Grail - Elizabeth Bear [100]
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