It is not to the house that my name is carved upon that I return
But to your arms
Wherever you may be
.”
Silly, idealistic drivel. He wished he remembered more of it.
Daria murmured something faintly inquiring, but it was not discernable and not repeated. She was asleep at last.
Tagen turned his head, watching the numbers on the timepiece turn. His back ached from its awkward lie against the headboard, his legs were burning and numb, but Daria was warm against his side and her cheek soft against his stomach. He wondered how he could be so contented with that and yet despair so completely whenever her name drifted through his mind.
It was a human thing, he decided. Just one more little thing he’d picked up along with the language and a taste for the food she called ‘ice cream’. Emotions were like any other accent, they had a way of creeping in. He would deal with it when the time came, but this was not the time.
Tagen drew a slow breath and shut his heart away. Then he picked up the earpiece of the telephone and began to dial the first number on his list.
*
“Waken, Daria. The hour has come.”
She had drifted off to the sound of that voice, and she was sure the rise and fall of it had influenced her dreams of him, but now that same voice was a well-oiled knife separating her skillfully from sleep. She stirred languidly, hugging his waist a little tighter, and kept her eyes shut. “You’ve come a long way from ‘Now is not the time to be open,’” she remarked.
“Thank you.”
Daria rolled onto her back, stretching every sore and car-cramped muscle. She knew she could easily sleep out the rest of this day. A three-hour nap did nothing for the bone-deep weariness that had settled into her, but it was all she dared to take. This was no Sunday summer drive they were taking.
Her eye had a way of sliding to him as she lay trying to rub the need for sleep from her brain, and the sight that met her was not a heartening one. He was staring fixedly out the window at the parking lot and his jaw was too tight. It was the same look he’d been wearing since he told her to stay and rest a while. She half-wished she knew what he was thinking, but was afraid she already did. It was the same expression, the same aura of grim stillness that Dan had worn that last day at the hospital, the day he’d brought her flowers and told her he wasn’t coming home.
Well, what did she expect? She’d known from the start that this was temporary. Even after she’d slept with him, she’d known that much. Nothing had changed, except of course, that now it hurt.
She thought she loved him. She really thought she did, and the knowledge didn’t bring her the same giddy amazement she remembered feeling as she fell in love with Dan, but a deep, throbbing ache. How could she let that happen? It wasn’t just the sex, although God knew the sex was a big part of it—his tenderness, his control, his intensity and passion—it was all of him. She loved his patience and his quiet strength; she couldn’t begin to imagine going door to door to all those motels if she hadn’t had his calm to center her afterwards. She loved his forthright manner, even when it was expressed by his near-total lack of diplomacy; he could be careful about how much he said, but she always knew he was telling her the truth. She even loved the strange, archaic way he had of speaking, and the awkwardness of his efforts to modernize his English. Sex had been the breaking point, that was all, the point at which she’d had to admit that there was an attraction there. Once she’d taken that leap, the line between like and love had passed unnoticed.
And now look at them. Alone together in a cheap motel where the seedy manager smugly knew they were stopping in for a quickie and where they had passed the little time allotted to them in pointedly Platonic fashion.
She didn’t know what to say to him. He’d told her already that his kind didn’t get married or even date. Which probably meant that heartfelt discussions of where their relationship was going once he’d found his escapee were completely out of line. She didn’t want to embarrass him with a deluge of emotion, but looking at him now, she could actually feel the space between them stretching out invisibly.
“Any luck?” she asked. Breaking the silence was something of a relief, but the words themselves, so far from what she wanted to say, felt cheap.
“If by that you mean, do I know where he spent the night, yes.” He passed her the printed page of motel names. Many listings had been crossed out and others marked with strange sigils, but only one was circled. The Top Hat Hotel, maybe eight miles up the road. “I know also that he left at nine hours of the o’clock.” He did look at her then, frowning. “I said that wrong.”
“Yeah, but I get your point. So we would have missed him anyway, even if we had kept driving.”
“Yes.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, facing away from her.
