“I am so sorry this happened to you.” He pulled back and held my hands. I couldn’t help but notice the dragon was now staring intently at the floor. “My name is Adrian Sol-dam. I am a doctor, but you know that, and I am a member of what you might call a resistance. You’ll have to forgive my colleague. He’s a little slow on the uptake, but he’s coming around to the idea of extra-terrestrial intelligence. I hope he didn’t subject you to anything too insulting, it’s a habit of his with everyone we’ve tested.”
“A…a what now?” I was fucking reeling. “Everyone, what do you mean everyone? Where’s Katy and Jonathan?”
“I don’t know, but it’s fair to say they’re fine. Humans are, for the moment, a precious commodity, and there’s only twelve of you. So, um, doing anything unsavory wouldn’t be in anyone’s best interests. Even for our opposition.”
“…Opposition?”
He sighed wearily and rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. This was not a fun question for him to answer. “You’ve seen, I’m sure, how little regard my kind have for alien species?” He grimaced. “Though I suppose we are the aliens to you, aren’t we? We are called Sarchans, and you are on the planet Sarchaia. I hope your, ah, host, hasn’t been cruel.” He glared at the dragon over his shoulder. The dragon made a deep growling sound and looked away. Something was troubling him, clearly, but it didn’t seem like he was directly angry at either of us. Weird.
“Not…to me,” I said, thinking of Orin. “But they deserved it and then some.”
“Ah. Well. I’m sorry if you’ve witnessed something…unpleasant,” he said. “Darin is, um…not quite on the up-and-up, I’m sure you’ve realized by now.”
“I have. What’s he do, exactly?”
“He manages the farming of a plant used in certain medications,” he said. “He’s not quite a gangster as you might say, but it is illegal, thanks to a hoard of people who use it for exclusively recreational purposes. Which should also be taken off the misdemeanor list, but that is a conversation for another day.” He did his best to smile, but there was a tightness in his eyes he couldn’t banish all the way. “World goes round because of people like him, though. I’ll have to explain it to you sometime, but we don’t have a great deal of time before my associate returns, and his lips are looser than most, I’m afraid to say.” He sighed. “So hard to find good help these days.”
I managed a dry chuckle.
He turned to the dragon briefly. “I don’t think I have it in me to spare you the ‘I told you so’, but at this point I think you deserve it and then some.” He smiled at me, and I smiled back, broadly this time.
The dragon scowled, and Dr. Sol-dam sighed. “If you’d let me teach you any other language, we could have saved this poor girl a lot of trouble.” He repeated himself in his own language and the dragon looked downright ashamed.
He shook his head and offered me an apologetic smile. “It’s hard for most of us to wrap our heads around. It’s pathetic, I know, I’ve been battling this collective phobia of progress for years now.” He sighed huffily. “I’ve been trying to convince this blathering fool for years and years. It’s almost funny he is the one to wind up with you.” He grimaced. “Not funny-funny, but coincidental. You know what I mean, I hope. It isn’t funny at all.”
“No, I got it.” I tried to shape my face into something vaguely reassuring. It worked. His expression softened and he sighed a little through his nose.
Something clicked and pushed itself to the front of my mind, slowly, the way an intern slides a portfolio across a table. “You’ve had other contact before,” I said. “Not with humans, but…others.”
Sol-dam seemed to know where my head was at. He nodded. “We have.”
“And they were—”
“Intelligent. Yes.” He made a face. “Every last one. None quite so innovative as humanity, though.”
“And none of them…” I swallowed. I couldn’t think how to phrase my question. “No one…”
“Believed?” Sol-dam offered. “No. They have seen and seen and seen, but it is never enough. The way so many of your people deny global warming despite copious evidence in its favor.” He shrugged. “People get into their own heads and it is impossible to dig them out. We do what we can, but sometimes stupid is stupid no matter what you do.”
“You know about global warming?” I said.
He laughed. “I and some of my less popular colleagues have at least a dozen ships at the edge of your system at any given time, searching for enough evidence to get the aforementioned stupid people out of their heads. We’re cloaked to high heaven, of course, you couldn’t hope to see them with the technology you have available.”
“Alar’s ship was cloaked?”
He groaned, closing his eyes briefly. “Alar is an imbecile with no professional connections to me and mine. My guess is he commandeered the ship and promptly threw every regulation we’ve ever had out the window to get close enough to grab you. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near you. I fear your kidnapping was more of a whim than anything. Wrong place wrong time, as it were. I’m sorry.”
Wrong place, wrong time. “Um. So…what exactly did you want to ask of me?”
Sol-dam looked sidelong at nothing in particular and sucked in his lip. “We were, and are, looking for ways to prove your sentience as a race to the population at large – we’d like to stop being so isolationist – but it is proving difficult. People say our translations of your language are made up, that photographs of your spaceships and interstellar stations are doctored.” Sol-dam groaned, visibly tired just thinking about it. “Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose. And then there’s the matter of the, ah…” he cleared his throat. “…industry, I’ll say, that proven sentience would completely and totally dismantle.”
“Slaves?” I said.
