Master of None (7 page)
Although he was lonely, he was rarely alone. Everything about Vanar life tended to be conducted in the company of others. The Vanar men spent a good deal of their waking hours in the shelter’s community baths, more, he suspected, out of boredom than an obsession with personal hygiene. Nathan’s flash sink doubled as a toilet, but for anything more than a simple piss in the night, he had to use the community baths on the ground floor.
He found the baths a necessity, but didn’t enjoy the curious stares or the silence that fell whenever he walked in, the empty circle that formed around him as people backed away in distrust. Whenever he disrobed and fed his clothing into the bath’s cleaner, standing naked and impatient for it to reemerge, he endured the open examination of men marveling at his freckled pale skin, the whispers and indiscreet pointing at the blond hair at his groin, the glint of gold curling across his chest. Only their obvious fear kept him from being physically touched.
He finally learned to use the baths at night, by silent agreement with the other residents. Alone, he exercised nude in the shelter’s gymnasium and swam to exhaustion in the long, shallow pools, his muscles slack from long disuse in prison. As his body hardened, he felt his mood improve, his spirit reviving. He had survived growing up in Westcastle. He could survive Vanar. Eventually, just as he had West-castle, he would escape Vanar as well. He would never give up hope.
Although he was still treated with wary distrust, he was often stopped in the streets, usually by a Vanar woman either scolding or curious. His halting apologies and incomprehension usually discouraged any lengthy conversation. He learned which areas to avoid, not for fear of crime, but because naekulam were discouraged from invading areas reserved for more privileged classes, particularly women from the Nine Families.
Curiously, one place that was not off limits to him, or any Vanar regardless of family, sex, or rank, was the Assembly of Families, the heart of Vanar justice. The Assembly was the largest building in the city.
A long, undulating staircase led up to the columned porch of the semicircular building, and an assortment of Vanar citizens usually could be found scattered across the steps, a colorful spectrum of sati. Anyone could petition to be heard by the Assembly, even the white-robed naekulam generally huddled protectively at the far end of the shadowed colonnade, with expressions of either hope or dejection as they waited for their hearing.
He spent several weeks sitting on the floor in the men’s public balcony watching the proceedings on the multiple layers below, not understanding a damned thing, but entranced by the mystery. It became the highlight of his day, hours spent enjoying the choreographed chaos, the multitude of discussions flowing around him like atonal music. Here was the key, he knew, to the soul of Vanar. He knew there was some kind of pattern, just outside his comprehension. The gestures and faces were curiously relaxed, like a family reunion of a thousand contentious relatives, everyone at ease with the familiarity and the arguments.
He watched as an elderly naekulam gestured eloquently with his hands as he talked to two Vanar women, serious expressions on their young faces. Whatever point the old man had to make, it convinced the women to lead him off across the vast hall, swallowed up by masses of other discussions. Nathan saw the three later when he descended from the balcony, the old man and two women now kneeling beside an older woman seated against the marble wall, the naekulam silent and immobile as the younger women discussed his plight, their hands moving with the same grace as they spoke. He wondered if the old man had won his case, wondered what his case might have been. Wondered if he would ever be able to understand Vanar well enough to plead his own causes.
Occasionally, he would see a face he’d seen elsewhere in the city in the swirl of figures in the vast open hall and feel the strange shock of recognition without actually knowing who she was. Once he had seen young Namasi dva Ushahayam ek Sahmudrah, sitting on a ledge with a woman in an identical shimmering green sati who could have been her sister. He observed how they spoke, their hands flitting like butterflies in rhythm with their speech. It made him again deeply lonely and intensely aware of how naturally the Vanar touched each other with casual ease, all but him. Namasi threw back her head and laughed, her round face smooth, delicate, her companion’s arm around her shoulders. He felt his face flush hot, a bittersweet tension in his gut, watching from his hidden vantage until they left.
Once he saw the Dhikar police Qsayati, Vasant Subah, walk by below him, unaware of his presence. His skin prickled with a strange fascination. She strode confidently across the marble floor, kneeling gracefully before two other women seated along the curved ledge. The Qsayati bowed and sat back on her heels. As she spoke, she gestured languidly with one arm. Even from this distance, Nathan knew which arm it was. Her mouth moved, words drowned in the chorus of voices echoing through the hall.
