20. Don’t Get Me Wrong #5
Charlie almost laughed. Because her brain, her traitorous, engineer-wired, problem-solving brain, was already doing the thing it always did.
Reyna had said "relationships" and Charlie's mind had immediately started building a schematic.
How do Kaelari relationships work? What do they look like?
Are they similar to human ones? And once the schematic started, it kept going, the way a build can do, past the parts she was comfortable examining and straight into the parts she absolutely should not be thinking about while sitting this close to the Captain of the Emberkind.
But the question was already formed. And Charlie had never been good at leaving a question unasked.
"Can I ask you something?" Charlie said.
Reyna looked at her. "I'm going to say 'yes' but, because of your explicit curiosity after I talked about the relationship shortcomings of the Kaelari species, I will add that it comes with the stipulation of 'it depends on what it is.'"
"Okay, fair," Charlie said. "And it does have to do with the Kaelari species. But, culturally."
Reyna raised an eyebrow. "That narrows it down to approximately four thousand years of Kaelari civilization. You're going to have to be a bit more specific."
Charlie took a breath. She was trying to figure out the right word. A respectful word. Not necessarily scientific, but something that would acknowledge she was a human from planet Earth asking an alien about something... intimate.
"Do Kaelari...'fornicate'?"
The word landed in the room and sat there like a brick someone had placed very carefully on a glass table.
Reyna stared at her.
And then she laughed. Loudly. Not controlled at all. The same laugh Charlie'd heard in Borran's kitchen, short and bright and completely startled out of her. It was the kind of sound that happened when someone's composure was ambushed by genuine delight.
"Do we fornicate?" Reyna repeated, and the word sounded even more ridiculous in her voice, like she was reading from a medical textbook that had been translated through three languages and lost all its dignity in transit.
"I was trying to be respectful!" Charlie said, her face going red. "I didn't know what terminology you use and I didn't want to assume—"
"Charlie. Do you mean do we have sex?"
"Oh my god." Charlie put her hands over her face. "I mean... well. Yes. I just, the act of mating without the need for population growth in any way. Is that 'sex' for Kaelari?"
"The act of mating?!" And Reyna lost it again. Charlie dropped her hands while her face tried to figure out what to do with itself. She was blushing, sure, but she also was tired of being laughed at regarding her use of words.
"You need to stop laughing. I didn't know that was a universal concept out in space! I'm from a non-contact planet, okay?" But Reyna didn't stop laughing, and Charlie suddenly felt giggles moving up her throat. "I'm trying to be respectful, dammit!" She uttered before a laugh broke free from her.
Eventually, Reyna did get control of herself, and Charlie watched her make every attempt to look the Captain again, ready to answer an alien's question.
"Yes, Charlie," she started, trying and failing to keep it professional. "I know the word. Every species in the Coalition knows the word."
"Fantastic."
"Oh, come on. You're right, okay? I have to say that. How would you know? You didn't even know there was a Coalition a few months ago."
"Thank you, o great captain, for highlighting further my voluntold naivety." Reyna barked out another laugh and then smiled a true, genuine smile.
And Charlie's mouth suddenly went dry.
"Okay, okay," Reyna took a steading breath.
"Well, it's one of the few concepts that translates perfectly across all known languages and species, actually.
" Reyna was still smiling, that one Charlie only now noticed she'd been cataloguing since the first time she saw it.
And right now, it made Charlie's world a little brighter.
"But, Charlie, Jesus, I have to ask what made you choose fornicate? "
"I panicked, Reyna!" Charlie shrieked, attempting to hold onto whatever dignity she may have left.
"I was trying to think of the most clinical, least offensive, most species-neutral term I could possibly come up with, and my brain went straight to the word my mother would have used if she'd ever had to describe the concept to a stranger, which she wouldn't have, because Helen Beckman would have just said 'relations' and moved on. "
"Relations."
"Don't start."
"I'm not starting anything," Reyna countered, but the lilt in her tone gave her away. Slightly. "I'm simply noting that humans seem to have an impressive number of euphemisms for something that is, biologically, not complicated."