Sol-dam swallowed uncomfortably and nodded. “Yes. Slaves. We like to think of ourselves as a civilized race, but it’s hard to be civilized in the promotion of forced labor. Sentience would undo the common assumptions humans apply to cows and horses. They are animals, domesticated for the express purpose of serving the ones to whom the food chain no longer fully applies. Their pull – that of those in the industry – is substantial. Even if we could magically convince every pedestrian at once that you are intelligent, we would still have them and their lobbyists to contend with.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Oh, loads.” He grinned.
“…What makes you think I’ll be the one to convince everybody?”
He sighed heavily. “Perhaps you won’t, but we are running out of time. We never, ever intended to take any of you from your home system, or anywhere else you might have ended up organically, precisely for the reasons you’ve observed in Darin’s household. You would have been treated as animals, as many other unfortunate species have been before you. We couldn’t risk, quite frankly, causing an international incident by taking anyone. Any conflict resulting from such an outright violation of interstellar space would go about as poorly as you’d expect, since my government wouldn’t even try to open communications. If anyone from your side opened fire, we would have no method of talking to you, and that’s a recipe for the most perfect storm I’ve ever heard.” He sighed and suddenly looked sheepish. “I’m rambling, though. Forgive me. This is somewhat of a struck nerve for me.”
“No, you’re, you’re fine,” I said absently. “I’m still like three sentences back, though, give me a second.”
He chuckled. “Of course, forgive me. But, my point. Our point. Now, you’re here. You’ve been taken, and it’s only a matter of time before someone comes looking for you. A disappearance of that nature shouldn’t be something anyone would be inclined to sweep up, considering the kind of nightmare space monster it might imply.”
Oh my God. “You think there’s a war coming.”
“Unless your governments are as callous as they are far away, I know there is a war coming. It has been our greatest fear since the beginning. So fa
r, none of the other races my people have enslaved have done anything by way of retaliation, but I maintain it is only a matter of time before we encounter someone who is technologically capable of blasting our entire planet to smithereens.” He shrugged. “Or something equally dramatic. We need to convince people intelligent life is out there before we offend something bigger than we are. All we need is to prove that one race is sentient, and from there they will fall like dominoes. We will have a lot of apologizing to do,” he admitted, “but a bruised ego would be better than a bruised planet.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Okay. Um. So…what do you want me to do, exactly?”
“Exactly what you’re doing. Learn our language. I will be forcing myself on Darin as his resident doctor so I can help you along.” He ran a finger along his forehead, stretching the lines in his skin. “We are currently looking for someone up high enough in the world to be our advocate, with little luck. But, that isn’t what you need to worry about.” He fixed a smile on his face. “Will you do what you can for us? For all of us?”
“Do I have a choice?” The word came out snapping like a piranha. “Sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “You’ve earned your teaspoon of irritation if anyone has. And you do have a choice, of course. We want, no matter what, to get all of you off planet and home, like I said, before there’s an incident. It would be easier if we had official leave, but it can be done without it. It will take a while, though. A long, long while. You saw the size of the cruisers. There’s half a dozen of those hanging in orbit at any given time. Getting past them without being seen will be tricky, to say the least.” He took a breath. “But I digress.”
I heard myself ask, “How do I know I can trust you?” Which is the dumbest question in the world.
He smiled warmly and squeezed my hands. “Because I went to the trouble to learn your language when no one else has,” he said. “And because I want to help you go home.”
I don’t know why, but that was enough. I nodded once. “I’ll do it.”
Dr. Sol-dam beamed. “Brilliant. I’m going to have a conversation with Darin about staying with you. We can do this. We can.” He said it like a revelation, as though it wasn’t something he’d considered. Maybe he’d never been this close before.
He talked with Darin for a while. Darin’s voice was low, and he kept his eyes down and his arms crossed, but it didn’t look like he was objecting. The dragon’s gaze drifted and smoldered. He was staring at the air beside me like he was trying to set it on fire through sheer force of will. His body wound tighter every time he breathed.
Sol-dam paused and stepped back, clearly waiting for Darin to respond. He didn’t.
“What’s up with you?” I said to Darin – in English, because I was being sarcastic and didn’t actually care to hear his reply.
But I guess he got the drift of the question from my tone. He spoke slowly in Sarchan. “I…have…hurt you.”
I snorted, and he glared at me. Then something passed across his face that I didn’t have time to analyze. He turned to Sol-dam and said something I didn’t catch, then practically ran out of the room.
“He said to bring you back to his home with me,” Sol-dam said, sounding even more confused than he looked. He offered me a reassuring smile. “It’s a lot to take in for most people. He’s not the worst kind of person in the world, but he has a long way to go.”
I nodded, staring after him. “Most people do.”
***
We made it back in time to hear the last crash.
The cage had been totally demolished. Not taken apart: torn apart. Every bar was bent or broken, full of teeth and claw marks, and a good portion of them were coated with soot. Darin stood in the middle of it, panting, wings outstretched, tail lashing back and forth like a whip. A slew of unfortunate books burned around him, smoldering quietly at his feet.
“Oh,” I said.
