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Ondry curled the end of his tail and watched as Liam arched his back and twisted. Liam’s cries had faded long ago, leaving the sound of his uneven and loud breathing. Liam moaned and groped about the nest. Shifting his arm closer, Ondry hummed in pleasure when Liam grabbed it.
Having his palteia hold him so tightly eased the ache that had settled into his chest. In the days since they had disagreed over Ondry’s silence about the rotilac, a distance had grown between them. Ondry had never expected his silence to upset Liam, but then again, Ondry had long since given up on understanding his palteia. Even if he understood every text on human psychology ever written—even if he reached a point of perfect calti about humanity—he would still not understand Liam.
“Oh God. Yes.” Liam gasped.
Ondry ran his fingers over Liam’s side. Since learning of tickling, Ondry had enjoyed teasing Liam until he leaked pheromones and could not form a coherent thought. Liam gave a warbling scream that ended when he came. White splatters decorated his stomach and chest and Ondry leaned down to lick a salty drop.
“I’m not sure if this much sex is going to lead to more endurance or break my dick,” Liam said with a soft chuckle.
Ondry didn’t respond. In the past, Liam would have drifted in a cloud of bliss and hormones so thick they filled the nest. Now he pulled himself out of his stupor too quickly to enjoy the total relaxation that came with human non-procreative sex. Liam’s inability to escape reality made Ondry feel selfish for continuing to enjoy the pleasure of ilsil each night.
However, Ondry feared the rift would grow more pronounced if he challenged Liam. Ondry had always understood that Liam had more in common with a kawt than an orna. Even when Liam had been at his most injured and timid, he’d shown his claws. He had fought to earn profits on every trade and had used the lessons Ondry had taught him to steal the meat from every plate he could. He was a kawt—a predator. No one would ever mistake him for a small herbivore. The human who had traded on Prarownt before Liam might have hidden in holes and deep grasses, scrambling out to make a furtive dash to grab a stray seed, but Liam demanded more from life.
But now Ondry wasn’t sure how to reach Liam without risking claws that could damage both of them.
“And now we have to get moving. It’s the big day today, huh?” Liam offered a wide smile, but he smelled sour. No lingering traces of pleasure remained. Ondry sneezed and sat back on his heels.
“We may meet with Imshee today.”
“Exactly. The big day.”
Ondry widened his eyes and studied his palteia. Chilta and palteia would no more lie to each other than to themselves, but Liam had already admitted that he sometimes hid his thoughts from himself. Repression. Ondry had found many references to it in the psychological databases. He still had not yet decided to be reassured or distressed at the idea that Liam’s ability to repress information made him a normal human. However, Ondry feared taking his palteia into a difficult and potentially dangerous trade when they were not communicating well. And the speed of the ship meant that Ondry had run out of time to consider his action.
Since he was unsure of the wisdom of speaking, Ondry focused on simple facts. “You smell distressed.”
Liam opened his eyes and propped himself up on an elbow. “Sniffing me is rude, and thank you for the reminder that I need to bathe. Do the Imshee go around smelling people?”
“I do not believe so,” Ondry said. As far as he knew, the Imshee possessed less acute senses than the Rownt, although if they were logical, they would hide their true abilities from trading partners.
“That’s a point in their favor.” Liam groaned, before climbing out of the nest.
Ondry wondered what competition the Imshee had entered to earn points and who Liam perceived as the other side. He suspected Liam might have subtly insulted the Rownt. If so, Liam would find the Imshee could carry out a good trade in insults, especially when it came to Rownt. The species was much older, and they considered Ondry’s people rather primitive. Given that even humans had formed that same impression of Rownt initially, Ondry had to suspect it might be accurate.
Ondry followed when Liam went to pee. They had moved to larger quarters in the tuk section, and Ondry missed the artwork from their old nest room. Perhaps he should commission an artist to paint a mural. Maybe that would help both of them settle into the new rank.
“What are the odds the Imshee are going to offer up their genetic knowledge?” Liam asked.
“Quite good,” Ondry said. The Grandmothers were convinced that curiosity would lead the Imshee to seek information on the human species, and Ondry had no reason to mistrust their judgment when it came to their trading partners.
“So you think they’ll lengthen my life?”
“I do not know.”
Liam shook the last drops of pee off his penis. “I thought you said the odds were quite good?”
