‘I would imagine not.’

‘Because there’s sex there.’

‘Yes, I’m aware of what a tet house is, thank you.’

‘It’s usually Hirikk who comes to buy fuel, and he always brings me cool rocks they find if they go outside their dome. He’s nice. Anyway, you can learn a lot from rocks.’ Tupo paused again as xe stared at xyr massive collection, seemingly overwhelmed by choice. ‘Do you know what an igneous rock is?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about a sedimentary rock?’

‘Yes, I know those, too.’

‘Okay.’ Tupo paused again, at a loss. ‘Well, you can just read the labels, then.’

‘I will,’ Roveg said. By this, he meant he would skim them, but he kept that to himself.

‘Oh, and also—’ Tupo ran over to a table off to the side that held an old-fashioned portable data server and an access monitor, both of which looked like well-loved hand-me-downs. ‘You can access the GC reference files here, if you want to look up something you don’t know about.’

‘Ah, you run a storage node!’ Roveg said approvingly. ‘Excellent. I have a number of friends who volunteer for the reference files, and they’re always on the prowl to find people willing to maintain nodes. Keeps the whole network more robust, as I’m sure you know.’

‘Yeah. I mean, I know I could just go on my scrib and access it through the Linkings, but I think this is cooler.’

‘It is cooler. And since you can’t get on the Linkings right now away, at least you’ve got this, hmm?’ He looked back to the other tables. ‘So. Explain to me how rocks fit into this omni-story you see at every museum.’

‘Oh, right, okay, so … you have a planet. It’s full of rocks, and the rocks tell you stuff about how things used to be on the planet. There basically wasn’t anything on Gora, ever. Well, there were volcanoes once, but not anymore. They’re dead. And there wasn’t any water, so we don’t have as many kinds of rocks as other places. But we do have some pretty ones from where the volcanoes used to be. Look, this is my favourite.’ Tupo picked up an unpolished gemstone for Roveg to see – murky blue and flecked with black.

‘That’s a nice piece,’ Roveg said. ‘Have you ever thought about polishing it?’

‘None of my rocks are polished,’ Tupo said firmly. ‘It removes the rock from its proper context and then people don’t know what it really looks like.’ Xe paused. ‘Plus I don’t have the stuff you need to polish them.’

‘That’s fair.’

‘So, at other museums, after rocks, you get exhibits about life. And the thing is, there is life on Gora. It just didn’t start here.’ Tupo gestured at the table of anthropological relics. Roveg noted a broken Harmagian piercing, an empty bottle of Whitedune, an immaculate Aandrisk feather presumably given to the child. ‘It is natural history,’ Tupo asserted. ‘Life came to Gora, just not in the way … not in the way most people mean.’

Roveg started to grasp what Tupo was trying to say. ‘You’re arguing that calling your collection natural history rather than geology is valid because life did, in fact, establish itself here, and is therefore a key part of the planet’s history.’

‘Yeah. Exactly.’

‘Tupo, I have to say, I’ve never heard that perspective before, but I truly enjoy it. You should write a thesis one day.’

Tupo made a face. ‘I hate writing.’

‘Well, then stick to curation, because this is a very fine museum.’

The child shuffled xyr paws. ‘It’s okay,’ xe mumbled happily.

Roveg’s gaze shifted away from the feather as a surprisingly familiar item leapt out of the crowd. ‘Ah!’ Roveg said, reaching forward. He picked up the three-dimensional ceramic object from the table. ‘You have a poem stone! Wonderful!’

Tupo blinked at him. ‘It’s a what?’

Roveg looked at the label the child had affixed below the stone: Unknown sculpture, 248/306, found by Tupo. ‘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.’ He turned the poem stone over between his toes. It was of charming make – the sort of thing you’d buy at a tourist trap, but endearing all the same. He hoped its former owner hadn’t been too sad over its loss. ‘So you don’t know what this is?’

Tupo quickly stuck out xyr tongue, the Laru body language for no.

‘Do you know how Quelin writing works?’

Another blip of the tongue.

Roveg set the poem stone down and looked around for something he could use. A vial of dirt – that would do. He walked to the Early Eras table and pointed. ‘Would it be all right if I emptied out one of these?’ he asked. ‘I’ll clean it up, of course.’