Sissix gave her a somewhat exasperated smile. “No. Remember, they’re not people yet, not by our standards. And they’re not my family. I know that sounds cold to you, but trust me, they’re loved by the elders raising them. Though, that said, elders don’t get attached to hatchlings, not until they see who they turn into. That’s where the real joy is for house families. Seeing the hatchlings they raised come back as fully-feathered adults, with stories and ideas and personality.”
“Like you’re doing now.”
“Right.”
“Have you ever met your… biological parents?”
“My egg mother, once. Her name’s Saskist. Very funny woman, and I’m glad I got her feathers. I’ve never met my egg father, but I know he lives with his feather family on Ikekt. Or he did last time I checked. That was a while ago, though, he may have moved on by now.”
Rosemary thought of what Lovey said if you gave her one task too many: I’m sorry, but that’ll have to wait a moment. If I put anything more in my databanks, my processing streams will stall. And I hate that. “How do you keep track of all the changes to families?”
“There’s a central database that our government maintains. All feather families are registered there, and the archivists keep track of every change. You can look up anybody’s name and see who their egg parents were, who raised them, which families they’ve been in, who they’ve had clutches with, and where the hatchlings have gone to.”
“That’s got to be one complicated database. Why go to all that trouble?”
“Same reason our full names include all our family details.” She gave Rosemary a pointed look. “Because inbreeding is gross.”
The shuttle ramp unfolded, bright sun flooding in. Rosemary tugged her satchel over her shoulder as she followed Sissix and Ashby down. Her legs wobbled, protesting the switch from artigrav to the real thing. Hashkath had just a touch more bounce than she was used to. She looked up. Theth loomed overhead, its rings and swirling clouds appearing as ghostly afterimages against the hazy blue. Her view was unhindered, no shield pylons or shuttle traffic to get in her way. An open sky.
They had landed in Sethi, a small community in the Western desert region of Hashkath. Well, Sissix had called it a desert. It wasn’t like any desert Rosemary had ever seen. Mars was desert, barren and parched. Its gardens and green plazas were constructs, enclosed beneath habitat domes, fed with recycled water. But here, the ground was alive, flocked with scruffy grass and warped trees, stretching from their flat landing site all the way to the angular mountains along the horizon. And flowers, too, flowers everywhere. Not like the lush, leafy genetweaks from the greenhouses back home, or the elegant vines creeping through Dr. Chef’s garden. These were wildflowers, bursting triumphantly from the gray ground, growing tangled and low in bundles of orange, yellow, purple. The trees twisted up over them, covered in spines and clusters of berries. They grew thickest in a long strip up ahead, a ribbon of green that hinted at a hidden stream.
Beyond the ribbon lay the community, a lazy gathering of pod-like homesteads hugging the ground. It was spread out enough to give a family space to stretch and grow things, but close enough to keep your neighbors right at hand. Sethi was a quiet place. Out of the way. Modestly prosperous. Uncomplicated. No gaming hubs or pre-fab stores. There wasn’t even a real shuttle dock, just a wide, unattended area suitable for landing small spacecraft and supply drones. Looking around, Rosemary understood why a young adult would want to leave such a place, and why an elder would want to come back.
She touched her bare nose, basking in the novelty of being able to breathe without a mask or an artificial atmosphere. The last time she’d been without one or the other was Port Coriol, which felt like a lifetime ago. The air at the port had been thick with the smells of algae and business. The air on Hashkath was clean, dry, oxygen rich, laced with the scent of desert flowers warming in the sun. It was good air.
Sissix obviously agreed. She threw her arms wide and her head back as soon as her clawed feet touched the ground. “Home,” she said, sounding as if she had just surfaced from a long swim.
“Wow,” Ashby said. “I’d forgotten that it would be spring here.”
Sissix inhaled and exhaled with vigor, as if purging the Wayfarer’s recycled air from her lungs. She looked down at her body. “Oh, hell no.” She untied the drawstring of her pants, stepped out of them, and threw them back into the shuttle. Her vest followed suit. Naked, she began walking toward her childhood home, her scales glinting in the sun.
As they walked, Ashby reached into his own satchel and pulled out his translation hud. He fitted the thin metal band around his head. The eyescreen flickered to life.
“I thought you speak Reskitkish,” Rosemary said.
“I understand Reskitkish,” Ashby said. “But I’m far from fluent when I speak. And since I don’t get much practice, it helps to have a cheat sheet.”
“Your accent is better than most Humans I know,” Sissix said. “I know it’s a pain for you to speak on an inhale.”
“It’s not the speaking on an inhale that’s so bad. It’s alternating it with exhaling within the same sentence.” He snapped his satchel shut. “Seriously, who does that?”
Rosemary pulled her own hud out of her bag. “It is pretty mean,” she said. Her knowledge of Reskitkish was practically nonexistent, but the few phrases she had tried made her feel lightheaded. “I don’t know how you can speak it without hyperventilating.”
Sissix thumped her chest with a fist. “We’ve got better lungs,” she said.
“Yeah, well, we’ve got warm blood,” Ashby said. “I think that’s the better end of the deal.”
Sissix gave a short laugh. “You have no idea. I’d take your weak lungs and useless nose over morning torpor any day.”
Ashby looked at Rosemary. “I can’t tell if that was a compliment or not.” He turned back to Sissix. “Hey, is Ethra still here?”
“As far as I know.”
“Do not make any puns around him,” Ashby said to Rosemary. “He wiped the floor with me last time I was here. And he’s got an arsenal of Human jokes that will cause permanent damage.”
Sissix chuckled. “He’s no kinder to his own species. What was the one about—oh, what was it, something horrible involving tails—”
Ashby laughed. “So a Human, a Quelin, and a Harmagian walk into a tet—”
“No, stop,” Sissix said, gesturing ahead with her chin. They had reached the scrub-filled banks of the desert stream. Two Aandrisk children were playing in the water, shouting over one another. A message appeared on Rosemary’s hud: Cannot process conversation. Please move closer to speaker(s). She had no frame of reference for how old the children were, but given their small size and playfulness, Rosemary thought of them as Human kids in their first years of primary school. Well, maybe. One of them looked younger than the other. She had a hard time pinning down anything else about them. Aandrisk sex was easy to determine in adults, mainly due to size, but at this age, they were androgynous, especially since male Aandrisks lacked external genitalia. Categorization aside, there was something fragile about these two, a paper-like quality to their scales. No wonder she hadn’t seen any Aandrisk children offworld before. She didn’t even know them, and already she felt protective. She imagined their parents must feel that way ten times over. Hatch parents, she reminded herself. Hatch parents.