An Imperfect Princess (6 page)

She had followed
them stealthily and breathed a sigh of relief as they took her into a rather
large dwelling and fussed over the woman’s unconscious body, washing the wound
on her forehead and bandaging it up.  This
was
a primitive world all
right.  They didn’t even sterilize it first.  Aijo fervently hoped that Eneria’s
physiology was far enough removed from this world that the local viruses and
bacteria wouldn’t know how to infect her.  Otherwise, her charge could be dead
within days.  Visitors from other worlds were usually inoculated against all
local bugs on the sterile orbital stations, but a primitive world so far
removed from the local cluster of known worlds wouldn’t have one of those for
hundreds or thousands of years.

The man,
apparently the lord of the estate, had taken Eneria’s things to his office.  He
had studied them a bit, but did not seem to know what to make of them either.

“Yeah, you guys
don’t exactly have screens capable of projecting augmented reality,” she
muttered to herself, as he fingered the goggles in confusion.

Aijo was able to
stay hidden in a sunbeam fairly easily. Her role for now would be to observe. 
She had until Eneria was conscious again to pick up enough local language to
communicate. 

Learning
languages was one of the many useful talents of her people.  Since the very
fiber of their being was made of a different type of substance than ordinary
matter, they had astonishing success at some areas–they had utter control over
the immediate electromagnetic spectrum in their surroundings–and a lack of
abilities that made their partnership with baryonic matter beings so crucial. 
Aijo could melt glass with her mind or rearrange the molecules of DNA or pick
up the underlying emotions and thoughts in a humanoid’s brain–but she could not
so much as lift a feather.  Gravity had no hold on her, but as such, she had no
help from it. The Pharinae’s physiology ignored classic physics and skipped
straight to the quantum level.

When the
Pharinae had first made their tiny civilization in a cluster of brilliant blue
stars known everywhere as the Seven Sisters, the people of the local cluster’s
worlds had still been in trees or in the water (or the soil in at least one
case)..  Knowing their time on their home world was short in the cosmic scale,
they had spread to the farthest reaches of the galaxy.  And as intelligent life
evolved from ordinary matter, the Pharinae were always there to help, guide,
and mold them into the humanoid image they preferred.  Five fingers, four or
five toes, hair on the head.  Some had wings, some did not.  Some were tall,
some were short, but they were generally gracile and built on the same major
biochemical design.

Obviously, this
world had been touched by the Pharinae. The humanoids were too perfect to have
evolved that way otherwise.  Without the interference of her people,
intelligent life could turn out any number of ways.

That’s why it
was so disturbing to Aijo that she couldn’t sense any other Pharinae on this
world.  Had they all been killed? Had they abandoned it?  The former was
unlikely; it was quite hard to kill something that amounted to sentient light. 
The latter would have to have a reason...

For now, though,
her goal was to keep Eneria alive, so she moved from room to room and listened.

Marilyn’s
governess, Mrs. Thomas, a middle aged woman to be commended for her seemingly
infinite patience with the hyperactive girl, was giving her a lesson on
geography.  The girl would be an Incomparable someday like her young aunt, if
only she would get over her incorrigible stage first.

“Now, what are
the major historic city states of Greece?”

“Pompeii and
Sparta,” Marilyn answered wrongly, kicking her shoes together petulantly and
fiddling with a ribbon on her pinafore.  Galileo the cat, the only thing that
could keep her focused for more than fifteen minutes, was forbidden from the
school room.

“Pompeii was
buried by a volcano almost two millennia ago.  Try again. The governess pointed
toward the beautiful marble globe that had been borrowed from her uncle’s
study.

“Athens,” the
girl finally said, wriggling uncontrollably.  The seat
did
look hard and
uncomfortable.

