The Harat-Shar shook his head. At least he left her alone with her bills and her questions: foremost being, what was she going to do for the next month or so? Everyone else had found something to occupy themselves. The only duties she had to occupy herself with were her worries.
Jarysh didn’t ask him if he was sure about working at the hospital, which suited Hirianthial. He gave his bed in the dormitory a cursory glance, tossed his bag on it and went to the bathroom to change into the durable and shapeless synthetic tunic and pants that were the medical industry’s uniform throughout the Core.
The explanation Jarysh had given him for the state of healthcare in the region had required most of two hours, but by the end of it Hirianthial had distilled it to the same premise that ruled all modern medicine: people left behind with nothing but sorrow and a body tended to want to balance the scales. If they could find no solace in family or faith, they found enough in money. Harat-Sharii’s answer to medical litigation had, not surprisingly for Harat-Shar, involved voluntary enslavement. But a wave of specialists trained by off-worlders with a more mercenary bent had produced a generation of highly-paid free-man doctors... creating an industry once again vulnerable to law suits and medical claims.
That the medical industry had a sociology of its own had intrigued Hirianthial when he’d come to the Alliance to study. Medicine on his home world could barely be called that, and doctors were so few they hardly had an effect on the population, the economy or the social order at all. Sick Eldritch died. Weak Eldritch died. Old Eldritch died. Eldritch babies died of diseases that the Pelted had cured so long ago they were taught only in historical classes. The Eldritch had no vaccines. No surgeons. Women still died in childbed at a rate the Pelted would have found horrifying.
Every society in the Alliance dealt differently with the social issues raised by the marriage of high technology and biology. Zhedeem’s healthcare crisis was only one of a hundred thousand examples of what could go wrong.
Hirianthial could not regret the contract. He was also old enough to dispense with the self-denials he might have indulged in as a youth about why he was here. He’d been at a loss when everything had fallen apart with Laiselin and then the executions, and it had led him to the Alliance. He was at a loss again. Better to drown himself in the work than to think about what he would do with the remainder of his still-too-many years. Better to think about Pelted children than about the daughter he’d almost had and the wife who, unlike Salaena the pard, had been certain that everything would work out for the best.
Hirianthial began to braid his hair back in preparation for work. He could hear a child weeping through the open door. His contract would expire, or it wouldn’t. Reese would come for him, or she wouldn’t. The work here would be worth doing even if he remained here for centuries.
The classifieds in Zhedeem almost inspired Reese to pack up the Earthrise and head right back out into the Core, pirates or no pirates. She figured out how to sort the listings so that nothing offensive would pop up on her screen, but by that time the pickings were so slim she didn’t really want any of them. She hadn’t bought the Earthrise so she could spend her layovers as a waitress or a cashier in a clothing store.
Then again, she hadn’t bought the Earthrise intending to spend ninety percent of the year hemorrhaging money like blood. Any job would do if it reduced the amount she’d have to plead for from her mother.
Reese applied at several places until a port-side cafe offered her a contract pouring coffee and serving dessert cakes so dense she could have used them for weight-training. The view out the large windows offered a disconcerting mix of high-tech landing pads and waving palm fronds, but the cafe itself was cozy enough to lull her agoraphobia. She even got used to the dusty breeze.
She hadn’t had the heart to read the book she’d bought since her fight with Hirianthial... or at least, what had felt like a fight. But frustration and boredom drew her back to it the following day and sucked her straight into the pages. Despite her mixed feelings about Eldritch and the fact that she had no physical copy to bring, Reese planned her lunch break so she could attend the book signing.
“Oh good, you came!” the leopardine said. “She’s in the back. Here, take this.”
Reese glanced down at the brightly colored reproduction of one of the covers. This one was an unlikely illustration of a Harat-Shar man torn between a ghost-pale Eldritch woman and a demure Tam-illee foxine. “Err, thank you.”
