Master of None (21 page)

They made love slowly, without speaking, black and pale blue cloth spread underneath naked bodies. He watched her in amazement as she suddenly gasped, back arching, roll after roll of orgasmic surge carrying her. She hadn’t reached the end of the waves before the tingling pressure began in his own legs, rushing through him and exploding in his head.

He dozed after that, his arm across her thin chest, her legs tangled around his. The warm breeze carried the sweet smell of the river across their sweating skin. When he woke, she had vanished as completely as a dream. He wondered at it, but was not surprised she could so easily slip away.

He rolled onto his back, his arms and legs loosely splayed against the sheer linen sati. Staring up into the electric blue of the sky as it began to darken into late afternoon, he sighed, then rose to shake the fragments of twigs and stiff river grass out of his sati.

A small package flew out of the silk folds, and he nearly lost it in the thick vegetation. Only the rainbow flash of paper caught his eye, and when he unwrapped it, he held a tiny wooden box. The fragile clasp was ancient, bronze metal in ornate design. His thumb pushed it up gently, prizing the lid open against the stiff hinge.

Inside, several dozen bloodred svapnah seedpods nested one against the other. He smiled, shaking the box a bit to make them roll across the bottom.

That afternoon, he started his garden.

He raided the groundskeeping system, the gardening tools oddly shaped as they were made for use by machines, but he managed. Choosing a site away from the main garden, screened by a stone wall but exposed to the morning light, he started breaking the ground.

Raemik settled onto the narrow ledge of the wall, sati pulled up from around his knees to allow him to sit cross-legged. Nathan wiped his forearm across his eyes to glance at the boy. His pale skin seemed to absorb the sunlight, glowing a golden color reflected from a silver mirror. The end of his sati over his head cast his eyes into shade, accenting the faint blue in his irises. But he looked distinct from his sister, now that Nathan was more adept at perceiving the subtle differences between them. He was also relieved to find his sexual confusion toward Raemik gone.

The boy regarded him silently, and Nathan went back to his back-breaking work, double digging the ground to prepare his garden site. As he worked, the only sounds were the trills of birds, insects humming in the air, and his own grunts and breathing as he dug the spade into the soil: lift, turn, break the clods with the edge of the shovel, step back, and repeat down the long row.

“You’re my sister’s lover,” Raemik said suddenly.

Startled, Nathan straightened, blinking away the sweat beading into his eyes. He wasn’t sure if Raemik meant it as a question. Probably not, since privacy was limited in the men’s house, gossip the lifeblood of their daily existence.

“I’m not your sister’s lover,” he said, recognizing the word Raemik had chosen as one that implied a semipermanence. “I”—he had to think of the various terms he could use, with all their shades of meanings—“had sex with her,” he finally settled on. “I don’t know if I will see her again.”

Surprisingly, the boy smiled, a tight, cold sneer that had nothing to do with humor. “You will,” he said. “Like attracts like. You’re both exotics.”

Nathan eyed the boy, but that seemed to be the end of the conversation for a while. After Nathan had broken the ground for nearly another hour under the watchful gaze of his young overseer, Raemik said, “Tell her she should go away. Go back to her beloved Worm.”

Nathan’s back ached as he straightened, and he jabbed the spade into the ground to give him a footrest. Leaning on the handle he looked up at the boy, breathing hard. “Why should she go away?” he asked reasonably.

There was more emotion in the single glance the boy threw at him than he’d ever seen: fear, loathing, anger, hate, and a faint sheen of desperation and bravado. “Tell her to come back in a year. I’m not ready. She can’t make me, you know. That’s one thing they can’t make men do.”

He understood what the boy meant. “And you’ll be ready in a year?” he asked dubiously.

The boy smiled enigmatically. “A year is nothing for her, and everything to me. Tell her I’m not ready yet to throw away the rest of my life.” Then he was up on his feet, running along the thin ledge of the wall with an agility Nathan had only seen before in Pratima.

As it was, Nathan didn’t see her again for several weeks, although he spent as much of his free time as he could waiting for her at the river or at the kaemahjah. There were few other places where they could meet. He had been reclining against the kaemahjah cushions smoking a water pipe and listening to the music with his eyes closed when he felt someone settling beside him. He knew before opening his eyes it would be Pratima.

