Tagen came slowly to the unpleasant realization that he didn’t want to leave Daria. It was even more than that; a part of him wanted very much to stay with her.
Impossible. He could never be safe on Earth. The tee-vee, and Daria herself, had made it clear that she could not protect him, and he did not doubt that if the fact of his arrival on this world were ever exposed, it would go very badly not only for him, but for her as well. It had been no less a thing than divinely-ordained chance that he had not been discovered already. He could not stay. Not one day longer than absolutely necessary. If the capture of E’Var were not so dreadfully important, he would have left already.
All of this was true and the truth was ugly. He couldn’t look at her now with these thoughts churning in his brain. There was no part of her he would not miss—the soft fall of her hair, her bi-colored eyes, the exotic lines and curves of her body, her voice and the amazing wisdoms it spoke so handily. Even her fat, smug cat. Life apart from that…felt hollow.
He didn’t know how many of these thoughts were shared by his human, but she was too quiet not to be aware of any of them. The quiet they made between them was suffocating, but for his life, he couldn’t think of a thing to say to break it. Not in N’Glish, not even in Jotan. After all the times he had seen humans in the tee-vee programs fumble over words at moments like this for comic effect, here he sat and it was not in the least funny.
He had to say something. It was too hot to simply sit here and wait for the moment to pass. With the groundcar’s engines stilled, its climate controls could not function. He could feel the slow itch of Heat creeping up at him from deep in his core. He said, “Perhaps—”
“Yes?” She still did not look at him, but from the sides of his eyes, he saw her hands tighten on the guidance wheel of the groundcar.
“Perhaps we should rest here.” He shifted uncomfortably, feeling the metal walls around him creep closer. “You are weary. Grendel is restless.”
Neither of them looked at the sleeping cat draped across his lap.
“Wouldn’t you rather keep checking motels?”
“I see no need to visit them to do so.” He motioned at the printed list vaguely. “You will show me how to work the telephone. I will make the necessary calls while you sleep.”
“You can’t read.”
“I can recognize identical symbols when I see them,” he replied. “If you do not trust me to do that much, you can make the calls yourself when you waken, but I think you would be better for some sleep.”
“Suit yourself.” She opened her door, admitting a breeze only marginally cooler than the stuffy air inside the parked groundcar. There she paused, staring intently at her knees. “Tagen?”
He steeled himself. “Yes?”
She said nothing for several breaths. Finally, she expelled an unhappy sigh and let her tense shoulders fall. “We’ll have to sneak Grendel in. No pets allowed.”
“I understand.”
She left him and walked back across the parking bay to the office. Tagen watched her go, wishing he knew of some way to sort out what he was feeling.
“Grendel,” he said suddenly. He didn’t look down, but heard the sleepy miack of the animal’s attention. “I despise this world and all it has done to me on this mission, but I can never regret that it brought me to you.”
The orange head of the cat butted against his hand, emitting rumbles of flattered satisfaction. Tagen began to pet it, his eyes still fixed on the door through which Daria had gone. “I do care for you,” he said awkwardly. “And for every part of you.”
Grendel rolled onto its back to offer the part of its underbelly for an expression of Tagen’s care. Tagen rubbed through the soft fur distractedly.
“I am leaving you,” he said. His voice kept dropping in volume, but still seemed harsh and overloud to his ears, despite the muffling presence of the cat’s purrs. “And I grieve for that. But I cannot stay. I could never stay.”
Grendel, clearly, was fine with this decision and Tagen abandoned further words. He felt foolish. What use was there in agonizing over such a speech? Just for a moment, he visualized saying such a thing to his last sexual partner, there just as his tour had ended. He could picture in exquisite detail her embarrassment as she withstood his clumsy words. No, her means of departure had been far easier on both of them: ‘When my number comes up, expect me to call on you.’ Quick, calm, friendly, and flattering.
What would be the human equivalent? ‘It’s been fun. If I could ever come back to visit you, I would.’ He could visualize her reaction, too. Gods, it would be like slapping her across the face.
