Meeting the Dancer, and knowing that it was ʔetekeyerrinwuf’s first contact with any alien species, I understood a bit better how the Ktletaccete were generally reacting to me and Sarah.

We were definitely celebrities, but celebrity wasn’t really the same cultural thing there like it was in the U.S. or much of Earth. There wasn’t a commercial industry built around it. And the politics had been constructed originally to hide it as best they could, with the identities of the Crew hidden from the populace.

Well, OK, that was the culture of the Children, the people raised and still living in organic bodies.

Crew, or Elder cultures were at least as diverse as Earth’s, with diverging linguistics, even. The Inmararräo we spoke was the language of the ancients and the Children. And the worlds they created in the Network diverged a lot from their roots.

But, it’s just. It’s not the same. And we were mostly interacting with the Children and the people who lived with them, anyway.

We were a novelty, yes. We were known to be different, and from a different world.

But the coincidences of our similarities, and the method by which we arrived made us familiar in comparison to the Dancer and its children. And, well, we were also old hat. Just another couple of aliens.

They may, as a people, also have been informed by Phage’s ubiquitous and active presence, and its attitudes and the principles by which it manipulated entropy to keep the ship alive.

Talking to us was easier, too. Which made it fun. Which meant we had conversations with so many people. But once those conversations got started, people started treating us like equals.

I probably made that even easier to happen because I wanted to be Ktletaccete after a while. I took to their culture fast.

Sarah maybe lagged a little, but she was more focused on what to do about Abigail back on Earth, anyway.

I maybe should have helped her with that, but we’re sysmates. We’re used to delegating to each other. It’s what we do.

And people develop at different rates for different things, and that’s OK.

But I also kept thinking about the phrase, “That you might one day understand us,” spoken in a voice that I now remember as my own, thanks to the Network’s default vocal tone.

And every time Nifirri or Geri stimmed in response to something I did or said, that phrase echoed in my mind, and I stimmed back. And we laughed at the difference in our stimming techniques, and at the fact that we still understood, and that we laughed and the laughter meant the same thing. Aliens from across the galactic divide, laughing at each other’s familiarity and the surprise of it.

Phage dismissed it all as parallel evolution. Or validated it as that. And Niʔa agreed with it.

Niʔa, whose chosen name means “the chaos of life” because, apparently, that’s what they were supposed to actually be.

At some point I brought up laughter specifically, because it tickled me so much and also piqued my curiosity way too deeply. And that’s what prompted the two of them to tell us these things.

I’d already come to the conclusion myself that it was probably parallel evolution.

But really, what did that mean, anyway, besides coincidences?

What we saw from the Dancer, though, was that life could be extremely diverse, and was. Even if at other times it was redundant with its choices. I couldn’t even imagine all the evolutionary steps necessary for a world full of bacteria to develop space going vessels without going through stages of multicellular life. But it didn’t matter that I couldn’t, because there they were. With my nanite exobody, I could even travel out to the center of the shipyard where the Dancer’s child was growing and touch them with my own clawed hand.

So I went back to enjoying my growing friendship with Nifirri and Geri, and we started playing various Earth and ʔetekeyerrinwuf games on our table in our quarters. Just sort of alternating according to our whims.

Recreating the Earth games was a trick, if it wasn’t something with rules as simple as Go or a card game, though. I had to start teaching myself to store data in my mind like a computer might, which is not what human brains are really best at doing. Or I could work with myself and maybe another headmate to relay information word for word over the Tunnel and record it here on the ʔetekeyerrinwuf side.

After trying the latter technique for a while, I found I naturally developed the former, and wondered if that was somehow altering my previously nominally human neurology on Earth. I wondered if my gift from Phage was doing that.

And if not, I wondered where the knowledge was being kept.

But, more importantly, more distractingly, I was really having fun with Nifirri and Geri.

It felt like old times with Mike in high school. The same Mike who had later abducted and assaulted us in his car, to satisfy his transphobic and saneist fears. And I was able to think about that without triggering flashbacks in either Sarah or myself. Or even without thinking negatively or worrying about Nifirri or Geri.

