Desert World Rebirth

by Lyn Gala

  “‘The Ballad of the Lonely Priest’,” Temar said softly.

  Shan felt a wave of horror run through him. “Oh, please tell me that it’s not about….”

  “Yep. You get the starring role. I’m the sweet young man who makes you question your faith.”

  Shan closed his eyes and struggled to find some core of calm that would allow him to avoid the emotional explosion he could feel building in his chest. She had no right. Worse, her ballad was a lie, and considering that Livre’s history was largely told through song, that was a sin in itself. “I’ll hold Wistia down if you want to drop the sandrat on her stomach and let it chew through her,” Shan finally offered. No wonder Temar was having trouble keeping his emotional balance. It worried Shan that Temar didn’t react to his joking threat at all. He decided to take the ballad more seriously.

  “Div must have objected; he must be telling people that she’s wrong. I didn’t leave the church because I chose you over God. God showed me that I needed to walk another path.” Shan thought about the events leading up to his decision. “Actually, God showed me, I ignored him, and God sort of shoved me off into the dirt because I wasn’t listening.”

  Temar nodded, but he stayed silent. Reaching up, Shan ran his fingers through Temar’s hair. Sweat stained the blond strands darker where they stuck together.

  “I care about you, Temar, but my choice to leave the church came from a realization that I didn’t fit there.”

  Temar got an arm under him and propped himself up, one hand braced on Shan’s chest. “I don’t want to think that I took away something important. I mean, the church was important to you, and I thought maybe you weren’t touching me because you weren’t sure about leaving it.”

  Shan shook his head. “God is important to me. Well, the church is, too, but not as a priest. I haven’t given up God, I haven’t given up the church, and I should have given up the priesthood a long time ago. I can love the first two and still love you.”

  “So, I’m not breaking any God rules here?” Temar asked. He hadn’t been one for coming to church until he was a young man. His father had blamed God when Temar’s mother died, so Shan doubted old Erqu Gazer would have taught Temar much of anything about the word.

  “The Gospel does favor marriage before the sex,” Shan started slowly, “but that’s what forgiveness is for.”

  “Marriage.” Temar swallowed, and Shan could have kicked himself for bringing that up so soon. They weren’t even an hour past their first sexual act, and he was bringing up marriage. Truly he was a fool when it came to relationships.

  Shan hurried to say, “We don’t have to—”

  “Do you think about marriage, about us and being married?” Temar gave Shan such an intense look that the easy answer that had had been resting on the tip of his tongue vanished. Temar didn’t want an easy answer; he didn’t want some apology for pressing forward too fast.

  Swallowing all his fears, Shan braced himself to tell the truth. “I do. I suppose I hope, if this works out between us, that you’ll be willing to give it a try even if neither one of us has a great role model.” Both their mothers had died young and both their fathers had been some variation on failure.

  Temar’s smile was slow and timid, but he gave a little nod. “Wistia is going to write a new ballad.” That sounded a lot like a yes. Shan swallowed, emotions pressing up faster than he could really think them through or even feel them.

  “As long as she gets her facts straight this time, that’s fine.” Temar settled back down onto the pillow, their legs still tangled, and Shan realized that, in the end, it didn’t matter. When confused, Temar came to him and asked him outright if he was interested, and as long as they turned to each other in trouble, they’d be fine. Wistia, on the other hand, was going to face a council complaint as soon as Shan could get a copy of the words to her new song.

  Right now, though, Shan only cared about this moment, about Temar’s warm body pressed to his side, about his sated cock and his sated body and his bone-deep desire to curl up with his lover and sleep.

  They lay, drifting in and out of sleep for a time, until Shan’s bladder finally started insisting that he get up. Despite the fact that he desperately didn’t want to move, Shan eventually had to admit that it was visit the bathroom or wet the bed. He was a little old for the latter, and he doubted that Temar would appreciate it much.

  “Problem?”

