Breath of Life (The Gaian Consortium Series) (6 page)

At once the hood jerked upright. “No—that is, I should have said you were looking very well. Your new things arrived this morning?”

“Yes.” I quelled the urge to turn around so he could see my finery from all angles. “Better?”

“Much better.”

It wasn’t hard to hear the approval in his tone, and a little heat flooded my cheeks. I glanced away, hoping that the Zhore wasn’t very good at reading human reactions and so therefore would have no idea what my sudden flush meant.

He continued, the words sounding a little rushed, “I thought we might try something a little different today.”

“Different?” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. I’d barely gotten used to the bit of a routine we’d put in place so far.

“You’ll see. Come.”

And so I followed him downstairs, past the dining room. I could feel myself frowning in puzzlement, but I continued to trot along behind him as he swept on to the back of the mansion and the entrance to the greenhouse.
 

In the main part of the house I’d hardly been able to hear the rain, but here the sound of it was more pronounced, the raindrops creating a dull roar as they hit the heavy polymer panels overhead. Somehow, though, the noise didn’t intrude, but created instead a soothing background note, rather like a recording I’d heard once of waves breaking against a seashore. The air was warm and heavy, filled with the scents of hundreds of exotic flowers.

“Here,” Sarzhin said, and I looked to see that a small table and two chairs had been set up in a little artificial glade created by a dozen or so small specimen trees in their individual tubs. A glow cell flickered from a faceted glass holder at the center of the table, while our meals appeared to be already waiting for us under protective clear globes.

In all, it was very lovely, and quite a change from the elegant but cold dining room where we’d previously shared our meals. Of course I immediately wondered whether he’d set all this up because he thought it would provide a setting more conducive to my accepting his proposal, but I tried to tell myself this was only lunch, and the previous two days he had waited until after dinner to ask me to marry him. A small reassurance, but at the moment I was willing to take what I could get.
 

“This really is different,” I told him.

“You like it?”

About that at least I could be honest. “Very much.”

He indicated I should sit down, so I took my seat in the little chair of delicately wrought metal situated opposite his. After I had seated myself, he sat across from me and poured some water into my glass from a pitcher that had been sitting off to one side of the table. I had gotten quite fond of that water during my short time in the Zhore’s home. Unlike the water back at the homestead, which always had a faintly metallic taste from being processed and reprocessed, the water here was sweet and pure and refreshed me in a way that our ’cycled water never could.
 

“Does it remind you of your home world?” he inquired, as he lifted the covers from our plates and set them aside on a second, smaller table that had been placed a few feet off, apparently for serving duties.

“Gaia?”

He nodded.

“I wouldn’t know,” I replied. As usual, I had no idea what was on my plate, but it smelled delicious. Somehow I kept myself from lifting my fork and plowing right into the food. I guessed I should answer Sarzhin’s question before I started stuffing my face. “That is, I was born on Gaia, but my parents moved to the moon when I was only eighteen standard months old. I don’t remember anything about Gaia.”

“Oh. Pity.”

I supposed it was. Twenty years before I was born, no one would have attempted such a thing with a child that age, but once the gravity compensators were perfected, living on the moon didn’t have the same physiological drawbacks that it used to. Still, it had been odd to see Gaia’s blue-green shape rise and fall in the sky and know I’d probably never get back there. Even that expense, small as it was, didn’t fit into my parents’ budget, especially since neither of them had any friends or family for us to visit on Gaia. The only reason we made it out to Lathvin was that the GRC pays full passage to its homestead planets. If you want to leave, the cost is on you, but getting there isn’t a problem. And Libba’s fare to Eridani had been included in her scholarship funds, but she certainly didn’t have any left over for return trips, which was why we hadn’t seen her for almost five years.

“What about your world?” I asked, and popped a forkful of something rich and savory into my mouth.

“It resembles some parts of it, perhaps.” He lifted his water glass and drank. “These plants have been gathered from a dozen worlds, any that support a Gaia-class atmosphere.”

