Starkissed (17 page)

She searched for a reason, something practical he couldn’t refuse. Then it came to her.

“J’Qhir, you have to promise that you will never do this again. If you cut yourself, you could develop an infection. We don’t know that the antibiotics work on you, and even if they do, our supply is limited. You could very well die from an infection. So you have to promise that you won’t do this again, ever.”

She waited while he considered her reasoning. His eyes lightened, and she thought he looked relieved. He tilted his head to one side and nodded once.

“I promissse, Leith.”

“Good.” She did not doubt his word. “I know that it’s difficult for you to go against your beliefs, but some of them just won’t work here.”

His hands tightened around hers. “Yesss. I have dissscovered thisss already,” he said, his voice barely audible. Then he spoke again the words he’d said to her before, “I will build a lair for usss.”

Leith started to shake her head, but stopped. She didn’t know why he insisted on constructing a shelter when the cave was perfect for their needs. Was there some hidden meaning to the words she couldn’t decipher? She had answered in the negative each time.

Perhaps he had to hear a positive answer to satisfy some Zi need she couldn’t understand.

“All right, J’Qhir, you do that. When we travel south and find a place with a warmer climate, building a lair would be fine.”

His hands tightened on hers and for a moment she thought he was going to smile. He didn’t, but he seemed contented with her answer.

She pulled free and wiped the perspiration from her face. “It’s so hot in here I can’t breathe. I’m going to step outside while you lower the fire and—” Her gaze swept over him, head to toe and back again, and her eyes widened. “And you, um, can get dressed.”

She turned and fled.

Outside, she headed for the stream. She splashed her face with cold water several times, washing away tears and sweat, and to cool her burning face. She needed lots of cold water. She sat back on her heels and rested her forehead on her knees.

She had learned two things about the Zi. One, nudity was not taboo to them. He had stood before her not wearing a stitch and didn’t try to hide a thing. Two, he didn’t have a
thing
to hide.

J’Qhir had spoken of younglings. Of course, the Zi had to procreate, but Leith had seen no evidence of how this could be accomplished. His chest was a paler solid shade of www.samhainpublishing.com

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tawny, and his skin was ribbed toward his abdomen. Below, there was…
nothing.
She had noticed some sort of vertical decorative mark about ten centimeters in length but nothing else.

Leith sat a long time and pondered the implications of her discovery. His unique physique rendered any kind of intimacy an impossibility…and made her recent dreams pure fantasy. Just her luck, she sighed. She would get marooned on a deserted planet for the rest of her life with a being incapable of sexual intimacy as she knew it. Worse, she thought she was falling in love with him.

Leith didn’t know if it was love or not and decided it was a waste of time trying to decide. It didn’t matter what she felt, or thought she felt, they were stuck with one another.

”””

“We scratch a grid in the dirt, like this.” Leith drew two vertical parallel lines, then crossed them with two horizontal parallel lines.

J’Qhir carefully did the same.

“Well, we only need one grid at a time, but—” Before she could finish saying they would use his later, he quickly smoothed the dirt over his. She sighed.

“We have to keep score.” She wrote an L and drew a horizontal line after it.

“Hmmm, I have no idea how to spell your name.”

J’Qhir drew a few glyphs composed of graceful arcs and lines. Leith wrote a J beside them.

“That’s how I would write the initial sound of your name.”

J’Qhir nodded. “Like ssso.”

He painstakingly printed J’QHIR in block letters. Leith smiled. She half expected to see his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. The letters were perfectly formed, like a child would write when practicing his alphabet.

“Terran Ssstandard,” J’Qhir proclaimed.

A fanciful name for English. Leave it to the English-speaking people of Earth to make their own language standard across the galaxy.

“Very good.” Leith then drew a C with a horizontal line beside it. “That’s for the Cat.”

J’Qhir’s mouth turned down and his crest furrowed. “Who isss the Cat?”

“It’s very easy to play to a draw in this game, so when there’s a tie, the Cat wins.”

He still looked puzzled. “That’s the way I played it when I was a child. Youngling. It’s not supposed to make sense now.”