Daria was coming back, yawning against her hand as she walked. The sight of her was a hurting thing. He saw her, but felt her absence, and it made the life awaiting him once he’d returned to Jota seem colorless and even emptier.
He kept these bleak thoughts to himself as Daria got back behind the console and activated the engines. She pulled them just a few walking steps over and parked alongside a wing of doors. The boarding rooms for the wayside hostel, each one numbered. He could easily imagine it at night, the road empty, the air still, and Kanetus E’Var going one to the other with a chemist’s harvester in his bloodied hand. And that, he told himself sternly, was why he was really here. Never forget that.
He obeyed without comment Daria’s instructions to hide Grendel in his jacket as they entered their room, even though it would be apparent to any on-looker that he was a man hiding a large, moving object in his jacket, and Daria was carrying the animal’s scratch-sand in plain sight. But never mind. The ways of humans were many and beyond explanation. It was more important now to soothe his human’s mind than to stir her up with contradictory observations.
The room assigned to them was emotionless, musty, and overwarm, like virtually every hostelry chamber in all the universe. Even the artwork framed on the wall was eerily similar to those in rooms Tagen had been assigned in the past. Fortunately, the room had climate controls much like the groundcar’s; within minutes after Daria activated them, the waking itch of Heat dissipated and that, at least, was something.
Daria paced the room’s dimensions twice (more even than Grendel, who had made a lazy half-circuit of the main area before hopping up on a chair and curling into an orange ball, exhausted from the effort of napping all morning, no doubt) before finally coming to the room’s only bed. She took off her shoes and sat down, then looked at him and lay down. She looked wholly uncomfortable. “Are you just going to stand there?” she asked.
Tagen joined her at the bed and sat beside her, leaning against the cumbersome protrusions of the headboard and stretching out his legs. The mattress managed to be at once lumpy and stone-hard. A noteworthy feat.
Daria produced the printed paper listing the motels of this road and spent several seconds unfolding it and trying to straighten out its creases. “What are you planning to say?” she asked.
Tagen thought about it. “Hello,” he decided at last. “I am looking for my three friends, who may be staying at your motel. One male, very tall, and two females, one of whom has purple hair.”
“One man,” Daria corrected, looking pained. “And two women. And try to sound a little less like a cop. What if they ask you what their names are?”
“I do not know their names. We met at a party. I was drunk.”
Daria’s lips twitched. “And why are you looking for them?”
“The one with the purple hair seems to have accidentally taken my packet of insulin.”
“Not bad.” She handed him the paper. “These are the numbers you press,” she said, running her finger along a short string of symbols. She indicated the telephone and Tagen could see the same symbols arranged on a button-grid, along with several other characters.
“I do not see this one,” he said, indicating the short dash that interrupted the symbols on the paper and frowning at the telephone.
“No, that’s not a number, that just…That’s complicated. Just ignore it. And some of these might be local calls, so if you push all these buttons and you hear a bunch of whistles and a voice telling you that you don’t need to dial a one or an area code, then just hang up and try again, only just push these seven numbers here. And if a voice tells you that the call cannot be completed as dialed, it means that either you pushed the wrong number or the phone’s been disconnected at their end, so just make a mark next to it. Otherwise, if you dialed the right number, the person on the other end of the line should say something like, ‘Riverside Hotel, may I help you?’ If they just say, ‘Hello,’ and nothing else, you might have gotten the wrong number, so just say, ‘Is this the hotel?’ and if they say no, apologize, hang up, and make a mark of some sort on the paper so I can double-check it.”
Tagen nodded once. He had seen how the telephone was used on the tee-vee programs. He was confidant in his ability to use it now. It wasn’t, after all, like a real media station, such as Tagen was accustomed to using back on Jota. The opposing party couldn’t see him, only hear him and speak to him.
Daria was regarding him with open misgivings. “You’re sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Yes.”
“And you won’t let me sleep too long?”
“No.”
