Episode 27: Mating (Pish)

He liked his work.

He loved it. The rhythm, the precision, the monotony. Hours, months, centuries of life spent on the same endeavor.

The same delicate procedures, day in and day out.

There was a girl who worked in the lab with him. Sometimes he remembered her name, but today wasn’t one of those days. Tea? Bray? Clay. Say.

It didn’t matter, as long as she did good work.

She was a profoundly scrupulous worker. She labeled, she documented, she didn’t distract him.

Until today.

She came in with a new plant, something shades of purple and deep green-black, with bubble-like seed pods.

“Hi, Pish.” She shoved the plant in his hands, which contaminated them. He’d need to re-clean. All the water that came into his lab was thrice-filtered, and in order for Tey to enter she had gone through two separate clean rooms.

There was no way the plant had been stripped of all the bacteria on it.

“I found this plant,” she told him. “Do you like it?”

“It’s a nice plant,” he agreed. Plants weren’t for liking or not liking; they were for purposes. Some plants were for food, some for cleaning, some for medicine, some were food for animals that were food to people.

Tey! That was her name. He knew he would remember it.

All things, on a chain, an endless chain. It wasn’t about liking a part of the chain. It was about ensuring that the chain endured.

“I thought we could study it next,” she suggested.

That deep in color, it probably wasn’t edible. Whatever its role was, it was low on the food chain.

“We could,” he said. She could, anyway. He had no interest in it.

“Maybe we can talk about it after work today. There’s a performance in the main area of the market.” She moved a little closer to him.

Pish knew people had personal bubbles. Most people had personal bubbles that were more or less an arm’s length away. Pish was happy with several rooms’ distance between him and other people, especially when they were looking at him.

“I sleep here,” he apologized. There was no such thing as after work. What would he do with it?

“Okay. I just thought you might want to go on a date and get out of here.” Once a week, on Rovish, he went home to see his mom. It was his least-favorite day of the week.

“A date?” he repeated. “You want children already? You’re only 63.”

“I’m interested in having children.”

He couldn’t fathom why, outside of the evolutionary obligation. He’d probably have to have kids someday himself. Otherwise, who would carry on his research?

But he had thousands of years before that became an urgent need.

“Then you should go on a date,” he suggested. He just wanted to get back to his algae. “Did you see how green these are? How do they get so green with so little sunlight?”
She backed away with her plant. “If you don’t want to be together, which is the obvious conclusion based on proximity, I can look elsewhere for someone to have children with. I wanted to offer.” She looked at his algaes. “We can experiment with light exposures.”

“You want to have children with me?” he sorted. “Why?”

He didn’t even want to have children with himself. Not just because kids were messy, but because he knew he was a dull person when it came to social interaction. No one wanted him around.

“I bonded to you a few years ago. I understand though; bonds don’t always go both ways.”

She bonded to him? He wondered why she’d gone and done that. Bonds were so hard to retract. Pish, by anxiety, had never relaxed enough to bond to anyone.

“It never occurred to me to bond to anyone,” he hedged. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I tried to.” She set the plant in a locker space, to keep it separate from the other plants. “You didn’t seem to understand what I meant so I made the anti-bond.” She met his eyes.

He felt an immense pressure in his upper arms. Fight or flight, kicking in over nothing.

“My parents would like me to settle. I wanted to pursue this before moving on.”

He had a girl interested. Not just any girl, but someone good at research. Someone able to be quiet when he needed to spend all his attention on his work.

He rippled his fin. “Do we have to date? We could just mate, it would be less complicated than all that other distraction.”

He wouldn’t have to leave the lab, for one. Or think about performances, or talk to Tey about whatever she thought was important.

“We could just mate,” she said.

He had no idea what she was thinking. If she wanted him, she had no standards. Maybe she just wanted a baby, because she was a girl and evolution made her want a baby. He was an easy choice in terms of availability.

“Is that what you want?” he tried to gauge her reaction.

She fluffed her hair through the water. “Can we experiment and see if just mating feels right?”

In other words, Can we just mate and see how we like it, without saying that’s what we’re doing?

“We can,” he agreed. His hands shook.

It was a natural response to an unexpected stimulus.

He took a deep breath.

“If it bothers you we don’t have to,” Tey said in a soothing tone. He didn’t know she could do soothing. Usually her voice was best classified as brusque. “It could enhance our work – they could learn.”

“Is it distracting you that we haven’t mated?” If the bond was getting in the way of their work, it was better to just do the sex thing and make sure she was focused. He didn’t need her distracted.

She shook her head, and he could feel some kind of frustration rolling off her shoulders and back. It was even visible in her eyes.

“It’s distracting me that I haven’t had a concrete answer,” she said. “I don’t like uncertainty.”

“I don’t want you to be distracted,” Pish told her.

He hated people. If he lived on land, he’d make a whole army of robot lab assistants that did what they were told without expecting any interaction.

“I can try,” he agreed. “We can try.” Kids. He didn’t want kids. They were the biggest distraction he could imagine for himself. “I don’t know how to date,” he warned. “I know about algae and sea flora.” And the bees problem, but no one in the water cared about bees. That was his personal side project.

She stepped closer to him again.

His personal bubble popped.