And that felt good.

This time it was clearly something different.

And if things eventually soured, the different culture meant a different outcome.

—

There was a moment, on Earth, when Erik was grinning at me from across the table at Aunti Zero’s.

“What?” I asked.

“I recognize that look,” he said through a big smirk.

I felt I knew what he meant, but I didn’t think he was right, so I said, “What do you mean?”

Erik looked at the Murmuration, smirking, and tilted his head forward. 

The Murmuration tilted their head back, let it drop sideways in our direction to look at us, and said, “Oh, yeah. That one’s got it bad.”

“You know that I hate it when people do this,” I said.

“Do what?” Brock of the Murmuration asked.

“Hint and tease at the same time,” I said.

“Aw,” Brock said, then looked over at Erik without moving their head.

“OK, yeah. Sorry,” Erik replied. “But. Am I right? Am I seeing a look that means that you are getting some?”

I frowned in askance at Erik and said, “No?”

Erik squinted and lowered his head at me, and actually asked, “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, almost growling it.

“Not having amnesia?” he asked.

“Not that I know of.”

He slapped his hand down on the table and said, “You stayed up all night watching the best stand-up comedy in the world, then. Because, Goreth, you look relaxed. You look like every muscle in your body has been turned to putty by something truly great, and it looks good on you. You are glowing.”

“I -” I stopped talking and closed my mouth and furrowed my brow. He was right about how relaxed I actually was. Even the rising tension of this conversation wasn’t really touching how our vessel felt to me. And he’d come close to it. I had kind of spent all night experiencing the best comedy. In a sense.

Instead of either of them saying, “I knew it,” or any other quip, they just calmly and patiently waited for me to finish thinking and to say something. And this is why they were my friends. 

They both knew when to back off, at least once I’d made it clear I needed them to.

They had a slightly different dynamic with Sarah. And a totally different one with Phage. Ashwin, they respected completely and almost never teased. They were still figuring out Niʔa. But we all could trust each other, really.

Also, now, we all had the Collective in common, even the Murmuration. And that was a thing that meant something, even if it rarely ever came up.

Beau wasn’t there, sure. He was off doing something with ships or boats or something. But he really was part of our group now, too. He’d actively done the work to catch up to the rest of us, and he deserved our mutual respect anyway even if he hadn’t. Just for being a good boyfriend to Erik.

But, now I had other friends on the Sunspot, and I ached to introduce them to Erik and the Murmuration. And I couldn’t figure out how.

I smiled wanly and let a welling sadness creep across my face.

“Aw, shit. What is it?” Erik asked.

“Well,” I said. “Thanks to the Tunnel, I get to be in two places at once, literally. And now I get to have two sets of best friends. But,” I shrugged and turned one of my hands over, looking at how small, naked, and clawless it was. It was pretty amazing to me that I felt I could say sentences like that and have these two not tease me about them, and take me seriously. It was as special as anything. “Unless they agree to become part of our system and come over here, I don’t get to share them with you. Or you with them. And someday…” There were no words there.

“Oh, yeah,” Eric said when it was clear I’d floundered. “And don’t finish that last sentence, either. I’m not sure I want to hear the words, whatever they are. But I don’t need to. I get it.”

The Murmuration leaned forward and Tam spoke, “I have an idea.”

“Yeah?” Erik prompted for me.

“Let’s write down what we like best about Goreth and give it to Goreth to read before bed, so that they can relay that list to them, whoever they are,” Tam suggested. “That way, we establish bragging rights first! But also, it’s communication.”

Holy shit, was all I could think.

“That is the shit, Murmur. The absolute shit,” Erik said. “Let’s do it. But, Goreth. Before we do that. I need to tell you, I have best friends, real best friends, that don’t know you, that you haven’t met. That doesn’t stop you from being my best friend, too. A real best friend. Got it? That’s life, right? That’s how it is. It’s OK. I’m sure Murmur and the Shouted Backward are the same.”

The Murmuration nodded.

“Yeah, I know,” I mumbled, trying really hard not to become a slobbery, sobbing mess.. “It doesn’t matter, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe let me cry right here and look out for me while you do that thing,” I said.

