Master of None (25 page)
T
HE TAEMORA DIDN’T TAKE HIM BACK TO THE BOYS’ DORMITORY, INSTEAD
guiding him through a maze of corridors and stairs to a room at the far west end of the women’s house. The single window overlooking a small garden was grilled with an iron lacework rather than the usual carved wood. It was pretty, loops and curls of metal shaped into leaves and birds, and quite secure. When she shut the door, Nathan heard the solid clunk of the deadbolt slide into place. He didn’t much care.
The room had no decoration at all, but was not quite desolate enough to be called a jail cell. It was not a place he hoped he’d have to spend much time in, although he had lived through worse.
A few ordinary pillows had been thrown onto a narrow ledge built along one wall, serving as both bed and divan. He sat on the low edge, legs crossed, and stared out through the openings in the metal lace barring the window. Rubbing his wrist, he wondered when his emotions would return, then was curious whether or not they
would
return. He hadn’t eaten since morning, but he had no appetite.
He sat quietly for over an hour before he heard footsteps and the bolt sliding back. He turned his head as the door was pushed open, but made no other movement. Raemik held a rolled sleeping mat as the taemora carried Nathan’s own small chest of belongings into the room. She dropped it unceremoniously onto the floor as Raemik slipped wordlessly into one corner. Checking Nathan’s eyes and pulse, she muttered to herself and pressed a medgun against his shoulder, the contents hissing painlessly into his body. He had no interest in what it might be.
She left, bolting the door firmly behind her. Raemik settled into the corner, sitting on his sleeping roll, chin on his knees.
“Are you in trouble, too, Raemik?” Nathan finally asked.
“No. But someone has to watch you.”
Nathan smiled briefly, glancing at the barricaded window. “I don’t think I could escape. Even if I could, where would I go?”
Raemik didn’t answer. Nathan leaned against the wall, withdrawn, gazing at the growing darkness without interest. The lights around the outside walls glowed as night fell, the sounds of insects growing in the quiet. Raemik had curled up on his sleeping roll, asleep. Stretching out across the narrow ledge, Nathan dozed off.
He woke from his recurring nightmare, jerking out of the vivid dream gasping and painfully awake. For a moment, he was sure he was back in prison, sealed in a whitewomb, the suffocating gel clogging his lungs. His heart pounded against his rib cage, racing out of control. His nerves felt as if they were on fire, and he was convinced he was about to die. Raemik’s pale eyes glinted in the dark as Nathan stood up, his legs stiff. He fought down an insane panic, unsure of what he meant to do.
Then his stomach rebelled and he smacked his hand against the wall panel, throwing up convulsively as the toilet emerged. He fell to his knees, his forehead pressed against the wall, eyes squeezed shut as he wept helplessly. Raemik’s cool hands settled gently on his shoulders.
The boy helped him back onto his bed and sat next to him silently while he shuddered uncontrollably. Suddenly, Nathan laughed, horrified as the harsh sound tore out of him, leaving him breathless and watery-eyed. The laughter subsided.
Exhausted, he fell asleep, limbs jerking as nightmares crawled through his brain. A cloud of shapeless black pursued him as he ran, the smell of smoke. His legs sucked down deeper into thick mud, a roar of death behind him he dared not look back at. His own voice crying out woke him. He lay on his back, drenched in sweat. His skin itched as if insects crawled on him. Raemik sat beside him, watching impassively.
“How long...,” he croaked, swallowing against his parched mouth, “. . . how long does this go on?”
Raemik shrugged. “I don’t know. The taemora says a day. Maybe two.”
It was closer to three. On the third day, he had recovered enough to keep himself under control, although the irrational fears had given way to a glum depression. They both glanced up as the door unbolted, but instead of the taemora, Pratima stood in the open doorway. A sharp pang jolted Nathan from his gloom, and he smiled.
Raemik bowed stiffly as his sister entered, then slipped around her to leave.
“You have no need to avoid me, Raemik,” Pratima said sadly in Vanar before he could vanish, but not turning to look after him. “I am your friend.”
The boy stopped, his face unreadable. He likewise didn’t turn to look at his mother. “No,” he said, his voice old, “you are not.” Then he was gone.
