Master of None (15 page)

“How long will you stay?” he asked, suddenly homesick for somewhere he had never lived, wishing he could leave as well.

“Not long. One month. Maybe a year.” She shrugged. “I don’t have much sense of time on the ground.”

“So it’s true, then, Pilots live forever?” he blurted.

She laughed again, making him feel as if he’d accomplished something, a strange sense of enjoyment in the sound. Then her face grew serious. “Pilots live outside time, within time, all time, no time,” she intoned in an earnest voice. “We exist without existence, eternal through all space and no space. We live forever and die young.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending, before the corners of her lips twitched. “Don’t you despise mystics? I do.” When she looked at him, her eyes seemed less uncanny. “That’s a myth, too,” she said. “Or an exaggeration at best.”

“You’re here for Raemik. Is he also going to become a Pilot?” “No.” She inclined her head to one side, gauging him. “My turn. You’re Yaenida’s son.”

That sounded too odd. “Adopted. She’s not really my mother.” “She is now,” Pratima said firmly. “That makes
you
Vanar as well.” He shrugged. “By way of Hengeli.”

She pulled up her knees, wrapping thin arms around them to prop her chin. “So tell me, what’s a nice Hengeli boy like you doing in a place like Vanar?”

He laughed, more at ease. “An act of monumental stupidity, I’m afraid,” he admitted. “I used to teach botany at a not-very-prestigious college on a remote outpost. I was frustrated, ambitious, and thoroughly ignorant about anything that didn’t have roots and chlorophyll. If I had any hope of ever working at a better university, I needed to impress the board. The little I knew about Vanar didn’t involve its sociology. I was only interested in a species of native plant. Someone had given it to me, brought it out from Vanar.”

Lyris had. She’d seduced him with a shy smile and dark eyes and a small, stubby plant frozen forever in cortaplast, blue leaves and bloodred roots. He’d spent more time cutting the sample and analyzing it, more excited by the shape of its cellular structure than the shape of her nude body pressing against his as she nibbled his ear to distract him.

“It was the only known sample and had some interesting properties. There’s next to nothing known on native Vanar botany, and I hoped to be the first non-Vanar to publish original research. I was warned what might happen, but I didn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.” He stopped, took a deep breath before he was able to go on. He shrugged dismissively. “Thought for some reason the rules wouldn’t apply to me. My ignorance exceeded my ambition. And now I’m stranded.”
Forever.
Suddenly, he found himself staring at the ground, swallowing at the ache in his throat.

“What kind of plant?” she asked quietly.

“What does it matter now?” he retorted with more bitterness than he intended. When she didn’t answer, waiting quietly, he relented. “It’s called
svapnah
in Vanar. There’s no word for it in Hengeli.”

“And if you could, would you still study this plant?”

He grinned in spite of himself. “If I could, yes. Unfortunately, it only grows out there.” He waved toward the dense jungle across the river. “And I’m confined to here. Svapnah doesn’t grow well in managed terraformed gardens, it seems. Too sensitive, or more likely it grows in conjunction with something else. The proteins are too foreign to be of any use to humans, pretty much like the rest of Vanar flora, but it secretes a resin with narcotic properties similar in effect to the stuff everyone smokes here. But why would a plant evolve to develop that sort of chemical when there’s no native fauna to react to it? The only insects or birds on Vanar have had to be imported from off-world, they can’t even survive in native rain forests. Which is what makes me think there’s some symbiotic or parasitical association happening with something else, maybe microscopic, mimicking the kind of defense against attack you might find with insects or . . .” He stopped, embarrassed as he realized he had fallen into his lecturing manner.

“Interesting,” she said, amused.

“For someone who doesn’t like coming down to ground too often?” She smiled but didn’t answer. She winced, then closed her eyes and rolled her head on her neck. He could hear the minuscule pops of her vertebrae. “Are you in pain?”

“It takes a while to adjust to this gravity. I’m not used to only one direction for down. It’s nothing serious.”

He might have offered to rub her shoulders, but her demeanor didn’t invite physical familiarity. Yet the thought of touching her sent a sudden tingle through him. “Where did you learn to speak Hengeli?” he asked instead.

She unwrapped her arms and stretched out her legs, leaning back on her arms to arch her back. Her nipples stood out in relief against the cloth of her mati, and he had to look away.

