‘Turn it up!’ Tupo cried raucously. Xe stomped xyr feet in a furious pitter-pat, as though trying to put out a fire.

‘Yes!’ Roveg agreed.

‘Not too loud,’ Ouloo pleaded Speaker. The request was good-natured, but delivered with the weight of someone who spent all day wrangling an already loud child.

Speaker gave Ouloo an understanding look, and nudged the music up just a bit more. She laughed as both paws and shelled legs responded accordingly, intensifying their movements. The Quelin and the Laru’s dancing styles were discordant as could be, and yet, somehow, the sight of them together made a strange sort of sense.

Ouloo did not get up to dance, but she bobbed both head and neck from where she sat, watching her child’s goofy moves with unmistakable adoration. ‘Stars, I love that kid,’ she sighed.

‘You two are an interesting pair,’ Speaker said, ‘if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘How so?’ Ouloo asked.

‘Well, you are just a pair, right?’

‘Yep,’ Ouloo said happily. ‘It’s just us.’

‘May I ask why?’ Speaker hadn’t spent much time with Ouloo’s species, but she had seen their homes in spaceports: large, communal buildings that belonged to no one and served all Laru in the neighbourhood (an arrangement Speaker could easily understand). And yet, here were Ouloo and Tupo, tucked away in a literal bubble that belonged only to them. It reminded Speaker in some ways of Tracker and herself, but she was sure the context could not be more different.

Ouloo thought for a moment. ‘You don’t speak any of our languages, right?’ she asked.

‘No, unfortunately,’ Speaker said. ‘All I know about them is they’ve got a lot of vowels.’

Ouloo laughed heartily. ‘That they do,’ she said. ‘They don’t have much in common, but there’s one thing true for all of them: we don’t have a word for family. We have lots of words for groups – sizes of groups, people who hang out together often …’ She trailed off.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know how to translate this type of … of word. I’m not sure it has a translation in Klip.’

Speaker was immediately interested; these were her favourite kinds of words. ‘What’s the gist?’

‘Moh. It’s a specific kind of noun, and it means … um …’ Ouloo frowned. ‘Gathering mood, I guess? Mood isn’t quite right. Gathering sense. Or … mmm!’ She bobbed her neck definitively as a connection was made. ‘Gathering flavour. That works.’

‘Gathering flavour,’ Speaker said, savouring the new concept. ‘Give me an example.’

‘Well, like … an energetic crowd, we have a moh for that. Like a crowd at a big party. Or a small group of good friends. A group of young people who do foolish things. A group that likes to have sex with each other. A group of people all keeping to themselves within a shared space. These are all types of moh. Is this making sense?’

‘Yes. I love it.’

‘Do you have anything like it in Ihreet?’

‘No, we don’t.’

‘I didn’t think so,’ Ouloo said. ‘I haven’t met anybody else who has moh. But see, there is no moh for family, because we don’t … have that concept. I know the rest of you draw those lines in many different ways, but we don’t. The only concept Laru have of family, among ourselves, is other Laru. Our species is a family. On that level, we understand, but anything smaller than that is not something we traditionally do.’

‘I see,’ Speaker said. She turned that idea over and around. ‘That’s … that feels somewhat overwhelming to me. Not in a bad way.’

‘How so?’

‘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.

Ouloo reached out a paw and placed it on Speaker’s suit. A detached gesture of reassurance, given that she wasn’t actually touching Speaker, but the intent was appreciated all the same. ‘Roveg told me about the sib tower,’ Ouloo said kindly. ‘I put an alert on my scrib that’ll let me know the second signal’s restored. You’ll be the first to know. I know that’s not much, but—’

‘No, it helps,’ Speaker said. It really did. Ouloo seemed the type to wake someone in the middle of the night over something like that, which was exactly what Speaker wanted.

Ouloo bobbed her neck in acknowledgement. ‘So. Siblings first, for you. And then …’

‘Then your mother. You always, always honour and respect your mother, even if you don’t like her.’

‘Hmm!’ Ouloo said. ‘I like that. You should tell Tupo.’

Speaker laughed. ‘Beyond that, everyone you share a ship with is family on an equal level. What you’re describing about your people – about your notion of family – feels like the same thing I feel toward the shipmates I grew up with, but on a scale of millions. Billions. However many of you there are.’