No Other Love

by Speer, Flora

  “No. Yes. I’m not sure.”

  “Ah, I see.” She quickly repressed the pain he had unwittingly inflicted upon her with his disjointed response. She was not well informed on intimate subjects, but even she could guess what Herne believed had happened in that chamber. She reminded herself that jealousy was a destructive emotion. No true Oressian would allow herself to feel it. Besides, Herne wasn’t even sure whether the entire episode had happened or whether it had been a dream. She tried to keep her voice neutral, telling herself that questioning him on the matter was her duty, to ascertain the truth for her report. “I have noticed that when men speak in such a confused way, it is usually the result of an experience about which they feel guilty.”

  “You see nothing!” he responded with barely contained fury. “You with your eyes always on the ground and your body entirely covered except for your face and hands. What do you know about men?”

  “Nothing at all,” she replied quietly. “I regret that you find my costume disturbing. The exact opposite was my intent. As for my questions or comments, they are required to elicit as much detail as possible about an incident that Tarik will doubtless find most interesting, and possibly threatening to the expedition.”

  “Tarik already knows. I told him.” He held the lamp closer to her, trying to read her expression.

  “What’s this?” He caught her face with one hand, turning it so he could better see her right cheek. “You’ve hurt yourself.”

  “It does not matter.” She stood with her eyes still downcast, fighting his grip on her chin.

  “It certainly does matter,” he told her. “We don’t know what organisms live here, what infection you might develop. Sit down on the ledge there and let me look at that cut more closely.”

  Obediently, Merin selected a spot on the ledge as far as possible from the tiny skeleton. After pulling off his shoulder-kit, Herne sat beside her, shining the light full on her wounded cheek.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this at once?” he asked, reaching one hand into his medical supplies. “You know the rules about reporting all injuries.”

  “It is insignificant.” She tried to stop the trembling that had seized her when he thrust the lamp into her hands before moving her face about to examine the damage.

  “Merin, it is your duty to take proper care of yourself. Tarik needs a healthy company.” Herne broke open a vial of sterilizing antimicrobial salve and began to apply it.

  “I will remember in the future.” The salve stung, but she would not flinch. Herne pressed a piece of flesh-colored plastiskin over the wound.

  “I don’t think you will develop a scar,” he said, “but if you do, I can perform a cosmetic repair after we return to headquarters. It would be a shame to leave a scar on your skin when it’s so perfect. You don’t have a single blemish that I can see.”

  “Thank you for your help.” Setting down the lamp, she rose, putting distance between them, and her trembling eased a little.

  “Do all Oressian women have such beautiful complexions?” he asked, repacking his kit while he spoke.

  “I do not know.”

  “Covering up so completely probably helps, though of course your face and hands are exposed to the elements. Why do you always wear that outfit and the headgear?”

  “I don’t know! Don’t ask me!”

  “Don’t know or won’t say?”

  “It is rude to question the customs of others!” Blazing anger roared through her, filling every nerve and vein, heating the very marrow of her bones. This was why Oressian discipline was so strict, to prevent just this kind of violent emotional reaction to another person. She struggled to control herself.

  Merin’s rage was not the result only of Herne’s words, nor of her growing frustration at her inability to fit into Tarik’s colony. She was frightened by the way she had felt when Herne touched her while treating her cut face. She was so careful never to touch anyone. She had been warned since childhood of the danger. But his hands had been so gentle on her face. She could still feel his fingers on her chin and her cheek. She wanted to put her own hands on the spots. She resisted the impulse, but she could not stop the urge to strike out at him, to say the same kind of cruel things to him that he had said to her, for though he did not know it, his curiosity was cruelty.

  “Shall I be equally rude and challenge you about the customs of Sibirna?” she asked, her voice as cold as the winter wind on his home world. “Where you were born and raised the vile natures of children are quelled with harshness, with constant painful punishment, until those children grow up into sour-tempered, irritable men and women, quick to take offense, eager to quarrel. Say what you will about the Oressians, my people have never started an interplanetary war.”

  “Who knows whether they have or not, when they are so secretive that they will allow no outsiders on their planet?” he retorted. Then, suddenly, he gave her a lopsided smile. “I don’t even know enough about your people to insult them properly, unless it’s by accident. That’s a fine situation for a violent Sibirnan, isn’t it, when you are saying those terrible things about my folk?”

  “Every word I spoke is true. I have studied your world’s history, and I have observed many Racial types while at Capital. But, Herne,” her anger dispelled by her brief verbal attack, she took a step toward him, looking directly at him as earlier he had told her to do, “there is in you a streak of kindness and gentleness that is at variance with your own traditions and upbringing.”

  “On my world,” he said, “the sick and injured are left to themselves, to die or recover as the local gods ordain.”

  “Did it hurt you to see that?” Something in his voice told her it had hurt him deeply.

  “Once, when my mother’s sister was ill, I took bread and drink to her. She died anyway, and I was beaten for trying to help her.” He was still sitting on the ledge, staring down at his hands. “It was then that I knew I could not live all my life on Sibirna.”

