Chapter 12: The Interspecies Roundtable
The mess hall was already rearranged when Jeff came through the aft hatch at oh-seven-forty. Somebody on the night watch had dragged the benches into a loose square and pushed three tables together at the center. The overhead lamps were set low and brown. Condensation beaded along the water line above the serving alcove and dropped into a catch pan with a slow plink that carried over everything.
Reilly was at the far table with the archive pads stacked in front of her. She'd been up since oh-five. The fragment about the bonding songs had gone into the handbook overnight, four verses and the grandmother's station, and she'd written the girl's name in the byline because the girl had asked her to.
Jeff set the new consent forms beside the pads. She didn't look up.
"People will sit where they sit," she said. "Don't steer them."
"I wasn't going to."
"I know." She squared the stack. "That's why I said it."
The crew came in ones and twos, some with trays, most without. Jeff had expected a shuffle and a slow sorting, but the room did it on its own, and quickly. The two Andorian engineers took the far bench with their blue hands folded on their knees. Four human ratings from the repair pod sat together near the door. A Tellarite with a cracked knuckle sat alone, which was apparently how he liked it. One Vulcan in sciences coveralls sat at the end of a bench with her hands still and her eyes moving across the room.
Mendes came last. She took a bench against the bulkhead, crossed her arms, and became part of the wall.
Reilly stood. She walked to the Andorians first.
"Before the war, what did your people believe about lying down with somebody who wasn't Andorian?"
One of them, the older one with the scar through her brow ridge, answered without hesitation.
"It happened. It wasn't forbidden. It was kept quiet, the way anything private was kept quiet, but nobody went to the courts over it."
"And now?"
Now it was a rumor and a joke and a thing said behind a hand. The younger one said it in about seven words. Reilly wrote down none of it, which Jeff noticed, and then he understood that she wasn't recording this part. She was only listening.
She went to the humans next.
"Same question. What did your people say?"
A rating with grey in her braid said her colony had a word for it that her father wouldn't teach her, and she'd only found it later in an archive file. A young man from the pod said he'd grown up on a station where the only offworlder was a Rigellian trader and the whole deck had opinions about her. The room laughed, once, quietly.
"And what do your people say now?"
Nobody laughed at that one. A few faces went carefully blank, the way they did when the answer was family.
The Vulcan answered last, and she spoke only when Reilly stood in front of her.
"It was tolerated as a discipline problem," she said. "A lapse in control. Not a crime. Not a preference."
"And now?"
"I do not know anyone who has." She paused. "I have not asked."
Reilly nodded and stepped back into the middle of the square. The room had gone still the way it had in the corridor outside her own mess hall, sixty strangers deciding what they were allowed to feel in front of each other.
"One more question," Reilly said. "This one isn't about your grandmothers. This one's you."
She turned a slow half circle so she could look at every bench.
"Forget what you were taught. Do you want someone who isn't your species? Do you want to take them to bed?"
The plink of the drip pan sounded three times before anyone moved. Mendes kept her arms crossed and her face gave nothing at all. One of the ratings from the repair pod looked at the deck between her boots and didn't look up again.
The younger Andorian, the one who'd said it in seven words, was the first to answer.
"Yes. I've thought about it. I never said it out loud before this minute."
The Tellarite snorted through his cracked knuckle.
"Half the crew's thought about it. Thinking and saying are different animals." He looked straight at Reilly. "Yes. Say it plain, then. Yes."
A human woman on the third bench, one Jeff hadn't heard speak yesterday, said, quiet enough that people leaned in.
"I want to be wanted by somebody who doesn't know what I'll do next."
Nobody laughed at that either. Reilly let it sit. She didn't fill the silence, and Jeff had watched her hold silences for four years and knew the trick of it, which was that it wasn't a trick.
"That's the question under all of this," she said finally. "Not whether it's allowed. Whether you want it. The archive says we used to. That's all I can prove. But what we might learn—how different species experience pleasure, how to bridge gaps in understanding—could reshape Starfleet's approach to interspecies relations. Imagine having real data from people who've touched minds and bodies across species. We could build better protocols for long voyages, deeper understanding between crews, stronger alliances. This isn't just about rediscovering what we lost. It's about building what we need for the future."
She picked up one of the pads and held it so they could see the screen.
"If you're interested, this is how it works.
The screen showed one page and two boxes.
"Box one," Reilly said. "You sign up to answer questions about your own species. What touch meant where you grew up. What your grandmother's people did in the dark. What your body does that you've never said out loud."
She tapped the second box with her thumbnail and the light caught the glass.
"Box two. You sign up to ask those same questions about somebody else's species. Their rites. Their hands. How they want to be touched and what they call it."
She turned a quarter turn so she had the whole square in front of her.
"You can take either box or both. That's the first thing."
A stylus rolled off a bench somewhere behind her and someone stopped it with a boot.
"The computer does the pairing," Reilly said. "It reads what you checked, it reads how you answered, and it puts two names together. If it finds you a match, both of you get a time and a room number. You'll know the name before you walk in the door. If you don't want that name, you decline and the slot closes and the other person is told the slot closed. They never learn why, because there isn't a why. There's just a closed slot."
