Tagen turned back around, his eyes narrowed. He studied her in silence for a short time, and then said, “His name is Kanetus E’Var. I have no words to tell you his crime.”
“But you’re going to find him.”
“Yes.” He paused. “If he is here.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
His brows drew down slowly, carving that line in deeper between his eyes. “No.”
“You can’t…I don’t know…scan for his life-source from orbit?”
Tagen’s head cocked to one side. He stared at her in thunderstruck irritation and snapped, “Can
you
?!”
“No,” she admitted, and then frowned. “Are you saying…are you seriously saying that you came all the way Earth looking for one guy, and you don’t even know where to look? What was your big plan, just to walk around shaking his food dish?”
It was just as well he couldn’t follow that, because it really wasn’t too smart a thing to say. While Tagen was still obviously attempting to decipher that, Daria took a breath and tried again, more calmly, “Do you know how big Earth is?”
“Yes,” he said, with a black that’s-enough look lurking in his eyes. “I am aware that it will be difficult.”
“Difficult? Tagen, making cassoulet is difficult! Solving the Rubik’s cube is difficult! Stumbling over the whole planet on foot looking for one guy is impossible!”
“Without help, yes.” Tagen leaned forward, his eyes unblinking. “Which is why I need you, Daria Cleavon. And which is why I will not allow you to refuse me.”
Daria sat back, blinking. “Me?”
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
“I found you first.”
“Well, you have a really inflated idea of just how much help I’m going to be,” she said, stunned. “Wouldn’t you rather have a scientist or a soldier or…Mulder and Scully or someone like that?”
“Yes,” he said, with an sincerity that was almost insulting. He raked his claws through his hair and gave the ceiling a long-suffering glance before returning his attention to her. “But I have you. And you will suffice.”
Daria had never been snubbed in quite that way before. It was like winning the mystery lottery and then being told your prize was getting to be sacrificed to a giant ape. On the one hand, she’d overcome amazing odds to win a once-in-a-lifetime experience. On the other hand, it sucked.
“Well,” she said in a small voice. “How can I help?”
He eyed her warily before answering. “I am hungry.”
She started to get up and then sat back down again. “I can’t cook without dishes.”
Suspicion painted itself over his face once more. “If I let you have those things, will you try to use them against me?”
She thought about it and her heart fell. “No,” she admitted.
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because I really, really want you out of my house.”
She didn’t know what answer he expected, but clearly, that wasn’t it.
“You scare me,” she said, “but you haven’t hurt me. And you could.” Her eyes dropped to his waist. There were two devices holstered at his belt, devices too ugly to be anything but weapons. “Not even when I threw pudding at you.”
He acknowledged that with a rueful glance back down the hall. One of his talons tapped at the carpet.
“Besides,” she said hopelessly, “even if I could get away from you, where would I go? If I told anybody you were here, I’d be locked up for life. So I might as well help you because I could never get anyone to believe me.”
“Thank you,” he said dryly, but then he sighed and said it again, without the sarcasm. “Thank you, Daria Cleavon. You will find what you need in the room of holding.”
Daria smiled faintly, understanding him perfectly. Dan’s old room, the room of holding. Holding stuff, holding still. It was a good place to hide things; she hadn’t been in there in years except to open the windows in the summer and close them again for the winter. She’d have probably starved to death before she thought to go in there and look for the hammer with which to pry open the doors.
And now this had happened. Nothing was holding still anymore. And nothing would ever be the same.
Daria got up from the couch and went upstairs so she could get her alien something to eat.
“W
hen do I get my tools back so that I can open my doors again?”
Tagen roused himself from the sleepy study of his near-empty bowl and looked at the human who had addressed him. He’d almost forgotten she was there. Gods, he was exhausted. “Again, please,” he said, and forced himself to concentrate.
The human only looked at him, frowning. Her eyes were the strangest he had ever in his entire life seen. One was green and yet not very green, like a tree that had begun to die. The other, blue. In them, Tagen saw concern shimmering up through the unhappy fear that he had put in her. It was the first time he had ever seen that look in the eyes of a human, and it was disconcerting.
