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When Leia straightened up, Radmer turned her loose and cleared his throat. "Gear. You've got a remote," he said, indicating the portable screen he'd given her back in the dining hall. "You've got a comm," he said, indicating the ear piece. "Next thing you need will be a heads-up display." He did something complicated next to one of the walls, then opened a tray and pulled out a pair of tinted glasses. She hadn't seen anyone wearing glasses. For that matter, she hadn't missed hers, which was really weird. He handed them to her and she automatically put them on, which made him frown, then say, "Ah. Ship-mind says we fixed your vision. I've heard others say in similar case that this makes them feel almost normal. If you would prefer, we can do a version of these that sits right on your eyeball." Leia shook her head. She'd tried contacts and hated them.
"Can I ask you a question about the ship-mind?"
"Yes. Many, if you like."
"You do a lot more tech stuff than Esifwu," she started.
"Not true," he interrupted. "It looks that way, but Esifwu with the medical equipment makes what I do look primitive and pointless. Esifwu with a full array of pharmaceuticals could do anything it occurred to her to try."
Leia blinked.
"Yes," said Radmer, "Be very afraid. She has a tendency to think She Knows Best and when she's wrong, she can create the most spectacular messes. However, you were about to ask about the ship-mind."
"When Esifwu talks about the ship-mind, she talks about it," and here Leia used one of two pronouns that were used for the English it, the one which referred to objects or things. "But when you talk about the ship-mind, you talk about it," and here she used the pronoun that means a person to whom sexual identity does not apply. "Why?"
"Why? Esifwu thinks of ship-mind as a resource, a tool. Ship-mind is a person." Radmer paused and said, "I think ship-mind is a person." He paused again, longer this time. "Did you ask ship-mind?" Leia didn't answer, so Radmer referred to a screen. "You did. You won't ask us questions, but you will ask ship-mind. Which makes sense. Ship-mind bothered to learn your language and spent a lot of time with you. And ship-mind uses I with you. It doesn't even do that with me. You are a puzzle." With a frown, Radmer muttered a command to ship-mind not to translate the next question, then very fast, said something very quietly to ship-mind and waited to hear the reply in his earpiece. Leia understood enough of it to know he was asking ship-mind how crew should respond to anyone else from Leia's world. Leia could guess the answer to that one. When he looked back at her, unhappy, she repeated the question to him. He looked even less happy.
"I understood what you asked."
"Yes." Radmer still wouldn't answer, so Leia pulled her screen up and asked ship-mind herself. The answer was quick and short: Leia is assumed to be at the stable end of her culture's continuum. Expect violence and inflexibility.
"That's encouraging."
He stared at her. "You're serious."
"I'd hate to think you guys were naive or overly trusting, especially if I'm going to be working with you. Closely. What's next?" He looked at her blankly. "After the heads up display? Do I get weapons or am I not cleared yet? I don't see you as a pacifist."
He laughed. "No, we are not pacifists." He muttered at the ship-mind and listened to the response. "Esifwu has not placed any limits on what I'm allowed to give you, which might or might not be an oversight on her part. Your mood is not modified now, so no limits from that."
"I thought she said she gave me something."
"Very short acting; nothing left in you by lunchtime. Knowing her, she deliberately misled you to get a placebo effect. She'll probably get around to telling you in a few days and act smug when she points out to you how well you've been doing on your own. Another fine plan I've interfered with."
"I won't tell her."
"Oh, she'll find out one way or another." He muttered again, and listened to the response. "You haven't accessed anything about Andal. You've got a couple days yet, which at the rate you devour information should make you our resident non-ship-mind expert by the time we get there." He muttered again, and listened. "Between your limited familiarity with super-cultural interfaces and extremely average navigational ability, we might or might not let you off the ship at Andal at all; we'd hate to misplace you." He peered at her, abruptly realizing she looked very confused. "What?"
"This isn't just shore leave."
