No Other Love (4 page)

Merin’s rage was not the result only of
Herne’s words, nor of her growing frustration at her inability to
fit into Tarik’s colony. She was frightened by the way she had felt
when Herne touched her while treating her cut face. She was so
careful never to touch anyone. She had been warned since childhood
of the danger. But his hands had been so gentle on her face. She
could still feel his fingers on her chin and her cheek. She wanted
to put her own hands on the spots. She resisted the impulse, but
she could not stop the urge to strike out at him, to say the same
kind of cruel things to him that he had said to her, for though he
did not know it, his curiosity was cruelty.

“Shall I be equally rude and challenge you
about the customs of Sibirna?” she asked, her voice as cold as the
winter wind on his home world. “Where you were born and raised the
vile natures of children are quelled with harshness, with constant
painful punishment, until those children grow up into
sour-tempered, irritable men and women, quick to take offense,
eager to quarrel. Say what you will about the Oressians, my people
have never started an interplanetary war.”

“Who knows whether they have or not, when
they are so secretive that they will allow no outsiders on their
planet?” he retorted. Then, suddenly, he gave her a lopsided smile.
“I don’t even know enough about your people to insult them
properly, unless it’s by accident. That’s a fine situation for a
violent Sibirnan, isn’t it, when you are saying those terrible
things about my folk?”

“Every word I spoke is true. I have studied
your world’s history, and I have observed many Racial types while
at Capital. But, Herne,” her anger dispelled by her brief verbal
attack, she took a step toward him, looking directly at him as
earlier he had told her to do, “there is in you a streak of
kindness and gentleness that is at variance with your own
traditions and upbringing.”

“On my world,” he said, “the sick and injured
are left to themselves, to die or recover as the local gods
ordain.”

“Did it hurt you to see that?” Something in
his voice told her it had hurt him deeply.

“Once, when my mother’s sister was ill, I
took bread and drink to her. She died anyway, and I was beaten for
trying to help her.” He was still sitting on the ledge, staring
down at his hands. “It was then that I knew I could not live all my
life on Sibirna.”

“So you left and became a doctor?” she asked,
fascinated by these revelations. How different Herne was from the
harsh man she had first imagined him to be, and how hard he tried
to hide the gentle part of himself. Yet the attempt was not
completely successful. She had seen through it. “Was the practice
of medicine your way of channeling your kindly impulses into useful
work?”

“Something like that,” he admitted. “But I’m
still a product of my upbringing. Is that why you left Oressia?
Because you didn’t fit in, either?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I fit in perfectly.
There and nowhere else.”

“Then why leave?”

“You would not understand.” Because he was
looking at her with a sweet half smile that tugged at her heart,
she added, “It was done because my age group was too large.”

“You mean excess population is sent away?
That’s been done often enough on many worlds. Younger sons or
daughters with no economic opportunity where they grew up,
political or religious dissenters, all have migrated and colonized
elsewhere since history began. You know that. It’s the same old
story. You go somewhere else and build a new life.”

“As you did?”

“I haven’t done too badly, considering my
past,” he said, thinking that this was the first time he had ever
spoken so freely about his early life. Odd that it should be Merin
who had generated his openness. Emboldened by the apparent
friendliness of their conversation, he added, “Why don’t you ever
take off that headdress?”

“I cannot. It is forbidden.”

Her voice was so calm and quiet that Herne
persisted. “Not on any world except Oressia. And this is a new
world, freer than any other place I’ve ever been. Take off that
stupid contraption and let your hair blow free. I assume that
Oressians do have hair.”

She stared at him in such disgust and horror
that Herne imagined she was afraid the would try to rip off her
coif. When he rose from the ledge and stepped toward her she backed
away, terror in her eyes, and he felt a stab of remorse, tempered
by something darker.