"Actually, that's valid. You have NO idea. We have hundreds, possibly even thousands. Entire dictionaries worth of ways to avoid saying anything close to the actual word. Or maybe for variety, I don't know."
"Why?"
Charlie sighed. "The truth? Because humans are deeply, profoundly weird about sex and always have been."
"That seems... inefficient. And a bad way to communicate."
"You quite literally just described the entire human race in one sentence, maybe two. And not even just over sex."
"Poor humans," Reyna said, her eyes bright with a humor Charlie rarely got to see, the kind that lived behind the gold and only came out when something genuinely surprised her.
Oh crap, I know that, too.
"To answer your question," Reyna said, interrupting Charlie's thoughts.
"Yes. Kaelari have sex. For reproduction, for intimacy, for connection, for all the same reasons most species do.
And before you ask the next question, which I can see forming on your face based on our previous discussions of this, no, there are no restrictions on who.
Gender, class, race, none of those are categories we apply to attraction. None of them ever have been."
Charlie sat with this, trying to process the concept of an entire species not caring about who you loved and, instead, just celebrated that you did.
On Earth, in 1980s California, being a woman who loved women had cost Charlie a family.
Sure, it had been a shitty family, but it was still the one she was born into.
Memories surfaced of her father's door and her mother's dismissal. All the years of careful calculation about who to tell and when and how, and the specific, exhausting math of risk assessment that every queer person learned to do before they learned to drive.
And here, on a ship forty light-years from the planet where all of that mattered, the captain was telling her that her entire species had simply... never bothered with the concept.
"On Earth," Charlie said, her tone settling into something sincere and real.
"Who you love is a whole thing. Humans have names for it.
Categories, slurs, even governmental laws.
And the opinions of our fellow human is always a...
gamble." Charlie twisted her hands in her lap.
"I personally spent years figuring out that it was okay to be me, that I was allowed to be who I am. "
"Allowed?" Reyna's eyebrows drew together, and Charlie could see her trying to parse the sentence, trying to find the logic in a system where a person needed permission to love who they loved. "Allowed by whom?"
"Everyone," Charlie answered honestly. "Society.
Family. Even my place of employment. In some places, laws were enacted to ban certain relationships.
Many of them still stand. My own biological parents told me I wasn't welcome in their home any longer because of it.
" Charlie paused. "I was twenty-five. I was strong enough to handle it.
But my sister, Katie, she was nineteen. She stood there, next to me in our front doorway, and looked right at our father and said, 'She's your daughter. '"
Charlie took a deep breath, the memory flooding her mind. It was always hard to think about it, but telling someone was entirely different. In fact, Charlie couldn't remember ever telling anyone this memory from beginning to end. Somehow, it soothed Charlie knowing Reyna would be the first.
"When my father didn't move, Katie just turned around to face me, and asked me if she could move to California.
" Charlie heard Reyna's sharp intake of breath.
"She walked out with me." Charlie's voice was steady, but the steadiness was load-bearing.
"She left her home for me. Packed her things, got in the car, and drove to California with me that same night.
She was nineteen years old and she chose me over everything she knew.
" Charlie looked at Reyna. "I lived with it for so long without my parents knowing because, I think, somewhere deep down, I knew that would be the result.
But I didn't know Katie would do that. I didn't know anyone would do that. For me."
Reyna's expression changed. The laughter was gone and what replaced it was something between bewilderment and anger.
"Your family rejected you for loving women?"
Charlie took a deep breath. "Yeah."
"And this is... common? On Earth?"
"It can be," Charlie said. "Humans can be... judgmental. Being here has actually made me realize it didn't have to be that way."
Reyna was quiet. Charlie could see it happening behind her eyes, the tactical brain being handed a problem with no logical basis and, therefore, no logical solution. Reyna fought things by understanding them, but there was nothing to understand here.
"And your sister," Reyna said. "She was nineteen."
It wasn't a question. Reyna was processing the data, just as when she repeated mission data when something didn't add up.
As though the number itself was the part she couldn't get past. Nineteen years old, and Katie had chosen Charlie over her own home, without hesitation, without having to even be asked.
"Yeah," Charlie said.
"And you didn't expect her to."