Once, Satlyt, brandishing a small metal junk shiv, had asked whether NuTay wanted them to corner a wayfarer in a lonesome corner of the port and rob them of their armband or their data coins. NuTay had slapped Satlyt then, so hard their cheek blushed pink.
NuTay knew Satlyt would never hurt anyone—that all they wanted was to give their maba a way to look at pictures of other worlds without having to barter with wayfarers.
When NuTay touched Satlyt’s cheek a moment after striking, the skin was hot with silent anger, and perhaps shame.
Sometimes the starship looked like monolithic shards of black glass glittering in the sun, carefully stacked to look beautiful but terrifying.
Sometimes the starship would change shape, those shards moving slowly to create a different configuration of shapes upon shapes with a tremendous moaning that sounded like a gale moving across the hills and pouring out across the plain. As it folded and re-folded, the starship would no longer look like shards of black glass.
Sometimes, when it moved to reconfigure its shape, the starship would look suddenly delicate despite its size, like black paper origami of a starship dropped onto the plain by the hand of a god.
NuTay had once seen an actual paper starship, left by a wayfarer on one of NuTay’s rough-hewn benches. The wayfarer had told them the word for it: origami. The paper had been mauve, not black.
The world that interested NuTay the most, of course, was Earth. The one all the djeens of all the peoples in the galaxy first came from, going from blood to blood to whisper the memory of the first human into all their bodies so they still looked more or less the same no matter which world they were born on.
“NuTay, Earth is so crowded you can’t imagine it,” one wayfarer had told them, spreading their hands across that brown horizon NuTay was so familiar with. “Just imagine,” the wayfarer said. “Peoples were having kin there before there were starships. Before any peoples went to any other star than Sol. This planet, your planet, is a station, nah?”
NuTay then reminded the wayfarer that this was not their planet, not really, because it was not a place of peoples but a port for peoples to rest in between their travels across the universe. Dunyshar had no planet, no cultures to imitate, no people.
“Ahch, you know that’s the same same,” the wayfarer said, but NuTay knew it wasn’t, and felt a slight pain in their chest, so familiar. But they knew the wayfarer wouldn’t know what this was, and they said nothing and listened as they spoke on. “If this planet is port, then Earth, that is the first city in the universe—Babal, kafeen-walla. Not so nice for you. Feels like not enough atmo for so many peoples if you go there, after this planet with all this air, so much air, so much place.”
And NuTay told that wayfarer that they’d heard that Earth had a thousand different worlds on it, because it had a tilt and atmos that painted its lands a thousand different shades of place as it spun around the first Sun.
“Less than a thousand, and not the only world with other worlds on it,” the wayfarer said, laughing behind their mask. “But look,” the wayfarer raised their arm to spring viz into the air, and there was a picture of a brown horizon, and dun hills. “See? Just like here.” NuTay looked at the dun hills, and marveled that this too could be Earth. “Kazak-istan,” said the wayfarer, and the placename was a cold drop of rain in NuTay’s mind, sending ripples across their skull. It made them feel better about their own dun hills, which caught their eye for all the long days. Just a little bit better.
So it went. Wayfarers would bring pieces of the galaxy, and NuTay would hold the ones of Earth in their memory. It had brown horizon, blue horizon, green horizon, red horizon, gray horizon.
When the starship was about to leave, the entire port plain would come alive with warning, klaxons sounding across the miles of empty dirt and clanging across the corrugated roofs of the shop shanties and tents. NuTay and Satlyt would stop work to watch even if they had customers, because even customers would turn their heads to see.
To watch a starship leave is to witness a hole threaded through reality, and no one can tire of such a vision. Its lights glittering, it would fold and fold its parts until there was a thunderous boom that rolled across the plain, sending glowing cumulus clouds rolling out from under the vessel and across the land.
A flash of light like the clap of an invisible hand, and the clouds would be gone in less than a second to leave a perfect black sphere where the starship had been. If you looked at the sphere, which was only half visible, emerging from the ground a perfect gigantic bubble of nothingness, it would hurt your eyes, because there was nothing to see within its curvature. For an intoxicating second there would be hurtling winds ripping dust through the shop shanties, creating a vortex of silken veils over the plain and around the sphere. The shanty roofs would rattle, the horses would clomp in their stables, the wind chimes would sing a shattering song. The very air would vibrate as if it were fragile, humming to the tune of that null-dimensional half-circle embedded in the
