And while it was true that I couldn't remember when I'd had time off last, Ididknow 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 fuckingstudyit.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 (myroom!) 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 forsecondary 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 makeduelling to defend honourboring?
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.Theirterritory was far away from the rest of Primus, and it was clear that they were, despite their membership, still a bit – mysterious.
Iwasable 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 asbaggage.
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.
I'd already familiarized myself with the physiological basics – I'd done that on the second day Araxis had shown up in the den, just in case – so I knew they were a species without multiple sexes.Everyone was the same.I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around howtheirgenders were the important signifier and pronouns were more or less a flourish; Araxis wasn't a man, hewas… whatever it was he had said.Sinnenthi.Egnax wasn't a woman; she was irenek.Evreni was zarravon.
I wasn't a man, to them.I was virra.
I was usually pretty good at squeezing my brain into different shapes when it came to understanding alien cultures, at least on the surface.This one was going to take a bit of time.The way I thought about gender, even though it was clearly a hell of a lot more expansive than what I'd learned on Seraphim, felt deep and intrinsic.Learning to think so differently was like expecting my eyes to blink a couple times and then see in infrared.
After I was jittery from so much sitting and reading, I headed out again to the kitchen and ate more soup, before trundling down to the training room to burn off some of the restlessness starting tohumin the sinews of my body.I warmed myself up, taking it slow, stretching, then going through the slowest iterations of the sequences that I could.Sometimes I liked to do that, to make sure I got every move perfect.
Of course, perfect for me didn't mean that it was accurate to the way I'd been taught.It meant that each movementlookedgood.Each shift of weight, each spin and thrust, had to be pretty.
I was a passable sword-dancer, but I wasreallygood at making movement look nice.
I whittled away a few hours there in the training room, barely even working up a sweat because of the languorous pace I settled into, before convincing myself that I should really go check in on Araxis to make sure he didn't need help.Maybe someone else on the ship might speak to me, which would be thrilling: so far, it felt like Araxis had maybe hallucinated half of the creche, because they were nowhere to be seen.I hadn't even seen any traces of them.I knew there were three nosy kids on board: why couldn't I hear them running around and causing mayhem?
I drifted out of the training room and thought about tapping out a cute message, but settled instead for an old fashioned search.The ship was small and I had time to kill.
For a moment, I was struck by how incredibly stupid it was to be killing time when I was hurtling toward the likely end of my life.Shouldn't I be, I don't know, squeezing the joy from every moment?
Since I didn't know how to do that, I went and ate a package of spicy crackers I found in the kitchen, and I laughed to myself, grim, as I carefully licked every crumb from the pack.
Yeah, I knew how to live it up.
When I did track Araxis down, he was partially wedged behind a panel in an auxiliary room off the bridge; Egnax was sitting cross-legged on the ground, muttering furiously in abayan while she fiddled with what looked like an immensely complicated piece of circuitry.I could see Araxis's legs and an elbow while he struggled with something half-hidden behind a tarnished metal panel.
I poked my head in."How's it going?"I asked.
Araxis jerked, something thudding behind the panel as he hissed something under his breath.Egnax looked up at me from the floor; she had a pair of goggles on that whirred and clicked as they tried to focus on my face.Her mouth hooked in a sharp smile and she said something in bright-toned abayan.
When Araxis shoved himself out from behind the panel, he was flushed silver."Sashen," he said, pushing himself to a seated position.He had a streak of grease across one cheek and looked wonderfully rumpled."Did you need something?"
"No.Just checking in."I didn't step into the small space, just leaned in and smiled."You sure you don't need help?"
"Yes," said Araxis."You are kind to offer."
Egnax craned her neck as she stared down at the panel in her lap again, muttering something else I couldn't understand.I wassurethough that I heard the word virra, and the look Araxis shot her was absolutely withering.He cast a furtive glance at me, and the flush turned pink.
