I didn’t want to do it. Now more than ever. They knew too much about me. But I needed them to trust me so I could keep them alive and keep doing my job. The good version of my job, not the half-assed version of my job that I’d been doing before things started trying to kill my clients. I still didn’t want to do it.

I had worked for some contracts that would have kept me standing here the entire day and night cycle, just on the off chance they wanted me to do something and didn’t want to bother using the feed to call me. Then she added, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?”

But the constant sounds of people working and laughing and fighting all around him had become a comfort. The open was an empty place to be, and there were moments when even the most seasoned spacer might look to the star-flecked void outside with humility and awe.

Dr. Chef exhaled a disparaging rumble and fixed his beady eyes on Rosemary. “Some advice? If Kizzy ever says the words ‘you know what would be a great idea?,’ ignore whatever comes after.”

A past birthday gift from Kizzy, who always ignored the fact that none of the non-Human crew members traditionally celebrated birthdays.

Alongside such oddities, his small stature was nothing special. It was hard to feel weird in a place where everybody was weird.

“I think that’s normal for anyone living with people other than their own. I’m sure they get tired of us, too.”

“It’s our hobby,” Bear said. “We only sell them to neighbors and trusted friends. We’re not in the business of equipping bad guys. But if you want to discourage bad guys, oh yeah, we can do that.”

The thought of imposing on these strangers for a day or two– eating their food, sleeping on a grubby couch, listening to inside jokes– left Rosemary awkward. But the siblings’ congeniality did away with those feelings. Bear in particular made an effort to include her, and attempted to fill her in when the stories started going over her head (most of the stories fell into one of two groups: “the time we built this amazing thing” or “the time we smoked too much smash and did something stupid”). Once she had gotten past the memory of the oozing ketling carcass, she found the shreds of spicy, flame licked insect, wrapped in airy flat-bread and washed down with crisp kick, actually made for an enjoyable meal. By the time dinner was over, Rosemary found herself unexpectedly at ease.

“Because people are assholes,” said Bear, dutifully keeping his head down. “Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes.”

He sat on a garden bench in the Fishbowl, his tea cooling as he worked through slow thoughts. Rosemary sat across from him, holding her own mug in her bony Human hands. She was silent as he thought out loud. He knew how strange they each were to the other– he for never thinking quietly, she for having no thinking sounds. He knew she understood his noise by now, though, and that knowledge made her silence feel companionable.

“Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?”

Justice takes so long that by the time you get it, it’s gone off and smells like an old corpse. Forget about justice. Just knock back a big, stiff drink and move to a new town with fewer pronks living in it.

… everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.

“As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. It’s grim.”

“When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light years.”

It blossomed all over again into cosmic grief at the ultimate impossibility of communication between two living beings.

I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.