by Diann Read
He watched Pulou gather up his dish and knife and settled in a squat on the floor, placing his plate before his feet. Familiar and practical. He took up his own knife, started to lift his own plate, but the governor glanced over at him. “Aren’t you hungry, Tristan?”
“Yes,” he said.
The governor studied him for a long moment. He stayed in the chair.
He could see no use for any of the utensils except the knife; he ate the meat circles in chunks from its point. Then he broke the bread and mopped up the gravy with its pieces, salvaging the rest with his fingers and licking them clean. The gravy’s saltiness left him thirsty but the aroma from the mug made him wrinkle his nose. He pushed it away.
“Here, little brother,” said Pulou, reaching up to deposit a handful of green fruit on the white tablecloth. “I don't like this.”
Tristan picked up the slices one by one and sucked at their sweetness. They assuaged his thirst. He licked the green juice from between his fingers.
“Tristan,” the governor said.
He looked up.
“There are handcloths for that.” The governor pointed. When Tristan cocked his head, puzzled, the governor took up his own and demonstrated.
“But that would dirty it!” Tristan said. “You clean your hands first so you won’t dirty things.”
The governor looked annoyed at that, but Tristan noticed the girl hiding a smile behind her hand. A smile about him. He shifted his vision away from her and shoved himself back from the table. “We don’t have things like this at home! This is a stupid way to eat!”
The governor pushed himself to his feet, his expression a forced calm, his words a controlled quiet. “Come here, my boy. I think it’s time that we talked.”
Tristan watched him cross to the fireplace and lower himself stiffly into a chair, but he didn’t follow. The governor favored him with a stern look and indicated the facing chair with his walking stick.
Tristan strode past it to the hearth and put out his hand to the flames. They gave no heat. “This isn’t a real fire,” he said.
The governor chuckled. “No, Tristan. It’s a holoprojection, like the scenery in your room. A real fire is unnecessary where technology provides more efficient means of heating. . . . Come sit down.”
Tristan glanced from the governor to the chair and back, and leaned up to the mantelpiece instead. He watched the boxy servos clear the table. Let his gaze wander the room again. Lady Larielle had slipped away, he saw, but Pulou still squatted in the shadow of the chairs, vigilant with half-closed eyes.
“I’m being patient with you,” the governor said at the edge of his awareness, “because I know this is all new and different to you. But don’t try me, young one; I’m not a good man to press too far.” He pointed his walking stick again at the empty chair and his tone went taut, like his jaw: “Sit down.”
Tristan held his place. Watched the governor turn the walking stick in his hands so the artificial firelight reflected, red as blood, up and down its metallic length. Watched him curl his hands about its handle like a knife or club. He touched the governor’s vision once more with his own, saw the controlled fury there, and waited as long as he dared.
Then he deliberately settled into a squat in front of the indicated chair.
The trousers pinched hard enough to make him wince. The boots made balancing on his heels almost impossible. He leaned back against the chair’s leg and locked his teeth against his discomfort.
The governor fixed a narrowed gaze on him. “Tristan, you are a human among humans,” he said. “It’s time you began to behave like a human instead of like an animal.”
Tristan glared at him. “Ganan aren’t animals! Pulou is my brother.”
The governor cut him off. “Your mother was an officer, a refined and accomplished woman in her own world. Your behavior would be an embarrassment to her.”
“My mother taught me what was right in my world,” Tristan said. “She had important things to do, like helping sick people.”
The governor sat silent for a moment at that, and his features softened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t begin to imagine what she’s suffered all these years!”
“She’s sick!” Tristan said.
“I know that. And I admire the way in which you are trying to help her. But you have no idea how vast the galaxy is, young one. No concept of what you’ve taken on. You can’t possibly accomplish it without assistance.”
“Then take me to my father!”
“If only it were that simple.” The old man grew momentarily distant. “But it isn’t. Not now.”
When his vision lifted again, he locked it on Tristan’s. “I don’t doubt your father will want to help you and your mother when he finds out,” he said. “In all the years since you and she were lost he’s never married again, never fathered other children.” His tone and expression grew enigmatic. “I have no doubt he’ll want you back.”
Something about his tone and choice of words sent a chill up Tristan’s spine. Sent his mind racing through the story his mother had once told him. He glowered and curled his hands.
“Perhaps we should send him a message,” the governor said. He beckoned to the uniformed man standing near the double doors. “Avuse, please bring us the strongbox General François sent from Ganwold.”
Avuse nodded and left the room.
Tristan could no longer resist the urge to put space between himself and the governor. He shoved himself to his feet and moved back to the mantel, his vision fixing on the old man. “My mother told me you tried to kill my father. Why did you say you were his friend?”
The governor met his steady gaze, appearing only mildly surprised at the accusation. “We were friends once,” he said. “Good friends—until he betrayed me. What he did almost cost me my life.”
“My father didn’t betray you!” Tristan said. “My mother said you betrayed him!”
The governor’s expression darkened. “Your mother,” he said, “knew only a small part of what actually happened. She couldn’t very well tell you the truth of situations about which she had no knowledge, Tristan.”
