by J. L. Hilton
“Fourteen rain seasons.”
“Twenty-one years old? You’re so young.”
Belloc looked down at himself. “Am I?” By Glin reckoning, he’d reached maturity five rain seasons earlier, when he could hunt on his own and knew he was male.
Her eyes moved up and down the length of him. “Right. Glin age faster than humans.”
“He should be married and raising children,” said Duin.
“Why?” asked Belloc.
“Why? Because you’re not really an adult until you’re responsible for the lives of others. I had four descendants by the time I was your age. Have you ever had a wife?”
“No.” Belloc had spent his life in isolation, with no one but his mother. He hadn’t spent time with any other female, except J’ni.
“I assume you like females,” said Duin, watching Belloc watch J’ni.
“I like females,” Belloc agreed, echoing Duin’s words in the human language.
J’ni was gathering something that looked like nuts from a gop tree, or maybe some kind of small snail. Belloc was surprised to see the look of arousal on her face when she put one in her mouth. “I so missed this.”
She tried to give one to Duin, but he grimaced in disgust. “It has the consistency and color of nibbalug dung and tastes like an oozing iggli.”
“How would you know?” she asked.
“I was a child once, with four older siblings who thought it was amusing to trick me.”
“How mean,” she said.
“Yes, it was great fun,” Duin laughed. “And I, in turn, amused myself at the expense of my younger siblings.”
“What about you, Belloc?” she asked.
“I have no siblings.”
“No, I meant this.” J’ni held one of the round, brown objects up to his mouth.
Belloc never had the opportunity to share food with her on Meglin. How he’d wished, every single day, that he could hunt for her, offer her food, even if she refused it. But the Wandant insisted she only eat what they gave her or she would get sick. Hunting the mellump for her suit was all he could do, but it didn’t mean the same thing.
“What is it?” Belloc asked her.
“Candy,” she said. “There’s a green block that grows cocoa beans and makes its own chocolate. This one’s sweetened with real honey.”
He looked at Duin. She had offered it to her nagyx first, so it wasn’t rude of Belloc to take it. But he didn’t want to upset the older Glin any more than he would have wanted to upset J’ni herself. She and Duin were One.
But Duin didn’t seem to care. He was looking at something on his bracer.
Grasping J’ni’s wrist, Belloc looked over her hand and into her eyes. “Thank you,” he said. That phrase J’ni had said to him several times before. Belloc took the candy in his mouth and she let it go. It is foul, he thought, but he swallowed it with an impassive face. He’d eaten worse. If this was the price he had to pay to share food with her, and to feel her fingertips on his lips, he would eat every last one.
J’ni put the rest of the chocolate in her bag and then checked her bracer. “Duin, is that the balance in our account?”
Duin glanced at her arm. “Yes, I think so.”
“You have got to be shitting me.”
“I assure you, I’m not.”
“Where did it come from?”
“INC, your followers, the Glin genetic research. Dr. Geber’s team has made a lot of progress there and already patented several new bio-technologies. And some of the money comes from confidential sources.” Duin leaned close to J’ni and whispered words that Belloc could not understand nor could the translator hear. Then he went on in a normal tone. “That was one of the reasons you were exonerated. When I realized how important it was to them, I refused to provide any further intelligence until you were free to return. They dropped the charges and they started giving me great gobs of money.”
“Don’t talk about it here,” she said.
“My back is to the netcam.” A tone sounded from Duin’s bracer and he examined his forearm. “It’s another vid from your parents. They sent several while you were gone.”
“They paid for the extra bandwidth, of course, because they couldn’t be bothered to type an email.”
“I don’t think they viewed any of the messages I sent them. I tried to explain what had happened, where you were, and that you were safe. But they only grew increasingly distressed.”
“Seth probably got them all worked up,” she said. “God knows what he’s been telling them.”
J’ni and Duin both viewed the new message on J’ni’s bracer. Belloc watched over their shoulders.
