B00CH3ARG0 EBOK (29 page)

“Why do you live like this?” Laura asked. “Like medieval
lords.”

His face went blank.

“I think she means, why not use technology in daily life,”
Marianne explained. “Machines could replace servants, houses could be made of
modern insulating materials – especially on a cold world like this – and so on.
You’re like interstellar Luddites.”

“We are communal,” he said. “To replace people with machines
only creates isolation for those who use them and deprives others of work.”

Laura was silent while she thought about it. “You have a
point. I’m not sure I agree with it, but you have a point. For us – for
humans,” she corrected herself. “
Some
humans think that being a servant
is demeaning.”

He laughed. “The stronghold servants honor me with their
service,” he said. “I care for them well in return. If I did not, they would
not serve me.”

“Well-paid, I presume.”

“We do not work to be paid with currency. We work because we
must work.”

Laura fell silent, seeming to digest this. “No money at
all?”

“None.”

“Amazing. Papa would have a stroke if all his trillions
meant nothing.”

The Sural raised his eyebrows. “We are content to work,” he
said, finally.

“What’s my work?” she asked.

“You are an artist. You will find your place. Have
patience.”

Marianne stifled a snort. He glanced at her.

“What was it you once told me?” she asked, her eyes dancing.
“I’m too young to be truly patient?”

“Far too young,” he agreed. “Both of you.”

They burst into laughter. The Sural eyed them,
incomprehension written plainly in his blank expression. Marianne stopped for a
moment at the look on his face and burst into a fresh paroxysm of mirth. Finally,
he seemed to give up trying to understand. He smiled, shook his head, and
resumed eating.

A guard flickered.

“Uh oh,” said Marianne.

The Sural pulled out his tablet and read it. “I must go,” he
said, and vanished.

Laura gazed at where he’d been. “How long will it be before
I can do that?”

“You mean camouflage?” Marianne shrugged. “As little as two
and a half standard years, as much as eight.” She stared out the doorway to the
main corridor. “The Sural says that when we’re able to, we’ll just know how.”

“It doesn’t look like what a chameleon does.”

“No, it really doesn’t. And anyway, his clothing disappears
with him. The chameleon idea must be a misinterpretation of what the first
humans to land here saw. It’s more like – stepping out of phase, or something. I
don’t think anyone from Central Command ever got a good look, honestly.”

Laura coughed. “They got a good look.”

Marianne cocked her head. “How do you know that?”

“You know it was Smitty and Addie who came down here first,
don’t you?”

Marianne opened and closed her mouth several times. “He
never told me. That would have been – what, nine or ten years ago? I had no
idea.”

“Did it ever come up?”

“Well...” She stopped. “No, it didn’t.”

“There you are.”

“You’re annoying when you make sense, you know that?”

“I just didn’t want you getting angry over nothing.”

“I’m not angry.”

“You were going to be.”

Marianne blew a raspberry. “I’m glad I don’t have to live
with you like this. Your poor Paran.”

Laura flashed a smug grin, and then sobered.

Marianne peered at her. “What are you holding back?”

The other woman shifted in her chair. “John knew Central
Command wanted to know more than just how the Tolari do their camouflage. I
think he didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was important.”

* * *

The next morning, Marianne jolted awake. Her sleeping mat
felt as if it were … swaying? She reached for Rose in her little cot next to
the mat. As she did so, the movement stopped.

Oh, right
, she thought.
An earthquake.

She was still a little rattled later, midmorning, when Cena
came to her quarters to examine her.

“The stronghold shook this morning,” she said, as the
apothecary passed a scanner slowly over Marianne’s deflated midsection.

“Tectonic activity is rare but not unknown in this part of
Tolar,” the apothecary murmured, unperturbed.

Marianne leaned back on divan and heaved a sigh, feeling
reassured. “Am I
ever
going to stop seeing you every day?”

Cena smiled. “Soon,” she said. She turned to Rose’s nurse
and scanned the baby, kneading her tiny belly gently.