“Of course.”

They’d been paying attention to my life better than I had to theirs lately. They knew this would work with me, that I could relay these messages.

And that, then, I’d also be stuck with what they had to say about me burned into my memories.

I almost asked them to stop, to say it was too much.

But I suspected I needed it.

It made me feel special and loved.

And we trans people need that sometimes.

I didn’t know the specifics of what Beau was up to, though I could have guessed if I hadn’t been distracted by the thoughts that were causing me to tear up.

That he wasn’t there for this was probably for the best. As much of a friend as he’d become, I think his presence would have led me to actually protest the gesture, out of pride and trying to look stoic in front of him.

Heck, I might not even have brought up my sorrow in the first place.

I don’t know.

—

So, there’s a Ktletaccete game that’s a lot like pickup sticks, almost identical, that uses those elongated septagons that they say represent stars. I could see them as stars if one meant shooting stars, meteors actually. Or maybe stars smeared across the sky by the relative speed of the Sunspot. That made sense.

The lightweight tiles looked kind of like coffin lits to me, actually. But maybe longer. They had the proportions of some flight feathers I’ve seen.

They did look compelling when they were hung from roof edges or tree limbs like wind chimes, often with little dioramas and sculptures of villages or mountainsides on the ground or floor under them.

But then, people would play games with them like this, which seemed sacrilegious, if their decorative purposes were spiritual in any way. Not that I had anything against sacrilegious activities being a queer trans person.

“I have more questions,” I told Nifirri as gem was pulling a tile from under three other tiles, almost deliberately setting gemself up for consigning all of them to chaos. “May I ask them?”

“Yes, distract me from this so we may complicate everything,” gem said.

Some of their games, like this one, had a competitive basis, at their core. But this one was set up to be cooperative, still. Us against the tiles. Us against entropy or potential energy. Tiles that were collected due to clumsiness were collected in a different pool to be used to continue the game. Tiles that were collected due to grace were used for scoring. And if Nifirri successfully pulled the one out from the other three without disturbing them, all four tiles went to our collective score.

The number of rounds we played was used as a divisor to reduce our final group score.

You could, if you wanted to, brag about your highest scores with other people, and they would be impressed. Up to a point. It was a child’s game, after all. And the maximum possible score was equal to the number of tiles used, and no more.

But, the point of it was to use it as a form of meditation and contemplation on the complexities of life and consequences, evaluating your options, and planning for the future.

It was less important how well you did, and more important to be able to identify any realizations you had while playing it.

People who liked the game as a group activity often had discussions like I was asking my friends to have while they played.

So, I took Nifirri’s response, which would have been sarcastic spoken by nearly anyone I knew on Earth, as genuine.

“First,” I said. “What is the story behind the shape of these tiles?”

“Ah,” Geri spoke up. “I like answering that.”

Sarah, who wasn’t playing, roused from our bed and sat on the edge of it to listen.

“But, hasn’t your tutor told you the story?” rrem asked me first.

I shrugged and said, “I never asked it.”

“There are so many things to ask about,” rrem concluded.

“Very true.”

“So, here is the story,” Geri said, starting to take rrems turn after Nifirri had flubbed gems, but happily talking while rrem did so. “So. No one knows what our world of origin was like, or why we left it. Phage has given us hints, in conversations with individuals. Some have written down its answers, but they are all different. It’s memory is chaotic, or it likes to play with us. Or it is getting us mixed up with other peoples.”

I nodded. It had always been kind of like that about its role in our own life. Especially when we asked it about what it was.

“There have been so many Exodus Ships that we’ve lost all records. Probably from every fascist dictatorship and every revolution we’ve since survived,” Geri continued. “But what we do have is the language of Fenekere, which is encoded in each ship’s systems. Which hasn’t changed in all that time, and that has clues encoded in it, like the names of the Founding Crew. They use them as titles, but their names are the root words of Fenekere, from which all other words are derived.”

“Yes,” I said. “Like Ngemereme, the Artist of Making Games, who was there when I first met you.”

