Conics Unfortunately: 8

Ellipse found the kitchen on the third floor, but only after stumbling upon the captain’s room, the tyran’s room, a nook stuffed with old gaming consoles and board games, and the engine maintenance room. A first glance, the kitchen looked relatively like those on the Fold Monitor. Closer inspection, however, showed that every single hot surface had latches, and that the cutting boards had lids with hand-holes.

It was also clean in a new-house sort of way; everything sparkled, and the metal sink glimmered with disuse. Scrunching her nose, Ellipse recited passages of Universal Biology under her breath and began hunting for a pantry.

“Sirens are carnivores,” she muttered, cracking open a cupboard. The kitchen had no large, obvious door or nook that shouted look-I-am-a-pantry. “Their digestive tracts are designed for breaking down proteins and large nitrogen-heavy compounds. They can eat small amounts of what we would consider plant matter, but do not get energy from it, and large amounts of carbohydrates or fiber will clog their systems.”

Ellipse scowled and pulled open a drawer near the oven. Ovens were universal in the same way that shrugging and corrective lenses were—humans had made them exactly the way everyone else had. “Tyran are primarily insectivores, as they possess the ability to digest chitin and like substances,” she continued. She pushed off of the floor and hovered by a cabinet, wondering if there was a spice cabinet anywhere. No point in cooking if nothing would taste good. “Tyran do enjoy sugars and carbohydrates, but require less of them than do earthlings. The percentage of overweight tyran has increased since earthlings joined the ranks of the intergalactic travelers.”

That particular cabinet held, of all things, a vast collection of dice. Ellipse did not want to think about how anyone would go about playing a dice game in space. She let out a growl and opened the next cabinet, only to find mugs upon mugs upon mugs. “Oh my hecking gosh. How many people live on this ship that they need four shelves full of mugs? None of them even look used!”

She moved on, cracking open metal cupboard after metal cupboard, finding nothing of the edible variety. She could not even locate an icebox. When desperation forced her to open the oven, she came face to face with a pan of brown-tinged water toeing the line between calm and boiling.

Ellipse groaned. “Fertilizer. Of course. The captain is a specifus.” She eased the oven shut and slumped against the door, pressing her cheek against the warm metal and pretending that her legs were not floating out behind her. Floating ruined the pathetic-hungry-soul look.

Not that anyone was around to see her acting pathetic. After a moment of moping, Ellipse peeled herself off the oven door and sighed. Her stomach gave an angry whine, and she pushed herself towards the hallway.

And who should appear just as she reached the entryway? Anyone who guessed Focci was wrong. It was not the tyran either, which Ellipse found upsetting. It would have been convenient to run into someone with a diet so much like hers. Instead, she barrelled head-first into a writhing mass of black-green vines and stiff, thick leaves. At least she would not get a concussion.

The plant shoved her away, and Ellipse tumbled back into the kitchen. “Hey hey,” she mumbled. “That was rude.”

Specifus were an unusual species. They were the only known intelligent species to use both photosynthesis and chemosynthesis, and each one grew into a unique shape, formed by the way light fell across them during infancy. They could have any number of limbs, though most grew between two and six. This one had four, all sprouting from its upper half. Its root system had twisted together into a white, hairy snake tail, a sign that this particular individual had grown up in space. The specifus’s three optic holes sat in a straight line down the central vine, and the two bioluminescent spots on either side flashed in a rapidfire pattern.

Ellipse reached into her pockets, grumbling about zero-g and species without auditory perception. She hit the cabinets on the far wall and stretched a hand backwards to steady herself. Then, squinting at the specifus, she pulled out a box smothered in LEDs and buttons and readied a response.

“Wrecktrix said you would be in the computer room,” the plant flashed. They tacked three quick blinks to the end of each verb—a signal of annoyance.

“Sorry sorry,” Ellipse flashed back. “I was there for a while.”

The specifus stretched their vines to the entryway and pulled into the kitchen, aiming for the oven. “Why did you leave? Were you not assigned a task in return for passage?”