Aijo picked up
on the agitation of the child.  She didn’t quite seem right, something beyond
merely not wanting to be in a lesson or sitting on a chair that was too hard, but
it was difficult to pin down.  Aijo couldn’t read memories without merging with
them completely, she could only comprehend the thoughts that lay on the surface
of someone’s mind.  Merging with an unknown being’s mind was dangerous.  She
could merge with Eneria, but that was because of long years of practice.  It
was the most efficient way to teach someone something, after all.   Aijo could
learn at the speed of light and then dump the information into her charge’s
brain, in an accelerated version of sleep osmosis.  The younger minds
especially soaked up knowledge imparted that way like a sponge, although they
needed practice with the material to make any real use of it.  Enny, Vaz, and Emmett
had learned a lot with her aid, more information than they probably ever
realized, but quite a lot of it turned out to be useless for them post-military
invasion. 

The tour of
Europe continued.  Aijo began to pick up a sense of the rhythm and phonetics of
the local language.  She was astonished at how wildly different everything
was.  Whereas convergent evolution–and the interference of the Pharinae–tended
to bring all humanoids to roughly the same size and shape as they evolved, it
did the opposite with languages.  Aijo was herself fluent in over a dozen
languages and could pick up on a new one in a few days.   It was her specialty.
Languages from the same world tended to have the same phonemes, but from
different worlds, the very building blocks of language could be unique. Writing
also varied wildly from world to world.

After the child
could sit still no longer, her governess released her, and she quickly fled the
school room and bounded outside to play with the cat.

Aijo went a few
rooms down, where the slightly older girl was doing a much more tedious task. 
She was looking at pictures with another girl who appeared to be her servant,
and they were jabbering excitedly over the pictures, holding up swatches of
fabric, and making notes about them.  Aijo was rather pleased with the
aesthetics of the local dress, although the women wore some interestingly
tortuous exoskeletons to squeeze into the desired shape. Eneria had once worn
similar dresses, although they were perhaps a little simpler and not so
voluminous and had no matching metal cages.

A visit to the
servant’s quarters, the kitchen, and finally outdoors to the stables rounded
out Aijo’s tour of the estate.  The language began to distill itself before
her, going from disorganized and discordant phonemes to concrete words and
expressions.  She learned the words for numbering and mathematics from the lord
of the manor, who was reluctantly going over the ledgers with his steward.  She
sensed he did not enjoy the task.  She picked up some etiquette from the older
girl, who was teaching the bored and miserable younger girl about specific protocols
for young women, perhaps more as a reminder to herself.  She had picked up some
much more salacious anatomical terms from two giggling maids in the scullery.

After a full day
of eavesdropping, she had learned enough of the language’s nuance to begin
focusing on aspects of the culture.  They were in a country called England,
which seemed to be not only the dominant power regionally, but perhaps
worldwide.  Eneria had been right to pick the country with the largest
concentration of steam and coal plants, after all.

It was dinner
time before Aijo found what they thought of their strange visitor.

“Has the girl
awakened yet?” Clarissa asked, slapping back her niece’s hand as she reached to
steal a biscuit from her plate.  “Really, Marilyn, it is rude to take food from
other people’s plates.  Don’t be a heathen.”

“You weren’t
eating it!” the girl proclaimed, and she tried to do the same to her uncle. 
Rather than slap her hand away, he simply picked his biscuit up and held it out
of reach.

“Marilyn, behave
or else I will have Mrs. Thomas take you and your dinner back upstairs.”

The girl looked
contrite and pretended to concentrate ferociously on her dinner.  Aijo had
learned that eating at the table had been a privilege granted fairly recently
for the girl, and the threat of having it removed was enough to make her behave
for the rest of the meal. 

“No, she is not
yet awake.  I checked on her earlier, and while her pulse and breathing are
fine, she has had a very nasty knock on her head.  I do wonder who she is,” he
said, staring off into space for a moment. 

“She’s a
princess from Greece!” Marilyn piped up, then giggled.

Apparently,
referencing her lessons was tolerated.  “Oh?” Clarissa said, laying her fork on
the plate in anticipation of a good conversation. “What part of Greece?”

“Athens or
Sparta,” Marilyn said proudly, “as she cannot be from Pompeii since it was
buried by a volcano.”

“A Grecian
princess, in our own home.  How lovely.”  Clarissa smiled at her brother-in-law,
sharing the conspiracy of humoring the younger girl with a friendly eye
twinkle. 