Tristan searched the governor’s face for several seconds, and shook his head against a churning confusion, an edge of doubt. “That’s not right!” he said, but realized even as he spoke the words that he said it more to convince himself than the governor.
The old man studied him, eyes still smoldering but features relaxing now. “Your father is not really so different from me, young one,” he said. “Every man has something in his life for which he will sell himself. I had mine, your father has his, you have your own. Remember that.”
He motioned to the servant, who had resumed his place near the doors. “Thank you, Avuse,” he said as the man handed him the box. He opened it on his lap, withdrew a pair of ID tags on a chain and a gray object that fit in his palm. “Your mother’s identification,” he said, “and a recording of your voice. Shall we include the holodiscs as well?”
Tristan glared at him and said nothing. But he watched as the governor drew the pendants from his pocket. He caught a glimpse of the images—the young man with the toddler, and the wedding portrait—before he put them into the box and latched it and returned it to the servant.
“When does the Nebula Wind leave Delta Station?” the governor asked.
“In two days, sir,” the servant said.
Renier nodded. “Convenient. Mark this ‘Personal for Admiral Lujan Sergey’ and entrust it to the Wind’s captain. It’s to be delivered to our embassy on Sostis and couriered to Spherzah Headquarters.”
* *
Tristan stripped to his shorts when he got back to his room, hurled boots and trousers and jacket into a corner on top of each other, and squatted before the holograph screen. He fingered its edge. Pulled once, experimentally, but it didn’t budge.
Moonlight had turned the ferns and grasses silver and made silhouettes of the foliage above.
He wanted to run his hand up and down the roughness of a tree trunk, take up a handful of soil and crumble it, moist and aromatic, between his fingers. Maybe that would help him relax.
His stomach had knotted. He hadn’t eaten much at breakfast, and thought now he shouldn’t have eaten at all, though he knew the food hadn’t caused the knots.
He started when Pulou squatted beside him, nudging his shoulder. “Something’s wrong, little brother.”
He nodded but didn’t look up. Pulou’s mane and claws reminded him of his own nakedness. He felt ashamed.
“It’s what?” Pulou asked.
He shrugged. Tried once more to sort out the turmoil in his head before he sighed and said, “He tells me things about my father.”
Pulou questioned him with only a blink; he caught the flash of amber through the corner of his eye.
“He tells me things different from what my mother tells me,” he said. “He tells me bad things he says my mother doesn’t know about.”
Pulou cocked his head. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” Tristan stared at the carpet between his feet and shook his head. “He says they’re right but I don’t think they are. I—don’t want them to be right!”
The knot in his stomach tightened. A knot of fear, he realized. Fear that perhaps the things the governor had told him about his father were true.
Seven
The hallway formed a circle. Four short corridors crossed it in the center, intersecting at a row of doors. Tristan watched the man called Avuse approach one, touch a square of metal on the wall beside it, and step into a tiny box of a room when the door opened.
One of those rooms that moved, he knew. They called it a ‘lift,’ and it carried people up and down to different places in the building. He touched Pulou’s vision with his own. “Maybe one of those goes to way out.”
Pulou looked doubtful. “Maybe,” he said.
Tristan waited until the door closed behind the servant to touch the metal square on the wall as he had done.
The door didn’t open.
He tried each lift in turn, but none of them opened. He punched each panel harder, two or three times, and got no response.
Glowering with frustration, he strode all the way around the circular hall, Pulou at his shoulder, trying one door after another. None yielded to his efforts.
At one place the corridor widened into an observation lounge with chairs and small tables. Only tinted panes separated him from the skyline. He stayed well back from the panes, gripping the back of a chair when the view made his senses reel.
He saw distant mountains beyond the city of towers, faintly visible as hazy silhouettes through the thick air. Catching Pulou’s attention with a glance, he pointed with a motion of his head.
He stood there gazing out at them for some time, his chest aching with homesickness the way it had when he’d first looked out on the darkening city three nights before. Throat tight, teeth light on his lip, he looked at Pulou again and turned away and returned to his room.
He went to dinner sullen that evening. Kept his attention fixed on his plate until he felt the governor watching him. He glowered when he looked up in response.
Renier said, “You’re very quiet this evening, Tristan. Is something wrong?”
“The doors won’t open for me,” Tristan said.
“This one and your bedroom door open, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, there’s no need for concern,” Renier said. “The others have not been programmed to accept your hand scan.”
“Why?” Tristan demanded.
“Because you have no business in those rooms.” The governor gave him a stern stare. “This world and its people and their customs are completely unfamiliar to you. You must realize this confinement is for your own safety.”
Tristan questioned that with a silent scowl. He shot a look at Larielle for her confirmation but she wouldn’t meet his gaze.
He suddenly had no more appetite.
* *
The governor hadn’t arrived when Rajak led him and Pulou to the dining room the next morning. Only Larielle sat at the table. Tristan paused in the doorway and touched his forehead when she turned toward him.
“Come in, Tristan,” she said. “My father will be late. He had a message this morning.”
