Breath of Life (The Gaian Consortium Series) (3 page)

“You are not considered beautiful?”

How was I supposed to reply to that? Libba had always been considered the golden child, with her strawberry blonde hair and big green eyes. If a person had been feeling charitable, they might have referred to my hair as dark auburn in certain lights, but really, it was plain reddish-brown, and while I was pretty enough according to Gaian standards, I didn’t think anyone except an indulgent parent would have ever thought of me as beautiful.

“Not by people who’ve had their eyes recently checked,” I said.
 

Another laugh. “Zhore eyes are sharper than human eyes,” he commented, rather cryptically. “Come—I will show you to your room.”

Failing any other alternatives, I followed him upstairs, where he led me down a long hall to a doorway with a palm lock.

“Put your hand on it, so it can learn your print,” he instructed me, and I pulled off my glove and set my palm against the cool glass surface. A second or two passed, and then a blue light came on, and the door slid open.

I hadn’t really known quite what to expect—maybe that he’d put me to work in the kitchen or tending the plants hidden in the greenhouse at the back of his property—but what I hadn’t expected was a room almost as big as my parents’ entire house, with sleek furniture of some pale polished material I couldn’t identify, and a bed covered in silky fabric in an elusive aquamarine shade.

“It’s beautiful,” I said in awed tones, before I thought that maybe I shouldn’t seem quite so grateful. After all, I was here under duress. The most luxurious bedroom in the galaxy couldn’t change that.

The hooded head tilted slightly. “I am glad it pleases you. The closet is there, behind that door, and the door opposite goes to the washroom. You will want to sleep, I should think. It is quite late.”

That much was true. Still, something made me blurt out, “But…why am I here? Those threats to my father, just so you could have a house guest?”

Silence for a few seconds, and then he said only, “You are tired. We will speak tomorrow.”

He turned and left. The door hissed shut behind him. It was only after I stood there for a minute, staring at the swirl-polished metal, that I realized I had never asked him his name.

I overslept, despite the strange bed. Or maybe because of it—my bed at home was lumpy and thin, while the bed the Zhore had given me was made of some soft material that seemed to cushion and cradle every inch of my body. The washroom provided similar luxury, with a polished granite shower and unlimited hot water—at least, it seemed unlimited, as I stood under the warm, pulsing spray for at least a quarter-hour with no sign of it letting up or the familiar warning buzzer telling me I was hitting the danger zone. Back home we’d always had to ration the water so we didn’t go over our allotment and get charged extra.
 

It seemed a shame to have to climb into my plain old gray coveralls after all that decadence, but there wasn’t much need for high fashion on a homestead, even if we could have afforded to buy fancier clothes. Once I was done getting dressed I halfway thought the door wouldn’t open for me, that I’d been locked in, but it slipped aside without any fuss and allowed me to enter the hallway unchecked.

The house was as gloomy and magnificent as it had been the night before. Lathvin IV’s days were about as somber as its nights, and so the Zhore’s house was still illuminated by the same artificial lighting I’d seen when I first arrived. I had no idea whether a Zhore home would follow the same layout as a human one, but it seemed logical that the kitchen and therefore the dining room or other eating chamber would be located on the ground floor.
 

Rain beat against the windows; it appeared I’d been granted enough grace to walk here last night without getting soaked, but that was as far as the weather seemed ready to cooperate. I realized then, as I stood on the bottom step of the huge staircase, that I had no idea what kind of schedule the Zhore might follow. It was entirely possible his race was a nocturnal one and that he’d greeted me last night just as he was getting ready to start his day. True, he had said it was very late. That might have just been a recognition of my human clock, though.

But then I heard him say, “Good morning, Anika,” and I turned to see him waiting in a doorway off to the right that led to a room I hadn’t yet seen.

“Good morning,” I said. I went on, “I never asked you your name last night. It was rude, I suppose.”

“You were tired,” he replied.
 

Still I could see nothing of his face, as his hood was constructed to droop so low that it covered him all the way down to his chin. If he had a chin, of course.
 

