Tales from Ardulum

by J. S. Fields

  A blush spread from Emn’s face to her fingertips. “N-no. Some…lead-up, I guess, but…”

  Nicholas swallowed loudly and sat back against a pile of clothes. “So, like, I don’t—I mean, you know I’m asexual, and I’m not the hands down galaxy expert on this, but… Have you thought of, you know, maybe?” He balled his hands into fists and knocked them together a few times. “Nothing says ‘happy birthday’ like, er, nudity. For some people, anyway.”

  Emn swallowed a laugh. “Nicholas, there hasn’t been a moment since Atalant kissed me at the inn in which I haven’t thought of sex. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I emerged as a second don, and now I’m sharing not only a room but also a bed with the woman I love, but I don’t know how to, you know. Ask.” She paused for a moment before continuing. “I want to. She wants to. We sort of swap emotions on it from time to time, but…I don’t know. I guess she’s just too busy.”

  An idea popped into his head. It was half-baked and maybe kind of silly, but there was a big difference between romance and sex, and maybe, just maybe, it was actually brilliant. “There isn’t time, or you both feel too awkward about it?” Nicholas asked.

  Emn considered. “Maybe both? It seems callous to say, ‘Hey so, Atalant, we have ten minutes. Can I rip your robe off and…’” Emn’s ears turned red. “I can’t even talk about sex.”

  “Ahh.” Nicholas pursed his lips together and tried not to smile. The more he thought about his plan, the more he liked it. “What’s on her calendar for tonight?”

  “Huh? Oh.” Emn reached into her back pocket and pulled out a folded biofilm tablet. She tapped it on and scrolled until Atalant’s calendar came up. “She’s in a meeting with the Eiean Council for the next two hours. Then, she has a dinner here in Thannon as part of the Eld ascension ceremony tour, a fitting for a new robe near the inn, another meeting that’s listed as ‘just make it stop,’ and then some sort of social event she labeled ‘Arik meetings and booze pls kill me.’”

  “Perfect!” Nicholas shot up, pulling Emn with him. Mithal came out at the same time with the whiskey. Nicholas grabbed the bottle, and Emn was barely able to say a thank you before Nicholas had her out of the store and halfway down the block.

  “Nicholas!” Emn said, breathless, as they ran. “You’ll break the bottle! Also, we didn’t pay!”

  “Corccinth said she’d take care of it. Anyway, I have a brilliant idea.” They rounded a sharp corner, and Nicholas stopped them in front of a small cottage that Emn had already passed over. The bay window in the front had so many books stacked against it that Nicholas couldn’t see inside at all, but that didn’t matter. If it had paper books, then it had a cellulose printer, and Nicholas had plenty of ready files on his portable comm. The data storage capacity of cellulose was so much higher than anything in Earth’s history that Nicholas could, and did, store every piece of media his family owned on his personal device.

  “Books?” Emn asked hesitantly as Nicholas pushed the door in and dragged her inside. The smell of dry rot hit them both at the same time, but while Nicholas grimaced, Emn cracked a smile. “Something is using cellulose in here, Nicholas, and it’s not me.”

  “Just hear me out, okay?” He didn’t let her go until they were halfway through the shop, in an aisle filled with green paper—paper!—books with little, yellow andal flowers embossed on the spines. “Robe fittings can wait, and clearly, Atalant doesn’t want to go to whatever Arik thing she has. I have the perfect idea. We just have to print the right one. Here.” He handed Emn the whiskey bottle and flagged down the far-too-cheerful Ardulan smiling at them from the corner of the shop.

  “Do you speak Common?” Nicholas asked loudly. No sense bothering with High Uklam. There was no way he could properly translate what he wanted the printer for.

  “And seven other languages besides.” The tall, thin gatoi approached, zir pale-orange hair braided neatly down zir back, zir skin the same tint as Atalant’s. Zie spoke with a slight, smooth accent that seemed to settle Emn’s nerves until she looked down at her hands and the collar of her unzipped flight suit.

  “My gloves,” Emn squeaked. She immediately turned back to the door. “I left them at the last place. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Emn, wait.” Nicholas grabbed her hand. Emn pulled against him, embarrassment flushing her face. Nicholas scowled. If she left, she’d never come back, and he had no idea where they’d find a book printer—especially one set up specifically for paper—in the capital proper.

