The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4)(34)
She turned her back on the douser and instead set her eye on the Aandrisk-style steam bath – a windowed, ovular container, made of stone and big enough for a single occupant to walk into. A gate was installed around this, for the sake of Harmagian safety. A Harmagian wouldn’t dare enter such a contraption anyway, but any steam that escaped when the door was opened would be unkind to their slimy skin. Pei herself was not built for the temperatures Aandrisks craved, but she knew from experience that a steam bath was a real treat if you used the button marked with the Reskitkish term for child’s setting (for years, she’d thought the button read low heat – a small but recoverable blow to her pride).
She returned to the dispensers in the hallway and found one containing scented steam tabs. She swiped her wrist over the patch scanner and a round capsule popped out, containing two powdery pucks flecked with dried herbs. She decided to be fully Aandrisk about it and bought a tiny pot of scale scrub as well – saltmoss-scented, a taste she’d acquired in her travels. Aandrisks had a much thicker, rougher exterior than her own, but scales were scales, and she’d found that just a tiny bit of scrub used lightly gave her a nice shine.
She returned to the steam bath, stepped in, closed the door behind her, popped the tabs into the receptacle on the wall, and entered her settings into the control panel. Her implant registered the instantaneous hiss of water being pumped through hot metal, and continued to let her know that the sound was present. She sat with that feeling for a few seconds, then did something she almost never did when away from the Mav Bre: she reached up to her forehead, and shut off her implant.
Pei had received implant and talkbox both when she was small, and it had been so long since she’d known life without them that turning the processor off was always jarring at first. She felt like when she’d reached for her locked-up gun two days prior – startled by the absence of something that wasn’t actually part of her but always came along for the ride.
After a few seconds, the weirdness wore off, and Pei allowed herself to be cradled by silence. Not silence in the way that other species spoke of silence. When hearing species said silence, they meant I can hear nothing but the wind and the leaves, or No one is speaking, but the sounds of the city are still present. That wasn’t true silence. Real silence. Her species’ natural state. The only time Pei realised how tiring it was for her brain to constantly process a type of input it wasn’t built for was when she made the decision to shut it out.
The silence wasn’t enough to fix the mental discomfort she’d awoken with, but it did make her care about it less, and right then, that would do.
A smooth lounging stone stood in the middle of the steam bath, its shape intended for the face-down posture of someone with strong haunches and a long tail. Pei had neither, but she lay on her belly anyway, wrapping her arms and legs around the stone, letting her shins and forearms settle into the grooves carved for that purpose. Scented steam began to billow from the tiny nozzles embedded throughout the walls and ceiling. She watched it swirl, felt it pull her airways wide. As her body let go, her mind took its cue to wander, and in doing so, pulled itself toward the inevitable topic of Ashby.
The man himself wasn’t the problem. He was what made problems bearable, what softened her angles and quieted her thoughts. They saw each other rarely – usually only a few days snatched here and there within the bulk of a standard year – but when she was with him, everything made sense. There was no work, no danger, no complications. There was only him, and her, and a bed beneath them. With him, there was a depth of conversation she couldn’t find with anyone else, an effortless surety that everything said between them was true and that nothing – no matter how messy or unflattering – would be judged. Not that all they did together was talk. Thinking of the way he moved when she touched him made the deepest part of her kick. She never stopped being intoxicated by the choreography they’d invented together, a dance made for two bodies that hadn’t evolved for each other. Everything fell into place when she locked herself away with him.
But then, inevitably, there was the other side of that door. There, she became someone else, and he loyally pretended not to know her even though she could see the sadness in his eyes as he did so. There, they fell into a different rhythm, one of secrets and denial. That reality was increasingly difficult for both of them to stomach, but she did stomach it, and had stomached it, because Ashby was Human. Ashby was Human, and Pei wasn’t ready to blow her life up.
She had no idea when exactly the Aeluon taboo against interspecies relationships had taken root in mainstream society, only that it was older than the GC and as much of a given as rain on a winter’s day. She knew there were accepting communities in the more socially liberal places of the galaxy – neutral worlds and modder hubs and the like. She’d once seen three Aandrisks and an Aeluon joyfully fucking in an open-air park on Port Coriol in the middle of the afternoon, uncaring about the fact that they were on broad display to anybody walking through the street below. She’d been jealous as she passed their revels by – not for their public display, which she did not share the Aandrisk ambivalence for, but for the fact that the Aeluon getting railed by an alien simply didn’t care who knew. She, on the other hand, went through endless acrobatics to keep Ashby safely quarantined from the rest of her life. They had elaborate protocols for how to meet at hotels and guesthouses without anybody knowing they were staying in the same room, and how to communicate when apart so that her crewmates wouldn’t notice messages between them. She’d gone to the absurd length of writing to him on paper and sending it via mail drone, and while he apparently saw a certain romance in that, she saw only how ridiculous things had become.