Dark Beneath the Moon (4 page)

She didn’t acknowledge my arrival and kept on attacking invisible opponents, so I shucked my jacket and kicked off my own shoes. I approached her warily, arms up in a guard position. I didn’t say anything, but I caught her eye and made a little “bring it on” gesture with the fingers of my right hand.

She grinned evilly. Or it might have been a snarl. Then she came at me. The only concession she made to our friendship was tossing aside the staff. It clattered hollowly up against the cargo bay wall.

I danced away from her initial lunge and brought a hand down on her arm when she was off-balance. She whooped joyously and spun around, aiming a kick at my kidney. I blocked it, pushed her leg sideways, and twisted. She ducked into a rolling fall and sprung up, agile as an Erian snowcat, six feet away from me.

It was my turn to attack, and I led with a feint, trying to get her off balance. When I managed to land a light blow on her shoulder, she laughed, a sound I hadn’t heard in too long. Even though sweat rapidly soaked the back of my t-shirt and my daily
tae-ga-chi
workouts apparently didn’t keep me in the shape I needed for this, I redoubled my efforts. Anything for a friend.

I lost track of time, but finally we stood, panting, a few feet apart, neither one of us willing to make the next move. Rei’s chestnut hair plastered in rings against her neck, and her bare feet were red from pounding on the floor of the cargo pod. But she’d stopped screaming a few minutes ago and had started to smile. I blinked sweat from my eyes.

“Had enough?” I managed to gasp.

She swallowed. “I think so.” She straightened and expelled a huge sigh, stretching her arms over her head and arching her back. Then she stepped forward and hugged me, hard.

“
Damne
, that felt good,” she said. “Thanks, Luta.”

I returned the hug, then pulled away, putting my hands on her shoulders and giving her a little shake. “I won’t say, ‘anytime’—you’re too hard on me. I’ll be sore for a week. Now, I hope you’re ready to talk. What’s going on with you, Rei?”

She walked over to the cargo pod wall and leaned her back against it, sliding down until she sat on the floor next to her discarded staff. I walked over and sat beside her, drawing my knees up and wrapping my arms around them. The stretch in my spine felt fabulous.

She pulled the elastic out of her hair and ran her hands through the knotted strands, pulling the damp ends apart. “I got dumped.”

I bit down on the words that immediately came to mind—
all this about a man?—
pursing my lips to keep them still. “Mm-hmmm?”

Rei tilted her head to one side and eyed me through long lashes. “By my fiancé.”

“The one on Eri,” I said. I’d only found out about his existence a few weeks earlier, second-hand through Maja. Apparently they’d be getting married, according to Rei, “when he’s old enough.” With so much else happening, I simply hadn’t had a chance to ask Rei more about this intriguing side of her life, about which I’d known nothing. She and Baden had had a casually sexual, on-and-off relationship before he’d met Maja, but that was their business as long as it didn’t interfere with life aboard the ship, and it never had. But when the mysterious message had come from Eri, she’d turned into some kind of wild thing.

“How many did you think I had?” she asked dryly.

“Well, I didn’t actually know about
any
,” I reminded her.

“Yes, the one on Eri,” she said with a sigh. “Raled. Sweet thing, completely compatible, only a year to go and he’d have been old enough to marry. Eighteen,” she added, when she saw the question in my eyes.

“So what happened?”

“Raled
decided
,” she said, “that he was better suited to a contemplative life than to one with me. He joined the Order of Xama three weeks ago, sent me a polite note explaining things, and that, as they say, is the end of that.” She leaned her head against the cold plasteel wall and banged it lightly a few times.

“Ah,” I said. “Well, it’s understandable that you’d be sad—”

Her head whipped around to face me. “
Sad?
I’m not
sad
. Sad is when your pet dies. Sad is when someone gets hurt. I’m not sad about Raled. I’m
humiliated
.”

I didn’t say anything else right away, waiting. I didn’t want to put my foot in it again.

“On Eri,” Rei said, “marriages are arranged about ninety percent of the time.”

“I knew that, but not exactly how it works.”

“The mothers take care of it, on both sides. Usually when the boys are about ten and the girls are about eighteen. They won’t get married until the boys reach eighteen, so the girls are encouraged to stay in school or choose a career early, do whatever they want before they’re tied down to a family.”

She paused, and I said, “Sounds reasonable enough. What do the boys think of it?”

Rei chuckled. “There are remarkably few complaints. They get mature, experienced, and still young wives who are mentally ready to start families. Then it’s their turn to stay in school or start their careers, with their wife’s guidance. The wife usually has savings by this time to support the family until the man gets settled, and she retains some financial independence.”

“Arranged marriages went out of fashion a long time ago on Earth,” I mused. “How do they usually work out?”

“Marriage is usually a fifteen-year contract, and the clock resets on the birth of each subsequent child. So if it’s not working out, you can go your own ways once your youngest child is fifteen. Or if you’re both happy, renew the registration.”

“What if one—or both—of the intended partners turns out to have different sexual preferences?”

She shrugged. “No problem. That’s a completely legitimate reason to dissolve an engagement. The mothers have to scramble then to find another suitable partner, and the logistics are a little different, but it’s not that big a deal.”

“And nobody is humiliated,” I suggested.

Rei sighed. “Right.”

“It seems a little structured for the men and more lenient for the women,” I mused cautiously. I didn’t want to offend her, since she’d never told me any of this before. I figured there must be a reason.

But Rei shook her head. “It’s only more structured for them when they’re young and foolish,” she said. “That’s when they need more guidance, anyway. They get their freedom later, when they’re better able to handle it.”