  “Nicholas, please. I have to go.”

  “Emn, Corccinth recommended this place too. It should be fine.”

  Emn stopped pulling and hesitantly looked back at the bookshop assistant. Nicholas looked, too. Zie wore the same smile as before, and it didn’t look forced. Still, there was clearly no makeup on zir, either.

  “You’re welcome here, Emn,” zie said, zir voice like syrup. “I’ve worked with Corccinth for a long time, especially on her flare ‘project.’ You are safe. You’d be surprised, I think, at how many of us non-flares she’s touched.”

  “See?” Nicholas released her hand. “Okay? And if it isn’t, you could destroy zir livelihood in like, one second.”

  “Comforting,” the shopkeeper said. “I appreciate the subtlety.”

  “Emn, please,” Nicholas whispered. “Trust me.”

  “Okay,” Emn relented, keeping her eyes on the assistant. “What are we looking for?”

  Nicholas’s eyes turned bright. He grinned lopsidedly as he turned back to the assistant. “Is your book printer available for use?”

  “Yes,” the assistant said, drawing out the syllable, “but we have a wide selection. Did you want to see if what you’re after is already printed, first?”

  Nicholas waved his hand. “We’re after something old. Also, something Terran. I’ve got the file. It’ll just take a minute to print.”

  “You might be surprised.” The gatoi pointed to the bottom row of books behind Nicholas. “Take a look.”

  Nicholas squatted down, Emn behind him, and started thumbing through the titles listed in Common. “Okay, but do Ardulans write books about romance?” He pulled one out, considered the “tentaclawed” quadruped in lingerie on the cover, and hastily shoved it back in. “Biped romance, that is. You know, person meets another person, or two, I guess, since you all do threesomes regularly. But circumstances keep them apart, but then, in the end, there’s kissing and maybe some nudity?”

  “Nicholas!” Emn hissed.

  “It’s a thing!”

  The assistant chortled. “Of course! You’re in our ‘Recreation’ section right now, and the items on the far right are imported from the Charted Systems, some from Earth, even. We have everything you see in paper also available on bark, biofilm, and numerous metals. Paper is just easier to display.”

  “Huh. I’m betting you don’t have—” But there it was. Sandwiched between a cover with a three-breasted alien biped and a cover with a seething robot horde was his sister’s favorite book. The book she’d forced him to read his sophomore year of high school. The book she’d stolen from their dead grandmother’s nightstand before their mother could keep it from their delicate little minds. Passion of the Pitcher Plants: An Old Bog Novel.

  “Nicholas, I do not need a sex book!” Emn hissed at him. “I know how to do it, just not how to bring it up.”

  “Okay, but wait.” Nicholas looked up at her, triumphant, and held out the ratty paperback. It was a first printing, the edges of the cover curled. He flipped to the interior pages to check the publishing date: 2030. Solid vintage and solid camp, with the cover showcasing two light-skinned Terran women. One was up to her waist in sand while the other looked to be trying to pull her out. They were dressed completely inappropriately for the forest, wearing strapped dresses. Their hair was long, loose, and flowing, and the one not in the sand was wearing shoes with some sort of spike on the heel. Their breasts were, of course, falling out of their dresses, something that had b
othered Nicholas to no end in high school but that would work just perfectly for Emn.

  “Just take a look at it, okay?”

  Emn took the book with her thumb and forefinger and flipped it. “Nicholas, it looks ridiculous.”

  “Okay, but just read a little bit of it. Imagine reading it to Atalant. Think how much easier it would be to talk to her about…stuff, if you’ve read about it first.”

  Emn raised an eyebrow.

  “Try it. And don’t think for a minute that I don’t understand romance just because I don’t want to stick my penis in another being. Open the whiskey. Have a glass each. Read the chapters aloud.”

  Emn huffed. “Fine. Where should I start?”

  Nicholas flipped through the book until he found the part just before the first sex scene. “Here. The scientist’s instruments aren’t working in the bog because of…plot convenience, and the hiker has stopped to see if she can help repair them. But the bog mat is fragile, and they could fall in and soak their clothes at any time. And the only backup clothes they have are the evening wear the scientist packed for her formal dinner that night.”