Pratima sat cautiously next to him. “Along with all the other reasons my brother has for despising me, I think he is also jealous.”
Then she was hugging him tightly, her thin arms around his neck.
T
HEY KEPT HIM IN THE ROOM, ALTHOUGH THE DOOR WAS NO LONGER
bolted against him. He quickly found that he was never allowed out of someone’s sight no matter where he went within the House. Although he was free to walk the small enclosed garden outside his window, the main grounds and the river as well as the doors leading to the outside were now completely forbidden to him.
For the most part, Pratima stayed with him at night, Raemik slipping away the instant she appeared. She shared his lonely meals, but disappeared from time to time. He asked no questions, and made no complaint, grateful she was there at all.
When Laendor, one of Yaenida’s numerous cousins, arrived to inform him Yaenida had sent for him, she didn’t even glance at the Pilot, as if Pratima didn’t exist. He squeezed her hand and followed Laendor to the library.
The room assaulted his senses, the smell of old books, stale smoke, and fresh polish as familiar as the buttery light cutting patterns through the wooden screen, but all of it now felt somehow wrong. Yaenida sat packed in pillows in her usual huge chair, her reader already glowing against the wood grain of the long table. His own reader lay unopened on the table.
“I trust you are feeling better, Nathan?” she asked him with a mocking smile.
He wondered if the flutter in his stomach was only a residual effect of the lajjae or if the fear was his own. He stared at her for a long moment, his mouth dry.
Her brown eyes squinted through smoke, drooping eyelids red rimmed. The shriveled skin was tight against the bones of her face, deep wrinkles cutting folds along her cheeks. She wore a plain sati, but rather than the sheer linen he wore, hers was woven of the finest imported birdsilk, gold thread intricately shot through the costly blue material, opaque and faintly iridescent. Several heavy gold bracelets weighted her emaciated arms, and although the pin holding the edge of her sati at her shoulder was elegantly simple, the large black diamond in its center was worth far more than Nathan would ever have hoped to earn in twenty lifetimes.
It hadn’t quite sunk in until that moment how close he had come to execution. He put his palms together, fingertips to his chin, and bowed deeply. “Most certainly, jah’nari pratha h’máy,” he said submissively in Vanar. When he straightened, her mouth had turned down in a frown.
He slid into the narrow chair and studiously opened his own flatscreen reader, avoiding her eyes. “I’m ready, Pratha Yaenida.”
She held the tip of the water pipe to her mouth with one hand, her nails thick and yellowed, while her other hand rested over the edge of the chair, gold bracelets tinkling as she moved her wrist absently. “Yes, I suppose you are.”
He inhaled to steady his nerves. “This naeqili is very sorry for the trouble my anger has caused—”
“Don’t, Nathan,” she cut him off, her voice pained. When he looked at her, she couldn’t meet his eyes. “Don’t apologize to me. You had reason to be angry.”
They sat in silence for several minutes. “If their decision had been different,” he was surprised to hear himself say, “would you have had me killed?”
“Possibly,” she admitted. “But not without a fight. Especially now. I doubt not even Eraelin would choose to oppose me that badly, and she got much of what she wanted, anyway. That, and for some reason I’ve become rather fond of you. I value your delightfully male insolence. I never meant to break you of it. Just curb it a little, for your own sake.”
It was as close to an apology as she would give. He didn’t know what to say, and sat with his hands folded in front of his reader like a docile child.
She sighed, suddenly appearing haggard. “Yes, Nathan, it’s true that I paid to bring you here. But I didn’t ‘buy’ you like a piece of meat. I paid for a service, privately and quietly. I thought I could trust Lyris to recruit someone who would have understood completely what he was getting into and be willing to remain on Vanar for the rest of his life, in return for a most generous compensation to his family. He had to have excellent credentials in history, comparative xenosociology, and applied psychology, as well as being sufficiently bilingual.” She smiled grimly. “I also had hoped for someone with a similar racial appearance to the Vanar, which might have made his integration less... conspicuous.”
“That’s not me,” he said cautiously.
She sucked in a lungful of smoke and blew it out in a fine stream, watching as it curled toward the carved beams in the ceiling. “No, it’s not. You certainly were not what I had ordered. I had thought her competent enough to find what I wanted since she’s spent most of her life off Vanar and knows the systems very well. I must admit I was vastly disappointed in her when she delivered a botanist. An excellent botanist, I’m sure, but you’re lousy with languages and you aren’t trained in any field that would have been of value to me.”
