Master of None (8 page)

The color of police.

The two Dhikar smiled at him, professional cold smiles as each of them kept one hand on his arms while the other remained casually loose, palm open and ready. His mouth suddenly dry, for a wild moment he was convinced he was being arrested for picking leaves. As they pulled at him gently, urging him down the gravel path, he tried to explain, unable to think of the Vanar words to protest his innocence. He was physically stronger than either of the women, but before he could object further, one of them had almost lazily grasped his wrist. The implants under her skin vibrated, and sharp agony shot through his entire body, bringing him gasping to his knees. The humming stopped, but the pain lingered. Even so, he knew from previous experience he’d gotten off lightly. They led him stumbling down the pathway, incapacitated, murmuring to him encouragingly, but warily cordial.

Another woman in a white kirtiya sat on one of the carved stone slabs Nathan had never been sure was meant to be sculpture or bench. Her face was dappled in the shadows of a tree, bent over an open reader balanced on her thigh, one leg tucked under her, deceptively benign. Light winked from her sati clip, the polished stones a deep wine color. The women stopped him a few paces from her, the three of them lined up side by side with their hands firmly gripping him between them.

As she looked up, Nathan recognized her, even expecting her. He would have been surprised had it not been her. Vasant Subah. He knew what the words meant now in Vanar:
spring morning.
Her dark eyes would have been pretty had their expression not been ice cold.

The two women did not relinquish their grasp on him, his arm still numbed to the shoulder, preventing him from greeting her with anything more than a small bow of his head. At the same time, he remembered he still held the ginkgo leaf in his other hand, the one not numbed. His fingers closed over it, crushing the tender evidence in his sweating fist.

She didn’t return his salutation, simply staring at him impassively for a long moment before snapping the flatscreen shut and placing it on the bench beside her. She stroked light fingers along her forearm absently, as if unaware of her habitual action, the implant pushing up the skin of her wrist into knotted ridges. He glanced at it, then forced himself to look away, his heart twisting hollowly in his chest.

“The public exposure of male pubic hair is considered indecent,” she said finally. She spoke in Hengeli, her accented voice mild. It was the complete lack of anger or hostility that frightened him more than had she shouted. He felt suddenly sick, wondering how they had found out about Namasi.

She waited, and when he didn’t respond, she said, “Complaints have been made. To continue to intentionally exhibit your sexual hair is not only obscene, but deeply offensive.” Now he was confused, and that frightened him even more.
Sexual hair?
Then he understood, almost laughing with the tension. He reached up despite the grip on his arm to touch the edge of his mustache incredulously.

She smiled, a thin, polite grimace. “Get rid of it,” she said. “You won’t be warned again,
ajah ae malinam
.” The insult was spoken in such an amiable tone, he didn’t realize until he’d translated it in his head:
worthless shit from a goat
. She waited until she was sure he’d understood. Then she stood, and the two women on either side released him and followed her at a languid pace. His hands trembled badly as he pulled the edge of his sati over his head to conceal his face.

The attendant at the baths was an old man, bad tempered and sullen, and Nathan was sure it gave him a certain malicious delight to strip the offending hair from the face of the foreigner. Without his mustache, his upper lip felt oddly sensitive. That night, he swam by himself in the baths, trying to exorcise his fear by sheer physical exertion, but it left him feeling sick and depressed.

He sat staring out of the tiny window, his wet hair cold against his back, while his fingers constantly brushed the denuded skin of his upper lip. Fear wore out to a numb rage, memories of the months of interrogation obscuring the view of the city below.

“It’s just a goddamned mustache,” he murmured to himself, trying unsuccessfully to convince himself.

That night, he dreamed again. A dozen blue-robed women silently watched his futile efforts to dress himself in an endlessly long length of linen that seemed to grow out of the cracked floor. His wrists were weighted down with heavy gold bracelets studded with jewels, locked together like manacles, making it impossible to drape the cloth around his hips. The folds frustratingly slipped from his nerveless fingers. The cloth crumbled into dust in his hands. He looked up at his silent judges as Vasant Subah stepped over their cardboard figures.

