“A conscious omission, no doubt,” Saresh said. “The doctors probably felt it would be too stimulating.”
Hathan glanced at his brother. “Speaking of stimulating, Zey told us about your encounter last night.”
“He did? Why?” I tried to sound nonchalant, but I felt a rush of heat to my face.
“He must have thought we’d be interested.”
“Well, I think he was imagining things. We were just talking.”
Hathan looked perplexed. Then his expression cleared. “Ah. Yes. Zey told us about that encounter too. But since you’re not actually wearing the sigil of Kasrash House, I assume he exaggerated a little.”
“You checked?” Saresh said.
“Of course. I didn’t want to use the wrong honorific. I’d hate to offend a Kasrash.” His smile was brief and wry and included me and Saresh equally. He went on, “No, I meant the other encounter. The one that wasn’t so friendly.”
“Oh,” I said. “That. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“It sounds like starhaven security thought otherwise.”
“That was actually kind of amazing. I thought they were being generous to give us two security guards. It turns out we have a lot more than that.”
“Still, you didn’t know that at the time,” Saresh said. “It must have been frightening.”
“Maybe a little. It was all over before I knew what was happening. Mostly I was just surprised. Although Kylie said I should have been expecting something like that.”
“How are things going with Kylie?” Saresh asked.
“They’re good. She’s a good friend.”
Hathan said, “You must be glad to be with your own kind again.”
“I am,” I said, and stopped. I wasn’t sure I could say what I wanted to say, which was that I was glad, but I was also anxious for a decision from the Echelon. The fate of the Pinion’s crew now rested in other hands than my own. Principally, it seemed, in Hathan’s. His ability to persuade the Echelon of his fitness for command would dictate whether Zey and I ever had the chance to sit together in the lounge of another ship, joking about our late nights in Downhelix. And all three of us were perfectly aware of that fact without my drawing attention to it.
Hathan, as always, seemed to anticipate my thoughts. He poured himself another cup of senek and stirred one of the remaining sugar pellets into it. “Three days. That’s what I’ve been told. The Echelon will make a decision within the next three days.” He toggled through the images on the wall again, idly, I thought, but he stopped on a view of the docking bays. He went over to the wall and pointed out a ship that even to my untrained eyes bore a marked resemblance to the Pinion, though its lines were a bit sharper and its hull had a bronze rather than a silver sheen. “This is the ship they’ll give us if we’re lucky. Straight out of the Zenadir shipyards, built for a crew of fifteen. Top-of-the-line propulsion and navigation. Not a mark on the hull.” There was something in his voice that was almost wistful. He wanted this as much as I did, I realized. His reasons, whatever they might be, had nothing to do with me. Maybe he liked being on a ship with his brothers. Maybe his brief taste of command had awoken a hunger for more. Maybe it was simply pride: having once been entrusted with an important task, he wanted to see it through to the end. Whatever the reason though, he wanted us all to go forward together, just like I did.
I went over for a closer look, careful not to stand too near him. “What’s it called?”
“Shavinakh,” Hathan said. “The Ascendant.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Hathan had said to expect word from the Echelon within three days. I resolved to put all questions about the future out of my mind until they made their decision. I was safely on Arkhati, one of the first of my kind ever to be granted that privilege, and I was determined to enjoy it. If these days were the last I spent with my crewmates, then they were doubly precious. Either way, I thought, I owed it to myself to make the most of my time here.
Kylie agreed. With the exception of that first formal dinner, her duties as Earth’s designated cultural representative on Arkhati hadn’t officially begun yet. We speculated that her handlers had been told to leave her schedule open for the duration of my visit. She offered herself as a willing second on all of my explorations. We spent the morning after my visit to Saresh wandering through the twisting alleys of the Atrium, shadowed but not impeded by a pair of the ever-present security guards. There we met up with Khiva, the Pinion’s chief of requisitions and my preferred source of wardrobe advice, who had just been released from her final debriefing session. As I’d expected, she had the answers to all of my sartorial questions.
