Speaker shifted her weight within the suit’s cockpit, breathing air she could not share with him. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘But also …’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know if I can explain this.’

‘I’d be happy to hear you try.’

She clicked her beak together three times. ‘It is difficult to feel sorrow for something I’ve never known. What you describe sounds magical. But swimming also sounds magical, and I’ve never done that, either. Or—’ She reached for something else. ‘Aandrisks can see in infrared. They can walk the world in the dark. That sounds like a magical thing, too. But it’s an experience I’ll never have. It’s impossible for me to have it. Likewise, it’s impossible for me to have a world of my own. So, I both grieve and am incapable of grieving, because I don’t know what it is that I’ve lost. And none of my kind can tell me. Nobody’s left who remembers.’

‘You are like the Humans, perhaps,’ Roveg said. ‘They likewise know only their ships.’

‘Maybe,’ Speaker said. ‘I’ve never spoken properly with one, so I don’t know. But something in me says we’re not the same. Their world isn’t dead, not completely. It’s being repaired, little by little. They can visit, if they want to. There are some who live there still. And their planet wasn’t taken from outside. They killed it from within. They chewed their own hearts out. No, I don’t think we’re the same at all.’ She moved restlessly in her chair, casting aside an unspoken rage. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Please, don’t be. You have every reason to be angry. We can talk about something else, if you—’

‘No.’ She took a steadying breath. He saw her hands unclench. ‘Tell me about your favourite place on your planet.’

Roveg did not need to think before answering. ‘Wushengat. It means Flower Lake, rather unoriginally.’

‘What’s it like?’

An ache spread through Roveg as he conjured the place in his mind. The memory was as sweet as summer syrup and twisted as an executioner’s blade. ‘It’s perfectly quiet,’ he said. ‘I never saw a time when the waters weren’t calm.’

‘What colour are they?’

‘They’re – I’m not sure you and I perceive colour in the same way.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘The gentlest, lightest purple. The sand on the shore is soft as clouds, and the trees around it explode with flowers in the springtime.’ The ache thickened and bloomed. ‘It is the sort of place where you can sit all day and be utterly sure that so long as you are there, everything will be all right.’

Speaker hung on every word. ‘I don’t think anywhere has ever made me feel that way.’

‘Well, it isn’t true, of course. But it feels that way at Wushengat.’

‘I think you should make a sim of it,’ she said. ‘You should make other people feel that, too.’

Roveg fell silent once more. ‘Tell you what,’ he said at last. He poured himself another cup of mek. ‘If I make this appointment, and if I get my permit, perhaps I will.’

PEI

Pei froze as Ouloo smiled at her. Her cheeks roiled purple at the intrusion, at being touched even in such a casual manner without being asked. But angry as she was, part of her was likewise relieved. She shut her eyes and resigned herself to the fact that covering her arm back up would not change what had been seen. Fine. It was one less topic to avoid.

As she looked into Ouloo’s face, she knew they were nothing alike. They had different bodies, different blood. Their respective ideas of what a ‘mother’ was could not be more disparate. For Ouloo, the concept seemed a core part of her identity, and why would it not be? It wasn’t an embryo that she’d given birth to, but an entire being that had swum within her, no shell keeping them separate. That same being had clung to her for years, living mostly in a pocket on her belly, a constant communion of one body against another. That level of attachment was unsettling to Pei, just as she found the whole concept of live birth horrifying. But the differences between herself and Ouloo were not limited to that of physicality. In traditional Aeluon culture, a mother was not a parent. Parents were men and shon. Parents went to school for it. Parents were the people who actually raised children, not those who had done the easy business of creating them. The gendered expectations of parenting were dissolving, but even though women could be found working in creches now, there was still an enormous difference between the person who produced an egg and the person who took care of the little being that crawled out of it. Parenting was a profession, and it was not Pei’s. She could not imagine living like Ouloo, performing two distinct jobs at once, splitting herself for decades until Tupo reached adulthood. The whole idea was overwhelming.

But in the absence of everyone else she wished she could talk to right then, Pei found herself oddly comforted by the company of Ouloo – someone who had, in extreme essence, been in a situation like this before.

‘How are you feeling?’ Ouloo asked. ‘Are you hungry? Do you need some proper exercise? I can keep everyone out of the garden for a while if you need to run around.’

Pei was mildly surprised that Ouloo knew any of the ancillary symptoms of shimmer, but with everything else she’d learned about her, such attention to detail made sense. ‘No, I’m fine,’ Pei said. She paused. ‘Please don’t, um—’