Master of None

by N Lee Wood

  “And if you could, would you still study this plant?”

  He grinned in spite of himself. “If I could, yes. Unfortunately, it only grows out there.” He waved toward the dense jungle across the river. “And I’m confined to here. Svapnah doesn’t grow well in managed terraformed gardens, it seems. Too sensitive, or more likely it grows in conjunction with something else. The proteins are too foreign to be of any use to humans, pretty much like the rest of Vanar flora, but it secretes a resin with narcotic properties similar in effect to the stuff everyone smokes here. But why would a plant evolve to develop that sort of chemical when there’s no native fauna to react to it? The only insects or birds on Vanar have had to be imported from off-world, they can’t even survive in native rain forests. Which is what makes me think there’s some symbiotic or parasitical association happening with something else, maybe microscopic, mimicking the kind of defense against attack you might find with insects or . . .” He stopped, embarrassed as he realized he had fallen into his lecturing manner.

  “Interesting,” she said, amused.

  “For someone who doesn’t like coming down to ground too often?” She smiled but didn’t answer. She winced, then closed her eyes and rolled her head on her neck. He could hear the minuscule pops of her vertebrae. “Are you in pain?”

  “It takes a while to adjust to this gravity. I’m not used to only one direction for down. It’s nothing serious.”

  He might have offered to rub her shoulders, but her demeanor didn’t invite physical familiarity. Yet the thought of touching her sent a sudden tingle through him. “Where did you learn to speak Hengeli?” he asked instead.

  She unwrapped her arms and stretched out her legs, leaning back on her arms to arch her back. Her nipples stood out in relief against the cloth of her mati, and he had to look away.

  “Well, whenever we’re not sucking out the blood of helpless infants, Pilots lead pretty dull lives,” she said, opening her eyes. “So mostly we eavesdrop. Spying may be rude, but it’s all the entertainment we get. Follow the Station gossip. Listen to ship chatter. Tune in to the next episode. Place bets on our favorite characters.” She pursed her lips with a wry expression. “Sounds heartless, I suppose. To be honest, it is. We Vanar are heartless people in so many ways.” She smiled wryly. “As I’m sure you are already aware.”

  “I wouldn’t say that...,” he said cautiously.

  “I would never expect you to. And I won’t bother to lie and claim any altruistic motives, either. I asked you to stay only because Vanar bores me rigid, and you’re about the only distraction I’m likely to find on this damned estate while I’m here.” She shrugged. “If that insults you, I will apologize and leave you in peace.”

  She waited while he thought about it, unconcerned with his verdict, not even looking at him. “I’m not insulted,” he said. “I’m bored out of my mind here, too. Other than Yaenida, there aren’t many people I can talk with. I’d sit around and chat with the damned trees if they spoke Hengeli. So, who’s entertaining who?”

  She smiled, almost a grin, sharp teeth evenly spaced. The aloofness melted. “I like that.” She looked at him in a way that made him tense, a dispassionate scan up, down, as if she could see through his clothing, measuring him with a quick inspection. “Yes, I like that very much,” she said, and he relaxed with an odd sense of relief without knowing why.

  She stood in one flowing motion, taking up her black sati with her. If she had trouble in the gravity, it didn’t show in her gracefulness. “If you wish to be left undisturbed in this place, I will come only in the mornings,” she said as she folded and knotted her sati around her in a style he had never seen.

  Her courtesy, so unlike other Vanar women, startled him. But if his being there was forbidden, she would not inform on him. “Will you want to be alone in the mornings, then?” he asked cautiously.

  She smiled. “If I do, there are other places I can go.” She gazed around the small clearing, the water rippling in long undulating ribbons in the river, before looking back at him. “It’s beautiful, but I don’t much like Vanar, Nathan Crewe. Talking with you has been a pleasure in an otherwise bleak place.”

  She walked toward the trees, back toward the House. As she passed him, he noticed she made almost no sound, but not, it seemed, because she was trying. “If you don’t like it here,” he called after her, “then you tell me: what’s a nice Pilot like you doing on Vanar?”