And once, he had seen a high-level meeting of the nine
prathae h’máyah
of the High Families, all but two in the flesh. Of the two being sent in remote, he recognized only Yaenida Nga’esha, the other transmitted image of a woman far younger and, he assumed, far from Vanar. The nine matriarchs of the High Families sat with the female members of their families in a circle around the center of the hall, listening as several women took their turn to speak. The audience was larger than usual, tension in the air, but he understood no more of this discussion than he had the old naekulam’s. One pratha h’may had spotted him in the crowd, a woman with a face like chiseled stone, wearing the Changriti burgundy. Even separated by the mass of bodies milling between them, he felt the hatred in her eyes like an unpleasant intimate touch. Not all Vanar found him an entertaining novelty.
Vanar was a warm planet with a shallow axis, the seasonal difference between winter and summer measured in rainfall. Even in the dead of winter, it was infrequently cold but rained constantly. He found a discarded umbrella in a rubbish pile in the early morning while wandering the streets looking for odd jobs before the automated cleaners arrived. Half a dozen of its intricate spokes were broken, the fragile silk torn. He sat cross-legged on the floor of his room with tiny bottles of varnish and glue, scavenged scraps of cloth and pieces of wood shims he carved himself, carefully repairing the umbrella while rain fell in gray sheets outside his window.
His nearest neighbor across the hall, an elderly man with a ratty white-streaked braid reaching nearly to his knees, sometimes halted just beside the archway, watching him while pretending not to. Nathan learned to ignore him, surprised one dismal afternoon as the man leaned in the doorway and placed a bright red umbrella against the wall then brushed away an imaginary insect from his face to avoid looking at Nathan. When the man left without a word, Nathan examined his umbrella, opening it to find a long rent in the silk.
He studied it thoughtfully, then shrugged. Basting the torn edges together, he glued a long strip of discarded silk across the tear and let it dry before he painted on a layer of thin varnish to waterproof the surface. He left it balanced against the open doorway before he went to sleep, and found it gone in the morning.
Two days later, the old man walked straight into his room, and without a glance in his direction began to cook a meal using Nathan’s own food supply. He watched carefully as the old man expertly chopped his vegetables, adding pinches or handfuls of different spices, and stirred it into a hot oiled pan. The old man served one platter for Nathan, one for himself, and they ate together in total silence. It was certainly the best meal he had had since his release. When they had finished, the old man cleaned up their dishes before he left without a word or glance.
If Nathan had any hope he might start up a friendship, it was quickly dashed, the old man ignoring him as studiously as before. He tried to reciprocate, walking into the old man’s room with food to prepare another meal, but had been firmly and all but physically ejected. A debt had been paid, that was that.
Nathan spent a good deal of his time sitting on the lumpy sleeping mat in the alcove, his chin resting on arms crossed on the window ledge, gazing out the moon-shaped window. This was the only truly pleasant aspect of his apartment, the view overlooking the city all that kept the room from being claustrophobic. He still had trouble with bad dreams. When he couldn’t sleep, he sat in the dark and stared out into the night.
The city, which he later learned was called Sabtú, extended out in the valley below him, bisected by the river. The lights of the old town glittered in the dark like gems of necklaces thrown down carelessly. The rest of the city fanned out from the narrow hills at the mouth of the valley and spilled into the basin for thirty miles. Streets branched off to looped clusters of residential villages, each quarter populated by its own extended family network, complete with small markets and cafes and entertainment. A cluster of bridges roped across the river, and on the other side of the river, a compact mix of tall spires towered at the core of the city, gleaming white spikes and turrets blended together like fused crystals. The lights of taxis and long public trains lit the roadways. Long boulevards trailed from the center like crooked spokes of a half wheel, and at their far ends, the roads ended at the walls of sprawling private villas of the High Families, the palatial estates tiny cities in their own right on the hillsides. He eventually determined which of them belonged to the Nga’esha, the massive fortresslike walls snaking their way across the hillside, nestling where the river forked on the edge of the city.
