She smiled. “Thank you.”
“Hey, here’s a question.” He rested his head on his arm. He had no idea why he was asking this, after a day like the one they’d just had. It was obvious where her head was at. But the idea had germinated inside him and now he had to run it to its inevitable conclusion, whatever that turned out to be. “You think that preacherman could marry us? We’re definitely of his flock. He’s probably got a service in his missal.”
“His missal?”
“Whatever it’s called. The thing with all the ceremonies in it.”
“A reader?”
“No. The document. You know what I mean.” His right hand found her left. “Interested?”
Her fingers enlaced with his. “If you are,” she said. “I don’t need a ceremony, though. And even if I did, I wouldn’t need a human to perform it.” She squeezed his hand. “Besides, we’d have to invite my dad, and he’d have to get time off, and then we’d have to move the island closer to shore, and–”
“OK, OK, I get it.” He let her hand slip away. “I just thought it might be nice.”
She cuddled into his chest. “It would be nice. But if that’s what you want, there’s no reason to wait for a human to approve of it.”
He inhaled the scent of her scalp. She smelled like ozone, like storms and rust and burnt sugar. “You don’t play fair,” he said, “turning down my proposal while you’re naked.”
Her head poked up. “I didn’t turn you down,” she said. “I just like doing things my own way. I never went to church, and I’m not going to start with some organization that built us to serve perverts.”
“So, we should wait for a Unitarian to show up?”
Amy rolled away. “No,” she said. “I’m saying we don’t need anything like that. We chose each other already. If you want to have a party for it, that’s fine. But you know it’ll just turn into some big media circus. They’ll stream it everywhere, on every feed. It won’t belong to us anymore.”
She had a point, and it was one he hadn’t considered. He’d been focused on his own private simulation of just how exactly he would slip the white silk up Amy’s legs, just what he’d say, just how it would all go down. So to speak.
“It’s OK,” he heard himself say. “I think I just wanted the wedding night, anyway.”
“… Oh.”
Instantly, he realized he’d made a mistake. She thought it was all about the sex. Usually he was better at planning these things out a few moves in advance. You didn’t sleep your way out of a Nicaraguan prison without being able to do that. But Amy was different. Just organic enough to make him yearn, just synthetic enough to make him slip. And that made moments like this one interminable. Amy folded her knees to her chest and hugged them. She focused on the shadows of the room. Her fingers danced across her shins.
“It’s not just that,” he said. “I want more than that.”
“It’s OK.”
It wasn’t. “No, it’s not.”
“No, really. It’s fine.” Her fingers fluttered like pale night moths. “Like you said. I’ve been holding out on you.”
Oh, Jesus. Shit. Puta madre. The conversation was slipping away from him. She was slipping away from him.
“It’s not like that,” he said. “That’s not why I brought it up.”
“I should take it as a compliment,” Amy said. “It is a compliment, right?”
“It’s a compliment I want to spend the rest of my life giving you.”
She smiled. “Thank you.” She stood. “I have to go look at the sub, now.”
Fuck. He’d lost. She was being graceful about it, but that much was obvious. Her clothes climbed up her body, vine-like and dark enough that she seemed to be slowly disappearing from the room. At the end, only her face remained. Her face was frowning, but not at him. She was talking with the island. In losing the plot, he’d lost her attention, too. She was already unsealing the room. She paused at the entry, hand on the jamb, peering over her shoulder at him.
“Do the words generation ship mean anything to you?” she asked.
He said no, and she drifted away. He was watching the darkness where she’d been when Pastor Powell showed up.
“I can’t sleep,” he said.
“This is some place you’ve got, here.”
They were proceeding along the thoroughfare. The night after a shipment was always animated; everybody trying on or trying out whatever came from the boat, showing off their new wares to neighbours and botflies. Small iterations ran past them with pinwheels and fireworks and glowing projector bangles. Rickshaws were out with samples of all the latest pre-fab foods, sent from all the best brands. Lantern bots dipped and hovered, casting mood lighting based on aggregate emotional data gleaned from ambient conversational keywords. And when the other vN noticed the human walking at Javier’s side, they stopped everything to watch him pass.