"Mhm! I really like coming here." She goes back to putting the books away. "Sometimes I really miss working at a nursing home. Some of the people where I was didn't really get visitors, so it was nice for them to be able to pretend that the cleaner was a visitor. And it's nice to go around visiting people all day, because most people are pretty great. But you don't really get to do that as much when you're cleaning normal apartments. Which makes sense, of course, people shouldn't have to talk to strangers just because they want to pay those strangers to clean things. But I do really like getting to visit you."

"I'm—glad you like it. I feel similarly."

She continues to regularly clean his apartment for a while longer. It continues to be nice.

Partway through summer, Kairda's cousin and his wife start talking about getting their own space, now that her cousin has a decent job and the baby isn't so small. She doesn't want to be in the way. She also really doesn't want to move to another urban center - bad enough that she's already polluted three cities and a tiny town in the arctic. She can't stop being polluted, and she doesn't want to drag Zada away from the educational opportunities the cities afford, but it's evil to keep living like this without so much as an attempt to limit the scope of the disaster. She's OK with being evil, given the alternative, but she really wishes she weren't.

It occurs to her that there is a place that isn't a major urban center, but which does provide a lot of space-related opportunities. It further occurs to her that the competition for long-term cleaning posts on the primary Voan moon base can't be that steep - space is great, but there are only so many people who are willing to put up with permaspring.

She lands a job on the moon. She tells her family, notifies her primary boss, and drafts a post to inform the followers of her writing blog. She forgets to tell Madral.

He's a little concerned when she suddenly vanishes, but there's not really much he can do about it. If something came up in her life, a move or a new job opportunity or a family emergency of some sort, it would be entirely reasonable of her not to broadcast it to all the people whose houses she has been known to clean on occasion.

A year passes. Kairda hangs out on the moon for a couple seasons, secret red niece in tow. Zada is incredibly studious throughout, and they come back in winter so that Zada can have her first spring on Amenta. It isn't a particularly pleasant time for anyone, and Kairda determines that the only way to make her niece feel OK about herself is to get her into one of the red-cleaning batches in recently-founded Miolee. She has to convince her nephew to pitch in, plus abandon her writing and her social life to work as many hours as possible of the highest-paying jobs she can snag, but after more than a season of wringing every possible second out of the clock, she pulls together enough money to get Zada into decontam.

She then takes three decontamination showers back to back, quits all her jobs, and burns out completely. She doesn't really remember that week. She ends up working a single delivery job, trying to remember how to stop being quite so tired and lonely all the time. She's not very good at it, but she's OK at faking.

One day, entirely coincidentally, she's tasked with delivering materials to someone named Madral. There are probably lots of Madrals in the world. Most of them are probably not as cool as the one she used to know, but they're probably still pretty cool, so she still smiles when she knocks on the door. It's, like, seventy-five percent forced this time.

He opens the door, with that same apologetic face from the very first time they met.

Except this time, as soon as he sees her, he blinks and then smiles.

"Kairda! What a marvellous coincidence! How have you been?"

Her brain processes the face before the words. He has such a good smile. Way better than her smile, she's pretty sure, which immediately melts in the face of something that deviates from the memorized script she's been reciting. She hasn't felt this relieved to see someone in months, and he's not even really her friend, he's just a really, really nice customer she had once. Stars, but she leads a pathetic existence.

Then her brain processes the words, and she laughs - half with the absurdity of how terribly she's been doing, and half with delight that he remembers her name.

"Wow. I, um, have been a lot of things? Uh, I was traveling some, and I spent some time working as a gardener, and I guess I was on the moon for a bit - oh no, I probably forgot to tell you I was going to the moon, my bad, there was this whole thing - I should tell you about it, but I should also give you this package you ordered, probably -"

He laughs and holds his hand out for the package. "Do you have time to come in for a cup of tea?"

She checks her everything. She's already behind, she super definitely doesn't have time.

"Yeah! Of course! Not a ton of time, but yeah, definitely!"

He sets the package on a side table and beckons her in with a wave of his hand, still smiling in an incredulously delighted sort of way.

"I'll put the kettle on. Did you say moon—?"

