by H. E. Trent
“There were more. I never met them,” she said in Tyneali and waited for the tablet to speak the translation.
Owen grunted in response, then asked, “What happened to them?”
Again, she fed the device some sentences. “I don’t know. Maybe they died. Maybe they were moved.”
“Were they like you? I mean, same parents, same genetic donors.”
Ais shook her head and tried to figure out how to explain. The words for that didn’t come easily, not even in Tyneali. She gnawed on her bottom lip for a few moments, considering. “I…sometimes heard them talk when I wasn’t supposed to. They talked about the engineering.”
“The genetic engineering?”
She nodded. “They complained. They said they needed more samples but that they could not easily get them.”
“Where did they get the ones they had?” The kettle whistled, and Owen reached over, ostensibly to turn off the heat element.
Ais sat up a bit straighter and watched him move the best she could. With his back turned, she could watch without embarrassment, though she wished she could see him more clearly so she could discern the liquidity of his movements—to see if he was graceful or plodding. Purposeful or spasmodic.
He turned around.
“Um…” She snapped her gaze down to the tablet. She told the machine, “I can guess, but I do not know for sure.”
“What’s your guess?” He turned back to the counter, reached into a canister and withdrew something small, perhaps a teabag.
“Based on what I overheard, the samples they had from men were specifically…collected?”
“Donated? Men do that on Earth, too.”
“What?”
“There’s no way in hell I can explain that without being crass. Just take me at my word that getting a sample from a volunteer is painless and, with the right stimulation, doesn’t take that long.”
“You are a volunteer?”
He snorted. “Hell no.”
She furrowed her brow. “Is it a bad thing?”
“No. There was just no good reason for me to. I had a…a brother who had some samples stored, but he did it for different reasons than most men do.”
“Why?”
Owen set a mug on the bedside table along with what she made out, with some squinting, to be the sugar canister and creamer powder. “Mike was sick from the time he was born. We were identical, and shared a placenta. He didn’t thrive the way he should have in the womb, but he lived anyway—longer than anyone thought he should have. He was a McGarry, though, so of course he was a stubborn bastard.”
“Oh.” Frowning, Ais pinned her gaze on the tablet screen again.
Perhaps his “Mike” was the one who he told all his secret things to. Mike must have been like Courtney’s Erin or Erin’s Courtney.
“Anyway, he had some samples preserved on a bit of a dare, I guess. They’re in cryo-storage, and my parents have been trying to figure out what to do with them. He had an ex-girlfriend who’d asked for them, but they worried that she was still so young and that there was a chance she’d get married soon. They thought maybe things wouldn’t be good with her having a kid or kids who looked so much like a dead man she still loved.”
“I would have,” she told the tablet.
“Would have what?” Owen asked.
“I would have had the children.”
“Really?” He voice rose at the end with evident shock. “Why?”
“Because if I loved him,” she told the tablet, “would I not make a more logical mother of his children than a stranger?”
He didn’t respond right away. She looked up and saw him twirling something with a metallic glint through his fingers. A spoon, perhaps. He seemed to have been looking her way.
She looked down.
“What about the next man?” he asked quietly.
“What about him?”
“Can’t you see how having the children would complicate things?”
“No.”
“Seriously?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps I am naive to such things.” She couldn’t imagine loving any man who wouldn’t love the children that went with her.
“That’s all right. Maybe that’s not really such a bad thing, you know?” He padded back to the kitchen, and opened the basket on the countertop.
She wanted to know more about Mike and what he must have been like for a woman to have wanted a piece of him after he was gone, but the conversation had already deviated too far. She had things to say before she forgot that they might have been important.
She plopped sugar and creamer powder into her tea and stirred. “The other samples,” she told the tablet, “the ones from the women, I am less clear on how they were obtained.”
“Do you know how you were born, Ais? I mean, did your mother gestate you before she went away, or a surrogate? Or did you develop outside of a womb?”
“I do not know. They did not explain such things to me. I did not know about the things women’s bodies did until after I started my menses.” She’d bled and cried, thinking she was dying. One of the frustrated Tynealean lab workers had thrust some medical journals at her before leaving her to her reading and her tears.
He grunted. “I guess they didn’t have much of a choice but to demystify things for you then.”
She nodded, but since his back was turned, he didn’t see her. She said, “Yes.”
“What’s your guess, though, about where the women’s samples came from? I have my own, but I’d like to hear yours.”
“I don’t believe they were…donated, if that is what you mean.”
“Harvested. God, the thought of that makes me sick. Ova aren’t exactly easy to get at.”
He handed her a plate that held a couple of muffins made of dishe grain, some fruit, and a few small wedges of soft cheese.
She grabbed some cheese first and bit into the pointed end. There hadn’t been cheese on the station. She’d had her first taste of the stuff when she’d been locked in Reg’s ship, and even that had been an accidental delicacy. Some crew member had fed it to her out of the ship’s galley thinking she could have a meal like all the rest, but Reg hadn’t meant for her to have real food. The next day, she was back to dry, flavorless pellets and tepid water.
