Master of None

by N Lee Wood

  Nathan thought he understood. “What is it that I can do for you?” At that, the kharvah smiled widely, looking up into the sky as he exhaled his laugh. “That’s just it. We don’t want anything from you. My wife loves her garden the way I love these fields. She likes enclosed safe shelters. I like the openness. We are happy here.” He looked at Nathan directly, solemnly. “We’ve never had many guests before, and certainly never any from the High Families. It took a lot of courage for her to invite you.”

  “I realize that.”

  “All Daegal wants is to show you her roses. That’s it.” He snorted with exasperation. “They’ve got some sort of... blight or fungus or who-knows-what, and to listen to Margasir, you can simply breathe over them and they’ll be magically cured.”

  Nathan held up his hands defensively. “Hey, hold on, I know close to nothing about roses!”

  Amitu laughed. “Which is slightly more than I do, jah’nar botanist.” He sobered. “But we asked you to come because you are Margasir’s friend, not because you are rich and famous Nga’esha.”

  “I understand.”

  “Thank you.”

  They sat in silence for another moment, taking in the color of the sky as it deepened, the wind in the wheat. “It’s lovely here,” Nathan said.

  “Yes,” Amitu agreed. “It is. And I know I am the luckiest man alive.” He grinned, restarted the float, and turned back toward the house. “Shall we go examine my wife’s precious roses?”

  If Amitu’s fields had been beautiful, Daegal’s secluded walled garden was flawless, half an acre of immaculately groomed borders overflowing with flowers. A small army of tiny drones disguised as garden ornaments, including a family of roly-poly hedgehogs meandering through the shrubs, kept the even emerald lawn meticulously trimmed. Tiny goldfish pirouetted under the shelter of sweet-scented lilies in a small pond, a cascade of water spilling down black rock rippling the surface. A majestic old lemon tree still laden with late fruit dominated the tiny meadow where dozens of bright-colored exotic birds flitted inside the invisible confines of an electronically controlled aviary. Nathan walked through her garden in wonder while Daegal trailed behind him anxiously.

  Nathan quickly figured the best way to speak with Daegal was to couch every question so that she could answer with a simple nod or shake of her head. Amitu followed at a distance, the little girl in his arms giggling merrily as they played tug-of-war with her father’s braid. Margasir was off somewhere with the boys, the faint sound of laughter drifting even over Daegal’s high stone walls.

  “This is beautiful,” he finally said. Daegal ducked her head, blushing furiously, as if it had been herself he’d complimented. At the end of the winding path through her gardens, a large wooden door with ornate ironwork hinges led into yet another annex of her garden. The perfume of roses when she opened the door flooded his senses. A pebbled walk meandered through an acre of rose garden of every conceivable genus. Yellow and white climbers enveloped the stone wall. Big flamboyant variegated flowers drooped under their own weight, dainty pink tea roses nestled in between. A wild dog rose laced its way through a stone pergola, the ancient rootbase as thick as his arm, simple mauve flowers with a dusting of yellow pollen. Bees and butterflies drifted through a row of damask roses, every plant, every insect imported from off-world.

  Daegal cultivated the rarer forms of rose as well, and he stopped to admire a large moss rose bush with its sepals and flower stalks covered with dense, mosslike hairs. Her pride and joy, though, was her delphinidin blues, their colors ranging from palest blue to nearly jet black, deep amethyst and turquoises.

  But while all the others in her collection were at the peak of health, the blue roses unquestionably suffered from some ailment. The leaves had wilted; yellowed new shoots had shriveled, as if the plants were drought-stricken although the ground was clearly well-watered. He could see no obvious signs of a fungal disease or viral blight. Which meant, he thought, looking at the diligently nurtured topsoil, that it was probably something in the ground.

  “Have you tested for nematodes?”

  She nodded.

  “And?”

  She nodded again, which Nathan took to mean she’d found them. “Have you tried a soil fumigant?”

  Nod.

  “I take it that didn’t work.”

  She shook her head, looking even more unhappy.

  He looked around at the garden. “Only the blues are diseased?” Nod.

  “Any idea how they were infected?”