“Well, whenever we’re not sucking out the blood of helpless infants, Pilots lead pretty dull lives,” she said, opening her eyes. “So mostly we eavesdrop. Spying may be rude, but it’s all the entertainment we get. Follow the Station gossip. Listen to ship chatter. Tune in to the next episode. Place bets on our favorite characters.” She pursed her lips with a wry expression. “Sounds heartless, I suppose. To be honest, it is. We Vanar are heartless people in so many ways.” She smiled wryly. “As I’m sure you are already aware.”

“I wouldn’t say that...,” he said cautiously.

“I would never expect you to. And I won’t bother to lie and claim any altruistic motives, either. I asked you to stay only because Vanar bores me rigid, and you’re about the only distraction I’m likely to find on this damned estate while I’m here.” She shrugged. “If that insults you, I will apologize and leave you in peace.”

She waited while he thought about it, unconcerned with his verdict, not even looking at him. “I’m not insulted,” he said. “I’m bored out of my mind here, too. Other than Yaenida, there aren’t many people I
can
talk with. I’d sit around and chat with the damned trees if they spoke Hengeli. So, who’s entertaining who?”

She smiled, almost a grin, sharp teeth evenly spaced. The aloofness melted. “I like that.” She looked at him in a way that made him tense, a dispassionate scan up, down, as if she could see through his clothing, measuring him with a quick inspection. “Yes, I like that very much,” she said, and he relaxed with an odd sense of relief without knowing why.

She stood in one flowing motion, taking up her black sati with her. If she had trouble in the gravity, it didn’t show in her gracefulness. “If you wish to be left undisturbed in this place, I will come only in the mornings,” she said as she folded and knotted her sati around her in a style he had never seen.

Her courtesy, so unlike other Vanar women, startled him. But if his being there was forbidden, she would not inform on him. “Will you want to be alone in the mornings, then?” he asked cautiously.

She smiled. “If I do, there are other places I can go.” She gazed around the small clearing, the water rippling in long undulating ribbons in the river, before looking back at him. “It’s beautiful, but I don’t much like Vanar, Nathan Crewe. Talking with you has been a pleasure in an otherwise bleak place.”

She walked toward the trees, back toward the House. As she passed him, he noticed she made almost no sound, but not, it seemed, because she was trying. “If you don’t like it here,” he called after her, “then you tell me: what’s a nice Pilot like you doing on Vanar?”

She laughed, full-throated. She twisted to face him, each hand on the trunk of the trees bordering the clearing, the sunlight reflected in her colorless eyes making them gleam gold, coins pressed against the eyes of a corpse.

“Getting pregnant,” she said, grinning, and vanished into the trees like the Cheshire cat.

XI

S
HE WASN’T THERE THE NEXT MORNING, NOR THE ONE AFTER, LEAVING
him disappointed, with an odd hollow ache. He wasn’t falling in love, nothing so clichéd. It was the fascination with the exotic that drew him over the wall, hurrying toward the river, hoping she would be there. But as the days passed, he was afraid she’d forgotten him.

He had never seen, never mind met a Pilot before. He knew of no one who ever had. They were the stuff of myths and drunken tales, shadowy figures made inhuman simply by their mystery. All he knew of Pilots were they were all Vanar women. Typically, the role of Pilots in fictional programs were either portrayed by breathtaking actresses with implausible anatomy, or by a variety of hideous creatures defying any possible hint of femininity. Pilotships were usually depicted as vague objects so brilliantly lit with flashing lights it was hard to make out any shape at all.

He had only once seen an actual Pilotship, when he was on the
Chandelle
as it had gone from the Quintin solar system’s station for transfer to the Cooper Station thirteen light-years away. It had not been the radiant blaze of colors favored in adventure shows, but it had been nonetheless spectacular. The
Chandelle
was one of the more midsized class of luxury cruisers, capable of accommodating three thousand passengers for voyages lasting up to several years. A pleasure liner designed for the not-quite-yet fabulously wealthy, she had everything a full-sized and affluent town could boast of, complete with theaters, sports gyms and pools, clubs, and a number of restaurants. He had gone to the civilian nav observatory to watch the docking, clinking champagne glasses with his fellow passengers, nervousness giving an edge to the festive excitement. As it was a small compartment, the invitations were restricted to those who had never seen a Pilotship docking before, a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.

