Phares glanced back at Jana, who stared, her eyes wide. She blinked, like prey caught by a predator, and she didn't move.
"Come," he said, adjusting the bags and continuing to walk through the crowds. Others separated around them as they walked through, into the main areas of the ship.
"That was bad, wasn't it?" she asked.
"What?"
"What he said, it was pretty bad, huh?"
Phares nodded. "Disrespectful and cruel."
"Do I want to know?"
"No."
"Why didn't I understand it?" she asked after a few minutes. "I seem to understand almost everything anyone says, now that I have this disk thing behind my ear. Why couldn't I understand him?"
"Some species have different languages that they did not register in the universal translator core. In his people's case, they registered formal speech, but certain levels of slur, they did not. Some species feel that certain words lose their strength if translated."
She nodded. "Like sex."
"That is a slur in your culture?"
"Depends on how it is used. In some cases, it is referred to as one's physical characteristics, like his sex is male. Her sex is female," she said, gesturing to a couple of people in the crowd.
"It means gender?"
"It can. But it also refers to the act of sex. And the, shall we say, intensity of the act."
"You have different levels?" Her people were sounding more and more complicated.
“Well, what do you have for physical intimacy?”
“I, uh,”
“Okay, so let me put it to you this way. Does it seem different when you’re being intimate with a partner if they are your mate versus when they’re not?”
Phares did not have an answer to that question. “Should it?”
“On my world, it is supposed to.” Her shoulders shrugged, and she looked down for a moment.
He put his hand on her shoulder. “I am sorry,” he said, though he knew not what he apologized for, only that he didn’t like that it hurt her. Whoever this previous lover was.
If Phares ever met him, he very well might rip him in half for whatever he did to Jana.
As they reached one of the main corridors, the ship opened, and they stepped out onto the spinning wheel that created the ship’s gravity.
She paused just as she stepped through. “This floor is curved.”
He nodded. “It is,” he said, gesturing out. “There is a spinning deck that rotates to maintain our gravity.”
She looked around and then looked up.
And gasped. “There are people walking up there!”
Others in the walkway curved around her, and a couple bumped into her as she stared in wonder.
One little kid with blue antennae and scales on his cheeks came up to her as she stood there, staring at the ceiling.