  She glanced at Amitu, forlorn. “I ordered the stock through a nursery that specializes in imports from off-world,” he admitted reluctantly. “It was a present from our eldest daughter, on her birthday, to her mother. Imports are normally very carefully screened for contamination before Vanar would ever allow them to be marketed. But, every once in a while . . .” He shrugged.

  “And you haven’t taken a complaint to the nursery?”

  Amitu and Daegal exchanged a wry look, as if sharing a private joke. “We tried,” he said obliquely. “They weren’t sympathetic.”

  Nathan could imagine. Daegal would go out of her way to avoid a quarrel with anyone, while Amitu, as a low-ranking man of Common Family, would be lucky to be simply ignored.

  “Would you mind if I took some samples to take away with me?” Nathan asked. “I can’t promise anything, but it’s an interesting challenge.”

  Daegal brightened considerably. “Yes, please,” she whispered, which would be the first and last words she spoke that afternoon.

  Her greenhouse was larger and better equipped than his own, and Daegal was an obsessively tidy gardener, every tool clean and hung, every bin of compost neatly labeled, not a speck of soil on the slate floor. He used her supplies to take snippets of affected leaves and rootstock, and filled several vials with soil taken at various distances from the ailing rosebushes while Daegal hovered anxiously.

  Margasir had organized a small snack under the lemon tree. Daegal, her daughter clinging to one hip drowsily, politely bowed and returned to the house. Amitu and Nathan settled onto the cotton cloth spread out on the grass. They praised the small pastries and tea fare served by the twins doing their best imitation of miniature sahakharae. Amitu wasn’t able to mask his regret, but Nathan knew that without patronage and training from an accomplished, well-placed sahakharae such as Margasir, even that recourse would be closed to boys from such humble lineage. The twins, for their part, simply enjoyed the attention without worrying about a remote future.

  The sun had already set by the time the Pakaran saw them to the door, waving and smiling as they walked down to a waiting taxi float at the end of the long road. As Nathan climbed onto the back of the taxi beside Margasir, he glanced toward the house in time to see Daegal lean her head on Amitu’s shoulder, his arm around her waist protectively before the taxi lifted and sped off.

  “So, what do think of my friends, the Pakaran?” Margasir asked lightly.

  Nathan didn’t answer for a long moment, and when he did, his voice was somber. “I think I’ve just met the only happily married people on all of Vanar.”

  Margasir shot him a look, but said nothing.

  The problem with Daegal’s blues was indeed an unusual nematode. It took him the better part of two weeks to track down exactly what type of particular microscopic roundworm it was, and more than that to figure out where it came from and how it got to Vanar. Seeking out the younger cousin who had escorted him to buy a sprig of plum blossom for Tycar, he sweet-talked her into an expedition to the garden shop that had sold the Pakaran the contaminated roses.

  He might have been merely a man, but he was still Nga’esha, and the brother of a pratha h’máy. Any indignation by the proprietor gave way quickly to worried politeness. He had no wish to cause her trouble with Vanar Customs, he assured her in a veiled threat well out of earshot of the cousin more preoccupied by a display of exotic orchids. He didn’t like Vanar Customs officials any better than she did, he commiserated, as th
ey were constantly disallowing any number of things he tried to import himself. He only wanted to know exactly where the roses had originated. She scribbled down the information without a word, and handed it to him.

  Following the paper trail back, he narrowed the source of infestation to a small outbreak that had wiped out an ornamental crop of hybrid petunia. Daegal’s elegant blues had used the delphinidin gene transferred from Petunia solanaceae, unwittingly attracting the nematode to jump species.

  Without the benefit of his library, Nathan might have found the task of locating the appropriate supplier off-world and ordering a quantity of the antidote impossible. The best genetic engineers anywhere could be found on Vanar, but as it was forbidden for a Vanar man to even initiate conversation with a woman, Nathan could not approach them. But by a quirk of the law, although he was not allowed direct contact with anyone outside Vanar, as long as he remained anonymous, he could go through the same blind channels he used when requisitioning his Hengeli music and book cubes.