“While I somehow
doubt she’s a princess, I do suspect she’s a lady.”  Or a thief, Aijo detected
from his mind, although he kept that thought to himself. “The necklace she was
wearing was a work of art.”

Aijo surfed on
his consciousness, floating on his thoughts.  According to him, Eneria did not
appear to be a laborer; her hands proved that. And there was something
positively aristocratic about her features that puzzled him.  Her face was
wider than classic English beauty called for and her hair definitely had an odd
bluish tint to its otherwise ordinary dark brown. 

Enny’s hair wasn’t
odd on Lathlor, Aijo thought to herself with a grin.  Hair came in all colors
of the rainbow.  She had inherited the bluish overtones from her mother and the
more dominant seal brown tones from her father. 

“I hope she
wakes up soon,” Clarissa said, and resumed poking her food around her plate
without much interest.

A moment of
inactivity passed, and Aijo crept out from her candelabra, memorizing the
plates and place settings, analyzing the chemicals in the foods.  Good, it
would be compatible with Eneria’s physiology for the most part. 

She leaned over,
trying not to get too far out from her hiding spot, but she failed to take into
account that she was much brighter in the dim interior than she had been
outside.

“Look Uncle
James, it’s a fairy!” Marilyn shouted, leaping up from the table and pointing
excitedly at the corner of the dining room where Aijo had unintentionally
exposed herself.  The dishes on the table clattered with her sudden movement. 
Annoyed, the fairy flickered back behind the candle, willing herself to become
almost transparent.

The lord of the
manor was fairly upset by the outburst. “Marilyn, I warned you that you needed
to behave.  Please go upstairs to your room.  Mrs. Thomas will bring you the
rest of your dinner.”

Stricken, the
girl pleaded with her uncle.  “But I saw one! I did! It was gold colored with
wings and it was right there by the lamp!”

“It was probably
a moth.”  Mrs. Thomas had come in from the kitchen where she had been eating
dinner with the servants, and she ushered the now sobbing child away from the
table.  She murmured her apologies to the earl and after Marilyn started
dragging her feet as if they were leaden, she simply plucked the wailing eight
year-old up around the waist and hauled her away.

The dining room
echoed with her howls.  The man put his head in his hands and looked up at the
stairway, a pained expression on his face.

“That girl... I
admit I have limited experience with female children, but I never expected her
to be so fond of make believe. Were you that way when you were a child? Was
your sister?”

Clarissa patted
her mouth neatly with her napkin.  “No, James. Caroline was adventurous, but
she was always grounded in reality.”  She quirked her mouth ruefully.  “We also
both lived in abject terror of our father.  If you think a ship’s captain looks
authoritative from afar, that’s nothing compared to how he acted at home. 
Neither of us dared to disobey him.”  Her expression softened.  “I think that’s
why Caroline spoiled her daughter, just a little.”

James set his
own silverware down, his appetite diminished over the issue of the recalcitrant
child.  “And George was much the same. Our father would have never put up
either of us acting like that.  The child is bright enough, but you do have to
wonder what is wrong.”

Aijo felt bad. 
The girl had seen her and told the truth, and she had been punished for it. 
But she had gleaned an important piece of vocabulary from the child.

Fairy.  The
phonemes were the same. The Pharinae
had
been here. Where in the world
could they have all gone?

The next day,
James popped into the bedroom where they had laid their mythical Grecian princess.

She lay on the
bed, peacefully, alive in body but dead to the world.

He leaned down
over her, once again fascinated by the apparent bluish tint to her sable hair. 
The color could not be natural, and he wondered where it had come from.  In the
candlelight it appeared almost black, but with the afternoon sun streaming in
through the window of the guest room, striking the counterpane, those elusive
threads of ice and cerulean appeared once more.

Black lashes
rested on dusky cheeks.  The goggles had hidden those quite effectively. She
had to be from the continent; no maiden of England appeared that bronze without
years of sun exposure.  And her skin bore no trace of the elements, not on her
face or her hands.