The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers (read along books txt) 📗

right as the door to the Five-Hop’s office slid open. She looked in the buzz’s direction and saw a robotic percussion instrument, playing a short tune to announce her arrival. Her brief recognition of the sound was drowned out a split second later by the sort of input her brain was far more receptive to: a veritable avalanche of colour. Pei was no stranger to environments that seemed to be shouting – she wouldn’t get far in a multispecies market otherwise – but given the tactfully neutral paint of the building’s exterior, she hadn’t expected the inside to be so loud.

The Five-Hop One-Stop’s permit office and traveller’s shop was jammed to the gills with items for sale, each emblazoned with a label or logo designed to make people of other species sit up and take notice. Pei noticed, all right, but not in the way their designers had hoped. She gave an involuntary wince as every hue hit her eyes at once. She felt as though she were staring directly into the sun, and that the sun really wanted her to buy something.

‘Oh dear, I know, I’m so sorry,’ Ouloo said. Pei hadn’t yet registered the ground host sitting behind a desk at the far end of the room. ‘There’s a basket of monocs just to your left there.’

Pei looked over and saw the basket in question, hanging from the wall and fixed with a computer-generated colour-sign that read Please take them if you need them! Return them before you go! Inside, as stated, there were several pairs of monochromatic spectacles, which, when worn over Aeluon eyes, rendered the world a tranquil grey. Despite her discomfort, Pei did not pick up a pair. Monocs were dorky as hell, the sort of thing you only wore if you were very young or very old or very fussy or never left your homeworld. The fledgling headache that had made its appearance would pass in a minute or two, she knew, and in this case, pride won out. ‘Thanks, but I’m okay,’ she said.

‘All right, well, they’re there if you change your mind.’ Ouloo sighed apologetically. ‘I can control how the buildings look, but not the labels on things.’

‘I completely understand,’ Pei said. ‘And honestly, the grey paint is more than I’d expect in a place that gets traffic from all over.’

Ouloo beamed at this. ‘I got that paint special-ordered from an Aeluon manufacturer,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows your rods are extra sensitive and can pick up colours the rest of us can’t see, so I wanted to make sure I wasn’t getting something that was … you know, sloppy. I know that what’s grey to me and what’s purely grey to you are different things.’

Pei smiled appreciative blue, because everyone didn’t know that, and Ouloo had clearly done her homework. That point was underlined as Pei perused the screaming shelves. There were baskets of all manner of fresh fruit, bags of spicy dried insects, jerky made from a broad swath of animals and plants alike, and a plex-doored stasie filled with single-serving tubs of roe and Hanto-labelled mysteries Pei could only guess at. A little something for everybody.

No species was a monolith, but if Pei had been asked to describe the Laru in broad strokes, she’d simply point to what Ouloo had constructed at the Five-Hop. The Laru had been even less technologically capable than Humans – believe it or not – when the GC had made contact about a century back. Their furry species hadn’t gotten any farther than space telescopes and short suborbital flights before Aandrisk ambassadors sent along a friendly hello. Pei had read that it was always difficult to predict how a sapient species would react to contact, but in the Laru’s case, the overwhelming reaction to learning they were far from alone in the galaxy was one of joyous enthusiasm. The Laru wasted no time in throwing themselves wholeheartedly into a life among aliens, opening their planetary system to metal mining and gas harvesting and whatever else the GC wanted, leaving their homeworld in droves to absorb all the lessons they could from interstellar exchange. Pei had met many Laru in her time, and they were each their own people, but the one thing they had in common was that she’d never met any who’d been born on their homeworld. She wasn’t even sure what their homeworld was called, come to think of it. All the Laru she’d encountered were transplants from elsewhere. She’d met one from Port Coriol, one from Hagarem, one from Kaathet who could speak Reskitkish so perfectly she would’ve thought they were an Aandrisk if she’d closed her eyes and plugged her nose. Ouloo appeared to have come straight out of the same mould as her predecessors – a champion for multispecies life, someone who dove headlong into the melting pot and was loving every minute of it.

‘Did you make those?’ Pei asked, nodding at Ouloo’s desk. A heap of office supplies had been shoved aside to make way for an enormous stack of iced buns, which Ouloo was in the process of transferring one by one into a drone delivery box.

‘Yes,’ Ouloo said, sounding quite unhappy for someone wielding that much sugar. ‘I made them for my neighbours who own the tet house across the way. I can’t call anyone, but Tupo has a telescope, and I used that to look around and see what was going on out there, and it looks like some of the debris hit their dome. There’s pieces of it all over.’

Pei straightened up. ‘Are they okay? Can you tell?’

‘Well, their shuttle was there, so nobody left, and I could see some people moving around, so I guess they must have some kind of shielding, or maybe it didn’t hit hard enough to break the seal, or – I don’t know. I don’t know, and it’s making me crazy. But I’m going to send them these, along with a note to send the drone back with a