“F-fi-f-five. Thank… you… miss.”
Miss Juniper had probably been aiming pretty low even before Sarah had moved, because the final stroke wasn’t much higher, and cut into the line between her bottom and her legs. It made Sarah whimper and more tears poured down her face as she felt the scorching pain grow even after the stroke had landed.
“Suh-suh-suh-six. Thk-y, mss.” Sarah couldn’t say the words properly because she was shaking and crying too much. She heard Miss Juniper move away from her, then her footsteps came closer again.
“All right, you’ve taken your caning. I want that work by tomorrow. You may leave.” Miss Juniper was all business as Sarah stood up gingerly, her skirt falling back down to cover her blistered bottom as she carefully reached her bag from the floor and left as quickly as she could.
Sarah stayed up until three a.m. with Ral’s permission. She would have finished sooner but it was difficult to sit in one position for long with the irate cane marks gnawing at her backside. Sarah felt a sense of triumph as she placed the completed project on Miss Juniper’s desk at eight thirty. Ral had been disappointed with her behavior, but he hadn’t imposed any additional consequences, aside from insisting that he supervise her while she finished her work. Sarah was grateful that he was letting it go since she’d already been punished. She knew she wasn’t going to do anything like that ever again.
* * *
On Thursday evening, Ral collected Sarah from school and carried her bag all the way to the main street, where he flagged down a flying car.
“Did you behave yourself today?” He had started asking her this every day since the incident with the art project.
“Yep. I got an A on my chemistry project and I got a B plus in music. The teacher said my voice was better suited to elven death metal? I thought that was a weird thing to say but there you go.”
“It’s a type of music that’s most similar to the type of music called Mozart on your own planet. Elven death metal professes the dissatisfaction of young elves who wish monogamy was socially acceptable, and that items were permanent instead of biodegradable.”
“Two questions. How is that similar to Mozart, and please can you explain the issue with monogamy?” Sarah was suddenly very worried that Ral was cheating on her every time he went away. He wouldn’t… would he?
“Mozart music sounds similar. I inferred that it was probably popular among a similar group; angry young men.”
Sarah burst into gales of laughter. “No! So much no! All of the no, in fact. Mozart was a composer, not a type of music. He was one man who wrote a lot of music. And his work is listened to by musicians who played classical music. I can’t believe you thought Mozart was like Megadeth. Where did you even get that idea from?”
“It seemed logical. I’m going to give you an archaeological mystery to solve someday and see what ideas you come up with. And the monogamy thing… well, some of us happen to think it’s a valid way of having a relationship.”
Sarah frowned. What else was there? Who wanted to be in a relationship with someone who was constantly cheating on them? “Back it up. Start over. How do elves normally do things? Like, they sleep around all the time or something? I don’t understand.”
“Elves are highly sociable creatures, and most elves have multiple long-term partners. For example, my father had three wives, and two of those wives had a second husband.”
“My friend’s mom had six husbands. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“At the same time.”
“…Oh. Like Laila.” Comprehension dawned. She hadn’t really thought about it very deeply before, and hadn’t realized that Laila’s relationship wasn’t classed as monogamous, since Sarah had always equated monogamy with the word ‘faithful’ not ‘one partner at a time’ and she knew for a fact that Laila would never cheat on her men.
“Yes. You’ll remember that one of her partners is my cousin Flin, who is a half-elf. On Telia II, the elven home planet, it’s seen as important for there to be enough people in any family to be able to raise the children with all the time and care they need, as well as all the other resources such as money, food, love, and discipline.” Ral paused, and Sarah decided that what he’d said made sense. After all, there was the well-known saying, it takes a village to raise a child. Not that Sarah wanted to date an entire village.
She nodded and he continued, “Unfortunately, that means that when elves try to be monogamous, they’re seen as being selfish or strange, and there’s a lot of pressure to find a second husband or wife. It’s not unusual for children of monogamous couples to be investigated by child protective services, who can legally order a couple to take a new partner if they don’t think the child is getting enough attention.”
“That is the most messed-up thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Monogamy has become quite a trend among the younger generation, so elves under a hundred years of age often rebel against their parents by only taking one boyfriend or girlfriend. Some of them decide they prefer that, and they remain monogamous.”
Sarah felt like a lead weight had sunk to the pit of her stomach, and she wasn’t sure why. She had no claim on Ral; he was free to do whatever he wanted. “Do you have… lots of partners?” she whispered.
“Yeah, the apartment is full of them. They’re coming and going all the time, haven’t you noticed?” he said, and Sarah giggled with relief at his sarcasm. “In all seriousness, though, I left Telia II for two reasons. First, there’s no archaeology, because everything is designed to disappear back into the natural environment. Second, I didn’t want anyone telling me how many people I was allowed to fall in love with. On Minos Kerala, people have as many or as few partners as they want.”
“How many do you want?” Sarah felt like his answer was going to make or break them.
“I’m a little selfish. I want to keep you all to myself, so I only want you.”
