The Marann (8 page)

Her mouth formed a small O, and her
eyes went wide as she turned to run back to her father. “Fafee!”
she cried. “I want to see everything!”

The Sural chuckled and nodded at the
man before turning to continue on his way, grateful the child had
distracted Marianne from asking about the theater crowd which had
reacted to the musician with the powerful gift. With one hand, he
settled the flower circlet in his hair. In truth, he had found the
child’s offer of it heart-warming.

He should not have startled Marianne,
but the prankish festival mood in the city had overcome him. It
did, however, help to set the human tutor a little off-balance,
making it easier to redirect her attention. The child had done the
rest. Marianne seemed to have forgotten about the music.

“Do you think there will be anything
here I can eat?” she asked, her eyes on the booths along the
street.

“Possible,” he replied. “Did you bring
your scanning device?”

“Right here.” She patted her… he had
heard her call it a
skirt
. Like robes, the peculiar
half-garment possessed pockets, and she seemed to have tucked the
food scanner into one.

The dark green
skirt
fell from
waist to ankles. Tucked into that, she wore a white garment
covering her upper body and arms. The color combination was
outlandish—laborers wore that shade of green, and no one but the
Jorann wore white. Since no human belonged to any caste, his
daughter’s tutor should, by all logic, wear Suralia blue. Instead
she wore a different color every day. It was… strange and exotic,
much like the woman herself.

A pleasant hum filled the air.
Marianne walked along the street, scanning the food at each booth,
the little device blinking red. He followed, nodding at the cooks
and the bystanders who bowed as he passed, observing as Marianne
smiled and exchanged words with them.

“Phooey,” she muttered, as she reached
the last booth and the device still blinked red. The street opened
onto another, smaller square, this one hosting entertainers. Her
face brightened. “What’s this?”

In the courtyard’s center, a musician
sat within a semi-circle of conical drums. He started up a beat,
and a few heartbeats later dancers joined him, gyrating and leaping
in a complicated pattern. Marianne hurried forward to stand with
those watching the display, delight shooting through
her.

He had not moved from the square’s
edge when the dancers finished their performance and the spectators
formed a circle to dance around the drum musician. Kyza slept
through it all, while the nurse stood beside him, keeping her
senses fixed on her slumbering charge. Marianne returned, pleasure
flashing in her eyes.

“Join them,” he said.

She glanced back, biting her lower
lip. He sensed longing in her. “I don’t know the steps,” she
replied.

“This dance is simple. I will teach
you.” He pulled the sling over his head, taking care not to wake
his daughter, and gave her an empathic caress before leaving her
cradled in the nurse’s arms. “Come,” he said, as he turned toward
the circle dance.

The steps were, as he had said,
simple, and Marianne danced with enthusiasm after a few
repetitions. When she needed no further instruction, he gave
himself up to the dance, relishing the rare opportunity to interact
with ordinary Suralians.

<<>>

Marianne lounged in a garden gazebo,
savoring the crispness in the air from the approaching autumn. The
graceful pavilions in the garden had become her favorite place to
spend time when she was not engaged with Kyza. The Sural had joined
her to continue a discussion begun over the morning meal.
Discussion finished, they had fallen silent, listening to the
flutters singing and chattering in the cora trees.

The Sural lifted an eyebrow and gave
her the penetrating look she’d found so unnerving when she first
arrived. “What were you reading when I joined you?” he asked. In
English. His accent sounded like a cross between Scandinavian and
New Mandarin.

Her eyebrows tried to meet her
hairline. “You speak English?” she exclaimed.

One side of his mouth tilted
upward.

“When did you learn
English?”

“The winter after your people first
made contact with us.”

“How
did you learn
it?”

“The Terosha were happy to teach us,”
he said. “Just as they were happy to teach our language to
humans.”

“Well,” Marianne said. “Well.” She
blinked and opened her mouth again, but no other word came. She
closed her mouth with a huff.

“Read to me from your tablet,” he
said. “One of your poets.”

She spent another moment huffing at
him, then at random chose a twenty-second century English poet,
Gaidon Damerell, known for his exquisite sonnets about love and
nature. The Sural leaned back against the gazebo, eyes closed and
long legs stretched before him, listening with a small smile on his
lips.

As she read, Marianne tried to stick
to Damerell’s poems about nature. Reading a love sonnet to the
Sural seemed inappropriate, so she skipped them. When she stumbled
into one that began on a pastoral theme but turned erotic, her
voice hitched, and he opened an eye, his face impassive.

“What do you find disturbing?” he
asked.

Blood rushed to her face. “It’s...
um... it’s not appropriate,” she stammered. “Not by human ethics.
To, uh, discuss intimate topics with—with an employer. Or someone
from a much different social class.”

His eyes glinted. “Compared to my
people’s love poems, that was chaste.”

“I would be more comfortable if you
permitted me to choose another.”

He shrugged a shoulder. “Proceed as
you like.”

<<>>

In the autumn, Kyza turned into a
noisy, grabby toddler who followed Marianne around the stronghold,
chattering and babbling, switching from one language to another:
the human languages Marianne had come to teach and the Sural’s own
dialect of Tolari. Marianne wondered if the tot believed she was
her mother, but it was also obvious she adored her father. She
preferred him to anyone else present, begging to be carried,
rubbing her forehead on his cheek, crawling all over him when he
sat. He tolerated it all—more than tolerated it, seemed to revel in
it. He was gentle and patient with his active, curious
daughter.

