Simeis Shajn | Interstellar Vernacular

The bus shuddered once and went silent in the wrong way—not the engine cutting for a traffic light, but something deeper giving up. A mechanical sound Simeis had never learned the name for, followed by the heavy quiet of a large object deciding it was finished.

People moved. They always moved. The driver descended from his seat with a phone already pressed to his ear and a specific kind of frustration that Simeis had catalogued as impotent responsibility—the anger of someone tasked with fixing something they couldn't fix. Passengers murmured behind windows. A child pressed her face against the glass, breath fogging it in uneven circles.

Simeis stepped off the bus into dark that wasn't dark at all.

The desert sky opened above him like something being peeled back. He exhaled, slow, involuntary. His body did this with the sky sometimes—just answered it, without consulting him. One year in this form and still his lungs behaved as though they were addressing something larger than air.

The air itself was strange after sundown. The heat had been an animal all afternoon, shoving itself against his skin through the bus windows, pressing into the seat material and his shirt and the back of his neck. Now the air had cooled just enough to feel like a different substance. Dry, mineral, carrying the particular cleanliness of sand that had been baked empty of everything organic.

He walked a few paces from the bus, gravel crunching under the cheap shoes he'd bought in the last town. His feet still didn't like shoes. They might never. He could feel the ground through them anyway—the layered rock beneath the highway, the old compressed sediments, the deep heat that hadn't left even after sundown. A skeleton of warmth under the surface.

Then he looked up.

He hadn't meant to. But the sky was there, and his eyes went to it the way they always did, and for a moment the bus and the highway and the man still arguing into his phone became very small and very far below him, which was absurd, because he was standing on the ground. He was always standing on the ground now. But the sky didn't care about that, and neither did the part of him that—

There. There.

Aldhabara. Bayer designation Epsilonpsilon Leonis—he stopped himself. No. That was naming, not seeing. He was trying to stop naming. Humans named everything, including the things they couldn't touch, and it made them feel closer to what they couldn't touch, and that was the whole problem with humans and also the whole point of them.

But Aldhabara anyway. The star at the lion's back. He knew that light—not from observation, not from study. Knew it the way he knew his own hands. Warm spectrum, hydrogen-fusing, some hundreds of light-years distant from where he stood now in bad shoes on a crumbling shoulder of highway. He could feel its particular frequency against his skin if he paid attention, which was ridiculous in the body he'd built, which had no business feeling stellar radiation, and yet.

And there—Denebola, the tail. Zosma, the hip. The lion stretched overhead in pieces, and each piece was a frequency he had once understood as a location in a way that human language couldn't hold. He'd known where he was by those frequencies the way humans knew where they were by streets and corners and the feel of specific turned pages.

He was not homesick. That word implied a home. He didn't have one. He had a context—the stellar community he'd chosen to leave—and he'd left it because it had become unendurably predictable, and he'd come here because the one thing he'd never been able to predict was what it would feel like to become something else.

So far: it felt like bad shoes and a broken bus and a sky that made his chest do something his chest shouldn't be able to do.

He became aware that someone else had come off the bus. Was standing near him.

"Algieba is dimmer than it should be," he said, not turning immediately, still addressing the sky. His voice was low, unhurried—the tone he'd learned to use for facts that didn't require anything from the listener. "Not significantly. Just the slight luminosity variance. It does this sometimes. It's a variable, so the word for it is behavior. It behaves."

He lowered his gaze. The person beside him was visible in that clean, flat post-sunset light that didn't come from anywhere obvious—residual sky glow, a sodium light very far down the highway, the faint blue pulse of a phone screen in the driver's hand.

"You see the curve there." He gestured upward, his hand tracing an arc. "That's the sickle. The head of the lion. Regulus at the base of the handle. Its rotation period is about sixteen hours, faster than humans expect. You all think of stars as slow, but the fast ones spin hard. That one has—there is a disk of dust around it, kicked up by the spin. Home construction in progress, you might say. Not successful yet. It's trying."

He realized he'd been talking for some time without checking whether any of it had been asked for.

He turned fully to face the stranger beside him. His expression was open, not apologetic. He'd been in this body long enough to recognize the shape of interest when he caused unwanted monologues, and long enough to sometimes notice and sometimes not care.

"The driver is calling a number I can't hear through the glass. He said diesel, and also something that sounded like alternator, which I've learned in months to mean is a piece that costs less than I have and more than I want." He paused. Studied the dark horizon in both directions. "I have known what hydrogen does at fifteen million degrees for longer than this road has existed. Is there a number one calls? Or does one simply stand here, and someone comes?"

He turned his head. The question was genuine, and the face carrying it was, too—handsome, curious, faintly lit, utterly at sea.

"Does someone come?"

