“Boring tea?” Rosemary asked.
“No caffeine. Just a lovely, normal herbal tea,” said Dr. Chef. “I’ll never understand why you Humans like the jittery stuff so much. As a doctor, I hate starting off your mornings with stimulants, but as a cook, I understand how important breakfast habits are.” He wagged one of his pudgy fingers at her. “But no more than three cups a day, and definitely not on an empty stomach.”
“Don’t worry,” Rosemary said, reaching for a mug. “I’m more of a boring tea person myself.” Dr. Chef looked pleased. She pointed at the rolls. “These smell wonderful. What are they?”
The answer came from behind. “Smoky buns!” Kizzy cheered. She jumped onto a stool and grabbed one of the yellowish pastries. She began to eat with one hand and dished out some porridge with the other.
“Smoky buns?”
“Yet another thing from my home that doesn’t have an easily translatable name,” said Dr. Chef.
“He makes ’em every time we tunnel,” Kizzy said, loading up a plate with an additional bun and a pile of fruit.
“They’re good, solid fuel for a hard day of work.” He squinted at Kizzy as she filled a mug with happy tea. “Unlike that.”
“I know, I know, three cup limit, I promise,” she said. She turned to Rosemary, cupping her mug between her palms. “What’s the verdict on the curtains?”
“They’re great,” Rosemary said. “They make things feel homey.” It was true. She’d almost forgotten that she was no longer living planetside until she’d drawn the curtains back that morning and found a stellar system floating majestically right outside. Even though she had traveled between planets before, the notion that she was now living out in the open still hadn’t sunk in.
She bit down into a smoky bun. The bread was airy soft, the unidentified filling rich and savory, somewhat reminiscent of roasted mushrooms. Smoky, yes, but also lightly spiced, with just the right amount of salt. She looked up to Dr. Chef, who was watching her eagerly. “These are amazing.”
Dr. Chef beamed. “The filling’s made from jeskoo. I think you Solans call it white tree fungus. Rather different than the ingredients I grew up with, but it’s a good approximation. And the buns are high in protein, too. I supplement the grain with mealworm flour.”
“He won’t tell us his recipe,” Kizzy said. “Bastard’s going to take it to his grave.”
“Grum don’t have graves.”
“To the bottom of the ocean, then. That’s even worse than a grave. Graves you can at least dig up.” She shook a bun at him. “Some dumb fish is going to eat whatever part of your brain stores this recipe, and we’ll all be lost without it.”
“Better eat them while you can, then,” Dr. Chef said. His cheeks gave a fluttering puff. Rosemary had deduced that the faster the puffs, the bigger the “smile.”
“So,” Kizzy said, turning her attention to Rosemary. “This is your first time tagging along for a punch, right?”
“Sorry, a what?” Rosemary said.
Kizzy chuckled. “That answers my question. A punch is the act of making a tunnel.”
“Oh, right.” Rosemary sipped her tea. Slightly sweet, nothing special. Okay, so it was a little boring, but comforting nonetheless. “I was actually wondering…” She paused, not wanting to sound stupid. “I know I’ll never have to help out with the tunneling stuff, but I’d like to have a better understanding of how it works.”
Kizzy pressed her lips together with excitement. “You want me to give you a crash course?”
“If it’s no trouble, that is.”
“Oh, stars and buckets, of course it’s no trouble. I am flattered and you are adorable. Um, right, okay. Have you taken any courses in interspatial manipulation? Probably not, huh?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Space-time topology?”
“Nope.”
“Transdimensional theory?”
Rosemary made an apologetic face.
“Aww!” said Kizzy, clasping her hands over her heart. “You’re a physics virgin! Okay, okay, we’ll keep this simple.” She looked around the counter for props. “Okay, cool, here. The area above my bowl of porridge”—she gestured importantly—“is the fabric of space. The porridge itself is the sublayer—basically the space in between space. And this groob”—she picked up a small black fruit from her plate—“is the Wayfarer.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to see this,” Dr. Chef said, resting his top arms on the opposite side of the counter.
Kizzy cleared her throat and straightened up. “So, here’s us.” She swooped the berry over the bowl. “We’ve got two ends of space to connect, right? Here and here.” She pressed her finger down into the porridge, making indentations on opposite ends of the bowl. “So we travel to one end—whoosh—and all the people seeing us fly by are like, oh my stars, look at that totally amazing ship, what genius tech patched together such a thing, and I’m like, oh, that’s me, Kizzy Shao, you can all name your babies after me—whooosh—and then we get to our start point.” She hovered the berry above the disappearing dent in the porridge. “Once we’re in position, I turn on the interspatial bore. Did you see it when you flew in? Big ol’ monstro machine strapped to our belly? It’s a beast. Runs on ambi cells. Our entire ship couldn’t hold the amount of algae you’d need to power it. Oh, and fair warning, it’s noisy as hell, so don’t freak out while its doing its thing. We’re not blowing up or anything. So, yes. Bore warms up. Then we punch.” She slammed the berry down into the porridge. “And then it gets weird.”
“Weird how?” Rosemary said.
“Well, we’re just squishy little three-dimensional creatures. Our brains can’t process what goes on in the sublayer. Technically, the sublayer is outside of what we consider normal time. Understanding what’s going on in there is like… it’s like telling someone—a Human, I mean—to see in infrared. We just can’t do it. So, in the sublayer, you feel that something is wrong with the world, but you can’t put your finger on what it is. It’s very, very weird. Have you ever done daffy?”
Rosemary blinked. Where she was from, people didn’t casually ask about illegal hallucinogens over breakfast. “Ah, no, I haven’t.”
“Hmm. Well, it’s kind of like that. Your visual perception and sense of time gets all fucked up, but the difference is that you’re fully in control of your actions. When you’re studying for your tunneling license—that’s separate from basic tech studies, so believe me when I say I’m super glad I’ll never have to set foot in a school again—you have to practice stuff like fixing the engines or entering in commands after taking a dose of sophro, which is basically a dumbed-down, government-issued version of daffy. Worst homework ever, I assure you. But you get used to it.” She stuck her fingers into the porridge, getting a grip on the hidden berry. “Okay, so while we’re all tripping balls, the ship’s pushing through the sublayer, dropping buoys to force the tunnel open. The buoys are there for two reasons. One, they keep the tunnel from collapsing, and two, they generate this field made up of all the same strings and particles and stuff that normal space is made out of.”