B00CH3ARG0 EBOK

by Christie Meierz

  “Like a shark.” At Cena’s puzzled expression, she explained, “An ocean predator. Dangerous to humans.”

  Cena laughed and pulled a small jar from her pocket. “Use this salve if you become sore.”

  “I’m already sore. Now I know why so many women feed their babies from bottles.”

  “I do not understand.”

  Marianne pressed her lips together and blinked several times. “I’m not sure how to explain it, beyond saying that many human women give their babies ... well, it’s synthetic milk.”

  Cena’s eyebrows flew up. “And this is common?”

  “Fairly common, yes.”

  “Astonishing.”

  “Cena—”

  “He told me of your conversation.”

  Marianne blew a sigh out the side of her mouth. “I don’t mean to pry.”

  Cena pocketed her tablet and her scanner and gazed out the windows of Marianne’s sitting room. “He tells me I deserve more than the broken heart of a broken old man. I cannot convince him his heart is a gift beyond compare. But perhaps you made him realize he cares for me more than he knew. For that, you have my gratitude.”

  * * *

  Laura sat in the delicious late afternoon cold, leaning on the base of a cora tree in the gardens, as far from any of the guards as she could manage. She sighed in the soothing solitude. No one was looking for her. Yet.

  Everyone in the stronghold glowed.

  Glow wasn’t the right word, but she didn’t have any other to fit the way people just ... glowed. Especially the Sural, who was brighter than anyone, except for little Rose. She was different. Uncomplicated. Elemental. Delightful. And very, very bright.

  Ties and connections and other things she had no names for flowed between and among the Tolari in the stronghold. Below, in the distance, she could sense the city and its hundreds of thousands. It was overwhelming just to feel it from a distance. The idea of passing through it, which might be unavoidable when she returned to Parania, made her shudder.

  If this was what it was like for the Jorann, she could understand why the ancient woman lived alone in a cave. She wouldn’t mind a little of that herself right now. If it weren’t for the Paran, she’d be tempted to march down there and ask the Jorann if she wouldn’t mind a roommate.

  If it weren’t for the Paran. She smiled. He would be so happy to see her like this. It meant they could be together ... as long as they wanted. She was young again. She could even have children again. Well, one child, anyway. A Tolari heir.

  It was worth some thought. She’d always wondered what it would be like to be young and yet have the wisdom she’d acquired in her sixty years. Or was she sixty-one now? She had no idea what the date was in human space. At any rate, she had the opportunity to find out if she could do a better job of raising a child, now that she had both the energy of youth and the perspective of experience.

  She kicked off her slippers and wriggled her toes in the ferny stuff that Marianne called grass. How long would she keep her toes before they grew together and her feet became peds? She wiggled them again, enjoying the sensation and wondering what it would feel like when her feet ended in a flap instead of toes.

  Someone was coming, leaving the stronghold keep from the family wing. Marianne. Her lively glow was distinctive.

  Somehow, she knew that Marianne could neither see nor sense her yet.

  “I’m over here,” she called.

  * * *

  Marianne led Laura through the garden door of the refectory. “Look what I found,” she said. “Can I keep her?”

  “I don’t eat much,” Laura added.

  The Sural lifted his eyebrows and stopped chewing. He swallowed before speaking. “Laura eats a great deal,” he said. “Almost as much as I do.”

  Marianne burst out laughing. Laura joined in as she caught sight of the Sural’s now-puzzled face.

  “A human expression,” Kyza told Thela, her voice weighted with all the authority of childhood. “Human children use it when they wish to keep an animal in their home.”

  Thela made a disgusted sound. Kyza giggled.

  Marianne checked on Rose, sleeping soundly in her nurse’s arms, before sitting down to her meal. “We were joking with you, beloved,” she said.

  “Ah.”

