Master of None (57 page)

“
You’re
Dr. Nga’esha?”

“Hae’m, qanistha bhagini.”

She stared at him pop-eyed, her mouth working before she blurted, “There must be some mistake....”

“There is, and you’re the one who made it,” Raemik said sourly, then added, “jah’nari l’amae,” with unmistakable disdain.

“I am Dr. Nathan Crewe Nga’esha, the director-in-chief of this research facility. And you must be Ulkar dva Daharanan Arjusana. I’ve been expecting you. We are honored you’ve chosen to accept a position with us. Please be welcome.” He bowed even lower to her.

“No, no,” she said, waving him off like an annoying insect. “I’ve been tricked, brought here under false pretenses. There’s no way I could work here, certainly not. I insist you take me back to Dravyam immediately.”

“Good,” he heard Raemik mutter under his breath. He kept his own expression mild.

“I’m sorry to hear that, jah’nari bhagini. Yours was one of the best graduate papers I’ve read this year, and the recommendations from the university were impeccable. I had very much looked forward to having your talents applied here. But of course, I understand your objections completely. Unfortunately, the float that brought you here is already on its way back and won’t return until tomorrow.” He shot a quick glare at Raemik to keep his son’s mouth shut, not wishing him to expose the lie. “It’s a long journey, and you must be tired. The least I can do is offer you a meal and a place for the night before you return in the morning.”

The girl glowered, annoyed. “Well, if I’m a prisoner here, I might as well make the best of it.”

“Your understanding is most gracious, thank you.” He bowed again then said to Raemik, “Would you ask Aedwyn dva Changriti if she would be willing to show our guest around the station?”

Raemik grinned, and vanished like a cat out the door.

“I don’t need the grand tour,” the girl was still complaining. “I won’t be here long enough to appreciate it. Just a bed for the night is enough.”

“Of course, l’amae.”

Aedwyn sauntered into the habitat dome with Raemik following on her heels wistfully. With her shorts loose on her hips, her mati artfully tied to show off her impressive abdominal muscles, Aedwyn Changriti was a beautiful young woman who knew all too well the effect she was having on his male graduate students and enjoyed every moment of it. Her eyes lit up at the sight of the new arrival, seeming oblivious to the look of horror she garnered in return. “Fantastic! The new peasant for the salt mines is finally here!” she crowed. “Don’t worry, he does allow us at least three hours’ sleep a night. You’ll get used to it in no time.”

“I have no intention of staying!” the new girl gasped. “When the float returns in the morning, I’m going straight back to Dravyam!”

“The float . . .” Aedwyn exchanged a quick look with Nathan, and smiled, her white teeth sharp in her dark face. He appreciated her more for her quick wits than her young, lean body. “Right. Well, let’s get you bunked in for the night then, and see if we can thin out the gruel with more swamp water.”

The Changriti girl led her scandalized visitor out of the habitat dome still chattering away at top speed, her banter disguising a formidable intellect.

Raemik tossed his head irritably, making the artful fringe of beads across his forehead rattle, another innovative fashion statement Nathan didn’t much care for.

“What a conceited imbecile!” he sneered. “As if anyone could
not
know who you are?”

“I haven’t been Nathan Crewe Nga’esha the troublemaking social reformer in a long time, Raemik. There are people whose world only consists of their own narrow specialty; the only Dr. N. C. Nga’esha they know is a research botanist. Which isn’t too far wrong.”

“I don’t understand you, Nathan. You, of all people! Why do you still let women like her treat you that way?”

Nathan sat down behind what passed for his desk—several packing crates cobbled together—and tapped his reader with his forefinger meaningfully. “Because while that particular woman may indeed be an arrogant shit, she is also the most talented botanical student I’ve read all year. This is the best research facility on Vanar, and she knows it. So we’ve got a day and Aedwyn Changriti to convince her to stay. Laws are easier to change than minds, and neither happens overnight. But once she’s here, she’ll adjust, just as everyone else has. If she’s not too major a prig, she may even learn to like it.

