The Caphenon

  “Perhaps they’ll surprise us and no one will be hurt.”

  Tal knew better. She’d known better the moment she hatched this plan. “Captain Serrado will pay a price no matter which choice she makes.”

  “You cannot take on every burden, Lancer Tal. Not even your shoulders are that broad.”

  “No. You’re right.” Then she realized what Lanaril had said and shook her head. “Except for one thing. Call me Andira.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure I’d like you to forget the first part of this conversation. Especially the profanity.”

  “How odd; I didn’t hear that part.”

  “Thank you.”

  They spoke for some time, with Tal wanting every detail of the Sharing and their conversation afterward. When they signed off, she walked across the room to her sideboard and popped the stopper on a new bottle of spirits. The blue mist trickled down the neck and over her hand, a cool sensation that she’d loved ever since her father had first shown her how to open a bottle. Pouring a glass, she took it to the window, raised it in the direction of the temple, and said, “Here’s to motivations.”

  Chapter 41

  Dinner and sex education

  “There she is,” Candini said. “About time. Hey, Lhyn! Over here!”

  She waved, making what Ekatya thought was an entirely unnecessary scene, because how hard was it for Lhyn to find her shipmates in a mess hall full of uniformed Alsean Guards? But Lhyn smiled, waved back, and began threading her way through the tables. Heads turned as she passed.

  “Why aren’t you in the officers’ mess?” she said when she arrived.

  “Because our esteemed captain had the bright idea of eating with the regular Guards so we could make ourselves more visible, for public relations something or other.” Candini was already two glasses into her bottle of spirits and feeling no pain. “Anyway, sit down and have a drink. Lancer Tal sent over a case of this stuff, and it is amazing.” She yanked out the empty chair next to her and had a drink poured before Lhyn even sat down.

  “Thank you.” Lhyn accepted her drink and looked around the table. “Am I very far behind?”

  “Behind Candini? Yes,” said Baldassar. “The rest of us have shown a little more self-control.”

  “Not true.” Candini pointed to the next table, where the weapons team was laughing uproariously at something one of them had said. “Roris and her team are ahead of me.”

  “Let me rephrase. The rest of us at this table have shown more self-control.”

  “And I have no idea why.” Candini took another sip from her glass. “Lancer Tal didn’t send this over for you to admire its color.”

  “But it is a lovely color,” Lhyn said as she lifted the glass to the light. “I can tell from the shade of blue that this is expensive.”

  “Because of course you would be an expert in Alsean wines.” Ekatya smiled as she raised her own glass.

  “As much of an expert as one can get while watching broadcasts.” Lhyn sipped her spirits and made a humming sound. “Oh, nice. Give me a few minutes, Telorana, and I’ll catch up with you.”

  “Finally!” Candini wrapped an affectionate arm around Lhyn’s shoulders and squeezed. “A woman after my own heart.”

  Ekatya narrowed her eyes at the display, wondering if standing up and knocking Candini’s arm off would be too obvious. Then she saw the wink from her pilot and knew she’d been caught. Candini might be a little buzzed, but she was still sharp. “I think the women after your own heart are at the next table,” she said. “Along with the men. Maybe you should switch.”

  Candini chuckled. “Not when Lhyn is at this one. I have too many questions.”

  “Er…you do? Wait, do I get to eat something first?” Lhyn looked around for a server.

  “You’re with the grunts, Dr. Rivers,” said Kameha from his seat next to Ekatya. “No one is waiting on you. Your food is up there.” He pointed at the counter on the far wall, where a number of servers filled plates for waiting Guards.

  “Oh. Save my place then, would you?”

  Ekatya deliberately did not watch her go, instead focusing on the conversation at the table as Kameha and Xi talked about the glass-making operation—which was now so smooth that they’d turned it over to the Alsean builders—and their impressions of the engineers that had come aboard for a tour and exchange of knowledge.

