Storaas returned the smile. “You are your mother’s heir, then?”
“I suppose you could say that,” she answered. “I was an only child.”
“An only child?”
“My parents had no other children,” she explained. “I was the only one.”
“Ah, I see. A human two-parent family.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Why then did they not have two children,” he asked, “to give themselves an heir for each?”
She pulled her smile sideways. “We don’t think of it that way. Humans just have children—however many they decide to have. Some people don’t have any, other people have a lot, or any number in between. It’s up to them.”
“How peculiar. Should Kyza pass her trials and become the Sural’s heir, he will not have another child.”
Marianne laughed. “How would you know how many children he’ll have?”
“It is our law. He can have but one heir.”
She sobered. “Truly? What happens if she dies before he does?”
“He would be permitted another child. It is not only his right, but also his duty. Suralia must continue.”
“What about you, do you have an heir?”
He fell silent for a moment. “No,” he replied, focusing on her. “And I am too old for that now,” he added. “Do you plan no child for yourself?”
“No.” Her response snapped out almost before he finished speaking. As if she realized she’d revealed something of her anxiety by her quick answer, her expression turned rueful. “I’m in the ‘some people who don’t have any’ category.”
“You are young,” he said. “You may change your mind.”
Her voice went flat. “No I won’t. And anyway, by the time I leave Tolar, I’ll be too old to have children.”
“It would be a shame for your gift of language to die with you. Perhaps the Sural would allow another human on the planet for a short time, to father a child for you.”
“No,” she exclaimed.
Anxiety—close to panic—burst out of her. Her desire to avoid intimacy ran deep, and he had triggered a stronger reaction than he intended. Storaas spread his hands, apologetic.
“Forgive me. I did not at first realize you cannot bear a child. Can your medical science not correct this?”
Marianne fell silent, eyes wide. The anxiety turned to surprise.
He smiled. “You would like to know how I could know that.”
“Yes, actually.” She closed her slack jaws with a soft click and swallowed.
“Among my people, I am renowned for my ability to read others.”
“To re—”
“You are familiar with our science of observation?”
Marianne nodded, and he sensed her surprise settling into comprehension. She could not truly understand—not yet—but he let her think what she would. She resembled a flutter with broken legs—able to fly, unable to land, pained and frightened by the very trees which should give her rest. Yet to be so gentle, even with all the pain she harbored, was remarkable, and he could understand the Sural’s attraction. He wondered what could have given her a wound so grave. Whoever harmed her was unforgivable, he decided, to wound such a beautiful flower.
“Come,” he said. “Let us return to the keep. Your time is your own for a few days. Kyza will be unavailable.”
<<>>
Marianne spent the remainder of the day reading in her quarters and studying in the library. It surprised her when neither Kyza nor the Sural appeared for the evening meal. They continued to absent themselves the following day, so she began to join Storaas at a lower table to take her meals. He welcomed her company.
“Proctor,” she asked during the evening meal of the second day, “what’s happening?”
He paused a moment before answering. “Kyza has reached a critical point in her development. The Sural must—restructure—his parental bond with her. Their relationship will then remain stable until she comes of age.” He paused again, then added, “The process requires three or four days.”
“Ah.” Marianne nodded. Storaas smiled at her, but was otherwise unreadable, and she got the feeling she’d amused him. She grinned. “No, I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
He gave her a Tolari stare before answering. She’d grown used to them, but they could still unsettle her. “Our children are bonded to us, for emotional stability. To the mother from birth, then to the father—if the child is his heir—from a little later in childhood. Kyza has reached the age of second bonding. Her first bond with the Sural dissolved, and she panicked when she felt alone. For several days, she will seek comfort and strength from the Sural, in the same manner you witnessed today. It takes place in seclusion, because while she draws on his strength, his instinct will be to protect her should another adult approach—with violence, if necessary. When their parental bond has re-formed, they will resume their normal activities.” He fell silent and regarded her with another stare.
“Wait—she’s been bonded to the Sural all this time rather than to her mother?”
“It is unusual, but it does occur.” He bowed and left the refectory before she could voice the next question on her mind: Who was Kyza’s mother?
Such a strange people. If she could have found woman friends among them, maybe then she’d understand them better, but perhaps Tolari women didn’t have the same need she did. She couldn’t talk to anyone on the ship other than Addie and Laura, though she would have liked to get to know that young lieutenant she met on Tau Ceti station. They might have become friends.
Adeline didn’t seem inclined to tease her during the next morning’s chat, much to Marianne’s relief. “So you haven’t seen either the Sural or his daughter since the day before yesterday?” she asked.
“Not a sign,” Marianne answered. “They don’t even come to the refectory for meals. Storaas said the Sural needed to ‘restructure his parental bond’ with his daughter. She will seek reassurance from him for several days, or something like that, and while she does that, he’ll protect her from any adult who comes near. Storaas wasn’t clear.”
“Interesting,” Adeline said, taking notes.