“And after you discovered I wasn’t the goods you’d ordered, you let me rot in prison. You know what they did to me there. For six
months
, Pratha Yaenida.” He felt his repressed anger begin to simmer, and fought to keep it down.
Her eyes narrowed. “I also taught you what you needed to know to get out and stay out.”
He had to force back the bitter laugh. “Then you packed me off to a charity shelter and abandoned me, which wasn’t that much better.”
“A shortsighted error on my part,” she admitted calmly. “I didn’t think you would be of much use, and I know when to cut my losses. I was not interested in social experimentation. As a result, you’ve learned Vanar haphazardly and have a lot of bad habits that have been difficult to rectify.”
In spite of himself, he did laugh, a hoarse, humorless cough. “So why didn’t you just toss me back in the pond and fish out another Hengeli if I wasn’t up to your standards?”
“I tried,” she admitted unashamedly. “Unfortunately, the deal I made with Lyris was barely legal, and only because I am pratha h’máy of the Nga’esha Family. Once the Changriti were aware you were here, I knew I couldn’t keep my more peculiar contracts quite so private. It was unlikely I would have another chance to repeat such a transaction. You’re the first permanent non-Vanar resident male in our entire history, Nathan, and it looks like you’ll be the last.”
“It’s me or nothing,” he said, bewildered by his own wounded pride. “But why can’t you let me go now? What good am I to you?”
She smiled, her hands busy as she tapped out the ashes and placed another pinch of resin into the bowl of her pipe. “Flexibility is the key to survival, in business or botany. You may not be what I ordered, but I invested quite heavily in you. I hate to waste money. And you’ve presented enough new challenges to keep things interesting. It’s been entertaining simply to observe how you’ve adapted. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to see the end of the experiment, Nathan. I am running out of time.”
That shook him. “Yaenida—”
She cut him off. “I am the matriarch of the Nga’esha, the most powerful and wealthy of all the Families on Vanar. The Nine Families own every Worm in existence; we have controlled the monopoly on trade between inhabited star systems for over seven centuries.” Her words came clipped and indifferent. “Only the Nga’esha hold the Worm connecting us with the entire Hengeli dominion, the richest system of settled worlds. No one,
no one
can defy us. Not even the Changriti.”
He studied the knuckles of his folded hands. “I know all this, Pratha Yaenida,” he said softly. He knew it very well.
“There are more people on Vanar who speak Hengeli than you might realize, Nathan. But there are very few native Hengeli speakers who know Vanar.”
“So you’re trying to turn me into a translator anyway.
Why?
”
She idly watched tendrils of smoke spiraling on the faint breeze through the wood lace screens. “Vanar is an isolated world ruling behind a screen of mystery. We are the unseen dragon. We move, and all that is heard is the sound of scales rasping. We breathe, and only the fire in our nostrils can be seen. They know we’re here, impregnable in our lair.” Her voice was flat, devoid of pride. “No one needs to measure the dragon to know it’s not wise to annoy her.”
She took a long inhalation on her water pipe, her intent gaze on him. He found himself studiously avoiding her eyes. When she exhaled, the smoke curled lazily. Like dragon’s breath, he thought.
“The Changriti are blinkered and unreasonable. But I am not the only pratha h’máy too old and frail to be popping up to this Station or that when I need to negotiate with the yepoqioh. And I have never found negotiation by remote control as effective as face-to-face contact. It is useful to have outsiders see how we live, the Nga’esha House far more impressive and intimidating than a Station conference room. Profits are the sole reason the Changriti haven’t been able to shut out all foreigners completely. I want more than just profits. Ours is a unique and rich culture we should be proud to share with the outside, not cut ourselves off even further.”
He thought about how much of it he would definitely not like to see shared, but kept his mouth shut.
“If I had chosen a woman to import into Vanar, that would have aroused too much suspicion in minds already welded shut. But a man?” She shrugged. “It might raise a few eyebrows, but no one would seriously consider a toy for an eccentric old woman as a threat. Until you. What a troublesome toy you turned out to be.”