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Mika only visited Aino Korhonen ahead of time because he was in an upward swing. He had awoken with a longing to see people, talk to them, to be surrounded by life. All the interesting markets and people were up the spokes, so that's where he went.

Aino's workshop lay in an artisan quarter on the third spoke, close to the hub. The little space was almost entirely occupied by a large table covered in patterns and scraps of cloth. Fat rolls of fabric jostled one another on shelves on the walls. Aino stood at the table, a lanky woman with skin and hair the color of pale sand. She looked up at Mika with gray eyes, straight at him, not gently sideways like normal people. Mika fastened his own gaze somewhere by her right shoulder.

“Mika Johannisson,” he said in Swedish. “I'll be interpreting at the meeting with the ambassador.”

Aino was still looking at him. “What do you want?”

Wha' doo'o wan?
Her consonants were partly smoothed away, the vowels rounded in a musical arch.

Mika smiled at her. “I was in the neighborhood. Just curious, is all.”

“Well. Watch, then,” Aino said.

She pushed herself off the table and over to the wall to fetch a roll of fabric, and her thin arms and legs folded in the wrong direction. In the low gravity it resembled a strange dance move. Mika watched as she plucked the roll from the wall, put it on the table, measured out a length of fabric, cut it off. He took a step forward.

“Can I touch the fabric?”

“If your hands are clean.”

Mika rubbed the material between his fingers. It felt uneven and alive. People paid good money for Aino's clothes. Wearing clothes handmade by an exotic woman who spoke a minority language was authentic and refined. Light trousers and tunics in muted shades, long shawls and plaids, clothes made to wear in layers for protection against hot days and icy cold nights in a place that wasn't the controlled climate of Amitié.

“Where do you get your fabrics?” he asked. “They're not printed?”

“I have contacts.”

“This is exciting,” Mika said, not quite sure what to say next. “
You're
exciting.”

“Am I?” Aino asked dryly.

The words flew out. “Were you born that way?” Mika bit his cheek.

“No,” Aino replied. “Were you?”

“What do you mean?”

Aino pointed at Mika's left hand, which was drumming a nervous triple beat on the tabletop.

Mika laughed. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude.”

Aino smiled crookedly. After a long silence that felt awkward to Mika, but looked natural to Aino, she said:

“What are they going to ask me?”

“I don't know exactly,” Mika said. “I'm just the interpreter.”

“They can't just be looking for information about Kiruna. They could find that out for themselves.”

“The most current information comes from the Kozlov reports,” Mika replied, “and they're very incomplete. Also, they can't land without a permit. Not before the paperwork is done. That's why they're starting with you. You're the first one to leave the place in a generation.”

“Hm,” Aino said. “I suppose that's how it is, then.”

Mika left with a triangular shawl over his shoulders. The fabric was unfamiliarly raspy on his neck.

*   *   *

The next day was worse than the one before. Mika had only gotten four hours of sleep but still felt energized. He had built music in the evening, and had then turned to the game he was currently playing. He had spent half the night on the steppe as the explorer Gunnhild, the part where she meets the warrior BÃ¥rd. It ought to have tired him out, but not this time. Eventually he had forced himself to unplug and took a sedative to relax. In Mika's dreams, Gunnhild defended her caravan over and over again. Each time, the caravan perished because BÃ¥rd never came. Gunnhild's companions gave her replies that were pure nonsense, and when BÃ¥rd finally showed up their love story was interrupted by song-and-dance sequences.

When Mika got up to have breakfast, he still had an imaginary dialogue with Bård going in his head. The food had no taste. He shouldn't have gotten himself overstimulated. Interpreting would be hard work today. If Mika didn't take better care of himself, work would be even harder tomorrow, and the day after, all the way up until the crash came and he wouldn't be able to do much at all. He could have chosen medication, but he wasn't qualified for any other type of work. His choice was between interpreting or unemployment, and unemployed people weren't allowed to stay on Amitié. So here he was, unmedicated, employed. And it was still worth it. Every word from the ambassador's mouth made it worth it.

