Grail

Tristen laced his fingers together, squeezing for comfort and control. “How far are you willing to trust Cynric?”

Benedick’s smile was wider, this time, and ever so much less genuine. “I could throw her pretty far, if I had to.”

   Danilaw and Amanda didn’t exactly have the run of the ship, but they didn’t exactly not have it, either. Samael returned when they had had a few moments to assemble their facades and assess their situation. He showed them to rooms where they could cleanse, take exercise, and refresh themselves as it became necessary. If anything could have convinced Danilaw of the sincerity and the divinity of the patchwork Angel, clean clothes and a chance to bathe and sleep were high on the list.

Mallory, too, came by to check on them and deliver supplies. The pajamas were soft, clean, worn—Danilaw was comforted by the Jacobeans’ ethos of reuse, repurposing, and recycling, when everything else about them seemed alien—and woven of some fabric that Danilaw did not recognize. He was fairly sure it was a natural fiber, something that grew on an animal or a plant rather than in a manufacturing vat, but other than that he found himself disinclined to inquire too closely.

Having shown him how the controls on the cleanser worked and made sure he knew how to operate the connecting door, the Angel and the hermaphrodite left Danilaw and Amanda alone again to bathe and dress. And sleep, he thought, luxuriously. It occurred to him that perhaps he and Amanda should arrange watches, or make sure they slept in some orderly fashion or protected location, but after a moment he dismissed that as foolish hyper-vigilance.

Whether he liked it or not, they were totally at the mercy of the Jacobeans. There was no escape, no place of refuge if their hosts chose to turn on them. He could trust, or he could worry, but the end result would be the same.

And so Danilaw shrugged, sorted out his confused thoughts, and went to restore himself. Standing in the hall by the cleanser, he stripped off the sweat-soaked garments he’d been wearing under his pressure suit and all through dinner. There was a niche in which to stow such things, and he availed himself of it.

That done, he climbed into the steamy environs of the cleanser. The tiny room was warm—almost too warm—and fitted with benches for relaxing while the vapor and sonics worked. Danilaw lay back, his head on his arms, and willed the heat and relaxation into his bones.

Perhaps it was antisocial—and definitely a little bit greedy—but he was still there fifteen minutes later, though he had switched to a lower, cooler bench. His eyes were closed, his muscles blessedly painless. He was reminding himself not to doze off when the old-fashioned manual slider eased open just a little and a familiar brown face poked through the coils of steam that billowed on a cooler draught. The sonics made her voice seem to reverberate. “Danilaw?”

“Amanda.” It seemed like a pretension of modesty to cover himself when she’d just wandered into his shower. It wasn’t as if this were an inappropriate setting for nudity, and they had been living in each other’s pockets aboard the Quercus, so he just sat up—a little too quickly for the heat, it turned out. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and let his head hang until the dizziness subsided.

She had an old-fashioned cloth towel in one hand, and was otherwise nude. As best he could see through the steam, she stood with her arms pressed to her sides and shoulders up, as if she were chilly. “Come in,” he said, as she said, “Do you mind if I join you?”

They laughed and she stepped inside, shutting the slider behind. She laid the folded towel on a higher bench as a pillow. “I wanted the company,” she said, reclining.

It was a relief to speak his native tongue, familiar words and known patterns that had settled into his bones with father’s milk and rooted deep. “Not sick of me after all that time on the scull?”

“Shocking, I know.” She slid a generously curved leg across the bench and pressed the side of her foot to his thigh. Warm flesh, calloused, the contact lubricated by condensation and his own slick sweat. “It’s going to be a long, boring trip home.”

He could have moved away. It was an unnecessary complication, and his rightminding was robust enough that the prospect of combining romantic and professional entanglements set off all kinds of alarm bells in his head. But then again, he and Amanda were both responsible, rightminded adults, and zero-tolerance policies about office romances were a thing of the benighted past. A modern, suitably adjusted, evolved human being was presumed capable of balancing complicated decisions without resorting to anything so crude as a rule of thumb.

He put his hand over her foot, a sort of embrace, and said, “Boring? When we have a whole new culture to interact with?”

“So you’re thinking of yourself as a tourist now?” It could have seemed harsh, but her tone of voice made it dreamy.

“I’m thinking of myself as a student.”

“An anthropologist,” she said. “Going to get yourself another tertiary in science?”

“That’s what you’re for.”

He squeezed her foot. She prodded him lightly with her toe and laughed. The steam and sonics were making his head spin; he let go of her foot and moved up a shelf to lie down beside her. “It’s an endocrine reaction,” she said. “Just enough stress, and not too much. The proximity of an attractive member of my preferred gender. The evolutionary response says ‘Get a piece of that while you have the chance and make a strong baby now.’ ”

“The world is uncertain,” Danilaw answered. He put a hand out; she took it. Her fingers, too, were wet. “I don’t have time to make any babies until my Administrative Obligation is done. After that, I’ve earned out two years of personal project time, and I was thinking children might be a pretty good personal project. But that’s a bit in the future.”

“The future’s even more uncertain than the world,” Amanda said. She drew up one knee. “But I don’t have any objection to practicing. Maybe when the time is ripe we’ll have gotten really good at it.”

“Maybe we will,” Danilaw said. He sat up more slowly this time. “Let’s rinse off and find out where we’re starting from, shall we?”

   A perfectly satisfactory first attempt, he thought later, licking her salt from his lips and trying to summon the energy to lift a hand and stroke her hair. She seemed to have dozed off, head on his shoulder, her leg thrown across his and her compact heel dug into the mossy cover on the bunk they occupied. The room felt cool now that they were quiet. Danilaw saw gooseflesh prickling across her shoulder. Mallory had shown him where the blankets were, in a cubby under the bed. With a groping hand he found one and managed to shake it open and drape it—somewhat haphazardly—over the two of them.

If Amanda had been sleeping, it was not heavily. She lifted her head from his shoulder and blinked. “Well,” she said. “In one regard, at least, I think I will declare this mission a success.”

Danilaw kissed the top of her head, straight hair slick against his lips. She smelled of crushed grass and clean woman and sweat and sex—an appealing combination. “But that was only the proof of concept,” he said. “We’ll have to run more extensive testing for a definitive result.”

She turned her face into his shoulder and snorted against his skin. A pause before she lifted herself up on an elbow and said, “You know all those tunes you sing? The ones from before the Eschaton and rightminding and The Obligation?”

“They’re songs,” he said, eager to assuage what he perceived as her concern. “I have not ever, nor do I ever intend, to shoot anyone over a quaint concept of infidelity. You have my word.”

“Your word? I shall have it bronzed.”

Because she made him laugh, he swatted her shoulder lightly. She laughed, too, before her expression settled into seriousness. “Why do you suppose we still find all that art from the bad old days so compelling?”

“Easy,” he said. “There have been studies. Which I have, as you might imagine, taken a professional interest in.”

“I might,” she admitted.

“Rightminding mitigates the conditioned emotional triggers for adrenaline response, among other things. We’re still capable of it, of course—adrenaline is useful stuff when a slarg is chasing you down the beach—but it used to manifest as a conditioned response to childhood trauma and hardwired primate social-dominance schema.”

“The source of a lot of irrational conflict,” she said.