He added, “It was understandable. You may call me Sarzhin.”
 

“All right…Sarzhin.” It felt odd to address him so plainly, but at least he didn’t want me calling him “lord and master” or some other nonsense. As my father had said, the Zhore’s voice did sound quite human, even if it was deeper than my father’s voice or the voices of the men I knew in Port Natchez. For some reason, that only discomfited me further. Shouldn’t an alien have sounded…alien?

“You are hungry?” he asked.

I nodded, even though I couldn’t repress the flutter of apprehension that moved through my midsection. Who knows what kind of food the Zhore ate? Maybe I’d get to see his face if we ate together. Of course, that might not be such a good thing. Rumors swirled about the Zhore, and how they must be hideous because they wouldn’t let anyone see what they looked like, but that was just human speculation. No one really knew anything.

“Then come in,” he told me, and moved out of the way so I could enter the room after him.

It was definitely the dining room, or at least what I’d learned from vids and books that a dining room should look like. We’d never had the space for a chamber like this, either on the homestead or back in our apartment on the moon. My family ate shoulder to shoulder at a round table that might have comfortably fit two. This place, though—I counted twelve chairs around the shining black table’s length, though only two places at the far end were set, with gleaming metal plates and glasses in a deep shade of cobalt.

So he did plan to eat. Another of those nervous little tremors passed through me, but I went and took a seat anyway, at the place setting to the right of the table’s head. I wasn’t about to presume to sit there. He went past me to pull out the chair reserved for the master of the house, so I supposed I had done the right thing. It was sort of difficult to know the etiquette involved in these situations when I’d spent my whole life sitting at a round table.

I wondered whether he had Zhore servants, or maybe humans for whom homesteading hadn’t worked out. There were quite a few of those in Port Natchez; they worked in the pub or the commissary or over at the spaceport, and a lot of them weren’t above taking on the occasional odd job if one came along.
 
Steady work in a rich Zhore’s household might not be such a bad gig.

But then I heard a soft whirring noise, and a gleaming humanoid shape drifted into the dining room, carrying a tray filled with food. My eyes widened a bit. Oh, I’d seen a few mechanoids from time to time at the spaceport, whenever a contingent from the GRC or possibly the Atmospheric Development Agency came by, but no one I personally knew could afford one. Despite all the human race’s technological advances, biological muscle was still cheaper than mechanical.

Obviously the Zhore—Sarzhin, I reminded myself—didn’t suffer such financial constraints. I tried not to stare as the mechanoid set a plate in front of me and then placed one in front of its master.

“Thank you,” Sarzhin said.
 

The mech bowed its gleaming head and disappeared back into the kitchen.

Although I couldn’t quite identify what was on the plate in front of me, it did smell good. I picked up my fork, hesitating.

“It is Zhore food,” Sarzhin offered, “but I chose something close to a human dish. You would perhaps call it crepes and mushrooms on Gaia. I grow the fungi here myself. I shall show you after breakfast.”

Fungi didn’t sound particularly appetizing, but I knew they were considered a delicacy back on Gaia. My family had never bothered with anything beyond the basics, although my father had set up a little hydroponic farm in a utility shed behind the house where we grew tomatoes and squash to supplement the bland rations that formed the bulk of our diet.
 

“Great,” I said, more because it seemed he expected a response than because I thought mushrooms sounded great…or, for that matter, because I was interested in seeing where he grew them. Besides, I had slept so late that this breakfast was almost a lunch, and I was hungry. Then I forced myself to put the forkful of crepe and fungus in my mouth.
 

The rich taste of butter and something more subtle, more savory, seemed to explode over my taste buds. I’d had real butter exactly three times in my life, but it had left such an indelible impression that I had no trouble recognizing it now. I quickly took up another forkful, and then another.

“Good?” asked Sarzhin. He sounded almost amused.

 
At least I remembered to swallow before I replied, “Amazing.”

“Excellent.”