  It would have been simpler and cheaper to have dug up and burnt Daegal’s blue roses, excavated the contaminated ground, sterilized the area, and started again from scratch with healthy new stock—as Nathan was informed by several agribiotech companies perplexed why anyone, even someone as rich as the Nga’esha, would want such a tiny supply of custom-designed material. He finally contracted an independent engineer who asked no questions, happy enough to charge his nameless Nga’esha customer a breathtakingly extortionary rate.

  As it was, he once again had to petition for an audience with the men’s household h’máy, Bidaelah, to beg permission to use his own funds. He was lucky; she was in a foul mood when he was admitted to see her. Although he was very careful to observe the strict Vanar formalities, she didn’t even take any notice of his efforts.

  “You want to buy what?” She scowled at him with incredulity. When he started to explain again, she impatiently waved him off. “Never mind. Whatever weird yepoqioh thing it is you want now, fine, go, buy it. Don’t bother me with it.”

  “It isn’t just a question of how much the product costs, jah’nari l’amae. There are other expenses—shipping fees and import tariffs— as well.” Not to mention the compulsory bribes to Vanar Customs officials, which he knew he didn’t need to mention. “All of which will be quite expensive. It may cost this month’s entire deposit in my account.”

  “As long as you don’t want to dip into your capital, I don’t care what it costs.” She was barely paying him any attention at all, her focus on the work in her reader.

  Nathan paused, bewildered. “My capital?” he said. “This isn’t my capital?”

  Bidaelah glared up at him, irritably. “Of course not. You would hardly be allowed access to that much money without a damned good reason, for which this certainly does not qualify.” She nodded at the card he held in one hand. “You’re only authorized to use the interest you’ve accrued on your investments—minus expenses, of course, now that you have a prásaedam to support. Now, please, I’m very busy and I don’t have time for such unimportant rubbish. Buy whatever you like, I don’t care. Just leave me in peace.”

  He was courteously but firmly ejected from her offices. Looking down at his datacard in disbelief, he mentally computed what the capital would approximately be based on the interest in his accounts. “My God,” he breathed. He was the richest poor man he knew.

  The package arrived a few weeks later, and too impatient to go look for Margasir himself, Nathan sent for his práhsaedam to join him in the men’s garden. When Margasir arrived, Nathan had his eyes closed with his face to the sun, leaning back to enjoy the warmth.

  “You requested to see me?” Margasir said, his tone baffled. When Nathan opened his eyes, Margasir stood stiffly in front of him, hands clasped together, head bowed in a posture Nathan had never seen the big sahakharae adopt before. For a moment, the deference surprised him, before he remembered he was, still, Nga’esha, and Margasir was, still, his subordinate práhsaedam. Despite all the good-natured banter, the sahakharae’s livelihood depended on such kharvah as Nathan. A request was as good as a command, but as he’d never gone through Aelgar before to summon the sahakharae, it was only reasonable for Margasir to assume something was amiss.

  He sat up, guiltily. “Please, sit down.”

  Margasir settled himself gingerly beside Nathan and waited for him to speak.

  “I’m not overly experienced with Vanar customs, as you might possibly be aware,” Nathan said, rewarded by a fleeting grin. “But it’s my understanding that I have actually been paying you something for your services as my práhsaedam, haven’t I?”

  The sahakharae’s expression became guarded. “Of course.” “Good, good.” This wasn’t going quite the way Nathan had planned. Margasir’s discomfort took a lot of the fun out of it. “But I think it’s also customary that if you’ve done me a favor above and beyond your normal obligations, I am expected to reward you in some manner, isn’t that also true?”

  Margasir’s eyes narrowed as he studied Nathan. “Occasionally, this is so,” he said carefully, obviously wondering what was up.

  “Well, then.” Nathan extracted a small wooden box from under the folds of his sati and held it out to Margasir. “I wish to thank you for arranging my visit to your friends, the Pakaran.”

  Margasir smiled, more from relief Nathan suspected, and took the box from Nathan’s hands with a slight bow. He opened it and gazed down inside it for a long moment.

  “It’s a box of dirt,” he said finally. “Yes.”

  Margasir looked at him with a sidelong suspicion. “You’re giving me a box full of dirt?”