“And
you
had better remember you’re my son as well as Nga’esha—you represent this research facility as much as I do. That sort of rudeness is not acceptable. I can always send you back to your Aunt Yronae should you need a refresher course in manners. Understood?”

“Sorry,” Raemik muttered, subdued but unrepentant. Nathan shook his head, bemused. The lanky teenaged boy had long disappeared, the years filling out his body with adult muscularity. But underneath, he was still very much a child, his cockiness merely a veneer hiding the vulnerable insecurity underneath.

When Pratima returned briefly to Vanar, her son had obediently done his duty. She conceived twin girls immediately, her body instinctively weeding out the male sperm. It would take a dozen more years before Pratima’s children would be born to the Worm, her newest sisters and infant Pilots. But once he had fulfilled his obligation, Raemik had waited with stoic resignation for the blade to fall on his neck, his distrust of women still unswayable.

Nathan’s own reunion with Pratima had been strangely genial, her love for him undiminished, but his own tempered by fifteen years in the wait. He had caught her up on the family gossip, bragged endlessly about both his children, teased her about the difference in their ages, and made love with her with a sad tenderness while studiously ignoring her reason for being on Vanar. She’d returned to the Worm several weeks later, Raemik’s twin daughters safely embedded in her womb. Pratima would never come back to him again, he knew; she had lived forever and would die young, her time in the Worm was running out. And when the temple had come to claim Raemik, the Pratha Yronae had politely sent them on their way empty-handed, as Pratima had promised her son, before a very relieved Raemik was sent back with his father to the haven of the Dravyam mountains.

Nathan picked up the snapshot of Aenanda from his desk and cradled it in his hands, smiling. “Besides, I think that’s the same thing you said about Aedwyn when she first came, almost word for word, isn’t it?”

Raemik flushed, the red accentuated by his pale skin. “That’s different,” he protested. “She’s not like other women, not at all.”

“Mm-hm.” Nathan twisted the snapshot to make the sequence begin. Aenanda perched on top of a camel, grinning and waving merrily with the Sphinx in the background. Behind her, her petrified kharvah clutched her around the waist with the same stunned expression he wore in nearly every picture taken during their honeymoon.
Hi, Dad!
he could hear her tiny voice say just before the camel harrumphed and spat disgustingly and the sequence cut off her peal of laughter. He reactivated it to run it through the little performance again.

“Well, she’s not,” Raemik insisted sulkily. His carefully nurtured hatred of the female sex had been under severe strain since his hormones had taken a lively interest in the Changriti girl. “Anyway, are you staying here over the term break?”

Nathan grinned, replacing the snapshot on his desk. Raemik’s change-of-subject ploy was far too obvious. “No, I’m seeing Kallah for a couple days. She’s taking another kharvah, and asked if I’d be willing to participate in checking him out with Ukul.”

Since Raetha Avachi had divorced her and was happily living with an ex-sahakharae he’d known since boyhood on a remote community farm in the Praetah province, Kallah had been deliberating whether or not to replace him. Kallah had had an uphill struggle as the Changriti pratha h’máy to salvage the prestige her mother had blackened. Disgraced and censored by the Assembly of Families, Eraelin Changriti had accepted temple exile, where she kept herself content with terrorizing hapless disciples, by all accounts. Her agent, Vasant Subah, had long vanished, the latest Qsayati a Hadatha Dhikar of impeccable reputation.

The man Kallah had selected seemed delighted with the proposal. A modestly ranked member of the Qarshatha Family, he was neither young nor handsome. But he was known to be a perceptive and resourceful diplomat, and even Nathan thought it would be a sensible arrangement. He’d decided to try talking Ukul into dispensing with the usual dancing and singing routine and go instead for the more yepoqioh tradition of them all getting stinking drunk together. Now that Ukul’s nine-year-old daughter, Ornas, had been named Kallah’s dalhitri and heir, the senior kharvah’s perpetual gloom had relaxed considerably, making him much more serene these days.

“Do you want to come with me? I’m staying with Margasir after. His wife has offered me tickets to a performance at the East Suvamam Theater to show off their new students.”