"No. You didn't know that. Why did you ask about weapons if you didn't know this was an operation? We don't even use weapons for most extractions, so asking about weapons implies you knew this was something unusual and large." He stopped and caught his breath. "Were you joking?"
"NO! I don't know why I asked. I just. I don't know."
He stared at her and slowly said, "Maybe we should rethink just how randomly you were grabbed." He gestured a wave, to erase that topic and move on. "If you go down to Andal with us, and we give you weapons, it'll be an addition to your screen. It won't change the shape or anything you've already learned about it. It'll just make it a little heavier. Bunch of nanotech stuff, some drugs, some flash-bangs, some hunter-seekers, some directional projectiles, some explosives. Ship-mind can tell you anything you might want to know about that. Now what's wrong? You look shocked."
"Look up my cultural matrix tech level."
He listened to ship-mind's response in his ear piece and his face went completely blank. "That's not possible. No, really not possible." Leia shrugged. "Remind me not to make any jokes about primitive cultures. You've never been in space." She nodded. "No wonder you panicked during the ship-to-ship transfer." He eyed her, uncertain, and muttered again. He scrubbed his face with both hands, stood up and shoved his chair back into the wall. A little more fiddling popped a wide padded bench out from the wall. He sat down and invited her to join him. "I do not know what you are feeling right now, but just thinking about what you might be feeling makes me feel anxious. I'm offering you whatever physical comfort you're willing to accept from me." And then he looked at her, and she tried to figure out what that meant. The closest analogy she had from her past for how these people did things was the idea of a gift economy or gift culture, but everything she'd pulled out of ship-mind suggested that set of ideas was a pathetic, over-tokenized version of what these people did as naturally as breathing and sleeping. She shoved her hands through her hair and looked back at him in anguish and said, "I'm sorry. I have a lot of trouble getting past my tokenizing past. What exactly are you saying?"
He banged his head twice against the wall behind him, swore, and reached for her hand, tugging her very gently down onto the bench with him. He mumbled something into her ear piece, and she got the translation, "Just snuggle, please?"
That she could do.
Or at least she could try. Once she had sat down next to him, he worked her back around to his front and wrapped his legs around her, resting his chin on her shoulder, mouth by the ear piece. At least, it was by the ear piece when it wasn't doing something really pleasant to her neck and ear. She was surprised at how still he kept his hands, folded together over her belly, neither moving up to her breasts, or down between her legs. She would not describe what he was doing as non-sexual, but neither was it goal-directed, or at least, not moving very fast. Most of the tension had left her body before she realized he was monitoring the pulse in her neck. By then, she didn't really care, and was starting to feel sleepy. It was all too easy to slump back against him, and let him slide down the wall until they were lounging back along the bench. He moved one of his arms up to make a pillow for her, then muttered something that ship-mind did not translate for her, but resulted in some changes in the wall behind him. "Would it be rude to fall asleep now," she asked sleepily.
"No," he answered, adjusting his legs more closely along hers, and pulling a blanket over both of them.
Now all she had to do was not dream about anything that would cause her to wake up screaming. Which would be awful, anyway, but extra special awful, if it resulted in Radmer deciding snuggling with her was a bad idea.
"Whatever you are thinking about, stop. I'd be happy to give you something else to think about, if you're having any difficulty changing topics." The hand still curved over her belly drifted very slightly lower. "More than happy. Ecstatic." Now she really wasn't sleepy. She rolled over on to her back against limited resistance. "I thought you were sleepy."
"I was sleepy. Then I thought about waking up screaming and you never wanting to do this again. Then you distracted me. Not sleepy any more."
"I'm good with not sleepy, as long as you don't use that as an excuse to sit up. You can sit up and, depending on what you do while sitting up, I might be in favor of that, but not if you're sitting up just because you are no longer sleepy."
