Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6) (38 page)

His eyebrows elevated in turn, “I was kidding about the pie!”

“I’m not!” she grinned.

Shan
watched in astonishment as she ate a large blackberry cob
bler. A
gain a la mode, scraping the dish when she’d finished. When he told his AI to pay the bill it turned out that she’d already paid it. “Hey!” he began.

She put her hands up, “I’ve got a job; you don’t. You got the tickets to the show, the least I can do is get the dessert!” She looked a little embarrassed, “Especially since I ate most of it.”

“Thanks!
” he put an arm around her,
“
I had a great time.
” As they walked out to the street he said, “
Hopefully we can do this again sometime?”

She looked almost shy
as she
quietly
said, “I’d like that
;
it was fun.”

Her little truck pulled up to the curb out front
,
but she turned to him there on the sidewalk. He tentatively put a hand on her hip and she turned willingly into his arms, putting hers around his neck and pulling him down for a kiss. A looong kiss that left his heart beating
faster
. She
slowly pulled away. “Send me that e-mail,” she winked, “and I’ll get it to the right place.”

For a moment
Shan
felt confused,
what e-mail?
Then he remembered
that
she’d said she’d send an email about his math
issues
to Donsaii. Gently he touched his lips as her truck faded into the distance. Wonderingly
,
he thought
to himself
that he
really
liked this girl.
Then he shrugged, p
retty,
great dancer, plays B-ball, fun to talk to
.
What’s not to like?

Deltain stood at the edge of the escarpment and looked
morosely
out over the valley.
The Yetany tribe camped
on this escarpment
every summer because it provided a relatively flat area for their shelters
,
and the prevailing winds
blew
up the escarpment provid
ing
an updraft for an easy launch to flight. The valley below and the plains behind both had pretty good hunting. There were quite a few molloe trees
in the area that provided him
r
with materials to tan
hies
leather. Deltain
had always
liked this part of the year
before
. The living was easy this year
too but
hie felt
desolate
.

Hie occasionally heard
dalins
speaking of Dex, but not with the love
Deltain
felt. Instead
,
hie could tell from the glances they sent hies way that
some thought
Dex
might be to blame
for
the loss of Syrdian
.
The blame they were putting on Dex had been causing Deltain to los
e
more
status as evidenced by the increased difficulty hie’d been having making good trades for hies leatherwork.
Hies wings involuntarily twitched with anger at the way they had decided Dex was guilty with no evidence that hie was anything but another victim!

Deltain had stopped Qes once to ask
himr
again if hie was sure hie hadn’t seen Dex on that fateful day when Dex and Syrdian disappeared and Qes returned late. Qes had drawn himrself up and stared
haughtily
at Deltain. “I barely knew who your child was Deltain. I certainly didn’t keep track of hies comings and goings.”

Hie’d been lonely before this summer. Hies status had been destroyed by
hies mate
Genex and
by
the way hie’d stood by Genex through hies
addiction
whe
n
most other dalins would have left
someone
who abused
fermented tubers
. Hies status had been
elevated
by hies skill at leatherwork, nonetheless, it was
still
low enough that
hie found it
hard to socialize with the dalins
that
the
others
considered to be hies equals.

Hie looked back over the camp. Sometimes hie thought hie hated all dalins and their constant preoccupation with status!
Other times hie recognized
hies
own inner
contradictions
. After all
,
if
hie was unwilling to socialize with those dalins currently judged to be similar in status to himrself but that hie considered to be below
hies own status,
how could
hie
condemn others for not socializing with himr
.

Sometimes hie felt betrayed by Dex who had
triggered
Deltain’s
further ostracization by disappearing on the same day as the beautiful Syrdian.

Most of the time hie worried about Dex though. Dex was hies only living child
,
and Deltain had
expected great things from himr. Hie’d
long wondered at how quickly Dex learned new methods
,
and how frequently hie thought of an even better way to do something that Deltain taught himr.
Deltain had been expecting hies own status to rise
with
Dex’s as Dex became an adult and began to contribute to the tribe
in the manner that
Deltain had thought hie might. In Deltain’s dreams, Genex’s problems were forgotten and Deltain’s pride
in Dex
reached enormous proportions.
Now a
ll
hies
dreams were
ruined
.