  Emn squinted at the book, took it between her thumb and forefinger again, and read the passage Nicholas pointed to. “‘But just as Emily reached for the spectrophotometer, Mary’s foot broke through the bog mat. Mary screamed, tossed the brand-new GPS onto higher ground, and grabbed Emily’s arms. “It’s so cold,” she wailed. “Quick, pull me out, and then I’ve got to get out of these clothes immediately. My jeans are really hard to take off when they’re wet, and I don’t know how I’ll ever get out of them!”’”

  “Jeans are pants,” Nicholas explained when he caught Emn’s confused look. “If you move ahead a page, you’ll see that they are, in fact, difficult to remove and—”

  “And Emily falls into the bog and has to change her clothes as well,” Emn finished for him. She looked up at Nicholas. “Right?”

  “Ah, yeah. The plot’s kind of obvious. That’s the point of a lot of these. You don’t really read them for the plot.” When Emn continued to look perplexed, Nicholas took the book and set it on the floor. Were there some Ardulan or Risalian mores he was stepping on that Emn somehow knew about but he didn’t? He and Emn had had plenty of conversations about body parts and sex stuff during their time on the stolen pod. Why was a conversation with Atalant so different?

  “Emn?” He prodded. “It was just an idea. We can try something else.”

  “No!” Emn grabbed the book, stood, and then crushed it to her chest. “It’s, ah— We should definitely get it.”

  Nicholas rubbed at his forehead. “Now I’m confused. You looked terrified a minute ago.”

  Emn looked everywhere, ignoring his eyes. “This book is fine, Nicholas. It was a good idea. We can go. We only have a few hours before Atalant is done with her meetings, and the book could use a cleaning before then. Galactic used books are probably pretty gross. The book itself isn’t, I’m sure, and using pitcher plants as allegory for…stuff is pretty clever since neither one of them ever tries to do anything sexual with one.”

  Nicholas’s mouth fell open. He snapped it shut and narrowed his eyes. “But there is a gross part when Mary kicks what she thinks is a bog body and then they both fall into quicksand, right?”

  Emn laughed nervously and tugged on Nicholas’s shirt until he stood. “Definitely not as gross as that scene. Can we go?”

  “You’ve read this before!” Nicholas crowed triumphantly.

  “I have not!” Emn nearly yelled.

  Nicholas cleared his throat and cocked his head. “Liar.”

  “I haven’t! I’ve…read the next two in the series. Atalant has them in a digital format on one of her biofilms. She left them up one night after going to bed, and I couldn’t sleep, so…yeah. But she doesn’t have this one. I don’t know why.”

  Nicholas laughed hard enough that he had to cover his mouth. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes. “Oh my god, she probably got them from a Terran library when she and Yorden visited Mars. This is perfect.” He pointed to the book. “Go back to the inn. When she comes in to change for her thing with Arik, offer her a glass of whiskey. Ask her if you can share a page from a new book you found.” Nicholas swallowed another round of laughter. “Read her something from this book. I bet you twenty diamond rounds she’s yours for the rest of the night.”

  “What if I can’t get her to sit still long enough to listen to a page or two?”

  Nicholas took her hand, waved to the shop assistant, and pulled Emn out into the street. “Don’t worry—it’ll work. Let’s head back, and I’ll help you set up. I know that book by heart. There’s a sex scene in there I know Atalant won’t be able to walk away from. And if you think she might, well, we could go back for some of those handcuffs…”

  Emn swatted his shoulder with the paperback, but she was grinning and practically bouncing as they made their way to the ground transport they’d borrowed. She hadn’t bothered to pick up her gloves from the first store, and her flight suit was still zipped down to her collar. No one stared or pointed, and as Nicholas watched Emn climb into the transport, alternately biting her lower lip and smiling to herself, he saw the Emn that had so captivated Atalant on the Lucidity. That look would stop Atalant in her tracks, Nicholas was sure, even if the whiskey and book didn’t.

