From a work in progress...

To understand more fully: Santio is a starship navigator; K'rissa, his mate and crewmate, is a feline anthropomorph; Alyan is the AI brain and soul of the ship they serve on, Dark Moon Rising. "Bugs" are wireless transceivers plugged into a socket installed in the foramen magnum.

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The Owl and the Pussycat

He had taken her outside during their first night together. After a frenzied session of learning each other’s bodies, they lay face up side by side, cooling off, only their hands touching. Santio leaned up reaching, to get their bugs off the desk. “Here, plug in. I want to show you something.” Alyan, may I have sensors only, realtime, please — and piggyback K’rissa to me?

The ship went away. She was disembodied, a singularity. Spaceborn, she instinctively, simultaneously squeezed her eyes shut, plugged her ears and held her breath against decompression. Then the feel of the bed beneath her back reminded her, I’m not really Outside.

Every way she turned her gaze, there was nothing but Everything: the universe from right there, in more than visible light. The stars they shone, they blazed, they exulted in radiating. Charged particles, wisps of color, streamed in unfelt crosswinds of force. Behind it all, filling half the sky: the galaxy, points of light in their millions blending into a black-streaked cloud. Now she turned the other way, into the dark of the halo, which was not black but glowed at the margin of infrared perception, a sparse scattering of stars making it look all the more empty. But she could see in radio, too, and X and gamma, and there were other galaxies beyond, and stranger things.

Her hearing filled with the harmony of human voices, singing in an unknown language, chords floating and twisting with her point of view as Santio spun Alyan gently, exquisitely slowly, through all three axes. At certain times, he’d linger… and K’rissa felt him squeeze her hand. He was showing her his favorite parts of the sky.

The music faded to a close, to be replaced by Santio’s voice, in her ears and her head:

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
in a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey,
and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

She felt him turn on his side to face her, then his finger brushing her fur, tracing a line from her nose, around her ear, down her throat, and farther down…

The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

She gasped, then giggled, then held his hand still where it had come to rest.

They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Inside the sim, he turned them both around, where hung in the middle distance a silver-grey-white orb, blotched with dark basaltic flows, spangled with mountain chains and the walls and rays of craters. She gasped again, this time in awe. Something primordial arose from within her core: a longing, an empty ache, a recognition, a homecoming, joy and sorrow all at once. She let the tears flow.

Finally she found her voice. “What…”

“You told me the Uhukin began on Earth… that’s her Moon.”