“You’re what?” Ruben asked, staring at him.
“Leaving,” Andrew replied, opening the drawers and starting to stack his shirts on the bed. “For good. With Lenore and Jaran.”
“With the alien?”
“With the alien.” How had he fit all his life in a suitcase the first time? Technically the second, he supposed, if he counted divorcing his wife, and he should. It felt like another lifetime ago, though. “The Ai-Naidari Emperor exiled him, and Lenore and I are going with him, because otherwise whatever world he ends up on is going to kill him. Ai-Naidar don’t do well alone.”
Ruben moved between him and the dresser. “Start from the beginning. And this time don’t leave anything out.”
“I didn’t leave anything out the first time.” He met the man’s eyes, a man who’d become a trusted subordinate… that he’d had to learn to trust in that role, the way the Ai-Naidar didn’t. They just took it for granted, that you would have good people beneath you, and above you, too. That you could start working from a position of strength, with the assumption that everyone around you was going to support you. What would it be like, to build a human society with assumptions like that? Was it even possible?
He was going to find out.
“Sit,” he said, pointing at the chair in the corner of the room. Once the other man had done so, he said, “You know I’m in love with him.”
“No,” Ruben said. “I don’t. I know you’ve been seeing him with Lenore. I know you like him. But that doesn’t mean anything.”
How to put this. Andrew looked up at the ceiling and blew out a breath. A thousand ways for humans to describe the act, and he had to choose one with the right nuance. “I’ve been sleeping with him.”
A very long pause. Very long, for Ruben, who talked as fast as he thought. “That doesn’t mean anything either—”
“I didn’t say I was screwing him,” Andrew said, trying not to be irritated. “I didn’t say I was experimenting with him. I said I was sleeping with him. As in ‘I care enough to still be there in the morning.’ Maybe I should have said I was making love to him. Would that make it clear enough?”
Ruben stared at him, hands on his knees and both feet planted flat on the ground. “An alien.”
“Jaran,” Andrew said, and started putting the shirts in the suitcase. “An Ai-Naidari. Not human, but a person. Not an animal.”
“They think of us that way.”
“Jaran doesn’t.”
Ruben stared at him, then said, “I didn’t think you swung that way.”
“Which way?” Andrew asked, not sure whether to be tired or amused. Mostly tired, he thought. He wanted all this to be over with already. The interstices were always hard. “Liking men? Liking aliens? Liking threesomes?”
“Everyone likes threesomes,” Ruben said dismissively, and then stopped abruptly. “You’re not joking. You and—” He covered his face with a hand, rubbed it. “So you’ve been sleeping with this guy, and his wife objected, and that got him exiled?”
“No, we’ve been sleeping with him, and his society objected, and that got him exiled.” Andrew shook his head. “Look, this part of it… there’s no point discussing it. We’re going with him. The question is what you’re going to do with the people who are left behind.”
Ruben straightened. “Don’t you tell me—”
“That I’m leaving you with the outpost? Who else?”
“I’m not qualified!”
“You’re a damn sight more qualified than anyone else on this rock,” Andrew said. “You’ve been my right hand man since we left Earth, Ruben.”
“I’m not a diplomat, though. I’m a soldier. Was a soldier.”
“Still are. Some things stay in your blood.” Andrew gave up packing and sat on the bed, facing the other man. “There’s not going to be much here left when Lenore and I go. Because we’re taking as many people with us as we can, and I’m hoping that’s almost everyone.”
Shock made Ruben’s caramel-colored skin look gray. It wasn’t a good look. But better here in private, away from both the rest of the outpost and the Ai-Naidar, than in company. “And now you’re gonna ask me why. And I’m going to tell you: we finally get a chance at what we wanted in the first place. Which was to colonize a world of our own. We got here, Ruben, and these people were already here. And they were willing to let us land and make what might as well be called an embassy, because that’s what it is. But they wouldn’t let us overrun this place, or make it ours. But this new world… we’ve got their permission to do what we want with it.”
“Their permission,” Ruben repeated with a curled lip.
“Yeah. And their transportation,” Andrew said. “So instead of spending a few decades in a ship, hoping the world we find at the end of it can support us, we step across a Gate onto a world guaranteed to be able to hold us, where we can thrive. Where we can have kids, spread out, and not worry about them shooting the satellites out of orbit.”
“They don’t even—”
“Yes,” Andrew interrupted. “They do. They know about it, and they’re letting us keep it up there. But the moment we step out of line here, they’re gonna bring the hammer of God down on us. You saw the reports that came out of the hospital about those rifles they shot their own man down with? Care to guess what the hell made that wound? Because they’re baffled, and so am I. You’ve seen more combat than I have. You tell me what it was.”
Ruben grimaced. “Fine. So we’re not familiar with how it worked. It doesn’t mean they can come after us and win, Andrew. You told me yourself they don’t have wars. We’ve done nothing but have wars since we climbed onto two legs.”
“And I’m tellin’ you, Ruben, I saw the look in that man’s eyes,” Andrew said. “That Emperor of theirs isn’t a fake. And I don’t think he’d make threats, even implicit ones, he didn’t think he could back. We don’t know how they put those Gates up, but I’m guessin’ anyone who can do that can freakin’ drop one on us. We’d vanish from the universe and no one would know where we’d gone.”
“And this is the man you want to take a gift from? Of an entire world? What’s to stop him from coming after you there?”
Andrew paused. Made himself remember the agonizing interview in the capital, which he wanted very much to not remember because of the pain it had caused Jaran, and because of the uncertainties it had created in him. He brought up the memory of Thirukedi’s face and said, “You’re gonna have to trust me on this one. They don’t want Jaran back. At least not in our lifetimes. They’re sending him away because we poisoned him, made him no good for their society, and they want to push him away before he does something to it they can’t control. No, if we go through that Gate, Ruben, they’re not gonna ask us to come back.” He snorted. “Besides, what do they need one more planet for? They’ve got five, six, who knows how many. They can make Gates and go to whole new ones. They haven’t even filled up the ones they’ve got!”
“Must be nice,” Ruben muttered.
“Yeah,” Andrew said. “And I aim to see if we can figure out how they succeeded, and maybe bring some of that home with us.”
“You’re really leaving,” Ruben murmured.
“Far as I’m concerned, I’m already gone,” Andrew said. “Better start picking out your command team and makin’ your pitches, because I’m going to do my damnedest to take as many people as I can with us.”