“The room felt charged with emotion when the proctor dragged me out,” Marianne added. “The Sural just knelt there on the floor with his eyes closed, holding her, but there was something else going on.”
“What kind of something?”
“I’m not sure, to be honest. When I asked Storaas about it, he picked a flower and made a comment that human senses are dull. I think he was being allegorical, trying to tell me something was going on with them that he could see but I couldn’t. I think—” Marianne thought back to the unfocused panic. “When Kyza grabbed onto me, I felt panic. Now I wonder if it was really hers.”
Adeline chewed on a lip, digesting that. “That would suggest empathic projection.”
“That’s what I think.”
“If that’s the case, it’s the first time we’ve ever run into any evidence of it. Most people think telepathy and empathy are impossible within a species, much less across species.”
“Most people think parallel evolution is impossible, yet here it is, staring us in the face.”
“Good point,” Adeline said, almost under her breath. She sighed and looked up. “Well, I have to go get some work done for Smitty. Keep up the good work, Marianne.”
“Talk to you tomorrow.”
<<>>
Two days later, Marianne wandered alone through the library, thinking about the Tolari and what she had learned of them in the five years she had lived on their planet. She’d shared little of her current train of thought with Adeline, and regretted what she had.
As she browsed the books of art prints, looking for something to occupy her eyes while she thought, the Sural joined her. He seemed the same as he ever did, calm and impassive, which surprised her, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps she had expected him to be somehow changed by this parental bonding thing. Shaking herse
lf out of her thoughts, she shot him a smile. The smile he returned carried real warmth, but then he seemed to look into her.
“Speak your thoughts,” he said.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking about you the past few days,” she said. “You Tolari, I mean.”
He motioned toward a table and took the chair across from her, lacing his fingers together on the table in front of him.
“You do a good job of hiding things from me,” she continued. “You carry on as if you’re all a bunch of cold, heartless monsters, but I’ve been here for five standard years. Every now and then, something happens—or something slips—and over time it’s added up.”
The Sural’s enigmatic smile appeared. She ignored the deliberate attempt at distraction.
“It’s more than just coming to believe you Tolari have a vivid emotional life,” she went on. “But the last straw came when Kyza grabbed my leg a few days ago. I felt panic. But it wasn’t my panic, I’m sure of it. I’m sure of it. And Storaas ordered me not to touch her when she clung to my leg. What could that accomplish? Why would anyone order me not to offer comfort to a distressed child who clung to me?”
The Sural steepled his fingers under his chin.
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re all empaths. Honest to God, for-real empaths, the kind our scientists say can’t exist, and you don’t want every race in the Orion Arm to know about it. That’s got to be why you don’t want contact with other races—I bet we step all over your empathic toes. But it leads me to wonder why you wanted to have anything to do with humanity—whether or not you look like us—because we’re a bunch of chatterboxes who couldn’t keep this sort of thing secret if your lives depended on it—and they just might. My government uses information, people, resources, anything, like weapons. If they decide to start using you, they’ll just start using you, the way they use me. Why did you let us in? Why am I here?”
“I do not fear your government,” he said, his voice mild. His eyes didn’t stray from hers, and he was very still.
“You should!” she exclaimed. “You don’t even have air travel, much less space travel. Earth Fleet ships could bombard you from above!”
He smiled and shook his head. “We are not as primitive as we seem. I would never permit an attack on my people.”
His words brought her up short. “Eh?”
“I would never permit an attack on my people,” he repeated.
“And just how would you manage that?” She waved a hand around her. “Look at this. You live in an archaic stone fortress. Forgive me if I give offense, but you haven’t even split the atom, if you know what an atom is. We did that six hundred standard years ago.”
He chuckled and stood. “Come with me,” he said.
He led her to the stronghold entrance. To one side of the great doors, he pressed a panel which looked no different than the others. With a stony sound, the wall opened, revealing a large, open room. An ovoid crystal pod, perhaps four meters long and three meters high, hovered over one of two empty shafts in the middle of the floor. The Sural touched its side, and the crystal melted away to form a doorway. He motioned for her to enter it.
“What is this?” she asked, eyes wide, as she stepped in.
“A transport pod,” he replied, following her. At another touch, the doorway melted over as if it had never been, and a small panel extended up from the floor in front of him. “It is alive and dimly sentient. When I touch it, it knows what I want it to do.” He placed his hand on the panel, and the pod dropped.
Marianne uttered a little screech and grabbed onto the Sural’s arm. He looked down at her, his impassiveness gone and amusement lighting his eyes.
“You are quite safe,” he said.
She swallowed and let go. Something flashed in his eyes—regret?—but then it disappeared, and his usual impassive expression slipped into place. A moment later, reassurance filled her, as it had when Storaas had lain a hand on her shoulder, except… no one touched her now. She glanced up at the Sural. He studied the control panel.
The pod came to rest at the shaft’s base. A long tunnel opened before them, bright as day, but she could see no source for the light.