  Laura stifled a snicker and opened her mouth to reply, just as her attention was caught by Storaas strolling in with Cena on his arm. “It still seems strange to me,” she said in a low voice. “Storaas looks so very much older than Cena. She’s like a child compared to him, yet she’s older than I am.”

  “Everyone in the stronghold is like a child compared to him,” Marianne said.

  “How old is he?”

  Marianne shrugged. “It’s not polite to ask. Past a certain age, an adult is an adult.”

  Laura’s eyes glinted with mischief. “What about you?”

  “I’d be of age. Thirteen is considered adult for most purposes, and I’m eighteen and change. I’ll be nineteen next spring. Rulers have to be twenty-five to take power.”

  “How old is your Sural?” Laura whispered.

  “One hundred forty-three,” he said.

  “You were eavesdropping!”

  “I was listening,” he replied in a mild voice. “I can hardly eavesdrop on a conversation taking place in front of me.”

  Marianne frowned. “I thought you were a hundred forty-two.”

  “I was born in the autumn, beloved. It is now autumn.”

  Laura squeezed her eyes shut, apparently trying to do the math. “On Earth, that’s ... that’s ...”

  “Two hundred ninety years,” he said.

  Laura sagged. “And I thought that 167-year-old woman in Japan was old,” she said. “Don’t you get tired of it?” She stopped and stared at him. “No, you don’t, do you. You love watching your people, your culture. You want to see what they’re going to come up with next.”

  “Even so,” he said, digging into his food.

  She eyed the rolls and fruit he’d piled on the table in front of him. “I wonder why your people never thought up the idea of using plates,” she mused.

  Marianne laughed. “That seemed strange to me at first too,” she said.

  “It is only more work for the servants,” he said. “They must still clean the table.”

  “Why do you live like this?” Laura asked. “Like medieval lords.”

  His face went blank.

  “I think she means, why not use technology in daily life,” Marianne explained. “Machines could replace servants, houses could be made of modern insulating materials – especially on a cold world like this – and so on. You’re like interstellar Luddites.”

  “We are communal,” he said. “To replace people with machines only creates isolation for those who use them and deprives others of work.”

  Laura was silent while she thought about it. “You have a point. I’m not sure I agree with it, but you have a point. For us – for humans,” she corrected herself. “Some humans think that being a servant is demeaning.”

  He laughed. “The stronghold servants honor me with their service,” he said. “I care for them well in return. If I did not, they would not serve me.”

  “Well-paid, I presume.”

  “We do not work to be paid with currency. We work because we must work.”

  Laura fell silent, seeming to digest this. “No money at all?”

  “None.”

  “Amazing. Papa would have a stroke if all his trillions meant nothing.”

  The Sural raised his eyebrows. “We are content to work,” he said, finally.

  “What’s my work?” she asked.

  “You are an artist. You will find your place. Have patience.”

  Marianne stifled a snort. He glanced at her.

  “What was it you once told me?” she asked, her eyes dancing. “I’m too young to be truly patient?”

  “Far too young,” he agreed. “Both of you.”

  They burst into laught
er. The Sural eyed them, incomprehension written plainly in his blank expression. Marianne stopped for a moment at the look on his face and burst into a fresh paroxysm of mirth. Finally, he seemed to give up trying to understand. He smiled, shook his head, and resumed eating.

  A guard flickered.

  “Uh oh,” said Marianne.

  The Sural pulled out his tablet and read it. “I must go,” he said, and vanished.

  Laura gazed at where he’d been. “How long will it be before I can do that?”

  “You mean camouflage?” Marianne shrugged. “As little as two and a half standard years, as much as eight.” She stared out the doorway to the main corridor. “The Sural says that when we’re able to, we’ll just know how.”

  “It doesn’t look like what a chameleon does.”

  “No, it really doesn’t. And anyway, his clothing disappears with him. The chameleon idea must be a misinterpretation of what the first humans to land here saw. It’s more like – stepping out of phase, or something. I don’t think anyone from Central Command ever got a good look, honestly.”