  “So you left and became a doctor?” she asked, fascinated by these revelations. How different Herne was from the harsh man she had first imagined him to be, and how hard he tried to hide the gentle part of himself. Yet the attempt was not completely successful. She had seen through it. “Was the practice of medicine your way of channeling your kindly impulses into useful work?”

  “Something like that,” he admitted. “But I’m still a product of my upbringing. Is that why you left Oressia? Because you didn’t fit in, either?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I fit in perfectly. There and nowhere else.”

  “Then why leave?”

  “You would not understand.” Because he was looking at her with a sweet half smile that tugged at her heart, she added, “It was done because my age group was too large.”

  “You mean excess population is sent away? That’s been done often enough on many worlds. Younger sons or daughters with no economic opportunity where they grew up, political or religious dissenters, all have migrated and colonized elsewhere since history began. You know that. It’s the same old story. You go somewhere else and build a new life.”

  “As you did?”

  “I haven’t done too badly, considering my past,” he said, thinking that this was the first time he had ever spoken so freely about his early life. Odd that it should be Merin who had generated his openness. Emboldened by the apparent friendliness of their conversation, he added, “Why don’t you ever take off that headdress?”

  “I cannot. It is forbidden.”

  Her voice was so calm and quiet that Herne persisted. “Not on any world except Oressia. And this is a new world, freer than any other place I’ve ever been. Take off that stupid contraption and let your hair blow free. I assume that Oressians do have hair.”

  She stared at him in such disgust and horror that Herne imagined she was afraid the would try to rip off her coif. When he rose from the ledge and stepped toward her she backed away, terror in her eyes, and he felt a stab of remorse, tempered by someth
ing darker.

  Having just opened his heart to her, he had expected in return some revelation of her own private feelings. He was disappointed by her continuing reticence, and angered by it, too. He knew he ought not to expect intimacy from her. Oressians were reputed to be incapable of emotional closeness, though they were so secretive that no one could be certain of what they might feel. Herne forced himself to swallow the frustrated anger that was so much a part of his own cruel upbringing. He tried to understand her reaction to what he had just suggested so he could soothe her obvious fear of him.

  “Here, now,” he said, catching her shoulders with hands that shook a little from his effort to be gentle with her. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a complete beast. I won’t hurt you, Merin, I promise.”

  Merin stood trembling, knowing she ought to pull away from him, especially when he bent his head, put his lips against hers, and pressed. She had seen other men and women do this, and had been shocked by such an intimate gesture. Thankfully, it had never been done to her before now. It was an obscenity. She should not permit it. And yet….

  “Merin?” He drew back a little, looking puzzled. His hand caressed her chin, then her wounded cheek, and the sensation was sweeter than it had been the first time he touched her face. She lifted her head, following the motion of his hand, keeping the contact as long as possible. He steadied her face with his fingertips and put his mouth on hers again. There was a sweetness in his lips, and a warmth toward him building inside her…. When she whimpered in fear of her own emotions, he let her go.

  “I never really noticed you before we came to Tathan,” he said. “Not as a woman.”

  “Do not notice me now.” She made her voice cool and crisp. “Never touch me again. I am not like other women you know; I cannot respond to what you want.”

  “You just did.”

  “You are mistaken.” She turned from his bewildered look, trying to think of something that would prevent him from ever kissing her again. Picking up the recorder from the ledge where she had left it, she paused, fingers ready for work. “Is this where your encounter with Ananka took place? On this ledge? Please recite a detailed account for the colony archives.”

  “Damnation!”

  “I would hardly call that a precise explanation,” she said, “though there may be some grain of truth in it.”

  “What in the name of all the stars are you, that you can ask a question like that after we just kissed?” he demanded.

  “I see no connection whatsoever between the two events,” she told him. “As for what you did to me, it was wasted effort on your part. I felt nothing.”

  “You’re lying.” He sounded angry as well as bewildered.

  “Oressians never lie. It is against our law.”

  “But you aren’t an Oressian anymore, are you? That’s one thing I do know about your people. Once you have left the planet, you cannot return. You are no longer an Oressian citizen.”

  She favored him with a look from those wondrous purple-flecked eyes, a look that would have stopped an attacking Jugarian crab dead in its own slime.

  “If you have completed your survey of this chamber,” she said, turning off the recorder and tucking it into her belt, “we had best return to the surface. We are overdue with our hourly report to the computer. Tarik will be worrying about us. And he should see the artifact you found as soon as possible.”

  “You did feel something,” he muttered, watching her begin the climb up the dirt-covered steps. If she heard him, she gave no sign. “And I am going to find out why you repressed every normal response to me. No woman who can become as angry as you were could possibly be as frigid as you pretend to be.”

  Chapter 4

  As anyone who knew him might have predicted, Tarik was fascinated by Herne’s discovery of a recorder with a serial number matching that of the recorder Merin was using.

  “There is simply no reasonable explanation,” Tarik said, holding the partially cleaned instrument. “This model has been manufactured only during the last five years, yet here we have the same recorder in ruins six centuries old.”

  “Some quirk of time?” murmured Osiyar, his telepathic training leading him to consider possibilities others might find frightening or unnatural.

