Master of None (4 page)
He winced, not willing to reminisce on either the young woman or the botched scheme that had trapped him here.
She raised one eyebrow at him. “I am still gullible enough to want to believe your absurd offer was made because you like me, rather than merely as a tactical strategy.”
“I do like you,” he said, then admitted, “but it was both.”
“Of course.” She hesitated, then asked, reluctantly curious, “Could you really have been able to make love to me?”
For an answer, he cupped her chin in his hand to tilt her face upward. Leaning over her, he brought his mouth down on hers, first a gentle press of his lips against hers. Then he parted her mouth with his tongue, and kissed her deeply, ignoring the smell of smoke on her breath, the faint taste of decay and death. He closed his eyes, feeling a sudden tenderness, something beyond passion or carnal desire, a sadness and affection for this dying old woman.
The kiss went on with a growing intensity until, to his own astonishment, he felt a flutter stirring in his gut. Her hands caressed his arms, the brush of bird’s wings against his skin. His heart was beating fast before she was the one to finally push him away, two bright spots of color on her wrinkled cheeks.
“You would kill me, Nathan,” she said, and laughed. He heard the girl’s lighthearted laugh and kissed her again, this time only a chaste touch of his lips to her forehead.
When he stepped out into the sunshine, his body protected from the hot sun by layers of undyed linen, he walked quickly away from the men’s gate as it shut behind him and stood at the edge of the road leading away toward the center of the city below. He looked back up at the sprawling estate dominating the hillside, trying to determine which arched window she might be behind. No birdlike figure perched above to see him off, the high walls of the enclosed House as impervious as the formidable
Dhikar
guards watching him with deceptive tranquility.
But he found himself smiling as he walked away, bare head up and enjoying the sunshine before he caught the disapproving scowl of two women passing him on the other side of the road.
He ducked his chin down and covered his head with the edge of the dingy cloth as he walked. Keeping his eyes lowered, he pulled in his natural confident stride to one less assertive, more restrained.
More appropriate for a proper, respectable Vanar man.
I
T HAD SEEMED LIKE SUCH A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME. ALL HE HAD
wanted was enough sketches and notes and field samples for a narrow but formative article on indigenous Vanar botany, enough to make his name within the narrow confines of academics at least. He’d thought it simple enough, choosing a spot as far away from human habitation and any contamination of native flora from terraformed fields as possible to be undetected. Looking back now, it had been utterly preposterous that he could have Lyris drop him in a pod from the
Comptess Dovian
down to the planet, run loose through the jungle undetected, grab up a bunch of plants, and dash back to the
Dovian
before it took off for another cargo flight.
He didn’t even last thirty seconds after landfall. In the midst of the densest alien rain forest he’d ever imagined, he’d opened the pod to find an entire contingent of women in their quaint native dress waiting to greet him. He’d been disappointed, but not frightened. Surely the worst that could happen would be immediate deportation on the next ship out, with or without a stiff fine. And these ladies looked harmless enough, until he’d smiled and advanced toward them, hoping to talk his way out of trouble....
The next thing he remembered was waking up in a small cell. He had expected to be interrogated, but instead had been escorted through a series of different buildings and passed from hand to hand until he found himself undergoing a thorough medical examination. He had been stripped, prodded, poked, scraped, scanned, and bled, then abandoned to sit naked on an examining chair in a locked room.
All of the medical personnel had been women, none of whom spoke Hengeli, which was nearly as disconcerting as the brusque treatment. He had never been on any world where, no matter what the native language was, Hengeli hadn’t been the most widely used vernacular. Insignificant as his home world might have become, her tongue was spoken on a hundred worlds throughout the star systems. All except, it seemed, on Vanar. The few memorized phrases Lyris had taught him achieved only blank looks and silence.
After several hours, he dozed off, jolted awake when the door hissed open. A lone woman stood in the doorway, studying him curiously. Her face was light bronze, dark eyes over high, sharp cheekbones. Her black hair was pulled back from her face and hung in a thick ornate braid over her shoulder. Her full lips and small delicate nose didn’t soften her hard expression in the slightest.