“What is your theory?” she fed to the tablet through a full mouth.
Owen was leaning against the wall near the bathroom door. “Maybe this is paranoia on my part, but I am a McGarry, and we’re genetically predisposed to the condition. I think that maybe the Tyneali have their own little collection of women they keep in captivity, just like the slavers do. Maybe whenever they think they’ve had some breakthrough—some new genetic discovery—they go back to their stock and pick out the right combination of parts to put together a perfect hybrid.”
“Why?”
“Now you’re asking me to speculate on the motives of a race I’ve never met?”
She shrugged. She had met them, and even she couldn’t speculate on why the Tyneali did what they did.
“I think the worst-case scenario,” he said, “is that they don’t just harvest ova from the women once or twice, but keep them locked away so they can access them until they have no use for them anymore.”
Ais set her plate down because her hands had started shaking too much for her to hold on.
The thought of her mother being one of those penned women—penned even worse than Ais had been—made her dizzy.
“Hey, maybe I’m wrong, Ais,” Owen said, almost soothingly. Apparently he was capable of empathy after all. “Maybe they volunteered, too. Maybe they got compensated. That happens on Earth sometimes, but not usually for experimentation. Sometimes women donate eggs for women who don’t produce their own, but they all know what they’re getting themselves into. There are no surprises.”
“I think you are wrong,” she said to the tablet, and plucked at her fruit. “I think the worst-case scenario is that they made the women have the babies and then took…t
hem away.”
“I hope that’s not what happened, Ais. Everyone on the planet who’s met the Tyneali said they were generally helpful, even if not overly so. I never got the impression that they could be so callous.”
She shrugged, and turned her attention to her tea.
She didn’t want to talk about Tyneali anymore, because she’d start thinking about things that were beyond her control, and that would lead to madness.
Owen knelt beside the bed, taking large bites off an orb of fruit as he rolled up his bedding one-handed. “Should be used to not sleeping,” he muttered.
“Hmm?”
“Nothing. It’s just, my cabin was drafty and more often than not, I slept like hell. I’d stay up late working on little projects instead of sleeping, because I figured I might as well use the time productively, you know?”
She nodded. She didn’t really know, but she liked when he talked about things that weren’t her. She liked hearing about his Earth, his family, and even his gadgets. He didn’t sound so snarly then.
“I kept promising myself I’d get outside and caulk up the logs a little better as soon as the weather let up, but of course, the weather there probably won’t let up any time in the next fifty years by most scientists’ estimates. I did the best I could, stuffing in bits of insulation wherever I could see daylight from the inside, but it was still a pretty miserable existence. Don’t tell my sisters, but if Court hadn’t had her spot of trouble, I probably would have considered leaving anyway.”
Ais was stunned to hear him confess such a thing. He’d never struck her as the sort of man who’d concede much of anything.
He tossed the used bedding to the pile in front of the bed, and scooped up the dog weaving around his pale feet. Owen set him on the bed and retreated to the kitchen.
Ais didn’t want him to go. “If not cabin, where?” she asked through a mouth full of bread. She didn’t bother engaging the tablet. The program wouldn’t have understood her with so much food in her mouth.
“This may sound funny, but I considered building a tiny house and moving down to Colorado, but I didn’t really have any firm plans. I guess I need to be much more agitated before I start planning major moves.”
“Courtney agitate?”
He scoffed. “Oh, yeah. She’s always been good at that. Mike used to call her and Erin ‘Agitate’ and ‘Annoy.’ Of course, I thought that was funnier than they did.”
Ais could see where that would be the case. “On station, wish sister.” She knocked some crumbs off her bodice and picked up the last sliver of the cheese. “Brother, either.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Lonely.”
She thought he nodded, but she couldn’t tell for sure. The light was poor in the corner he stood near.
She finished her tea and her food, tugged up her nightgown hem, and padded to the trashcan to deposit the crumbs.
Owen gestured toward the bathroom. “You’ve got some time, so don’t feel like you have to rush. Court hasn’t called over to say the doctor’s there yet, and once she does, you’ll still have at least another thirty minutes.”
She gathered up her few toiletries and her clean dress and then set everything atop the counter in the small bathroom.
Although the configuration of the room was different from the one she most often used at the farmhouse, the contrasts were easy enough to make out, and she didn’t plan on spending more time in the cramped space than necessary.
Her hair was still wet when she emerged, gripping her underclothes discreetly inside her nightgown.
Owen wasn’t in the kitchen anymore.
Frantically, she scanned the room. Not by the bed or his chair. Not by his desk.
Nowhere.
Then she saw the light from the cracked front door. Heart pounding hard enough to scare her as much as his absence, she moved slowly toward the opening.
Did he leave?
“Owen?” she shouted.
The quietest of barks sounded from just outside.
“Owen?” she said even louder.
“What’s wrong?” The door squeaked open and Owen put his head in.