  “Yes,” Nathan said cheerfully.

  The big sahakharae looked back down at it. “I see.” He closed the box and considered for a moment. “Nathan Crewe Nga’esha, it has been my experience that you are indeed a truly bizarre individual, but you don’t usually do something without a logical reason, if known only to yourself. May this jaelmah ajnyaenam, this ignorant wretch, inquire as to what exactly this is supposed to signify?”

  Nathan looked at him with mock innocence. “Only a trivial gift to indicate my gratitude for your devoted attentiveness and companionship.” He waited a beat. “But of course, if it doesn’t please you, I suggest you toss it away.”

  The sahakharae mulled that over. “Just... toss it away?” “Absolutely.”

  “Mm-hm.” Margasir had borrowed quite a few of Nathan’s more Hengeli habits, this small grunt being one of them.

  “Might I suggest, however, that a suitable place for you to toss such a loathsome gift might be under the afflicted rosebushes of your friend Daegal dva Pakaran?”

  At that, a slow smile creased the sahakharae’s face. “Naturally. So what else is in the box, Nathan Nga’esha?”

  Nathan shrugged theatrically. “A few specially imported designer viruses, maybe. Nothing worth mentioning.”

  Margasir stroked his braid thoughtfully, smoothing the end of it against his chest. “That must have been expensive,” he suggested with uncustomary bluntness.

  “More than you really want to know. And much more than you will ever tell the Pakaran, yes?”

  He nodded. “Yes.” He stood, the apprehension gone. “Well, at least it’s a nice box.” The big sahakharae turned to walk away.

  “Margasir . . .” When he looked back, Nathan said, “Why did you want to be my práhsaedam?”

  “You needed one,” Margasir said, again wary.

  It was true—life had been much easier for Nathan. His quarters were always tidy now, fresh flowers by his bed, clean clothing laid out for him every morning. More importantly, he had been able to spend a good deal more time with his daughter at the Changriti House, Margasir always with him to cater to Ukul and his coterie, serving as a buffer between Nathan and the Changriti men and smoothing away any ruffled feathers.

  “And you needed a patron who leaves you alone,” Nathan said with a smile.

  If Nathan had wante
d his práhsaedam to attend to his every whim, play endless qaellast games with him, sing and dance like a pet monkey, or supply nightly company as a sahakharae should, Margasir would have fulfilled his obligations. As it was, Nathan hardly ever knew where the man was half the time, nor cared.

  “We suit each other well,” Nathan said.

  Margasir returned his smile. “Yes,” he agreed dryly. “We do.” “There is no one I would prefer more as my práhsaedam than you, Margasir. No one. My mother, Pratha Yaenida, left me far more than any one man could ever use in a single lifetime. I would be profoundly insulted if, should you ever need anything, anything at all, you did not come to me and ask.”

  Margasir stared at him, then his gaze dropped, his attitude once again disconcertingly humble. “There were many who said I was foolish to offer to become your práhsaedam, Nathan Nga’esha,” he said. “They were wrong. My life has been greatly enriched by your strangeness. And your generosity.”

  Nathan felt uncomfortable. “Even if I am so very ugly,” he said, trying to lighten the tone.

  Margasir looked up, his face split into a broad grin. “Fair enough, since I’m so lousy in bed.”

  As he watched the older man walk away, Nathan felt an odd warmth that had nothing to do with sexuality, wondering at it. He hadn’t felt this way since Fat Ivan had awkwardly hugged him on the loading platform on Remsill, thumping him hard on the back before reboarding the Warthog. He had never seen the old fat bastard again, Ivan killed less than a year later. Nathan had a sudden memory of being a child again, back in Westcastle, feeling nothing at all as his mother either caressed him weepily or slapped him in her rage at the injustice of the world. He couldn’t even remember her face, while he had never been able to get Fat Ivan’s out of his memory.

  He missed the old man more than he’d ever imagined he would.

  XXXII

  WHERE HIS DAUGHTER GOT ALL HER ENERGY FROM BAFFLED NATHAN. At this time of the evening, the playroom was empty but for Aenanda and her father, and one of the ever-present Dhikar guards standing watch.