“Well, if it works, it works,” I said. “But to get to the real point of this conversation, what are
you
going to do now?”

She blew out a long sigh, leaning forward to wrap her arms around her knees. “Good question. I know all my options, but none of them are very appealing. At least I don’t feel so angry now.” She glanced up at me with a smile. “I needed something real to vent on, I think.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “You can wait on me hand and foot when I can’t move tomorrow. So what about those options?”

She tipped her head back and stared up at the cargo pod ceiling, vaulted high above us. The cargo pods were good thinking spaces, a break from the more confined spaces of the rest of the ship.

Finally, she said, “
Okej.
I could go to Eri and ask my mother to arrange a new match. But it would be extremely embarrassing, and she’d either have to find a boy from the current batch of
pels—
the young boys—which wouldn’t be easy since
their
mothers are considering girls almost ten years younger than I am, or find an
ulan
, a boy a little older who for some reason is still without a mate.” She pulled a disconsolate face. “And there are usually reasons for that, some of them not very pleasant.”

“Although there could be someone left alone because their intended mate died or had a different preference,” I said.

“True, but they’re not very plentiful,” she said. “It makes it much harder to find someone compatible. And being off-world, I’m not there and ‘available’ to be re-matched easily.”

I waited a minute, then asked, “So, is that it for options?”

Rei shrugged. “I could probably hook up with an older man who’s left a marriage, or lost his wife. But he’ll already have done the whole family thing and probably won’t be interested in that. If he were, he’d have stayed with his wife.”

“Unless he simply didn’t love her,” I suggested.

“Wrong,” she said with a snort. “These are marriages arranged strictly on the basis of genetic compatibility and congenial neural oscillation adhesions. There’s no question of love or lack of it. These people are destined to get along.”

“But you said they can leave the marriage if they’re not happy.”

Rei puffed her cheeks, slowly blowing out another sigh. “Sure, but it doesn’t happen very often. Sometimes one partner might suffer a brain disease or injury, but usually when it does happen, it’s because their careers or interests take them too far apart physically.”

“You’re a tough case,” I said, shaking my head. “So, how about this radical idea? There are more men in the universe than the ones born on Eri.”

Rei looked scandalized, her golden eyes widening. “Marry a non-Erian? My mother would go
freneza
, for one thing,” she said. She stared up at the catwalk stretching across the cargo pod, far above our heads. “I don’t know. That idea would take getting used to.”

I slowly got to my feet and brushed cargo pod dust off my jeans. “Well, then I suggest you stop thinking about it for a little while,” I said. “You can’t do anything about it until we finish this mission for Lanar, anyway. Things might seem different in a few weeks.”

She nodded. “I know. But being dumped by a seventeen-year-old who’d rather be a monk . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It’s pretty bad. And having to watch Baden and Maja tripping over each other isn’t making it any easier.”

I laughed as I collected my shoes and slipped them on. “They are a little overwhelming, aren’t they?” I hesitated. “Rei, does it bother you about Baden? I mean, I know you two were close . . .”

She smiled then, a real smile that touched her eyes. “No, and I told Maja that. Baden was a nice diversion on long runs—really nice,” she said with a wink. “And good experience. But I never thought of it as anything more than that.”

Her eyes narrowed suddenly. “Speaking of couples, I haven’t been as completely unobservant as you might think. You and Hirin—”

Her words were cut off by a jolt that shook the ship. I stumbled and fetched up against the plasteel wall of the cargo pod with a thump.

“Ouch! What the—”

“Captain! Rei!” Baden’s voice sounded over the ship’s comm. “You might want to get the hell up here!”

I pressed the implant in my left forearm as I straightened up. Rei ran for the ladder that led to the upper decks, and I followed a few steps behind.

“On our way!” I told him, and as I pounded across the cargo pod behind Rei, the things I’d been worrying about seemed small and far away.

I REALIZED AS
Rei and I climbed past the engineering deck that the pounding I’d heard on my way down had stopped. Viss sat planted in a skimchair, punching commands into the engineering console.

“You okay here, Viss?” I yelled as we scrambled past.

“Keep going, Captain,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Just let me know what’s happening.”

“Keep the shipwide comm open!”

Another impact, slightly weaker than the first one, shook the ship as we neared the top of the ladder. One of Rei’s hands slipped off the metal rung, but she didn’t even stop moving. I was only a rung below her by this time, and if she’d fallen, we both would have landed on the unforgiving floor of the cargo pod far below. As it was, I was right behind her as we pounded up the corridor to the bridge.

Hirin’s voice reached us as we arrived, issuing commands in a steady, level voice. He’d taken a spot at the pilot’s console in Rei’s absence. He heard us arrive and slid out of the way neatly for Rei to take his place, but I didn’t move to take the captain’s seat. I’d been absent, and he still had the chair. Somehow I’d thought about it on the way up from the cargo deck, and this seemed like the only way to handle it. I dropped into a skimchair at the secondary pilot controls and locked it down.

“Trouble?” I asked Hirin.

He flashed a grin. “Something like that. Innocent-looking C-class starrunner passed within a few hundred klicks, turned when he got behind us, and came in with a flash-pack torpedo.” He turned his palms up. “Don’t know what he was thinking. Even without shields it wouldn’t breach our hull, but it shook us up a little. You okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “Where is he now?”

My question was answered by a thump on the starwise side of the ship.

“What does he want?”

“Good question,” Baden said. “He should be on standard trader channel, and I’m trying to get through to him with a signal, but he’s not answering.”