The woman sitting behind the table in the back of the bookstore looked nothing like Reese had imagined: no young and sensual woman this, but an older woman with spots on her fading fur. Her head hair had also run to white, and there were wrinkles in the finely felted skin beneath her eyes. In front of her on her desk was a sign that read: “Natalie Felger: Writer of Exotic Alien Romance.” A younger woman kept her company, but other than her the room was empty, its many chairs abandoned.
“Am I the only one here?” Reese asked, bewildered. “You should have more fans.”
“So far,” the older woman said, her grin flashing yellowed fangs and arching whiskers. “But it’s nice to be told otherwise. I assume you’re here to have something signed?”
“I guess,” Reese said, looking at the paper in her hands. “I hadn’t planned on it, but the bookseller gave me this.”
“You look a bit perplexed,” the writer said.
Reese sat on the nearest stool and said, “You got them so perfectly you have to know how infuriating they are. How can you fight with someone who barely talks?”
The two at the table exchanged glances, then the elder said, “Sounds like you have a story of your own.”
And since the Harat-Shar seemed so disposed to listening, Reese found herself telling the whole crazy tale from the Queen of the Eldritch giving her money to Hirianthial vanishing into some hospital to give up his freedom for little children. Or to avoid her. Or both.
“You need advice,” the older woman said. She handed Reese a card. “This will be of far more value to you than any signed flat, though I’ll sign that too if you want.”
“What is this?” Reese asked, trying to make sense of the numbers on it.
“My address,” the Harat-Shariin said. “Stop by tonight for dinner and we’ll talk.”
Just what she needed: another missed dinner with Irine. Reese looked up into the other woman’s face, though, and saw something there: not just kindness, but something alert, something shrewd.
“Later tonight, then,” she said.
After her shift released, Reese headed for the address on the card. She had to ask for directions several times, which proved irritating since every adult who helped her had to invite her to his or her home instead before pointing her down the next lane. A pale violet twilight finally found her on the doorstep of a modest house that showed only its glazed tile roof and a few feet of wall before submerging amid a collection of flowerbeds. Reese took the earthen steps to the dark blue door and rung the bell; while waiting for someone to answer she reflected that she felt safer here, cocooned in the earth, than she did under the open sky. She might not like everything about Zhedeem, but this part she liked a great deal.
Natalie’s younger companion opened the door. “Ah! You did come. We’re eating in the garden, come with me.”
Reese followed her through a central corridor that opened onto several other rooms, none of which she saw more of than the dusky lanterns illumined. She had an impression of warmth and close walls, though, as the girl led her back up a set of stairs on the opposite end of the house, up to a circular patio set into the ground. Its walls ended somewhere at ground level, which hit Reese around her shoulders. Spicy-scented flowers draped into the enclosure, where a round table had already been set with ceramic plates glazed a beautiful deep blue.
Natalie was pouring water from a pitcher as they entered. “Ah, here she is. Did you have trouble finding the house?”
“A little,” Reese said. “I’ve never been off Market Avenu
e.”
“Probably wise,” the younger woman said with a grin. “We haven’t met. I’m Shelya, Natalie’s niece.”
“She keeps my house for me, Angels preserve her,” Natalie said. “I’d forget to eat if she didn’t remind me. Sit, sit! And tell me how you find Harat-Sharii, if this is your first visit, and how long you’re staying.”
Reese sat and obediently took a warm yeast-scented roll from the basket Shelya passed her. Natalie’s questions proved so easy to answer that she didn’t notice the second course: sweet green spears with a tangy glaze. The main course proved to be some sort of tiny bird, still bird-shaped, and Reese was wondering how to eat it when Natalie said, “Now tell me why you dislike your Eldritch so.”
Reese jerked her gaze from the fowl to her hostess. “I don’t actually dislike him.”
“Are you sure?” Natalie asked. “You seemed very unsettled by him.”
“Being unsettled is different,” Reese said. She tried stabbing one of the tiny birds with her fork to see if she could peel the meat off the bone; her hostesses were eating with their fingers, which looked messy. “He’s hard not to be unsettled by.”