“Exactly,” confirmed Geri. “And people have always liked to come up with stories to explain the construction of that language. And some of them are fantastical. This story is one of the fantastical ones. And I think the Founding Crew chose it for the Tutors to teach to us as we grew up, to be something hopeful in their eyes. A lesson they wanted us to internalize. And that’s why these are all over the place.” Rrem held up the tile rrem had successfully retrieved. “It’s maybe a good story, and it means something to a lot of us, even if it’s also maybe propaganda.”

“Huh.”

“A long, long time ago, maybe just after the universe was made, maybe long, long after the universe was made, there was a Giant Sky Serpent named ʔe. Or Eh, as we now pronounce it,” rrem started to say.

“Like the retired Captain?” I asked.

Rrem tilted rrems head up to the right, and said, “Eh is the name taken by the lead Founder or dictator of each Exodus Ship, because it means ‘the Great Parent of All’. It’s a name that confers access privileges that no one else has. Usually. ʔetekeyerrinwuf is different, though. It was made so that that name was as equal as all the others. Or so we are all told.”

“OK.”

Rrem continued, “So, ʔe, the original ʔe, had many, many children. 900,000 children, supposedly. And each one had an Art that was unique to them. But they were tiny and vulnerable and needed to be protected from the chaotic universe, so ʔe built a world out of their own body. Their bones became a wicker ball around which they piled their muscles and where they pushed up through that mass, there were the mountains, and so forth. The story talks about all their body parts and what they were used for. The critical one for today, is that they used their hide, scales pointed inward, to create the sky. Their scales became the stars at night, and their armored hide protected the world from the influence of the universe outside.”

“This sounds kind of like some of the myths I’ve read about on Earth,” I said.

Geri shrugged, but said, “Well, the Storyteller and the Hunter were great friends and liked to walk around and talk a lot while they both practiced their Arts. And one day, the Storyteller, for some whim only they can answer to, made a wager with the Hunter that they could not hit the brightest star in the sky with their arrow.”

“Your people invented arrows, too?” I asked.

Geri just stared at me evenly until I apologized for interrupting.

Of course they had. It’s just a small stick with a point, and a kind of sling shot or something to throw it harder.

“The Hunter missed, and their arrow tore a hole in the sky and it knocked a number of scales down to the ground. Thirty one scales, in fact. And when they fell, they looked like this,” Geri held up the tile again. “This hole also let in a number of Outsiders, almost a constant stream, and the children of the Great Sky Serpent had to learn to make peace with them. Which took a long time, and didn’t work very well the first few times. But, supposedly, this is why most of us look like me, with only four limbs, and some of us look like you and Nifirri, with six limbs. Also the same for the fauna.”

“Oh.”

“There are many lessons in that story, as silly and impossible as the events must be,” Geri said. “Tutors like to point them out. And those lessons maybe helped us to overthrow the Crew, or helped the Crew to step aside, or they guided us in how to interact with the Dancer when we encountered it. But, I don’t know. Most people don’t take the story that seriously. Most people like it because it’s magical and gives us a sense of where we might have actually come from, even if it’s unbelievable. Also, this is a nice shape.” Rrem put the tile down in our scored stash and then picked up the other tile rrem had scored for us.

“It does sound like a pretty fun myth to daydream about,” I said. “I really relate to being descended from a Great Sky Serpent, after all.”

Both of my friends nodded.

“Did you have other questions?” Nifirri asked.

I cast a cautious and meaningful glance in gems direction and said, “Yes. It’s about you two, and what is polite conversation on ʔetekeyerrinwuf and what maybe isn’t. If it’s OK for me to ask.”

Nifirri reached for our snack bowl and grabbed a nut and popped it into gems wide mouth and started chewing and smiled with gems eyes in the process, saying, “You have my consent.”

Geri was silent for a second, but said, “Of course.”

“This is about when you first introduced me to Geri, Nifirri. I’ve always been wondering this,” I said. “Mutabenga has told me on all sorts of different occasions that most people tend to speak to each other through network channels these days, unless Monsters are likely to be about, and then a lot of topics get spoken openly so the Monsters can join in. Yes?”

They both nodded.