He looked back at us over heaving shoulders. His mouth hung open, reddish smoke pouring out from between his teeth. His breathing came ragged, grating against the air like sandpaper.
He swallowed, grimaced, and tried to speak. His lips moved slightly, but he made no sound. It took him a very long time to find his words, or maybe he had plenty of them and was having to kick each one out of his mouth.
“You…will stay…upstairs,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
He flinched as though I’d struck him and stormed past us. Sol-dam and I looked at each other.
“Give him time,” he said, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“He’ll come around?” I said.
Sol-dam grimaced, looking at the burning cage. “He already has. And it scares him.”
***
It wasn’t long. A month, maybe two. Sol-dam and I existed almost exclusively in the library, running through flashcards and vocabulary tests and some less contrived linguistic exercises. We made quick progress, just like he’d promised. It definitely helped that everyone around me but him was speaking the language I was trying to learn; no teacher like immersion.
We were sitting in the library at a table we’d dragged up to the now repaired window. The fresh glass was currently taking a pounding from a ferocious rain thick enough to obscure the cliffs and sea and everything. The draft pouring around its edges was blissfully cold.
“Brilliant, brilliant!” said Sol-dam, clapping his hands together. “You’re doing spectacularly Brittany, truly spectacular.”
“Halan,” I said, smiling.
“Veltor,” he said, a more informal way to say “you’re welcome”. He held up the flashcards – honest paper flashcards, written on in black ink – and pointed to the word on top, written in the Sarchan script: miris.
“Great,” I said. “Or grand, high, or…hang on, um…majesty?”
“Essentially,” he said, and he laid down the card. “It has also been used to mean Brittany, but only in certain dialects.”
I laughed, resting my cheek on the heel of my hand. “Whatever, give me the next card.”
“What, no thanks? No fervent denial of my affections? No threatening my life or throwing yourself at me across the table?”
“Dun suluca,” I said, which most closely translated to “go procreate with goats”. It wasn’t exactly the “fuck you” I was hoping to find in the language, but it did its service. Dr. Sol-dam grinned broadly. He shuffled through his cards, looking for something specific, and held up the card for “arsil”: irritable, though it was usually used in the same context as touchy.
“Fuck you.”
“Not quite,” he said.
“You’re looking at its definition.” I snatched the card out of his hand and tore it in half, but I was biting back a laugh. “Next question.”
“Why do you abuse me this way?”
“I’m lashing out because you ate my popsicle.”
He grinned. “I regret nothing.”
I grinned back. “Of course you don’t.”
Sol-dam and I had become fast friends. We were both scientists, and when we weren’t burying our sanity in a mountain of verb tenses, we exchanged information. I told him about the Large Hadron Collider and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and a whole hell of a lot about the chemistry of drugs – specifically the research I’d been allowed to conduct on rats. He told me about hyperspace travel and antigravity technology, the latter of which was still in its infancy. Ninety percent of my language lessons now consisted of colorful jibes, both in English and Sarchan.
We both felt the air change and went stiff.
“We have company,” he said, loudly and as congenially as he could. He straightened his baggy white jumpsuit, still his staple garb, and turned to the door of the library with a fire-bright smile. “Afternoon, Luras. Care to join us?”
Darin didn’t look the least bit interested in joining us. He stood in the door with his arms crossed, hunched slightly, one shoulder pressed against the dark wooden frame. I managed to smile
at him. We’d spoken off and on since the destruction of my cage, but only because Sol-dam wanted me to converse with someone who wasn’t a part of my lessons. His words were small and curt, and he could never seem to look me in the eye. If I hadn’t seen him magically punt Orin out the fucking window, I’d say he was shy.
“Luras?” said Sol-dam.
Darin had been standing there for about a minute, totally silent. He looked up suddenly and nodded once, striding forward to sit with us. He frowned as he pulled out his chair, as though confused by his decision. He very much had the look of “oh Jesus what did I just do” plastered across his face.
“Brittany is making staggering progress,” Sol-dam said in Sarchan. He spoke with an affected enthusiasm. “But I’m sure you knew that. She’s following everything I’m saying, aren’t you?”
“Every word,” I said.
“Ask her about the um…” Sol-dam snapped his fingers, searching for something in the infinite filing cabinets of his mind. “What did you call it, the Heisen something…”
“Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” I said.
Sol-dam snapped once more, louder, and smiled. “Yes, that’s it. You can either know where you are or how fast you’re going, but by the time you know one, it’s too late to learn the other. Fascinating stuff, definitely something about life in there somewhere, though I fear I’m not enough of a poet to parse it out. Perhaps you’d have more luck, Darin.”
Darin wouldn’t look at me for long. The second I tried to catch his eyes, he would turn away, occupying himself with Sol-dam or the flashcards or the exceedingly interesting carpet. His whole body was wound like a wire, the tightness of the last tendon clinging to a loose tooth.
Sol-dam realized he wasn’t going to respond in the same second I did. We exchanged a look. “Or cocaine.” Sol-dam leaned back in his seat, his hand on the table, fingers drumming across his stack of index cards. “Our dear Brittany knows more about illicit drugs than I do about her entire planet.”
A Pet For Lord Darin Page 8
