became dogma, and dogma became law, and tada! Here we are.’

‘Where did you get this?’ Roveg asked. ‘Oh,’ Tupo said. Xe looked around the floor. ‘There were some other Quelin here a while ago, and they forgot it in the garden.’ Roveg tried to catch Tupo’s eye. ‘Did you take it for your collection before or after they left?’ The child became interested in a pebble near xyr forepaw. ‘Umm . . . well . . .’ ‘I’m not your mother, Tupo,’ Roveg said. ‘You could always try to mail-drone it back. But theft is a long, proud tradition for many museums, so that decision’s up to you.’

‘No,’ Speaker said. Her voice shook, and she could not find a way to make it stop. ‘No. How fucking dare you. You think I’m talking about history. You think I’m talking about something that’s over. You think that because you have your accords and your treaties and your fucking licences, you can keep doing the same shit as always with a clear conscience. Oh, yes, it’s all so civilised.’ She heard the words leaving her mouth, and she was afraid – afraid of what this angry alien might do, afraid of getting into trouble, afraid of all the unpleasant situations she’d spent her whole life teaching herself to avoid. But stars, it felt good to just say what she wanted to say, and she had no intention of putting the lid back on this box, not now. ‘Just because there’s no one living on a planet does not mean it’s yours for the taking. Do you not see how dangerous that mindset is? Do you not think that treating the galaxy as if it is something to be endlessly used will always, always end in tragedy? You think you’ve broken the cycle. You haven’t. You’re in a less violent period of the exact same cycle, and you don’t see it. And the line of what you find to be justifiable cause is going to keep slipping and slipping until you end up right back where you started. You haven’t fixed anything. You put a stamp and a permit and a shiny coat of paint on an idea that has been fundamentally damaged from day one. You engaged in bloody theft and you called it progress, and no matter how much bet...

Roveg had never been happier to see a pair of Laru offering dessert. He was too drunk for this. Whatever it was Ouloo had given Pei, it had melted his brain, and he had neither head nor heart for a conversation of this sort. He did not want the galaxy to be a mess, but he didn’t want to talk about it, either. He had problems enough without arguing over ones that he could not solve. The only solution he wanted was one for his own mess, and if he couldn’t have that, he wanted to forget about it for a while. And since that was apparently out of the question as well, then if nothing else, he wanted some of that cake.

She was in that stage of intoxication where she was beginning to entertain the possibility that maybe – just maybe – she’d overdone it.

. . . there’s no reason not to.’ Speaker looked at her for a moment. ‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to.’ ‘That’s not a reason. That’s a feeling. Feelings have to have reason.’ ‘Since when?’

‘Are you all right?’ she cried in Ihreet. She was too loud. She didn’t care. ‘I – yes, yes, of course, I’m—’ Tracker sputtered. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Speaker said hurriedly, ‘but are you well? Have you taken your medicine?’ ‘My – what?’ Tracker said. She was shouting, incredulous. ‘Who cares about that?’ ‘I – I care, you were having such a bad day when I left, and—’ ‘Speaker, you’ve been stuck on a planet alone. Alone! For days! And you want to ask me about my fucking medicine?’ Both sisters stared, realising in real-time that neither had considered the possibility of the other worrying about them. Baffled and exhausted, they did the only thing that made sense: They laughed.

‘Which homesteader are you from?’ Pei asked. ‘Hmm? Oh,’ Dr Miriyam said with a glance at her arm. ‘You know what this is.’ ‘I do.’ The doctor smiled as she worked. ‘I’m from the Ratri.’ Pei smiled blue. She knew the name. ‘I have a friend from the Asteria.’ The Exodan gave her a quick look and a wry smile. ‘Our waterball team is better.’ The blue in Pei’s cheeks freckled with green. ‘He’d fight you on that.’ ‘Yeah, well, he’d lose, just like his team does under pressure.’

Roveg lowered his spoon. ‘Can you explain being ticklish to me?’ he asked. ‘I have never understood the concept.’ ‘Yeah, it’s—’ Pei started to answer authoritatively, but got no further than that. How did you explain being ticklish? Speaker stared at the top of her cockpit, eyes narrow with thought. ‘I . . . have no idea how to describe what it feels like.’ ‘It’s like . . .’ Ouloo frowned. ‘Hmm.’ ‘Is it painful?’ Roveg asked. ‘No,’ Speaker said slowly. ‘It’s not.’ ‘But you don’t like it?’ Roveg said. ‘I don’t like it,’ Pei said. ‘I mean,’ Ouloo said, ‘I don’t mind it.’ ‘It’s not my favourite, but it’s not the worst,’ Speaker said. Roveg looked around the group with his hard-shelled face. ‘Thank you, this has been incredibly illuminating,’ he said.

‘Okay, so maybe this isn’t a good present, because it’s more for your sister, I think. You said she likes crystals, and I know you really want to see her, so I’m giving you a present to give to her, since we didn’t get to meet her. If that makes sense.’

Pei opened her eyes, and she saw two things. She saw the bluest blue, dark as the sea, shifting in currents that carried nothing but love. She saw orange, sharp and sorrowful. This was not incongruous with the other hue. Sorrow was the right thing to feel when there were two doors in front of you and you knew that one of them was going to stay closed.

They’d changed the archway. When you landed at the Noble Harbour Spaceport, and you exited your ship, the sight that greeted you was that of a decorative stone archway, dripping with vines and crowning the walkway to the customs building. Roveg had seen it dozens of times, on everything from childhood vacations to his state-mandated departure. But this time was different. He couldn’t see the archway this time, because they’d removed it and replaced it with some garish light installation instead. Roveg had braced himself for a return to a place he thought he’d never set foot in again; he hadn’t been ready to see it move on without him.

Thanks to my friends and family for putting up with my nonsense, yet again. Thanks to my wife, Berglaug, who brings me more joy than all the words in the dictionary and stars in the sky. (Is that too sappy? Probably. I don’t care. If only one scrap of my writing outlives me, I want it to be the one that says that I loved her, and so I will write it wherever I can.)