Most days, the haze of mist obscured the horizon around the city. On a clear morning, Nathan could see as far as the agricultural fields, rolling land cleared of the massive native trees. All he had wanted to do was to walk out into the fields to examine the drones trundling along the rows of crops, sunlight glinting from their metallic beetle backs as they searched out what few bugs had managed to elude Vanar importation screens. There had been no fences, no gates that he could see, but he’d only reached the edge of the fields before he’d been stopped politely but firmly on the road by solidly built women in drab green coveralls. Sitting between them, sweating and terrified, he’d been taken back to the city in their maintenance patrol hoverfloat and dropped off at the first street they came to. He didn’t attempt it a second time.
Sometimes, if the clouds had lifted far enough, he could even just make out the black band of indigenous forest in the distance that surrounded the edges of the city like a lake of darkness. The Vanar cared surprisingly little about the native rain forest, their efforts concentrating on terraforming an ever-increasing expanse of land. Vanar or Hengeli, human beings needed food evolved from the same genetic foundations, native Vanar flora too primitive and too alien for human physiology. Narcotics the Vanar derived from the native svapnah were not as strong or as effective as those of other off-world sources, nor could Vanar hardwoods compete with the giant forests of other long-established timber companies.
Occasionally, he saw a convoy wandering through the jungle toward Dravyam to the south, or the high-speed train to Praetah in the northeast, lights winking briefly before it disappeared, burrowing its way through the dark. Far behind him, hidden on the other side of the mountain, cargo lifters launched from a remote airfield, bright specks of light like shooting stars in reverse, arrowed at an angle into the night sky.
But as elegant as it was, Sabtú was small for a capital city and an unimposing center for the planet’s government. Compared to the glittering cities of other planets in the settled systems, Sabtú appeared almost naively provincial. But appearances, Nathan knew, were deceiving. To his eyes, Vanar houses most resembled half-melted wedding cakes, built from natural materials and decorated with colored glass windows, copper tiled roofs, open atriums, and fountains and breezy verandas drenched in flowers and climbing ivy. Its rustic ambience was careflully crafted, with all of Vanar’s sophisticated technology deep underground, hidden under a veneer of simplicity. Nathan tried not to think too much about their technological capability he had already experienced at firsthand.
It was as much an act of minor defiance as boredom to grow a mustache. He’d only once let the hair on his lip grow as a teenaged boy, curious to see how it would change his face. The spotty growth had made him look even more an ungainly adolescent. After a few months, it was a relief to finally shave it off. Now it grew in with an adult luxuriance, a thick red gold he enjoyed stroking with his fingertips. He kept it immaculately trimmed with a pair of tiny scissors, every hair clipped neatly in a line just meeting his upper up. He smiled whenever it was stared at in the streets, with a strange perverse pride.
When the rains let up, he escaped the monotony and loneliness of the charity shelter by walking through the parks of Sabtú. Taking advantage of a sunny day, he was grateful to have the freedom to wander, open air on his skin. The trailing edge of his sati hung limp from one shoulder, the heat of the sunlight against his bare head as he wandered through the wooded park. He stopped to admire a dense mass of purple linaria growing along the winding path, then crouched on one knee to let his fingers trail through the rich earth under a carefully pruned ginkgo. When he stood, he plucked one of the ginkgo’s rounded leaves, rubbing his thumb across its surface as he studied the splotches of yellow against the dark, vibrant green. He absently wondered what the pH of the endless rainfall was, missing his portable analysis lab kit, and was trying to diagnose what might be causing the discoloration when a light touch on his arm made him jump.
As he turned his head to look at the woman standing beside him, someone grasped him by his other arm. He caught the glint of a bead inserted within the woman’s right ear. Each of them had a tiny button of black protruding from the hollow of the throat where a subvocal transmitter had been surgically embedded. The rest of the implant was barely detectable, the spidery threads of a subcutaneous parasite wrapped around the windpipe just visible under smooth skin. He recognized a couple of the devices clipped to their more functional than decorative belts, as well as the emblems pinned to their shoulders. White kirtiyas over white saekah, theirs was not the unbleached drab colorlessness of his linen sati but pearl white, iridescent, luminous white. The color of power and authority.