Chapter 5 – Deep Space Spectres
My apparent need to mope around and be a sad sack aside, life with an abayan creche was pretty decent, if a little weird, because it didn't feel like I lived with a creche.
It mostly felt like I lived with Araxis for those first few days, like it was just the two of us on the ship, rattling around on our own.
I was just contemplating my next move, leaning against the wall next to the arched door into the kitchen and staring into space, when Araxis popped his head into the dining room. "Sashen," he started –
"Am I allowed to have this?" I asked, tapping my finger on the massive clay mug I was drinking my breakfast soup from.
The skin around his eyes tightened, and he stepped into the dining room. "Yes, of course. You can help yourself. Do not feel that you need to restrict yourself to dasha – our food stores are ample. Eat what you wish."
I studied him, uncertain. That still seemed a little too good to be true. But what else was I going to do, trade them for some ration blocks? I did have 87 credits. I could transfer those over when we arrived in the Thenat cluster. It wasn't like I'd be needing them after that.
Privately, I resolved to stick to soup. In my experience, people often made offers they didn't really mean. Everything had a cost.
"I wanted to find you to let you know that we are…
delayed in our departure." In the unsteady light of the dining room, Araxis looked washed out.
His features were tight with something I couldn't name.
Stress? Guilt? "Evreni and I have charted the course for the day, but there is a problem with one of the forward thermoregulator panels.
We can fix it, but it will take the day. "
Well, I had fourteen days. That was fine. "Sure," I said, sipping on my soup as I watched him through the curl of steam.
Araxis hovered. I saw his hands flex by his sides, and then he tucked them behind his back. He was in a jumpsuit this morning, dark and a little worn at the collar and cuffs. "We had agreed to begin lessons today," he added, hesitant. "I suspect I will be involved all day with the repairs."
"Oh." That was why he'd come to see me. Maybe my bad temper had put him off, and who could really blame him?
I'd had some time to think about it this morning, and I wasn't pleased with how I'd conducted myself.
I didn't like to tell people about Seraphim because whenever I thought about it for too long, my heart started to flutter and I had a hard time breathing, and suddenly all the things I'd left behind felt close, like ghosts hovering just beyond the edge of what I could see.
So what if aliens had decided I was one of their genders?
It didn't matter. And if they, if Araxis, thought my gender was always raring to go, I mean.
Was he wrong? He'd watched me at the den for a week.
I'd asked him to the back rooms. It wasn't like I could get insulted over the truth.
And why was it insulting or upsetting anyway?
Because I still thought I should be at least a little ashamed that I was, as he'd said, voracious?
Here I was, getting a free ride with an open kitchen that didn't track how much every item cost, I had a massive bed to myself, and now I got the day off from the one thing I was doing that was anything remotely like 'work.'
Although I suspected giving Araxis private lessons wouldn't feel like work.
"Can I help with the panel?" I asked, then. Maybe he could put me to work in a different way.
Something complicated flickered across his features, before Araxis shook his head. "No, we will be fine. If we do need assistance, I will find you. You should take the day to rest and… relax."
I snorted, a slow and incredulous smile curving my mouth. "I can't remember the last time I had a day off," I admitted. "I won't know what to do with myself."
And while it was true that I couldn't remember when I'd had time off last, I did know what I was going to do with myself.
I was going to read every scrap of information I had on my wristband about abaya.
I was going to fucking study it. The ship wasn't connected to the datasphere, but I had (thankfully) come prepared and I could go full deep dive if I didn't have an audience.
Araxis's lips twitched, like he was fighting a smile of his own.
"If you require anything, I should not be difficult to find.
And you can send me a ping; we have local frequencies active.
" He flicked his fingers at his wristband, and my own shivered against the inside of my wrist, just against my pulse point.
I pulled up his contact card and added it to my roster, flipping back my own data as well.
"I mean it: tell me if you need help," I insisted as Araxis turned to leave, his back a dark smudge in the dim doorway.
"Yes, we will message if there are any tight spaces to be filled." His tone was bone dry, but I could still hear the amusement in it, so he left me cackling in the dining room by myself.
I drank my soup and cleaned up after myself. I was tempted to start poking my head in the various dark rooms on the second level, and I was curious to see what was behind all of the closed doors – but some of them opened to bedrooms, so there was no way I was going to start exploring willy-nilly.
So I went to my room (my room!) and sprawled out on the bed, my menu of downloaded files hovering above my wrist like a tantalizing feast. I even forced myself to start with the information I'd downloaded about the Tournament and the initial schedule that had been attached to my congratulations message, because that was what I wanted to think about the least, which meant it was where I had to start or else I'd never be able to force myself back.
The first twelve days, the conglomerate documents informed me, were for secondary filming, which essentially meant that all of the participants were locked inside the shared housing complex to train, do interviews, and look menacingly at one another while bookies and gamblers followed the ever-changing odds when the daily compilation was sent out in a burst across galactic broadcast. After that, the Tournament began, and I didn't like to think about that part so I stopped reading anything after Day Twelve.
I even opened my contract once to do a quick skim, but my eyes glazed over immediately.
I'd already signed, so what did it really matter anyway?
Instead, I spent the rest of the morning playing around in all of my files about abaya – admittedly, not nearly as much information as I usually liked to have on hand about an alien culture.
There wasn't anything at all about their genders; there was barely anything about their government.
I tried to find anything about Creche Thiel to see if I could understand why Araxis had been so worried about that other ship, but their name didn't come up once.
Not that many creches did. In all the articles I'd hastily downloaded, only a handful of important houses were mentioned – and even then, it was in passing.
Trade delegates. Regulatory changes. Once, memorably, a duel of some sort over someone's honour at a museum opening, which had ended with no injuries and nothing that even counted as interesting gossip.
What did it say about a culture that could make duelling to defend honour boring?
Whatever had made Araxis nervous, whatever had made Creche Thiel hide their shuttle away, wasn't something I was going to find on a news site.
Abaya didn't seem to make it into the news very often, or into informative articles or encyclopedia entries.
Their territory was far away from the rest of Primus, and it was clear that they were, despite their membership, still a bit – mysterious.
I was able to turn up a bit more about their complicated history with reproduction, which had to be the source of the weird hang-ups about sex.
These days, there were these massive hatcheries – that was fucked up in its own way; all future children were held (stored?
refrigerated?) by the Concord and creches had to be approved to pick up eggs – but once upon a time laying a clutch of eggs was more or less a death sentence.
The literature was vague and used a lot of specialized abayan terminology that seemed untranslatable, which meant it was deeply rooted in cultural stuff, or what I liked to think of as baggage.
These days, all abaya were carefully crafted from the best genetic stock, their eggs grown until someone was approved to collect some eggs and hatch them and raise the kids, and that was that.
Which meant that it couldn't really be a surprise that Araxis was as ridiculously attractive as he was: he was the best of the best. A designer model.
The importance of the hatcheries, and the appropriate level of existential dread around laying eggs, also meant that abaya were all sterilized now.
There'd been a few intense opinion columns in the writings I'd skimmed, which weren't actually about abaya but about whether or not that was a practice other cultural groups should adopt.
Even though abaya couldn't lay their own eggs now, though, the dread remained.
And if I knew anything about having a fucked up relationship with bodies and sexuality and pleasure – and, being from Seraphim, I definitely did – it was that these things tended to get baked in pretty deeply.
You couldn't unlearn terror or shame overnight.