Having just opened his heart to her, he had
expected in return some revelation of her own private feelings. He
was disappointed by her continuing reticence, and angered by it,
too. He knew he ought not to expect intimacy from her. Oressians
were reputed to be incapable of emotional closeness, though they
were so secretive that no one could be certain of what they might
feel. Herne forced himself to swallow the frustrated anger that was
so much a part of his own cruel upbringing. He tried to understand
her reaction to what he had just suggested so he could soothe her
obvious fear of him.

“Here, now,” he said, catching her shoulders
with hands that shook a little from his effort to be gentle with
her. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a complete beast. I won’t
hurt you, Merin, I promise.”

Merin stood trembling, knowing she ought to
pull away from him, especially when he bent his head, put his lips
against hers, and pressed. She had seen other men and women do
this, and had been shocked by such an intimate gesture. Thankfully,
it had never been done to her before now. It was an obscenity. She
should not permit it. And yet….

“Merin?” He drew back a little, looking
puzzled. His hand caressed her chin, then her wounded cheek, and
the sensation was sweeter than it had been the first time he
touched her face. She lifted her head, following the motion of his
hand, keeping the contact as long as possible. He steadied her face
with his fingertips and put his mouth on hers again. There was a
sweetness in his lips, and a warmth toward him building inside
her…. When she whimpered in fear of her own emotions, he let her
go.

“I never really noticed you before we came to
Tathan,” he said. “Not as a woman.”

“Do not notice me now.” She made her voice
cool and crisp. “Never touch me again. I am not like other women
you know; I cannot respond to what you want.”

“You just did.”

“You are mistaken.” She turned from his
bewildered look, trying to think of something that would prevent
him from ever kissing her again. Picking up the recorder from the
ledge where she had left it, she paused, fingers ready for work.
“Is this where your encounter with Ananka took place? On this
ledge? Please recite a detailed account for the colony
archives.”

“Damnation!”

“I would hardly call that a precise
explanation,” she said, “though there may be some grain of truth in
it.”

“What in the name of all the stars are you,
that you can ask a question like that after we just kissed?” he
demanded.

“I see no connection whatsoever between the
two events,” she told him. “As for what you did to me, it was
wasted effort on your part. I felt nothing.”

“You’re lying.” He sounded angry as well as
bewildered.

“Oressians never lie. It is against our
law.”

“But you aren’t an Oressian anymore, are you?
That’s one thing I do know about your people. Once you have left
the planet, you cannot return. You are no longer an Oressian
citizen.”

She favored him with a look from those
wondrous purple-flecked eyes, a look that would have stopped an
attacking Jugarian crab dead in its own slime.

“If you have completed your survey of this
chamber,” she said, turning off the recorder and tucking it into
her belt, “we had best return to the surface. We are overdue with
our hourly report to the computer. Tarik will be worrying about us.
And he should see the artifact you found as soon as possible.”

“You did feel something,” he muttered,
watching her begin the climb up the dirt-covered steps. If she
heard him, she gave no sign. “And I am going to find out why you
repressed every normal response to me. No woman who can become as
angry as you were could possibly be as frigid as you pretend to
be.”

As anyone who knew him might have predicted,
Tarik was fascinated by Herne’s discovery of a recorder with a
serial number matching that of the recorder Merin was using.

“There is simply no reasonable explanation,”
Tarik said, holding the partially cleaned instrument. “This model
has been manufactured only during the last five years, yet here we
have the same recorder in ruins six centuries old.”

“Some quirk of time?” murmured Osiyar, his
telepathic training leading him to consider possibilities others
might find frightening or unnatural.

“Here in the Empty Sector,” Herne began, for
once apparently ready to back one of Osiyar’s peculiar
theories.

“This is nonsense,” Alla cut into their talk.
“I am certain there is some scientific reason for what Herne has
found. Given enough time and thought, we will discover it.”

“My dear,” Osiyar told her, smiling, “after
our intimate association you should have learned that not
everything in the universe has a rational cause or effect.”

“I must admit,” said Tarik, “that all the
theories occurring to me are unreasonable and so unscientific I’d
rather not consider any of them until we have more
information.”