  “Here in the Empty Sector,” Herne began, for once apparently ready to back one of Osiyar’s peculiar theories.

  “This is nonsense,” Alla cut into their talk. “I am certain there is some scientific reason for what Herne has found. Given enough time and thought, we will discover it.”

  “My dear,” Osiyar told her, smiling, “after our intimate association you should have learned that not everything in the universe has a rational cause or effect.”

  “I must admit,” said Tarik, “that all the theories occurring to me are unreasonable and so unscientific I’d rather not consider any of them until we have more information.”

  That seemed to close the discussion. The recorder was packed away in the cargo hold to await further cleaning and examination upon their return to headquarters at Home. Merin continued to use her own, matching recorder every day.

  Feeling oddly disturbed by the duplicate recorder and frightened by her emotional and physical reactions to Herne, Merin tried to avoid him as much as possible. It was not terribly hard to do. For a place built by only a few telepaths, Tathan covered a large expanse of land. The telepaths had surrounded their houses with spacious gardens and had maintained many parks and open areas. All of this, as Tarik observed, would have made it a green and pleasant place in which to live. The visible ruin stretched over many acres, with still more buildings buried under earth, trees, and bushes. Their aerial surveys had shown evidence of outlying farms and villas, but those areas had yet to be thoroughly mapped.

  In all this space it was easy for Merin to stay away from Herne. By saying she wanted to record every detail of Osiyar’s impressions of the city his ancestors had built, she was able to convince Tarik to switch places with her, so that he worked with Herne. Osiyar said nothing about the change, accepting Tarik’s decision with his usual serenity, but Alla was another matter.

  “So you can’t stand working with Herne any longer,” Alla said. “Why don’t you just fight back when he’s being difficult, instead of withdrawing into yourself as you always do?”

  Refusing to say anything about what had happened between Herne and herself, Merin kept her eyes and her fingers on the recorder. Alla would not be discouraged.

  “He was in one of those black moods of his after he saw that invisible woman. That was the day you worked with him. Did he say or do something to offend you?” Alla asked, adding, “I suspect Herne only became a doctor so he could have a legal excuse to torture people. I will never understand why Tarik chose a Sibirnan for our colony doctor.”

  “Tarik probably chose Herne for the same reason he chose the rest of us,” Merin replied mildly. “Because we are all misfits in one way or another.”

  She had been watching with interest while Osiyar eased a piece of stone out of a mound of dirt and weeds. When he looked up, laughing at her words, their glances met for an instant.

  “Indeed,” said Osiyar, his sea-blue eyes twinkling. “Even those of us added to Tarik’s colony after he reached this world are oddities.”

  “I, at least, am not a misfit or an oddity,” Alla declared, looking at Merin in a way that made her wonder if Alla planned a lecture on the subject of Oressian aloofness.

  Osiyar stopped whatever Alla might have said. “We are here to work, not quarrel. Now come, my dear, help me to clean the dirt off this carving.”

  “This entire trip is a waste of time,” Alla told him. “We need more workers and heavier equipment if we are ever going to do any real excavating or make any important discoveries.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” said Osiyar. “Tarik and I have been working with Merin to map the location of specific buildings and some of the streets.”

  Merin stopped listening to them. S
he respected Osiyar, but found it impossible to understand how he could be so patient with Alla. Perhaps his telepathic powers gave him special insight into Alla’s true feelings, which were buried beneath her constant barrage of sarcasm and criticism toward others. It might be that the strength of their bond to each other lay in the mysterious physical relationship between male and female. Merin dared not speculate on that fearful subject, but when she tried to clear her mind Herne’s voice intruded on her thoughts.

  He stood a short distance away, discussing something with Tarik. Since their visit to the grotto, he had occasionally tried to talk with her. When she did not respond to him except on archeological matters, and then as briefly as possible, he gave up and began to ignore her. It was better so. The thought that he might want more from her than the kisses he had already stolen made Merin feel ill.

  While she was able to endure the busy days by avoiding Herne completely – and when she could not avoid him, by not looking at him and declining to enter into extended conversation with him – the nights were another matter. With all five of them crowded into the shuttlecraft, it was harder to pretend that Herne was just one of the others, no more to her than Tarik or Osiyar. His kisses had changed that safe relationship forever. Merin found it increasingly difficult to sleep in the same shuttlecraft with him.

  One night she lay wakeful in the darkest hours, refusing to allow herself to turn over one more time, or to sigh, or even to stretch her cramped legs. But she could not control the twinges in her limbs or make herself fall asleep. Nor could she keep herself from thinking forbidden thoughts. She knew the discipline imposed on her for her entire life was weakening. The fault was mostly her own, though Herne did bear some of the blame. If only he hadn’t kissed her; if only she had been able to stop her response to him before he noticed it. For the tenth time that night she tried the regular breathing exercises that had always before brought rest.

  With her eyes half closed and her mind at last beginning to slip toward repose, she thought she saw a movement at the front of the shuttlecraft cabin. The only light came from the green glow at the control panel, where Tarik had set the scanning instruments for security. Something moved between Merin and that green light, then drifted toward the main hatch.