Bright Shards

by Meg Pechenick

  I was grateful when Saresh joined me. “How’s the first human ever to finish the Outmarch?” he inquired.

  “Good. Pretty tired.”

  “I’m not surprised.” He gestured to the dancing. “What do you make of all this?”

  I followed his gesture. My eyes went unerringly to the red surcoat. “As a cultural showpiece, it’s stunning. So much history. The journal article practically writes itself. As a party . . .” I shrugged. “It’s a little much, you know? It reminds me of the first night on Arkhati. That dance with the twirling fireballs.”

  “The harvest dance from Arideth,” he said. “A strange kind of welcome.”

  “Exactly.”

  We watched the dancing for another minute. Then I said, “Is this what Earth Night felt like to you guys?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m sorry you can’t join in the dancing. So is Zey. He wanted to hijack the music. Play a couple of club hits from Earth. I talked him out of it. I hope that was the right thing to do.”

  “It definitely was! Jesus, what a horrible idea.” I shuddered.

  “He meant well,” Saresh said, “but I persuaded him that the best part of the scheme was the intention behind it.” After a little silence he said carefully, “Eyvri, did something happen out there? With Hathan?”

  I didn’t look at him. “No. Why?”

  “You weren’t at dinner. It crossed my mind that you might be avoiding him. And you haven’t spoken to him since you arrived.”

  “You’ve been watching me?”

  “Yes,” he said simply. “As your hadazi, as well as your friend.”

  I nodded, acknowledging that. “I missed dinner because the doctors took forever making sure I checked out. And then I took a really long shower. As for tonight, I think we’re both just making the rounds.” When he didn’t say anything, I added, “It was nice, having that time alone with him. It could have been weird, but it wasn’t.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. For both of your sakes.”

  His ready acceptance of my denial should have been a relief, but I didn’t feel relieved. I felt ashamed. Lying to him was harder than lying to Zey. I wasn’t sure why that should be the case, but it was. I watched the distinctive crimson surcoat pass by again. “How long do I have to keep making the rounds?”

  He scanned the room. “I’d give it another hour.”

  I sighed. “Fine. I can do an hour.”

  “I know you can,” he said, and touched my arm, and left.

  A few minutes later, Hathan came to stand with me on the edge of the floor. I’d just begun to think I ought to go find him and initiate an utterly banal conversation. Saresh wouldn’t be the only one to notice if, after a full day alone together, we didn’t speak to each other at all. We embarked on an utterly banal conversation. He asked about my ankle; I asked about his dinner. We compared shower lengths.

  Feeling like we ought to make a show of talking a little longer, I said, “Do you ever find it hard to step back into your real life after a long hike?”

  He answered without hesitation. “Always.”

  “Me too. Especially this time. I miss the quiet. Not just the quiet in the woods, although I miss that too, but . . . the quiet in my mind.”

  Hathan said, “Three things elude me tonight.”

  I looked for a connection between his words and mine and found none. Reluctantly, because we had been in perfect accord only moments before, I said, “I don’t understand.”

  “You didn’t get this from Saresh?” He followed the question with a sentence in archaic Vardeshi.

  I recognized the words as poetry from their cadence. “He gave me a lot of proverbs. Not many poems.”

  “This one was written by a poet from Vardesh Prime on a tour of the outlying planets. It’s one of my favorites.” Beneath the music, in a voice pitched for me alone, he said in English, “‘Three things elude me tonight: the stars of home; my lover’s touch; a quiet mind.’”

  My mind went blank. It was a love poem. He was quoting me a love poem. What could have possessed him to do it now? Here? Was it a test? I was profoundly tempted to say something like I know the feeling. In the end I settled for saying blandly, “It’s beautiful. Where was it written?”

  “Obviously not on Rikasa.”

  I blinked. Then I looked at him. He wasn’t looking at me. He was still watching the dancers. There was the shadow of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He was teasing me, openly, about last night, after all our solemn promises to pretend it had never happened. I felt the heat rising in my face.

  Before I could think of a response, I saw a young dark-haired woman in a purple-gray dress approaching us. She smiled engagingly and asked me loudly in standard Vardeshi, “Are . . . you . . . having . . . a . . . nice . . . time?”

  I had been on the verge of laughter before she joined us. Her words gave me the excuse I needed to yield to it. “Wonderful. Thank you.”

  She laughed too, once she heard my Vardeshi, and said at a more natural pace, “May I steal your khavi for a dance?”

  “Of course. Enjoy.”

  She held out her hand to Hathan. He accepted it. I looked resolutely away from the sight of his hand in hers as they walked out onto the floor.

  I stayed another hour, had another drink, drifted in and out of a dozen more conversations of which I remembered nothing afterward. Then I thanked my hosts, my manufactured smile as bright as it had been all evening, and went back to my room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The two drinks I’d had during the reception had long since burned away, leaving me clear-headed and alert. Our launch was scheduled for midday, a mere eight hours from now. I wasn’t about to waste a single moment of my final night on Rikasa sleeping. I rinsed off in the shower and put on matching underwear, a rare occurrence in my life, then jeans and a T-shirt, white to set off my tan. I laughed a bit uncomfortably at myself as I did so. It was an after-party outfit, and I hadn’t been invited to any after-parties. By rights, if I wasn’t going to bed, I might as well put on my uniform. Still, as indulgences went, it was a small one. I could pretend, for these few hours, and only to myself, that anyone cared what I looked like tonight. And there was a symbolic meaning in selecting civilian rather than Fleet attire for the thoughts I needed to think.