His hands shook. He didn’t know where to put them so he hid them behind his back.

“I’ve heard this part is straightforward,” she said.

“Is it? It seems like it should be.” Instinct should make it easy to perpetuate the species.

She ran the palm of her hand up his chest and neck, and then she held his face in her hand and kissed him.

He shivered, a good shiver.

A shiver he’d never felt before. It left him wanting more touch, more Tey.

“How was that?” she asked when she pulled away.

He wanted this so much, now that she’d touched him. He didn’t know his body could respond like that. He thought sex was a thing that happened to other people, like friendships were, not a him thing.

But there was something, some memory… “Aren’t there rules about dating and working together? Or is that only a strong suggestion?”

She stepped a little away from him but she kept her hand on his chest.

He made a mental list of the pheromones that were probably passing between them. It was short, but intense.

In most mammalian males, sex would be inevitable by this point. A foregone conclusion.

“We can keep our relationship professional, Pish,” she offered. Then, bafflingly, she added, “You should have offspring with a mind like yours.”

Did she think that meant that because he was smart he should have kids? Or did she think it meant that he shouldn’t sleep with anyone until he found someone who understood him?

And why was she even offering that when they’d established that she was offering to keep things professional?

It was the most confusing sentence of his life.

He had a bad feeling that it mattered.

He should have evolved to have some kind of clue what he was doing.

“Okay,” he said, generic and vague. Maybe she’d clarify.

“If you want me to stop,” she said. She tilted her head, looking into his eyes. Hers were teal, an uncommon color.

That made her an evolutionary rarity.

He wondered whether teal was a dominant or recessive trait.

His eyes were blue-grey like a storm on the surface.

Their children would have interesting eyes.

Their children? When had he decided to go through with this?

He rubbed the growing headache in his forehead.

“You’ve never been with a female,” she said slowly. “I propose you experience being with a female so you can decide if you like females. You know me. I can be rational if this doesn’t work for you.”

It was the same thing his mom always guessed. He must be the least-masculine person in the ocean. “I’m not gay, Tey. I’m focused.”

“I know,” she said, to his surprise. His mom always treated him like he must be in denial, because a love of science wasn’t a sexual preference.

“I’ve respected your focus,” Tey continued. “But if we don’t mate, I have to with someone else.”

Girls were so unpredictable about babies. Tey was a perfectly normal functional girl – unusually functional – and suddenly it was all about babies.

Pish sighed.

He wanted her focused.

And now he was all distracted too. He’d never focus again today unless he did something about this.

“But I said yes,” he told her.

He wasn’t actually sure he had.

If he had, he hadn’t meant it.

He needed to mean it, so he could focus on that strange green algae.

“I’m sorry,” Tey said, swimming closer to him again. “It didn’t sound explicitly like yes.”

She kissed him again.

Her tongue was smooth as it glided along his. He hadn’t expected that. He always thought the taste buds must make it coarse when people kissed.

This was ridiculous.

He needed to stop thinking.

He didn’t know how.

She bit his lip, and something inside him gave way to the sensations of her touch and her attention. He swam them upward, to the ceiling of the lab, and pinned her against it. Lip to lip, hand to hand, body to body.

This was why people dated.

All that wasted time, for a few minutes of intense and breathtaking feelings.

He felt the moment when his body relaxed enough to shift back to a fin instead of legs. Tey noticed too. “Do you want to get back to work?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

He really didn’t. He’d never be able to focus the same way again.

“Did you enjoy that?” she asked. She ran her fin against his.

Personal bubbles. He wondered if there was a couples bubble that he could include Tey in without interfering again with his own sense of space.

“Yes.” He smiled at her and admitted, “Things make a lot more sense now. Did you?”

“Yes,” she said, with a matching smile of her own.

There was good in her he’d never noticed before. He could try to make this work, longer-term. Possibly permanently.

“So are we mating?” he asked.

“We just did,” she teased. “Yes. We should often until we know I’m pregnant.”

“We should do it often because it’s good,” he countered. It was good, and it relieved tension, and it made her happy, and he could find a new way to focus with this distraction in his life.

She laughed.

He’d never heard her laugh before. He’d never noticed it, anyway. She was a person, it stood to reason she’d laughed before.

“I agree,” she said. “And more than just to get me pregnant. I could live here too.”

It was his dream come true. If she never went home for the night, if they lived there… “We could get way more done that way.” He looked at her. His hands seemed to want to touch her again, so he did. He ran them over her waist, down the curve of her fin. “How did you know you would like it?”

“I knew I would like you.” She ran her hands across his body too, her fingers grazing over his transverse abdominal muscles. “The bond made me feel impulsively attracted. It wasn’t as much about knowing I would like it as feeling I needed it. I did like it, too. I will keep liking it.”

He knew he hadn’t bonded, but the intercourse had made him feel drawn to her and protective. It was almost the same thing, without the love. Maybe love and emotional attachment would grow out of this.

“Yes,” he told her, “that’s what it feels like.”

“Did you bond?” she asked. He could see the hope in her eyes, the way they waited, caught between possibility and disappointment.

He couldn’t.

“Yes,” he lied. He kissed her again to hide the lie.

He’d study other bonded couples and see how they interacted. She’d never have to know the truth.

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