Much of the summer had passed and
despite Deltain’s fervent prayers
Dex had not appeared at the summer camp. Deltain had
all but
resigned himrself to the
reality
of Dex’s death. Hie often thought of leaving the Yetany tribe to join another. Of course hie would start with the lowest possible rank in
a
new tribe but hie felt confident that hies status would rapidly rise
.
Nonetheless Deltain
had resolved to stay with the Yetany until after the migration back North. Hie had to see for
himrself
that Dex hadn’t somehow survived the summer there
and by some miracle returned to the cave.  E
ven if Deltain only found hies remains, at least knowing that Dex
was
truly
gone
would settle hies
mind for hies departure.

Eventually Deltain turned and trudged back to hies little shelter.  Hie shared it with no one despite the normal tendency for dalin to live in groups of two to five.

***

Syrdian looked up lovingly as Dex flared to land beside himr where hie stood beside the pond outside their cave. “Look,” hie said, pointing into the pond, “a swimmer showed up this morning.”

Dex leaned over to look, “Where…? Oh, wait, I see it now… Are you going to catch it?”

“No
. Right now we’re not hungry. I’m going to leave himr for someday when we need himr.”

Dex shrugged hies wings, “Good idea.”

Syrdian stood and stretched, “It’s getting cooler.”

Dex dipped hies head in affirmation.

“I’m thinking we could move a little lower on the mountain. It’d be easier to fly and the animals will be more plentiful.”

Dex turned and looked back at their cave. “What will we do with…” hie waved a wingtip at
all
the supplies they had accumulated. Leather, spears,
flint blades and a buried cache of dried meat. Far more than they carry in this thin air.

Syrdian turned to look too.
Things ha
d been going very well since that first
successful zornit hunt. They’d had plenty to eat and
because they wer
e in the “growing age” near the
end of youth
they had
both grown
quite a bit
.
Dex had had to make both of them new leather harnesses
to fit their increased sizes
and had used their
new
zornit skin. Elegant and carefully worked
,
they were beautiful
harnesses
and Syrdian was fiercely proud of hies.
Without having to hunt all
the time they’d had time to practice their new
“
making
”
skills
.
Syrdian
had found a trove of flint up the stream
where hie’d found the first nodule
and, having a lot of material to practice with, had become an expert at
flaking spear heads from
it
. Hie shrugged, “Maybe we could make several trips?”

Dex’s wings sagged, “I guess. It’ll be a lot of hard work but…”

“But
h
aving all this stuff will help us establish
much
better status when the rest of the tribe comes back.”

Dex
brightened visibly
, “You think so?”

“Oh, yeah. No one else our age has ever arrived into adulthood as a mated couple with so many wonderful things to contribute
to the tribe
.”

“Do you think they’ll accept our mating? It wasn’t approved by the council.”

“Hah! Just let them try to object! We
could
just take our stuff and leave to join a tribe that appreciates us.”

Dex’s head went up and back in startlement, “Really? You think we can push them like that?”

“Dex, you have no idea how important these things are, do you?”

“But, once they see how to do them, they won’t need us!”

Syrdian lowered hies head and beat a small wingful of air at Dex, “We don’t show up with a
spear
. We show up with a
zornit
! If they want to learn how to hunt zornit, they’ll have to accept us. We don’t tell them about your
sutures
, we just tell them that you healed an enormous rent in my wing and show them the scar. If they want someone in the
tribe who can heal wings, they’ll have to
accept us!”

***

Allan, Ell’s AI said, “The email that you’ve been waiting for
,
the one from
Shan
Kinrais
to ‘Raquel,’
has arrived.”

Ell leaned back in her chair, surprised that it had finally come in.
He
’d said
he
would send it several weeks ago. Since then they’d been out to a movie and
he
’d invited her to a party put on by
his roommate
Ryan
. She’d had a great time at both and had definitely promoted
Shan
to “friendly boy” status
in her mind
. She admired his disheveled
good looks, his lean muscular physique
,
and the fact that he was a guy who liked to dance. Mostly though, she found that she
simply
loved talking to him. He was knowledgeable but never “showed off” his intelligence.  He liked
talking about
the same topics she did and led her to talk about things she knew little about
,
but found herself studying to understand better after she’d gotten home. She had found herself hoping that he
really
did understand her math. She found herself desperately wanting a friend that she could discuss
her math
with. Someone who actually understood it rather than just admiring what it could do. Someone she could admire and think of as a “boyfriend.”

Now she found herself dreading the opening of this e-mail. What if it turned out that he didn’t have a clue?
This is ridiculous,
she told herself,
just because he
didn’t
understand my math
wouldn’t
mean I
couldn’t
love him. I’m sure
that in
most marriages the two members of the couple don’t have the same understanding of
all
the same topics. One’s strengths compliments the other’s weaknesses and vice versa.