Grendel, sensing imminent departure, immediately uncoiled from the stained chair in which he’d been snoring and dropped seismically to the floor. He rubbed at Tagen’s ankle, finally winning a rub to the many folds of his neck for his troubles, and then waddled eagerly to the door. He waited there, making a mountain of himself once seated with his tail wrapping his ample frame, and stared at the doorknob with that creepy feline intensity.
It was a solid cue to leave. Daria rose and put her shoes back on, wishing she could command Tagen’s attention as easily as the cat. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “I know it’s a nuisance.”
“What is?”
“Having to bring Grendel along. I’m sure that wasn’t part of your plan.”
“No. But I do not begrudge the necessity. He…He has been good company and I am fond of him.” Spoken utterly without emotion.
She wanted to ask if he would miss the cat when he left Earth, but didn’t. It was too easy to read more into that than just the words. She didn’t mind being transparent, but she didn’t want to be an embarrassment. Instead, she said, “Do you have a pet waiting for you at home?”
“No. Like my
som sommora
, it would only suffer in my absence. I dislike the thought of abandoning the things in my charge.”
Was that aimed at her? He was too taciturn to be sure and there was no easy way to ask. She went to gather up Grendel’s litterbox and when she turned around, Tagen had the cat stowed ridiculously away in his jacket. They went to the car in the baking midday heat in silence and Daria started up the A/C before running the key in to the office.
The manager, every bit as sleazy as she remembered, gave her a salacious wink as she came in through the door. “Enjoy your…nap?” he drawled.
That hollowness left by Tagen’s withdrawal struck on that question like steel on flint. “You bet,” she said sharply. “We napped the living hell out of that bed. I enjoyed all twelve inches of his throbbing nap and he napped my nap ‘till I napped. Thanks so much.” She bounced the key off the countertop and onto the floor and stalked out, leaving him with his mouth agape.
Tagen was frowning as she slammed herself behind the wheel, an expression that further blackened as he stared into the office and saw the manager craning to look after her. “What was said?” he asked.
“He accused us of taking a nap,” she said crossly, buckling herself in.
Tagen waited, his silence increasingly perplexed. “Is that all?”
“He did it salaciously. Never mind, Tagen, it’s a human thing and I’m not very reasonable right now.”
His face blanked and he turned to face out the windshield. “I regret,” he said quietly, “that I have forced this travel on you.”
“You…? That’s not what I meant, Tagen, I…”
What did she mean?
Silence.
Daria stared at her hands helplessly and then put the car in gear and pulled out onto the road.
*
Regardless of how well one believed one knew oneself, there was always some small new revelation waiting for the right situation in which to be discovered. For Tagen, after a lifetime of exemplary service in space, it was the surprising fact that lengthy rides surrounded by monotonous countryside put him to sleep. The hum of the engine, the whine of passing vehicles, the steady exchange of light and shadow through the trees on his right—all of these combined to heavily sedate him. He had to believe it was the intermittent rise and fall of the road beneath them, because when it came to unchanging scenery and hypnotic sub-sounds, nothing beat a star-cruiser and he had served the better part of fifty years without ever once nodding off on the job.
Although Tagen supposed he could have easily bargained a short nap back at the motel, at the time, he’d felt he could go all day and into the night on the adrenaline of knowing E’Var was finally almost in his grasp. And while he knew academically that the motel wasn’t that far behind them, it seemed the instant it passed out of sight, exhaustion had hammered into him. He didn’t want to give in to it. Daria didn’t seem to mind if he dozed off, but the fact remained, that was damned rude. He was supposed to be representing the Fleet, for the gods’ sakes.
But, ah, it was so easy to fade away. The engines. The flow of trees. The road, always reaching before them, winding and snapping like a great, grey ribbon every time he opened his eyes. Sleep…
A loud bang shattered the lull that had settled on him, but before he could even force his eyes to focus, all residue of sleep was shattered as the groundcar unexpectedly veered onto the gravelly roadside. Daria cursed, gripping the guidance wheel with white hands and stomping at the pedals beneath her feet. The groundcar tipped and Tagen had a flash-recall of tee-vee imagery—groundcars rolling, crashing, exploding—before they came to a painless stop.