Sarah smiled happily. She didn’t have any problem with people who weren’t monogamous, but she didn’t want to share Ral, and she was glad that he felt the same way.
“Our table is booked for seven-thirty for our date, so I’d like you to start getting ready as soon as we get home. I bought you a dress to wear,” Ral said.
Sarah excitedly wondered what sort of dress Ral had gotten her. When she got home, she discovered it was pale pink with a cute floral pattern and a very full skirt that finished just above the knee. Normally, she hated showing her knees because they were a horrible shape, but there was something about the way this dress was cut that made her legs look innocuous.
* * *
After getting ready and leaving in good time to get to their reservation, they alighted the flying car they’d taken, and Ral led Sarah down a little floating jetty. A large boat was moored beside it, and a man in a captain’s hat stood beside the gangway.
“Names?” the man asked, and Sarah realized he was a bouncer of some sort, to check if everyone trying to get on the boat was definitely on the guest list. Ral gave the man their names and they were allowed to board.
“Boats… are pretty much the same as they were when I last saw one.” Sarah was surprised. She’d thought by now they would be made from hover-boards or something. This whole area seemed so… normal.
On the boat, things were even more reminiscent of her own time. The tables were round and covered in tablecloths made of some unfamiliar fabric. There were candles in the center of every table, and the place settings looked like they’d been based on French restaurants, although on closer inspection, the actual items of cutlery were strange.
Sarah asked Ral about the cutlery after a waiter showed them to their table, which was beside a window overlooking the purple waves.
“The puller is the scoop-shaped one with a pointy tip. It’s for sea creatures with a hard shell; it’s shaped to get the meaty part out without making a mess. The twirly one is called a twizzle, and it’s good for long thin foods; you just put it on top of noodles and twist until you
have enough. I think the fork and spoon are self-explanatory.”
They ordered and waited for food to arrive. The boat began to pull away from the waterfront, and Sarah rose from her seat and put her face to the window to watch, while Ral got up and stood beside her. Sarah stared at the sea in amazement.
“The water’s so calm, it almost looks like it’s made of mercury.”
“It’s the way the light changes as the sun starts to go down.”
“Does everything need an explanation? It’s pretty. I don’t want to think about it. I want to appreciate it.” She gazed into the incredible water. It looked similar to how photos of the sea sometimes came out, when photographers manipulated them until they looked nothing like anything in real life. Only this was real, and she was seeing it. Maybe the future wasn’t so bad after all.
“I thought you of all people would be interested in knowing why it’s so pretty.” He sounded like she’d disappointed him. For the first time, Sarah noticed that Ral always seemed to want to show her how everything worked. He didn’t only explain things to her because he thought she didn’t know about them. He simply loved teaching people. And she’d just rebuffed him.
“I am, I mean, usually. But not right now. Right now, I want to look at the pretty thing. Don’t you ever want to just stop thinking and experience things?”
“I like to do that after I know how it works.”
The silence surrounding them was made more obvious by the sounds from around the dining hall of other couples laughing, joking, and making upbeat conversation. Sarah wondered how she and Ral possibly had a future together when they were so different.
She looked up at him, and saw him staring out into the water as the boat moved through it. The look on his face made her heart bounce.
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
Sarah reached up and took his hand. His fingers surrounded hers and made them invisible. When he gave her hand a little squeeze, she smiled.
“So… you went to college for a long while to become an astro-archaeologist, right? What did you specialize in?”
“My main research centered around the early twenty-first century.”
Sarah nodded. It suddenly made sense why he’d been so excited to find her. “How long did it take you to get to the moon and back?”
“Months. But it was more than worth it.” He looked down at her and she saw the love in his eyes. It made her stomach flutter.
“Are you going to write a report about me?” It hadn’t occurred to her before, but given the way he’d found her, he was probably well within his rights to write whatever he wanted about her and present it at conferences. She didn’t like the idea at all, but she wasn’t sure she’d have any say in it.
“I’ll have to write something about the site, but I’m not going to turn you into the subject of a study. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with the ethical considerations, and of course, there’d be far too much investigator bias.” He leaned down, their eyes locked as he moved toward her slowly. His face was a hair’s breadth from hers. She parted her lips slightly, some reflex response to being so close to someone she found so attractive. He closed the distance between them and kissed her. A bolt of need shot through her core. She felt like she only belonged with him; no other time, no other place, no other person could ever feel right.
Unlike the last time they kissed, this felt deeper. As his tongue gently probed her mouth, she moaned softly and her legs turned to jelly. The kiss transcended any differences they’d had a moment ago and pulled their hearts together. Sarah never wanted this to end.
They broke apart and returned to their seats when the waiter put their food down on the table. As they ate, Sarah watched the sunset colors of the sky as it turned green, then yellow, until finally with the faintest trace of red, the sun had vanished from the horizon. The whole sunset had taken maybe twenty minutes, and now the night sky was bejeweled with stars.