“You look terrible,” she said bluntly.
He recoiled slightly, first stung and then irritated. He wanted very much to point out that, however bad he might look now, she had looked a damned sight worse when she was vomiting and urinating on herself earlier, but he didn’t know enough N’Glish. And once he took a breath to calm himself down, he decided it wouldn’t have been a very politic thing to say anyway. “I know,” he said instead. “It has been a long span of very long days.”
“Yeah.” She picked up his bowl, still with a spoonful of soup in the bottom, and hugged it to her chest, as though for comfort. She was still frowning at him. “You know, forget the doors for tonight. You need to go lie down.”
He scowled at her. “I am not going anywhere, Daria Cleavon, and you test my patience every time you force me to remind you.”
She was shaking her head already, reshaping his annoyance back into weary confusion. “I meant, you need to sleep. Come on. The sofa in…in the room of holding folds out into a pretty comfortable bed. I’ve got clean sheets and a couple extra pillows. It’s not much, but it ought to do for now.”
The words buzzed through him without substance, but then his mind seized and clung to one of the first she’d said: Sleep. He half-rose, his body moving him by reflex alone, before common sense sat him down again. He said, “I do not trust you.”
“That’s pretty smart, all things considered.” She edged away from him and put his dish into the sink, all without taking her eyes off him.
“You admit you will run.”
“I admit I want to,” she corrected, and showed him her empty hands. “But I won’t. I swear. And sooner or later, you’re going to have to believe me or there’s no point to your being here at all. Besides—” She gave the dish in the sink a pointed glance. “—if I was going to do anything, it would have been a whole lot easier to put Draino in your soup then climb out my bedroom window while you sleep.”
Tagen looked at her in surprise. Poison, she meant. He had not even considered the possibility. That was appalling.
“So come on,” she said, stepping towards the doorway and gesturing for him to follow. “Let me get you into bed before you fall down. You’re not going to be any good to anyone the way you are now.”
It was another insult, he was sure of it. Then again, perhaps he only thought so because he was so tired. He decided reluctantly to give her the benefit of the doubt. He stood up. “Take me to bed.”
She gaped at him for a second, making him run rapidly back through his words. He found nothing wrong in what he’d said, but before he could question her, the human uttered a nervous laugh. “We have, um, two slightly different meanings for that particular phrase. Clearly, you’re interested in the sleep one. Sorry.”
“What is the second meaning?” he asked.
“It, um…” The skin of her face began to pinken. “Never mind,” she said, leading him away towards the stairs. “You keep watching cable long enough, you’ll pick it up all on your own.”
Yes, he supposed that was true. The tee-vee was a remarkable font of information and instruction. There was one program in particular, a show that depicted the labors of officers in what passed for the On-World Security Fleet here on Earth. Tagen was astounded by the very concept. Jotan media broadcast many fictional programs for the entertainment of its citizenry, but never one based on law enforcement. Watching Earth’s officers investigate and prison criminals filled Tagen with an embarrassing sense of fascination and pride. He took comfort in the fact that it was also educational.
Daria reached the top of the steps and moved back toward the room of holding, but Tagen paused by the privy door. “Wait.”
She looked back over her shoulder at him, and the sudden tension that had entered her when he spoke evaporated, turning her a shocking shade of red. “Oh,” she said. “Um. Yes, of course. Do you know how to, um, work everything in there?
“Yes,” he said tightly. When she’d been under the effects of
vey
Venekus’
mild
sedative, he’d asked her to show him the operation of the privy. He’d been reduced to an embarrassing mode of pantomime to make the request, but she had eventually explained the workings of the toy-let. Now, he said, “I would like to shower. Show me again, please. Which is the soap for my body and which for my hair?”
