Speaker assumed that Roveg could read her about as well as she could read him, but even so, she did her best to mask her sadness as the sib tower let them know that it could not, in fact, establish a transmission path.
'Damn,' Roveg said. He returned to the access panel, picking up his tools. Speaker was fascinated by both components of this action: the bifurcated ends of his legs, which could do nothing more than grasp objects between them like pairs of tweezers, and the tools designed for such appendages, which were so slim they seemed fragile. But Roveg wielded these with far more dexterity than Speaker would've thought his toes could manage, and he dove back into the access panel to tinker further. 'All right, let's give it another go.'
'Are either of you hungry?' Tupo asked. Xe paused. 'Right, you can't have snacks.'
Speaker clicked her beak kindly. 'I can have snacks, just not out here. But no, thank you, I'm not hungry.'
'Me neither,' Roveg said.
'Okay,' Tupo said. Xe paused again. 'Well, I'mhungry.'
Roveg laughed. 'You go on, Tupo, we might be a while out here.'
Tupo made an awkward exit without another word, padding up the path to the house
'Xe's a funny one,' Roveg said once Tupo was inside.
'I don't really understand kids,' Speaker said. 'Ours are in that state so briefly that it doesn't make much of an impression. A few tens of tendays of chaos, and then they're on their way.'
'You don't have any of your own, I take it.'
'No.'
'And your sister?'
'No.'
Roveg continued his work, using four pairs of feet at once, and nearly as many tools. Speaker had initially thought all those legs must be a bother to keep track of, but she was starting to see the benefit. He sat back and dug through his tool bag. 'Speaker and Tracker,' he mused. 'You speak. What does she track?'
'Other Akaraks,' Speaker said. 'Or, more specifically, their ships.'
'To what end?'
'So we can help them.'
'Yes, you made mention of that work last night. Acquiring supplies, I believe you said.' He paused. 'Forgive me, I still don't understand.'
Speaker considered how best to answer. She had no qualms about sharing the shape of her life with others, but had so little opportunity to do so that she wasn't sure which pieces to include and which to skip. This had gone beyond small talk, now, and Roveg's interest seemed as sincere as her fascination with his feet. Given that she could contribute nothing to his work – which he was doing as a favour to her, after all – she saw no reason not to explain in full. 'Once a standard, all – or, well, most– Akaraks gather for an event we call rakree. Literally, it means exchange. Or sharing, I guess. That's a better fit. Anybody who wants to gather with other ships does so. We all go to the same coordinates and we link our ships together with these...oh, I don't know the word. They're essentially portable airlocks. A big, airtight tube that links two ships together.'
'And you use these to link...all of them?'
'Right. Imagine...imagine if there was one tenday a standard in which every house in a city opened its doors, and everybody was free to go in and out of wherever they wanted.'
Roveg's frills rippled. 'That sounds a bit hellish to me, to be honest. But I'm getting the impression you feel the opposite.'
'It's wonderful,' Speaker said honestly. 'It's my favourite thing.'
'And what's the purpose?' Roveg asked. 'Trading, politics, partying, sex?'
'Akaraks don't have sex.'
Roveg's tools froze in place. 'What?'
'We reproducesexually, but we don't have social sex. I'm fully aware of how that works in other species, but we...physically don't have the capability for what you're referring to, or the need. We can't. We don't.'
The Quelin absorbed this information. 'I'm not sure whether that's tragic or whether you've been spared a lot of bother. Anyway, sorry, continue.'
'You got two of the activities right: trading, primarily, and partying, second. We don't do politics, or at least not in the way you mean. We don't have a government. Each ship makes its own decisions. But I'm getting sidetracked: you wanted to know about my job, not my culture.'
'Well, now I'm interested in both.'
Speaker crinkled her eyes at him. 'The point of rakreeis to be open with others. You tell people what you need, and you give others whatever you can provide. Maybe you've got a big crop of food, and there's surplus to share. Maybe you need a compressor coil, and there's someone three ships over who's got a spare. Maybe your ship needs a doctor, or a pilot, and you find someone with those skills who's been looking for a new home. Or maybe it's as simple as needing to sleep in a different place for a few nights, or talk with people you don't live with all day every day. A change of pace. That's the thing about rakree. Needs can be big or small, but they all matter.'
'So it's not a barter, then. It's a truly open exchange.'
'It canbe a barter, but yes, you've got it. There's no expectation of receiving something in return for what you give, and no guilt about taking what you need.'
Roveg's hard-surfaced eyes rotated in their sockets with an almost mechanical quickness. 'Is thatwhy you came to my ship and quizzed me on my skills? Because that's what you do among yourselves?'
'I suppose,' she said. 'Did you find it unusual?'
'Yes, I admit I did. Not in a bad way. It's just not what I would've done.'
