by S. L. Viehl
I wanted to pull him down beside me; I wanted to hide beneath the linens. How long had he been watching me sleep?
“Not long. I have an early meeting this morning,” he said. He sounded much more relaxed than he had since claiming me from Teulon. “I signaled Squilyp and told him you would not be in to work today.”
“Why did you do that?” Rather alarmed, I sat up. “I am not ill.”
His hand stroked my arm. “I didn’t let you sleep much last night.”
No, he had not, but I would gladly remain awake for more of the same. Last night had been a revelation, and not just of the ways of intimacy among the ensleg.
Stop thinking about coupling. “I will take Marel to the learning facility,” I said, trying to rise.
He did not permit me to do so. “She has already gone. Fasala came to walk her to school. I will meet her when her classes are over.”
Fasala was Salo Toxin’s daughter, and a trustworthy child, but having her look after Marel did not sit well with me.
“She will be fine,” Reever assured me.
He kept reading my thoughts before I could speak them. That was still annoying. “If I am not to look after the child, or report for duty,” I countered, “then what am I to do?”
“Go back to sleep,” he suggested. “Later you can read or listen to music. Rest, Jarn.”
I could rest when I was dead. Feeling bold, I tugged on his hand. “Stay with me.”
“Then there would be no rest for either of us.” He pressed his mouth to the top of my head. “Don’t kill the cats while I’m gone.”
I could see the gray-furred one lurking near the storage container. “As you say, Husband.”
I did not go back to sleep, however, and as soon as Reever left I got up to dress and arm myself. On Akkabarr I had been an outcast, but I had never been permitted to spend much time alone. Daneeb had rightly feared that my ignorance would kill me. The skela who had taken me in also lived as a tribe unto themselves, and they believed the tribe should remain together. Daneeb had repeatedly told me that it was not good to become lonely and depressed on a world that could kill you ten paces from your shelter.
Even with a protector like Reever to guard me, someone or something on this ship could do that quite easily. I needed to learn more about these people and their technology, and quickly, or I would not be able to keep myself or my daughter safe when Reever was not with us.
The beasts trailed after me as if watching me, but both kept a respectable distance between us, so I ignored them. I ate a small meal of synthetic meat from the wall machine. It was plain fare, but better than the strange dishes Reever kept preparing for me. Perhaps now that we were closer as husband and wife I could persuade him to allow me to program some meals.
One of the small banes of my existence was that nearly everyone on the ship, including my former self, did not eat meat. We Iisleg had relied heavily on synthetics toward the end of the rebellion, but before that I had lived mostly on the meat of the animals we killed, or a portion of what we butchered for the iiskar.
Pretend meat was not very appetizing, but I was sick unto death of eating pretend plants.
Once I had cleared up after my meal, there was nothing left for me to do. I only listened to Cherijo’s music when Reever insisted; the strange sounds of it did not move or intrigue me. I had grown weary of reading her journals. There were no hides for me to scrape, stretch, or cut; no furs to be cleaned. The wall machines prepared the food we ate. The three of us were tidy, and even so there were small drones that Reever had programmed to clean the surfaces and furnishings once a week. The beasts had gone off into Marel’s room, and now slept huddled together in the center of her bed. I would have gone to work, but for Reever’s orders.
I stood by the viewport and looked out at the stars, feeling utterly useless. Despite Daneeb’s efforts, I had been a lonely creature among the skela, bound only to the work, but no more. Reever and the child had already made a place inside me, and I found myself empty without them.
Empty, useless Jarn. A pretend Cherijo who wanted to be anything else.
The door chime sounded, startling me so much that I jumped and drew a blade. I went to the panel and enabled the screen to show a view of the outer corridor.
At first I thought it was Squilyp, but the Omorr outside the door bore only a rudimentary resemblance to him. She was female, to begin with, and had a thicker torso. She also wore very elegant, colorful garments with so many baubles that she practically glittered.
I had never seen her before now, so I kept the panel secured and enabled the audio panel. “Yes?”
“I am Garphawayn, the Lady Maftuda,” the Omorr female said. “Squilyp’s mate. I would speak to you, Terran.”
She didn’t sound angry or disturbed, but her posture and tone indicated what I interpreted to be determination and resolve. I didn’t see any weapons on her, but that meant nothing. I rather doubted the Senior Healer had sent his wife to assassinate me, not when he could have done it himself in Medical and made it look like an accident.
I released the security mechanism on the panel, opened it, and stood back.
“Thank you.” The female Omorr jingled as she hopped in. Little gem-encrusted rings around some of her gildrells sparkled, and four circular strands of matching gems swung from her throat. “Where is your lavatory?”
It took a moment for me to realize she referred to the privy. I pointed to it.
“Excuse me.” She bounced quickly over to the unit and shut herself inside. A few minutes later, she emerged. Her hide seemed a little pale compared to Squilyp’s, but that might have been a normal gender difference among the Omorr. “Thank you. I nearly had an accident.”
It took a moment to realize she meant her body functions. “Do you not have your own privy?” I had thought sanitary facilities standard in all the quarters.