  Grinning wildly, Nicholas took his seat, fastened his lap and shoulder belts, and closed his eyes. For the very first time in almost a year, Nicholas realized that both he and Emn were truly, genuinely happy. And maybe, just maybe, soon Atalant would be, too.

  Legacy

  2062 CE

  Emn tore herself from the heavy blanket. The room was dark, and she could hear Atalant’s steady breathing, but behind all that was the screaming.

  It had started as a whine—the sort of high-pitched kind made by engines—and at first, Emn had simply rolled over and assumed the Scarlet Lucidity was malfunctioning, but the sound had continued. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard it since yesterday, but it was definitely the loudest. And this morning…this morning, the pitch had kept increasing until the whine became a lilt. It came in gasps, in segments short enough to be breaths. Just behind it, Emn could hear wracking sobs.

  Emn tried to follow the sound, but it was omnipresent…and foreign. Was it telepathic? Maybe? Except, she knew what telepathy felt like, and she knew what Ardulans and Neek felt like, and this voice belonged to neither of those. It was…lengthy. Ardulan voices were more rounded and succinct. Neek voices were also round, but shaped more like an oval—at least, that was how Emn visualized it. All telepathic messages echoed in the same place inside her skull, sort of lower and rightward, near her neck. This voice did too, but it was just…it sounded so alien.

  Emn shivered. Neither she nor Atalant was clothed, and the room temperature was set to be compatible with the thick blanket that Atalant so enjoyed. Emn could have done without the cooled room, but Atalant tended to stay much closer to Emn in the bed if she was cold, and that Emn appreciated.

  The whine came again. It was lower this time, more mournful than frightened. Emn stood from the bed, moved to the small porthole—which was barely wider than her hand—and pressed her nose against it. They were docked on Sava, Craston’s first moon, in Yorden’s private berth. Outside, all she could see was darkness cut through near the floor by yellow track lighting. The sound remained though, made more of sobs now than cries. It didn’t seem any louder at the tiny window, so Emn moved to the door. Still the same.

  “I’m losing my mind,” Emn muttered to herself as she rubbed goosebumps from her arms. Was it a small animal, maybe? A small, creepy animal that Atalant couldn’t hear? Emn snorted at her own ridiculousness. Still, Emn walked cautiously back to the bed, knelt down, pushed the bed skirt aside, and peered into yet more darkness, searching, hoping, to find the owner of the sobs.

  Nothing was there. Nothing was ever there, but the sound came again, and this time, it was no sad wail, but an excru
ciating shriek.

  “Agh!” Emn clapped her hands over her ears and fell back onto the thick woolen carpet. The scream continued—threatening to shatter her eardrums—for another two heartbeats and then cut off as quickly as it had come.

  “Emn?” Atalant’s voice was heavy with sleep. Emn only just heard it through her hands. “Emn?” Atalant tried again.

  Emn tentatively moved her hands from her head and then shifted back to her knees. Maybe it was just a dream—a lucid dream—and Atalant had just woken her from it. That was…possible, right? That, all those other times, she’d been dreaming too?

  “I’m down here.” Emn heard Atalant scoot to the edge of the bed, and the sight of Atalant’s face peering over the edge of the andal bedframe helped Emn slow her breathing. Atalant had always had that effect on her, even when she was first don. Atalant was always so stable, it seemed to Emn—even now. Even after being thrust into a leadership role in a religion she loathed. Even in the early morning when her girlfriend was clearly acting strange.

  “Emn? Sweetheart, why are you under the bed? What time is it?”

  “It’s early, and I…thought I dropped something.” Emn stood and slid back under the blanket. She wrapped an arm around Atalant’s waist, hoping she could pull the other woman close and go back to sleep, but Atalant pushed herself up on an elbow.

  “What did you drop?”

  “Hmm?” Emn buried her face in her pillow, willing the screams to stay away. This was the third time she’d heard them. They’d started just as the Lucidity entered the Charted Systems, and Emn was more than ready for them to stop.

  “You said you dropped something. Did you want me to help look? What are we looking for? Did you bring a biofilm to bed?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing. I think I was dreaming, or maybe hearing some stray andal through you.” And I want to have fun on this trip, not end up in a medical facility for hearing voices, Emn thought darkly to herself.