Speaker clicked her beak contemplatively. 'It would've felt odd not to, especially in an emergency,' she said.
'Even though we're different species?'
Speaker considered that. She hadbeen apprehensive about approaching a group of sapient strangers one by one, but as she reflected on it now, she understood that her fear of their hostility had been lesser than that of facing danger alone. 'I was operating on the hope that such things wouldn't matter when the sky is falling apart.'
'Such things shouldn't matter at all, regardless of what the sky is doing.' Roveg swapped one tool for another, and continued his work. 'So, do I correctly surmise that under normal circumstances, you and your sister offer something to your people that fits a particularneed?'
'We do,' she said. 'We offer me.'
'You?' He leaned his shelled torso back, and thought. 'You speak Klip. You understand other customs. You're...you're their Speaker.'
Speaker warmed with the quiet joy of being understood. 'Exactly.'
'You can get access to things others can't. Go into shops where they might get turned away, or ...'
'Help them finish the formwork to get an official pilot's licence. Get a bunch of seedlings from the nursery that didn't understand what they wanted. Track down a medical specialist for something particular. Set up a standing order with a fuel depot. Buy groceries for someone who's too nervous to go to a big market stop.'
'Are these imaginary examples, or ...?'
'My last five jobs.'
'Fascinating,' he said. 'That's fascinating.' He returned to the panel, twisting a wire here, loosening a clip there. 'Right, let's try that.' He went once more to the interface panel and rebooted the system. 'You still haven't answered my question, though.'
'Sorry, which?'
'What does Tracker do?'
Again, Speaker gathered all the components this answer required, and tried to filter them down to the most necessary. 'So: a ship is a family, and a ship is autonomous. We're not an instinctively hierarchal species, like many of you are. We do best in groups, but each group is an entity unto itself. We don't have any sort of larger government, or ship registry, or anything like that. We don't log flight plans, we don't submit travel routes. We just go where we need to, as we want to. That freedom is very important to us, but it also means--' 
'You're hard to find.'
'Right. But that's also by design.' She paused. 'If I explain this, you have to understand it's not intended as an insult.'
'Now I'm dying to know what it is.' His face was stone, but his voice was kind. 'Don't worry. I won't take it personally.'
She continued, carefully. 'Most Akarak ships go to great lengths to not show up on anybody else's wake scan. Both in a navigational sense and a technological sense. We mask our ships' signals. We make flight plans that look nonsensical to outsiders. By and large, we avoid contact with other species as much as possible, but the side effect of that is it's hard for us to find each otheras well. And that'swhat Tracker does. When we take on a task for someone else, we know roundabout where they're headed, and we know their data wake signature, but we don't often make a hard and fast rendezvous plan. Plans change. Circumstances are unpredictable. And a ship that really wants to stay off the map might not even feel comfortable sharing their flight plan with us, beyond what system they'll be in. That's where Tracker comes in. Her speciality is tracking untrackable ships.'
'How?'
'You would have to ask her. I don't understand it at all.' Tracker had tried to explain, of course, many times, but Speaker had had as much luck understanding Tracker's monitors filled with nav charts as Tracker had made purchase with syntax.
'Well, hopefully, if we get this thing working, I'll be able to say hello, at least.' Roveg glanced at the monitor, watching the reboot progress. 'That must be extraordinary difficult, treasure-hunting your peers across the galaxy.'
'Depends on who it is and how seriously they take their privacy. Some ships don't care at all. Aversion to other species isn't a universal rule – we're not all the same, obviously. But most of us prefer to travel incognito. And that's because ...' She paused. 'Again, please don't take offence at this.'
'You don't trust the rest of us,' Roveg said simply. 'I understand that completely, and I don't take offence.' He gestured at himself. 'My species' reputation hardly makes me one to judge on that front.'
'It's...not quite the same.'
'Isn't it? Sure, we're talking xenophobia on very different scales, but fear of outsiders is fear of outsiders all the same.'
Speaker disliked that categorisation, but in keeping with her own request, did not take it personally. 'I'm not sure I'd call it xenophobia in our case. It's just...experience.'
'Hmm.' Roveg considered that. 'Yes, perhaps I'm not viewing it in the proper context. My peers would argue your situation and ours boil down to the same principle, but then, they're wrong about most things.'
Now it was Speaker's turn to be curious about delicate matters. She hesitated, not sure how he'd take this question, but the ease of the conversation made her feel bold. 'May I ask why the Quelin Protectorate...why it is like it is?'
All the holes along Roveg's abdomen pulsed air at once. 'We could sit here for days discussing that. Do you know anything about our history? What happened after contact?'
'I know there was war, but not the specifics.'
'Right.' He idly rubbed one of his eyes with a toe as he thought. 'When we first made contact with other sapients, there was an inevitable explosion of cultural evolution, as there always is. Technology, philosophy, art, all of it in flux. You know how it goes.