“Genny, I can’t tell you how disappointed we are,” said a female who looked like an older J’ni with long orange hair. “Your father is so upset, we’re going to the moon.”
“Because slot machines and buffets are the perfect cure,” J’ni said as the message continued.
“Then, to have this alien emailing us. I don’t know what’s going on, but Seth will help you. I l’upped him on the net, and I trust him. He has the best gen-mods, good networks, an exemplary military record. The grandchild you two would have! Get away from those aliens, they are fallen angels who want to destroy this holy planet given to us by—”
J’ni turned off the message. “Sorry, my parents are religious zealots.”
“Zealots?” Belloc repeated.
“I don’t think that one’s in the translator.” Duin reached over and pulled the device out of Belloc’s suit. “Fanatic, follower, devotee.”
“Crackpot, lamebrain, fruitcake,” J’ni added her own triad.
“Cracked pot and lame brain I can understand, but fruitcake sounds rather pleasant,” Duin said, as he added zealot to the device. “Why can’t you eat that, instead of chocolate?”
She laughed and hugged Duin’s waist, pushing her large breasts against his back. “I love you.”
“To my great good fortune,” Duin replied over his shoulder. “And I would kiss you, but you probably still taste like iggli.”
“What is an iggli anyway?” she asked.
“A fungus. That moves.” Duin wiggled his hand up her arm to illustrate. “I’m thinking I could fund our liberation by selling the second most foul thing on our planet—after the Tikati, of course—to humans like you who would stuff themselves with it until they got a raging case of hallucinogenic indigestion.”
J’ni laughed harder, and rained kisses on his speckled neck.
Watching them, Belloc was even more determined to learn all he could about humans, their language, their Asternet walls, their food and their culture. He would learn to fly the Tikati ship, and help Duin, and someday he would prove that he was brave, brilliant, capable and amusing, too.
Then he would kiss J’ni, even if she tasted like iggli.
Belloc slept in the garden, curled up on the ground beside the fish pond. Not that he slept much. He spent most of his time looking at everything in Duin’s collection or practicing English with the translator. J’ni told him to knock on the door when he was awake, but he didn’t want to interrupt them doing what they had done at the lake on Meglin. And if he were Duin, he’d be doing that as much as possible.
The thought made him flush with arousal. He didn’t feel guilty for watching them—as he didn’t feel guilty for seeing J’ni without clothes on. What he felt guilty about was wishing that she was not J’ni Nagyx Duin. But he couldn’t help it. For the first time in his life, someone had taken him in instead of driving him away, protected him instead of hurting him. He would never forget the way she seized Ga’Duhn’s arm to stop him from cutting off Belloc’s hand. Belloc was surprised, again and again, whenever she laughed. J’ni was fearless and joyful in a way he’d never known anyone to be. His mother had never laughed and she had lived in fear every day of her life, even to the end.
J’ni had the other half of her soul. Duin, Soulbound of J’ni, Elder of Long River, Envoy to Earth, Hero of the Tah Ga’lin Uprising, Foun
der of the Freedom Council, and INC Star 20 Blogger.
Still, Belloc remembered the drop of rain that fell from her eyes when she thought she wouldn’t see him again, and it gave him hope.
***
Belloc learned about the words reconnaissance and intelligence when he accompanied Duin to Glin. They flew around and looked for Tikati outposts, recorded vids, and collected more water for Asteria. Finding water was difficult, because Duin refused to take it from inhabited lakes or rivers, and they had to avoid Tikati. So Belloc saw areas of Glin he never knew existed.
“I am content to share both water and information with the humans,” Duin said as they stood on the bridge of the stolen Tikati ship. “But I would love to know when they will be content to share freedom with us.”