  “These people are advanced,” Kameha said. “You wouldn’t think it looking at their agricultural base and the small size of their cities, but some of their technology and understanding is right up there at Protectorate levels. Did you know about their nanotech capabilities?”

  Ekatya shook her head. “Not before I got here. Not before Dr. Rivers and I put together those reports, actually. I still have a list of things I want to discuss with Lancer Tal.”

  “Well, I asked the engineers about that neat little collapsible sword trick we saw at the funeral. Xi and I were both itching to get our hands on one of those to see how it worked, but I figured a bunch of engineers was the next best thing. Turns out the swords use nanotechnology to lock the individual blade sections together. The seams are stronger than the metal itself.”

  “So when they press the release in the grip,” Xi added, “the sections are launched out and joined at the molecular level.”

  “Essentially an atomic weld,” Kameha explained to Candini, who looked as if she wasn’t quite following.

  “Right, and then pressing the release again breaks the welds and collapses the sections. Really an intriguing bit of tech.” Xi sipped his drink.

  “What I love about it is the blending of modern and ancient.” Kameha nodded to Lhyn, who had returned with a plate in her hand. “The blades are incredibly advanced, but the grips are a throwback to what they must have used a thousand stellar years ago. They’re works of art.”

  “You’re talking about the swords?” Lhyn asked as she settled in. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  On the other side of Ekatya, Baldassar chuckled. “I have to admit, I didn’t expect our resident linguist and anthropologist to be admiring Alsean weaponry.”

  “Not all of their weaponry. I have no interest in disruptors or rail guns or missiles. But those swords really are gorgeous. They’re a big part of the warrior mythos.”

  “Blunt told me that Gehrain told her that warriors save for months—I mean, moons, to get their first swords,” Candini said. “It’s like a rite of passage.”

  “Oh, Blunt did, did she?” Baldassar nudged Ekatya. “Who’s going to have the sex talk with her, you or me?”

  “Definitely not me. I’m certain that’s in the first officer’s job description.”

  “That reminds me.” Candini turned a gleeful smile on Lhyn. “You still have some information to share.”

  Lhyn groaned. “Really? I just started eating, can’t you wait until I’m done?”

  “Nope. Last time we got interrupted, I didn’t see you again for a day and a half. No more interruptions.”

  “I want to hear this too,” Kameha said.

  Xi nodded, leaning forward and crossing his arms on the table expectantly.

  Lhyn looked around at them and then rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. To start with, they don’t have penises.”

  The men made “ouch” noises.

  “Or clitorises.”

  Candini pulled her head back like a turtle and grimaced. “Poor things!”

  “Or testicles or the whole fallopian tube slash uterus thing.”

  Ekatya held back a laugh, but it wasn’t easy while her senior staff were all showing various signs of horror.

  “Then what the Hades do they have?” Candini demanded. Everyone else nodded.

  “You know those ridges on their faces? They have more of those…elsewhere.”

  Now they all looked speculative, and Lhyn chuckled. “I really wish I had a vidcam right now.”

  “Never mind that,” Candini said. “What about these ridges?”

  ??
?They call them pelvic ridges. They start here at the top of the hips, run along the lower edges of the pelvis, and meet where, er, our most sensitive organs would be. The curve where they meet is called a molwine.”

  “So instead of jiggly bits they have a hard ridge?” Candini sat back in her chair, her face undergoing an interesting shift of expressions.

  “A very sensitive hard ridge.” Lhyn laughed when all of the crew leaned forward again. “Extremely sensitive when rubbed together, or nibbled—lightly, because biting too hard is apparently a good way to get kicked out of bed.”

  Ekatya dropped her head and pinched the bridge of her nose as everyone at the table shifted uncomfortably. She had a head start on them, since Lhyn had explained this to her in the healing center, so she shouldn’t be laughing. But it was next to impossible to hold it back.

  “But knowing how to bite just hard enough is considered an extremely desirable skill in a lover,” Lhyn continued. “And did I mention the neck ridges?”