  Laura coughed. “They got a good look.”

  Marianne cocked her head. “How do you know that?”

  “You know it was Smitty and Addie who came down here first, don’t you?”

  Marianne opened and closed her mouth several times. “He never told me. That would have been – what, nine or ten years ago? I had no idea.”

  “Did it ever come up?”

  “Well...” She stopped. “No, it didn’t.”

  “There you are.”

  “You’re annoying when you make sense, you know that?”

  “I just didn’t want you getting angry over nothing.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “You were going to be.”

  Marianne blew a raspberry. “I’m glad I don’t have to live with you like this. Your poor Paran.”

  Laura flashed a smug grin, and then sobered.

  Marianne peered at her. “What are you holding back?”

  The other woman shifted in her chair. “John knew Central Command wanted to know more than just how the Tolari do their camouflage. I think he didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was important.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Marianne jolted awake. Her sleeping mat felt as if it were … swaying? She reached for Rose in her little cot next to the mat. As she did so, the movement stopped.

  Oh, right, she thought. An earthquake.

  She was still a little rattled later, midmorning, when Cena came to her quarters to examine her.

  “The stronghold shook this morning,” she said, as the apothecary passed a scanner slowly over Marianne’s deflated midsection.

  “Tectonic activity is rare but not unknown in this part of Tolar,” the apothecary murmured, unperturbed.

  Marianne leaned back on divan and heaved a sigh, feeling reassured. “Am I ever going to stop seeing you every day?”

  Cena smiled. “Soon,” she said. She turned to Rose’s nurse and scanned the baby, kneading her tiny belly gently.

  “Not that I don’t enjoy talking to you.”

  “Of course not, high one.”

  Shock and emotional turmoil impinged on Marianne’s awareness. She frowned. It was coming from ... the Sural?

  “What is it?” Cena asked.

  Rose started fussing in her nurse’s arms. Marianne stood and reached, distracted, to lift her over one shoulder. “The Sural is upset about something,” she said, bouncing gently on her heels in an attempt to soothe Rose. “Very upset.” She closed her eyes and opened them again a moment later. “He’s coming this way.”

  The door opened, and her bond-partner burst into view. He glanced at Cena. “Good,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion, his face a mask. “You are here.”

  “What’s wrong?” Marianne asked. “What happened?”

  “Storaas is missing.”

  Cena gasped and sat hard on a divan, pale under her bronze skin. “High one ... how—” She stopped, unable to continue.

  He seated himself beside her. “He took a transport pod at dawn. When he did not return to attend a meeting, I had him traced. The trace ends at the ocean entrances to the city tunnels. Apothecary – Cena—”

  She didn’t look up.

  “Are you entwined with him strongly enough to know if he lives?”

  Marianne gasped at the intimacy of the question, when posed by one Tolari to another.

  “I—” Cena stammered, then swallowed hard and whispered, “Why?”

  He took a deep breath before he answered, his voice very soft. “We know the pod is dead.”

  Marianne drew a sharp breath and clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes filling with tears.

  The Sural looked up at her. “It does not mean Storaas is dead.”

  Rose began to wail. Marianne handed her to her nurse, who carried her out into the corridor.

  Cena’s voice was hoarse as she answered. “I think he lives,” she said. “I cannot be certain.”

  The Sural put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “We will find him.” He stood. “I must return to the guard wing.”

  Marianne slid onto the divan as the Sural strode out the door. Tears coursed down the apothecary’s cheeks.

  “He’ll find him,” Marianne whispered, pulling her into a tight hug. “He has to.”

  Cena wrapped her arms around her swollen belly and sobbed into Marianne’s shoulder.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Storaas groaned. Water lapped at his legs, and something was picking at his hair. Something else was crawling in his hair. He raised his face from the sand. A large beach flutter hopped back from him, scolding, its mottled tan feathers puffed out to make itself appear larger. He ignored its threat display and swiped at the prickling sensation on his scalp in disgust. A small sand crawler dropped off and scuttled away. The flutter chased it.