She breathed.
Stars.
“I let the dog out,” he said. “Give me a minute. I need to chase him down. He doesn’t have a leash or good training yet.” He closed the door.
She needed to get a grip on herself. She hated that’d she’d become so skittish.
Ais stuffed her dirty clothes into a sack for her to launder later, then picked up her comb.
When Owen returned with the dog under his arm, she was batting out tangles from the ends of her hair and swearing under breath.
“You probably need conditioner,” he said.
“Hmm?” She peered at him through a fall of hair.
He set down the dog and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Conditioner. My sisters may have some. I don’t generally bother.”
“What for?”
“Smooths the strands so they don’t knot together, among other things. My hair’s short enough that nobody cares if it’s not perfectly smooth, especially me. Or maybe people do care, and I just don’t care that they care.”
“Oh. Well, I try.” It was either she utilize the “conditioner” thing or she lose some life force. Battling her hair was becoming something of an epic trial. None of the Jekhan women on the farm seemed to have the same issues, or even the Jekhan men as far as she could tell, and Jekhan men grew their hair long by default.
“I think yours is finer,” he said curiously.
“Hmm?”
Owen stepped over, hands shoved into his pockets and tongue clucking. Slowly, he removed one hand, and extended it. The wet ends of her hair looked like an ink smear in his hand, light against very dark. “Your hair is really thick, but the strands are fine. With so many narrow strands, the chances for tangling goes way up.” He dropped the hair and held out his hand. “Here.”
“What?”
“Give me the comb. Your crown is tangled.”
“Is not.” She put her palm to the top of her head, patted the knots, and sighed in frustration. She’d probably pulled new tangles in during her hasty shower. She’d been in such a hurry to flee the small room and its large window.
“I guess I’m programmed to point them out now.” He hooked up a section of her hair with his fingers and set the comb to the roots. “A consequence of being so much taller than my sisters is that I can see the tops of their heads.”
“Erin have less.”
“Yeah. I don’t bug her anymore since she cut her hair, but I’m sure she’ll grow it back at some point, only if to cut it off again and annoy the ever-loving shit out of Esteben and Headron.”
“Why care?”
“Why do they care?”
She nodded, and winced at the tug of the comb. She might have been lazier with that particular patch of hair for longer than she cared to recognize.
“I think they just like the way long hair looks, simple as that. Plus, Jekhans seem enamored of curly hair.”
Ais nodded, but shallowly because she’d learned her lesson the first time.
He hooked up a bit more hair and, moving directly in front of her, batted at the knots with the comb. He was far more gentle than she would have expected. He knew to grip the lock in the middle and put some tension on the hair so the comb didn’t tug so painfully at the roots. He knew to detangle from the bottom up.
“You good.”
“Oh?” He leaned in a bit more, and dragged his fingertips across her scalp, likely in search for more matted hair, and she sat—whether fortunately or unfortunately, she couldn’t decide—at eye level with the zipper of his cargo pants. She wasn’t sure if being nearly blind was a good thing for the overly curious.
His wrist buzzed and he pulled away.
Again, she breathed.
“Yeah?” he told the COM.
“Doc’s here,” came Courtney’s voice. “Where are you?”
“In
the cottage.”
“Oh? You got over there fast. Where’d you sleep last night?”
“What time do you think the doctor will be here?” Owen resumed his meticulous detangling work, turning Ais’s head a bit to the side and leaning it against his hard belly.
She didn’t think the bracing boded well for that patch of hair or her scalp.
“That’s not how Q and A works,” Courtney said. “I ask a question, you answer, and then if you have questions, you can ask them if I’ve gotten satisfactory answers to my own.”
“Do you have conditioner packets to spare?” he asked and tugged.
At the ensuing yank to her scalp, Ais winced and grabbed reflexively for the closest thing she could reach, which happened to be his thighs.
He swore in an undertone.
“Sorry,” she whispered and dropped her hands.
Courtney sighed. “Why, Owen?”
“Ais needs them. She’s matting.”
Ais harrumphed.
“I’ll send them over with Amy.”
“Why with Amy?”
“She’s curious to see what Dorro has to say about Ais. Medical curiosity, and such.”
“Uh-huh.” Owen rotated Ais’s head a bit more, so her forehead was pressed right against his belly. She jammed her eyes shut and held her breath.
The last time her head had been in similar proximity to a man’s body, there’d been a threat of strangulation and vomiting. But Owen wasn’t asking her to do that thing, or anything, really. In his eyes, she was just an invalid who couldn’t even sufficiently comb her own hair.
“Does Ais mind?” Courtney asked.
Ais must have taken too long to realize the question had been directed to her, because Owen nudged her head up by the chin and looked down at her.
“Mind?” she asked.
“Do you mind if Amy hears what Dorro tells you?” Courtney asked.
“Oh. No. She hear.”
Owen handed Ais her comb, then stepped away.
“He should be there in half an hour or so,” Courtney said. “He’s talking to Erin right now.”