Once Upon a Star

by Anthea Sharp

  Because he offered the best deal, she told herself as she reached for the door controls, then faltered, realizing she did not have the ability to open it for herself. You know there’s no way your biological father would have given you up unless it meant fattening his own bank accounts.

  She had to wonder how much her new husband thought she was worth….

  Luckily, the door controls also had an intercom, so she pressed the button and spoke into the tiny speaker. “I’m here.”

  To Alexa’s disappointment, the metallic voice of the mech came back to her. “Would you like to take a walk and get some fresh air?”

  “Did my husband send you?”

  A pause, and then it replied, “Yes.”

  Well, she supposed he was trying to be kind by allowing her to walk in the gardens. She almost asked why he hadn’t come to escort her himself, but she held her tongue. Anyone with the wealth to own this house and the spaceship that had brought her here — and yes, that shiny brand-new mech — was probably a very busy man. Most likely, he didn’t have the time to walk in the garden.

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “I would like to take a walk.”

  The door opened, revealing the mech, which regarded her with its impassive metal face. “This way, Miss Alexa.”

  She wondered why it kept calling her “miss.” Wasn’t she a married woman now? She’d been under the impression that she must have been married to her unseen husband by proxy, because she very much doubted that her father would have allowed her to come here if that part of the arrangement hadn’t already been fulfilled.

  No matter — the form of address was probably just a quirk of the mech’s programming. Alexa followed the machine down the hallway to the lift, and from there out through the elegant ground floor of the house and into the gardens. While she had seen such things in vids and read about them in books, this was the first time she’d ever experienced such an abundance of growing things. There was a small, carefully curated botanical garden in Luna City, true, but it had never given her the same impression of abundant life as this place. She didn’t recognize the plants, so she guessed this was not a Gaian colony world, as those planets tended to be terraformed and then seeded with Gaian flora to make them as familiar to their human settlers as possible. Again, she wondered if this place was in Eridani territory somehow. Maybe. The Eridanis did not have a large, far-flung star empire the way the Gaians did, but she knew they possessed at least a dozen or so colony worlds.

  “Do you find your room comfortable?” the mech asked, its head swiveling toward her.

  Odd. Alexa had never before encountered a mech who indulged in small talk, but this was a very up-to-date model. She supposed it was possible that its creators had decided to add a social module to its programming. At any rate, she didn’t see the harm in replying, “Very much. My new clothes are beautiful, and I especially like the balcony and the view of the gardens.”

  “Good,” it said. “Your new husband wanted you to be as comfortable as possible here.”

  “I would very much like to meet him.”

  “You will. He is…currently occupied with other matters.”

  As she’d thought, but she still couldn’t quite hold back a flicker of resentment at being treated as though she was a relatively unimportant addition to her husband’s world. One would think that after having her travel thousands of light-years to be here, he might be a little more interested in at least seeing what his investment had got him.

  “I suppose he is a very important man,” she said lightly, then bent to sniff the delicate perfume of a pale lavender flower that hung from a vine nearby. “Someone far too busy to spend valuable time on a wife.”

  Was it her imagination, or did the mech seem to stiffen somehow? No, that was impossible. He was already made of metal; you couldn’t get much stiffer than that. “He regrets the necessary delay that prevents him from being here with you now.”

  Such a careful reply, and one that didn’t tell her very much. But then, Alexa found herself hoping that this “delay” was something real, not just a convenient excuse. She was already starting to feel at home here, as if something tight and controlled within her had suddenly begun to open up, like a flower lifting its head to the sun after a long, dark night. The last thing she wanted was to be at odds with this new husband of hers before she had even met him.

  “I regret it very much, too,” she said, and began to walk again, her goal this time a small pond with slender, gracefully drooping trees planted around its border. There had been several fountains in Luna City, but this was the first time she’d ever seen a body of water set into the ground and open to the sky.

  The mech paused a few feet away as Alexa went up to the edge of the pond and then knelt, trailing her fingers in the cool, clear water. She didn’t stop to worry whether any unfriendly creatures lurked in the pond because she somehow knew her husband must have made sure there wouldn’t be anything here that might cause her harm.

  “Can you tell me something of him?” she asked then.

  “There is not much to tell. He is a man of means, as you can see from this house and these grounds.”

  “His house and his lands aren’t his character, though.”

  The mech was quiet for a moment. If she hadn’t known better — if the machine had been human — then she might have thought it was weighing its next words, but such an explanation didn’t seem very likely to her. A mech could parse the thousands of calculations required to make a polite reply in less than a nanosecond.

  “That is all I know,” it said at last.

  “Really? Even a mech should be able to tell me something. Is he young or old? Thin or fat? Human or….” Alexa paused there, then decided to take the gamble. “Eridani?”

  “He is not Eridani,” the mech said flatly. “Otherwise, I would say that he is of above-average height and around the average weight for a male of his age.”

  “Which is…?”

