Sawyer
He stood at the railing outside the dockside bioscans, luggage in hand, breathing in the recycled air. It was different than the air he knew, for sure. It wasn’t what he’d call good air, not like what you’d get around a forest or a field. There was a slight metallic edge to it, and though the walkways were lined with healthy planters exhaling oxygen back his way, something about each breath just felt artificial. There was no wind here, no rain. The air moved because Humans told it to, and maybe in that, it had lost something along the way.
But Sawyer smiled. Different was what he was after, and everything he’d encountered in the twenty minutes since coming aboard was as different as could be. What struck him was the practicality of the architecture, the intense economy. On Mushtullo, people embellished. There were mouldings on the tops of walls. Roofs twisted and fences spiralled. Even the ships were filigreed. Not here. Nothing in the foundation of this vessel had been wasted on sentiment.
But while the ship’s skeleton was simple, the people within had spent centuries fleshing it out. The metal walls were disguised with inviting paint: warm tan, soft orange, living green. On his way to the railing, he’d come upon an enormous mural that had stopped him in his tracks. He’d stood for a minute there, as other travellers split their busy stream around him. The mural was vibrant, almost gaudy, a spree of colour and curves depicting dancing Exodans with a benignly burning sun beneath their feet and a starry sky above. Myriad professions were on display – a farmer, a doctor, a tech, a musician, a pilot, a teacher leading children. It was an ordinary sort of theme, and yet there was something about it – the lack of actual ground, perhaps, or something in the sweeping style – that was undeniably foreign. You’d never see a mural like that on Mushtullo.
Sawyer let his reality sink in: he was in the Fleet. The Fleet! He was finally, actually there, not just reading reference files or pestering elderly folks for any scraps they could remember about what their parents had told them about the ships they’d left behind. He’d made it. He’d made it, and now, everything was right there for him to explore.
There were no other species in the crowd, and it left him both giddy and jarred. The only times he’d seen anything close to this many Humans in one place was on holidays or at parties, and even then, you’d be sure to see other sapients in the mix. There’d been merchants from elsewhere on the transport with him, but as soon as they reached a branching sign that read Cargo Bays on the right and Central Plaza on the left, all the scales and claws went right. Everyone around him now had two hands, two feet, soft skin, hairy heads. He’d never blended into a public group like this, and yet, he felt like he stuck out more than he ever had.
Sawyer had thought perhaps some part of him would recognise this place, that he’d feel himself reversing the steps his great-great-grandparents had taken. He’d read accounts of other grounders visiting the Fleet. They’d written about how connected they felt to their ancestors, how they felt immediate kinship with the people there. Sawyer hadn’t felt that yet, and part of him was a touch disappointed. But no matter. He’d been there for all of twenty minutes, and the only person he’d talked to was the patch scan attendant. So far, he’d dipped a toe in the water. It was time to dive in.
He took an elevator down to the market floor, an expansive grid of shop fronts and service centres. It wasn’t like other marketplaces he’d been to, where everything sprawled and piled as if it were alive. The Fleet, as he’d read and as had already proven true, was a place of orderly geometry. Every corner had been considered, measured, and considered again. Space efficiency was the top order of business, so the original architects had provided future generations of shopkeepers with defined lots that could be assigned and repurposed as needed. The end result was, on the surface, the tidiest trading hub Sawyer had ever seen. But once he got past the neat exteriors, the underlying business was bewildering. Dozens of signs, dozens of displays, hundreds of customers, and he had no idea where anything was.
He eyed the places that served food – all open-air (if that was the right term to use inside a ship), with shared eating tables corralled behind the waist-high metal walls that defined each lot’s edges. Sawyer found himself drawn toward a cheery, clean cafe called My Favourite. The menu posted outside was in both Klip and Ensk, and the fare was things he recognised – beansteak skewers, hoppers, jam cakes. It looked like a respectable spot for a non-threatening meal. Sawyer pointed his feet elsewhere. That was a place meant for merchants and visitors. Tourists. He wasn’t here to be a tourist. He was after something real.
He spied another eatery of the same size and shape. Jojo’s, the sign read. Or it would have, if the pixels on the second. hadn’t been twitching themselves nearly illegible. There was no posted menu. The only other signage displayed the hours of business, which were in Ensk numerals and Ensk numerals only. (Standard time, though. They only used Solar for age, or so he’d been told.) Behind the corral, some folks in algae-stained coveralls wolfed down whatever was for lunch. A group of five or six elderly folks were arguing over a game taking place on an old pixel board. Nobody had any luggage.
Perfect.
No one greeted Sawyer as he walked in. Few looked up. There were two people behind the counter: a wiry young man chopping something, and an imposing middle-aged woman peeling shells off steamed red coaster bugs. The woman was absorbed in a loud vid on a nearby projector – a Martian period drama, it looked like. She cracked each shell segment with speedy precision, without so much as a glance down at her work. Sawyer had no real way of knowing, but he got the unshakable sense that this was her place.
The woman gave a short, mocking laugh. ‘This Solan shit,’ she said in Ensk, shaking her head at the projector. The vid music hit a melodramatic crescendo as a character in a clunky exosuit succumbed to a sandstorm. ‘Why does anybody watch this?’
‘You watch it,’ an old woman piped up from the board game table.
‘It’s like a shipwreck,’ the shell-cracker replied. ‘Once it starts, I can’t look away.’
The scene changed. A tearful group of terraformers sat huddled in their dome. ‘This damned planet,’ one actor cried. He wasn’t about to win any awards for this, but stars, he was trying. ‘This damned planet!’
‘This damned planet!’ the woman repeated, laughing again. Her eyes snapped over as she noticed Sawyer at last. ‘Hey,’ she said, glancing at his bag. ‘What can I get ya?’
Sawyer walked up to the counter. He was more or less fluent in Ensk, having crammed Linking language lessons hard over the past few years, but the only person he’d been able to practise speaking with had been the lady at the shoe shop back home, and her slang was about twenty years out of date. He screwed up his courage, and asked: ‘Do you have a menu?’
Every person in Jojo’s looked up. It took Sawyer a moment to realise – accent. His accent. He didn’t have the distinctive snap of an Exodan, the silky smoothness of a Martian, the muddle of someone who did a lot of bouncing around. His face said Human. His vowels said Harmagian.