“Why did you want to come on this trip, Pirra?” Alexander asked her.
She looked up absently from the pad she’d been reading in her sleeping bag.
“Hm?” she asked.
It was probably work-related, he thought, at what she’d been reading. She was always so into her career.
Repeating his question, Alexander studied his wife.
As with all Dessei, her eyes were larger than a human’s, and seemed all the more expressive for it. Despite having a head nearly the same size as a human, her body was more gracile. It gave her a strange, almost stick-figure look, but lacking the sickly appearance an overly-thin human had. A feature inherited from her bird-like ancestors.
It was hard to imagine that she threw herself into danger without a second thought. She looked delicate, but evolution had given her species bones and muscles that were stronger than they looked, at least comparable with a human.
“It seemed a chance to get off the ship, to have that vacation you wanted,” she chirped in answer.
Even though the translators could seamlessly cancel most sounds of a being’s language and translate it, he had learned her language years before. At least the parts within the human audio range; some Dessei sounds were too high in pitch for his ears to even register. Just through sheer experience he could sometimes pick up nuances in her words that even the translators could miss.
And right now he could tell that she was making an excuse.
“I wanted to go to that resort on Axas,” he said. “Just a day there and back – we’d have two days of just relaxation and fun. Do you know how great the museums are there?”
She offered her attempt at a human smile. It wasn’t actually her mouth, he knew. What adorned her face was more akin to a large nostril (though thankfully not snotty like a human’s). She sang through it, whistled her lovely language, and below that, under her chin was the rather-terrifying mouth that had evolved to swallow whole the fish-like prey her ancestors subsisted on.
Smiling didn’t come naturally to them, with their . . . singer, as they called it. But she tried, because he’d told her once he loved it when she did that for him.
“I . . . didn’t really want to go to the resort,” she admitted.
“Why?” he asked. He didn’t want to be upset, but they hadn’t gone on a proper vacation since their honeymoon four years earlier.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her tone sounding more like admitting to a mistake than evading the question. “Maybe a resort was just too sedate after what I’ve been through. I like museums – I really do – but I didn’t want to go to one now.”
Alexander smiled wryly. “So going to some weird frontier colony is better?”
She considered. “Yeah. It does seem better. It’ll still be interesting, though, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure it will,” he said, smiling at her. “And at least we’ll be together.”
She leaned out of her sleeping bag to reach for him. Her fingers were as white as paper, and appeared so much more delicate than his own. As their strength closed on his hand, he felt a happy warmth in his chest.
She said nothing, but smiled again for him and held his hand.
Other Terrestrial 