“Not that I don’t enjoy talking to you.”

“Of course not, high one.”

Shock and emotional turmoil impinged on Marianne’s
awareness. She frowned. It was coming from ... the Sural?

“What is it?” Cena asked.

Rose started fussing in her nurse’s arms. Marianne stood and
reached, distracted, to lift her over one shoulder. “The Sural is upset about
something,” she said, bouncing gently on her heels in an attempt to soothe
Rose. “Very upset.” She closed her eyes and opened them again a moment later.
“He’s coming this way.”

The door opened, and her bond-partner burst into view. He
glanced at Cena. “Good,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion, his face a mask.
“You are here.”

“What’s wrong?” Marianne asked. “What happened?”

“Storaas is missing.”

Cena gasped and sat hard on a divan, pale under her bronze
skin. “High one ... how—” She stopped, unable to continue.

He seated himself beside her. “He took a transport pod at
dawn. When he did not return to attend a meeting, I had him traced. The trace
ends at the ocean entrances to the city tunnels. Apothecary – Cena—”

She didn’t look up.

“Are you entwined with him strongly enough to know if he
lives?”

Marianne gasped at the intimacy of the question, when posed
by one Tolari to another.

“I—” Cena stammered, then swallowed hard and whispered,
“Why?”

He took a deep breath before he answered, his voice very
soft. “We know the pod is dead.”

Marianne drew a sharp breath and clapped a hand over her
mouth, her eyes filling with tears.

The Sural looked up at her. “It does not mean Storaas is
dead.”

Rose began to wail. Marianne handed her to her nurse, who
carried her out into the corridor.

Cena’s voice was hoarse as she answered. “I think he lives,”
she said. “I cannot be certain.”

The Sural put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “We will find
him.” He stood. “I must return to the guard wing.”

Marianne slid onto the divan as the Sural strode out the
door. Tears coursed down the apothecary’s cheeks.

“He’ll find him,” Marianne whispered, pulling her into a
tight hug. “He has to.”

Cena wrapped her arms around her swollen belly and sobbed
into Marianne’s shoulder.

Storaas groaned. Water lapped at his legs, and something was
picking at his hair. Something else was
crawling
in his hair. He raised
his face from the sand. A large beach flutter hopped back from him, scolding,
its mottled tan feathers puffed out to make itself appear larger. He ignored its
threat display and swiped at the prickling sensation on his scalp in disgust. A
small sand crawler dropped off and scuttled away. The flutter chased it.

He shuddered when the crawler’s death stung his senses.

With another groan, he pushed himself up to his knees and
looked around. He was on a spit of sand, and it was too warm for this time of
year. He squinted. A series of sandbars described an arc in the green ocean. It
was a small reef of perhaps ten of the little spits, of which the one where he
stood was the largest.

He brushed the sand off his hands before rubbing it from his
face and looked around him. There was no telling where he was. The hevalrin
that had saved him could have taken him most of the way to the equator in the
time he’d been unconscious. A late afternoon sun sat near the horizon, and he’d
left the stronghold not long after dawn.

He could not be near Suralia. It was far too warm to be
autumn in that northern clime.
Why? Why take me so far from home?

Something tickled at the edges of his senses, and he turned
to face the ocean. A colossal shadow lurked in the darker, deeper water. The
hevalrin.

Gentle as flowers, hevalra were massive creatures. Marianne
had told him Earth had a similar creature called a
blue whale
, though she
could not say if it was a sentient empath as were Tolar’s hevalra. He had not
attempted to communicate with any of the hevalra now alive, but his sensitivity
was such that those few he’d met, over the long years of his existence, had had
no trouble understanding him. He waded knee deep into the surf and reached out,
sending it a longing for home. It pushed him away.

Denial.

It appeared he could communicate with this hevalrin, though the
creature did not seem inclined to take him back to Suralia.

He trudged out of the water and stood in the middle of the
sandbar to scan the horizon and the sea around him. It would be foolish to stay
here. If the tide was low, the tiny spit would disappear under the waves before
long, and the new moon was going to set with the sun. It would be a dark night
– not a good time to be lost at sea.