“You wanted something more like the books other writers write,” Shelya said. “Instead you got what Aunt Natalie writes.”
Reese paused.
The girl laughed. “Don’t think we haven’t read the competition! They make the Eldritch sound like fragile, forlorn creatures, easily led astray, broken or changed. Not like that at all, are they?”
“No,” Reese admitted.
“But they are as mysterious,” Natalie said. “Imagine it, though. If you live as long as they do, why bother getting to the point of anything?” She wrinkled her nose. “It makes writing the sex scenes hard. That’s why I never write a book about two Eldritch. We’d be dead before the triumphant part with the birth of the heir.”
Reese almost choked. As Shelya patted her back, Reese wiped her watering eyes with the edge of her napkin and said, “You seemed to do well enough with the one I just read.”
“That was a little more of a fantasy than I usually write,” the older woman said agreeably. “And if you keep at it with the fork you’ll shred the meat. We won’t mind if you eat it with your hands.”
So Reese did, and it was messy but also delicious. “Why Eldritch?” she asked over the second bird. “You could have picked any number of other races.”
“Oh, I’ve done others,” Natalie said. “Under a different name, I write rather shocking books about humans falling in love with Ciracaana that involve quite a bit of physics, if not in the way most physicists imagine.”
“You’ve made her blush,” Shelya said. “I can smell it.”
Reese said, “Well, the Ciracaana are nine feet tall and centauroid. If you were human, you’d have the sense to blush about it yourself.”
“No wonder she and the Eldritch don’t get along!” Shelya said with a laugh. “Do you talk this way to him?”
“Maybe,” Reese said. “Sometimes.” She sighed. “Okay, maybe all the time.”
Shelya snickered and cleared away the dishes.
“Why Eldritch, you asked,” Natalie said. “Why not? I’d say. Except that would be an unfair answer. The reason is because my family’s always been interested in them, and it seemed appropriate to uphold the tradition.”
“That seems like a weird thing for a Harat-Shar family to be interested in,” Reese said.
“Not at all!” Natalie said, laughing. “We are the Alliance’s libertines, aren’t we? Pleasure for its own sake. If it feels good, how can it be wrong? And naturally we would gravitate toward our opposites, yes? What could be more diametrically opposed to a Harat-Shar than an Eldritch?”
“Nothing, I guess,” Reese said. “Still, that seems like a good reason to stay away from them. Opposites might attract, but they also cause friction.”
“Perhaps,” Natalie said. “Are you so unlike your Eldritch, then?”
Reese sighed. “He’s not mine. As I keep telling him, or he keeps telling me, or which I can’t remember anymore because he’s so stubborn I can’t tell when he’s disagreeing with me or doing what I want him to do.” She turned her glass in her fingers, leaving greasy prints on it. “I just want him to leave me alone. Things were better without him.”
“Were they?” Natalie asked.
“Yes!” Reese exclaimed. “I feel like he’s always judging me according to some standard I’ll never meet. Like he’s seen everything and I’m nothing special. I hate that he only answers the questions he wants to answer. I hate feeling like he’s part of some world that only barely touches ours. Why does he get to live so much better than we do?” She stopped abruptly, wondering when her voice had risen.
“Didn’t quite realize how much you were holding in, did you,” Natalie observed.
“I guess not,” Reese said, then straightened. “It’s still true, though.”
“Wash your fingers,” Natalie said, nodding to a bowl with a hot towel at Reese’s side. “Then come with me. I have something to show you while Shelya prepares dessert.”
Scraping the grease from her fingers with the pebbly surface of the hot towel left her hands feeling surprisingly clean, almost raw. Reese set it aside and followed Natalie into the lantern-lit warmth of the house, through the shadowed corridor in its center and into an intimately lit room, one almost too small to be called a room... in a groundsider’s house, anyway. There was a single cushioned bench in it facing a dark wooden bureau, and this Natalie opened with a thin brass key she withdrew from her vest. When she opened the bureau’s doors, the pungent smell of paper, ink and paint rushed out, tickling Reese’s nose.
