Every few days, Rove made an inspection. Dr. Rat fawned on him, and so did the dozen other rat-creature scientists and mathematicians who were in and out of the lab at any given time. Kay had already worked out that hierarchy amongst them was something of all-consuming importance as far as they were concerned. Dr. Rat was very definitely in charge, and didn’t let any of them forget it, but below him there were constant confrontations and escalations as various underlings tried to pull rank on their fellows. It was almost entirely done with body language. Kay imagined that there might be a scent element to it as well, but they were all so universally pungent, and her poor human nose was incapable of picking up any of the subtext. For a long while she had decided the rat-creatures just stank, but then she’d caught one of the more junior scientists applying a reeking cologne and realized they were all “dressing for success” in the nose department. They were drenching themselves with the olfactory equivalent of the elaborately impractical clothes their superiors wore.

She, as a giant alien from a parallel Earth, was excused from having to play games. She intimidated them because she had unwittingly been born with the biggest signifier of superiority in their world: taking up a huge amount of space. They practically tied themselves into knots around her, trying to suppress their own instinct to cower and defer. Only Dr. Rat was comfortable enough in his post to get past it, and he was more than happy to poke her and shoo her out of the way when he wanted to look over her figures. He ignored the human-style keyboard and screen, instead plugging his techno-monocle into her terminal and viewing things there.

She had seen a lot of their kind, by now. Not just in the lab, either. She had made some advances in the field of counter-surveillance, in fact, and had smuggled in a steady stream of images from the world below the airship. She’d seen rooms of ratlings, crop-eared and lop-tailed, crammed in like battery hens. They’d seemed intent on whatever their goggles showed them, double-thumbed hands busy with their spindly interfaces. These were classrooms, she’d understood at last. This packed throng was learning, because learning gave you status and a chance at a job that might give you space for a family, for a brood of your own. These were the lucky ones. She had been looking at a rat-creature private school for the offspring of the affluent middle class, or whatever their equivalent was. The poorer echelons—meaning the vast majority of their gridlocked global civilization—lived and died without education or prospects, choking on fumes and pollution, victims of violence caused by overpopulation and stress, starving, suffocating…