Desert World Rebirth (5 page)

“Or maybe we’re normal and getting through this,” Shan countered. “Do you want to talk?”

Temar shook his head. “No, not really. I want to stop feeling so off balance.” Temar shook his head. “Stop thinking you’re to blame for this. I have enough issues without your guilt,” Temar said as he stood up.

“I didn’t say anything,” Shan protested.

“I can see your guilt all over your face. You helped.” Temar lowered his voice. “This helped. I feel like I have a chance for something good—Ben didn’t ruin that. So stop feeling guilty and show me the inner world communication network.”

Shan didn’t know when Temar had learned to read him so well, but if Temar said that their relationship helped him regain his happiness, Shan could only believe him and hope it was true in the long run. “One inner world communication network, coming right up,” he promised as he stood. “Well, maybe not right up, because these systems are a mess, and every time I try to read a repair manual, I have to look up two dozen other systems in order to understand what I’m supposed to be fixing.”

“That bad?” Temar asked.

Shan made a face. “It’s almost enough to drive me back to the priesthood,” he agreed. “But for you, I will face the disaster that is that computer system.”

Feeling like a warrior of old about to go into battle—although his battle would involve computer relays and switches and corroded circuits that needed replacing—Shan held out a hand to invite Temar to join him. Temar’s expression turned almost shy as he took Shan’s hand, and they headed back into battle with the circuit demons.

Chapter 4

TEMAR watched Shan, his hands working the keyboard with confidence. Thoughts darted through Temar’s head faster than he could feel them, aggravating his headache. He hadn’t touched another man since Ben, but Shan couldn’t be more different. Where Ben always knew what he wanted, Shan hesitated. His hands moved slower, they ghosted over Temar’s flesh instead of bruising it. Temar would never confuse them. However, when Shan wasn’t touching him, he could feel the lingering traces of Ben. It was as if he was poorly heated glass, and the tiny particles still lingered in the clear melt.

Insisting on news of the war… that revealed an imperfection in the glass. Temar couldn’t stop obsessing over what might have been. If Ben had escaped Livre in that old space ship he’d found hidden in an old base, would he have walked into a war? Would he have been shot down? Ben had insisted that he had a right to escape a dying planet, even if it meant stealing the very resources everyone else needed to survive. Would the people up there have seen Ben’s plot as a clever man surviving and escaping a dying world or as a manipulative man condemning others to death? Would Ben have taken him? Looking back, Temar could almost see the twisted affection Ben had for him, this sick belief that he was favoring Temar every time he raped him. Naite insisted that his own father had been the same, but Temar’s guts twisted at the idea that Ben would have dragged him out into the universe. Of course, the alternative included being trapped in Ben’s secret base, a forgotten launching station leftover from the earliest Livre miners. Would Ben have left him to die of thirst and hunger in that hidden base?

When abandoned in the desert, Shan had walked out like some hero from a ballad, but Temar didn’t have the physical strength to do that. Shan and Naite were both imposing men. When Shan had been a priest, Temar had never noticed it, but now, he could see that Shan had a strength, a surety in his movements, a physical presence that Temar couldn’t match. Not only was Shan six inches taller, but Temar had a beauty that tended to make people dismiss him, and fair skin that would be dangerously burnt within hours of being on the desert. So, would he have given up and died in that base? Would he have tried to walk out?

The thoughts circled, a sandrat in a pipe trap, always circling until the poison seeps in so much that the animal dies. And Temar didn’t know how to escape. The worst part was that he knew Shan would do anything he asked to relieve this pain… so would Naite and Tom and Hannal, and even Cyla had made a few awkward attempts to offer sympathy. It wasn’t an emotion she did well, but he appreciated the effort.

Now Hannal knew how to do sympathy. Tom’s wife had found excuses to be over to his farm several times a week, her children exploring every nook of it as she sat and shared lemonade with him. He didn’t remember his mother, but he could imagine from the stories people told that she was a lot like Hannal, with her soft voice and her willingness to sit and stare out a window as she waited for whatever pieces Temar chose to share. All these people would shovel sand dunes one spadeful at a time if he could only tell them what he needed, and he didn’t know.

Even Dee’eta Sun had offered him her apologies with tears in her eyes, up to the point where she’d left the room, too emotional to talk to him. All these people cared about him, and he felt like that should be enough. He should be able to take all that support and turn it into an ability to simply move past this maelstrom that buffeted him. But he couldn’t. He obsessed over the “might haves” and saw ghosts in the shadows.

“You want some dinner?” Shan asked, still poking away at the computer.

“I’m fine,” Temar said. His stomach tightened at the thought of eating.

“Well, I’m not,” Shan pushed himself back from the computer. “I’m going to have to replace circuits on the tower. I should start apologizing to God now for the cursing I’m about to do.”

Temar’s guilt knotted his stomach. “You don’t have to do this. It was a stupid thought.”

“Eventually, I have to get all this up and running, but you know me. I’ve been spending more time on the mechanical systems. I understand them better.” Shan stood up and stretched his back. “Right now, though, I need food. I have a potato stew going.”

“That sounds good,” Temar said, even though he really didn’t want anything that heavy. He followed Shan into the living areas, leaning against a wall as he watched Shan gather bowls and fill them. “Why would they have let the communications systems fail? I mean, if I was planning on flying into a war zone, I would want to know if I was likely to get shot down.”

