Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (10 page)

“And you know what that means, then,” Avek said.

“I think we both do.”

Chapter Five:

             
A Bold, New World

They were led by the female Uman-Chi through a maze of halls and passageways, Bill supporting Melissa until she could finally walk with just a hand on his arm.
Eventually the Uman-Chi pushed open a door to a room paneled in green, with varnished wood floors and a wooden table in the center with a red marble top. Polished rosewood cabinets lined the walls, with shelves full of bottles and urns behind glass doors. The female guided them inside, closed the door behind them all, and had handed them each robes. They looked at each other, then at her, and blushed crimson. Finally she sighed and turned around.

“They want us to put the robes on,” Melissa said.

“Yep.”

She looked at him, looked down, and looked at him, still blushing.

“Hell,” she said finally, and pulled her top off. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts, pert and pink and perfect, bobbed free. She looked into his eyes.

“Start strippin’, stud,” she said.
“You were going to see it tonight anyway.”

He started unbuttoning his shirt.
“Yeah?”

She smiled, turning her skirt on her hips so she could unfasten it, and kicking off her heels.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “It was your lucky night.”

He pulled the shirt off, then the t-shirt.
His belly felt like it had more bounce than her breasts, the skin hidden under a mat of hair. He kicked off his shoes as well.

“When did you decide that?”

She pulled the skirt off and was naked in front of him. She had shaved her pubic hair away except for a heart, just above her lips. He had never seen that before and caught himself staring. Then he realized she hadn’t put her robe on.

“I can turn around if you want,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

She turned, put her hands on the marble table, and arched her back.
This was better than cable,
he thought. He wanted so bad to touch her right then, as he pulled off his pants and his desire betrayed him.

She turned around, then reached for the robe.
It wasn’t silk or rayon, but it was something soft like that.

She looked at him and said, “I would ask if you liked it, but I already know the answer.”

He smiled as he slipped his drawers off. He was fat. He knew it, but he still felt self-conscious about it, especially with her fashion-model looks. She seemed to sense this and she laughed.

“More salads for you, Bill,” she said.
“I am going to work that belly off.”

He peeled off his socks.
“Really?”

“Yeah.”

He slipped the robe on, and he tapped the alien girl on the shoulder. She turned around and reached for their clothing.

“Man!” Melissa said. “I hope I
’m getting that top back. I just got that.”

“I think those drawers are older than you are,” Bill said.

Melissa laughed out loud, startling the alien girl. She pushed the clothing into a cloth bag of some kind, and pointed to the table. She waited for them to climb up onto it, and then she left without a word to them.

“You didn’t answer me,” Bill said, when the woman left.

“Sure did,” Melissa said.

“Did not.”

“About what?”
              “When you decided.”

“Oh, that.”

She didn’t continue and he sighed.

“Why are you fighting me off so hard,” she said finally.
“I thought you would like me.”

“I think you’re a great gal,” Bill said.
“But you’re younger than my daughter.”

It was out of his mouth before he remembered about her parents, probably a sore spot for her.

“You know what I need right now?” Melissa asked him.

His heart skipped a beat.
She saw his expression and smacked him.

“A cigarette, you dog.”

“Oh, don’t remind me,” Bill said. “I’ve been dying. And you know they aren’t going to have them here.”

“
What?
”

“Dorothy, we aren’t in Kansas anymore,” Bill said.
“I thought they were space aliens, but this is a whole other world, if these people are to be believed.”

“Do you think they
can
be believed?”

Bill shrugged.
“That tunnel between there and here would be quite a trick,” he said. “And their language isn’t like how people speak. It sounds more like whistling.”

“It was like a flute playing,” Melissa said.

“I can’t think of any language that is like that, and I used to work in communications, so I’ve heard a lot. Languages obey certain rules based on the noises people can make. And those didn’t look like people.”

“You could see better aliens on Star Trek,” Melissa said.

“Yeah, but you can always see the makeup lines up close,” he said. “Those weren’t masks, those people look that way. Those eyes are definitely real.”

“So, some kind of worm hole, star gate, watcha-ma-call-it,” Melissa said.

“I think so.”

“And we have to wait for them to let us go,” she said. “Except they don’t seem to know how we got here.”

“Yeah,” Bill said.
“I don’t like that much.”

She looked down at her feet kicking, then back at him.

“Take care of me, okay?” he saw tears in her eyes.

“Of course I will,” he said.

“No, I mean it,” Melissa took his hand and held it in her lap. “Be there for me, do the Lancelot thing, guardian protector, whatever the hell. Will you?”

He squeezed her hand.
“I will Melissa,” he promised. “I am right here for you.”

She worried about having bolted, he knew.
She either blamed herself or him, and either way she expected him to handle it.

In his heart, he knew he would
—somehow.

Their hosts
made a liar out of him almost immediately. An older Uman-Chi came into the room, and the first thing he wanted to do was separate them.

Melissa took a death grip on Bill’s upper arm.
The older man tried to guide her away by her elbow. That failing, he took a firm grip of her shoulder and pulled.