Nathan didn’t know much about traveling between solar systems, despite having been the ersatz cabin boy to his mentor and patron, Ivan Brohm, for a couple years aboard the freighter WT/HG-574, known semiaffectionately to its crew as the
Warthog
. Freighters did not come equipped with a virtual nay obs, that sort of optical illusion reserved for gullible tourists. Living on the
Warthog
wasn’t much different than living inside a sealed sewer pipe and about as interesting.

He had escaped Westcastle, and hadn’t been planetside until Fat Ivan set him down on Remsill, helped him forge his academic records and identification to get him into a decent university program, and left. He had promised to return for him, but the old fat bastard was killed in a freak blowout during a Station loading just after Nathan’s graduation and bequeathed the bulk of his relatively meager estate to Nathan. Nathan had found a job teaching, and space travel had become one of those adventures that eventually fade and become only peripheral experiences in a life.

When Arcavia University had turned him down for tenure, he’d taken a year’s sabbatical and spent every last penny he had to pay his way to Cooper. He’d planned to look for employment on a freighter like the
Warthog
as a terraform ecologist like Ivan had been, with the hope of making a study of the botanical ecology on one of the dozens of planetary systems still under Hengeli control.

He’d paid his fare, wandered around searching for his cabin with other lost passengers, worried about his baggage, and trusted the actual mechanics of getting from point A to point B to the people trained for that job. He was a botanist—what would he know about space travel? But he knew a Worm could not be seen in space. It is
there
, it just
is
, and is the only method of cheating the lightspeed limitations.

Pilotships were actually a part of the Worm, the liner’s bright and cheerful travel brochure informed him. They were incapable of existing independently, and unable to remain still, even during the docking and debarkation procedures at either end. Other than that, there was no further useful information in the literature, not even a diagram.

He had been keeping one eye on the viewport while trading anecdotes with a neurosurgeon on his way to a research hospital on the Nga’esha-controlled Cooper Station. Sweat prickled Nathan’s skin in the close compartment, the surgeon’s red face uncomfortably close to his, the man’s breath soured from the alcohol.

So when he first noticed the Pilotship, it was only because the stars seemed to be extinguishing themselves, vanishing in an ever-enlarging circle. Then he made out the faint features of the Pilotship, his mind taking a minute to adjust to what his eyes saw.

It was immense, eclipsing the
Chandelle
as a giant’s boot might shadow a beetle. Light-absorbing black, quark-eating black, a smooth-hulled machine too alien to call a ship, its enormous maw slowly engulfing them and a thousand other fellow ships like plankton down the gullet of a whale as the passengers stared speechless, overwhelmed.

“Son of a bitch,” the surgeon finally breathed, and someone tittered, a strangled sound bordering on hysteria. The surgeon promptly knocked back the rest of his champagne and left in search of something stronger, too shaken to watch any more.

The actual transfer into the belly of the Pilotship took place hours later. There had been a momentary rush as the
Chandelle
was swallowed, then nothing to detect he was traveling inside the Worm at speeds he couldn’t imagine. He’d gone to bed eventually. When he woke, he was on the approach to Cooper Station, still several million miles away, the Pilotship long gone.

To have met one of the hermetic human beings who lived in the Worm, who controlled the great ships that made interstellar travel even possible, intrigued him. That she spoke fluent Hengeli made him all the more aware of his deep longing for basic, simple conversation. That she might want to see him again excited him in a way he couldn’t quite explain. It wasn’t love but desire she stirred in him: a deep physical hunger sparked by her strangeness, erotic and perilous.

Perhaps the curious feelings stirred up whenever he thought of Pratima were from the lack of any sexual contact in far too long. He found himself watching Raemik more often, constantly comparing the eerie similarities between the two, and the boy developed a wariness around him, as if he could sense Nathan’s growing sexual tension. Even the sahakharae seemed aware of his need, like vultures scenting blood. Nathan did nothing to encourage intimacy with them, going out of his way to avoid sahakharae, his own past a ghost still haunting his dreams. He wanted a woman. He wanted one particular woman. A woman who looked eerily like Raemik.