That was the standard designation for a world where humanoids could breathe the air without assistance, but it still seemed a little odd to hear an alien use such a Gaia-centric term. Privately, I’d thought for some years that it was the height of arrogance to land on an alien world and try to transmute its atmosphere into something it wasn’t, but I’d known better than to utter such heresy in my parents’ home. Anyway, the Zhore didn’t appear to share my scruples, as they were here terraforming Lathvin IV right along with us humans. At least this scrubby little planet didn’t have any indigenous sentient life, and barely any animal—a few rock borers that lived beneath the surface, some insects that probably no one except the xeno-entomologists would miss. And its plant species could be counted on the fingers of two hands…even if you were a twelve-fingered Zhore.
 

“It almost feels like we’re outside,” I ventured. “That is, outside someplace where you can sit and not asphyxiate.”

“You’ve never experienced that, have you? To live on a world whose environment isn’t inimical, where it’s safe and even desirable to walk around on the surface without protective gear?”

“No,” I said, and set down my fork. Some would say you couldn’t miss what you never had, but somehow his words awoke a wistful longing in me, a desire to know what it would be like to walk outside and lift my head to the sky and the wind and not have to worry about breathing apparatus or a containment suit. “Have you?”

“Of course. Zhoraan never suffered the same ecological disasters as Gaia—it is a world of great natural beauty.”

Zhoraan
, I repeated silently. To my knowledge, no one had ever learned the name of the Zhore home world, just as no outlander had ever been allowed to set foot there. Since I had the notion that Sarzhin did very little by chance, he must have given me his world’s name as a gift, perhaps something to further establish trust between us.
 

“Do you miss it?”

“No.”

Startled, I gazed across the table at him, at the obscuring cloak and low-falling hood. Not for the first time I wished I could see something of his expression, even if I might not have been able to read it very well. “Really? Even though it’s so beautiful?”

His voice level, he replied, “Why should I? I have everything I need here.”

Again I found myself flushing, so I busied myself with drinking some more water and then having another mouthful of the delicious whatever-it-was. But that only lasted so long, and since he didn’t seem inclined to say anything else, I knew I’d have to come up with some sort of reply. “You’re a better person than I am. I’ve never liked this planet.”

“Indeed?”

“Indeed. Oh, some days I could almost convince myself that I didn’t totally hate it, but…” I trailed off and sighed. “Really, it doesn’t have a lot to recommend it, except that it’s got gravity and other surface conditions in the habitable range. I suppose by the time I’m an old woman it’ll be really livable, but right now it’s just damp, dark, and pretty darn inconvenient.”

He laughed then, a rich amused laugh that somehow made me think of the dark chocolate bars my father used to get for Libba and me as holiday presents. “When you put it that way, I suppose I can see your point. And of course I would assume that your life as a homesteader would be rather different from the one I live here.”

“Just a little.” Yes, he had two atmospheric generators on the property, but I’d never seen him do anything to maintain them. That was probably part of the mech’s duties, I supposed—the generators were supposed to run pretty much unattended, in theory. But that theory didn’t cover substandard replacement parts or filters which clogged up or flat out rusted, and so babysitting the generators became pretty much a full-time job for most of the homesteaders. Because if your generator didn’t produce its quota in a given month, then somebody from the Atmospheric Development Agency came by, and the next thing you knew you’d been given a fine that would postpone your payoff date for the homestead by a good two or three standard months.
 

I somehow guessed Sarzhin didn’t have to deal with anything so mundane.
 
I added, “Don’t mind me. I’m sure my feelings about Lathvin are probably more jealousy than anything else.”

“Jealousy?”

“Because my sister got to go to college on Eridani, and I got stuck here. Oh, she got a full scholarship, and probably I could have if I’d tried for one, but there are always odds and ends that a scholarship doesn’t cover, and my parents just couldn’t afford to send me off-world, too. So here I am.”