"Who else sees the list?" the rating with grey in her braid asked.
"Nobody. Not the captain. Not your division head. Not the XO." Reilly glanced at the bulkhead, where Mendes hadn't moved. "I've checked that with her already."
Mendes uncrossed one arm and held up two fingers, then put them back.
"What you do in that room is yours," Reilly said. "Talk for an hour and walk out, that's a complete session, and I'll count it as one. If it turns into something else, that's two adults deciding, and there's no camera in that suite and no audio pickup I haven't told you about. I'll say that again, because it matters. There is no recording. The suite's systems are dark unless somebody calls for them."
She put the pad down on the table and made a small square with her hands, as if she were framing the deck plating.
"Afterward, you fill out one page. Anonymous. What you learned, what you felt, what you'd do differently, whether you'd do it again. No name on it, no division, no rank. I read them. The Science Council gets them in aggregate with everything identifying stripped. If you write something ugly, it still goes in, because the ugly parts are half the data."
Nobody laughed. The drip pan plinked twice.
"Does anyone want the form read out loud before they touch it?"
A rating near the door shook her head. Two others didn't move. Reilly took that as enough.
"Then they're in the corridor, and they're also loaded on every pad in this room. Take one. Nobody's watching who takes one."
Jeff carried the stack around the square himself. He didn't hand them out, he just set a pad within reach of each bench and moved on, the way you'd set water down. The Tellarite took his without looking up. The young Andorian took hers and immediately turned it over in her hands, reading both sides of a device that had only one.
The room got loud in a low way. Not talking, exactly. The sound of forty people breathing and shifting and not deciding.
"Is it a real hour?" a man from the repair pod asked. "Or does it end when the talking ends?"
"It ends when you say it does," Reilly said. "Or when the hour runs out, whichever comes first. You'll have a chime at fifty minutes. Ten minutes to dress and check in."
"What happens if I match with somebody I'd rather not sit across a table from?"
All the heads on that bench turned, and then a few more.
"Then you decline and it closes," Reilly said. "No reason filed. No note to me. The system just logs that the slot didn't fill."
"Does the other one know it was me who said no?"
"No. They know the slot closed. That's the whole of it."
The rating seemed to chew on that and then typed something into her pad with her thumb.
The Tellarite leaned forward on his bench, and the wood complained under him.
"Who reads the reports first?" he said.
"Me."
"And if one of them says something a captain should know? A breach. A hurt. Somebody who got loud."
Reilly didn't blink at the word hurt. Jeff watched her take it at full weight.
"Then the encounter stops being anonymous in one direction only," she said. "I go to the person it happened to and I ask them what they want done. Not the author of the report. Not the captain. The person it happened to."
The Tellarite grunted and looked at his pad for a while. Then he punched the screen twice with a knuckle, hard enough that Jeff heard it.
The young Andorian did hers next. She checked both boxes and didn't hide it, and the older one beside her watched and said something too quiet to carry, and the younger one shrugged with one shoulder and kept the pad.
The woman from the third bench, the one who wanted to be wanted by somebody who didn't know what she'd do next, signed without any ceremony at all. She set the pad down when she was finished and folded her hands.
Reilly walked the square once while they worked. She didn't coach anyone. She stopped at the Vulcan in sciences coveralls, who had the pad in her lap and her thumb hovering.
"You don't have to," Reilly said.
"I am aware." The Vulcan looked up. "I am considering which box."
"Which one are you weighing?"
"The first." A pause. "There are things I have been asked about my own body that I could not answer. I would like to know why I could not answer them."
Reilly nodded and moved on.
Mendes stayed against the bulkhead until the room started to stand. Then she got up, walked the length of the square, and took a pad off the table at the center. She held it under her arm and left without a word to anyone, and the line at the aft hatch swallowed her.
Jeff counted fourteen pads gone. He collected the rest and stacked them and stood by the serving alcove while the mess hall emptied out, and the drip pan plinked, and the brown lamps buzzed at a pitch just under hearing.
Reilly came up beside him with her own pad and set her thumb on the reader.
"The queue's going to sort overnight," she said. "It runs at every even hour."
"I know."
"Do you know why I want you at the desk for the first one?"
He did. She wanted a second pair of eyes on the same screen, so neither of them could pretend later that they hadn't seen the name.
"Nine o'clock," he said.
The first sort ran at ten hundred, because Reilly wasn't patient, and the suite's terminal threw up two names in white on the dark. Jeff read them and then read them again.
Mendes, Aroha. Rating, second class, Tellarite, engineering, Bork-kin registration out of the rim yards, name of Hesh.
Reilly stood over the screen with both hands on the console and said nothing for four seconds.
"She took a pad," Jeff said.
"She took a pad." Reilly reached past him and opened the second row. The queue went on down the screen, twelve more names sorted into pairs, and she scrolled it slowly. "Write the protocol for room two and put it in her box. Standard first contact sheet. Nothing about what they do in there."
"She's the captain of this ship," Jeff said.
"She's an adult who signed a form." Reilly closed the row and stepped back. "Route the notification at nineteen hundred."