“This folio never leaves this room,” Natalie said, turning from the bureau with a leather folder in her arms. “But you have plenty of time. Enjoy it, and when you’re done set it back and join us for coffee.”
“I couldn’t possibly—it’s so old—”
One of the woman’s brow ridges quirked. “And only young things need to be touched?”
Reese blushed but couldn’t come up with a response before Natalie abandoned her with the folio in her lap.
It was larger than she’d thought—longer than her forearm, but narrow. The leather wasn’t stiff, as she expected, but supple, dyed a dark blue. Hesitant, Reese untied the cords holding it shut and spread it open.
...and gasped at the parchment inside, a painting in vibrant hues, so jewel-rich she had to restrain herself from touching it. The smell of oil rose from the page and with it a sense of age.
It was only barely less staggering than the subject matter: a Harat-Shar jaguar? Leopard? reclining on a day bed beside a young Eldritch woman in sumptuous garb. The Eldritch had a book in hand and appeared to be reading out loud. The Harat-Shar was listening.
They looked so real. And they continued to look real in all the paintings that followed: twenty-two in all, each more unbelievable than the one before. It wasn’t what Reese had expected from a folio of paintings in a Harat-Shar’s bureau—there was nothing salacious about it—but despite the two never touching, never being undressed, never doing anything at all inappropriate, there was an unbearable sense of intimacy in each scene, so pointed Reese touched her cheek and realized it was warm from blushing.
She looked through the whole series of pastoral scenes twice, trying to decide what about it made them so hard to look at, and for the life of her couldn’t decide. And despite her embarrassment, she found her fingers reluctant to tie the folio shut and put it away.
The two women were back in the garden, sipping coffee and nibbling on a white cake thick with a frosting made especially rich by the yellow candlelight. Reese resumed her seat, blinked at the slice handed to her by Shelya, and sipped the coffee, bitter and dark.
“Well?” Natalie asked.
“Who were those two?” Reese asked.
“Sellelvi and Fasianyl,” Natalie said.
“Were they real?” Reese asked.
“Ah!”
Natalie said with a laugh. “Does it matter?”
Reese focused on the cake, then looked up at the Harat-Shar. “Of course it matters.”
“Does it make the paintings any less special?”
“No, of course not,” Reese said. “But it could make them more special.”
“Eat the cake,” Shelya whispered. “You look like you could use it.”
Dazed, Reese parted a corner of the cake with her fork and tried it. The frosting was lemon.
“Maybe they were real. Maybe they weren’t. Even if they were real, some secrets aren’t mine to give away,” Natalie said. “That’s the first thing you should have figured out about Eldritch. It’s not just that they keep secrets... it’s that the secrets keep them, fast as prisons.” At Reese’s expression, she grinned and continued, “Those paintings have been in my family for over a hundred years... and whosoever made them didn’t do us the kindness of telling us about their inspiration. She had a fine hand with a brush, and maybe painting them was all she could say. Or maybe it was all she had to say.”
“They’re priceless,” Reese said. “Reproductions of them would make you a rich woman.”
“You saying that as a trader?” Natalie asked. “Or as a woman who wishes she had a copy?”
“A little of both, maybe,” Reese said, realizing the cake was good. She gave it more of her attention, and the more she ate the less vague she felt.
“There’s more than one way to be rich,” Natalie said. “I have no use for more money.”
Reese hesitated over the cake.
“You’re thinking something awkward, I’m sure,” Natalie said. “Say it, say it. We’re not oh-so-polite Eldritch ourselves.”
“It seems wrong to keep something so beautiful hidden, when so many people could see and enjoy it,” Reese said slowly. “Those pieces could hang in a museum.”
“They could,” Natalie agreed. “But not everyone could enjoy them as you have.”
“What makes me so special?” Reese asked.
The old woman grinned. “You have an Eldritch of your own. That makes you special... very special. I hoped that seeing the pictures would keep you from wasting him.”
Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) Page 18