Had the specifus never heard of hunger? Hecking photosynthesizers. “Focci and Wrecktrix must eat at some point,” Ellipse pointed out. “I have to eat too.” The specifus word for ‘eat’ nearly messed up Ellipse’s rhythm; it was an unnatural triplet born from siren music and superimposed over the even time of every specifus language.

She watched as the alien pulled open the oven and curled their tail toward the water pan.

“Are you Captain Maj?” Ellipse asked.

The plant paused. “No,” they blinked. “I am Min. Maj is my parent.” Their roots dipped into the water pan, and an unbidden passage about osmosis ran across Ellipse’s mind. “What do earthlings eat?”

“Almost anything a tyran can eat.” Ellipse bit her lip. “Except methanol and the larger alcohols, and also that funny-looking purple bean pod.”

Still draining water out of the pan, the specifus shrugged, lifting up all four vine-arms. “Wrecktrix and Focci keep their food in the cargo bay. I would look there.”

And so Ellipse left, feeling somehow unsettled by the way Min watched her while still soaking up the fertilizer water. She knew the specifus had their own body language regarding staring, but it was still uncomfortable.

The kitchen opened into a narrow hallway, and the ladder down rested less than a meter away. Flinging herself down to the second floor, Ellipse wondered if the cargo bay had a second kitchen. That would explain the cleanliness, after all. As she glided through a short hallway built from lime green plastic, she caught a glimpse of the command room, where another specifus tapped away at a massive keyboard and sipped from a tall black mug.

That hallway led into an open space built of mismatched colored panels, and from there, Ellipse dove down to the first floor.

“Focci!” she sang, cupping a hand to her mouth. “How do I get to the cargo bay?”

A beat of silence passed and then: “Why?”

“I am starving! Min told me you have food down there!”

A vague, scratchy melody drifted up through the floor, and Ellipse caught a phrase about kelp and earthlings, but then Focci raised his voice again. “You took off an extra note in Min’s name. Leave in the subdominant from the root word. Also there should be a gap in the floor near my room.” He muttered something else, but it was directed at Wrecktrix, and so Ellipse ignored it.

There really was a gaping hole in the floor by Focci’s room, but it lay tucked inside a corner where the straight panels of the walls and floor met the Conics’ curved metal frame, invisible to anyone not looking for it. Ellipse slipped through and found herself inside a sparsely lit cavern filled with an eclectic collection of crates. Focci whistled a hello, and the tyran clacked his beak at her, and Ellipse floated towards them and the little triangle of light they kept on near the bay doors.

As she drew near, she noticed a small earthling style kitchenette composed of a fifties-revival refrigerator and microwave set and a bathroom sink-vanity combination that might have come out of the Lowe’s catalogue. That did not explain why the kitchen upstairs was so clean. A kitchenette was not enough for real cooking.

“Do you want kelp?” Focci asked. He held a white chess piece in one hand and a slab of something pink and limp in the other. Ellipse hoped to the hecking sun that was not raw fish.

“Sure.” She looked to the tyran, and he groped the air and then pushed a sleeve of thin mints at her. “Thanks?”

“Blue crate over there,” Focci said, and then he plunked the chess piece on the board floating between him and the tyran.

Ellipse ripped open the thin mints and drifted to the crates and opened her mouth to speak in one of the tyran languages. “How do I say your name?” she asked. Focci sang it like the word for directrix with the first four notes chopped off, but that could mean removing either the first or last syllable of the common tyran word.

Wrecktrix took off both. Of course. Nothing was allowed to go the way Ellipse predicted.

As she rooted through the nearest blue crate, the magnetic clink of chess pieces echoed through the cargo bay, and the tyran began humming. She stopped searching, prepared to ask for quiet on Focci’s behalf, but when the melody hit, she realized she would not need to ask. Focci had even begun to sing along, crystal clear tone betraying his enjoyment of the poetry.

She pulled out a thin package of Sirena kelp and used it to fan the blush off her face. It was flattering to hear people sing that song, really. If only Andra-Media had paid her for composing it.