What did surprise him was the depth of his hunger as he pulled her down by her neck to kiss her gently. He held her tightly, and when she pulled back, her own eyes regarded him with a touch of alarm and wonder.

“I’ve missed you,” he said quietly.

“Family business,” she apologized. She smiled, reserved. “How is your garden coming along?”

He shrugged. “I’ll just have to wait to see what comes up.”

She smiled, placing a gentle hand on the swelling in his lap. After that, they sat side by side quietly, listening to the end of the music holding hands with almost chaste diffidence. When it finished, they left by silent agreement, taking a taxi hoverfloat into the center of the city to the white tower.

They rose up the marble shaft into the top without speaking, nor even looking at each other much, and Nathan found he was vaguely uneasy. As the floor petaled back, revealing the vast room, he realized they were not alone.

He heard her before he saw the woman in the pool, then glanced at Pratima. She had her lips pursed in an expression of regret for him, but her eyes sparkled with far more animation than he’d seen before.

The woman swam languidly to the edge of the pool, dark red hair fanning out like sea grass behind her in the water.

“Pratima,” she said, her voice clear over the sound of the waterfall. As she heaved herself out of the pool, Nathan realized with a shock that she was naked and very pregnant. He looked away as she bent awkwardly to retrieve the silk robe on the floor.

Pratima crossed the huge circular room and the two women raised their hands, palms pressed together for a long moment. “Bralin,” Pratima said, more as a confirmation than a greeting. They kissed, more chastely than lovers, but far more intimately than Nathan expected.

Bralin glanced at him curiously, her eyes an unusual shade of green. She draped the black silk over her shoulders, tying it loosely above her swollen belly, and crossed to lower herself carefully onto the mass of pillows kicked into a circular screen.

“Bralin is a Pilot for the Ushahayam motherline,” Pratima said to him in Hengeli.

Bralin’s eyes widened. “You must be Nay-teen Karoo,” she said to him in heavily accented Hengeli, obviously intrigued. He felt his face flush as Pratima looked at him expressionlessly.

“I apologize if I embarrass you,” Bralin said hurriedly. “But I never before meet a . . .” She stopped, struggling for the word, then said something in Vanar to Pratima.

“Foreigner,” Pratima answered. He was suddenly sure the word Bralin had used had far more meaning than what had been tactfully translated. “Nathan, Bralin and I would like coffee.”

His back stiffened, and he stared at her, seeing nothing but an impassive cold in her face. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to serve you both, l’amaée,” he said in rigid Vanar before he turned his back on Bralin’s puzzled glance and marched toward the opposite end of the tower room.

“Coffee please, Ilitu,” he said to the mechanical spider and watched as the machine disengaged itself from the slot in the wall. The articulated robot quickly and efficiently made the thick, dark brew, but as it clamped its mandible around the tray to balance it on its flat back, Nathan got an almost perverse pleasure out of bending over to pick it up. “Thank you,” he said firmly.

The machine didn’t resist, silently refolding its jointed legs back into the slot.

The two women sat together as comfortably and close as lovers, Pratima’s palm resting lightly on the pregnant woman’s belly. They spoke in an odd, soft, rapid language, not even Vanar, he realized, resentful of even this smallest exclusion. Doing his best to parody the lowest-ranking sahakharae he could envision, he carried the tray across the room. He shifted his weight to sweep his sati to one side with his foot, and set the tray on the soft carpet. His hands shook only slightly as he held out the small porcelain cups ritually to the two women. Bralin looked uncomfortable, he was pleased to see, but Pratima regarded him with remote indifference.

He sat at their feet, head bowed docilely, not touching his own tiny cup, until the other woman finished, made polite excuses, and left. Only when she had gone did he allow the anger out.

“Does the entire planet know I’m your lover?” he demanded, using the same Vanar word Raemik had.

“Probably,” Pratima said, serenely.

He glanced in the direction Bralin had left. “And now quite literally the entire inhabited universe knows. Tell me, am I a popular character in the Pilot’s latest entertainment? Anyone placing bets on me for the next episode?”