She stared at me, and then sniffed. “Of course I do. I could not make it there in time.” She rested the membranes of one arm against the straining bulge of her belly. “Not when he kicks like this.”
“A son?” I smiled and went over to her so I could admire the fertile curve. “When is your birthing moon?”
“My … the child is due to be born soon. Among my kind, each mother’s time is slightly different.” She sounded stiff but appeared slightly bemused by my question. “It is my first, too, so we cannot judge by past deliveries.”
“Come, sit.” I took one of her arms and guided her over to the front room’s furnishings, offering her the most comfortable place. “Are you thirsty, or hungry? I can procure something for you from the wall machine. Do you enjoy pretend plants?”
“Pretend plants?”
Wall food might not be good enough for her. Fertile females needed the best, freshest nourishment. I eyed the entry to Marel’s room, but remembered that I had promised Reever I would not kill the beasts. “There is no fresh food to be had.”
“It is not necessary for you to feed me. Please, sit down.” She studied me as I sat across from her. “I apologize for not calling upon you sooner. I thought you might need time to … adjust.”
“Adjust what?” I scanned the room, but all the lights and equipment seemed to be working properly. The female Omorr did not answer, so I added, “If you people do not tell me what you want adjusted, I will never find it on my own. Do you know how many things there are on this ship? They are as crystals in a frost storm.”
“We—I—meant adjust as in grow accustomed to your surroundings,” she said. “Our environment on board the ship must seem very strange to you.”
“It is warm, there is food and water, and no one is trying to shoot me,” I told her. “I do not need to adjust to that. I am grateful for it.”
“Yes. Well. You seem very different.” Garphawayn gestured toward my head. “I have never seen you wear your hair loose in such a fashion. I had not realized you possessed such a large quantity of it.”
The female Omorr had no hair, but there were
some long, feathery-looking growths on the very top of her scalp. They were red and purple and blue, and quite striking against her pink skin.
I must look like a beast to her.
“If I had belonged to a tribe, I would have had to cut it off. Only outcast females among the Iisleg grow their hair long.” I ran a hand over the unruly mass that I kept forgetting to groom. “I plait or roll it up and clip it for work. It requires much care, but Reever forbade me to cut it.”
Her gildrell rings tinkled as she sat up. “He did what?”
“I do not mind,” I said quickly, worried that I had given her the wrong impression. “The length of my hair pleases him.” In that moment I realized that Cherijo must have worn it long. “I will, ah, adjust to it.”
Garphawayn muttered something under her breath before she asked, “What would please you, Terran?”
I did not understand the question. “You should not call me that. I speak Terran, and my body belongs to their species, but in all other things I am Iisleg.”
“Well, I will not call you Iisleg; it is considered rude by my kind. Your name is Jarn?” When I nodded, she asked, “Then what would you do with your hair to please yourself, Jarn?”
“Among my people, a woman’s greatest pleasure is to serve.” When her expression remained blank, I added, “It pleases me to satisfy Reever’s desires.” After last night, a great deal.
“Indeed.” She thought for a moment. “I would know more about these Iisleg women. Would you be so kind as to tell me of their lives?”
I told her what I knew, making it clear from the beginning that I had never been permitted to live among the tribes, and what I knew had been gained through stories told by my sisters and my own infrequent observations. I added a little about my life among the skela, the outcast Iisleg females who recovered ensleg corpses from surface shipwrecks and butchered game for the tribal hunters so they would not have to sully their hands with the taint of the dead. She seemed interested in how hard my sisters had worked to ensure their survival away from the protection and safety of the iiskars.
“When the rebellion came, and so many were lost fighting the Toskald, things changed for the women of the tribes,” I said. “Part of that was because our Raktar made the skela into vral.”
“Vral?”
I explained the old lisleg legend of the vral, the dead whose spirits returned as faceless healers to judge and restore to health those who were sick or injured, and how we pretended to be the vral by concealing our faces behind Lok-teel masks. “We became vral to save fighters who had fallen during battle, and our men did believe we were gifts from the Gods, sent to those worthy of saving. But Toskald survivors and reinforcements did not know our legends, and often forced us to defend ourselves.”
Garphawayn hmphed. “You should not have had to resort to such a ruse.”
“We eventually exposed ourselves.” I thought of Resa, and how much I missed her fearless presence. “That we had deceived them angered our men, but by then we had healed so many of them that they forgave us for our deception.”
“How generous.” Garphawayn rose on her one leg. “I have but one question for you, Jarn. Why do you continue to behave as an lisleg female would among us? You must know by now that we are not like the people of Akkabarr.”
I wondered why her skin had flushed. “Daneeb, our headwoman, advised me do so. I do not know ensleg ways so it seemed sensible. You females have much more freedom, but your males are not so different from the kheder I knew. Are you feeling ill?”
She ignored my question. “Has my mate been ordering you about, as Reever has?”
“Squilyp is my superior,” I reminded her. “He guides me and prevents me from making mistakes. I am grateful for his direction.”
“Cherijo was once Squilyp’s superior. He has spoken of those years often, and credits her with teaching him to be a better physician.” She hopped over to me. “You did not lose any of your healing skills on Akkabarr, did you?”