  She laughed, full-throated. She twisted to face him, each hand on the trunk of the trees bordering the clearing, the sunlight reflected in her colorless eyes making them gleam gold, coins pressed against the eyes of a corpse.

  “Getting pregnant,” she said, grinning, and vanished into the trees like the Cheshire cat.

  XI

  SHE WASN’T THERE THE NEXT MORNING, NOR THE ONE AFTER, LEAVING him disappointed, with an odd hollow ache. He wasn’t falling in love, nothing so clichéd. It was the fascination with the exotic that drew him over the wall, hurrying toward the river, hoping she would be there. But as the days passed, he was afraid she’d forgotten him.

  He had never seen, never mind met a Pilot before. He knew of no one who ever had. They were the stuff of myths and drunken tales, shadowy figures made inhuman simply by their mystery. All he knew of Pilots were they were all Vanar women. Typically, the role of Pilots in fictional programs were either portrayed by breathtaking actresses with implausible anatomy, or by a variety of hideous creatures defying any possible hint of femininity. Pilotships were usually depicted as vague objects so brilliantly lit with flashing lights it was hard to make out any shape at all.

  He had only once seen an actual Pilotship, when he was on the Chandelle as it had gone from the Quintin solar system’s station for transfer to the Cooper Station thirteen light-years away. It had not been the radiant blaze of colors favored in adventure shows, but it had been nonetheless spectacular. The Chandelle was one of the more midsized class of luxury cruisers, capable of accommodating three thousand passengers for voyages lasting up to several years. A pleasure liner designed for the not-quite-yet fabulously wealthy, she had everything a full-sized and affluent town could boast of, complete with theaters, sports gyms and pools, clubs, and a number of restaurants. He had gone to the civilian nav observatory to watch the docking, clinking champagne glasses with his fellow passengers, nervousness giving an edge to the festive excitement. As it was a small compartment, the invitations were restricted to those who had never seen a Pilotship docking before, a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.

  Nathan didn’t know much about traveling between solar systems, despite having been the ersatz cabin boy to his mentor and patron, Ivan Brohm, for a couple years aboard the freighter WT/HG-574, known semiaffectionately to its crew as the Warthog. Freighters did not come equipped with a virtual nay obs, that sort of optical illusion reserved for gullible tourists. Living on the Warthog wasn’t much different than living inside a sealed sewer pipe and about as interesting.

  He had escaped Westcastle, and hadn’t been planetside until Fat Ivan set him down on Remsill, helped him forge his academic records and identification to get him into a decent university program, and left. He had promised to return for him, but the old fat bastard was killed in a freak blowout during a Station loading just after Nathan’s graduation and bequeathed the bulk of his relatively meager estate to Nathan. Nathan had found a job teaching, and space travel had become one of those adventures that eventually fade and become only peripheral experiences in a life.

  When Arcavia University had turned him down for tenure, he’d taken a year’s sabbatical and spent every last penny he had to pay his way to Cooper. He’d planned to look for employment on a freighter like the Warthog as a terraform ecologist like Ivan had been, with the hope of making a study of the botanical ecology on one of the dozens of planetary systems still under Hengeli control.

  He’d paid his fare, wandered around searching for his cabin with other lost passengers, worried about his baggage, and truste
d the actual mechanics of getting from point A to point B to the people trained for that job. He was a botanist—what would he know about space travel? But he knew a Worm could not be seen in space. It is there, it just is, and is the only method of cheating the lightspeed limitations.

  Pilotships were actually a part of the Worm, the liner’s bright and cheerful travel brochure informed him. They were incapable of existing independently, and unable to remain still, even during the docking and debarkation procedures at either end. Other than that, there was no further useful information in the literature, not even a diagram.

  He had been keeping one eye on the viewport while trading anecdotes with a neurosurgeon on his way to a research hospital on the Nga’esha-controlled Cooper Station. Sweat prickled Nathan’s skin in the close compartment, the surgeon’s red face uncomfortably close to his, the man’s breath soured from the alcohol.

