“I don’t know. It’s not in their signatures.” He checked with the ship. “They both came via Pfaff, but they haven’t made their origins public.”
“Wherever it is, remind me not to visit.” She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself. “Do we have to wait here for the verdict? It could be a while. And they will make it public.”
“What did you have in mind? I don’t think I could face the Blue Room.”
“How about my cabin?”
Tchicaya laughed. “You have no idea how tempting that sounds, right now.”
“That’s how it was meant to sound.” Rasmah took his hand; she hadn’t been joking. “These bodies are very fast learners, especially when they have memories of a prior attraction.”
Tchicaya said, “I thought we’d put an end to all that.”
“This is what’s known as persistence.” She faced him squarely. “Whoever it is you’re still hung up about, I promise you I’ll make an impression that will erase all memories of the competition.” She smiled at her own hyperbole. “Or I can try, if you’re willing to make the same effort.”
Tchicaya was tongue-tied. He liked everything about her, but some deeply ingrained part of him still felt as if it was a matter of principle to back away.
He said, “I’m seven times your age. I’ve had thirty-one children. I have sixth-generation descendants older than you.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re a battered old creature, on the verge of slipping out of sentience into senility. But I think I can drag you back from the brink.” She leaned closer; the scent of her body was beginning to regain significance for him. “If you have scars, I’ll kiss them away.”
“I want to keep my scars.”
“That’s all right. I can’t actually erase them.”
“You really are sweet, but you hardly know me.”
Rasmah groaned. “Stop dividing everything by four thousand years. Your age is not the natural unit of time, by which all else must be measured.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth; Tchicaya did not pull away.
She said, “How was that?”
Tchicaya gave her his best Quinean wine-judge frown. “You’re better than Yann. I think you’ve done this before.”
“I should hope so. I suppose you waited a millennium to lose your virginity?”
“No, it just felt that way.”
Rasmah stepped back, then reached out and took both his hands. “Come and wait with me for the vote. We can’t do anything you don’t want to do; it’s biologically impossible.”
“That’s what they tell you as a child. But it’s more complicated than that.”
“Only if you make it complicated.” She tugged on his arms. “I do have some pride. I’m not going to beg you. I’m not even going to threaten you, and say this is your last chance. But I don’t believe we’re wrong for each other, and I don’t believe you’re sure that we are.”
“I’m not,” he conceded.
“And didn’t you just deliver a speech about the folly of making decisions without sufficient information?”
“Yes.”
She smiled triumphantly. He wasn’t going to argue his way out of this. Logic had nothing to do with it; he simply had to make up his mind what he wanted. One instinct told him that he should turn her down, because it was a decision he’d made so many times before that it seemed like a betrayal of himself to do otherwise. And another told him that if he didn’t change, there was no point living even one more century.
Tchicaya said, “You’re right. Let’s put an end to our ignorance.”
They went to Rasmah’s cabin and lay on the bed together, still dressed, talking, occasionally kissing. Tchicaya knew his Mediator would make the vote known to him instantly, but he couldn’t help but remain distracted. He’d done everything in his power to see that the Preservationists heard the whole case for the far side, but he couldn’t rest until he knew whether or not they’d been persuaded.
Almost two hours after they’d spoken to the gathering, the news came through: the moratorium had been approved. No percentages had been released, but the Preservationists had agreed unanimously before beginning their debate that the majority decision would be binding.
Tchicaya watched Rasmah’s face as the information registered. “We did it,” she said.
He nodded. “And Tarek. And Sophus.”
“Yeah. More them than us. But we can still celebrate.” She kissed him.
“Can we?” Tchicaya wasn’t being coy; he couldn’t tell by mere introspection.
“I’m positive.”
As they undressed each other, Tchicaya felt a rush of happiness, beyond sex, beyond his affection for her. Whatever hold he’d imagined Mariama had over him, it was finally dissolving. Their conspiracy over the power plant might have ended any chance that he could be truly at ease with her, but that hadn’t poisoned everything he’d admired in her. He hadn’t forfeited the right to be with someone who had the same strength, the same ideals as she’d once had.
Rasmah stroked the scar on his leg. “Do you want to tell me about this?”
“Not yet. It’s too long a story.”
She smiled. “Good. I didn’t really want to hear it right now.” She moved her hand higher. “Oh, look what we made! I knew it would be beautiful. And I think I have something that would fit here, almost perfectly. And here. And maybe even…here.”
Tchicaya gritted his teeth, but he didn’t stop her moving her fingers over him, inside him. There was no more vulnerable feeling than being touched in a place that had not existed before, a place you’d never seen or touched yourself. He lay still, and allowed her to make him aware of the shape, the sensitivity, the response of each surface.
He took her by the shoulders and kissed her, then did the same for her, mapping the other half of the geometry their bodies had invented. He was four thousand years old, but he was never tired of this, never jaded. Nature had never had much imagination, but people had always found new ways to connect.
Chapter 13
Tchicaya’s Mediator woke him. It had just received a messenger from Branco, and judged it urgent enough to break him out of sleep.
He let the messenger run. He didn’t want to close his eyes and risk drifting off again as he watched, so he hallucinated Branco standing in the darkened cabin beside the bed.
“This had better be important,” Tchicaya said.
“I’m very sorry to disturb you,” the messenger whispered. It was much more polite than Branco himself. “But this is something you’ll want to hear. I’m only telling a handful of people. People I trust.”
“I’m flattered.”
The messenger gave him a look that suggested it was not immune to irony. “Someone has been trying to take control of the ship. I don’t know who. The proximate, physical source of the attack was a spare communications link for external instruments, sitting in a storage area that hundreds of people have had access to.
“There was no chance of the attack succeeding. Whoever did this must be awfully naive about some of the technology they’re dealing with.” Tchicaya felt a frisson of recognition; hadn’t Tarek imagined that Yann could “corrupt” the ship’s network, just by running on one of its Qusps? “But it suggests a combination of foolishness and desperation that might not stop with this. So I’m telling a few reasonably level-headed members of both factions: you’d better find out who these idiots are, and keep them from going any further. Set your own houses in order, or you might all find yourselves walking the airlock.”
The messenger bowed, and vanished. Tchicaya blinked into the darkness. “Walking the airlock” was a quaint way of putting it, but he didn’t think Branco was bluffing. If factional squabbling reached the point where the Rindler itself was at risk, Tchicaya didn’t doubt that the ship’s builders would evict the squatters, one way or another.