"Yeah!" Oh good, this part is way easier to explain than the rest of what she's been doing. She can handle this. "Irdeza, the one with the big Voan base on it? Uh, my cousins wanted to have the apartment to themselves, so I had to move out. My niece has been obsessed with space since she was barely one, and I figured since we were moving anyway, it'd be really cool to live on the moon for a bit, you know?"

She laughs weakly, feeling like this is a really flimsy explanation for suddenly moving to the moon. She did suddenly move to the arctic that one time, though, so clearly she's the sort of person who does that sometimes.

"I admire the audacity of moving to the Irdeza base simply because you need to move somewhere and a moon sounds interesting," he comments as he sets up the kettle.

She has a hard time believing that any of her recent actions have been particularly admirable, especially leaving for the moon for no immediately apparent reason. If he didn't sound so sincere, she might suspect that he was making fun of her, but she's pretty sure he isn't.

"Thank you. It was nice! Zada absolutely loved it there, I'm really glad we went. I wish I'd remembered to tell you I was going, though. I hope it wasn't too much of an inconvenience?"

"I assumed something had come up, although I admit 'moved to a separate celestial body' was not in my list of hypotheses. My apartment got a little messier, but I managed."

"I'm glad."

Frick, she's gonna have to leave this apartment as soon as the tea is done, then at least try to finish the rest of her orders. And then she'll be back to her incredibly dull life, which currently lacks anything else even half as pleasant as this sort of casual conversation. There has to be a way to prevent this. 

"How have you been recently? Working on any new projects?"

"Old projects, in a sense. Someone was impressed with my work on the calculating engine and wanted me to build a better one, something closer to a true mechanical computer. I'm enjoying it immensely."

"I'm glad." Oh wait, no, she already said that. Different words, Kairda. She's pretty sure she knows lots of them.

"What's this one capable of? The original calculating engine could only handle basic arithmetic, right? Is it possible to do anything more complex without introducing electricity?"

She doesn't know anything about computers and isn't at all sure she's going to be able to understand any explanation he offers, but as long as she's saying things that aren't totally out of line with the flow of the conversation, maybe she'll have time to come up with something. 

"In theory, clockwork can do anything electricity can do, although not nearly as quickly. In practice, speed is a fairly serious limitation. No one will be playing Alarmadillo on a clockwork everything anytime soon. But I've managed several fancy tricks that improve on the original design in both speed and scope."

"Cool! I'd love to see it sometime and hear more about how it works."

She tries to think of something more interesting or elaborate to say about the clockwork computer, something that more clearly conveys that she is, in fact, impressed that so much can be accomplished given the limitations he's working with. She fails to come up with anything. And it's not like she can talk about her life; all the interesting things it once contained have been cut out over the course of the past couple seasons. 

Talking is so much harder than she remembers. 

"Are you still making custom tea blends?"

"Yes. I think I have a new one you'll like, if I'm remembering your preferences correctly—you seemed to enjoy my fruit teas."

He remembers what kind of tea he used to give her. She remembers all kinds of details like that about most of her past customers, but she's not used to people remembering that many details about her. It's nice. 

"Yeah, that's right! I've missed it."

This isn't a lie, she reasons, because she really did miss receiving tea. The fact that she has a hard time producing opinions on tea itself is a minor technicality.

He selects an appropriate tea. "Well, here we are again. I'm sure the tea has missed you as well."

She laughs weakly and ducks her head. It sounds like he wouldn't mind seeing her again. Now if she can just think of a reason for that to happen.

Think. Think. Augh.

Madral smiles awkwardly. He can't think of anything else to say. How does normal conversation work? What is friendship and how do you get it and by what signs do you identify its presence?

She lets the silence continue for several seconds. At that point there's really no way to escape the awkwardness. They're going to be stuck like this until one of them thinks of something, and she has no reason to believe that Madral is currently trying to think of an excuse for her to come back to his house, so if she doesn't think of something soon, then she's just not going to get to come back.

This would be terrible. 

She stares at the wall, nervously balls one hand into a fist so tight it hurts, and does her absolute best to ignore the lurching in her stomach. "I'm trying really hard to think of an excuse to ask to come back here after my shift, because you're really great and I'd really like to spend more time with you, but I'm sort of worried that I'm not going to think of anything before the tea is done."