Shan carried the bowls to the table and headed back for something else. Spoons, maybe. “I don’t know,” Shan admitted. “I know the inner planets have ways to monitor the systems, so maybe they were afraid that they’d get caught stealing water.”

“Great. Some inner world would know that someone stole water. What difference would that make?” If the inner worlds couldn’t bother with their contractual obligations to finish the terraforming, he couldn’t see them showing up to arrest Ben and his co-conspirators for theft.

Shan turned around, bread and silverware in hand. “I have no idea. I do know that they were obsessed with their secrets. You would have to be, to keep a secret that good for fifteen years.”

Temar shrugged. “They knew what would happen if anyone found out. That’s a lot of motivation to keep your mouth shut.”

“True.” Shan headed to the table, sitting down and giving Temar a concerned look. Temar supposed he should probably try to eat instead of standing against the wall, staring at the food.

“Looks good.” Temar didn’t sound convincing, even to himself, but Shan simply pulled off a chunk of bread and soaked it in the stew before eating it. “Do you think they knew they’d get exile?” Temar blurted out.

Shan seemed to think for a long time. “Ben must have,” he said slowly. But then Ben hadn’t just stolen water, he’d committed rape. That wasn’t a crime that the councils had any patience for. “The others should have. If they’d succeeded, people would have eventually died.”

“They may anyway,” Temar pointed out. The extra water would give their farmers more time to develop drought-resistant crops, but in the end, Livre wasn’t terraformed. It didn’t have enough water to permanently sustain itself without help from the inner worlds. And the fact was the inner worlds were more concerned with war than a dying colony. Shan didn’t answer that. Livre children learned the truth young and lived with it their whole lives, had been for three generations now. Eighty-two years. Eighty-two years, and the inner worlds hadn’t shown up to fulfill the promise they’d made to the first settlers.

“Did you know Naite went out to watch?” Temar changed the topic.

“Watch what?”

“Ben.”

Shan’s spoon hesitated halfway to his mouth, and Temar pulled off a bit of bread and focused on dunking it in the pale stew.

“He… he watched?”

Temar nodded.

Shan sighed and put his spoon back down. “I sometimes worry about my brother’s soul.”

“I’m glad someone saw him die,” Temar disagreed. Part of him wished he’d been out there on a hauler watching Ben walk the dunes in bare feet. He wondered if Ben sat down or if he fought the whole way, struggling against the Livre desert. Naite refused to tell him.

“Part of me did wonder if he had some other plan, some way of saving himself,” Shan said quietly. “I’m not sorry to have the proof, but to stand by and watch while a man dies….” Shan fell silent. His sense of morality had always had seemed more developed than Temar’s. Cold anger still dominated Temar’s thoughts about Ben.

When Temar didn’t answer, Shan turned to his meal. Temar tried eating what he could, not wanting to waste food, but the discussion of Ben had pretty much ruined his appetite. After getting out of Ben’s house, Temar had been so proud of himself. He’d fought back, he’d demanded respect, he’d helped bring down a conspiracy against his world. He’d been okay. Now he could feel little parts of himself unraveling. He’d left Dee’eta Sun’s after the cooled punty had caused the piece to fall to the ground and shatter, but he hadn’t finished the story when he’d talked to Shan.

After Dee’eta Sun had tried explaining how to recycle scraps, Temar had confronted her, demanded to know why she couldn’t respect him enough as an apprentice to hold him accountable for his actions. That had been the general question, although the tone had been a good deal more angry. He’d stormed out of the tent, knocking over another piece of glass and leaving Dee’eta, two assistants, and another apprentice staring at him in shock. Temar had always wanted to work glass—he’d never had another dream in his whole life—but the very act of watching the glass grow and form on the end of a blowpipe, the sight of glass bending to Dee’eta’s will, annoyed him. Angered him. It was the most illogical reaction Temar could imagine, and yet he couldn’t escape it.

The stew settled poorly in his stomach and Temar listlessly poked at the chunks of potato and pork.

Chapter 5

“TRY now.” Shan’s voice came through the computer, and Temar could admit the technology made him a little uneasy. He flipped the switch Shan had showed him.

“Done,” he answered. He looked at the open manual and tried to understand the explanation of subspace communications relays. It was beyond him, but at least it provided a good distraction.

“Did anything change colors?” Shan asked.

Temar looked at the line of lights. “The top row is all blue now. Is that good?”

An inventive string of curses came through the computer speaker. “Lord, forgive me, but even you would be frustrated by this machine,” Shan added at the end. Temar smiled. Even if Shan managed to get the communication system up, Temar figured there was a good chance no one was on the other end, yet he was up there working to fix this only because Temar had asked. He’d never had anyone willing to put everything aside for him like this.

“The top lights just turned green,” Temar said loudly into the microphone. Micro. Small. Phone. Sound. He eyed the device and tried to figure out the logic of that name.

“Yes!” Shan called out triumphantly. “There has not been a machine built that I can’t fix.”

Temar doubted that. The first colonists came in huge ships with subspace drives and folded space generators and fusion reactors, and those had little to do with life on Livre, but he did imagine Shan could fix anything on Livre.

“The line of lights below are all blinking blue and green,” Temar said, hoping that he wasn’t destroying Shan’s joy with some bit of news that meant the whole system was on the verge of blowing up.