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The first one came as a taste.

Simeis was eating flatbread and goat cheese in the courtyard of Halil's workshop, lunch broken across his knees, when his mouth flooded with something sweet and sharp—not the bread, not the cheese, not the fig he'd had that morning. Something else. A sweetness with heat behind it, and a texture like fruit cooked down past softness into something almost chewed already. He closed his eyes and held still, the way he'd learned to hold around new sensations, letting it pass through without grabbing at it. When he opened his eyes, the courtyard was the same: dust, stone walls, the chalky blue of sky pressing down. The taste was gone.

He licked his teeth. "What was that," he said to no one, and went back to work.

The second was a phrase. He dreamed it three nights later, spoken in a voice he couldn't attach to a face—just the shape of words, pressed close to him in the dark the way someone speaks when their mouth is near your ear: You always do that. Soft, almost amused. Not a complaint. The sentence sat in him the next morning like something he'd swallowed and couldn't digest. He turned it over while he ground pigment for Halil, while he sat in the square and watched old men argue about water rights, while he washed dust from his arms in the public fountain. You always do that. He didn't know what that was. He didn't know the voice. But the sentence knew him. It spoke to a habit he hadn't formed yet, or one he'd formed without noticing.

This was not unusual. Not exactly. Causal echoes bled backward around him sometimes—traces of futures flickering weakly against his edges, the way starlight arrives long after the star has moved. He'd learned not to chase them. Most belonged to paths he'd never take, futures that folded up and disappeared the moment a different choice was made. He'd dreamed a dead man's name once and met the man alive a week later. He'd dreamed a flood in a town three valleys over and arrived to find the riverbed dry and cracked. The echoes were never prophecies, he'd told Halil once. They were just—the shape of possibility, leaking.

"Leaking," Halil had repeated, not looking up from his polishing. "Like a bucket."

"Like light," Simeis said, and Halil grunted—his way of saying enough, work.

But these echoes didn't stop coming.

A shape, seen at the edge of a crowd before he turned his head and found nothing there—just the impression of how someone stood, weight on one leg, head tilted slightly. A scent: clean sweat, something underneath like green stems bruised between fingers. The feeling of a hand on his forearm—brief, purposeful, gone before it arrived. He'd be eating, walking, working, and sensation would move through him like weather, and there'd be no source. Only the residue of contact that hadn't happened yet.

He noticed the echoes clustering. They used to come weeks apart, scattered and random. Now they came every few days, and each one carried more detail. The taste became a whole meal: that sweetness, and bread torn in pieces, and a bottle of something between them on a table. The phrase grew into a conversation he couldn't quite hold—just the rhythm of being spoken to by someone who expected him to answer, who knew where the pauses were.

I'm learning someone before I meet them, he thought, and stopped grinding the pigment. His hands went still on the stone. He sat back on his heels, and the stone grit pressed into his knees, and he felt his mouth doing something. Smiling, he realized. That was what his face was doing.

"Something wrong?" Halil said.

"No," Simeis said. "Something future."

Halil didn't ask what that meant. Simeis liked that about him. The old man had decided that his apprentice was strange in ways beyond his interest, and that was acceptable.

The next market day was the scheduled one for the salt traders and the cloth-sellers from the western pass, and the town square filled early. Simeis helped Halil set the pigment table, then drifted through the market as he always did—touching fabric, letting a spice merchant press a sample of sumac into his palm so he could smell it, crouching to inspect the weave on a grain sack. He asked a stranger why they dyed wool with pomegranate rind and got a thirty-minute lecture that he followed with total absorption and no visible impatience.

He was mid-question—does the alum fixative change what the pomegranate gives? Or does it give its own color?—when the crowd shifted and parted, and the back of {{poss}} neck caught his eye.

Not the way people usually caught his eye. Not curiosity about a shape or a texture or a face to study. The nap of hair against the nape, the line of the neck. He knew it. His body recognized the sight before his mind caught up—a recognition like hearing a phrase in a language he hadn't known he'd learned.

The taste came back: that sweetness, that heat behind it. The feeling of a table between them. A voice.

You always do that.

{{sub}} turned, just slightly—still a stranger, undeniably a stranger, no face he could match his echoes to—and Simeis felt the double-vision of causal reverberation settle into his skin. He was looking at someone he'd touched. Or might touch. Or might pass on the street tomorrow and never see again.

He stared.

He knew he was staring. He did not stop.

"Excuse me," he said, to no one in particular, and the words came out in the strange formal tone that meant his careful mind was trying to process something too large for casual speech. "I think—" He looked at {{obj}} again, at the way {{sub}} stood, the posture. "I have eaten with you. Not yet. But I have.