She glared at him with undisguised distaste, dark eyes over high, sharp cheekbones. The skin of her forearm writhed, drawing his unwilling attention. He stared in helpless fascination as the implant came alive, metamorphed into a black insect slowly waving long stick legs as it oozed out from under her skin and crept around her wrist, intimate in its wiry knowing embrace. His own skin crawled. He would do anything, he knew, say anything, submit to
anything
to escape that creature’s touch.

“Answer the question,” she said, but her voice was Yaenida’s. He was startled; he couldn’t remember being asked any questions, but suddenly wanted desperately to answer them, wanting to make this woman believe him.

The sati in his hands vanished, as if sucked back into the center of the earth. Vasant Subah pointed over his shoulder. “It is for your own good.” He looked behind him at the whitewomb in dread. Thousands more squatted in long rows, so many they vanished into the dream-darkened horizon. He tried to run.

Without knowing how he had gotten there, he was abruptly inside it, the whitewomb skin sealed up behind him without a seam, jelly crawling down into his throat, filling his lungs.

“Mer’iv báat sunoh,”
he called to the obscure forms moving outside the whitewomb wall. He pressed his fingers against the pulpy skin, begging. “Listen to me, please . . .” The shadows continued on, ghost figures, unconcerned. He woke to more rain, clawing his way into consciousness and gasping, the air too thick and humid in his lungs. His head pounded with a vicious headache.

It rained for four days, a constant lukewarm drizzle too tenuous to be anything more than annoying. At night, the lights of the city were obscured in the glitter of the crystal drops of water running from the edge of the roof jutting over his window. Nathan’s window faced west, and in the morning, the light poured in on his face, golden on clear days, the color of molten lead on cloudy days. At sunrise and sunset, he was high enough to look down on sharp-winged black swallows, the patch of white between their shoulders, sweeping and tumbling close to the building. Higher above him, the specks of dark purple martins spiraled, trilling as they rode the air currents to feast on insects driven up by the rain. By midmorning, both martins and insects vanished, seeking shelter from the humid afternoon heat to wait for evening.

The humid heat slowly turned his tiny room in the public residence into a sauna. After four days of confinement in his microscopic apartment, the constant noise of his neighbors echoing down the hallways, not even the heat, the rain, or insects could keep him inside.

Fear locked him in, loneliness drove him out, enough to risk another encounter with Vasant Subah.

He left his apartment, beginning the slow climb down from the complex to the narrow street emptying out into the city below. The streets, at least, were swept clean if not dry, and by pulling the end of his sheer sati over his face as a screen, he could discourage the worst of the tiny gnats still hovering in clouds.

While the white sati marked him as an outcast, it also gave him a certain luxury of isolation, free to roam the wide, sculpted boulevards with tiny oases of parks, winding streets lined with shops and tall Vanar houses, all curves and melting shapes. Steel gray clouds hovered close to the ground, the rumble of thunder in the distance, and when the rain began its slow drizzle, he ignored it, as did most Vanar habituated to the endless wet. Within minutes, his clothes were soaked, and he held his well-patched umbrella up more to keep the water from running into his eyes than for any hope of staying dry.

He was not the only one on the streets, but he was one of the few men outside, and the only one unaccompanied. Naekulam were supposed to be socially invisible and politely ignored, but he knew he wasn’t an ordinary naekulam. Whenever the curious stares became too uncomfortable, he stood in front of shop windows, pretending to examine merchandise he could never even hope to afford.

As he turned away from one of these shops, he caught sight of her, at first not recognizing the tall woman in the red sati. It was more her gait, the roll of her walk that jogged his memory. Then he saw the flash of dark auburn hair.

“Lyris,” he said to himself, a blaze of hope singing in his blood. Then, louder, “Hey, Lyris, it’s me!” The woman didn’t turn her head as she walked away from him. Here it was, his chance to get off this god-damned planet, escape from this nightmare. He broke into a run after her, hobbled by the wet cloth adhering to his legs. “Lyris!”

When she didn’t respond, he thought he might have made a mistake, but when she turned a corner, she glanced back at him, the glimpse of her face enough.
“Lyris!”
He jerked up the edges of the sati, freeing his legs to run. If he saw it, he didn’t understand until later that she had sped up her pace, trying to avoid him. “Lyris, wait...”