  “He is thirty Gaian years old.”

  Relief swept through her. Not so very much older than she, and taller than average. This was sounding better and better. “None of that sounds like anything he would need to hide.”

  “As I stated earlier, he is not hiding. He has pressing business to attend to.”

  “So you say.” Mechs were very literal machines, and therefore did not possess the necessary temperament to lie, but, on the other hand, Alexa supposed they could repeat falsehoods if they’d been programmed to do so. “There are many who would think a new wife might constitute ‘pressing business.’”

  “Are you hungry?” the mech asked then. Something about its voice sounded almost strangled, and she turned away from the pond to look at it through narrowed eyes.

  “Changing the subject?”

  “No. I have calculated the hours since the last time you ate anything substantial and realized that perhaps it would be a good idea for you to consume something.”

  To tell the truth, she was hungry now. Maybe the fresh air had awakened an appetite she didn’t know she possessed. Besides, it seemed clear enough that the mech wasn’t going to offer any information its owner hadn’t decreed harmless enough to pass along.

  So she told it that yes, she could eat, and it led her back to the house. As she went, however, she had to wonder exactly what the machine — and its master — were keeping from her.

  Marek relinquished command of the machine as soon as Alexa sat down to eat a very human meal of roasted game bird and rice and Gaian vegetables, which he had begun to grow in the greenhouse here as a hobby a few years earlier. Her color was good, and she looked content enough, and that was about all he could ask for at the present. However, he knew he would not be able to dodge her questions forever, even in the guise of his mechanical servant.

  Would she be angry if she learned that he’d approached her in this way, rather than confronting her the moment she’d entered the house and informing her that her new husband was not human?

  He was
n’t sure. For one thing, he could tell immediately that she had a reserved nature, wasn’t one to offer much of herself. Such a temperament was understandable, he supposed, considering the manner in which she’d been raised. No doubt she’d done what she could to avoid attracting attention — no mean feat, considering how beautiful she was. Now that he’d seen her close up — through the mech’s eyes, but still — he was struck by the perfection of her pale skin, the copper fire of her hair when the sun caught it. She was the sort of woman who would make any male look at her, whether he was human, Stacian, or Eridani. Probably even one of the mysterious Zhore might have turned his hooded head as she walked by.

  But he could tell she was relieved by the few pieces of information offered to her, that her new husband was not someone twice her age, or lacking in the physical qualities it appeared she preferred. She was fairly tall for a Gaian woman, but Marek would still top her by more than a head.

  Perhaps you are a coward, he told himself then. For there she is, eating her dinner alone, while you linger up here in your study and fret over how she might react to you. That is one thing you will never know until you find the courage to face her and tell her the truth.

  That self-flagellating thought was almost enough to make him go to the door and send him down in the lift. However, he stopped himself in time, mostly because he knew Alexa had traveled a very long way and must be weary, and that it was probably better to allow her tonight at least to rest.

  The next day…well, he would just have to see what happened.

  Alexa slept far better than she thought she would and woke up the next morning feeling quite cheerful. Why, she couldn’t exactly say, except that possibly she’d faced what she’d feared for most of her life, and it hadn’t turned out to be nearly as bad as she thought. All right, she still hadn’t met the man who had taken her away from her stifling existence in Luna City, but things could have been worse. She had been given a lovely place to live, and the mech had told her that her new husband was young and tall. Although she knew a lack of height wasn’t a very good reason for not being attracted to someone, she’d never been able to quite overcome that particular prejudice — probably because she was tall herself, and always felt odd when talking down to a man who was shorter than she.

  And the door to her suite wasn’t locked this morning. Had it been a mistake that it was locked yesterday? She didn’t know, but no one stopped her from going downstairs once she was showered and dressed, and no one prevented her from wandering in and out of the rooms on the lower level of the house, exploring the large dining room and the entertainment hall with its wall-to-wall vid screens and comfortable, reclining chairs. There was also what seemed to be a music room next to the entertainment hall, with an assortment of Gaian and alien instruments arranged around the space.

  She touched the keyboard, played a bit of a Mozart concerto she’d learned years earlier, and felt herself smiling. Her mother had insisted on music lessons — why, Alexa had never been entirely sure, except that young women of her class were still expected to be “accomplished,” whatever that meant — and she was glad of it, since she did have some aptitude and kept up with her practice as a way of filling the empty hours.

  “You play very well,” came the mech’s voice, and she startled, fingers stilling on the keyboard.

  “Is it all right?” she asked, not sure what she was and wasn’t allowed to do in her new home.

  “Is what all right?”

  “Is it all right for me to use this keyboard?”

  “Of course,” the mechanoid replied at once. “This is now your house.”

  Alexa wasn’t sure what to make of that reply. Under Gaian law, a man and a woman only shared what came into the marriage after they were legally wed; technically, this wasn’t really her house, but her husband’s. He could write up a contract that said she had an interest in it, true, and yet she hadn’t been asked to sign any paperwork.