He covered his groin with his hands, both embarrassed and vulnerable, but she didn’t appear to notice his absurd gesture of modesty.
“My name is Vasant Subah,” she said in accented if fluent Hengeli. She wore the simple blouse and loose-fitting pants he had seen Vanar women on Station wear, hers a luminous white with a deep burgundy border. Although she didn’t appear sympathetic, she didn’t seem hostile, either. “Who are you?”
“Thank God,” he breathed. “My name is Nathan Crewe. I’m a Hengeli citizen. I request to see a lawyer, please.”
The corners of her lips curled up sardonically. “A lawyer?” Alarm prickled the hair on his neck. “Or whatever the Vanar equivalent is. Under the human rights directives of the Convention, I am entitled to legal counsel.”
Vasant Subah stared at him, and rubbed her forefinger across her chin as if to stifle a laugh. “
What
Convention? Vanar never signed any Convention; we were never part of your Territories. You are subject to Vanar laws now.”
Now he was truly afraid. “Am I under arrest, then?”
“You could call it that. As you’ve trespassed into Vanar illegally, you’re suspected of being a saboteur or a terrorist.”
“Terrorist!” he blurted in shock. “I’m no terrorist, I’m a botanist. All I wanted was to take some samples of Vanar flora for scientific examination. Ask Lyris Arjusana, the subcaptain of the
Comptess Dovian
. She’ll tell you—”
“We’ve already spoken with Subcaptain dva Arjusana.” Vasant Subah cut him off. “Her story seems a bit too far-fetched to believe.”
He swallowed, his anger tempered with fear. “But it’s the truth. Don’t I even get a trial? You people must have some sort of a justice system, don’t you?”
“Of course we do. You’ve already had your trial. You’ve been found guilty of illegal entry.” The woman’s stiff formal attitude had softened, although he wasn’t certain the contemptuous humor replacing it was much of an improvement.
“Fine, no problem, I admit it. I’ll pay whatever the fine is. So deport me.”
For some reason that made her smile even wider. “That almost convinces me,” she said. “Who would send a terrorist into Vanar as ignorant as you are?” Her eyes glittered with malicious amusement. “But whatever happens to you isn’t my concern. Others will have to decide what to do with you.”
“So why are you here?”
Her smile faded as she stepped toward him. “To find the truth.” He glanced down at her arms as she flexed strange muscles, ropy cords writhing under the skin. When she touched him, he understood.
H
E QUICKLY FOUND HIS DEMAND TO SEE A HENGELI OFFICIAL REPRESENTATIVE
was not only futile but his daring to even question the Vanar legal right to hold him prisoner punishable in ways he hadn’t dreamed of. His indignation at this injustice quickly turned to desperate offers to pay whatever fine or serve whatever time or hard labor they chose to sentence him to, all attempts at reasoning or pleading with his captors utterly ignored. He never stopped thinking of escape, but eventually he stopped talking about it, realizing his best defense was to remain silent and compliant.
After several months of Vasant Subah’s agonizing interrogation whenever she felt he was too slow or unwilling to answer her relentless questions, he couldn’t imagine his torture could have gotten any worse.
He was wrong.
He couldn’t remember how he had gotten where he was, wherever that was, dimly aware of being cradled inside a spongy egg-shaped chamber, a soft white glow all around him. His entire body was enveloped in blood-warm membrane, and he gagged as he realized he couldn’t breathe, no air in his lungs. He flailed in horror before he realized he wasn’t actually suffocating. The membranous fluid enclosed his face, down his nose and throat into his lungs, keeping him alive. All he could smell was bitter cinnamon. He could move, but it was like swimming in jelly. It pressed lightly against his eyes, making even blinking slow. He ran his fingers over the surface of the smooth, soft barrier. It felt like living tissue, deceptively fragile, but no amount of desperate clawing at it had any effect. Although he wasn’t hungry, he couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten, his stomach oddly tight. He’d never been so terrified in his life.
Drugs washed him in and out of unconsciousness, the sticky membrane delivering the chemicals through his skin and lungs. Every time he managed to fight his way back into waking,
something
knocked him down again. He fought the dreams, one nestled into the next, like an infinite set of hollow dolls, prying one open only to find another inside.