  “Yeah, a bladder that’s too small,” Shan answered as he climbed out of the warm bed. Despite the fact that Livre was never truly cold, there was a chill in the air that suggested night was falling. This inner room didn’t have a window to check the time, but it felt right.

  “I hope you’ll stay rather than risk running the dunes this late,” Shan said before he headed into the bathroom.

  “So, I can either stay or break my neck and get eaten by sandrats. I think I’ll stay,” Temar said with some amusement.

  “I didn’t mean….” Shan sighed as he finally started peeing a stream. “I made that sound like a threat, didn’t I?”

  “A little. You made it sound like an offer to stay wouldn’t be good enough without the threat of death. Trust me, it is.” Temar’s voice turned hollow as he went into the mechanical room. Sound echoed in there. Shan refused to even hum, because the notes reverberated oddly off the walls. Their ancestors had considered sterile, harsh places like this normal, and had, from what Shan had read of their stored records, considered Livre inhospitable and brutal.

  Livre was dangerous—Shan knew that better than most, but he also knew the beauty of a sunrise after a good sandstorm, the air glowing gold and red as the sun lifted over the horizon. He knew the floating shadows of a double moon and the soft, sweeping shapes of a sand dune. The windwood trees taught of survival and the sandrats taught conservation and the buteo and raptors that soared above the sands made a man think of freedom. And every time he stood out on the sands, he could feel God. He couldn’t imagine the world the settlers had described—the horrors and stark desolation they saw in the landscape.

  Shan finished and shook the last drops off before heading for the bedroom in search of clothing. “What are all these lights?” Temar called from the control room. His voice bounced around the metal walls when he spoke too loud, and Shan grabbed his pants and padded out there rather than risk more of those odd, disconcerting echoes.

  “Systems. The family that ran the place kept the water systems in top form.”

  “Well, yeah, because they were stealing water,” Temar pointed out.

  “True. The other systems were all in some stage of disrepair or shut down.”

  “Huh.” Temar let his hands flow over the control panel, thin fingers tracing the switches and the indicator lights, red, blue, and green—mostly red. “I thought the relay was supposed to listen for the inner worlds’ signals.”

  “They were. I guess they figured that if they were going to steal water and a ship, it didn’t matter if anyone was sending them messages about the inner worlds or their war.”

  “Which is stupid. If I’m going to fly an old ship into the middle of unknown space, I would want to know how the war is going.”

  Shan leaned back against the wall and considered Temar’s form. He seemed taller now, although that had to be illusion. Shan calculated that Temar had to be twenty-two or twenty-three… old enough that he’d stopped growing. He had grown thinner in the days since Shan had really paid attention to his body… his ribs evident, and his muscles were hard lines of cord under the skin. It worried Shan that he seemed so thin. Not unhealthy, necessarily, but painfully thin.

  “Did you even hear what I said?”

  Shan blinked as he realized that he’d tuned Temar out for a time. “Um… not exactly.”

  Instead of getting upset, Temar slowly smiled as he shook his head. “I suppose I should be complimented that my naked backside is that distracting.

  Shan could feel himself blush. “It is. It’s been a while.” Shan stopped,
painfully aware that Temar had been sexually active far more recently.

  “Well, then, welcome back,” Temar said, either not noticing or not commenting on Shan’s discomfort. “I asked which of these monitors the inner worlds. Maybe we can find out something about their idiotic war.”

  “I don’t actually know.” Shan went over to one of the stations and turned the interface on. “I’ve been trying to get the mechanical systems up and running—battery recharging, mechanics, planetside communication. I think I can get Landing and Red Plain back in radio contact, although Blue Hope’s tower was taken out by a storm thirty years ago, and Gambles never did have the right equipment. There’s a lot of inventory here that no one knows about, so there’s a chance I’ve got the right materials to get one or both added to the system, but I really thought getting local communications up should take priority.”

  Temar came over and watched as Shan went through assorted menus. The old ship systems were getting easier to understand and navigate, but when he’d first started, he’d questioned the logic of the programmers more than once. Years of having to translate Latin had improved his patience, though, so he was slowly deciphering the logic behind various chains of commands.