He grasped her arm lightly as he reached her, forcing her to stop. She swiveled her head to one side, then the other, as if she wasn’t sure which way to turn to look at him. “Lyris, it’s me, Nate.”

He wasn’t prepared for the hostility as she spun around and glared at him. “I know who it is,” she said harshly. “
Everybody
knows who you are. Leave me alone, Nathan, okay?”

“Lyris, you have to help me, please. . . .”

“Let go of me!” She shook off his hand fiercely. “I want nothing to do with you, Nathan. Don’t bother me, or I’ll call the Dhikar, do you understand? Just leave me the hell alone!”

He stared after her, too shocked to feel hurt as she walked swiftly away. Disbelieving, he mouthed her name. A sudden flurry of motion out of the corner of his eye made him turn his head just in time for a stinging slap to his face. He staggered, then nearly fell as a short, furious woman jabbed stiff fingers hard against his chest. He was taller than she, outweighing her by nearly half, and he stared at her as she berated him loudly, jerking at his sati, shaking an indignant finger in his face, shouting at him angrily. A small crowd formed as women stopped to watch, a few grinning. They laughed as she pushed his chest again.

All the repressed fury and resentment suddenly boiled up in him. He took a single step toward her, his fists clenched, teeth bared, shaking with anger and even eager for a fight. She froze, her eyes round, her mouth an O of astonishment as she jerked back from him. He stopped, glancing at the expressions of alarm and outrage from the gathering witnesses. Several others from the crowd stepped up protectively beside the short woman. It took all his self-control to un-clench his fists and bow his head meekly.

Emboldened by the reinforcements, she resumed her harangue with more belligerence. The mood of the crowd had changed, the amusement replaced by a grim hostility as he was pummeled. Ringed in by the women slapping and pushing him several more times, he stumbled and tried to pull his wet sati to cover his legs and arms before he gave up. Although the blows were more annoying than actually painful, the ominous quiet frightened him. The women finally left him huddled with his face pressed against a building, fingers clutching at the damp stone wall.

When he turned, the spectators had gone but for a lone woman standing quietly, the rain tapping against her umbrella. His own lay torn on the street. He shot her a glare of pure hatred as he adjusted the edge of his soaked sati over his head with shaking fingers and picked up his broken umbrella. She watched him, her eyes impersonal, then
tsk
ed before she turned away. It wasn’t sympathy, he realized, but the disapproval a benign mother might give an ill-behaved child.

He knew he could not take much more. Not even Vasant Subah had been able to crush him as thoroughly as this place was doing now. His dream of escape had shattered. But if he was going to at least survive here, he knew he had to find help.

It took him the rest of the day to walk the long boulevard leading to the Nga’esha Estate. Slogging through the rain and mud, ignoring the traffic speeding by him, he hiked up the wandering hillside toward the walled villa. The road ended at a large gatehouse. Two Dhikar women who could have been clones of those with Vasant Subah but for the blue and gold edging embroidered on their white kirtiya and saekah, watched him approach with wary curiosity. They emerged, right hands flexing the cords of the implants under the skin of their forearms in warning.

He stopped in front of them, his body trembling from fatigue. His drenched sati clung to him, slovenly and mud-stained. Miserable, his head hung, the rain pouring from the ends of his wet hair like a veil of beads over his face.

“My name is Nathan Crewe,” he said in stumbling Vanar, praying they could understand him. “I want to see Yaenida Nga’esha.”

He suddenly covered his face with his hands, appalled at himself but unable to keep from weeping. Slowly he went to his knees in the wet road, no longer caring, unaware of the gentle hands on his shoulders and the women’s surprised and uncertain concern.

V

A
FTER HIS SECOND AUDIENCE WITH YAENIDA, SHE HAD GIVEN HIM NO
idea of exactly when he would be summoned back to the Nga’esha House, leaving him waiting a lot longer than he ever expected or hoped before she sent for him. While he waited, whenever he couldn’t stand the cramped closeness of the shelter, he worked off his nervous energy by walking. From one end of the city to the other, wandering the streets aimlessly. He learned to walk with his eyes down, diffidently polite, his shoulders hunched to try to make himself appear as small and nonthreatening as he could manage, not easy when he stood a good foot taller than everyone else.