He had no idea how long he slept. It might have been hours. It could have been weeks.
It was certainly forever.
Suddenly, he was no longer asleep. Three women, barely visible through the opaque membranous wall, watched him. Two of them he knew now to be Dhikar, the Vanar equivalent of police. The other he recognized. The Qsayati Vasant Subah, head of Vanar security.
“Where am I, what is this?” he struggled to say, heart beating rapidly. His voice sounded strange, muffled in his own ears, and he wondered if she could hear him.
Apparently, she could.
“It’s called a whitewomb. These are designed for disturbed patients.”
“Patients? I’m not ill.”
She smiled wryly, her face distorted through the membrane. “There are no prisons on Vanar. We didn’t know where else to put you. It was decided this was the best solution, for your own protection as well as ours.”
His anger flared even through the stupefying drugs. “If this is how you treat people, I’d settle for being treated like dirt, that might be an improvement.” He watched her idly stroking the implants in her arm, and fought down his panic. He pressed his hands against the pulpy wall to steady himself. “But you
are
going to kill me if you keep me in this thing for too much longer,” he said less heatedly. “Or is that what you intend to do to me?”
She stared at him for a long moment. “Your alien physiology does seem incompatible with our whitewomb system. Most patients find it... soothing.”
He gasped as he felt his palms being pulled into the whitewomb’s membrane, and tried to pull away.
“Stop resisting,” Vasant Subah advised him. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”
His hands were sucked through with a wet pop. The gelatinous fluid flowed around his face as the membrane expelled him, his arms waving eagerly like a blind man’s in front of him. He felt the odd vibration of her implants as Vasant Subah took his forearm. Without thinking, he tried to jerk away from her.
“If you fight me,” she warned, “you’ll go back inside.”
His fear of the whitewomb barely outweighed his fear of her, but he stopped struggling.
“Don’t pull,” she said as his head was released, his eyes opening wide as the membrane peeled back with a wet smack. She held him steady as his remaining foot was slowly spat out, her fingers wrapped firmly around his biceps. He shivered in the cold air, his naked skin worm white against the brown of the woman’s hands. Trying to inhale, he panicked when his lungs didn’t respond. His knees buckled as he vomited, expelling a huge amount of membranous jelly from his lungs and throat. The women allowed him to remain on his hands and knees, coughing hoarsely until he could breathe again, before helping him to his feet.
He glanced at the whitewomb behind him. It had sealed up without a seam, and now resembled a partly deflated oversized beachball someone had forgotten to add air into. A dozen more squatted in neat rows, a few as pale as mist, others with their shadowy contents moving sluggishly inside, hidden from view. He looked away, shuddering.
The women took him to a place where he could shower the sticky white coating off his skin. Once he was clean, one of the impassive Dhikar silently handed him a paper jumpsuit. He pulled it on with trembling fingers. As he fastened the disposable suit, the second Dhikar produced a pair of gold bracelets decoratively incised and set with small gems. She clipped one around each of his wrists, their function made clear when she locked them together quite functionally as handcuffs.
No one spoke as the two slender Dhikar held him casually between them, following the Qsayati through the long corridors. His damp bare feet stuck to the hard floor. Although he stood a good head and shoulders taller than either of the Dhikar, by now he knew better than to even think of resisting them. Their slightest touch was enough to inspire his wholehearted obedience.
A stocky woman waited as they approached, a large door at her back. Like Vasant Subah, she wore a loose shirt and pants, but of a pale blue shimmering silk, intricately embroidered, pleated, and immaculately pressed. She had one thumb hooked on an ornate belt around her waist, standing with her legs apart and her chin arrogantly high. She examined him with undisguised contempt as they stopped in front of her.
Vasant Subah nodded toward the Dhikar. They bowed slightly to the Qsayati and left without a word. The woman in blue held a quick conversation with Vasant Subah while he watched expectantly, his starved senses jittery.
“Personally,” Vasant Subah said finally as she turned to Nathan, “were it up to me, you would remain permanently in the whitewomb. I don’t care if it killed you or not. However, others higher in authority have taken an interest in your welfare.”