“What do you mean, again?” She came towards him with a puzzled look on her face. “Um, okay. Let’s see. Here’s the shower. Here’s how you turn it on. This is the hot water tap, by the way. And here’s the soap for your body and a sponge you can use if you want to. Don’t use the yellow one, it’s mine. In fact…” She removed the puffy yellow object from the shower stall entirely, an insult Tagen withstood in silence. “And here’s the stuff for your hair. It’s called shampoo. Actually, it’s a two-in-one with conditioner, but you don’t need to know that.”
“And that?” Tagen asked, pointing to a canister and accompanying instrument on the far corner of the shower stall.
“Oh. That’s for shaving. You know, if you want to take your beard off. Not my beard. I don’t have a beard, but I use it for…never mind. You can use it if you want.”
Tagen followed little of her disjointed words, but fortunately, she had made a scraping movement across her cheeks as she explained, which made her meaning clear. He touched his own face, feeling the roughness of stubble growing in thick on his jaw. “Thank you,” he said.
“The towels are right there for drying off after. Just don’t drop them on the floor,” she added anxiously.
“Of course not.”
“Okay, then, you…carry on in here and I’ll get your bed ready.” She ducked out of the white-tiled room and half-ran down the hall.
Tagen shut the door behind her just long enough to use the crude and incredibly unhygienic toy-let in privacy. Then he leaned out into the hall again, listening to the human move around in the far room. She was having to shuffle quite a number of crates.
Leaving the door open, Tagen stripped out of his uniform. It was stiff with grime and clammy with sweat, and removing it freed a great cloud of unpleasant odor. There was a mirror over the sink, inescapably positioned to catch occupants. In it, Tagen saw a man he would not trust to repair his waste reclamator, much less invite into his house. His heart thawed a few degrees toward the human.
Just a few.
He stepped into the shower and knelt to work out the controls. Hot water, she had said, but he only wanted enough of that to take the ice out of the spray. Coolness streamed over his body, blessedly welcome. Tagen braced his arms against the wall and bent his head, letting it pour over him.
He could be right back on Jota. Not in the Fleet Barracks, which, like most of the civilized world, used vaporizing disinfectants, but on any of the carrier ships, this shower would be right at home. Or, for that matter, he could be back in the country, in the house where Kolya Pahnee had raised him. That neat, sterile house…much too big for just the two of them. It had only the most minimal furnishings, only the most basic necessities, and if there were any decorations within its walls, Tagen had missed them. But he had bathed beneath aquatic jets there, and he had trained on hard white tiles, and worked his body to exhaustion in the orderly gardens Kolya grew. Nostalgia was all around him here in the human’s house, leading him inexorably back to his first, true home.
Without question, those were the worst years of his life.
Kolya Pahnee had been a Fleet commander, decorated no less, a veteran of the Kevrian conflict. His name was still spoken around high tables. His combat methods were still taught at Fleet Academy. He was a hard man, not given to words or to patience. He had bred many young among some very high-ranking houses, but he had taken only one son, and he had waited until he was retired, his two hundred years of service behind him, so that he would have the time to train up a child.
Tagen supposed he should be grateful. He was ten years old when Kolya Pahnee brought him out of the Child Halls, and at that age, he’d known his time was running out. Graduation, unadopted, won a man a lifetime of menial labor and the inescapable stigma of having Male Live Birth and a number as his primary identifier instead of a name. But Kolya had wanted a ten-years boy. Had demanded one. At ten years, a boy could feed himself and put himself to bed. At ten years, a boy knew enough to keep quiet and not irritate his elders.
And so at ten years, Tagen had been sent out of the city and into the middle of wind-blowing nowhere to live in that horrible, aseptic house. He could still remember having to stand in the receiving room, his few possessions in a box in his arms, surrounded by old men who poked at him and discussed in loud voices how his eyes were too close together and his feet were slightly splayed, wondering which of them he would have to call ‘father’. All of that, just for a half-year trial, not even a true adoption.
But in the end, Kolya had accepted him, named him, and put him on the path that led unswervingly to the Fleet. There was never any discussion on that subject, never any doubt that Tagen would obey Kolya’s wishes. Even after the old man died, there was a certain expectation.