  “No,” Kameha said in a high voice. He cleared his throat and added in a lower tone, “I’ve never seen any neck ridges on an Alsean.”

  “That’s a good thing, Commander. Because if you had, it would mean they were sexually aroused.”

  “Come to think of it, I thought I saw some neck ridges on two or three of those engineers in your tour,” Candini said. “What were you telling them, anyway?”

  “Nothing! And you did not.”

  “They’re all engineers,” Baldassar said. “They could have been talking about spanners and gotten aroused.”

  Ekatya gave up and laughed, leaning back and holding her stomach. The entire table joined in, and when the laughter trickled down to intermittent chuckles, Lhyn resumed her explanation.

  “The neck ridges are sensitive too, though not nearly as much as the molwine. And both sexes have what we’d call a vaginal opening, except that it doesn’t lead to a uterus. It ends in a tiny little pouch designed to hold a sperm capsule next to an egg. Both sexes can produce the sperm capsule, too. And the egg.”

  “I am so lost,” Candini said. “Are you saying they can fertilize themselves?”

  “No, no. The pouch won’t accept a sperm capsule from the same body, and Alseans can’t produce both at the same time anyway. But I am saying that both sexes are capable of fertilizing eggs, and both are capable of carrying and nursing a baby.”

  “How in the purple planets does that work?” Kameha wanted to know.

  “Their sexual dimorphism isn’t as pronounced as ours. For instance, adult males still end up with denser musculature and thicker ridges, but both sexes have the same internal structures, and neither sex fully develops those structures until actual pregnancy. That makes it easier for males to flip all the way over to female if they want to be the ones carrying their offspring. So while females are the ones who can carry and nurse offspring with a relatively nominal change in hormone production—I mean, I’m sure you’ve noticed the Alsean women have breasts…”

  Candini looked at the men, who said nothing, and nodded her head. “They noticed.”

  “So did you, Telorana, don’t look so innocent. Anyway, the males can do the same thing; it just takes a more profound change in hormone production. They’ll grow breasts for nursing, and develop their internal structures for sustaining and growing a fertilized egg to a full-sized infant. Once the baby is weaned, the hormone surge fades away and they revert to their normal sex.”

  “That is…fascinating and a little disturbing,” Kameha said.

  “Why disturbing?”

  “Er…”

  “Because he’s stuck on the whole not having a penis thing.” Candini waved a hand in dismissal. “Never mind that. What I want to know is how the women make this sperm capsule, and how the Hades it gets from wherever it’s made into this pouch thing.”

  “The sperm capsule and the egg are both made on demand, after a long period of very specific stimulation of the molwine. The egg is made in the pouch, where it sits and waits. The sperm capsule is made in a little fold between the molwine and the entrance. It’s ejected and then pushed into the receiving pouch.”

  “Yes, but with what?” Kameha asked.

  Lhyn lifted her hand and wiggled two fingers.

  “No way!” Candini spluttered with laughter and pointed at Kameha. “You’ve got the obsolete model! Better upgrade, Chief.”

  “Hey, I seem to recall you being very unhappy to leave Station Erebderis on our last visit, because you had to say good-bye to not one but two of those obsolete models.”

  “Two?” Baldassar’s eyebrow rose.

  “Brothers.” Candini sighed with the memory. “Identical twins. They did everything together.”

  Lhyn looked at her incredulously. “I thought you said that was just a stereotype about pilots running wild on leave.”

  “It is a stereotype. That doesn’t mean it can’t occasionally be true.”

  “In Candini’s case, it’s not a stereotype,” Ekatya said. “So if the egg and sperm capsule are both made on demand, then reproduction is entirely planned, right?”

  “Right. Which is why their global population is still only half a billion. I mean, there are accidents, but they’re not very common.”

  Baldassar ticked off the points on his fingers. “So, planned reproduction, both sexes can carry and nurse a baby, males can become functionally female—”

  “And females can become functionally male,” Lhyn interjected. “Just as the males undergo a hormone surge to produce that egg and then host it, the females undergo a hormone surge to produce the sperm capsule. That’s why their creation ceremony lasts five days, because it takes that long for the hormones produced from the molwine stimulation to result in gamete production.”