“Just a few hours. Here.” She reached over him to the small stand on his side of the bed where the telephone and a glowing timepiece sat. She pulled out a drawer, unerringly finding paper and a writing stylus within, and quickly wrote. “When this—” She tapped the timepiece’s display. “Looks like this—” She indicated the characters written on the paper. “Wake me up.”
Tagen’s hand rose of its own power and drifted through the soft cloud of her hair as she lay tensely draped over his lap. Immediately, some of the nervous energy inhabiting her small frame sapped itself away. She settled there, pillowed on his stomach, her arm encircling his waist. His back was already beginning to ache from pressing on the rigid headboard, but she looked so comfortable and felt so close, he could not bring himself to move her.
“Sleep,” he told her. “I will wake you.”
She sighed and pressed her face against him briefly. “Talk to me,” she said. “Just for a little bit. I need to hear your voice.”
“What would you have me say?”
“Tell me something good. Tell me…what’s the happiest day of your life?”
Tagen thought first of making love with her in the grass before her little garden, the blue sky above them and her lindaria twining through stone behind him. That was happiness, to be freed of Heat at last and in the welcoming arms of beautiful Daria, understanding only then why it was that human sexplay was so slowly carried out. Because it demanded to be savored. It deserved to be.
But he could not tell her this. He was not a man of great intuition, but he sensed that this was not a memory to speed her into sleep. Nor was it a memory he could invoke, and then sit quietly alongside while she lay in his arms and the end of his time on Earth loomed.
He said, “When I received my commission. When I became an officer. I had served some six years as…as a ‘beat cop’, I believe is the term, or as near as I can approximate it. To be made an officer so soon was a point of fiercest pride to me. I knew that it had been an inevitability, due to my father’s name and reputation, but I believed that I had earned it as well.”
“So soon,” Daria echoed. “Six years.”
“How long is one a beat cop on your world before one is expected to see promotion?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it depends more here on whether or not a cop wants to stay on a beat. I know in the army you can go pretty far up the ladder under the right conditions in just a two-year tour of duty, but the rules are different for policemen. I don’t know, really.” She was quiet for a while, long enough that he’d begun to wonder if she’d faded into sleep, when she said, “Did you celebrate? When you received your commission and became an officer?”
“Ha. Yes. I suppose you might say I did celebrate. I purchased a
som sommora
, a kind of plant, for my new officer’s quarters, solely because the regulations now allowed such things to be kept.” He’d also celebrated with several bottles of
ul
and a like-minded female, followed by more
ul
, a meal too expensive for even his new eighth-rank officer’s salary, and another female. He kept this to himself, however.
“Was it a flowering plant?”
“Not in my hands,” he said wryly. “Mine suffered and surrendered swiftly to death. In your care, surely it would someday have flowered.” He paused, and then said, “The
som sommora
has many long, slender leaves. Very long, like strands of hair. The blooms emerge on broad, curling stems, all along the sides in beads. They can be blue, white, or a deep purple. I no longer recall which mine would have been.”
“It sounds beautiful,” she said sleepily.
“I suppose it was. The things most familiar to us are often unappreciated,” he added. “I have seen little on Jota to compare with the beauty of certain of Earth’s treasures.”
“Like what?”
He stroked her cheek free of stray hairs. “It’s lindaria,” he said.
She smiled, her eyes still shut. “I still think it’s an ugly plant, but you’re entitled to your opinion.”
He said nothing. The plant had not been the only meaning of his words, but he would not emphasize this if she couldn’t hear it on her own. She was weary and sleep was close. There were times appropriate to such conversations and this was not one of them.
Yes, and if he were fortunate, he could continue not having such a conversation until he stood at the airlock of his ship, when all he would have to say was goodbye.
Once again, the thought of leaving swallowed him. Earth, beautiful but despised. A world of hostility and Heat. Farewell to it and good riddance, but Daria…
A snatch of song came to him now and he sang it in his own tongue, in a low and musing tone scarcely above a breath and carrying no more than a tint of melody:
“
Many suns I’ve seen
And knocked the dust of tens of worlds from my traveled feet,
But when I am called to home