  I straightened up my room—that too was part of the illusion—then turned off most of the lights and went out onto the balcony. It was another exquisite night. The white moon was setting; the golden one still rode high in a clear sky, gilding the peaks of the surrounding mountains. My room was on the outward-facing side of the Perch. From my vantage point I could look down over the flank of the mountain to where the river wound its way along the valley floor. I could almost see the place on the far shore where we had made our camp the night before. The place where I had found my way, against all expectation, into the embrace of a man I loved. Who didn’t love me. Who shouldn’t have wanted me, but did.

  At a few hours’ remove, it all seemed more incredible than ever: incredible in its original sense, not to be believed. That circumstances had arisen that argued compellingly for my being left alone with a single companion. That Hathan had volunteered to be that companion. That I had found the courage—if an unethical act could be called courageous—to confess my desire for him. That he had rejected me, reconsidered, looked past a litany of perfectly sensible objections, and said yes. That I hadn’t lost my nerve. That he hadn’t. In how many alternate universes, I wondered, had that delicate chain of causality snapped? How many other Averys had slept alone last night, to give me one night in his arms? God, they must hate me right now.

  I had had him for a night. I would never have him again. But the memory was there, every word and look and touch, locked away in my heart as securely as if it had been encoded in crystal. Nothing could ever take it from me. I felt an incredulous gratitude at the thought. Other emotions would doubtless follow in time. Shame, probably, for propositioning a man
who wore the pledge of his commitment on his hand for all the universe to see. And fear, that he had consented to be seduced out of pity, to keep from humiliating me again, or because he felt he owed me something. But just now I felt neither shame nor fear. I stood there on the balcony, impossibly far from the stars of home, nearer to my lover’s touch yet infinitely apart from it, with that most elusive of things: a quiet mind.

  I had been standing there for twenty minutes or so when someone knocked on my door. I was so far from expecting an interruption that I felt only vague irritation at the noise. So there was an after-party, then. This would be Zey, or Sohra, come to cajole me into attending it. They wouldn’t succeed. I sighed and went to the door. I was already readying my excuse as I slid it open.

  Neither Zey nor Sohra was waiting outside my door. Hathan was. He wore his Fleet uniform, which to my eyes signified two things: he’d already been back to his room, and he wasn’t planning on going there again tonight. I stepped back to let him in. He closed the door behind him. I reached past his shoulder and snapped the lock into place.

  There had been, last night, a surfeit of words between us. We had needed every single one of them. Now we needed none. For him to seek me out, dressed for the morning, told me everything I needed to know. And that single act of mine, after what had happened the last time a locked door sealed us off together from the world, did the same for him. We took a simultaneous step toward each other. He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me with the assurance of a lover who knows he will not be refused. After that there was no more space for thought.

  Sometime later, as we lay tangled together on my tiny bed, on top of the blanket because our bodies hadn’t yet cooled down enough to need it, he said, “How long,” and stopped. “I was going to ask how long it’s been for you, but I think I already know.”

  “Three months.”

  “Fletcher.”

  I nodded. “Fletcher.”

  “Before that?”

  “I guess . . . Two years?” In my first year of graduate school I’d briefly dated a student at the military language academy in the neighboring town. His face was a vague blur in my memory. “What about you?”

  “Three years.”

  I felt an utterly unjustified wrench of disappointment. So he had been unfaithful to Sidra before. Why had I assumed I was the only one? And what did it matter? What bizarre ethical tightrope did I imagine him to be walking? The reality, at least among humans, was that if someone was willing to break his vows once, he was willing to do it more than once. And that was fine. He was here in my bed for one reason: I had been unprincipled enough to invite him, and he had been unprincipled enough to accept.

  As if he heard my thoughts, he said, “It was just before my engagement.”

  “That was three years ago?” Something about the number struck me as odd. I dredged up the memory of my very first meeting with Zey. “Zey’s been engaged longer than that. A lot longer. And you’re older than him.”

  “Yes.” When he didn’t elaborate, I told myself again, more firmly than before, to let it go. I had no right to push for more detail. He had already told me more than he needed to. I closed my eyes, far from sleep, and breathed in the scent of his skin.

  Again he surprised me by offering more information. “I waited a long time. Longer than most. I was . . . Some part of me was hoping for a more authentic connection.”

  “You mean love,” I said, astonished. “You wanted to fall in love.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were the one. In a thousand.”

  “Evidently not.”

  “What happened?”

  I felt him shrug. “Nothing happened. That was the problem. I had a few girlfriends, but I never felt more than a passing fondness for any of them. My parents started to worry. I started to think I was being unrealistic. And I got older. And lonelier. One day I just stopped looking. I sent a message home. Sidra is the daughter of one of my mother’s childhood friends. She was finishing a five-year term on a ship doing deep-space exploration. She’d been waiting until the mission was over to start looking for a match. My mother wrote to her mother. The whole thing was settled in about a week.”