  “That’s my Shan, always the practical one.”

  Shan laughed. “Tell my brother that.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. He seems to think he’s the one with his feet on the ground. Actually,” Temar said, his tone shifting, “I think he’s really annoyed that you were right and he was wrong about the whole slavery issue.”

  Shan’s fingers stumbled on the keyboard.

  “You can talk about it, you know.”

  “I can, but when I do, I’m intensely uncomfortable,” Shan pointed out. “Do you need to talk about it?” he added when it occurred to him that he was still putting what he wanted before what Temar wanted. He’d always thought of himself as a thoughtful man, but that self-image was taking a few hits.

  “No. But I don’t want to walk around it, either.” Temar rested his hands against Shan’s shoulders and leaned into him. “My father was a drunk, your father was a rapist, Ben stole water and could have caused a whole lot of deaths. Evil happens.” Temar didn’t point out that he had been at the center of more than his share of that evil. Erqu Gazer had robbed his children of any sort of financial success with his drunken neglect. Ben had raped him. Ben’s plot to fly a decommissioned ship off the planet, burning up a good deal of the colony’s remaining water in the process, had put Temar on ground zero. Shan still remembered standing in the abandoned mining base with Ben’s co-conspirators holding them captive. He remembered the earnestness in Ben’s face when he’d offered to “rescue” Temar and take him off planet. The bastard had had his own sick and twisted affection for Temar, and that was an evil Shan couldn’t understand. He couldn’t understand how men like Ben could confuse love and rape.

  Shan’s own father had been a quieter sort of evil. Yes, Yan Polli had raped his oldest son in the name of family love, and in doing so, had turned Naite into an angry man who had never finished any sort of training. However, Shan had only seen the quietly neglectful and drunken side of his father. It was Naite who had suffered.

  None of it made sense to Shan. When he’d been a priest, he’d been so sure that God had some plan, but after all this, it was so hard to believe that. Shan still had faith in God, but he understood Him less than ever.

  Shan considered his answer carefully, concerned that Temar’s attitude couldn’t be the full truth. “It shouldn’t have. God—”

  “No, not God,” Temar interrupted. “What happened had very little to do with God. So, if you want to talk, we can talk about greed or stupidity or evil, but not God.”

  Shan took a deep breath and let it out as he tried to reorganize his thoughts. “Fair enough,” he said slowly. “Ben was evil, and his greed led him to do things, and I want you to know you’re safe to say whatever you want, and I will still see you as an incredibly strong, ethical man.” Shan focused on the computer instead of turning around, trying to give Temar the privacy to really consider that offer.

  For a long time, Temar stayed quiet. Shan worked through subroutines and cross-referenced repair manuals and programming specifications as he tried to figure out the inner world communication network. It had been one of the first to fail and go unrepaired.

  “Do you want me to say I’m angry?”

  “If you are. If you want to,” Shan said, his fingers pausing.

  “I am, you know.” Temar retreated, and Shan missed the contact where Temar had been touching him. “I’m so angry that sometimes I feel like I’m going to crack, but Ben is gone, and almost everyone who conspired with him is gone, and the few that aren’t are slaved out, and they’ll never earn anyone’s trust ever again. Who is left for me to be angry with?” Temar made a strangled noise and then left the room, his feet slapping against the bare floors.

  Shan swung his chair around and sent up a quick prayer, asking for some guidance here. He’d counseled people through grief and anger, listened to their fears and talked them through loss. None of that mattered now, because he didn’t actually know what to say to Temar. After waiting long enough to give Temar a little time to collect himself, Shan followed him back into his living quarters. The sitting room was empty, so Shan headed into the bedroom.

  Temar sat on the edge of the bed with his pants on and his shirt in his hand. “I don’t want to be angry.” His voice sounded so pained, it tore at Shan’s heart. The man had survived so much, but he had a few more wounds than he was ready to let most people see.

  “Okay.” Shan wasn’t sure what else he could say to that.

