"Mmmmmm." Hali stretched and arched her back. "It smells so nice here."
"It? What's the smell of an it?"
"Oh, stop that." She turned toward him. "You know what I mean - the air, the moss, the food in your beard." She brushed at his whiskers, wove her fingers in and out of the coarse hairs. "You're the only Shipman with a beard."
"So I'm told."
"Do you like it?"
"I don't know." He reached out and traced the curve of the small wire ring which pierced her left nostril. "Traditions are strange. Where did you get this ring?"
"A robox dropped it."
"Dropped it?" He was surprised.
"I know - they don't miss much. This one was repairing a sensor outside that little medical study next to Behavioral. I saw the wire drop and picked it up.
"It was like finding a rare treasure. They leave so little around. Ship only knows what they do with all the scraps they carry off."
She slipped her arm around his neck and kissed him. Presently, she pulled back.
He pulled away from her and sat up. "Thanks, bu...."
"It's always, 'Thanks, bu....'" She was angry, fighting the physical evidence of her own passion.
"I'm not ready." He felt apologetic. "I don't know why and I'm not playing with you. I just have this compulsion toward timing, for the feeling of rightness in things."
"What could be more right? We were selected as a breeding pair after knowing each other all this time. It's not like we were strangers."
He could not bring himself to look at her. "I kno.... anyone shipside can partner with anyone else, bu...."
"But!" She whirled away and stared at the base of the sheltering tree. "We could be a breeding pair! One pair i.... what? Two thousand? We could actually make a child."
"It isn't that. It'...."
"And you're always so damned historical, traditional, quoting social patterns this and language patterns that. Why can't you see wha...."
He reached across her, put his fingers over her mouth to silence her and gently kissed her cheek.
"Dear Hali, because I can't. For me partnership will have to be a giving so deep that I lose myself in the giving."
She rolled away and lifted her head to stare at him, her eyes glistening. "Where do you get such ideas?"
"They come out of my living and from what I learn."
"Ship teaches you these things?"
"Ship does not deny me what I want to know."
She stared morosely at the ground under her feet. "Ship won't even talk to me."
Her voice was barely audible.
"When you ask in the right way, Ship always answers," he said. Then, an afterthought as he sensed it between them: "And you have to listen."
"You've said that before but you never tell me how."
There was no evading the jealousy in her voice. He found that he could only answer in one way.
"I will give you a poem," he said. He cleared his throat.
"Blue itself
teaches us blue."
She scowled, concentrating on his words. Presently, she shook her head. "I'll never understand you any more than I understand Ship. I go to WorShip; I pray; I do what Ship direct...." She stared at him. "I never see you at WorShip."
"Ship is my friend," he said.
Curiosity overcame her resentments.
"What does Ship teach you?"
"Too many things to tell here."
"Just give me one thing, just one!"
He nodded. "Very well. There have been many planets and many people. Their languages and the chronicle of their years weave a magic tangle. Their words sing to me. You don't even have to understand the words to hear them sing."
She felt an odd sense of wonder at this.
"Ship gives you words and you don't understand?"
"When I ask for the original."
"But why do you want words that you don't understand?"
"To make those people live, to make them mine. Not to own them, but to become them, at least for a blink or two."
He turned and stared at her. "Haven't you ever wanted to dig in ancient dirt and find people nobody else even knew existed?"
"Their bones?"
"No! Their hearts, their lives."
She shook her head slowly.