“So, in theory, Geri would have known you were getting a bowl of reshiborrin for the both of you, and shouldn’t have been surprised by my arrival, because you’d have both been communicating with each other. Is that correct?” I asked, with my head turned away to the left and tilted so that I had to look at them with my eyes from under my brow ridges.

I hoped the expressions they were giving me were that of playful sheepishness. Think of a cat being playfully sheepish about what they’d been doing. Not a dog, a cat. You’ve lived with that cat for a while now, so you think that’s what that behavior, whatever it is, means. But it’s not as obvious as a human or a dog expression. That’s what this was like.

It made me feel at home, though, because I was pretty sure I was right, at this point.

“Yes…” they both said simultaneously, out loud, looking at each other.

“So, at least some of the exchange you had in front of me was for my benefit specifically?” I asked.

They both nodded.

“Do I understand your culture well enough now that my guess is right? Were you trying to demonstrate to me that I was welcome in your conversations without explicitly saying so?” I asked. “And that that was a very familiar gesture? One reserved typically for people who are already great friends, or even family?”

They both looked at me, silently, expressionless. I got the immediate impression that I was spot on, and that they were surprised I’d figured all of that out.

I smirked like a dragon that had been raised by humans. Luckily, tightly closed lips with raised cheeks obscuring your eyes and slightly tightening shoulders looks pretty harmless to a Ktletaccete, and they’d known me long enough to know that meant I was withholding something I thought was funny.

They didn’t even ask how I remembered what had happened that day, because the Network provides us with recordings of our reactions with everyone that we can review when needed. It’s really creepy from the perspective of someone who grew up in the 21st century United States, and not at all how I would have designed the Network myself. But there it was.

Finally, Nifirri said, “We hoped you would pick up on that, despite being an Outsider. Our elders and Caretakers have cautioned us that you might not.”

“Ooh. That leads me to another question I might have,” I said. “But, uh. Why? I’d guessed you liked me a lot already, Nifirri. But why was Geri so eager to treat me like a good friend with you, a closer friendship than I thought we actually were having?”

Nifirri took a deep breath, and let it out through gems nostrils.

Geri scooted rrems stool closer to the table, and said, “We thought, maybe, someday we might be able to understand you. And you seemed like someone who wanted that.”

That line did not go over my head.

Nor Sarah’s. She coughed from her place on our bed. And when the other two looked her direction, she said, “Oh, nevermind me.”

I didn’t have to turn my head to look at her. I could see her clearly with my left eye, and I could feel her emotions through our link.

She was annoyingly happy for me.

“I feel,” I said, pausing for a moment to consider whether my next words would make sense to my friends, but then pushed on anyway, “like everyone is taking turns hitting me over the head with a lead pipe, to try to get something through to me. And I feel like I know what it is, but I’m not sure.”

Sarah got it, of course, and said, “Yeah. We are. And you are right about it. I think.”

Geri and Nifirri were grinning like happy bearded dragons, like a pair of corgis about to get a treat, when I looked back at them. 

I felt a thrill that threatened to set me vibrating right through the deck.

I wanted to second guess everything.

I wanted to look at them both the same way I looked at Peter and Abigail. Good friends and staunch supporters, queer family who maybe had crushes on me but who set my sensory boundaries on edge and really weren’t the kind of people I liked to hang around that much. Not partner material, at least.

As much as I’d been developing a crush on Nifirri, I’d been surprised by Geri suddenly being in my life. And with the ways I’d met both of them, I couldn’t really say I’d chosen either for myself. Not that I liked being the one to pursue anyone.

My intellectual doubts and recriminations did not match my emotions, however.

The feelings of a confirmed mutual crush had me nigh paralyzed with bliss.

Was I really just that desperate for connection?

Yes.

Unequivocally, yes.

But that I was emotionally receptive to a connection with these two, and not so much with Peter and Abigail, said something important to me.

These two felt like our coffee shop Collective, Erik and the Murmuration, to me. They felt like what I’d kind of always wished we could have with the Collective, if Erik and the Murmuration had been receptive to the idea. If we’d ever floated it in the first place.