“It is likely they will offer their abilities to analyze the human genome. I am unsure about whether they will take action to fix whatever error has given you such short lives.” Ondry focused on calming his thoughts so he did not show his deep horror. Forty years was the length of a contract—not an appropriate amount of time for Liam to have left on his life. Ondry refused to lose Liam so quickly. Even more alarmingly, Ondry feared he might lose Liam earlier to the rift caused by his inability to predict Liam’s reactions or even understand them. “Is the uncertainty over the Imshee’s response the source of your worry?”
“I’m not worried.” Liam walked around the nest to the bathing chamber. The tuk quarters were closer to the central engines and the bathing sinks much warmer. Ondry had worried that Liam’s thin skin might suffer damage, but Liam appeared to prefer the warmer temperatures and bathed far more frequently now.
“Your scent and your words contradict one another.”
Liam sighed and stopped in front of the sink cover. “Are you suggesting that I’m lying?”
“Humans lie to themselves.” That was a simple statement of fact, and Ondry could point to the psychological texts that proved it.
For long seconds, Liam stood and stared at the cover. Ondry thought he might have changed his mind about bathing, but without speaking, he pushed the hatch aside and climbed down the short ladder into the tub. These basins were designed for tuk-ranked individuals and were easily large enough for three Rownt of Ondry’s size. Ondry crouched next to the edge and watched Liam tread water, one hand on the ladder, the other reaching for the scraper.
“What are the odds we could get a smaller bathtub in here? This is a little wasteful for a small person to use all this water,” Liam complained.
Every bathing sink on the ship was attached to hydroponics, fauna management, engine cooling, oxygen generation, and other ship systems. The pools were one function of the common reservoir, so the size of the individual sink did not matter. However, Ondry should ask an engineer to modify the space to be more useful to someone as small as Liam. Given that this particular basin was twelve feet deep, Ondry was grateful that humans were less dense than water. Rownt sank unless they were young or exceptional swimmers.
After several minutes, Liam twisted around. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to figure out how to cheat me in trades.”
Ondry paled. “I would never cheat you.”
“Let me rephrase that,” Liam said with a sigh. “You have an expression that reminds me of when you’re trying to cheat others in trades.”
“I am thinking.” Ondry rocked back on his heels and studied Liam.
“About what?”
Since Ondry could not understand Liam, he decided that he needed to be as direct as possible. Liam was not a trading partner with whom to share a shaded truth. “Since we debated about the rotilac, you have not enjoyed our sex as much.”
“Shit!” Liam twirled in the water, and for a second, Ondry feared he had injured himself by kicking the ladder, but then the skin scraper floated to the surface. Ondry reached across the wide mouth of the bathing sink and captured it before handing it back to Liam. “Thanks,” Liam said before he set it on the edge. “I do enjoy sex with you.”
“Not as much as you did before our debate.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Danger was like a kawt’s breath on the back of his neck. “You are more wary since we disagreed about the rotilac.”
“How are you measuring wariness?” Liam asked. He sounded confused rather than confrontational, so perhaps Ondry had chosen correctly when he decided to be factual.
“In the past you produced hormones in far greater quantities, and after sex ended, you were unable to perform any complex task for a period of time no less than twenty minutes. During that time, you would lie in the nest and make inarticulate noises.”
Perhaps it was the heat of the water, but Liam appeared to blush. “You’re talking about subspace.”
Ondry had read of that in the psychology texts, but he had not understood how a human disassociated their brain from immediate experience in order to enter a trance-like state. He accepted the reality of the concept, but it was not one a Rownt could duplicate or even comprehend.
“Right, you’re less interested in the name than the recent changes,” Liam said, which seemed a tacit admission that their communication had changed. Even though he had not finished scraping down his body, he climbed out of the sink and sat on the textured edge. The ends of his hair dripped, the water running over his naked back and to the floor. “I’ve been under more stress lately, and I need to relax to reach subspace.”
“You have had no trouble in the past.” Ondry squatted and rested his hand against Liam’s neck.
“Believe it or not, I always had trouble relaxing into subspace. This last year or so has been the exception to that rule.” Liam smiled up at Ondry. “You make it possible for me to relax more than I ever have in the past.”
“But now you do not relax as easily.” Ondry waited for Liam to either disagree or explain.
Liam stared at the wall on the far side of the bathing basin. Sometimes Ondry felt as if he understood Liam even less than the Grandmothers. And he had no hope of following whatever logic those cagey old women used. Ondry still wished they had not included a large non-sentient predator on the ship. Humans might favor dogs, but dogs killed a significant number of humans. They killed far more than lions and sharks, two predators humans claimed to fear. And the Grandmothers had sided with human illogic on the matter.