Leia decided that nervous person on the make was, like a lot of things, even more universal than she had realized. She rolled over onto her other side. She brought her arms up and around his neck, sliding her face closer to his, until their noses were touching. It was impossible to know whether he was declining the initiative out of deference to her background, the manner in which they had met, because it was in his character to do so, or because that's what his cultural programming dictated. He'd stated his receptivity to whatever she wanted physically, and every non-verbal she knew about confirmed it, then left the rest up to her. She still didn't get the gift thing, but she was starting to. No taking, and asking is rude. But offering is always acceptable. Holding firmly onto that thought, she put her mouth on his, eyes wide open, watching for any sign that she'd screwed up.
Moaning seemed encouraging. She flicked her tongue out to explore his lip, and felt him roll over onto his back, pulling her on top of him.
The thin, suitable-for-a-science-fiction movie loungewear did absolutely nothing to conceal his enthusiasm. For a few minutes, she tried very hard to settle against him and stop thinking about things like, do I really trust these people when their computer says I don't need to worry about STDs. For one thing, should they be worried about something I have that I don't know about? Maybe this is how plagues get started in galactic empires. She knew enough about history to know that foreplay and sex had a lot of culturally defined variations and limits. Add that to individual variation? Forget it. She'd never had a one-night-stand back home, drunk or sober. Why did she think she could roll around on a couch in a spaceship with her hot rescuer and have it turn out like in a romance novel? Or porn flick? Or whatever.
He stopped kissing her and gently angled her head down to rest her cheek on his shoulder. "That was not a happy, sexually excited moan."
She hadn't realized she had moaned, although now that he mentioned it, she could hear herself doing it again.
She felt a rumble of laughter underneath her, then he shifted and found a cushion or something to prop his head up. She risked looking at his face and was relieved to see calm sympathy rather than raging sexual frustration or irritation at being teased or any of the other, infinite negative possibilities. "It does not appear to be position that matters, or kissing," he added. "Probably it is what you are thinking."
"Yes. It is what I am thinking."
"I am happy to listen."
She thought about that, wondering whether her limited language ability or ship-mind's slightly better (because ship-mind did not forget anything, and had a lot better language facility to begin with) translational skills would be up to explaining. While she thought, he massaged her back, and she recovered some of the calm she'd found when she first sat down on the bench with Radmer. She mentally flipped a coin, and decided to talk.
"I like you." Then she ran down, unable to say what she wanted to say next.
"I like you, too." He kissed her again, a more-than-friendly kiss with a definite end to it.
"I want to," take a deep breath, "do this. But I'm always shy and a little lonely, and now I'm even more shy and lonely and terrified of screwing up and being kicked out with absolutely nowhere to go. You and Esifwu are the only people I know here and I don't know you. Or Esifwu."
"Which makes something that is never easy for you almost impossible."
"Yes. Also, I keep panicking."
He muttered, which she took to mean he was making sure he understood panic, then said, "That's important and expected. Do not dismiss that. We are not going to kick you out. You cannot screw up. We all know what happened. Everything you do or say or do not do or do not say is understood as having happened or not happened in that context."
"I can do anything, and just, hey, I was kidnapped and no one knows where my home planet is, and anyway, it's really primitive so I cannot be held to reasonable standards."
He rolled his eyes and said something that ship-mind went on for a while about, but which Leia interpreted as, "Only someone from a token culture would think something that ridiculous, much less say it out loud." When he realized she was still listening to the explanation, he looked at her a little uncertainly. "I was joking. Ha ha? You get a medical waiver after something traumatic. You've accessed stuff about it, twice? Three times? I checked." He dumped her back on her side, and spooned himself against her. "Am I panicking you? Or is it just what-might-happen?"
"Just what-might-happen."
"Then let's try to get back to where you felt sleepy, and not have anything happen right now. Nothing happens, no panic."
She wiggled closer, and closed her eyes. If he was prepared to ignore his boner parked between her thinly clad cheeks, she could do the same. And after a while, she did indeed feel sleepy again, and some time after that, she dozed off. She did not wake up screaming.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 9, 2012