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

were beginning to steady. ‘It’s just … not a lot of people come in here, so I got excited.’ Xe pulled xyr head back to a respectable angle and looked at Roveg with huge, eager eyes. ‘Can I give you the tour?’

Roveg’s initial intent upon entering the building had been to simply take a peek at the place, and his impression once he’d come through the door had not given him any desire to stay long. But the situation had changed. Now, he had but one goal, and that was to give his full, undivided attention to the head curator. He’d have been a monster to do otherwise.

‘Tupo,’ he said, ‘I would love to see your tour.’

The child nearly began to glow. ‘Cool,’ Tupo said. ‘Have you been to a natural history museum before?’

‘I have indeed.’

‘It’s really hard running a natural history museum on Gora.’

‘Because visitors are so unpredictable?’

‘No, because there’s no life here.’

‘Ah,’ Roveg said. ‘Yes, I can see how that might affect the study of natural history.’

The little Laru looked at xyr displays and huffed. ‘Everybody has such high expectations,’ xe said, delivering this opinion with the gravity of someone far more mature. ‘They think natural history museums have to have fossils or plants or bugs and stuff, and I’m here to tell you that no, they don’t.’ Xe gestured proudly at xyr displays. ‘Rocks are natural, and they have a history, and they’re awesome.’

‘I quite agree. But … I do have a question.’

‘Okay.’

‘And you’ll have to forgive me, as I’m not a scientist.’ Roveg said this with all the courtesy he would utilise in a professional setting. ‘If your study is primarily rocks, is your field not … geology?’

Tupo waggled xyr neck in acknowledgement. ‘That’s what Mom said at first, but listen. I’ve done a lot of sims of natural history museums, and they all have the same story.’ Tupo rose up and walked on xyr back legs, so as to be able to gesture with both forepaws. ‘You start with planetary formation. How the planet got here.’ Xe pointed to the first table, which held a stick-and-ball model of the Tren system – an easy thing to make when you only had two orbital bodies – plus an ancient scrib that was playing a pop-up pixel projection of planetary disk formation on loop. Tupo nodded at the scrib apologetically. ‘I couldn’t find a vid of Tren, so that’s a vid of Hagarem. But planets all happen the same way.’

‘Yes, I see,’ Roveg said. ‘And there’s no shame in using a different vid. This one gets the message across. I’d say that was a good educational instinct.’

Tupo beamed and continued on. ‘Okay, so then, there’s rocks.’

Stars, yes, there were rocks, all tagged and dated diligently. Slate, 158/306, found by Tupo. Gneiss, 6/305, found by Tupo. Calcite, 184/307, present from the Aashikset feather family. ‘Who’s the Aashikset family?’ Roveg asked.

‘They own the tet house north of here,’ Tupo said. ‘We’re neighbours, I guess. Mom gives them a discount on fuel and they give her a discount on … um … I don’t know. I’m not allowed to go there yet.’

‘I would imagine not.’

‘Because there’s sex there.’

‘Yes, I’m aware of what a tet house is, thank you.’

‘It’s usually Hirikk who comes to buy fuel, and he always brings me cool rocks they find if they go outside their dome. He’s nice. Anyway, you can learn a lot from rocks.’ Tupo paused again as xe stared at xyr massive collection, seemingly overwhelmed by choice. ‘Do you know what an igneous rock is?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about a sedimentary rock?’

‘Yes, I know those, too.’

‘Okay.’ Tupo paused again, at a loss. ‘Well, you can just read the labels, then.’

‘I will,’ Roveg said. By this, he meant he would skim them, but he kept that to himself.

‘Oh, and also—’ Tupo ran over to a table off to the side that held an old-fashioned portable data server and an access monitor, both of which looked like well-loved hand-me-downs. ‘You can access the GC reference files here, if you want to look up something you don’t know about.’

‘Ah, you run a storage node!’ Roveg said approvingly. ‘Excellent. I have a number of friends who volunteer for the reference files, and they’re always on the prowl to find people willing to maintain nodes. Keeps the whole network more robust, as I’m sure you know.’

‘Yeah. I mean, I know I could just go on my scrib and access it through the Linkings, but I think this is cooler.’

‘It is cooler. And since you can’t get on the Linkings right now away, at least you’ve got this, hmm?’ He looked back to the other tables. ‘So. Explain to me how rocks fit into this omni-story you see at every museum.’

‘Oh, right, okay, so … you have a planet. It’s full of rocks, and the rocks tell you stuff about how things used to be on the planet. There basically wasn’t anything on Gora, ever. Well, there were volcanoes once, but not anymore. They’re dead. And there wasn’t any water, so we don’t have as many kinds of rocks as other places. But we do have some pretty ones from where the volcanoes used to be. Look, this is my favourite.’ Tupo picked up an unpolished gemstone for Roveg to see – murky blue and flecked with black.

‘That’s a nice piece,’ Roveg said. ‘Have you ever thought about polishing it?’

‘None of my rocks are polished,’ Tupo said firmly. ‘It removes the rock from its proper context and then people don’t know what it really looks like.’ Xe paused. ‘Plus I don’t have the stuff you need to polish them.’

‘That’s fair.’

‘So, at other museums, after rocks, you get exhibits about life. And the thing is, there is life on Gora. It just didn’t start here.’ Tupo gestured at the table of anthropological relics. Roveg noted a broken Harmagian piercing, an empty bottle of Whitedune, an immaculate Aandrisk feather presumably given to the child. ‘It is natural history,’ Tupo asserted. ‘Life came to Gora,