“Not about you and me, although every Pilot is certainly aware of your presence on Vanar,” Pratima said quietly. “Nathan, why does it surprise you to find you are known? Of course people are curious about you.”

“Is that what I am? A novelty? A rare animal in a zoo to be stared and pointed at?”

She paused, her head to one side, then, “Why are you so angry?” “How can you ask that?” he said hotly, dropping any pretense of meekness. “You snap your fingers and expect me to jump, then parade me in front of your friend like a prize bull.” He stood up, pacing away from her. “I expected better than that from you.”

“Did you expect me to be someone other than Vanar?” she said quietly behind him. There was no emotion at all in her voice.

He was shaking. Westcastle had smelled like the sea in the winter when the sporadic acid rains churned up salt into the air from the desolate badlands. Sometimes, when the light was right, he would pretend the shimmering mirages on the horizon really were water, wanting desperately to believe in a magic that, if only he prayed hard enough, would deliver a boat to sail him away and set him free. He had never stopped believing in that magic. He didn’t want to now.

“Did you expect
me
to be someone other than Hengeli? I’m not your whore, Pratima, not some plaything to be used and thrown away when you get tired of me.”

When he turned toward her, some trick of the light filtering through the pseuquartz threw a slant of rainbow-prismed color across the room, splashed against her white skin like colors spilled from a child’s paint box. “I see,” she said softly. “Do you want me to take you back to the Estate?”

His pride made him badly want to say yes, but he knew if he did, he would never see her again. She was not a woman who would come around to ask his forgiveness.

“No,” he said, miserable. “I love you.” She didn’t react any more than if he’d told her the correct time or that the weather looked like rain. “I want you to love me.” He gestured toward the exit where Bralin had gone. “I don’t want to be just a bit of lewd gossip between Pilots.”

“You want more respect than that,” she said, and he wasn’t sure it was a question.

He walked deliberately back and sat down next to her. “Don’t I deserve that much? Or are you really so Vanar that every man is nothing to you?”

She was the one who finally looked away. “I’ve never lied to you, Nathan. But whatever I feel about you, whatever you feel for me . . . is irrelevant.”

“Why?” He heard his voice break.

She laughed sadly. “Because I’m a Pilot.” When she looked up again, her pale eyes glittered wetly. “I’d have thought you’d have noticed by now.”

“I’ve noticed,” he said, and took her hands. “Do you love me, Pratima?”

“I don’t know. I do know that I want you, more than anyone I’ve ever known.” Again, it was that cool lifeless voice, totally devoid of feeling.

“Then take me with you.”

“I can’t.”

“For godsake, why not?” he demanded, not bothering to amend the gender of the deity he swore by. “You’re a Pilot, you can do whatever you
want
!”

Her mouth twisted in a spasm of anger and pain, but she left her hands trapped in his. “Even Hengeli is discerning enough to make the distinction,” she snapped. “I didn’t say I
won’t
. I said I
can’t
. Nathan, I live inside the Worm. If you think it’s lonely here, you can’t imagine what it’s like on a Pilotship. I live with a hundred other women who are so completely like me, it’s as if I am alone. When I speak with my sisters, I’m talking to myself. When we make love, it’s only masturbation—”

She laughed at his shock. “What did you imagine we were like? We’re human beings, too. We have feelings, we are capable of love. There’s nothing I want more than to be with you. But you can’t survive in a Pilotship. The first time we passed from one End to the other, every atom in your body would be torn apart.”

“I could stay on one of the liners in transport—”

“How would I reach you? A Pilotship is part of the Worm itself. There’s no access between a Pilotship and the cargo we transport.”

“You got from there to Vanar,” he pointed out.

“Yes,” she said. “On an automated single-passenger shuttle I have no control over. It goes to Vanar and back and that’s all. There’s only one way on and off this planet for me. And
only
for me.”

“Then stay on Vanar. Stay with me, Pratima.”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “I can’t. That would kill
me
.” “You’re here now, and you seem far from dead,” he objected.

“I only come to Vanar once a year, and I don’t stay planetbound any longer than I have to. It
hurts
me to be here. Every minute I’m here, this planet is literally tearing me apart inside.”