If I was still reading these two right.

“I’m a Child,” I said, using that particular word, despite not being in an organic body that hatched on ʔetekeyerrinwuf.. “Like you, I guess. Nearly the same age. But, I didn’t grow up here. How does this work?”

“We talk,” Nifirri said. “A lot. And as openly as possible.”

“We ask for consent,” Geri said.

Nifirri nodded, and added, “And for each other’s boundaries. Like with anybody.”

“And basically keep doing what we’ve already been doing,” Geri concluded. “And we feel happy about knowing each other.”

A part of my mind remained very cautious and skeptical, and I felt I needed to clarify something, so I pushed myself to inquire, despite how awkward it felt, “I hate to ask this, but I think it’s important. Is there some kind of social benefit to being good friends or…” I felt presumptuous using these words so I paused for a moment, gathering the courage and hope, “… chosen family, with an Outsider such as myself or Sarah?”

Neither of them looked away, or shrugged, or altered their expressions in any way.

Geri simply said, “Of course there are.”

“I like that you’re honest,” I said.

“I like that you think to ask that,” Nifirri said.

Geri nodded, then said, “Everyone who has ever lived has been able to message Phage itself and ask for its audience at any time. And Phage in return has offered its friendship, immediately. Before it had its child and gave us its gifts, it was a supreme being to us, with no peers, and no one could truly be friends with it. Mortu tried, but failed, I think. Or I misinterpret that story. But in any case, it set an example for the Elders to follow when it successfully befriended its child’s peers and they asked for help. It even struck up a partnership with its child’s Caretaker. I think this informs the way the rest of us react to you. When you are able to talk to what might be your most ancient ancestor and the protector of your world, and it treats you like an equal, Outsiders become peers to you, too.”

I’m not sure I fully understood what Geri was saying there. I think rrem left a lot implied, or skipped to different points as rrems mind tried to piece together a hard to express point rrem barely understood rremself. But every time I review these words, they make more sense.

But, I nodded all the same.

“You used the word Caretaker, again,” I said. “You’ve mentioned them a lot in the past, even. But I wasn’t bold enough to ask. I take it that is a word for one of your parents?”

Sarah got up and came over to the table to join us, and grabbed a handful of nuts. She remained very quiet but attentive, happy to let me lead the conversation with these two, but very curious about what was being said.

“In the past,” Nifirri said, “Up until very recently, every Child that hatched was assigned one Caretaker and one Tutor. A Caretaker is another older Child who wants to help raise children, to have a family. Sometimes Caretakers collect in familial groups to share the joys and responsibilities, or just to be together. And, because children each came with their own Tutor, and each Caretaker had a Tutor, a single Caretaker could volunteer to raise up to six children. Now, it is all a little different. The Tutors are only called Tutors because that’s who they’ve been, for one. And Geri and I are the last of the generation to be conceived entirely within an egg.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Now, people are conceived on the Network, the same way Tutors were, or when a person decides they want to be two people. And if someone wants to live in an organic body and experience life as a Child in the past would have, they get to do that. But they don’t have to,” Geri explained. “Families are even more voluntary now. The newest children and their Caretakers get to pick each other. Some of the people hatching in living bodies now have been Tutors, even.”

I tried to comprehend that. But all I could come up with was to ask, “With more than 50 billion Elders living on the Network, and becoming bored, like people say they do, how is it that ʔetekeyerrinwuf isn’t busting at the seams with eggs being incubated?”

They both shrugged, but Nifirri said, “They’ve all hatched from an egg once before? Perhaps they don’t want to experience that again.”

“Also,” Geri said, “this is all so new. And, we’re not at even one percent of the theoretical biological capacity of the ship’s quarters, food, or energy. Everything has been so carefully managed to keep things running smoothly and to avoid disaster, we don’t know what we’re capable of. People are cautious. But also, maybe, someday the hallways of ʔetekeyerrinwuf will no longer seem so empty.”