Bill straightened and pulled back on Melissa.
The Uman-Chi gave a prolonged whistle and four men came in wearing metal armor and carrying long knives, not quite Bowie knives and not quite swords.

They wore an armor of rings connected to other rings, like what had seen in movies about knights and such.
The long knives sat ready in their hands.

They looked like Uman-Chi but Bill could see the differences.
They were darker. They didn’t have the silver eyes, and they clearly deferred to this older man. Their eyebrows grew pencil thin and sat raised in arches high above their eyes. Their ears seemed more human and less pointed, and yet had no lobes.

They indicated the girl, and Bill stepped in front of them.

Overpowering one would be easy. He probably had a hundred pounds on the largest of them. From there, if he could get a knife, he had a chance.

With no warning his feet affixed themselves to the floor and his arms to his side.
He tried to pull against his own limbs, to work his muscles and defend her, but Bill remained as still as a statue. He did nothing but watch as two of them took Melissa, one by either arm, out the door and away from him. To her credit she kicked and screamed and looked to him to intervene, but he couldn’t even wave good-bye.

The moment she left the room, he could move.
At first he thought to charge after her, but the old man, the Uman-Chi, raised a threatening hand.

The old man could do something to immobilize him.
He wouldn’t hesitate to use it, and he’d been wise enough to leave two of these other beings behind with their swords out. Bill would have had his hands on the man’s neck otherwise.

Bill sat up on the table again.
The man looked into his mouth, under his robe, and at the soles of his feet. He took a sample of hair, and he talked to him the whole while, although Bill couldn’t understand it.

Finally the Uman-Chi Angron entered, and the old man bowed to him.
Angron waved him off and looked at Bill.

“You resisted our taking your female,” he said.

“Yes, I did,” Bill said. “Where is she?”

His eyebrows rose.
Probably a King wasn’t used to being talked to that way. Well, Bill didn’t know a lot of Kings.

“She is well,” Angron said.
“We are interested in your health and your nature. And we wanted to talk to you separately.”

“To make sure our stories match,” Bill said.

He nodded. “And so,” he said. “When you have answered me, then you will be reunited.”

Bill nodded and waited.

“You have no nobility where you are from?” Angron asked.

“I wouldn’t say we are animals,” Bill countered.

Angron thought for a moment, then nodded and said, “I meant you have no King.”

“Some do, my people don’t,” Bill said.

“Where are your lands?”

“A planet called ‘Earth,’” Bill said, looking for some emotion in the silver-on-silver eyes.
“Does that mean anything to you?”

“Earth is one of the Fallen Gods.
Is that what you mean?”

Bill shook his head.
“God is different from Earth, at least for my people,” he said. “There are some people who think that God is in the Earth, but not most.”

“Here, we know Earth is a god, and that we live upon and are of Him, and his mate, Water.”

Well, that seemed weird, but he didn’t say anything about it.

“You do not know how you came here?”

“I have no idea,” Bill admitted.

“How old are you?”

“Fifty,” Bill said. He almost lied.

The King looked shocked.
“In truth?”

Bill nodded.

“Do most people look like you?” Angron asked. “Are you common for your people?”

Bill shrugged.
“I don’t know what you mean by common. On my world, most people are Chinese. They have black hair, yellow skin and are shorter. In my nation, most people look like me, except not so fat.”

“What do you eat?”

“Meat, beef and chicken and fish,” Bill said. “Do you have those?”

Angron nodded.

“We eat vegetables. Some people eat all vegetables, but they aren’t the norm.”

“Do you know a man named Lupus?”

“Most people have two names,” Bill said. “But I don’t know anyone by that name at all.”

“Rancor Mordetur?”

He was leaning forward slightly. The salesman in Bill told him that this question had been what he really wanted.

“Rancor is a word that means ‘anger,’” Bill said.
“Mordetur means ‘death.’ I think in Latin or Greek.”

Angron smiled.
“So you know these words.”

“I know Lupus, too, as a word,” Bill said.
“It means ‘wolf.’”

Now Angron
really
started smiling. “So although these are not names, you know these words,” he said.

Bill nodded.

“Do you know ‘ercher nomics’?”

“Ergonomics, or economics?” Bill asked.

“What of chem—stree?” the old Uman-Chi asked. His eyes, though silver-on-silver, seemed more intent by the set of his eyebrows. This was a question he
really
wanted to know the answer to.

“If you mean ‘chemistry,’ I studied it a long time ago,” he said.

Angron turned and left. The doctor came back and looked at him some more, then left as well.

Sitting alone, he wondered at what he might have just learned.

* * *

They wrestled Melissa down a passage, dimly lit with torches, the walls gray and rough, to another room like the one she had left.
They tossed her inside and closed the door.

She found the first breakable she could, a ceramic urn, and whipped it at the wall.
It smashed into bits. She followed it with other breakables, glass and ceramic. Finally she had to hop up on the table for fear of cutting up her feet.

She felt humiliated.
She had been ripped from her home, she had been ripped from Bill, they had done something to her once that made her weak as a kitten, and they would likely do it again.

Already she felt stupid for trashing the room.
She was about to actually get up and start cleaning it when the door open and the old man from the first room entered.