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

by Becky Chambers

How could anyone find comfort in silence that could end without warning?

All Akarak twins were halved souls, but Speaker and Tracker’s bond was what was called a triet. ‘Straight cut’ was the literal definition, but the word in Ihreet was weighty, reverent, a way of describing a pair made whole by the other’s complement.

‘Wait, so, how …’ Speaker made a hesitant face. ‘I’m going to regret this question. How is it … prepared?’ Pei grimaced. ‘They take the milk, they add some ingredients – don’t ask me, I have no idea what – and then pour the mess into a … a thing. I don’t know. A container. And then …’ She shut her eyes. ‘They leave it out until bacteria colonise it to the point of solidifying.’ The cacophony returned. ‘I knew I’d regret it,’ Speaker said.

‘How is it that their milk makes them sick?’ Speaker said. ‘That’s got to pose a problem if they can’t feed their young.’ ‘Oh, no, I – stars, I forgot the worst part.’ Pei rubbed her neck with her palm. ‘They don’t make cheese with their own milk. They take it from other animals.’ At that, chaos broke out.

‘To me, family is the group within your ship, but there are … tiers of a sort within that. Siblings are paramount. Twins, specifically – the person you hatched alongside. That’s …’ That’s the other half of yourself, she intended to say, but the words evaporated as the worry she’d worked so hard to distract herself from took the opportunity to return to the forefront.

He’d been taught that if one person had more than another, feeling guilty about it was the least productive reaction. The only proper way to approach such inequities was to figure out how best to wield them, so as to bring others up to where you stood.

‘My planet,’ he said, but not to her. He spoke the words to himself, experimentally, studying them from an angle he had never thought to consider. He looked at the Old Marketplace, and it was a marvel, truly, but not his, not at all his. ‘You know how it feels when you hop between worlds? How you begin surrounded, in a place like this—’ he gestured at the screen with his legs ‘—and it’s everywhere, it’s everything. It appears flat and endless. But then you push away with as much engine thrust as you can muster, and it all zooms out at once, and quickly begins to curve. And once you’re above, you see it’s just a sphere like all the others, a giant ball that becomes a marble that becomes a speck. And then you approach another marble, which becomes another ball, and when you land on that, it becomes that flat endlessness once more. There’s no centre to it. There’s no up or down, there’s only close and far. You know this feeling?’

‘Well … to have your own planet means that despite knowing the universe is edgeless, that everything is relative to everything else, you feel there’s one place that’s the true centre of it. I don’t mean the true centre in an astronomical way, or a topographical way. I mean the true centre. It’s the anchor, the … the weight that holds the weaving together. It’s not the true centre for everyone, but it is for you. And that knowledge reframes all that zooming in and out. You’re not drifting. You’re attached, somewhere. It may be far, but you can always feel it. And it reminds you, when you go back, that it’s yours. We travellers, we move through so many artificial environments – so many combinations of air pressure, humidity, temperature, gravity – that we forget how achingly good it feels to step into the natural environment your body spent millions of years evolving for. Everything in you settles instantly, as if you are water and the world is the cup. When you look to the horizon, even though you’ve been above it, even though you know better, you can fully believe in the flatness, the endlessness. You wrap yourself in that illusion, and you will never feel safer.’

Roveg would never forget the sound Ouloo made when she ran into Captain Tem’s shuttle and saw Tupo. He couldn’t call it a scream. A scream was sharp and shrill. This sound was curved, liquid, moaning. It was a frightened sound, a mourning sound. If blood could speak as it was spilling, that was the sound it would make.

Tracker did what any twin would do in response: she held the other half of her soul tight, saying nothing, holding fast, giving the pain space to pour itself out.