Liam finally spoke. “I’m not upset about our argument.” He chewed on his lower lip. In all his life, Ondry had never felt more helpless—not when he’d learned of his mother’s death or when he had stood in the temple and waited for the Grandmothers to decide whether or not Liam was a true palteia. He disliked the feeling.
“If you are not still upset about my choice to forgo the rotilac, why do you suffer more tension?” Ondry asked.
“Forgo?” Liam turned and crossed his arms. “I thought you said you were going to delay it until after you had developed more trading contacts.”
“I do not have enough information to make any decision. I choose to forgo it for now. I may change my mind later.” Ondry relaxed his facial muscles. He was speaking the truth, although much would have to change for him to decide to grow. If additional size would make Liam uncomfortable, then Ondry had an obligation to protect their nest, and the rest of the ship would have to adjust to a small tuk-ranked trader.
Liam narrowed his eyes in a human gesture of aggravation. Ondry suspected that he was about to lead him on a convoluted verbal trail where Ondry could not compete with his much more verbose partner.
“Is this conversation becoming another debate?” Ondry asked.
“No.” Liam scrambled to his feet. “We aren’t fighting.”
Ondry remained in a crouch. The lack of truth in that statement made him widen his eyes.
“We aren’t!” Liam said defensively. “I’m feeling a little stressed.”
Ondry stood. “Why?”
Liam grabbed a towel and headed back into the nest room. “I don’t like change.”
“I have promised to avoid any change until much later,” Ondry said as he followed.
Liam stopped near the shelving with the clothes. He grabbed one upright support and held on. “I’m not talking about the rotilac, although you did catch me off guard with that. You should have talked to me.”
“You should have mentioned that you are uncomfortable with the idea of me growing larger.” Ondry countered.
Liam turned around. “Why would I bother? Since I didn’t know about the rotilac, it was a moot point.”
Ondry shook his head; he used a human gesture to make his point clear. “No, I will grow with or without the rotilac. I cannot stop my bones from lengthening, and depending on how long the Imshee can extend human life, we will still share a nest when I am as large as any tuk.”
“Are you sure the Imshee can or will do that for us?” Liam asked, his tone angry. Ondry had not been so confused since the first weeks of claiming Liam.
“I believe the Grandmothers will ensure a profitable trade, and the only profit the eldest Grandmother and I seek is the extension of our palteia’s lives.” Ondry inched closer to Liam.
“I don’t want to hope for that,” Liam said softly.
The logic of that statement was so flawed that Ondry wondered if Liam had misplaced his negatives. He waited for some explanation.
Liam began scrubbing himself with the towel. “I hate change. Every time I make a big change in my life—every time I think I’m jumping out of the frying pan, I go into the fire.”
The sentence as a whole distressed Ondry enough that he focused on the least important and most irrational part of it. “You would not fit in a cooking pan.”
A rough bark of laughter burst out of Liam. “You’re right about that. I shouldn’t translate idioms directly, but English-speakers use that phrase to explain the difficulty when an individual attempts to escape a dangerous or painful experience, like being in a hot pan, only to land in a far more dangerous situation.”
Ondry could follow that logic, even if he loathed the image of Liam in a pan. “You fear jumping into a fire.”
“Pretty much every time I’ve chased some fantasy about making my life better, I have landed in one fire or another. And sometimes I’ve dragged a whole lot of people into danger with me.” Liam rubbed his eyes.
Ondry suspected he remembered those who had chosen to go out on patrol with him during his people’s battle. Ondry understood this pain. “You made choices that led you to me. Your decisions were logical based on the information you had available at the time.” Ondry rested his hand against Liam’s neck, and Liam leaned into Ondry.
“Part of me wants this so much. I don’t want to leave you alone for centuries, and I want the Imshee to offer some miracle, and part of me is so afraid this is going to be one more huge mistake. Changing our genome could lead me to getting cancer, and then maybe I’ll die in five years instead of forty. Or maybe they’ll make a change, and I’ll die in some freak accident with superheated water cooking me in the bathing waters.”
Ondry knew that couldn’t happen. The mechanical releases that controlled the flow of water would not release it from the cooling areas until it was safe. The ship had bacteria and aquatic life that required temperature control, and the ship’s ability to maintain life required careful attention to the life balances in those systems. Liam understood that as well, so Ondry wasn’t sure how to make him stop worrying about an illogical fear. Instead, he held Liam.