“The hair colors you saw were artificial,” she said as we browsed through a display of spiky metallic objects she said were hair ornaments. “If it’s not black or gray or silver or white, it’s fake. We don’t use pastes or dyes. There’s a radiation process that’s harmless but permanent. Gold and red are the trendy colors right now, but it has nothing to do with what’s popular on Earth. The different skin tones were real though. Some of our outlying worlds are exposed to different spectrums of light. The early settlers were worried about radiation damage, so they modified their skin pigments to increase their protection. When they had children, they passed on the altered colors. You’ll see gray and blue and even purple. That one’s pretty rare. Not a lot of people on that planet.”
“They genetically engineered different skin tones for themselves?” I asked. “Just like that?”
Khiva shrugged. “It was practical. And our people have a deep respect for explorers. We don’t all succumb to wanderlust, but we all feel it. Ask anyone working soilside and they’ll tell you they’re saving for a trip offworld.”
“Ivri khedai,” I said. Literally translated, the phrase meant “the longing for another sky.” Its companion term, ivri avanshekh, meant “the longing for permanence.” I thought of it as “homesickness.”
“Exactly. So a unique skin tone is a good thing. It shows that your ancestors were pioneers. Of course, it helps that they picked attractive colors. Most of us find them glamorous.”
Kylie, ever direct, said, “Meaning sexy?”
Khiva flashed her a grin. “That too.”
A few stalls down I stopped, mystified, in front of a display of what were obviously House sigils, all rendered in deep indigo or gold on squares of what looked like gray canvas, each at least a foot across. I recognized the Takheri sigil, and some of the others looked familiar. I didn’t think Vekesh was among them. “Is this artwork?” I asked. “Would you hang a picture of your sigil in your quarters?”
Khiva laughed. “No. These are just to show the quality of the artist’s work. She paints actual sigils.” She held up her right hand for emphasis.
“There’s a market for that? Here?”
“Not a large one. But some people come of age when they’re starside. The main demand here is for the gold ones though.”
Kylie traced the sweeping lines of a gold sigil with her forefinger in a sequence that looked utterly haphazard to my Mandarin-trained eye. “People get engaged in space?”
“All the time. Lots of marriages are arranged long-distance. If my parents found me a match while I was between worlds, I’d get my sigil at the next starhaven.”
“That’s it?” I said. “You just go to a stall and buy it? I was picturing something a little more . . .”
“Romantic?” Kylie said. “What do you expect, when you let your parents pick a husband for you? They probably don’t go down on one knee either. It’s basically a business transaction.”
“More or less,” Khiva agreed, seeming unoffended by the analogy. “And it’s important to get your new sigil as soon as possible, especially if you’re marrying into a house that’s ranked higher than your birth house. If someone greets you incorrectly, and then finds out that you outrank them, it’s embarrassing for everyone.”
“Practical,” I said. “Again.”
“So what do you say?” Kh
iva gestured to the display. “Want to join a house? This is your chance. If I were you, I’d choose one of the higher ones. Everyone says it doesn’t matter, but it does.”
“Where’s Khiva House ranked?” Kylie asked.
Khiva smiled. “There is no Khiva House. We’re subordinate to Garian. They’re right in the middle.”
Kylie looked thoughtfully at the back of her own right hand. “It would be a pretty great joke. Imagine the looks we’d get.”
“If you really wanted to confuse people, you’d get a gold one,” Khiva said. “An ink one would be an obvious lie, since you clearly weren’t born into a Vardeshi house. But who’s to say you aren’t engaged to one of us? There are humans and Vardeshi sleeping together, so why not getting married? No one would know how seriously to take it. It would be hilarious.”
“The joke would wear pretty thin after a while,” I said. “Unlike the sigil. I think I’ll pass.”
Kylie said, “Maybe someday they’ll design a twentieth one. For humans.”
“I wonder what it would look like,” I mused.
“I wonder where it would rank,” Khiva said more pragmatically.
“Probably right at the bottom.” I had meant it as a joke, but the look on Kylie’s face told me it had fallen flat. I turned away, pretending to admire the brushwork on one of the sigil paintings, until I saw her move on to the next stall.