That seemed to close the discussion. The
recorder was packed away in the cargo hold to await further
cleaning and examination upon their return to headquarters at Home.
Merin continued to use her own, matching recorder every day.

Feeling oddly disturbed by the duplicate
recorder and frightened by her emotional and physical reactions to
Herne, Merin tried to avoid him as much as possible. It was not
terribly hard to do. For a place built by only a few telepaths,
Tathan covered a large expanse of land. The telepaths had
surrounded their houses with spacious gardens and had maintained
many parks and open areas. All of this, as Tarik observed, would
have made it a green and pleasant place in which to live. The
visible ruin stretched over many acres, with still more buildings
buried under earth, trees, and bushes. Their aerial surveys had
shown evidence of outlying farms and villas, but those areas had
yet to be thoroughly mapped.

In all this space it was easy for Merin to
stay away from Herne. By saying she wanted to record every detail
of Osiyar’s impressions of the city his ancestors had built, she
was able to convince Tarik to switch places with her, so that he
worked with Herne. Osiyar said nothing about the change, accepting
Tarik’s decision with his usual serenity, but Alla was another
matter.

“So you can’t stand working with Herne any
longer,” Alla said. “Why don’t you just fight back when he’s being
difficult, instead of withdrawing into yourself as you always
do?”

Refusing to say anything about what had
happened between Herne and herself, Merin kept her eyes and her
fingers on the recorder. Alla would not be discouraged.

“He was in one of those black moods of his
after he saw that invisible woman. That was the day you worked with
him. Did he say or do something to offend you?” Alla asked, adding,
“I suspect Herne only became a doctor so he could have a legal
excuse to torture people. I will never understand why Tarik chose a
Sibirnan for our colony doctor.”

“Tarik probably chose Herne for the same
reason he chose the rest of us,” Merin replied mildly. “Because we
are all misfits in one way or another.”

She had been watching with interest while
Osiyar eased a piece of stone out of a mound of dirt and weeds.
When he looked up, laughing at her words, their glances met for an
instant.

“Indeed,” said Osiyar, his sea-blue eyes
twinkling. “Even those of us added to Tarik’s colony after he
reached this world are oddities.”

“I, at least, am not a misfit or an oddity,”
Alla declared, looking at Merin in a way that made her wonder if
Alla planned a lecture on the subject of Oressian aloofness.

Osiyar stopped whatever Alla might have said.
“We are here to work, not quarrel. Now come, my dear, help me to
clean the dirt off this carving.”

“This entire trip is a waste of time,” Alla
told him. “We need more workers and heavier equipment if we are
ever going to do any real excavating or make any important
discoveries.”

“That’s not entirely true,” said Osiyar.
“Tarik and I have been working with Merin to map the location of
specific buildings and some of the streets.”

Merin stopped listening to them. She
respected Osiyar, but found it impossible to understand how he
could be so patient with Alla. Perhaps his telepathic powers gave
him special insight into Alla’s true feelings, which were buried
beneath her constant barrage of sarcasm and criticism toward
others. It might be that the strength of their bond to each other
lay in the mysterious physical relationship between male and
female. Merin dared not speculate on that fearful subject, but when
she tried to clear her mind Herne’s voice intruded on her
thoughts.

He stood a short distance away, discussing
something with Tarik. Since their visit to the grotto, he had
occasionally tried to talk with her. When she did not respond to
him except on archeological matters, and then as briefly as
possible, he gave up and began to ignore her. It was better so. The
thought that he might want more from her than the kisses he had
already stolen made Merin feel ill.

While she was able to endure the busy days by
avoiding Herne completely – and when she could not avoid him, by
not looking at him and declining to enter into extended
conversation with him – the nights were another matter. With all
five of them crowded into the shuttlecraft, it was harder to
pretend that Herne was just one of the others, no more to her than
Tarik or Osiyar. His kisses had changed that safe relationship
forever. Merin found it increasingly difficult to sleep in the same
shuttlecraft with him.