‘Try … what?’ Tracker said.
‘Crawl,’ Speaker said. ‘And make sure your belly is touching the sand.’
Tracker gave her a quizzical look, but got down on her forelimbs and crawled forward. ‘Ha!’ she cried. She rocked her torso back and forth, granules of sand spilling out below her. ‘Oh, that feels so weird.’ She looked at Speaker, her gaze burning bright. ‘What else can we try?’
They learned the feeling of sand together. They learned the feeling of water on their legs, and of floating in a boat, and of laughing after the boat flipped. They climbed a tree and hung from the branches. They lay on the ground and looked at the sky. They spent hours in Roveg’s favourite place, forgetting every chore and fix-it list that awaited them in the ship they could no longer see. The lake wasn’t real. It wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. They would never feel a real world this way, Speaker knew. None of her people would, not in her lifetime. But maybe …
… maybe one day, one of them would.
The sim wasn’t real, but their bodies were, and there reached a point where even a purple sky and sugar sand couldn’t distract them from their growling stomachs.
‘We can come back after we eat,’ Speaker said. ‘Or any time.’
‘Yeah,’ Tracker said. ‘Ready?’
Together, they peeled their patches off. They blinked at their home as though they’d never seen it before. They reached out without speaking, and held each other’s hands.
‘What do we do with this?’ Tracker asked, nodding at the hub. ‘We can’t keep it just for us.’
Speaker popped the drive out and held it in her hands, running a finger over the label Roveg had written for her. ‘We make copies,’ she said, ‘and we show everyone. We give it to anyone who wants to know what a world feels like.’
‘And what will that do?’ Tracker said.
‘I don’t know,’ Speaker said. ‘I just want them to see what we saw. Feel what we felt.’ She turned the download drive over and over in her hands, savouring the memory of the imaginary. ‘I don’t know if it’ll do anything. I don’t know if anyone else will care. But I think that’s what we have to do.’
Day 119, GC Standard 308
OULOO
Ouloo awoke not out of habit or rhythm, but thanks to a smell. She pulled her head from beneath her hind leg and drew in one deep breath. That was all it took to get her up and running.
Something was on fire.
The direction of whatever calamity had arisen in her home was easy to place, as there were lights on in the kitchen, and a great deal of bustling and clanking from said-same. She stumbled through the door, paws tripping over each other in haste, untended fur puffed in alarm.
‘It’s fine!’ Tupo yelled in the aggravated tone of someone who had hoped to remedy a problem without being noticed. ‘It’s totally fine!’ Xe stood at the pot filler, blasting water into a smouldering cooking pan. Steam and smoke mingled together over the carbonic remains of whatever it was xe was trying to scrape out.
‘Tupo, what—’ The burst of adrenaline that had awoken her was still waging war with her sleep-addled perception, and it took her a moment to fully digest the surrounding scene. The kitchen, which she’d left pristine at bedtime, now looked as though the contents of her cupboards had violently expelled themselves onto every conceivable workspace. Raw batter dripped from a tilted bowl stacked atop several others. Used spoons and cups lay scattered about. Beneath the smoke, there was the powerful smell of cooking oil, which was explained by the soggy stack of rags set atop a spilled puddle in an apparent attempt to mop it up.
The baffled reprimand preparing to launch from Ouloo’s tongue dissolved as Tupo turned xyr face toward her. ‘I wanted to make you breakfast,’ xe said mournfully.
Ouloo closed her eyes, took a breath, and approached the sink. ‘What were you trying to make?’
‘Sunrise dumplings,’ Tupo sighed.
Ouloo peered into the blackened pan, now parsing the molten shapes of what could conceivably have been sunrise dumplings, or an attempt at them. They were one of her favourites, when not reduced to slag, but why a child who rarely could be found at the stove would attempt a dish this intricate was beyond her. ‘What gave you that idea?’ she asked, taking both pan and spatula. She began to pry the ruined bundles out.
Tupo’s paws shuffled. Xe was as tall as xyr mother now – a development that had happened in a blink, and one Ouloo was coming to terms with – but still so soft and clumsy in how xe moved. An adultish body housed with childish spirit. That was what adolescence was, she supposed, but stars, Ouloo wished she could’ve kept her little Tupo just a short while longer.
‘Well,’ Tupo said, ‘we don’t have any guests docking today, and we’ve got lots coming tomorrow, so I thought …’ The shuffling intensified. ‘I thought maybe I could give you a break.’
Ouloo wrestled in a most parental way between melting over her child doing something kind for her, and the fact that she did have a full guest list the next day and really could have used an uninterrupted sleep and a kitchen that didn’t need to be cleaned again. ‘You silly sweetie,’ Ouloo said, melt winning out. She nuzzled Tupo’s head with the side of her neck, then blinked. ‘Did you trim your fur?’
‘Yeah.’
The trim was extraordinarily uneven, but never in a million years would Ouloo voice that. She
