Breath of Life

by Christine Pope

  Finally it was time to catch the sixteen hundred shuttle. I insisted on being in the debarkation area a good half-hour before the shuttle’s departure, and at least my mother and sister had the good sense not to argue with me. On the trip back I said nothing, but only stared out one of the viewports as the bruise-colored disk of Lathvin grew larger and larger, and we eventually descended through the soupy gray clouds.

  At least I had had the presence of mind to pack everything before we left for Four-A, so once we returned to the homestead all I had to do was gather up my satchel and leave. I gave my father a quick hug, told a rather startled-looking Cole that it had been very nice to meet him, and then put on my breather and bolted for the airlock.

  By then it was almost seventeen hundred, and Lathvin’s quick-falling dusk was upon me. I climbed into the transport, turned on the headlights, and headed toward Sarzhin’s property, pressing down on the accelerator with a reckless disregard for the pouring rain and the increasing darkness. In fact, I was going so fast I almost missed the turnoff, but at the last minute I saw the small break in the ranks of moonflowers where the drive was located and took a hard left. The treads snarled at me a little bit, but the traction held, and soon enough I was approaching the garage.

  I pushed the button on the remote and pulled inside, then shut the door again so the garage compartment could repressurize. I knew it was silly to expect Sarzhin to be waiting for me here, but even so I couldn’t help looking around as I got out of the vehicle. No one was there, of course.

  After grabbing my satchel, I headed for the door into the house. It was quiet and dim in there, all the hall sconces burning at quarter-power, which was unusual for the time of day. Usually they were only set at that level during the overnight hours.

  “Sarzhin?” I called out, but only silence met my straining ears.

  Hmm. I placed my satchel on the bottom step of the staircase and drew off my rain poncho as well. I could have gone up to my room, but I wanted to see him, and I doubted he would be on that level, as his study and the library and the other rooms he utilized the most were located on the ground floor.

  He was in neither of those places. The dark images from my dream of two nights earlier rose in my mind, of the house abandoned and dead. I told myself not to be an idiot, that of course Sarzhin must be out back, tending to his plants. I bolted into the greenhouse at a half-run, but then pulled up short as the air seemed to suddenly be ripped from my lungs. Gasping, I paused and looked around, only to see that many of the plants were drooping, dying in their carefully arranged rows. A faint whistling sound reached my ears.

  I shut my eyes and told myself not to panic, that surely there must be a logical explanation for all this.

  Emergency breathers hung from a rack next to the door. It was extremely unlikely that the sturdy polymer out of which the greenhouse had been constructed would ever rip, but Sarzhin was not the type to take chances. I grasped one of the breathers and fastened it over my face, and then took a second breathing apparatus and tucked it into my belt before I headed toward the very rear of the greenhouse, where I knew a secondary door and airlock were located.

  Both were open, subjecting the greenhouse and all the tender plants inside it to the painfully thin atmosphere. I closed them behind me as I went outside and prayed I hadn’t been too late to keep them all from dying of exposure.

  The tall stalks of the moonflowers crowded around me, seeming to glow in the growing darkness. Between them I could see a faint path, as if someone had stumbled or fought his way through the crowding plants. I followed the path, my own breathing harsh in my ears, my heart beating painfully in my chest. The cold rain soaked my clothing at once, but I hardly noticed the chill. On Lathvin, it wasn’t the cold or the damp that killed you.

  I found him lying in a messy black heap some hundred yards from the house. The cloak and hood still shrouded him. Pale moonflowers bent over him, ethereal mourners.

  “Sarzhin!” I cried, and knelt next to him in the mud.

  Grasping him by the shoulders, I turned him over onto his back. The sodden hood draped itself across his face. I had no idea how long he had been out here, but somehow that didn’t matter. I knew I must try to save him, even if he had been lying in the mud for hours.

  One moonflower nodded particularly close, and I grabbed it and pressed it against his still-hidden visage. I saw no stir, no answering breath or gasp. I realized then that if he were not breathing on his own, a moonflower would do nothing for him. Neither would the spare breather I still had hanging from my belt.

  There was only one thing I could do, and even so I didn’t know if I would be too late. But I had to try.

  With trembling fingers, I grasped the edges of his hood and flung it back.

  Even though I knew time was my enemy, I paused for a second, staring down at him. For he was beautiful.

  Alien, yes, from the high, sharp cheekbones to the longish flattened nose. His eyebrows arched, black against black, above crescents of dark lashes. And his skin was dark as night, yet shimmered with iridescence like an oil slick on midnight waters, his face and throat covered in scales so fine I almost didn’t realize what they were at first.

  All this I took in, and then I lifted the breather from my face and bent down and pressed my mouth against his, breathing the warmth and oxygen from my own lungs into his body, willing him to accept the gift. Breathe, damn you! I thought.

  Live.

  His mouth was slack against mine, unmoving. I gulped more air from the breather and forced it into him once again, locking my lips on his, pushing every ounce of oxygen I could spare into his mouth. And then he began to cough, his lean frame racked with the struggle to get the good air in, and I immediately lifted my head and slapped the spare breather over his mouth and nose.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” I demanded, the anger in my voice somewhat diminished by the tinny quality of the speaker in the breathing apparatus. Hot moisture mingled with the stinging rain on my cheeks, and I realized I must have been weeping as I bent over him.