* * *
We fell into the habit of spending our mornings in the Atrium, our afternoons in Kylie’s suite, and our nights in Downhelix. I checked my Vardeshi bank account, saw that it contained just under thirteen thousand units, and spent them lavishly. I saw no reason to restrain myself, given that my food and lodging were provided by the Fleet and that another twelve thousand units would have accumulated by the time we reached Vardesh Prime. I went back to the stall with the gray crystal whiskey glasses and bought them as a gift for Dr. Sawyer. I bought an embroidered wall tapestry for my mother and a senek set for my father, along with a canister of powdered senek leaves from Stall 27. I bought myself a memory crystal, more for the aesthetic appeal of the object itself than for its recording function, although I did have it encoded with an image of the Pinion. I wandered from one jewelry stand to another until I found a pendant that suited me, a faceted gemstone strung on a glimmering silver chain, its color the exact blue of the silk dress I had bought in Zurich for an unspecified formal occasion that had yet to materialize. The stone had been mined on Vardesh Prime, the shop owner told me. I weighed it in my palm: a tiny intact fragment of another planet. In taking it away with me from Arkhati I would be, at least temporarily, bringing it home. I liked the idea of wearing it together with the silk dress, two beautiful objects of identical hue from different worlds. I still wasn’t sure I had the courage to wear the dress among the Vardeshi, after what Khiva had told me about the symbolism of that particular shade of blue, which was apparently a near match for their blood. To wrap my purchases for transport I bought filmy scarves in all the colors Arkhati’s inhabitants seemed to favor: white, orange, gray, indigo, purple.
When we tired of shopping, Kylie and I summoned our collective courage and went to get haircuts. The stall we chose, on Khiva’s recommendation, was on a bustling commercial helix below the Atrium. It looked more like a spa than a salon; there were no mirrors that I could see, the dark walls were adorned with spiraling designs in silver and gold, and the lighting was so soft I wondered how the stylists could see their work. Hairdressers and patrons alike stared when we walked through the door. For an instant the silence was so oppressive that I wanted to flee, but Kylie held me in place with a firm hand on my elbow. After a brief murmured exchange, two of the stylists, a man and a woman, stepped away from their clients and approached us. The woman asked in halting and oddly inflected English how they could be of service. Finally, I thought, someone who didn’t speak perfect English—although why a hairdresser on a starhaven three months’ flight from Earth would need to speak a word of it was beyond my comprehension. I quickly explained why we were there. The relief that flooded her face and her companion’s when they heard my Vardeshi was almost comical. They ushered us to two hastily positioned stools at the very front of the shop, where anyone passing by would be sure to notice us. So much for trying to be discreet, I thought, sitting down on the right-hand stool.
The woman spent a few moments running her fingers through my hair, making comments about its choppy styling. I said apologetically that I’d been trimming it myself in my quarters. She laughed. “It shows. Why didn’t you just freeze it before you left your homeworld?”
“Freeze it?” I said.
“Have it treated to stop new growth.”
Was that how Zey had maintained his perfect spikes for three months? I wondered. His hair certainly didn’t look like he’d been cutting it in front of a sanitation-room mirror. “You can do that?”
“Of course.”
“Permanently?”
“The effect lasts for about a year. I can do it for you today, if you like.”
“I think I’d like to see how it looks first,” I hedged.
She laughed again and began smoothing a fragrant oil onto her hands. “This will soften the texture of your hair. It’s so coarse. Like a khanat’s bristles. You should be treating it every day.”
I didn’t know what a khanat was, but I didn’t think the description was meant as a compliment. I also didn’t think my hair was especially coarse. It must seem that way to the Vardeshi though. Their hair was as fine and smooth as cornsilk, if I could generalize from Zey and Sohra, who had submitted cheerfully to a tactile investigation shortly after we left Earth. I glanced over at Kylie, who was receiving a similar treatment. “Do you think this is safe?”
“Soaps and lotions are supposed to be fine,” she said dubiously. “Let’s hope this oil stuff counts.”
