Just say yes, a little voice inside Sissix begged. Say yes, Sissix, she’s right—“Rosemary… I want to say yes. I do.” She thought back to the shy new clerk who had come aboard less than a standard ago. Who was this woman with the serious eyes, the woman who spoke her mind so bravely? What had she discovered out here in the open? Sissix took a breath. “But I don’t want to hurt you. Coupling’s different for us, I think. I’m flattered that you want to give me something I need, but I don’t know if I can give you what you need.”
Rosemary gave a little smirk, the same kind Jenks gave Kizzy when she’d said something absurd. “Sissix, I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m not in love with you. I like you. I like who you are and how you are, and I like the way your feathers fall across the curve of your head. I understand that you don’t limit yourself to one person. I understand that our notions of family are different, and that they probably won’t fit together down the road. But I’d like to be part of your notion for a while, all the same.”
Curiosity. Now there was a concept Sissix understood. “I think I’d like that, too,” Sissix said. The warning voice within her was dying, but it wasn’t about to go out without a fight. “But there are things you need to understand.”
“All right,” Rosemary said. There was a brightness in her eyes, a hopefulness. Sissix found herself melting. This could be a very lovely thing.
“Family members, as I’m sure you noticed, aren’t just about sex. We cuddle and touch and hold each other all the time. If coupling is too much to ask, if it were to—” What was the proper way to say overload your crazy mammal brain? “—to make you feel uncomfortable, or to make you want more from me than I can give you, I would also be okay with just being close. Like you saw with my family. Even that would be enough.” It’d be a big improvement from the current status quo, for sure.
Rosemary nodded. “I’ll keep that option in mind. But I don’t think there will be a problem.”
“And we don’t have to act that way around the others, if that would make you more comfortable. We don’t even have to tell them.” Sissix didn’t care about the others finding out, but if Rosemary could make cultural concessions out of kindness, she could return the favor.
Rosemary considered this, and nodded. “I think that might be better, at least to start,” she said.
Sissix paused. The next thing, she knew, was not an idea most Humans took to with ease. “If we were planetside, and I met other Aandrisks—”
“I wouldn’t mind you going to a tet,” Rosemary said. “Just don’t expect me to come along.”
“It wouldn’t be because they were more important than you,” Sissix said quickly. “Or because I liked being with Aandrisks better—”
“Sissix,” Rosemary said. She squeezed Sissix’s hand, and did something that no one had ever done before. She raised Sissix’s fingers to her mouth and pressed her lips against the knuckles, just once, letting them linger for a moment. Sissix had been given kisses before, from Kizzy and Jenks and Ashby—fast, dry brushes against her cheek. This was different. It was slower, softer. It was an odd feeling, a soft feeling. She liked it. Rosemary pulled her lips back and smiled. “I get it.”
Stars, she really did.
“There’s one more thing,” Sissix said. She noticed that her voice had sunk lower. Something else was piloting her brain now, the part of her who was no stranger to tets and couplings, the part of her who was shouting with joy that finally, at last, someone in her family understood. She met Rosemary’s eyes and gave an embarrassed laugh. “I’ve never coupled with a Human.”
Rosemary grinned. “That’s good,” she said. She leaned in, running a smooth fingertip along the length of one of Sissix’s feathers. “I’d hate for you to have an unfair advantage.”
Day 45, GC Standard 307
OCTOBER 25
“So,” Ashby said. “Can you fix it?”
Jenks inspected the exposed insides of Ashby’s scrib with the attention of a surgeon. “I can tweak it,” he said. “But it won’t be a permanent fix. You need a new pixel array. Easy enough for me to hook up, but I don’t have one on hand.”
“But you can get it to stop hopping between feeds?”
“Yeah. The picture might start to degrade after a couple tendays, but it won’t—Wait. Uh oh.” Jenks paused. “You hear that?”
Ashby listened. Raised voices down the hall, coming from the algae bay. He sighed. “Not again.”
Jenks rolled his eyes. “I swear, they’d save so much time if one of them just spaced the other already.”
They followed the voices, which was easy enough to do. Pieces of the argument made their way to his ears as they got closer.
“—absolutely incompetent—” That was Corbin.
“—weren’t such a pain in the ass—” Sissix.
“—no regard for my work here—”
“—just communicate like a fucking functional adult, then maybe—”
“I did communicate, it’s just that your thick lizard ears won’t—” Dammit, Corbin! Ashby quickened his step.
“Hisk! Ahsshek tes hska essh—”
“Oh, yes, hiss all you want, it still doesn’t change the fact that I’m—”
“Enough,” Ashby said, entering into the room. Jenks hung back in the doorway, far away enough to be polite, but close enough to get a good view.
“Ashby,” Sissix said, feathers on end. “You tell this pompous, speciest asshole that—”
“I said that’s enough.” Ashby glared at them both. “Now, I want to know what this is all about.” Corbin and Sissix began yelling in tandem. Ashby put up his hands. “One at a time.”
“Your pilot,” Corbin said, in the same tone that an angry father might say your child to his partner, “pushed the induction lines past capacity. It put too much strain on one of my pressure caps, and now look.” Ashby looked to the fuel distributor. He couldn’t see the problem, but the green goo in a small number of tubes was lying still.
“I had no idea that he had swapped out the cap for a lesser model.” Sissix shot Corbin a murderous look. “And I still don’t understand why he did it at all.”
“I swapped it out because it was the only part I had on hand. In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t had any market stops in a while. It was either make do with a lesser model or replace the entire apparatus. Which is what I’ll have to do anyway, thanks to you.”
“Yes, it’s my fault, because you actually bothered to tell me about any of this. Oh, no, wait, you didn’t.”
“I brought this up in the kitchen day before yesterday.”
“You weren’t talking to me! You were bitching about your lab to Dr. Chef! How the fuck was I supposed to know that it had anything to do with my ability to fly the—”
“In other words, you chose to ignore me. Perhaps if you’d pay a little more attention to the needs of others instead of acting so self-involved, then—”
“Stop,” Ashby said. He took a deep breath. “Let me make sure I’m hearing this correctly. This argument, which we could hear coming down the stairs, is all because of a minor incident involving a damaged pressure cap.”