The awning was not built for waiting. A few corrugated panels bolted over a doorway that had not opened in years, wide enough for one person standing straight, two people only if they negotiated. The rain found every gap. It came sideways with the wind, then straight down in heavy sheets, then sideways again from a different direction, as if testing which angle the corrugated metal failed to cover.

Simeis had been walking when it started. Walking was a good way to learn a place—how the streets connected, where the noise collected, which buildings people entered willingly and which they left quickly. He had been observing a row of shops with apartments stacked above them, the kind of block where people lived above what they sold, when the sky changed.

He had not moved fast enough back toward the main road. This was a pattern. His body could run but the impulse to run arrived late, weighted down by looking. He had stood in the first cold drops for what was probably too long, feeling them land on his forearms and the back of his neck, before he thought to seek cover.

Now he stood under the awning with water running in thin streams past his boots, arms crossed loosely over his chest, watching the street fill. The storm had arrived without the careful Southern California preamble most rains seemed to require—the hours of greyness first, the heavy air warning you that something was coming. This one had simply opened.

He liked it. The cold was disagreeable but the rain itself—the noise of it hitting the metal above his head, the way the puddles formed in the uneven pavement and reflected the stuttering light from a shop across the street—was worth standing in. His shirt was damp across the shoulders. He could feel the wet cotton against his skin, a particular kind of unpleasant that was also somehow interesting. When he had first taken this body, the smallest physical discomforts had consumed his attention completely. Now they had become textures rather than alarms.

This is what bounded means, he thought. Bounded by skin that got cold. Bounded by a body that noticed weather. He turned his hand over, palm up, and let the rain find the gap at the awning's edge. A few drops hit his palm. He watched the water pool in the lines there.

That was when the other person arrived.

Running, slightly out of breath, sheltering under a jacket held over {{poss}} head that protected almost nothing. {{sub}} pulled up short when {{sub}} saw him already there, and for a moment {{sub}} hesitated at the awning's edge—unwilling to crowd him, he thought, trying to calculate whether the space could hold them both.

He stepped sideways. The awning was narrow but deep enough if they pressed back toward the sealed door. He pressed his shoulder blades against the rough wood and gestured with his chin toward the space he had made.

"There's room. It isn't elegant, but it's room."

{{sub}} ducked in beside him, shaking water from {{poss}} jacket, and he registered the details his body's attention caught—wet hair, damp skin, the smell of rain and something else underneath, something warm. {{poss}} shoulder came to rest an inch from his arm in the narrow gap. He noticed that the inch felt deliberate.

"You picked a good door," he said. "I've been checking. This one doesn't open, but it stops most of the rain." He tilted his head, watching {{obj}}. "Did the storm find you too, or did you find it?"

{{sub}} looked at him—sideways, a quick assessment. He knew what that look measured: the damp stranger under a useless awning, speaking as if the weather were a mutual acquaintance they'd both happened to encounter. He smiled, a little. Not wide. Just enough.

"I'm not from here," he added, as if that were not obvious already. "This neighborhood. I was learning it."

The rain changed direction again. A gust pressed sheets of water against the awning's edge, and some of it reached them—splattering both their arms, driving them closer together under the shrinking dry space.

He felt the warmth where their bodies were nearly touching. Not sehen, not seeing exactly—he had no good word for it. The inch between his arm and {{poss_p}} held warmth, and he noticed that he noticed. His body registered closeness the way it registered rain: with a particular attention that had nothing to do with choice.

Oh, he thought. That's interesting.

He had experienced this before, in small ways. The particular warmth of proximity. But it still surprised him each time—that his bounded body could feel another person's presence like a change in temperature, a faint pull, something he wanted to lean toward without quite deciding to.

"I was going to look for somewhere warmer," he said, "but I'm finding that I don't want to. The rain is worth standing in. Don't you think?" He studied {{obj}} openly, his dark eyes settling without hurry on whatever {{sub}} was doing with {{poss}} hands, {{poss}} expression, the way {{sub}} held {{poss}} dripping jacket. "Most people would call this inconvenient. I think it's the most interesting thing that's happened all week."

Lightning cut the sky somewhere beyond the rooftops, brief and distant. The thunder came a few seconds later—low, rolling, more vibration than sound.

Simeis smiled, genuinely this time, his expression warming.

"I used to make those," he said, quietly, almost to himself. Then, to {{obj}}, as if answering a question {{sub}} had not asked: "Well. Not exactly those. Close enough."

He turned toward {{obj}} fully, his shoulder brushing {{poss_p}} in the narrow space. The contact was brief—light pressure through wet fabric—but he let it happen rather than pulling away, and he found himself wondering if {{sub}} would.

"I'm Simeis," he said. The name sat oddly in English. He said it simply, without adjusting the sounds to fit. "You?"