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Lanette

Curington

“Ssss…”

“Now, the first one to get three X’s or three O’s in a row wins.”

J’Qhir quickly marked three X’s diagonally across the grid. Leith clamped her lips together and tapped her stick against the bottom of her boot.

“Um, it’s not a race. It’s a game of strategy. We take turns.” She smoothed out the dirt and re-drew the grid. “Since you’re so eager, you go first. Do you want the X’s or O’s?”

Off to the side of the grid, J’Qhir precisely lettered one X and one O. He studied them a moment. “Thessse two figuresss are diametrically opposssite.”

“They’re what?”

“Diametrically opposssite. One isss a complete curve and the other isss composssed of ssstraight linesss.”

Leith bit her lip. She didn’t know if she did so to keep from laughing or crying. Or slapping him upside the head. Somehow she resisted that urge.

“So they are. Do you want to play or not?”

“Yesss, Leith.” He rubbed out the two letters. “I will ussse the X.”

He drew an X in the center of the grid. Leith drew an O in the upper right corner.

J’Qhir put an X in the center right. Leith blocked him by placing an O in the center left.

They continued until each had taken four turns, and there was only one square open.

“It’s a tie,” Leith pointed out and made a mark beside the C.

“But there isss no way to win,” J’Qhir protested.

“Not if the first player always begins in the center square.”

“Yesss… Then what is the purpossse of the exercissse?”

“It’s for children, to make them think, I suppose.” Leith rubbed out the grid and the scoreboard. She stood. “You’re no fun. I’m going to bed. Good night.”

“Good night, Leith.”

”””

The next evening, after another long, exhausting day of hauling deadfall and scanning for potential foodstuff, Leith spent the better part of an hour creating a checkerboard in the dirt. J’Qhir watched her, completely absorbed in her actions, and didn’t say a word.

His intense silence wore on her nerves, but she said nothing either. She had scratched out sixty-four squares. To differentiate between the colors, she pressed a flat piece of bark in every other square. Earlier in the day she had scoured the bank of the stream for two dozen uniform pebbles, twelve white and twelve brown. She had painted one side of www.samhainpublishing.com

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each with sugarpod juice and laid them in the sun to dry to a glossy finish. They could turn one over to be “crowned” instead of trying to balance one rounded stone atop another.

Now, Leith set the pieces on the bark squares, glazed side down. When she had all twenty-four in place, she rested her hands in her lap.

“It’s called Checkers. This is the checkerboard. It’s supposed to be made with black and red squares, but we have to make do with what we have.”

J’Qhir nodded, hanging onto her every word.

Leith pointed to the stones. “These are checkers.”

“I thought you sssaid the game isss called Checkersss.”

“Yes, but each playing piece is called a checker. The brown ones are yours and the white ones are mine. You move the pieces in a certain way, diagonally forward only. The object of the game is to move your pieces across to the other side while capturing as many of your opponent’s as you can.” Leith took one of her stones and placed it upside down on the far side to demonstrate. “When a piece gets to the last row, it’s considered a king and can now be moved forward or backward, but still only diagonally.”

She then prepared a simple jump position and demonstrated how to capture.

“I’ll go first,” she said as she replaced the stones in their original positions. “There is little action during the first few moves, but it gets better.”

Leith thought they would be evenly matched because of her familiarity with the game and his quick grasp of strategy, but she was wrong. He obviously planned out moves far in advance, and she didn’t stand a chance. As the game came to a close, she had never even reached the edge row on his side. He had kings all over the board and a pile of white pebbles beside him.

“I concede,” she said rather than give up her lone piece.

“A very interesssting game,” J’Qhir said as he gathered up all twenty-four stones.

“Well, yes, you would think so.” Leith wiped out the board in one stroke and sifted out the bark chips. “Since you won.”

“You are angry.”

“No.” She shrugged. “I never cared for the game anyway.”

“You sssound angry that I have won your game.”

“I’m tired, that’s all. I’m going to bed. Good night, J’Qhir.”