Duin drilled Belloc on the features of the Tikati vessel. Alone with Duin, without J’ni or the colony to distract him, Belloc found it much easier to pay attention. It also helped that he had a drenching desire to understand. Belloc’s mother died in a Tikati ship, because he didn’t know what to do. He would have died too—along with the screaming, trapped Glin—if the Finders had not discovered them. The prison ship was much larger than this one, but it had a bridge, full of lights and flat reflective surfaces that looked like water but were not liquid, and windows that were not openings. Now he understood. The room controlled the entire ship.
“For a race that didn’t have space travel five rain seasons ago, they managed to figure out how to automate everything, so it’s not too difficult. Pay close attention to that sensor, there—” Duin pointed, “—because if that changes color, it means another ship is nearby, and the only other ships out here are Tikati ships, so we will have to leave in a hurry. And watch that one—” he indicated another glowing light, “—because that’s the Tikat communication channel, and if that lights up, it means they’re trying to contact us.”
“Why would they contact us?” asked Belloc.
“Well, not us specifically. The Finders disabled the identity beacon—that was a constant signal put out by the ship, to alert all other Tikati ships of its location. But, if that light blinks, it means we are picking up Tikati communications. And, again, we’ll have to move away from the source of the signal. This one shows the air that we breathe. This one the gravity. This one is the level of the ground, if we’re over a planet.”
Duin went on and on like that, explaining everything as they traveled. When it occurred to Belloc to think of the ship as one giant musical instrument, and keeping it in the sky was like sustaining a long, complicated melody, it made much more sense to him.
“Was long time to learn flying?” Belloc asked.
“Did it take me a long time to learn how to fly the ship?” Duin corrected Belloc’s grammar. “Almost two rain seasons. But most of that was spent trying to get information out of the Tikati we captured. They didn’t speak Glinnish, and we didn’t speak Tikati, and I had no idea what was involved in sailing the sky ocean or operating a machine. Many, many pieces were cut off of them, and ultimately it was the Finders who came along and showed me what to do.” He glanced around. “I cleaned up most of the blood, I think.”
“Will it take me so long?” asked Belloc.
“I doubt it. The length of a few storms, maybe. If you pay attention.”
When Belloc wasn’t on missions with Duin, or learning Earth letters and numbers with Mose’s children, he still followed J’ni. Duin encouraged this.
“I will gut you with my bare hands if you let anything happen to her,” Duin warned him.
As if Belloc needed any incentive. He would gut himself if anything happened to her. Belloc knew about the previous attacks by humans who didn’t like Glin, which didn’t surprise him. What surprised him was that any humans liked them at all.
But J’ni did not seem to be in danger. She spent a lot of time sitting at the table, using the Asternet. So Belloc spent a lot of time sitting beside her. He knew how to read and write Glinnish, as much as his mother had taught him. But he was amazed how much J’ni and Duin would read and write in a day using the Asternet and tapping—they called it “typing”—their fingers on the table. He liked listening to the typing. It sounded like rain.
“I’m torn between sharing the existence of the Finders with humanity, and wanting to protect your people there,” she told Duin one day when they were blogging.
“But didn’t you return with stacks and stacks of notes?” Duin asked.
“I did. I guess I could still write about most of it, without saying where they are. Not that I even know where they are in relation to Earth or Asteria. But I wouldn’t want the Tikati to try and go after them.”
“The Finders are too far away,” said Duin. “Tikati ships can’t space shift. I doubt they monitor or understand the Stellarnet anyway. If they did, they would know I’m here, and what I’ve been doing, and they would have acted on that information.”
So, J’ni wrote about the Wandant. She also told the stories of the Glin refugees. She was kind enough to read these out loud to Belloc, since he couldn’t read her language yet. She also read him her email and tickers.
When she wasn’t busy, she showed Belloc vids of Earth. She’d told him many things while they were on Wandalin, but being able to see the vids amazed Belloc. Vids were images that could be viewed again and again, like memories. She had one of Belloc, and laughed when she showed it to him.
“Look at you, you look so sad,” she said.
He didn’t think it was funny at all, and he knew neither did she. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he had begun to believe that sometimes her laughter was an act of defiance in the face of things that upset her, and not from constant joy. Anyone who was happy all the time was an ezzub, an idiot, and J’ni was no ezzub.