  He coughed again and shook his head. I didn’t know whether it meant he had no answer for me, or simply that he hadn’t recovered enough for speech.

  One thing I did know was that I needed to get him inside. Somehow I found my way past all the heavy, waterlogged robes to slide an arm around his torso and half pull and half drag him to his feet. He clung to me, the rasping of his breaths magnified by the apparatus covering his nose and mouth.

  Each inch seemed like a foot, each yard a torturous mile. One hitching step after another, we made our way back to the airlock at the rear of the house, and from there on into the greenhouse. It was warmer inside, but I didn’t know whether the air circulation system had compensated yet for the disastrous loss it had suffered while it was open to the outside. Certainly the plants still drooped, although I supposed it was too soon for them to have begun to revive.

  So we pushed on to the main part of the house, where I limped Sarzhin into his study, as it was the room closest to the greenhouse. Besides the desk and chairs and various small tables scattered about, it had a large electrical fireplace with a sofa placed conveniently in front of it. I deposited him there and then located the remote for the fireplace. It roared into life as soon as I clicked the button, flames dancing in shades of blue and green over a bed of frosted glass.

  No doubt the water from Sarzhin’s robes would ruin the upholstery, but the couch was the warmest place I could think of. Certainly I didn’t have the strength to drag him all the way up the stairs to his rooms.

  Almost as soon as he was seated on the sofa, he reached toward the hood of his cloak, as if he meant to pull it back up around his face.

  “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” I asked.

  He paused then, and slowly lowered his gloved hands to the breather, which he lifted away and set down on the cushion next to him. “I suppose it is.” His voice was hoarse, with none of its usual richness.

&nbs
p; I found myself wanting to stare at his features, at the way the firelight caught those delicate scales and shimmered with glints of sapphire and emerald. His eyes were blue, a startling cobalt against his black skin.

  Instead, I moved a little closer to the hearth and tried to tell myself I wasn’t quite as cold as I thought I was. That didn’t work too well—I ended up sneezing and sending a fine spray from my wet hair as my head jerked from the violence of the sneeze.

  “You’re soaked,” he said.

  “So are you.”

  “True.” He reached up toward his head, to the sodden black mass of his hair. For the first time I realized it was actually quite long; most of it had been caught into a clasp of dark metal at the nape of his neck, but some straggling pieces had escaped and clung wetly to his neck. “You wish to talk. I understand. But I propose we both get ourselves more in order first. In the library in one half-hour?”

  My lips parted as I began to voice a protest, and then I stopped myself. He was right—it would be foolish to sit here in our wet clothes and try to sort all this out. As much as I hated to delay, I didn’t want either him or me to catch cold. If Zhores even got sick. We Gaians could cure a cold within a day, but so far there still wasn’t a workable vaccine.

  I nodded. “A half-hour.”

  Despite having to dry my hair back to something resembling normality and having to strip to my skin and work my way back out with all clean, dry clothes, I was still the first to enter the library.

  It appeared Sarzhin had given some orders to the mech, however, since another fire burned in the hearth here, and on a table that sat between two small divans was a square bottle and two fragile-looking glasses that had to be antiques of some kind. I moved closer so I could see the label on the bottle, but the words on it were written in a heavy, flowing script I didn’t recognize.

  “It is called zharis,” came Sarzhin’s voice, and I looked up to see him enter the room, once again in the familiar black robes. He had left the hood down, though, and met my curious gaze directly.

  “From your home world?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He moved past me and picked up the bottle, then removed the silvery stopper that sealed it. When he poured the liquid from it into the two glasses, I saw the zharis, whatever that was, had a pale green hue that seemed quite alien here on Lathvin, where everything was gray and black and dark red.

  He handed a glass to me, and I lifted it gingerly to my nose and sniffed. It smelled sweet and delicate, and rather like some of the flowers he raised in his greenhouse.

  “It is quite safe, I assure you. It is considered a gift between friends, back on Zhoraan.”

  After a statement like that, I knew I couldn’t do anything except take a sip. So light it felt more that I was inhaling it rather than actually drinking it, the zharis slipped over my tongue in a burst of effervescence, and then left a trail of tingling warmth down my throat.

  Sarzhin watched me as I drank, and for some reason I felt terribly self-conscious, as if it had been I who had hidden her face all this time and was only now revealed. Those startling blue eyes were grave, intent. A heat that had nothing to do with the zharis flooded my cheeks as I glanced from his eyes to his mouth and recalled the touch of his lips against mine. Yes, I’d been trying to save his life, but now—

  Now I wanted to lay my mouth against his again, and for an entirely different reason. I hadn’t wanted to think it, had tried to couch my feelings in insipid terms such as “fond” or “like,” but those horrible moments when I thought I might have lost him had taught me a very different story.

  I cradled the delicate glass between my palms, and then said, “Why?”

  His mouth lifted slightly at one corner. “Only one ‘why’?”

  “I thought I’d let you decide which one to answer first.”

