And I Liked It - Ashley talking to Samantha about Kolyat (pt 3)
anonymous
January 28 2015, 18:56:32 UTC
"I was in the lounge flipping through a Tennyson collection Shepard gave me and suddenly this _green_ guy in the next chair starts reciting 'The Lady of Shalott'! Said it was in an anthology of Earth poets he'd read once, months before, but drell remember things like... We started testing each other's recall on stuff we'd read or heard years back, cracked each other up a few times. He seemed like a sweet kid." She fiddles with her glass. "We talked a bunch more times in the next couple weeks. I started looking forward to seeing him. Dunno when I stopped thinking of him as just 'that nice alien boy'." She pauses to frown and think about it. "I do remember looking at his hands. First staring at, y'know, the fused middle finger thing, thinking 'that's so _weird_', and then looking at the rest of his hands thinking they were, other than that, not bad. At some point it lost the 'other than': he just had really nice hands. His face too, the whole shape of him, went from compellingly strange to just... compelling. Like the more I looked the more I wanted to keep looking. Those hands, though." She shakes her head and sips her water. "His dad was terminal, and in a lot of pain. One day I held his hand to try and comfort him--and it was the best hand-holding of my entire life." Samantha smiles at the wry astonished joy on Williams face. "It should've been uncomfortable, not being able to interlace our fingers right, but it wasn't. Our hands fit. And the texture of his skin just..." Another head shake. "I think we both freaked out after that. I didn't see him again until after Udina's coup. When he told me his father'd passed I hugged him. Didn't even think about it. That was like permission. We kept touching each other--totally innocent, just hand on arm or upper back, knees bumping, pressing shoulders when we sat side-by-side. It only lasted a few days before the commander let me back onto the Normandy, but it was so _sweet_--I had to admit, I wanted more." Her face falls. "It snuck up on me somehow. Guess it always does. I must be just as twisted as the rest of them, because I fell neck-deep in crush with a talking lizard." Williams looks so despondent, slouching in her seat like that. Samantha's forehead creases. "Permission to speak freely, ma'am?" Williams sips her water and says, "Of course." "Well... he's not exactly a gecko, is he? Your drell friend. No more than you're, I dunno, a pygmy marmoset. Less, actually, because drell aren't related to Terran lizards at all. It's just how the galaxy works: different planet, different lifeforms, different history--still people. On his homeworld scaly green critters got the hang of fire and language and on ours it was apes." Samantha shrugs. "I always thought drell look a bit like dinosaurs, myself--old pictures, that is. Without the feathers." Williams shakes her head with increasing emphasis over Samantha's post-script. "Sure, but isn't that even worse? Doesn't really matter if evolution is guided by God or completely random; we are from literally two different worlds. We're not supposed to knock boots or even want to." "If that were the case, why'd we ever meet in the first place? I've seen analyses. Some biological similarities are expected--developing socially and technologically complex cultures is tricky, sometimes species will solve problems the same way. As a data set, though? The civilizations we've met so far cluster far tighter than mathematically plausible. If you want to credit that pattern to God then I have to conclude: God does not hate the idea." Williams rolls her eyes. "I'm still tripping out over a couple of kisses, Traynor. That to me does not scream 'blessing'." Samantha waggles her head. "I take your point, though some people would probably argue the reverse." She pauses to consider her wording. "Might it help to try to think of this as an exception, rather than a need to change the rules?"
She fiddles with her glass. "We talked a bunch more times in the next couple weeks. I started looking forward to seeing him. Dunno when I stopped thinking of him as just 'that nice alien boy'." She pauses to frown and think about it. "I do remember looking at his hands. First staring at, y'know, the fused middle finger thing, thinking 'that's so _weird_', and then looking at the rest of his hands thinking they were, other than that, not bad. At some point it lost the 'other than': he just had really nice hands. His face too, the whole shape of him, went from compellingly strange to just... compelling. Like the more I looked the more I wanted to keep looking. Those hands, though." She shakes her head and sips her water. "His dad was terminal, and in a lot of pain. One day I held his hand to try and comfort him--and it was the best hand-holding of my entire life." Samantha smiles at the wry astonished joy on Williams face. "It should've been uncomfortable, not being able to interlace our fingers right, but it wasn't. Our hands fit. And the texture of his skin just..." Another head shake. "I think we both freaked out after that. I didn't see him again until after Udina's coup. When he told me his father'd passed I hugged him. Didn't even think about it. That was like permission. We kept touching each other--totally innocent, just hand on arm or upper back, knees bumping, pressing shoulders when we sat side-by-side. It only lasted a few days before the commander let me back onto the Normandy, but it was so _sweet_--I had to admit, I wanted more." Her face falls. "It snuck up on me somehow. Guess it always does. I must be just as twisted as the rest of them, because I fell neck-deep in crush with a talking lizard."
Williams looks so despondent, slouching in her seat like that. Samantha's forehead creases. "Permission to speak freely, ma'am?"
Williams sips her water and says, "Of course."
"Well... he's not exactly a gecko, is he? Your drell friend. No more than you're, I dunno, a pygmy marmoset. Less, actually, because drell aren't related to Terran lizards at all. It's just how the galaxy works: different planet, different lifeforms, different history--still people. On his homeworld scaly green critters got the hang of fire and language and on ours it was apes." Samantha shrugs. "I always thought drell look a bit like dinosaurs, myself--old pictures, that is. Without the feathers."
Williams shakes her head with increasing emphasis over Samantha's post-script. "Sure, but isn't that even worse? Doesn't really matter if evolution is guided by God or completely random; we are from literally two different worlds. We're not supposed to knock boots or even want to."
"If that were the case, why'd we ever meet in the first place? I've seen analyses. Some biological similarities are expected--developing socially and technologically complex cultures is tricky, sometimes species will solve problems the same way. As a data set, though? The civilizations we've met so far cluster far tighter than mathematically plausible. If you want to credit that pattern to God then I have to conclude: God does not hate the idea."
Williams rolls her eyes. "I'm still tripping out over a couple of kisses, Traynor. That to me does not scream 'blessing'."
Samantha waggles her head. "I take your point, though some people would probably argue the reverse." She pauses to consider her wording. "Might it help to try to think of this as an exception, rather than a need to change the rules?"
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