“I did not know if I could follow you to Asteria, and it hurt me.”
“It hurt me, too. I’m glad no one took a vid of me at that moment.” She laughed again.
Belloc was glad that the thought of not seeing him again upset her so much that she had to laugh.
***
One morning, while Belloc was curled up by the fish pond, Duin came into the garden and prodded him with his booted foot.
“Why haven’t you built a hut yet? Granted, the materials are a bit unfamiliar, but you could come up with something.”
Belloc sat up. “I don’t know how.”
“How is that possible? In all your entire village, there wasn’t a single dwelling?”
“I didn’t grow up in a village.”
“You had no grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins?”
“Just my mother.”
Duin looked at him for a long time. “I’m very sorry.”
“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”
Duin sighed, sitting down on the ground beside him. “Don’t be an ungrateful brat, Belloc, you’re too old for it. But you’re not too old to have your nose wiped on the ground.”
Belloc found that amusing. “I’d like to see you try, Elder Duin,” he said with a laugh.
“Don’t tempt me. Just accept my honest feelings.”
“To be sorry for me is to say my life is lesser than yours. My life is what it is and it’s been mine.”
“Why didn’t your mother ever weave a hut?”
“We never stayed in one place long enough.”
If Duin found that odd, or unfortunate, he said nothing about it. “Well, you shall have a hut, and I shall show you how to build it. Though I doubt any Glin ever had one quite like this.”
While Duin gathered materials, he sent Belloc to the Tech Center to pick up lumina paint and hardware from a purple-haired human named Hax.
“Blue Glin mod. I like it,” Hax said when Belloc entered. “I’ll add that to the game.”
“Game?” Belloc examined the room. The Tech Center was almost like Duin’s garden, full of enigmatic objects and materials. But larger and brighter, with lights and Asternet windows covering every wall and some of the table tops.
<
br /> “Mysteria.”
“What is Mysteria?”
“Ah, come this way, young Jedi grasshopper noob.”
The translator didn’t have some of those words, but Belloc understood “come this way.” Hax led Belloc to a wall, which disappeared to reveal an empty thoroughfare. Belloc had already seen so many impossible things on Asteria, he didn’t know if anything would surprise him any more.
“Should I go?” Belloc pointed down the corridor.
“Sure.”
Belloc’s attempts to enter sent Hax into a fit of laughter.
“It’s a picture of a thoroughfare, on a wall, not a real thoroughfare,” Hax explained, and had to try hard to stop laughing. “Omigod. ’K, ’k, sorry.” Hax wiped his eyes. “Grab those gloves over there.”
Belloc began to wonder about Hax’s mental stability as he picked up a pair of gloves from a nearby table. The gloves were supple, like wallump skin, but had no visible stitching. Similar to J’ni and Duin’s bracers, they were covered with adornments that Duin would have called icons and displays.
“Put them on,” Hax said. When Belloc hesitated, Hax started giggling again. “Really, ’k? I’m done. I’m done. I promise. It’s fine. Put them on. No more funnies.”
Belloc thrust his hand into one of the gloves and it lit up. It covered not only his hand, but almost his entire forearm. He pulled on the other. They were comfortable, like a second skin.
“Activate the Mysteria app. That little icon that looks like a star. No, not that one, the other one. No…the star. Sparkle. Pointy thing. For the win.”
Duin appeared on the wall. At first, Belloc thought he had contacted him through the Asternet. But when Belloc moved his arm or took a step, so did Duin. Every movement Belloc made was shadowed by the Duin on the wall. And the Duin on the wall was holding a very dangerous-looking, spiked weapon, not unlike the zap-sword real-Duin had in his garden.
“These gloves were for Duin, so he’s the default setting. “Watch out, here come the zombies.”
A group of human corpses were walking straight toward them.
“What do I do?” Belloc asked.