Raemik grimaced. “Would you mind if I didn’t?” Traditional Vanar dance wasn’t high on his list of exciting entertainment, competing with too many off-world novelties.

“No, of course not. I take it you and the gang are planning another seek-and-destroy expedition into the wilds of Dravyam? Is the lovely Aedwyn going as well?”

The young man’s flush deepened, his transparency painful. “Amaliel is planning a party for his birthday. It’s a surprise for his mother.”

Nathan chuckled. “I’ll bet. Happy birthday to poor l’amae Uzzael dva Seonae. You pay for what you break this time and don’t look to me for the money.” The ancient Vanar tradition of honoring mothers on their children’s birthdays had lately degenerated into an excuse for general revelry and mayhem amongst the younger members of society. Amaliel was from a cheerful Middle Family used to the Dravyam Mountain Botanical Research Facilitys staff’s locustlike invasions of their tranquility every off-term. Nathan couldn’t help feeling his students were taking advantage of the family’s obvious pleasure over their son’s companionship with famous Nga’esha members. All Nathan really wanted was for Raemik finally to have a taste of long-overdue normal life, and was grateful to the Seonae for that. Any damage caused he knew he’d pay for, willingly if covertly.

“Pratha Yronae is coming end of the month to see exactly what she’s been wasting Family money on, so that extension had better be finished before you go. I suggest you get those beads out of your eyes so you can see what you’re doing, and get back to work.”

Raemik ignored him, his attention diverted by the girl leaning into the doorway of the habitat dome.

“Dinner’s on, Dr. Nga’esha,” Aedwyn said, diligently ignoring Raemik. “You’d better come before there’s nothing left.”

“Thank you, Aedwyn. Is our guest still foaming at the mouth?” The girl laughed. “She’ll change her mind before the day’s out, you wait and see.”

Nathan raised an ironic eyebrow. “Our cuisine has made that much of an impression?” The food at the Research Facility was nutritious but not notable for its excellence.

“Never underestimate the power of a properly aimed challenge,” Aedwyn said, mocking one of his own slogans. “Tell someone they can’t do something, and they’ll kill themselves to prove you wrong.”

“Oh?” Raemik said innocently. “Bet you can’t do this.” With the supreme grace the genes he shared with his sister gave him, he did a lazy handstand, then balanced on one hand, the other patting his mouth in a mock yawn. Provoked, the girl aimed a kick at the boy’s ankles, knocking him over before they both sprinted down the hill, competing with extravagant somersaults. Nathan watched them go, then shivered in the chill of early evening.

From the kitchens, he heard laughter lifted in the thin breeze. The sky over the Dravyam mountains was tinged a pale rose. A few migrant martins trilled faintly, far from their roosts in the distant city below, riding thermals in search of winged dinners of their own. As he shrugged into a worn padded jacket, he breathed in the smells and sounds, and knew he had succeeded in finding on Vanar something he had never known anywhere else in his life, something even stronger than love, more powerful than family.

“Home,” he whispered. And smiled.

Acknowledgments

W
RITING IS A SOLITARY OCCUPATION
. B
EING ABLE TO WRITE NEEDS THE
support and love of special people. I’m more grateful than I can ever express to those who made this novel possible: my friend, grammarian and polyglot extraordinaire, Andrew Plant; my “cousin” Sue Wood; my friends in the south of France, Martine de Roulhac and Eric Noye; my agent, John Silbersack; my editor, Jaime Levine; my “girls,” Caroline and Lynsey Spruce, and their mother, Sarah; true Geordie knight in shining armor, Jon Barron; and even though he couldn’t care less, my best mate, Robinson the cat.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, and subsequently bounced all over the United States and Europe,
Lee Wood
has worked as a long-haul truck driver, a surgical nurse, an insurance company secretary, a graphic artist, and in sundry other jack-of-all-trade jobs. Easily bored, she devotes her meager spare time to such activities as patchwork quilting, archaeological digs, reading bad French novels, writing medieval history research papers, and tending her medicinal and poisonous plant garden. She is currently single and no wonder.