Tristan sat down and watched without speaking as the servos distributed the plates. When Pulou retreated under the table with his, Tristan picked up the knife from the collection of utensils spread before him.
He glanced over when Larielle said, “It’s really easier to eat this way. Try these two.” She showed him her own utensils. “Watch how I do it.”
He watched her, his utensils motionless, feeling awkward in his hands. His mind wandered from her lesson. “Who is the message from?” he asked.
His question startled her; she stopped in mid-motion. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why, Tristan?”
“He sent a box of—” he shrugged, “things—to my father the other day.”
“The box wouldn’t have been delivered to your father yet,” she said.
They both jumped when the double doors abruptly opened. “. . . make the arrangements right away,” the governor said to someone outside. “We’ll leave directly after breakfast tomorrow.”
Striding into the room, he came briskly around the table to Larielle without the aid of his walking stick. “Good morning, precious,” he said, running a hand down the mahogany tumble of her hair, and bent to kiss her forehead before he seated himself.
Tristan eyed him as he unfolded a linen napkin over his lap. “Was the message from my father?” he asked.
The governor frowned. “No, it wasn’t.” For a moment he seemed about to add something else, but he changed his mind. He turned to his daughter instead. “Lari, it’s become necessary to make an unscheduled inspection tour of the mines on Issel II. It will require a week at the moon residence. I would like you to accompany me.”
Tristan saw how she froze. “I really don’t want to go, Papa,” she said. “Examinations will begin soon at the University and I still have a great deal of work to do on my presentation for Intersystem Issues.”
“You can work on your studies at the moon residence.” The governor’s tone held a firmness Tristan hadn’t heard him use on his daughter before. “You don’t have to accompany me on the actual inspections.”
Larielle lowered her gaze. “Yes, Papa,” she whispered.
In the brief silence that followed, Renier set his gaze on Tristan. “You and your little friend will go with us, too, of course.”
* *
“Level, please?” said a female voice as the lift’s door slid closed on the governor’s party.
Tristan wondered if Larielle had spoken, but her attention appeared fixed on some troubled distance.
“Shuttle bay,” said Renier, and the floor rose up under their feet.
Tristan steadied himself, scanning the cubicle again. “Where’s that girl?” he asked.
The governor smiled. “There isn’t a girl,” he said. “The voice is synthesized by a computer which is programmed to recognize certain words and take the lift to that level.”
Tristan furrowed his brow, more confused by the explanation. But before he could ask what ‘synthesized’ and ‘computer’ and ‘programmed’ meant, the lift’s ceiling spiraled open, revealing sky, and its floor rose until it became part of a larger floor.
They stood on the round tower’s roof, a platform hollowed like a dish and blackened by the fire of launch. It had no walls like the shuttle bay on Ganwold, not even a rail. Just the city and the distant mountains rising on all sides, and a warm, fitful wind, laden with the bitter smell of burning, tugging at their clothes. Tristan stood paralyzed, surveying the view, as if from the edge of a cliff on Ganwold.
A shuttle craft waited at the center of the platform. The governor paused at the foot
of its boarding ramp to shift his walking stick to his other hand and offer Larielle his arm. “Come, Tristan,” he said. “We’re on a schedule.”
The ramp led into a passenger lounge furnished with reclining acceleration seats and viewpanes that arched high enough for Tristan to see the sky beyond. He cocked his head at a series of handles running the length of the overhead. “What are those for?” he asked.
“They’re for moving around the cabin after we reach zero gravity,” said Renier. “Take a seat over there.” He motioned to a chair close to the viewpanes.
Tristan dropped into it and beckoned Pulou to the one beside his own.
Movement outside caught Tristan’s eye; the curved viewpanes reflected it upside down. He looked up from the buckles of his safety harness, reached over and nudged Pulou. “Look!”
Steam erupted from beneath the shuttle, lit pink and gold by the fire from the thrusters. Sudden pressure crushed Tristan into his seat. He gasped, wind-robbed, and blinked at the blur of the horizon falling away. It tilted precariously, sweeping past far below in a replay of a nightmare he had never forgotten.
A lifepod. An acceleration seat big enough to swallow a child not quite two. He wanted to cry, to reach out for his mother, but it pushed too hard, and the rushing starfield made him dizzy.
He locked his teeth, closed his eyes against the memory, clenched his hands on the upholstery. Beside him, he heard Pulou’s breath coming in hisses through his teeth.
The pressure eased gradually until it lifted completely. By the time he opened his eyes, the craft had fled the atmosphere; but the planet, a turquoise globe veiled in white, still filled the viewpane. He watched it recede, almost imperceptibly at first. Wondered if Ganwold had looked the same way.
The thought of that sent a pang of homesickness through him. Swallowing against sudden constriction in his throat, he tore his vision away from the viewpane.
“We are now on course for the Issel II Command Complex,” said a voice from the overhead, a voice like the one in the lift except this one was male. “Flight time will be approximately nine and one quarter standard hours.”
Across the aisle from him, the governor asked, “Haven’t you ever flown before, Tristan?”