Incandescence

It was the role of the depot workers to unpack the cart while he and Saf stood by, offering occasional gratuitous complaints about the way the goods were being handled. As this was happening, Rakesh noticed one of the workers looking at him with surprise. Lacking anything corresponding to a primate's mobile face, the Arkdwellers expressed their emotions in their posture, gait, and length and duration of gaze. Rakesh's odd appearance had occasionally caused an involuntary moment or two of staring, but this worker kept looking back, as if she couldn't quite believe what she was seeing.

Rakesh introduced himself, and the worker, Zey, did the same. After these pleasantries the conversation went no further, but when the cart was unloaded Zey emerged from the depot's chamber and approached them.

Saf drummed softly, "Be careful, I think they might be looking for recruits."

Rakesh didn't want to break the news to her that, grateful as he was that she'd employed him, he really wouldn't mind moving on. "I'll be careful," he promised.

Zey said, "Forgive me, but I couldn't help noticing the differences inside you."

"There's nothing to forgive. I know how strange my appearance must be."

Saf said, "Ra tells us he was hatched 'outside the world'. This is not his real body, he just wears it to get along with us." Rakesh still couldn't quite gauge the intent behind her tone of amusement; he didn't know if she was inviting Zey to mock him, or imploring her to deal gently with his delusions.

"Are you our cousin, then?" Zey asked.

Rakesh felt goose bumps rise on the back of his arms, back in the control room; there were some things he simply wasn't equipped to feel viscerally through the avatar itself.

He replied carefully, "It depends what you mean by that." Although the Arkdwellers had terms to describe the relationships between adults and their offspring, they rarely knew who their various relatives actually were. You could respectfully call any stranger of the appropriate age "father", "mother", "brother", "sister", "daughter", "son". The term he was mentally translating as "cousin" was — as far as the data the probes had gathered could reveal — a negation of siblinghood that carried a connotation of distance. It was not unfriendly, but if someone had traveled from the other side of the Ark for the first time, you were more likely to call them "cousin" than "brother" or "sister", as if to acknowledge that it really was stretching plausibility to suppose that you might have shared a parent.

Zey said, "I heard that once there were six worlds, not one. People used to travel between them, but then something happened to the cousins, and all the journeys stopped."

Rakesh was torn between pressing her for details of this story, and taking care not to misrepresent himself as something he was not.

"My people have never been here before," he said. "I don't know the whole history of this world, but I believe I've traveled farther than the cousins you describe."

Zey took a few moments to digest that.

"You don't know the six worlds?"

"Far away there are many more than six. But I haven't seen any world, nearby, from which a traveler could have reached this one." Rakesh hesitated, then added, "The worlds you mention might have been closer, in the past. But I have no direct knowledge of these matters; I can only guess what the fate of these worlds might have been."

"I see." Zey seemed confused and disappointed, but then she said, "You've been outside, though?"

"Of course."

"What is there to see?"

"Bright lights. Long distances." Rakesh had never reached the point of someone asking him even this much before. "Where I come from, we live on the outside of the world, the surface of the rock."

"Everyone would get sick and die!" Saf scoffed.

"It's different, it's safe."

Saf was growing impatient. "We need to sleep, then reload for the return journey." She started walking away.

Rakesh said, "You should look for someone new to go with you."

"Why?"

"I'd like to stay here a while and talk with Zey," he explained.

"Talk with Zey?" Saf seemed to find this suggestion far more surreal than any of Rakesh's baroque cosmic fantasies. "You're going to join this team, after three words with one member? When were you hatched?"

"I'm sorry to let you down," Rakesh said, "but this is part of my job, part of my duty."

Saf rasped a word with no simple translation, but the gist of it was that Rakesh was a damaged infant simpleton who could not be relied upon to perform any task, and his loyalty was so promiscuously offered and so easily withdrawn that he might as well have been a flake of excrement drifting on the wind.

Zey said, "We have all the workers we need."

Saf drummed contemptuously, "They don't even want you, you fool!"