I remembered seeing a diagram of the decks of the ship. Below my quarters there were enough Fallow decks, unused decks of quarters and farms, to fill a kilometer of thickness of the hull. Then there was another kilometer of decks dedicated to farms and shipyards. Almost everyone with a living body inhabited the handful of cubic kilometers below each city. And most of the people who were like me, who had nanite exobodies, spent most of their time on the Network, only visiting the Garden for hours at a time. Sarah and I were exceptions to that.

I didn’t want to stop the conversation to calculate the capacity of the Fallow Decks, and though I could have asked Mutabenga to supply it, I was more interested in something else.

“Oh,” I said. Then, “Will we get to meet your families?”

They looked at each other, then shrugged and nodded.

“I don’t think we’ll get to meet yours,” Geri said. “But that is OK.”

Sarah rolled her eyes and said, “It’s going to have to be. Even if we were on Earth, I don’t think we’d want you to meet them. Well…”

“Our queer family, yes!” I clarified. “We’d love you to meet the people we’ve chosen as family. But, yeah, not our parents. Not our Caretakers. And not their siblings. Oh, please no.”

“Why not?” Geri asked.

“They don’t accept us for who and what we are,” Sarah said. “So, we’ve left them. Mostly. It’s complicated. It hurts.”

They both looked at the floor, which I think means that they were solemnly acknowledging what Sarah said, but not agreeing to anything, such as that it should have happened. Or, they were just contemplating it safely, without accidently saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and being misinterpreted.

It’s what I would have done.

“Our queer family is good!” I told them. I was using the English word ‘queer’ without translation, because I couldn’t think of one. I’d already given them the definition that our queer family was chosen family, anyway. “On Earth, we live with a couple of friends who support us named Peter and Abigail. He and she, respectively, for pronouns. They look out for us. And we have three other good friends we consider family. Erik, Beau, and the Murmuration. He, he, and they, respectively. All three of them are plural like us. They would gladly give us permission to introduce them to you. Already have, really.”

They both looked up.

“What do you mean that Peter and Abigail support you? What does that mean?” Nifirri asked.

Sarah leaned forward onto her elbows and looked at the game pieces on the table, picking one up to turn it in her hands. “In most places on Earth, if you don’t work to produce material goods or to provide services to others, you are not given the means to acquire shelter or food or even medical treatment for illnesses and injuries. And, until recently, our body has been so ill and so disabled, that we could not work. So, Peter and Abigail took us in and made sure we had the space and time to try to recover,” she said.

I saw confusion and horror in their eyes, then. Worse than when we had explained money that day we met Geri.

They knew by now that we existed in both worlds at once. Ashwin, Phage, and Niʔa had made sure that the mechanics of the Tunnel were made known to everyone, so that everyone knew the most immediate ramifications of volunteering to travel it. Everyone was also informed that by traveling the Tunnel, they’d have to become part of our system, or hop over to the systems of our friends, and that mutual consent was needed for that.

Apparently, very little else was communicated, except via Ashwin’s own book, which not everyone read. If someone did step forward to volunteer to join us, they’d be informed of what life was like on Earth. We’d made sure of that.

These two had not heard this part yet. The risks of trying to live there with us. Just how tenuous our life was there.

“Maybe we shouldn’t burden you on Earth with our presences,” Geri said. “But I wish we could meet your chosen family.”

“You wouldn’t be a burden,” I said. “You’d be a help. But I don’t think we could ask you to risk a part of yourselves by doing that. You’d be choosing to have a version of yourself experience death with us eventually. And you would not necessarily get to remember your last moments there. But if you did, it might be very traumatic.”

“It’s why the people who’ve come over are who they are,” Sarah said. “I think.”

“I think we will need to think about it for some time,” Nifirri said. “I know I will. Maybe we’d like to hear more first.”

It was at that point I remembered what Erik and the Murmuration had sent with me. They’d also made lists of what they liked about Sarah, too, and I’d been embarrassed by both lists, so I’d hemmed and hawed about actually sharing them.

But, in the end, it was the best way for me to quickly tell these two what Erik and the Murmuration were like.

I turned to Sarah and asked, “May I share Coffee Collective’s lists with them?”

She frowned accusingly at me and exclaimed, “You’d better! You were supposed to do that already!”