  Sarzhin chuckled a little then; somehow it sounded different when it wasn’t muffled by the folds of his hood. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

  “We missed the shuttle. My stupid sister and her stupid shopping trip—” I broke off and watched him lift his own glass. He still wore the gloves, I noticed. “It certainly wasn’t enough for you to kill yourself over!”

  “Wasn’t it?” He drank a little of the zharis, then added, “Perhaps I answered the wrong ‘why.’ Let me start over.”

  I nodded. “That might be a good idea.”

  He smiled. His teeth looked human enough, although I got the impression that there were somehow more of them than in a regular human mouth. “The Zhore are empaths, Anika. Not telepaths—we cannot read minds—but we do sense emotions. Among other Zhore, this is not an issue, as we have had millennia of practice protecting ourselves and refraining from unrestrained projection of emotion. Out in the galaxy at large, however, we are at a disadvantage. This is why you see us go cloaked and hooded as we do; the very weave of our garments contains elements that block some of these emotions. But this is also why we don’t allow off-worlders on Zhoraan.”

  It made some sense, I supposed. But his answers only brought up more questions. “Then why live here at all? I would think your people would feel uncomfortable if they were surrounded by humans.” Never mind the little matter of inviting me into his house, or repeatedly asking me if I would be his wife. One would have thought a member of an empathic race would have done everything possible to protect his isolation. Now I was beginning to be very glad I had come here after all, but that didn’t explain why he had requested my presence in the first place.

  “You’ll notice that I have no near neighbors,” Sarzhin replied. Then he shook his head. “That is no real answer. The truth is—” He hesitated, and again regarded me carefully. “The truth is that our population has been declining for some time. Our scientists have applied themselves to the problem, as you might well imagine, but as of yet they have found no solution. One thing they did discover, however, is that the Zhore are compatible with humans. Biologically, that is.”

  For a few seconds my brain didn’t quite know how to process that particular piece of information. Then it caught up, and I said, “Oh.” Well, I supposed that explained why he kept asking me to marry him. Or did it? After all, marriage wasn’t exactly a necessary prelude to procreation.

  “‘Oh,’ exactly.” Another smile, but this one looked rather grim. He lifted his glass and took another drink before continuing, “For my people, though, it is one thing to know your race is compatible with another in the purest genetic sense, and quite another to make the mental leap necessary to do anything about it, especially for a people as reclusive as the Zhore. The dispute over Lathvin provided an opportunity, however—we were given a chance to live among you and attempt to see if such unions were at all feasible.”

  I reflected then that the Zhore had an odd way of going about the process. After all, it’s sort of hard to meet people when you’re holed up in a mansion all the time. I certainly had yet to see a Zhore hanging out in the Filling Station and offering to buy the women getting off-duty from the commissary or the GRC’s office a round of drinks. I refrained from saying so, however, and waited for Sarzhin to continue. After so many months of mystery, it was a relief to finally be getting some answers from him. And after seeing him lying there, still and silent, I wanted to hear his voice, if only to reassure myself that he was all right and hadn’t done any irreversible damage to himself.

  “I had sensed you,” he told me, and his eyes met mine and held. For a second I felt as if I might drown in those depths, blue as the world where I had been born and yet could not remember at all. “Faintly, of course, but still, I knew when you drove past, felt your comings and goings. This was the first sign, the first realization that compatibility with a human might be more than simply biological. I could not think how to approach you, though. Others of my kind have encountered similar difficulties.”

  That didn’t seem too surprising. After all, if your entire race makes it a habit to keep to themselves, then any outward sign of changing its behavior
would of course be met with suspicion. All Sarzhin could do was wait, and hope for a chance—

  “You didn’t—you didn’t make my father have that accident, did you?”

  Sarzhin’s eyes widened, and he said immediately, “No, of course not. You saw how bad the weather was.”

  “Yes,” I replied, suddenly ashamed I could even have thought that of him. I wanted to step forward, reach out to touch him, but somehow I couldn’t quite work up the nerve. Maybe, since he was an empath, he’d be able to pick up from me that I wanted more contact than I’d previously allowed. “I’ve never seen a storm like that, before or since.”

  But he made no move toward me. “While I did not cause the accident, I did take advantage of it, and for that I must apologize. By then I’d begun to feel quite desperate, as the months and years went by, and I found no way to initiate a meeting with you.”

  I wanted to tell him—what, that it was all right? That blackmailing my father was a small thing compared to being a member of a race that was slowly dying and needed to do whatever it could to survive? The ends never justified the means, or so I had been taught, but I understood what he had done even if I couldn’t completely condone it.

  “Is that why you settled where you did?” I asked. “So that you would be near a homestead with two daughters?”

  “That was why I chose the site initially. Lathvin presented a number of difficulties, among them being the sparseness of the settlements here. To have two young women nearby increased the odds, although I did not count on your sister going off-world to attend college. That turned out to be of no import, because it became obvious to me soon enough you were the one who mattered.”

  As much as I wanted to reach out to him, one logical part of my brain was crunching the numbers and coming up with a sum I didn’t like very much. “So I was just supposed to be…what? Convenient breeding stock?”