“Shit.” Breathing hard, Daria released the guidance wheel. It seemed to take some effort. She leaned back into the captain’s chair and drew a long, shuddery breath. “Shit,” she said again, but she looked much calmer.
“Rowr?” The groundcar halted, Grendel now roused and hooked his front half over the seats between them, tail high and tone expectant. Rest stops for the cat meant a stretch, a bite to eat, a scratch at the true Earth, and perhaps some petting from one or both of them. That Daria was not immediately turning her attention to it seemed bewildering to the animal. It turned its eyes on Tagen as though demanding an explanation.
“What is wrong?” Tagen asked cautiously. He was not a mechanic. He had only the most rudimentary knowledge of engine repair and he doubted any of it would be useful when applied to human groundcars.
“We blew a tire.” His words seemed a kind of catalyst to her; Daria unbuckled her harness. “No biggie. I know how to change a tire. In theory. Shit.”
Feeling superfluous, Tagen pulled the cat onto his lap and occupied it with gentle rubbing as Daria exited the vehicle. He watched her circle the car, her expression one of tight dismay. She knelt at the right front wheel, stared for a while, and cursed. Then her eyes rose to meet his through the fore-window. He had no idea what she expected him to do about their situation but Tagen unharnessed and got out.
“I can do this,” were her first words to him. She looked just at the edge of tears.
The front passenger wheel was gone. Nothing remained except the metal round the rubber tread had wrapped. Looking behind him, Tagen could see wide flaps of black shrapnel that had once belonged to the vehicle. The groundcar, it seemed, could not operate without it.
In his arms, the cat was irritably resisting captivity, so Tagen set it down with a stern admonition to behave itself. Grendel flicked its tail to show what it thought of stern admonitions, and then wandered into the near bushes. Tagen watched it long enough to make certain it was staying close, and then walked to Daria’s side. “You can exchange the wheel?” he prompted.
“I think so.”
“Then you had best make the attempt.” He glanced skyward pointedly. “It is too hot to do nothing for long.”
She looked up at the patch of sky visible between the flanking lances of Earth’s trees, and then stared back at him bleakly. “You’re going to go into Heat anyway,” she told him. “I can do this, but not that fast.”
“I can help.”
She looked doubtful.
“I am a soldier,” he reminded her dryly. “One thing at which I excel is following orders. Tell me what to do.”
She managed a smile that didn’t much touch her eyes and went to open the rear hatch. She pushed Grendel’s traveling necessities to one side, pulled up the carpeting, and revealed an extra wheel sunk into a recess. It took some doing to pull it out, as it was fastened down with metal bars, but when she had it freed, she kept the bars in hand. They folded together into a tool-shape and she brought it to the wounded quarter of the groundcar and knelt down again.
She was struggling to insert the tool underneath the vehicle, but with the tire utterly gone and the metal base sunk into gravel, it would not fit. Tagen watched her efforts as they edged toward panic, and then bent, took hold of the groundcar’s frame, and lifted it.
She looked at him, blinking rapidly.
“Do not ask me to carry it to town,” he said.
Hurriedly, she placed her tool. “Set it down,” she said, fitting a lever to the base she had placed. She pumped her arms furiously and the tool lengthened in short lurches.
A lift. A portable lift. Every so often, it struck Tagen all over again how completely un-primitive the people of this world were.
The front quarter of the groundcar rose slowly but steadily, and although the base of the lift sank into the soft gravel, it seemed secure enough. “Okay,” Daria said, once the metal round was fully freed. “Bring me the spare.”
Tagen went to the cargo hatch. He brought out the new wheel and, as an afterthought, a tin of cat food. He leaned the former against the side of the vehicle, opened the latter and placed it on the ground, and then stood back. Grendel came running, but Daria only continued to sit and look helpless.
“Do I have a…” She shook her head, striking the heel of her hand against her brow. “Christ, I don’t even know what it’s called. It looks like an X?”