“What if I’m not meant to have the same life span as you? I’m designed to die after eighty or so years. What gives me the right to change that?” Liam asked. His words implied an unexpected belief in creator deities.
“Would just gods deny you the right to live as long as you can? Individuals may claim any profit left abandoned on the table.”
“What if you and the Grandmother have to trade away too much?”
Ondry then took a chance and connected two parts of this conversation that would appear unrelated, except that Liam had mentioned both. “You will not harm the Grandmothers or me in this trade. This is not a case of your decisions leading others into danger.”
Liam looked up at Ondry. “Am I that obvious?”
“A little,” Ondry said.
Liam closed his eyes. “I’m also afraid of change. My favorite part of Prarownt was the sameness of it all. Every day was some variation on the previous. If you came, I had a good day, and we would eat together and I would learn something. If you didn’t come, I had a bad day where I made a few trades, walked home, and watched vids while eating in my bunk. Nothing changed, and I loved that.” Liam had a strange expression, his eyes turned down on the inner corners, altering the shape of his face subtly. Liam had strong emotions about the issue of change, but Ondry was unsure about how to soothe him. All Ondry could do was stroke the side of Liam’s neck, and since Liam did not have a fora, even that was limited in its ability to calm him.
“This is stupid,” Liam said without defining which “this” he referenced. Ondry’s chest ached at the thought that Liam might be describing himself. “I know this trade is exciting, and I want to meet a new species, but I’m so afraid of the past repeating itself. And I’m frustrated that I can’t let go of all the pain in my past and be as excited as Mora. I am starting to hate him for his lack of psychological damage.” Liam’s tone suggested he was not serious.
Liam pulled away and turned to the shelf. “I hate that my stupid fears are putting your rank in jeopardy. You’ve earned tuk-rank.”
“And I will keep it,” Ondry said. “If tuk is defined as challenging the Grandmothers, then one could argue that I am proving my status by challenging tradition.”
“Rownt like tradition.”
Ondry huffed. He couldn’t argue with that. “Is this why you no longer enjoy sex as much?” Ondry asked.
Liam dropped his head. “You are annoying in your persistence.”
Ondry respected Liam’s ability to lead a speaker in a circle around a subject and they had profited from it more than once; however, Ondry needed answers. So he waited in silence.
After he chose a pair of pants from the shelf, Liam turned around. “I enjoy sex just as much. However, as long as I’m worried, I probably will have trouble sinking into subspace. And I feel guilty because I know you enjoy it.”
“And is my rotilac any part of this guilt and worry you carry?”
Liam pulled a shirt on and then leaned back against the shelf. “Maybe. Right now I think I’m too worried about everything. I don’t know what is causing the most stress. And I am frustrated with myself. I can recognize that I’m being illogical. Hope doesn’t always end in disappointment and death, and I’m not sure how to get my brain wrapped around that fact. And I’m annoyed that you kept information from me. It’s all tangled up with the stress of meeting the Imshee.”
Ondry hated that his choices had contributed to the pain his palteia carried, but he didn’t know what other choices he could make. Giving up on the Imshee or abandoning his palteia to enter the rotilac were unacceptable. “I would have told you about the rotilac had I understood your dislike of change.”
“And you have a right to do what you like with your own body,” Liam said, but he said it slowly, as if struggling with the words. Ondry didn’t know how to interpret that. Liam continued. “But tell me, do you trust me with your trade routes?”
“Absolutely,” Ondry said. Liam had learned trading faster than any Rownt Ondry had ever known. Ondry had spent decades learning his craft, and Liam had become known for his pursuit of profits after only a few short years. Ondry had explained to Liam that many Rownt had dismissed humans as being too timid and slow to understand profit until Liam had come. “I know you would trade well for all those we represent, and no Rownt would ever question your right to trade in my name and access our goods and claim our markers.”
“I would never cost you profits.”
“I know,” Ondry said.
Liam blew out a heavy breath, and Ondry waited for him to bring up another concern. However, he remained silent.
“Will meeting the Imshee make your fears better or worse?” Ondry asked.
“I’m meeting them,” Liam said, without answering Ondry’s question. He grabbed the two decorative cuffs with the large central jewels off the shelf and slipped them onto his wrists. Ondry considered offering the nictel, but given Liam’s volatile mood, he decided not to. However, he would wait until Liam’s back was turned and slip the delicate, strong chain into his trading bag. Since Ondry didn’t fully understand Liam’s reactions, he could only prepare for any future and hope that Liam’s fears didn’t materialize.