“We have an extensive network of these tunnels beneath the surface of every province,” the Sural told her. “It is how we travel.”
“You don’t need air travel.”
He shook his head. “No. We have control over Tolar’s weather, but even so, the skies are too perilous. In the days when we traveled by air, too many of us died in treacherous air conditions. This way is as swift and much safer.”
The pod leaped forward into the tunnel before them. They sped along for a time, until they burst into open ocean.
“Ohhhhh,” Marianne sighed, looking all around.
The Sural’s mouth twitched, and he aimed for a school of small sea creatures, bursting through them with an open smile. Marianne laughed. Then she realized, as the pod swooped and dove, she didn’t feel the rolling or the accelerations.
“Transport pods possess inertial dampening,” he said.
“How did you know I was wondering about that?” she asked.
“I am very good at reading others.”
“Like Storaas?”
“He is more proficient than I,” the Sural admitted, eyeing her. “More proficient than most, in truth. He is a noted sensitive.”
Marianne shook her head. If he really was an empath, at least he wasn’t the most sensitive of them. As he guided the pod into deeper water he peered around as if searching for something.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“The hevalra migrate through the waters off Suralia during the autumn,” he answered, and then pointed with his free hand. “Look. There. A hevalrin. The largest creature on Tolar.”
She looked. A shadow loomed in the distance, and he aimed the pod for it. As they drew closer, she realized it was enormous—a vast marine creature larger than a terrestrial blue whale, with three sets of fins and a long tail. Six limbs. Like the flutters. The hevalrin seemed to notice the pod.
Marianne gasped. “It’s coming toward us!”
“Have no fear,” the Sural said. “She means us no harm.”
“She?”
He nodded, and the pod stopped. The creature approached until it hung in the water in front of them like a wall.
“Greetings, old friend,” the Sural murmured as the hevalrin bumped the pod. He put a hand on the wall where the creature contacted it, and his hand sank through the crystal until he touched its skin. Then he put his other hand on Marianne’s shoulder and closed his eyes. “Just feel,” he said.
Marianne drew a sharp breath. She could feel the hevalrin, calm and deep and ancient. It bumped its feelings against her, playful as a puppy. The Sural smiled, his eyes still closed.
“She likes you,” he said. “Touch her.”
“But I’m not an empath.”
“She is.” He took a hand and guided it onto the crystal. Then he pushed, and her hand sank in as if through half-set gelatin, until she reached the cold water and the hevalrin’s rough skin. Her sense of the great creature grew clear, a direct connection rather than feeling the ancient leviathan through the Sural. To her surprise and wonder, the world faded, the universe contracted to only herself, the Sural, and the hevalrin. She felt as if a large, stately old dog, full of affection and calm strength, licked her mind. She tried to return the warmth, and the creature’s entire body shivered, rocking the pod. Delight surged through the connection.
A distant call echoed. With a brief flash of reluctance, the hevalrin broke the contact and backed away. Flicking her six fins, she rocketed toward the surface and breached, taking in a fresh supply of air. Another flick, and she headed into the deep. As they pulled their hands back into the pod, Marianne noticed her hand bore little trace of moisture. The Sural had a fond smile as he watched the enormous marine animal disappear into the depths.
“You know her?” she asked, as he put
his hand back on the controls.
“Oh yes,” he replied, his eyes still distant, gazing into the deep. Then he turned a brief smile on her. “She is a great matriarch of her kind. I have known her since I was a boy.” He retreated behind his usual impassiveness and fell silent.
Marianne let the quiet stretch as they returned to the stronghold, but when the library door closed behind them, she spoke.
“I can see why you don’t fear my government,” she said. “Did your people invent those pods?”
“Yes,” the Sural replied, nodding. “What will you tell your Admiral?”
“I don’t know.” She knitted her eyebrows. “I don’t know how to feel about this. I love my world—but I don’t have any illusions about my government. They’re rapacious, expansionist, greedy. I thought I needed to protect you from them. I thought yours was a beautiful, primitive, pastoral world. But now I’m wondering if I need to protect my world from you.”
“Your people have nothing to fear from me unless you make yourselves my enemies. My people wish to pursue their own arts in peace.”
“If I tell the Admiral what I saw today, my government will either panic, or they’ll try to weasel your secrets from you any way they can. Or maybe both. They already use me to get information from you. It will get a hundred times worse.”
He smiled. Then he grew serious. “I do not wish to see your spirit clouded from deceiving your friends,” he said. “Have a care what you do if you decide to take that path.”
“Do I have any choice?”
“You have always a choice.” He steepled his fingers under his chin. “What you do freely is of great value to us. What you do under compulsion is of no worth.”
“That’s why you wanted me to say I was staying of my own volition, my first day here.”
He nodded. “Even so. I would prefer to see you retain the clear spirit my people value, but it is your choice. You can see there is no need for you to protect us, so you may tell the Admiral whatever you like. He cannot harm us. None of the space-faring races you know can harm us.”
“What if he calls me back to the ship?”
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