The thirty ambassadors claimed to come from an early colony. They were looking for a new home, they said, one that fit them better. No one could really contradict their story; at the start of this era, everyone who could had launched themselves into a galaxy that was absolutely lousy with habitable worlds. No one really knew how many ships had left and where they had come from. People showing up from distant places with strange modifications weren't unheard of.

These ambassadors had named themselves for celestial bodies and phenomena. They looked more or less like baseline humans: neither short nor tall, neither slight nor heavyset, most of them with olive-colored to brown skin and dark eyes and hair. The abnormal thing about them was their speech.

The general consensus was that they spoke an archaic form of English. In the moment they spoke, they were completely understandable. But as soon as they fell silent, any memory of what they had said disappeared. The listener had a feeling of having heard something wise and profound, but exactly what, they didn't know. Communicating by text didn't help, as the ambassadors' written language resembled that of children. It was very obvious that sound was a vital element of their communication.

A very small number of people could understand them and relay their words. Something about the way their brains were wired gave them a sensitivity to the language that others didn't have. It had its drawbacks, however. The same sensitivity that made Mika an interpreter also made him sick. But it was only without the medication that he could listen.

*   *   *

It was typical of the interpreting company to make Aino come down to the main office, instead of booking a conference room in the spokes or visiting her workshop. Down here, she was clumsy and seemed to be in pain. She sat hunched in her chair, tightly wrapped in her muted shawls. Ambassador Oort arrived dapper as usual, in a teal suit and short hair slicked flat against her skull.

“You're here,” she said to Mika.

Those words held the fact that Oort was glad Mika was there, that she had looked forward to their meeting, and that she would remember their encounter with warmth. The message went through him like a warm whisper, and he stopped drumming his fingers against the tabletop. He was here and only here, now.

Aino reacted like everyone else at first. She looked awed as the ambassador spoke to her, then confused when the words disappeared from her mind. Mika repeated Oort's words, a formal greeting. Aino kept her composure better than most and replied to the questions Mika relayed to her. Was she typical of her kind? What was her village like? What did she do all day? What did the others think of her? Why did she look that way? How did they get their voices? Aino replied.

That the villagers used their children as incubators for large insects. That their throats were then modified during this process so that they could communicate when the moons that bathed Kiruna in soundwaves drowned out the frequency of human speech. That Aino looked like she did because the incubation sometimes had terrible side effects. That she was cast out because she reminded the others of what they did to their children. That she had taken the biologist Petr Kozlov's place on the shuttle to Amitié. When the ambassador asked Aino to demonstrate her voice, she let out a series of trills, like a little bird.

Aino asked why Oort's people wanted to settle on Kiruna specifically. Oort replied that the moon's sound environment seemed to fit them.

“That sound environment doesn't fit anyone,” Aino replied.

Oort smiled.

*   *   *

Sleeping was even more difficult that night. Mika's thoughts ran in circles, a long cavalcade of conversations and snatches of music and ideas and all of a sudden Mika was sitting up in bed composing a new piece; the foundation was a sequence that had been going through his head, adorned with a filigree of frail triplets that he gently dropped over it, an abstract choir that welled in from the sides and enveloped the little cupola he had built, and suddenly the alarm went off and it was time to get up and go to work and he wasn't tired in the least despite sitting with the music piece for four hours but he made himself take a shower and eat something because that's what healthy people did.

Émile had left him because of this. Mika couldn't blame him. It could hardly be easy to put up with someone who one month would stay up all night, talk incessantly, and always want sex, and the next month couldn't get out of bed or even respond. Émile couldn't.

“Oort is more important than I am” were his parting words.

Maybe it was true. But Mika's skin ached to be touched.

*   *   *

“We would like you to come along as an informant when we reconnoiter,” Mika translated to Aino the next day. “You have knowledge of the community that we don't.”

“What do you need me for?” Aino said.

“We need help interpreting and negotiating on site,” Oort replied.

“What's in it for me?” Aino asked. “I left for a reason. I don't want to go back there. They treated me like dirt. I was heavy and in pain. I can be light here.”