He applied himself to his own plate. Any thoughts I’d had of sneaking a look at him while he was eating vanished; his hood still drooped so low that I could see nothing of his face, only the fork disappearing up into the recesses of the bulky fabric and then reappearing quite clean. I found myself wondering whether Zhores used forks back on their home world or if the utensil was a concession to my human ways.

After a moment he said, “You are currently enrolled in university coursework, are you not?”

“Yes.” Why should he care?

“You will continue with that. I will have a desktop unit installed in your room. Is there anything else you require?”

My freedom
, I thought, but I only shook my head. “All my books are already on my tablet. But—you really want me to keep going to school?”

“Of course,” he replied, as if surprised that I should have even asked the question. “I wish your life to be disrupted as little as possible.”

Funny sentiment for someone who had basically blackmailed me into being here in the first place.
 
I just murmured, “Thanks,” and went back to eating. That seemed to be the safest thing to do.

He seemed to guess my mood, and went on with his own breakfast. The rest of the meal passed in silence. The mech came in to clear away our empty plates, and Sarzhin rose from his seat.

“Come,” he said. “Let me show you something of where you’ll be living.”

The mansion seemed almost bigger on the inside than it appeared from the outside, if that were possible. Why one person needed all that space, I couldn’t imagine, although I had to admit to myself there was something quite decadent about having room after room, each devoted to its own purpose—the library, which had real books on the shelves, in languages both human and alien; the Zhore’s study, with banks of gleaming screens and yet more books; a gallery filled with art from a dozen worlds, some of it quite hideous to my untrained eyes; the kitchen and the ranks of bedrooms and bathrooms. He did not show me his chambers, however.

“And the greenhouse,” he said finally, after he had taken me all over the house and I had begun to feel as if I could do with another plate of those marvelous crepes and mushrooms.

The space was huge, easily the size of my parents’ entire homestead. Far above us was a many-paned ceiling of clear polymer. Grow lights in various spectrums hung from metal bars separating the polymer panes, and all around us were plants in so many shapes and sizes and colors that I didn’t quite know where to look first.
 

“Azar lilies,” he told me, pointing out a row of elegant blooms in shades of deep blood red to almost black. “Highly prized.”

“They are?” I asked stupidly, then blushed. I probably should have known that, but besides helping my father with his hydroponics, botany wasn’t very high on my list of priorities.

The dark hood tilted down toward me. “I just sold a particularly fine specimen to the chairman of your Gaian Relocation Corporation for ten thousand units.”

“Ten thousand?” I gasped. “For a flower?”

“Oh, yes.”

Well, that explained where he got some of his money, I supposed. The source of the Zhore’s wealth had been the subject of some idle speculation between Libba and myself, back in the days when we still discussed such things, but I’d never imagined he was selling flowers for more apiece than it had cost my sister to go to college.

He did seem quite proud of the greenhouse, and I was forced to admit it was pretty spectacular, with its careful sections of rare flowers and exotic vegetables. The fungi sprouted from a variety of wooden stumps or trays of mossy-looking substances, back in a far corner where none of the grow lights had been hung. Some of the mushrooms looked a little frightening in their natural state; I was glad they had come out of the kitchen already prepared so I didn’t have a chance to be scared off from eating them.

At length we returned to the dining room, where the mech fed us another amazing meal—this one a very fine casserole with vegetables that had to have come from the greenhouse, as well as tender meat cutlets whose origin I didn’t recognize. No huge surprise, as my family couldn’t afford real meat. Most people on Lathvin IV couldn’t, except executives with the GRC. We mostly ate soy substitutes and used protein capsules as supplements.

Sarzhin told me the cutlets were more mushrooms. Not that I was an expert, since I’d had meat only twice in my life, both times when my family still lived on the moon, but the texture and taste reminded me of my last birthday meal there, when I’d had something called a tenderloin.
 

I must have made a surprised sound.

He said quietly, “The Zhore are what your people would call vegetarians.”

“Oh,” I responded, since I didn’t know what else to say. You could have said the same thing about most of the people I knew, although they didn’t really keep to that sort of diet by choice.