Grail - Elizabeth Bear [101]
“I’m thinking of myself as a student.”
“An anthropologist,” she said. “Going to get yourself another tertiary in science?”
“That’s what you’re for.”
He squeezed her foot. She prodded him lightly with her toe and laughed. The steam and sonics were making his head spin; he let go of her foot and moved up a shelf to lie down beside her. “It’s an endocrine reaction,” she said. “Just enough stress, and not too much. The proximity of an attractive member of my preferred gender. The evolutionary response says ‘Get a piece of that while you have the chance and make a strong baby now.’ ”
“The world is uncertain,” Danilaw answered. He put a hand out; she took it. Her fingers, too, were wet. “I don’t have time to make any babies until my Administrative Obligation is done. After that, I’ve earned out two years of personal project time, and I was thinking children might be a pretty good personal project. But that’s a bit in the future.”
“The future’s even more uncertain than the world,” Amanda said. She drew up one knee. “But I don’t have any objection to practicing. Maybe when the time is ripe we’ll have gotten really good at it.”
“Maybe we will,” Danilaw said. He sat up more slowly this time. “Let’s rinse off and find out where we’re starting from, shall we?”
A perfectly satisfactory first attempt, he thought later, licking her salt from his lips and trying to summon the energy to lift a hand and stroke her hair. She seemed to have dozed off, head on his shoulder, her leg thrown across his and her compact heel dug into the mossy cover on the bunk they occupied. The room felt cool now that they were quiet. Danilaw saw gooseflesh prickling across her shoulder. Mallory had shown him where the blankets were, in a cubby under the bed. With a groping hand he found one and managed to shake it open and drape it—somewhat haphazardly—over the two of them.
If Amanda had been sleeping, it was not heavily. She lifted her head from his shoulder and blinked. “Well,” she said. “In one regard, at least, I think I will declare this mission a success.”
Danilaw kissed the top of her head, straight hair slick against his lips. She smelled of crushed grass and clean woman and sweat and sex—an appealing combination. “But that was only the proof of concept,” he said. “We’ll have to run more extensive testing for a definitive result.”
She turned her face into his shoulder and snorted against his skin. A pause before she lifted herself up on an elbow and said, “You know all those tunes you sing? The ones from before the Eschaton and rightminding and The Obligation?”
“They’re songs,” he said, eager to assuage what he perceived as her concern. “I have not ever, nor do I ever intend, to shoot anyone over a quaint concept of infidelity. You have my word.”
“Your word? I shall have it bronzed.”
Because she made him laugh, he swatted her shoulder lightly. She laughed, too, before her expression settled into seriousness. “Why do you suppose we still find all that art from the bad old days so compelling?”
“Easy,” he said. “There have been studies. Which I have, as you might imagine, taken a professional interest in.”
“I might,” she admitted.
“Rightminding mitigates the conditioned emotional triggers for adrenaline response, among other things. We’re still capable of it, of course—adrenaline is useful stuff when a slarg is chasing you down the beach—but it used to manifest as a conditioned response to childhood trauma and hardwired primate social-dominance schema.”
“The source of a lot of irrational conflict,” she said.
“And a lot of folk music.” When she glanced up at him, he grinned.
She answered with one of her own, nodding that he should continue.
“But the amygdalae are still in there, and we still have a response to cathartic emotional stimulation. We’ve removed the crazy from our daily lives, but it’s still satisfying in art, safely removed and bounded. A nice thing, too. I’d hate to think what we’d be missing if we’d removed our ability to enjoy Ovid or Robert