Dante lifted the edges of his lips in an expression Regi thought was a smile. He hoped it was. “I'm not considering it now,” Dante said. “Now, my imagination is working on a whole new set of possibilities, and most of them aren’t so terrible, although there is a chance we are going to end up dead in rather short order, which sucks.”
“Possibly,” Regi admitted. That was more than he wished to confess to the crew. “If I am right that my goddess is guiding us down a path, then the odds of dying are exponentially higher than if we were left to our own devices. But I do not understand how the application of suction applies.”
“The application of...” Dante laughed. “I don't think the translator has worked out all the bugs, which makes sense given the pirates didn’t talk much past issuing orders. Suck means terrible. And my imagination no longer supplies a plethora of sucky images of my future. That makes it easier to set aside any lingering thoughts of suicide.”
Suicide. The intentional killing of one's self. Regi's people did not have a term for the phenomenon, although on rare occasions someone did suffer brain damage or brain dysfunction serious enough for them to engage in the behavior. But for Dante's people to have a specific word for the concept did suggest something ominous. “Do many of your people consider suicide?”
Dante glanced toward the door with the damaged seal before answering. “Not generally. Generally, we’re pretty optimistic. You put a problem in front of us, and we’ll work on a solution, no matter how long it takes. But sometimes we get overwhelmed with all the imaginings, and if we can't imagine any possible good in our future, it gets hard to justify sticking around.”
That raised a host of new questions. “Why did you stick around?”
Dante took a deep breath and used it to fill his cheeks with air before he released it. “At first I didn’t want to consider it. I spent a lot of summers with my grandmother, and that woman was a good Catholic. She believed that it was your job to overcome whatever the good Lord put in front of you, and if you gave up on the good Lord's work, He was not obliged to forgive you for it.” He huffed. “Besides, if I weren’t around, who would do my work?”
That was the first time Regi had heard of anyone discussing how their god might motivate their actions. “My people know that the gods’ attention is a blessing and we would never refer to it using any other term, but we are often miserable when we are so blessed. Blessings cause hardships.”
“Amen,” Dante said softly, and the translator refused to offer any suggestions.
Regi continued. “My mother is one of the exalteds of the Lady Otutha. As a child, I often complained because the blessings my mother enjoyed from her goddess meant that everywhere we traveled, my mother encountered pregnant women. Our vehicle would lose a wheel and the wife of the shop owner would be ready to give birth. Our flight would be canceled and when we went to the lodging for the night, the woman at the desk would be heavily pregnant. And every time I saw a pregnant woman, I knew that my mother had been called because the birth would be a difficult one.” Regi had been insufferable in his frustration as a child. He was lucky that his fathers had been more tolerant than his mother.
“Sounds annoying,” Dante said.
“As an adult, I understand my mother's work has saved many children. When young I was quite resentful that she loved her goddess more than her family.”
Dante drew his eyebrows down until twin wrinkles appeared between them. “That must've been hard on your mama, never getting any time off and always knowing she could land in the middle of a medical emergency at any time.”
Regi greatly doubted that. His mother adored her position as one of the exalted and served as the local representative for the temple of the growing season. As an exalted, she had to vote in major propositions, but she chose to become a representative. Regi had not talked about his family for many years, and he found the subject disquieting. “Are your grandmothers and parents waiting for you on your planets?”
“My grandmother died when I was a half-grown sapling. She passed from a stroke.”
The translation matrix offered only noise at the concept of stroke, but Dante's demeanor made it appear to be something expected, if not celebrated. Regi always found those societies where people celebrated death rather disturbing. He expected his goddess to take him at his death, but he was no more willing to rush into her arms than he was to celebrate her sudden interest in him. “And your parents?”
Again, Dante lifted a shoulder. “My mom is a nurse, so I suppose she's not that much different than your mother, except for the part where she takes her marching orders from a god. My dad is still around, but I haven't talked to him for a while.”
“Is it normal for you to have only one mother and one father?” Many species raised young in groups, and some—like Regi’s people—had multiple individuals involved in procreation. Although a couple of species did use asexual reproduction.
“Lots of people have step-parents, but I tend to think of one mother and one father being the norm, and that makes me a rather hypocritical homosexual since I firmly believe in a gay couple's right to adopt children.”
Once again, Regi did not understand most words. Communicating with Dante was frustrating, but if the pirate had any sort of surveillance on the hallway, two chatting individuals avoided suspicion, so Regi took the only part of the statement he understood and focused on that. “Among my people, procreation requires one female and two males with different genitalia.”
Dante raised the hairs over his eyes so much that it changed the shape of his features. He was amazingly expressive, even if Regi did not understand most of the expressions. “Biologically, I'm wondering how that works, but it feels rude to ask.”
Regi would have explained the function of the two males since it was not one of the more common procreation methods, but Dante continued. “Among my people discussing anything related to sex in public is a big no, so I will keep my curiosity to myself and employ that imagination that you seem so impressed by.”
That was such an odd comment that Regi had no retort. He wasn't sure why his people's reproductive cycle required imagining. However, if huumans found discussion of reproduction a taboo, he would honor that prohibition. Movement in his peripheral vision distracted him. Dante started to turn that direction, and Regi caught him by his arms and turned him away from the door. Regi kept his gaze centered on Dante. “Do not look,” he said quietly.
“You know how to sweep a man off his feet,” Dante said, his words coming with an excess of air. Regi had hoped that the pirate would dismiss them as irrelevant, but his goddess’s blessing was still strong. The pirate threw the door open and fired a weapon. Regi threw himself backward, dragging Dante to safety around the corner as the laser scored a black line into the wall. A second later, radiation alarms blared. The alarm wouldn’t sound for an ephemeral spike in radiation, such as a quickly opened and then closed door. The engine was shedding radiation in dangerous levels into the living area.
And Vk wasn’t back with the radiation suits. Regi pushed Dante back. “Get to safety!” he yelled over the strident alarms. Then he turned toward the danger. His goddess had set him on this path, and he wouldn’t allow others to die because she overestimated his abilities. And that meant he had to get that damnable door shut.