“No, but—”
“You are superior in authority to everyone on this vessel. Did no one tell you this?” she continued, her voice growing louder. “I imagine they would not. Always believing they know best.”
Now I felt confused. “Something was said about Cherijo’s position on some council, but I was told I would not understand—”
“Pah.” She made a dismissive gesture. “The males on this ship have gone too far this time. They treat you like a sick child but make use of you as a woman grown. They conceal vital information from you on the pretext of protecting you. This cannot be permitted to continue. You are functioning in a coherent manner. I will not have it.”
She had completely lost me. “This is not the way of the women of the tribe.”
“In this tribe, Jarn, men and women are equals. Power commands respect. The key to power is knowledge, and it cannot be withheld from you simply because you are ignorant of it. So.” Garphawayn’s expression turned grim. “I will tell you everything they have not.”
FOUR
It took Garphawayn some time to relate the many facts that she felt were imperative for me to know. Most had to do with the reasons why my former self had fled Terra. I was shocked to learn of the bioengineering her creator, a Terran named Joseph Grey Veil, had used to transform his own cells into a female, altered version of himself. His experiment had made Cherijo into something more than human, the female Omorr told me, and discovering her uniqueness had shaped her and her life.
I could not believe that my body had been copied from that of a male. What did that make me? Were there others? “Is it customary to create genetic copies of other ensleg and then change them so?”
“No,” Garphawayn assured me. “You are the only one that we know of, but there may be others. Cherijo’s creator told her that she had ‘brothers.’ “
The female Omorr also repeated what her mate had told her of my former self, Reever, and a Jorenian named Kao Torin, and how the three had contributed to the long, troubled relationship between Cherijo and my husband. None of these things had been detailed in the journals, but Garphawayn assured me that Squilyp would attest to the facts.
It seemed that there was much I had not been told.
Squilyp’s mate then detailed how it was with ensleg females, and permitted me to ask anything about ensleg ways, no matter how embarrassing. She remained patient with my ignorance, tolerated my many questions, and when something made no sense, she took me to the console and used the database to illustrate the point. She dismissed the laws of the Iisleg as gender bias born of ignorance-riddled custom and superstition. When I refused to believe her, she showed me examples of other species that had developed similar and opposing cultures, as well as the doctrines agreed upon by the Allied League.
She did not argue with my beliefs. She destroyed them.
By the time Garphawayn had finished my world had turned upside down and inside out. I could no longer look upon myself or Cherijo as the same person. All I could think was that I inhabited a body more valuable than anyone suspected, and the danger, to me and Marel seemed to loom higher and colder than anything I knew, even an ice cliff ready to collapse.
Why had Reever kept such things from me?
I felt so many emotions that I could not untangle them: confusion, bitterness, anger—and an overwhelming sense of outrage. I only had one last question for Garphawayn. “What am I going to do, now that I know all of this?”
“Jarn, you said that when you were among the skela, you did not act like a woman of the tribe or follow the skela ways,” the female Omorr said. “You saved lives.”
I gave her a blank look. “It was my work. I knew the work had to be more important than anything the skela did. Besides that, the Iisleg would never have accepted the survivor of a crashed ship into an iiskar; I could never live among them as a proper woman.”
“Your work is the same here. Even if the men do not agree with it, you must do what you feel is right.” Garphawayn rose. “Now I
must go and have harsh words with my mate. Signal me if you again need to speak of this or anything we have discussed.”
She left me in that muddle of emotions and thoughts. Some time later the console blipped, indicating a priority relay was waiting, and I answered it. It came from the ship’s communication center.
“ClanLeader Teulon Jado is signaling from the peace summit,” Salo Torin told me. He did not seem to want to meet my gaze directly. “He insists on speaking with you, Healer.”
“Permit him to do so, please,” I said.
Salo forwarded the signal, which made Teulon’s image appear on the console screen. The distance between us caused some slight distortion, but his familiar features loosened the knot inside my chest.
“Jarn.” He lifted his hand and touched the screen.
I did the same. “Raktar.” He looked tired and worried. “You and Resa are well?”
“Yes.” He smiled a little. “My Chosen asks the same of you.”
“I miss you both, but I am making a place here for myself.” A place that I was no longer convinced I wished to occupy, but Teulon had not signaled me to listen to my woes. I also needed to check further into Garphawayn’s claim that Cherijo had been grown from her creator’s own cells to be the perfect, immortal physician. It was not something I entirely believed possible. I had been a man? “What is the matter?”
“HouseClan Torin has refused to permit you travel to Vtaga, to aid the Faction with this sickness on their world. Is this so?” When I nodded, he said, “SubAkade TssVar has just presented an ultimatum to the mediators here. If you will go to Vtaga, the Faction will voluntarily abandon their slaver operations and free Hsktskt-held slaves.”
“They will? All of them?” I was stunned.
The Hsktskt Faction administered the most extensive network of slaver operations, depots, and transport routes in the territories bordering League-explored space. It had been the collision of Faction slavery and League colonization that had created the tensions that eventually built up to outright war. No one knew how many slaves were held by the Faction, but conservative estimates were in the tens of millions.