  Rather than question her current situation, she only shrugged. “Still, it never hurts to ask permission.”

  “You may play the keyboard,” the mech said. “Whenever you like.”

  “Thank you,” Alexa replied, and for the briefest moment, she had the strange fancy that she wasn’t actually talking to the mech at all, but the man who had married her. Was it possible? She’d never heard of a human controlling a mech in such a way, and yet she supposed it could be done.

  She stared at the machine, and it stared back at her, its sharply angled humanoid face absolutely blank. But then, even if her new husband was speaking through its mouth, he couldn’t exactly make the machine suddenly show any expressions.

  To test her hypothesis, she moved closer. It remained where it was, silvery glowing eyes fixed on some undefined point past her left shoulder. “You are very friendly for a mech,” she said. “Ours weren’t much for small talk.”

  “I am a very advanced model,” the mech replied. “If your mechs were older, that would explain much.”

  “I suppose,” Alexa said. “But still…there seems to be something almost human about you.”

  It didn’t exactly flinch, but she got the impression that it would have liked to take a step or two back. “No, there is nothing human about me, I assure you.”

  “If you say so.”

  It didn’t respond, only stood there, staring at her impassively.

  Which didn’t tell her much. Since she was hungry, she decided to abandon the game for now. Better not to spook the thing too much, just in case all she had sensed was its advanced programming and nothing more.

  “Do you have tea?” she asked.

  Although its metal shoulders couldn’t exactly relax, she had the impression that the mech wanted to sigh in relief. “Yes, Miss Alexa. Tea and breakfast, this way.”

  As he led her out of the music room, however, she could feel her forehead pucker in a frown. Her instincts still told her something was off, and she knew she needed to get to the bottom of it.

  After all, what else did she have to do with her time?

  Marek blew out a breath of relief and sat back in the chair in his study, relinquishing control of the machine. Since Alexa seemed to be watching the thing so closely now, she might very well notice a difference in the way it behaved as it served her breakfast and how it had acted when it came upon her in the music room, but he needed to take that risk so he could reevaluate his position.

  Honestly, he hadn’t expected her to pick up so quickly that something wasn’t quite right about the mech. He’d done his best to speak to her in a way that was neutral and formal, but clearly she’d decided that his responses didn’t quite match what she’d observed in other mechanoids over the years.

  Which meant he needed to decide what to do next. Perhaps the best move would be to simply go to her and tell her the truth, that while he wished to get to know her a little better, he’d thought it wise to use the mech as an intermediary as she became accustomed to her new surroundings. She’d already been through a great many changes in a short period, and he hadn’t wanted to burden her with the knowledge that her new husband was a Stacian until a little more time had passed.

  But possibly that hadn’t been the correct approach to take.

  Or was it?

  Alexa hadn’t seemed particularly upset. In fact, she’d worn a teasing little smile, as if she was pleased with herself for making such a discovery. Which she should be, he supposed. Behind her lovely face and outwardly placid demeanor, it seemed she hid a sharp mind. He probably should have expected as much. After all, she was Henry Bischoff’s daughter. The man had been born to privilege, but his family had not ranked in the upper echelons of Gaia’s oligarchs. He’d achieved that position on his own, through ruthless ambition and a keen eye for where to invest the capital he’d inherited.

  But back to Alexa. The house and its grounds had been constructed with a nearly undetectable surveillance system in place, although Marek had turned off the cameras in Alexa’s suite so she might have a modi
cum of privacy. Now, though, he was able to watch as she ate a breakfast of fruit and a sweet roll, and drank the Gaian beverage called tea. She seemed to be content to consume her food and do little else, but he couldn’t miss the way her gaze followed the mech, the way she seemed to be analyzing its movements. Yes, it seemed clear enough that she’d noticed something amiss, and was now observing the mechanoid to see if its current behavior matched what she’d observed before.

  Of course, it wouldn’t, because he was no longer controlling the thing. And if he activated the link-up now, its behavior would change again, and she’d be sure to notice that shift as well.

  Better to let it alone and hope she found something else to occupy herself. There was the music room; the Eridani architects who’d built the house had told him that such a home needed a space dedicated to music. Marek had acquiesced, mostly because he didn’t care much one way or another. Stacians were not particularly musical, although they enjoyed percussion and certain reed instruments. Alexa’s proficiency at the keyboard had surprised him, and he hoped she would go back to the music room to pass the time playing.

  After breakfast, though, she went out to the gardens, the mech trailing along a few paces behind her. The machine had been programmed to function as her personal servant, so there wasn’t anything particularly strange about that behavior…or at least, Marek hoped there wasn’t.

  She paused near a bed of Eridani linnias, pale purple flowers that resembled the calla lilies of Gaia in shape, although their blooms and leaves were more delicate. The ghost of Syrinara’s largest moon hung above her, its usual warm coppery color not much more than the palest orange against the blue morning sky.