“Good night, Leith.”

”””

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100

Lanette

Curington

“No games tonight,” Leith announced when they’d finished tidying up after dinner the next evening. She sat cross-legged on her solar film pallet, and J’Qhir did likewise on his beast blanket. They had taken the skin to the pool and scrubbed it clean of vermin and matted mud and blood. It had finally dried out enough to use. J’Qhir wanted her to use it since it was her kill, but she explained that he would feel warmer next to the fur. In truth, she had no desire to have it as a trophy. “Tonight we sing.”

J’Qhir seemed to brighten. Leith knew she had lost patience with him the past few nights. She had chosen elemental games to pass the time, but they were too simple for J’Qhir’s analytical mind. He was too good at them. What she planned for this evening was a child’s song, but she didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t face many more evenings of having nothing to exercise her mind.

“I like musssic. My mother could play the
ohsiroh
exquisssitely.”

“I don’t play any musical instruments and I’m not much of a singer, but this is an easy song.” Leith taught him the words to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, then the melody. J’Qhir’s voice was rich and deep, and he picked up the tune and carried it easily.

Leith joined in and their voices blended well, her higher pitch a nice contrast to his baritone.

Leith urged him to sing alone one more time. In the classic rendition, Leith started in with “Row, row, row your boat” as J’Qhir began the “Merrily” line. J’Qhir stopped abruptly.

“You ssstarted too late.”

“I was supposed to. It’s the way the song is sung.”

“You ssshould have told me.”

“I wanted to sssurprissse you,” Leith said then clamped her lips together. She hoped he hadn’t noticed. It was too easy to mimic his long, drawn-out s’s. She caught herself doing it from time to time. She was afraid he might think she mocked him and take offense. “Shall we try again?”

J’Qhir nodded and started the song. Leith joined in at the appropriate time. They went through the ditty several times and finally Leith flubbed it. Suddenly, she found herself singing along with J’Qhir, word for word. He cut off in mid-sentence, and his crest furrowed.

“But now you are sssinging the sssame wordsss with me.”

“That’s the point. To see how long we can keep it going before someone loses their concentration and makes a mistake.” Leith sighed. “It’s usually sung by a group around a campfire. Maybe we just don’t have enough people to make it fun.”

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J’Qhir shook his head. “The wordsss do not make sssenssse to me. Perhapsss if the sssong had meaning it would be easssier to sssing.”

Leith stood and straightened her blanket. “Some songs aren’t meant to make sense.

They’re sung for the way the words flow together. Do all Zi songs make sense?”

“Yesss. They tell ssstoriesss and confirm truthsss about the nature of our people.”

“We have those too. We have an entire industry devoted to music, its creation and performance. There are individuals and groups who make a very good living with their music.” Leith lay down, curled on her side, an arm beneath her head. “Not from songs like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, but longer, more complicated pieces. We have more sophisticated games than the ones I’ve shown you. These things are mostly children’s games, just to pass the time.”

“I sssee. It isss ssso with usss alssso.” He was quiet a few moments. “Life isss not a dream.”

“Oh, I agree considering our lives have turned into a nightmare.” Leith closed her eyes. “Tomorrow night is your turn. Good night, J’Qhir.”

“Good night, Leith.”

”””

J’Qhir used the checkers Leith had made and set the white stones in a pile in front of her, keeping the brown ones for himself. He had drawn three concentric semi-circles in the dirt, the ends connecting to the wall of the cave. With his forefinger, he marked a dot in the middle of the center space. At two meters he had drawn another semi-circle. At four meters, a straight line which they crouched behind.

“We take turnsss tosssing a ssstone againssst the wall.” He demonstrated. The stone banked off the wall and landed in the second band, but very close to the innermost line.

“Now, it isss your turn. The object isss to land your ssstone asss clossse to the center mark asss posssible.”

Leith had never played pitching pennies, so she had no idea how hard to throw the stone. She tried to gauge the distance and the heft and let it go. The stone careened off the wall and sailed several centimeters past the outer band.