  He shuddered when the crawler’s death stung his senses.

  With another groan, he pushed himself up to his knees and looked around. He was on a spit of sand, and it was too warm for this time of year. He squinted. A series of sandbars described an arc in the green ocean. It was a small reef of perhaps ten of the little spits, of which the one where he stood was the largest.

  He brushed the sand off his hands before rubbing it from his face and looked around him. There was no telling where he was. The hevalrin that had saved him could have taken him most of the way to the equator in the time he’d been unconscious. A late afternoon sun sat near the horizon, and he’d left the stronghold not long after dawn.

  He could not be near Suralia. It was far too warm to be autumn in that northern clime. Why? Why take me so far from home?

  Something tickled at the edges of his senses, and he turned to face the ocean. A colossal shadow lurked in the darker, deeper water. The hevalrin.

  Gentle as flowers, hevalra were massive creatures. Marianne had told him Earth had a similar creature called a blue whale, though she could not say if it was a sentient empath as were Tolar’s hevalra. He had not attempted to communicate with any of the hevalra now alive, but his sensitivity was such that those few he’d met, over the long years of his existence, had had no trouble understanding him. He waded knee deep into the surf and reached out, sending it a longing for home. It pushed him away.

  Denial.

  It appeared he could communicate with this hevalrin, though the creature did not seem inclined to take him back to Suralia.

  He trudged out of the water and stood in the middle of the sandbar to scan the horizon and the sea around him. It would be foolish to stay here. If the tide was low, the tiny spit would disappear under the waves before long, and the new moon was going to set with the sun. It would be a dark night – not a good time to be lost at sea.

  Wading back into the surf, he called out to the hevalrin, begging for safety, the feel of shade, the smell of trees.

  Acceptance.

  Projecting gratitude, he stripped off his robe, tied
it around his waist, and swam out to it ... no, to her. The creature was a medium-sized female, although size was relative when speaking of hevalra. He patted her rough hide and climbed onto the massive, wedge-shaped head, anchoring himself in place by hooking an arm around one of the ridges that ran between her pair of blowholes.

  “Why did you save me?” he asked, as she flicked the front pair of her six flippers and began moving.

  No answer.

  “I would have been happy to die.”

  She blew spray at him from one of her blowhole vents. He sighed. No one would allow him to die, not even a sea creature.

  It was foolish of him to have been in the underwater caves in the deep waters off the coast of Suralia, but he loved it down there. Beautiful, phosphorescent creatures swam in the darkness, seeking food, shelter, and mates. Watching them soothed him. It was his favorite place to think, when he needed time to ponder something important, away from the infringing emotions of others.

  But then the sea floor shook, bringing huge rocks down from the roof of the cave, mortally wounding his transport pod. It had tried to get him back to the surface, but had only reached the cave entrance when it died and dissolved, leaving him in the frigid water, too far from the surface to entertain any hope of survival.

  His last thoughts were of Cena and the son he had given her. Then, as darkness descended, the hevalrin swallowed him.

  The creature must have continued her journey, cycling air through her cavern of a mouth while he lay unconscious on her tongue, and then spat him out when she reached this reef. He wondered if she had enlisted the aid of smaller creatures to get him onto the spit of sand.

  “Why did you stay?” He patted her head. “Your kind journeys to the southern oceans during this part of the year.”

  A burst of emotions assaulted him. Sorrow. Affection. Hope.

  He shook his head. “I do not understand.”

  Loss. Hope.

  “You want me to have hope? Hope for what?”

  Love. Affection. Parental love.

  He stared down at the head on which he sat, shocked. “You think I should have a child?”

  Agreement.

  “I am too old for that. I would die while the child still needed me.” His eyes narrowed. “How do you know I have no heir?”