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.”
Ruben frowned. Andrew ignored him and resumed packing, opening the drawer for his pants. Would he need the uniform anymore? Best to bring them anyway. The colony would still need a command structure, even if it was going to be Ai-Naidari influenced.
“All of you and one alien,” Ruben said finally. “And that’s worth going for.”
“Even if it wasn’t worth going for him,” Andrew said. “It’s worth it for a real chance at a world we can have.” He drew in a breath and finished. “But it is worth it for him.”
Ruben watched him pack in silence, then said abruptly, “Aw hell, you’re taking our best translator with you!”
Andrew grinned. “You’ll get by.”
“You’re not going,” Laurence said, grabbing her wrist. He shook it lightly. “Lenore. You’re not. What will our parents say?”
“They’ll wish me every happiness, the way they did when we left Earth,” she said, sliding her hand out of his grasp. “I’ll remind you, we both decided to go on this trip. Why do I have to be the one to come back? You go back, if you’re so eager to make them feel better.”
“I’m not the miracle daughter they never expected to have.”
She stopped, throwing her bag on the bed. “Is that what this is about? Again? About you being adopted?”
“No,” he muttered.
“They don’t love you any less because I came along after they thought it was impossible for them to have their own kids,” Lenore said, forcing herself to moderate her voice. It was so hard, though. She was done here. Jaran was somewhere over on the throne world, awaiting word from them. She missed him, missed the sanity of Kherishdar, missed speaking the language, missed touching fur softer than velveteen. She was going to lose a lot of that, of course—Jaran alone did not make an entire society. But he would carry some of Kherishdar with him wherever he went, and if she was lucky, they could turn that seed into a better society.
Even if they didn’t, it would be better than living here in an uncomfortable détente with the aliens she wanted so badly to belong to.
“Laurence,” she began, then sighed. She put her hand on his shoulder and pulled him over, hugged him. “Laurence, I love you, but you can’t protect me forever. “
She felt his hands rest on her back, but she could tell he was upset by how his arms trembled. “You want to go away. With people who tried to kill me.”
She pressed her forehead against his chest, pushing past her exasperation. “Laurence, you started yelling at one of their heads of state. If you started yelling at the President, getting in his face about something, you’d better believe the Secret Service would have done something about it.”
“Sure,” he said, angry. “They would have stepped between us. They would have tried to pull me away. But they wouldn’t have tried to kill me, like a rabid animal, like something they couldn’t reason with. Lenore, they’re not like us. They’re not just not like us, they don’t think of us as people.”
“Yet,” she said, and leaned away. “They’ve never met anyone like us—”
“How do you know?”
It was the first thing he’d said since she started falling in love with Jaran that gave her pause. Because… she didn’t know. And Laurence had grown up with her, the perfect baby sister, the miracle child he’d doted over, no less than their parents. He could see it instantly in her eyes, the uncertainty.