  “What’s she like?” I asked.

  “Honestly, I don’t really know. We’ve only met a few times, and our conversations were . . . concise. You’d be better off asking Saresh—they were in the same class at the Institute. She graduated with distinction, which isn’t easily done. She’s currently serving a hadazi year aboard the Vigilant. Her field is engineering. I know that our mothers thought we were well matched in temperament. I know that she’s beautiful. She looks a little like Sohra. She’s smaller than Zey, but her ranshai designation is novice fourth class, which is impressive for her size. And I know that in a few years, when we feel the time is right, we’ll meet on Vardesh Prime for our wedding. That’s really all there is to tell.”

  I let out a breath that was almost but not quite a sigh.

  He said, “You’re going to tell me I should have held out for love.”

  “No way. I’m not that arrogant. Also, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m still single, so my advice is worth crap.”

  He lifted my left hand in both of his. “Which finger?”

  “This one.” I waggled it helpfully.

  He stroked my ring finger with his thumb, a slow, deliberate caress that sent shivers of heat through my body. “Strange to think of a sigil that can be taken off.”

  “Strange to think of a ring that can’t.” I added more tentatively, “Can I look at it?”

  He turned his right hand over. With my left forefinger I traced the slightly raised golden lines I had tracked so many times with my eyes. “It’s your life. I think you get to make the choices you think will give you the best shot at being happy. Without me, or anyone else, telling you you’re doing it wrong.”

  Hathan said, “I don’t know if I’ll be happy with Sidra. I just know I won’t be alone.” He raised himself slightly, looking toward the balcony, and made a sound in his throat: recognition and, I thought, disapproval.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Dawn.”

  “Already?” I pushed myself up to look as well. Through the open balcony door I could just make out the line of the mountains, now faintly visible, gray on darker gray, where before there had been only formless dark. Tears prickled behind my eyes. I turned my face into his shoulder to hide them. When I thought I could speak steadily, I said, “There must be a planet out there with thirty-hour days. Why couldn’t we have gone to that one?”

  “If you’d told me how you planned to spend them, trust me, we would have.”

  “See, that’s kind of an awkward topic to bring up at morning briefing.”

  “‘Any other matters of note?’” he said in a perfect imitation of the uninflected query with which Reyna closed each briefing. We both laughed.

  The chime of a flexscreen sounded from the shelf beside the bed. I looked over at it. “Yours or mine?”

  “Mine.” He scanned the message. “Ziral wants to meet me before the crew breakfast.” He sent back a one-handed acknowledgment.

  Dreading the response, I said, “How long do you have?”

  Hathan replaced the device on its shelf. “Long enough.” He turned back to face me again. His eyes traveled from my face to the line of my body beneath the sheet in a frank appraisal. I had been waiting for months for him to look at me that way. I watched his face, knew he would reach for me a moment before he did it. That instant of anticipation was as exquisite as any physical caress I had ever felt. I moved into his arms, found his mouth with mine, tried again to say with my body the things I couldn’t say with words. The irony was sublime. I had been hired as a linguist.

  We both knew it was the last time. Perhaps that was the reason for the urgency I sensed in him. Certainly it was the reason for my own. At the end, impelled by love even if I was forbidden to speak the word, I did what I had promised myself from the start that I w
ouldn’t: I said his name. I felt his whole body respond to the sound. I waited, breathless, to see what he would do. Had I gone too far? Implied an emotional bond that didn’t exist between us, even when our bodies were tangled together under a sheet?

  “Again,” he breathed in my ear. And it was that whisper of command, of distance preserved in the midst of absolute intimacy, that drove me over the edge into pleasure. I didn’t know what it meant, or if it meant anything at all, that it should happen that way. But I knew, with a dreamlike certainty, that hearing me say his name again did the same thing for him. And I knew I would be hearing his whisper in my nights for a long time to come.

  Afterward I said, “Is it just me, or were you a little different that time?”

  “In what way?”

  “More . . . aggressive.”

  “Aggressive? Did I hurt you?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  He frowned. Then a look of sudden comprehension crossed his features. “Oh. You’re not used to the daybreak hormone shift. I haven’t had my morning senek.” He held a trembling hand in the air.

  Enlightened, I said, “You were in predator mode.”

  He laughed. “It sounds dramatic when you put it that way. Really it’s just irritating. Like being overcaffeinated for you.” He checked his flexscreen again. “I should make senek now, but I have just enough time to shower.”

  “I’ll make it,” I said.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Thank you.” He unlaced his fingers from mine and sat up. I watched him walk to the shower room, that ineffable Vardeshi grace even more visible without clothing to hide it. He made no attempt to conceal his nakedness. I tried to etch the lines of his body in my memory. I had never understood before why people took illicit pictures of their lovers. Now I did. It was a hollow kind of possession, but possession nonetheless. All I had was my imperfect human memory: riddled with impurities, like the crystals of Rikasa. It was enough. It would have to be enough.