 
It somehow seemed too intimate to add that I’d felt I would be abandoning my parents to manage the homestead on their own if I’d applied for a scholarship and left them behind the way Libba had. Yes, I’d left them behind to come here, but five kilometers’ worth of separation was a far different thing from five hundred light-years.

“Yes, here you are.” He was silent for a moment. I could somehow tell he was watching me intently from within the confines of that dark hood, and I did my best not to blink or look away. “I hope you will forgive me if I say I am very glad that you were, as you put it, ‘stuck here.’”

That makes one of us
, I thought, but of course I didn’t say it aloud. For one thing, it certainly wasn’t his fault that I hadn’t been able to get away from Lathvin IV, and second of all, he had done his best to make my time here in his home as comfortable as possible. Besides the dreaded marriage proposals, of course.

I smiled at him, since that seemed to be the best reply I could come up with. Perhaps noticing my awkwardness, he went on to talk about the trees surrounding us, and how he had worked very hard on the greenhouse setup so it could provide micro-climates for the dizzying variety of plants he grew there. It actually was very interesting, and I found myself gaining new respect for him, for the determination that drove him to create this little piece of paradise hidden away from the rest of the world. I would be lying, however, if I didn’t say I was more than a little relieved when our lunch ended with nary a proposal of marriage in sight. So perhaps he really did reserve those for the conclusion of our evening meals.

At any rate, he let me go back to my room afterward with no protest. I actually did have more studying to do, and he seemed to accept my explanation for how I needed to spend the rest of the afternoon. He said he would see me at dinner, and left it at that. An importunate suitor, he was not. Maybe he thought he had plenty of time. After all, there had been no discussion of how long my tenure here was supposed to be.

I didn’t want to think about why he had left the whole situation so open-ended.

Another day passed, and then another. We fell into a regular routine, sharing meals more often than not. Dinner, however, was sacrosanct, as was the inevitable question at its end. And every night I had to answer no.

It wasn’t that I disliked the Zhore, or even resented him all that much for compelling me to take up residence in his house. If I were forced to admit it, well, my life here was much easier than it had been in my parents’ homestead. True, if given my choice, of course I would have returned home, but it wasn’t as if he had locked me up in a dungeon or something—not that any could have even existed on Lathvin IV, given the planet’s high water table. But of course it was impossible that I could consider becoming Sarzhin’s wife, not when I had never even seen his face.
 

I worked hard at my studies, as much because I didn’t want to fail my parents as because it gave me something to fill up my time. And I did do very well, my midterm scores higher than they had been in previous semesters, so obviously all the free time was of some benefit.
 

All seemed to be going as well as it reasonably could, given the circumstances, but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

I retired early one night, my latest refusal to Sarzhin still ringing in my ears. As always, he had accepted my demurral with quiet acceptance, but I wondered how long this possibly could go on. By that point I had lived under his roof for a little more than a standard month. Surely he didn’t intend to spend the next year listening to me tell him I could never be his wife.

Usually I didn’t dream, or at least I had a difficult time remembering my dreams when I awoke the next morning. This time, though, I clearly saw myself wandering through the corridors of Sarzhin’s home, even though in my dream it was somehow bigger yet darker than it was in real life. I seemed to be looking for him—I called out his name, but got no reply. Finally, I approached a room I had never seen before, one my dreaming mind told me was his private chamber, although of course I had never seen it with my waking eyes. In a far corner I saw his dark shape, although something in its outline appeared horribly wrong to me. I stepped toward him, and he turned.

The hood was down. And above his shoulders was…nothing. Only a dim space filled with shadows, where his face should be.

I screamed. My eyes snapped open, and I realized I lay in my own bed, with the familiar shapes of my bedroom furniture all around me. Off to one side, the chronograph glowed faintly into the darkness. It was just past two hundred hours.

My breath came as quickly as if I had just spent an unprotected seven minutes outside in Lathvin’s inhospitable atmosphere. I sat up in bed, and tried to tell myself that it had only been a dream. A terrible dream, to be sure, but no more real than my dreams of getting off this rock one day.