Wading back into the surf, he called out to the hevalrin, begging
for safety, the feel of shade, the smell of trees.

Acceptance.

Projecting gratitude, he stripped off his robe, tied it
around his waist, and swam out to it ... no, to
her
. The creature was a
medium-sized female, although size was relative when speaking of hevalra. He
patted her rough hide and climbed onto the massive, wedge-shaped head, anchoring
himself in place by hooking an arm around one of the ridges that ran between
her pair of blowholes.

“Why did you save me?” he asked, as she flicked the front
pair of her six flippers and began moving.

No answer.

“I would have been happy to die.”

She blew spray at him from one of her blowhole vents. He
sighed. No one would allow him to die, not even a sea creature.

It was foolish of him to have been in the underwater caves
in the deep waters off the coast of Suralia, but he loved it down there.
Beautiful, phosphorescent creatures swam in the darkness, seeking food,
shelter, and mates. Watching them soothed him. It was his favorite place to
think, when he needed time to ponder something important, away from the infringing
emotions of others.

But then the sea floor shook, bringing huge rocks down from
the roof of the cave, mortally wounding his transport pod. It had tried to get
him back to the surface, but had only reached the cave entrance when it died
and dissolved, leaving him in the frigid water, too far from the surface to entertain
any hope of survival.

His last thoughts were of Cena and the son he had given her.
Then, as darkness descended, the hevalrin swallowed him.

The creature must have continued her journey, cycling air
through her cavern of a mouth while he lay unconscious on her tongue, and then
spat him out when she reached this reef. He wondered if she had enlisted the
aid of smaller creatures to get him onto the spit of sand.

“Why did you stay?” He patted her head. “Your kind journeys
to the southern oceans during this part of the year.”

A burst of emotions assaulted him.
Sorrow. Affection.
Hope.

He shook his head. “I do not understand.”

Loss. Hope.

“You want me to have hope? Hope for what?”

Love. Affection. Parental love.

He stared down at the head on which he sat, shocked. “You
think I should have a child?”

Agreement.

“I am too old for that. I would die while the child still
needed me.” His eyes narrowed. “How do you know I have no heir?”

Sorrow.

“Ah. You are a perceptive one.”

Smugness.

He laughed and patted her again.

Amusement. Curiosity.

“No, I do not want to live any longer than I must.”

Curiosity.

“The only woman I ever truly loved died ... a long time
ago.”

Denial.

“No. There will never be another like my Suralia.”

Denial.

An empathic image of Cena formed in his senses. The hevalrin
was perceptive indeed to have lifted that from his heart. He clamped his jaw
shut. No.

Denial.

“I cannot give a broken heart to Cena. She deserves more.”

Denial.

“I know my own heart!” he exclaimed.

Silence.

He took a deep breath to calm himself and noticed the
hevalrin had stopped swimming. The breath went out of him in a gust. How could
she presume to know him better than he knew himself? His ability to give his
whole heart had died with the Sural’s grandmother.

Sympathy. Caring.

“Ah,” he said, gazing out to sea, then down at the hevalrin.
“You have known loss.”

Agreement. Sympathy. Loss. Renewed hope. Joy.

“You have found joy after a great loss?”

Agreement.

“Is that why you are doing this? Why me, why now?”

She gave a sort of empathic shrug.
Need.

“I needed you?”

Agreement.

He chuckled and shook his head. “And you want to convince me
to live.”

Agreement.

“For Cena.”

Agreement.

Did she have a point? His last thoughts when he believed he
would die were not of his lost Suralia, but of Cena. Was he that entwined?

Was he?

Agreement.

He leaned his forehead against the ridge to which he clung
and sent his senses roaming. He touched new life.

“You are increasing!”

Joy.

“And you want me to have this joy.” A sudden welling of
affection for the great creature made him smile. “Your heart is kind,
hevalrin.”