The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers (best novels in english .txt) 📕

‘Yes,’ Speaker said. ‘I do.’

‘How have you never played a sim?’ Tupo said.

Speaker gave a nonchalant gesture. ‘They don’t make them for Akaraks,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

The answer came to Roveg immediately, and he didn’t like it at all. ‘Sims have to be tailored to the nervous system of the player,’ he said. ‘An Aandrisk and a Harmagian can enter the same sim, and it’ll behave identically from both of their perspectives, but they’re accessing different versions of the software. A designer like me will build the base world or story, then port it to different species-specific templates. Brain maps, we call them.’

Tupo frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Well, if one player has arms and one player has tentacles, the—’ he reached for a kid-friendly word ‘—the rules that make the sim work behave differently for each of them. Otherwise it won’t feel like the players are actually touching something.’ He looked back at Speaker. ‘And nobody’s ever bothered mapping Akaraks, it would seem. I’d never thought of it before, but you’re … you’re not an option in the design tools I use.’ His words came out quiet, bothered.

‘I guess nobody expects us to buy them,’ Speaker said.

‘Yes, well, you can’t buy them if they don’t exist, can you?’ He huffed air through his spiracles, and rattled his mouthparts in disapproval. Carefully, he replaced the machine’s innards, and closed the panel back up. ‘All right. There. Let’s give that a try.’ He moved to the control terminal and started to gesture commands, but immediately ran into a problem. ‘I … can’t read this,’ he said, facing an unfamiliar alphabet. Laru, presumably, but he’d never seen their language written before. ‘Where are the translation settings?’

‘Oh, uh …’ Tupo came over and swung xyr neck under Roveg’s thoracic legs so as to get a better look at the screen. ‘Um … that one that looks like a square. Here, lemme.’ Xe entered in some quick commands, and the screen transformed into Klip.

‘Ah,’ Roveg said with relief. ‘Thank you.’

‘Is it working?’ Speaker said.

‘Can’t say yet. We’ll need to reboot in order for the changes I made to be recognised. It’ll take several minutes, at least.’

Speaker shifted in her suit. It was evident she did not want to sit by even one minute more, but she accepted the situation and leaned back into her seat. ‘So we wait?’

Roveg bent his legs affirmatively. ‘We wait.’

PEI

The bathhouse, it turned out, was pretty nice.

It wasn’t huge, like the spas and saunas you’d find in a big city, and it wasn’t plush, like some of the places she’d treated her crew to after a long haul. From the outside, the Five-Hop’s bathhouse looked like it had room for maybe six people; inside, it was quiet, inviting, and sparkling clean. The walls were tiled with affordable faux silicate (it looked decently close to the real thing), and across these, decorative trails of pillowy moss had been coaxed to grow in spiralling lines. The floor was so polished that Pei could almost make out her reflection in it, and upon seeing this, she wasted no time in removing her boots. She placed them in one of the large cubbies by the entryway intended for this purpose, and her clothing followed in short order.

On the other side of the hallway, two rows of automated dispensers were built into the wall, each labelled with a pixel frame. All manner of soaps and scrubs and oils were on offer, and Pei smiled as she imagined Ouloo tying herself in knots trying to narrow down the scale scrub scent that would appeal best to Aandrisks, or a tonic spray that most Harmagians would find suitable. The animated pictures on each dispenser did look tempting, but Pei decided to check out the facilities first.

Just as the crammed sign out front had advertised, the bathhouse offered a broad variety of culturally specific bathing fixtures, all of which were installed in a single, large room with waist-high dividing walls between. There were curtain rods circling each setup as well, and the intent of this was clear. If visitors wanted to chat with others, they could, but privacy was equally available. Do you, Ouloo’s handiwork said.

Pei walked around the room, enjoying the sensation of cool tile on bare soles. She stopped in front of a very familiar apparatus: an Aeluon douser. This was the traditional way of getting clean – a sustained blast of steamy mist to kill germs and loosen dirt, followed by a single splash of cold water emptied from a tank overhead. Pei had used one of these nearly every day of her life, but she wasn’t in the bathhouse because she needed to clean up. She was in the bathhouse to kill time and chill out, and if that was the goal, there was one species who had those things down better than most.

She turned her back on the douser and instead set her eye on the Aandrisk-style steam bath – a windowed, ovular container, made of stone and big enough for a single occupant to walk into. A gate was installed around this, for the sake of Harmagian safety. A Harmagian wouldn’t dare enter such a contraption anyway, but any steam that escaped when the door was opened would be unkind to their slimy skin. Pei herself was not built for the temperatures Aandrisks craved, but she knew from experience that a steam bath was a real treat if you used the button marked with the Reskitkish term for child’s setting (for years, she’d thought the button read low heat – a small but recoverable blow to her pride).

She returned to the dispensers in the hallway and found one containing scented steam tabs. She swiped her wrist over the patch scanner and a round capsule popped out, containing two powdery pucks flecked with dried herbs. She decided to be fully Aandrisk about it and bought a tiny pot of scale scrub as well – saltmoss-scented, a taste she’d