you're too young & eager to love

Work and a Halloween party interrupted my possibility of writing yesterday. Yadda yadda.

Here's some sci-fi to hopefully make up for the nothingness that was yesterday.

-

I no longer speak for effect.
I speak the truth without the niceties.
I am hundreds of years old but do not know how many hundreds.
The person I was does not know me.
- Marvin Bell

“Your kind,” the cook asks while stretching his stiff arms, “they live for a while, don’t they?”

Priam does not blink her eyes. She glances up from the holograph of yet another discovery - a new breed of cannibalistic post-humans. She’s studying again, integrating the anatomy of a fanged and elongated jaw into her memory. Humanity seems a decreasing concept with evolution, she thinks, then realizes that spending so much time around these people has made her feel included. Less foreign. The body she hides behind her more acceptable skin shivers. “Up to their forty-eighth Twenty.”

The cook calculates, whistles between his teeth. It’s a shrill noise and hurts her ears. “960. So, you’re … relatively young?”

She smiles, thin lips arching difficultly. She still has trouble with a pliable mouth. “You could say that.”

The silence that settles is awkward, but she doesn’t notice, adding notes into the ship’s computer database. Her fingers are tired. Her body feels worn from being contained for so long. When she stretches, too many joints crack. A splintering noise that has the cook lift an eyebrow and she recognizes that male grin on his face. Can smell sweat and pheromones and the lechery of a limited mind.

“You know, I’ve always been interested in – “

“The entering of a tentacle down one’s throat? Then a mucus block forming? Because that’s the beginning of my mating rituals.”

The cook grimaces, fumbles a response, and then conveniently finds a reason to shuffle away. Creeping with the dark shadows of the ship. From a corner of the room, bundled in layers to protect herself from the deep cold, the engineer laughs. She’s a sprightly thing, tiny-boned, impossibly friendly in the impending isolation of space. “Do you really have tentacles?”

Priam tries smiling again. “No. Now ask me if I have mating rituals.”

“You have a sense of humor, though.”

“When I remember to.” Shifting back to the holograph, she doesn’t notice the engineer frowning. She can feel the pity though, the thickening of the air. It brushes down her spine, easily ignored.