Winter brought treacherous
temperatures, putting an end to time in the garden and, indeed, to
any movement out of doors. Marianne’s usual haunt moved to the
guest wing common room, which contained a small library. Not all
the books on the shelves were in the Sural’s dialect, and Marianne
began to spend her free time puzzling out books written in a simple
dialect close enough to Suralian for her to understand it. When she
felt she had mastered the language, she gave it a try on the
Sural.

He eyed her with growing amusement as
she spoke, then burst into the first honest laughter she’d heard
from him. Sporting a crooked grin, he composed himself and said,
“You sound like a Paranian. I shall have to find some books from
Detralar. Detrali is even more amusing to most Tolari.” He stifled
a chuckle, his eyes sparkling.

“Why is that?” Marianne
asked.

He shrugged a shoulder. “It
is.”

“You have—biases—on Tolar?”

“Not in the same way that you have
explained human biases,” he answered. “Racism—I do not understand
this. You are all human. Your physical variations mean nothing.
Culture, however—cultural differences can be quite
amusing.”

It was Marianne’s turn to shrug.
“We’ve tried to root racism out of ourselves for centuries. It
never dies—some people even think the other races in the Trade
Alliance are inferior—but it would be unfair to say we haven’t made
progress.”

“Skin color, hair color, Tolari are
all the same,” the Sural said, “but we find our cultural
differences highly entertaining.”

“Hmm,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow at
her.

“Does anyone find Suralia...
entertaining?” she asked.

His mouth twitched. “Not while I
live,” he answered.

Marianne laughed. The Sural watched
her, mild amusement crossing his face.

“We do have a reputation,” he
continued.

“For what?”

“Coldness.”

Marianne bit her tongue.

“Speak your thoughts,
proctor.”

“Um,” she said. “I can see
why.”

He cocked his head.

“I mean—well—you all walk around
looking disinterested and impassive most of the time, except during
your festivals. You in particular—you’re pretty
emotionless.”

The Sural lifted an eyebrow. “We are
what we are. But I admit the plateau is a colder place now than it
was in my grandmother’s day.”

Marianne’s breath caught. “What
happened to cause that?”

“The last attack. Everyone in the
stronghold died.”

That explained the gloom. “Oh.” She
rocked back on her heels. “Forgive me.”

He waved it away with a hand and
started to pace. “You would call it two generations ago,” he said.
“We have strengthened Suralia’s defenses since that day. Another
such attack could not succeed.”

She bit her lip, a nasty sensation
crawling up her spine, as the reality of Tolari interprovincial
conflict smacked her in the face. He glanced over at
her.

“Have no concern, proctor,” he added.
“My enemies in the ruling caste seldom make an attempt on me now.
But even could an attack succeed, an invading ruler is more likely
to capture and hold you than to harm you.” He eyed her. “You are
not one of us. Capture would not dishonor you.”

“That’s not comforting,” she
said.

“Human worry is needless. We prepare
and do what needs to be done. And what needs to be done, perhaps,
is to search my personal library for books in Detrali.” He bowed,
mouth twitching, and strode off.

Marianne dug into the books he brought
back. It helped her mood to occupy her mind as the weather grew
colder and the stronghold became entombed in ice and snow, but the
dark and the cold grew pervasive and unsettling. Without the solace
of the gardens and the chattering flutters, Marianne fell into a
continuous gloomy mood.

She attributed it to the short days at
first. The sun was in the sky for perhaps eight hours, rising after
the morning meal and setting by the evening meal. After some
thought, she realized she had been on Tolar for something more than
a standard year, cut off from almost all contact with the ship. She
had grown lonely, much to her own surprise. She’d never experienced
much loneliness. School, college, and then her job as a high school
teacher had kept her busy, and the social interactions of the
teacher’s break room, Tuesday night bowling, and, to a lesser
extent, volunteer work and language practice in the Babel cloud’s
virtual parks and cafés, had fulfilled her slight needs—but none of
those could be had on Tolar.

To her frustration, she couldn’t find
a way to socialize with the stronghold’s other inhabitants. Both
status and rank mattered to them. No one in the keep had anything
like Marianne’s combination of false rank and no status, and they
didn’t know how to respond to her. She had no common ground on
which to strike up a friendship with the women among the servants,
guards, nurses or cooks.

The Sural may have been content to
live in splendid isolation, but she felt alone and cut off. And he
seemed to sense it.

“Proctor, something oppresses you,” he
said, broaching the topic during the evening meal. They ate alone
in the refectory.

“I’m fine,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow, waiting with his
usual patience. She fiddled with her food. She looked up to find
him staring at her. “Forgive me, high one,” she
murmured.

He raised the other eyebrow.
“For?”

“I don’t need much, but—I need
more...” she stumbled.

He cocked his head. “More of
what?”

“I miss—I miss just... just talking
with another woman.” She winced. Talking about this made her feel
naked. Taking a breath, she pressed on. “Girl talk. We—we need to
talk to each other sometimes, just women. Unburden our hearts. I
never realized before just how much I need it.”

He nodded, a thoughtful look in his
eyes. “I understand. By limiting your contact with the ship, I have
deprived you of something you need to be content.”

“I’ve always thought I didn’t need
anyone. I was happy by myself in Casey, living alone. I guess I
wasn’t as alone as I thought.” She fell silent, staring past him,
at the dark outside the windows.

Something like compassion warmed his
expression. “Very well,” he said. “For the sake of Kyza’s tutor,
there shall have to be less peace in the Sural’s airwaves. You may
contact your ship each day when it is in orbit.”

She turned back to him, a huge smile
bursting onto her face. “Truly?” she blurted.