  So when he first noticed the Pilotship, it was only because the stars seemed to be extinguishing themselves, vanishing in an ever-enlarging circle. Then he made out the faint features of the Pilotship, his mind taking a minute to adjust to what his eyes saw.

  It was immense, eclipsing the Chandelle as a giant’s boot might shadow a beetle. Light-absorbing black, quark-eating black, a smooth-hulled machine too alien to call a ship, its enormous maw slowly engulfing them and a thousand other fellow ships like plankton down the gullet of a whale as the passengers stared speechless, overwhelmed.

  “Son of a bitch,” the surgeon finally breathed, and someone tittered, a strangled sound bordering on hysteria. The surgeon promptly knocked back the rest of his champagne and left in search of something stronger, too shaken to watch any more.

  The actual transfer into the belly of the Pilotship took place hours later. There had been a momentary rush as the Chandelle was swallowed, then nothing to detect he was traveling inside the Worm at speeds he couldn’t imagine. He’d gone to bed eventually. When he woke, he was on the approach to Cooper Station, still several million miles away, the Pilotship long gone.

  To have met one of the hermetic human beings who lived in the Worm, who controlled the great ships that made interstellar travel even possible, intrigued him. That she spoke fluent Hengeli made him all the more aware of his deep longing for basic, simple conversation. That she might want to see him again excited him in a way he couldn’t quite explain. It wasn’t love but desire she stirred in him: a deep physical hunger sparked by her strangeness, erotic and perilous.

  Perhaps the curious feelings stirred up whenever he thought of Pratima were from the lack of any sexual contact in far too long. He found himself watching Raemik more often, constantly comparing the eerie similarities between the two, and the boy developed a wariness around him, as if he could sense Nathan’s growing sexual tension. Even the sahakharae seemed aware of his need, like vultures scenting blood. Nathan did nothing to encourage intimacy with them, going out of his way to avoid sahakharae, his own past a ghost still haunting his dreams. He wanted a woman. He wanted one particular woman. A woman who looked eerily like Raemik.

  Guilt and fear added to his problem. Raemik had crept into the boys’ quarters late, long after curfew. He never said where he’d gone, nor had Nathan ever asked. Wherever he had been, none of the other boys took any notice, or if they knew kept it among themselves.

  Nathan had been the only one awake, unable to sleep, propped up against the wall listening to the quiet breathing of children. Tired of wrestling with Vanar calligraphy, he had left his reader on, glowing faintly unread beside him. No one stirred as the boy slipped past the sleepers. Nathan watched him in silence as Raemik unclipped his sati and let it unwind at his feet.

  The boy stood with his back to Nathan, legs bare under his mati, then turned to stare back at him. Nathan found he was unable to look away, his heart suddenly beating too fast. Slowly, the boy drew his mati over his head and stood naked in the darkened room, his pale skin glowing like moonlight. Slender young muscles still soft with adolescence, Raemik stepped out of the mound of cloth his sati made on the floor, closer to him. Horrified, Nathan felt his breathing becoming hoarse, electricity dancing on his skin. The boy glanced down at Nathan’s crotch, then back, unblinking.

  To his dismay, the smell of the boy’s young flesh transfixed him. He was close enough to touch him, grab him, drag him down roughly on top of him. Slowly, Raemik knelt over him, one hand beside him for balance, and waited, fear in his eyes along with the trust and willingness.

  If the boy touched him, he’d be lost. He didn’t want him, Raemik was not his sister. But the resemblance sang to the same erotic desire Nathan felt toward Pratima. The intensity of his need appalled him, frightened by what the boy had aroused.

  It took every fiber in him to smile and shake his head. “Raemik,” he whispered. “Go to sleep.”

  The child didn’t change expression, but simply turned and wriggled under the sheet over his own narrow mat, his face toward Nathan, eyes open. Nathan finally had to turn away to avoid the look, and it was a long time before he could fall asleep.

  The next morning, he hiked to the clearing, now as afraid Pratima would be there as not. He was both relieved and disappointed to find it empty. A flutter of color in the notched bole between the old tree’s two trunks caught his eye. A reader-sized package wrapped in bright protective envelope had been left wedged in the tree’s hollow. Inside was a book, the antiquated kind, thick paper pages pressed between a cover of leather. It was old, incredibly so, but preserved in better condition than most of the antique books in Yaenida’s extensive library. He knew instinctively it was priceless.