In a corner of the room, someone started playing an instrument that sounded like a cross between a saxophone and a piano. Sarah looked around and saw a man waving his hands over the top of what looked like the oscillating heterodyne she had used in music class at the academy. She had never known it made such beautiful sounds. Whenever she tried to play that instrument, she produced a screech that sounded like someone had tried to auto-tune the noise a cat might make when its tail was being pulled. The jazzy smooth sound wrapped itself around the table and Sarah felt an amazing sense of calm as she tried to pick up her noodles with the piece of cutlery that Ral had said was called a twizzle.
“How’s your food, Sarah?” Ral had paused eating from his own plate, and Sarah felt his beautiful pink eyes upon her before she met his gaze. She wanted him to sweep the plates off the table, bend her over it, and take her right now. Trying to distract herself, she seized on the opportunity to talk about her food.
“Tasty. I like these noodly things. They’re not like any noodles I ever ate before.”
He smiled and nodded. “They’re made from Anassian cornseed, like the sketti you eat sometimes.”
Sarah looked at the noodles and tried to figure out if ‘cornseed’ was related to American corn. “Is Anassian cornseed anything like the corn we used to have on Earth?”
Ral shook his head. “No, I’ve studied this. Anassian cornseed is a much smaller seed, a bit like a cross between your corn and what you used to call wheat, only it’s not made from either of those things. The Anassians have been growing cornseed for thousands of years.”
Sarah brought a twizzle loaded with noodles to her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. She swallowed before she remarked, “Food in the future is less weird than I thought it would be.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Worms?” Sarah giggled when Ral looked at her in confusion. She’d never told him how worried she was, the first day she was in his apartment, that people in the future might eat wriggly worms.
“Why would we eat worms? What a strange thing to say.” He shook his head in amazement and went back to eating his own food.
A few minutes after they both finished dessert, the boat returned to where it had started. Ral scanned his chip to pay as they left, then they walked down the jetty toward the glowing city.
“Where are we headed?” Sarah asked, as the lowest flying cars paused and a ‘don’t walk’ sign, which only had a picture of a shoe on it, changed color.
“I have something else planned that I think you’ll like,” he said cryptically.
They arrived at a hotel and Ral scanned his chip at the electronic check-in desk. A key was dispensed from the machine. He took it and led the way to the elevators.
“Why’d you book a hotel room? Your apartment isn’t so far away.” Sarah frowned slightly as the lift opened to let them out somewhere in the hotel.
“You’ll see.” He scanned his chip in a door at the end of the corridor. A sign beside the door said ‘Innovation Suite.’ The door slid open. Inside, the room was completely black. Sarah wasn’t even certain that she was standing on anything.
Ral tapped a control panel and the room suddenly changed. The disorientation made Sarah gasp. The black floor was now made of brown lacquered wood. Lights sparkled across the ceiling and a disco ball reflected it on the walls and floor. There were velvety seats to one side and people dancing as some music played, that sounded like it should be in a disco from the 1970s, although the bass was stronger and the words didn’t seem to make any sense as they came through her Speakeasy chip. Sarah had always wondered what a real disco would have been like, instead of the lame school discos that her middle school had put on every Christmas.
“What do you think?” Ral asked, as he returned to her side.
“It’s… magical. Although, what’s with the music?”
“We don’t have any surviving examples of Earth music from the disco age, so I took the descriptions of that type of music, and I searched a music database for anything similar. T
his is what it came up with. It’s Nidian electric folk music.”
Sarah smiled. The music suited the scene quite well, once she got over the strangeness of the way the lyrics were translated.
“Care to dance?” Ral led Sarah across the dance floor, until they were standing under the disco ball. At the mention of dancing, Sarah felt a sense of dread that she was going to embarrass herself. That year of ballet lessons in a class full of stick insects had culminated in a murmured conversation between her mom and the dance teacher, who didn’t understand that children listened harder to adults who were clearly trying to hide what they were talking about, and the teacher and her mom had no idea that each child in the room had heard every word of their muted conversation. Subsequently, the playground teasing for being too fat and clumsy to do ballet had left its deep mark, and now she was afraid to dance near the man she cared about.
He didn’t give her a choice. He took her hands and led her. When she stumbled her feet, he wrapped his hands around her waist and placed her firmly on his shoes. For the first time, Sarah truly appreciated the size and strength difference between herself and Ral. She always felt so big, in everyone’s way all the time, and like she always had to apologize for existing and needing to take up space. But he was easily moving around the dancefloor, carrying her on his feet. She cracked a smile.
Three songs later, Sarah was having so much fun that she forgot her fear of being seen dancing, and soon she hopped off Ral’s shoes and was dancing around without a care in the world.
They alternated dancing and sipping cocktails until finally, Ral looked at his watch and said, “Time for us to leave. You have school in the morning.”
“Do we have to? Can’t we stay for a teensy bit longer?” She squeezed her fingers together and held them up to show him that she was only asking for a very little thing.
“No, I want you in bed so you can learn lots of new things tomorrow.” His voice took on a steadfast tone that implied he wasn’t going to change his mind.
His Little Earthling Page 17