  “Wait a minute,” Candini said. “They have sex for five days to get pregnant?”

  “Well…not every minute of those five days. But yes, there’s a fairly regular need for stimulation.”

  “Holy Seeders. No wonder they have ridges instead of jiggly bits. The jiggly bits would fall off by then.”

  “That really does have profound implications for their culture,” Baldassar said. “If either sex can fertilize eggs or give birth, then there’s no selection pressure for sexual preference. There’s probably very little mate competition as well.”

  “Exactly. It also has implications for their attitude toward recreational sex. With us, the sex we have for fun is identical to the sex we have to get pregnant—”

  “Not all of it.” Candini winked and sipped her spirits.

  “Fine,” Lhyn said, rolling her eyes as the others laughed. “The heterosexual penetrative sex we have is—”

  Candini raised both eyebrows.

  “I am not going to be any more specific!” But Lhyn was smiling. “Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that for the Alseans, those are two very different acts. Sex for fun is quick and easy and there’s practically no danger of pregnancy, even when it’s between opposite sexes. That’s why they call it joining, because it implies something that’s easily done and easily ended, and they don’t assign any emotional weight to it. I mean, it can be emotionally profound, but there’s no cultural expectation that it should be. They reserve their expectations of that kind of connection for the Sharing, which really does have emotional weight.”

  Everyone wanted to know more about Sharing, and from Lhyn’s answers Ekatya knew she’d learned a great deal about it from her studies today. She caught her eye and sent a silent message, wanting to know how it had gone, but got only a slight head shake in response. Lhyn wasn’t going to talk about it in front of the others.

  Funny, Ekatya mused as she sipped her drink. Lhyn could explain Alsean sex and reproduction in excruciating detail with her crew and not bat an eye. But emotions? Those were too private.

  Maybe they were closer to the Alseans than they realized.

  Chapter 42

  The right thing

  Lhyn slipped inside the room just as she had t
he two previous nights, and Ekatya was waiting with a bottle of spirits that she’d found on her sideboard. The accompanying note from Lancer Tal explained that what they’d had at dinner was merely excellent, while this was superlative. It wasn’t an exaggeration.

  “Long time no see,” she said, handing over a glass.

  Lhyn lifted it in a salute. “Yes, it’s been at least an hour since evenmeal.” Even when speaking Common, she often used Alsean words.

  “I know, what took you so long?”

  That earned a chuckle as Lhyn brought the glass to her mouth. “Wow. This is even better than the last bottle.” She set her drink on the side table and plopped onto the couch.

  “I’m told it’s the finest on Alsea. Can’t imagine how much it must cost.”

  “There are advantages to being globally famous heroes, aren’t there?”

  Ekatya sat beside her. “VIP quarters, delicious food and fine wines, and a secret lover’s entrance? Definitely. So how was your day? I mean, the parts you didn’t talk about at dinner?”

  This was the first day that Lhyn hadn’t been with or at least near her at all times, and she’d found it ridiculously distracting. Ten months without so much as a message, and she’d gotten along just fine. Now one day was a trial.

  “Oh my stars, I had the most wonderful day. You would not believe it. I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Start with your trip to Blacksun Temple,” Ekatya suggested.

  Lhyn eagerly complied, telling her all about her introduction to Lead Templar Satran, the stories she’d heard, and how she’d finally gotten to experience the Sharing she’d been so curious about.

  “It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever felt. You can’t imagine—it’s like being inside someone else’s mind. Except not quite, because you’re not outside your own mind. I don’t know how to describe it.” She sipped her spirits thoughtfully. “Remember the night we really connected? When we felt safe enough to tell each other the real truth about ourselves instead of the usual getting-to-know-you conversation? When we talked about how we felt, rather than what we did?”