Kylie’s shoulder-length hair needed only a straightforward trim, but at the last minute she gave in to her stylist’s urging that she replace her grown-out blond highlights with platinum streaks. The result looked better than I would have predicted. Somehow the glints of silver brought out the darker gold of her natural hair color and the blueness of her eyes. “That’s great,” I said. “Very chic. You should freeze it like that.”
For lack of a mirror, Kylie admired the effect by reversing the camera on her phone, an object of instant fascination for both our stylists. “Maybe I will. There’s no hurry. I have six months to think about it.”
My own cut took a little longer, but when it was done, I was relieved to see that my hair looked more or less as it had when I launched, though perhaps a bit wispier and spikier. A little more like Zey’s, in fact. I declined the offer of coppery highlights. The reflection I saw on Kylie’s phone screen had begun to lose its alarming pallor, and now, the stylist’s work completed, it was more familiar than it had been in weeks. I didn’t want to do anything to disrupt that sense of recognition. We paid with our flexscreens and left. On my way out the door, I was flattered to hear an older woman inquiring whether the salon could match the shade of my hair. Human pigmentation might not be a fad yet, but maybe it was about to trend. I wondered how many salons on Earth were booked solid with requests for silver and gray and white tones. Most of them, probably. The glamour of the Vardeshi had been irresistible even on their first visit to Earth, and now that they were poised to become a fixture in our lives, their allure would only intensify. When next season’s hottest looks arrived on the runways of Paris and Milan, I had no doubt that platinum hair and jumpsuits would figure prominently in them.
To celebrate the success of our venture, we went back to Kylie’s suite for a beer. I had finally had my first taste of the cloudy Vardeshi beer, which I found to have a relatively mild grainy flavor with a slight sourness and an incongruous herbal aftertaste. It was highly carbonated and not especially strong. It didn’t thrill me in the way senek had, but the satisfaction of being able to fill my own glass and Zey’s from the same pitcher was tremendo
us.
He and Khiva were waiting for us outside Kylie’s rooms. Her suite had become a popular afternoon hangout for my crewmates, most of whom had now finished their debriefings. They were fascinated by the casual displays of Earth culture scattered around. Kylie was traditionally feminine in a way I wasn’t, and the common spaces were littered with shoes and stacks of fashion magazines and baskets of nail polish. Our most frequent visitors were Zey and Sohra and Khiva, but Ziral stopped by a couple of times, once with her fiancé, Ahnir, the Pinion’s cook, in tow. I had invited him specifically to witness my attempt to make popcorn on a camp stove. Corn was on the list of Earth foods approved for the Vardeshi, and I had been inspired when I discovered a bag of kernels among Kylie’s food stores. I burnt the first batch, causing an embarrassing halt while my security team flooded into the galley to investigate the source of the smoke, but the second batch came out perfectly. Ahnir made no attempt to hide his shocked delight when I lifted the lid to reveal the fluffy white popcorn. He took a piece, crunched it thoughtfully, and nodded. When he asked me to teach him the preparation method, I knew I had won his approval. Stepping out into the lounge again, I felt sheer elation at the sight of Zey, gray beer in one hand, popcorn in the other, curled up in rapt contemplation of a movie on Kylie’s laptop.
Daskar came by at one point to trade the mystery novel she had borrowed while we were still on the Pinion for another. I suspected her of using the book as a pretext to check on me. She stayed for a cup of senek, which she drank while flipping through one of Kylie’s racier magazines, her expression so neutral I was sure it concealed some maternal disapproval. Even Vethna paid us a brief visit, mainly, it seemed, to drink our beer and make mocking comments while he watched Kylie paint Zey’s fingernails. Zey had watched her giving Sohra and Khiva manicures the day before and had insisted on having his own turn next. He picked through the basket of little bottles for a long time before settling on jet black, which made him look more like a diminutive punk rocker than ever. The next day he gleefully reported that Hathan had condemned his cosmetic experiment. “He said I should take it off right away. It makes me look like a corpse.”
Bright Shards (The Vardeshi Saga Book 2) Page 8