  He opened it to a colored plate of the svapnah plant he had described to Pratima. The printed words were in Vanar script, but a note inserted between the pages was scrawled in an oddly childish Hengeli handwriting:

  “Learning is easier with a carrot rather than the stick.”

  He spent an hour reverently looking through the book, reveling in the beautiful prints of native Vanar plants. Then, carefully replacing it in the envelope, he settled into the hollow of the tree, his back against one trunk, his feet propped against the other, pulled his sati up around his waist, and masturbated quickly, almost frantically. Branches swayed as the wind flicked leaves, gold and red veins lacing through the deep, wide green. Silk tongues of air flared against his skin as the sensations rushed through him.

  His fierce orgasm ripped up into a scream of starved exultation, leaving him trembling, a sheen of sweat on his body, and feeling strangely empty.

  If anything, his hunger only intensified. He alternated between wishing he’d never met her to desperately wanting her to appear in the clearing. Not even the years he’d spent on the all-male crew of the Warthog had driven him as mad as the thought of Pratima, so close and so far beyond his reach. And the continued unwanted attention from the sahakharae made his frustration even more acute. After he tried yet again to tactfully rebuff the overt advances from a few more aggressive sahakharae, chiefly from Tycar, he lost his patience. He made his point with a bit of yelling and heated shoving.

  The sahakharae quickly backed off, leaving him alone with all the aversion to a leper just as the men in the charity shelter had. But he was satisfied with the result. Problem solved. So he thought. When he arrived a few mornings later in Yaenida’s library, he found he had been sadly mistaken. He had not even gone in to the room far enough to bow and take his seat before Yaenida stopped him.

  “I do not as a rule involve myself with men’s disputes,” she said harshly. “If there are difficulties, the senior kharvah handles it. It is his domain. But”—she looked up at him, eyes bloodshot behind their thick, tired lids—“there is the language problem. So I’ve been asked to speak to you.”

  “I can explain—” he started.

  “I am not interested,” she cut him off curtly. “Half a dozen sahakharae are threatening to leave my House. Twice that number of kharvah complain you are disruptive and violent, and it is being unfairly tolerated beca
use you are an exotic. I’m getting complaints from my daughters that the men’s arguments are affecting their private lives, and I am personally extremely cross at being forced to deal with this. My time, limited as it is, is valuable.”

  He stood stiffly, clutching his reader against his chest. “I apologize, Pratha Yaenida. It wasn’t my intention—”

  “I don’t give a damn what your intentions were,” she snapped, the cold anger in her voice far harsher than he’d heard before. “Violent behavior within my House will not be tolerated. You know that. You go back and fix it, do you understand? I want my men happy. I expect to see them very happy, Nathan.”

  “I don’t want to fuck sahakharae, Yaenida!” he protested.

  “Then fuck that boy sleeping with you!” she shouted, slamming one knobby fist against the arm of her chair. “What the hell’s the matter with you! You don’t like boys, find a damned taemora, there’s at least a dozen unmarried women parasites around ready and willing to ease your appetite. You’re not required to be celibate. You’re a man, you’re not expected to be. If you have a need, do something about it, but I don’t want trouble from you again. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes,” he said, whispering.

  She seemed to collapse within herself, as if the energy spent had physically drained her. “Good. Now get out,” she said brusquely. “I’m too tired today.”

  He bowed, and turned, but hesitated at the door, knowing he was risking further wrath. “Pratha Yaenida—”

  “What!” she shouted at him with more exasperation than strength, glaring.

  “I didn’t know,” he said simply. “About the taemora. About anything. How do I play by the rules if I don’t know what they are?”

  She stared for a moment before her expression softened. “I believe you,” she said, bemused. She waved at him weakly, beckoning him back. He sat down on the edge of the hard chair as she canted her head at him. “But I know you’ve registered at a kaemahjah. If you felt the need, why haven’t you gone back there?”