  Temar looked up, his eyes bright, but he rubbed the moisture away with the heel of his hand. “You have no idea what to say here, do you?”

  Shan sighed, not sure he liked that Temar could read him so easily. “This is why I was a terrible priest. I really don’t. I had a habit of parroting back Div’s advice when people came to me. I rarely had inspiration from my own heart.”

  Temar took a deep breath, and Shan could hear the shakiness in it. He wondered if they hadn’t pushed too fast, no matter what Temar had said when he showed up. “What would Div say to this?” Temar asked.

  “I have no idea. This situation never came up.” Shan moved carefully closer, watching Temar. Choosing the chair, he sat down so he was on level with Temar. “When you rang the bell, and I could see your shape through the glass without being able to see who you were, my first thought was about Ista and Ben.” Shan’s words made Temar’s head snap up. “My second thought was that I am alone far too much if I’m expecting dead people to show up at my door.”

  “So, I’m not crazy when I wake up at night, certain that Ben is about to come back and get into bed with me?”

  Shan rested his elbows on his knees and consciously tried to open himself to Temar, to let his lover see the truth of his words. “Only if I am for expecting him to ring my bell and ambush me.”

  “Maybe we’re both crazy,” Temar said with a rough laugh.

  “Or maybe we’re normal and getting through this,” Shan countered. “Do you want to talk?”

  Temar shook his head. “No, not really. I want to stop feeling so off balance.” Temar shook his head. “Stop thinking you’re to blame for this. I have enough issues without your guilt,” Temar said as he stood up.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Shan protested.

  “I can see your guilt all over your face. You helped.” Temar lowered his voice. “This helped. I feel like I have a chance for something good—Ben didn’t ruin that. So stop feeling guilty and show me the inner world communication network.”

  Shan didn’t know when Temar had learned to read him so well, but if Temar said that their relationship helped him regain his happiness, Shan could only believe him and hope it was true in the long run. “One inner world communication network, coming right up,” he promised as he stood. “Well, maybe not right up, because these syst
ems are a mess, and every time I try to read a repair manual, I have to look up two dozen other systems in order to understand what I’m supposed to be fixing.”

  “That bad?” Temar asked.

  Shan made a face. “It’s almost enough to drive me back to the priesthood,” he agreed. “But for you, I will face the disaster that is that computer system.”

  Feeling like a warrior of old about to go into battle—although his battle would involve computer relays and switches and corroded circuits that needed replacing—Shan held out a hand to invite Temar to join him. Temar’s expression turned almost shy as he took Shan’s hand, and they headed back into battle with the circuit demons.

  Chapter 4

  TEMAR watched Shan, his hands working the keyboard with confidence. Thoughts darted through Temar’s head faster than he could feel them, aggravating his headache. He hadn’t touched another man since Ben, but Shan couldn’t be more different. Where Ben always knew what he wanted, Shan hesitated. His hands moved slower, they ghosted over Temar’s flesh instead of bruising it. Temar would never confuse them. However, when Shan wasn’t touching him, he could feel the lingering traces of Ben. It was as if he was poorly heated glass, and the tiny particles still lingered in the clear melt.

  Insisting on news of the war… that revealed an imperfection in the glass. Temar couldn’t stop obsessing over what might have been. If Ben had escaped Livre in that old space ship he’d found hidden in an old base, would he have walked into a war? Would he have been shot down? Ben had insisted that he had a right to escape a dying planet, even if it meant stealing the very resources everyone else needed to survive. Would the people up there have seen Ben’s plot as a clever man surviving and escaping a dying world or as a manipulative man condemning others to death? Would Ben have taken him? Looking back, Temar could almost see the twisted affection Ben had for him, this sick belief that he was favoring Temar every time he raped him. Naite insisted that his own father had been the same, but Temar’s guts twisted at the idea that Ben would have dragged him out into the universe. Of course, the alternative included being trapped in Ben’s secret base, a forgotten launching station leftover from the earliest Livre miners. Would Ben have left him to die of thirst and hunger in that hidden base?