Heat (22 page)

And now look at him. Not the youngest to ever achieve fourth-rank, but still damned young. And
sek’ta
, assuming he survived it, was a true springboard to greater things. He would see command of his own ship before he hit his century mark, he was sure. There would be
crona
for the taking. Females would come to mate with him, even to breed with him. And perhaps one day, when he was retired and had the time, he would adopt a half-grown son to mold as his replacement.

Gods, what a depressing thought.

Tagen straightened under the spray of cool water and picked up the human’s soap. He washed thoroughly, scouring life back into his body with the thing she called a ‘sponge’ and replacing the hot stink of his flesh with something flowery and feminine. He cleaned his hair with a viscous green fluid that, despite its unhealthy appearance, stripped the sweat and grime from his hair with admirable speed. Finally, Tagen’s long years aboard-ship began to prickle at him, reminding him unreasonably that there was only so much water and it would all have to be recycled before the crew could bathe again tomorrow, and as illogical as the feeling was, he still had to obey it.

Tagen shut off the flow of water and dried himself briskly with one of the human’s white towels, then tied it around his waist for modesty’s sake as he exited the shower stall. He took the canister and the device the human had indicated to be a shaver with him and stood in front of the mirror.

Good so far, but now what? The shaver was nothing but a triple-row of naked blades partly-sheathed in some synthetic material, with a handle too small for him to comfortably use. The canister did nothing; he shook it, brought it to his face, touched it to the shaver, and even tried speaking to it in the event it were voice-operated, but there was no response. Hesitantly, knowing he was using the thing wrong, Tagen put the canister down and gingerly touched the shaver to his face.

He cut himself immediately.

“
Shu-ra
,” he muttered, pressing a fingertip to the wound. Inexplicably, his anger targeted
vey
Venekus, the far-distant Human Studies scientist, who had not only inundated him with badly-outdated information, he also had not packed a shaver in the supply pack he’d sent off with Tagen. He peered closely at the shaver, tried turning it the other way, and promptly gouged himself another hole as he attempted to neaten his face. “
Shu-ra
!”

“Okay, it’s all ready. Oh.” The human stood in the doorway, still pink in the face as she looked at him. “Sorry. Your bed’s ready anytime you want it. I’ll go now.”

“Wait.” Tagen held out the shaver, defeated and disgusted by his helplessness. He supposed there was not much wisdom in giving her something that could cut, but the blades were small and so was she. It would take no little effort for her to do him any real damage. “Show me. Please.”

Daria hesitated, but did take the shaver. “It’s not really that complicated,” she said, picking up the canister he had been forced to disregard. “But I guess there’s a certain amount of familiarity that comes into play. Sit down so I can reach.”

Tagen lowered himself onto the side of the shower’s short wall and tipped his head back, offering his jaw to her.

She pressed a button on the top of the canister and filled her palm with clear, blue gel. This she rubbed into a lather and used it to paint his lower face. “Just relax,” she murmured, and drew the shaver down his cheek. She rinsed the blades in the sink and came back to him, smiling. “I never thought aliens would need to shave,” she said.

What an odd thing to think.

“Why not?” he asked, clenching his jaw to keep it still.

“I don’t know,” she said, rolling one shoulder. “I guess it’s because it seems like such a human thing to do.”

“You think humans alone have hair?”

“Well…sort of.” She finished one half of his face and moved around to the other side of him to continue. “We have…stories, I guess you’d say, about aliens. Made-up ones, you know, or at least, they’re supposed to be. So everyone knows what an alien is supposed to look like, even though no one really believes in them. And they’re supposed to be little, grey, hairless guys with huge heads and no noses.” She laughed. “You don’t look much like one.”

Sounded like a So-Quaal drone to him, but he refrained from saying so. Contact with a Jotan was enough of an adjustment for her. He did not need to further complicate her reality.

“What does E’Var look like?” she asked.

“I do not know.”

She finished with the shaver and handed him a small towel, disbelief etched all across her face. “You don’t know? How do you expect to find him then?”

“I expect,” Tagen said dryly, “that he will be the only other Jotan on Earth.”

She blinked, comically surprised, and then eased into a smile. “Yeah. Obviously. That would make sense all right.”

Tagen cleaned the foam from his face, stroked the smoothness of his jaw experimentally, and smiled. He felt so much better, less threadbare and lost.

“So that’s what you are, huh? A…Jotan?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your planet’s name?”

He regarded her closely, and said, “Jota,” in a tone that was half-question.

She looked faintly insulted. “Like I’m supposed to know that? Hey, I’m a human, but the planet’s name is not Hum.”

“I know.” He stood up. “I always thought that very strange. And when you do not call your planet Earth, you call it Terra, Tor, Chikyuu, Di, Aard, Jord. You call yourself human, but you are also menneske, essere umano, jiyuujin, homid, homo sapiens, ningen, and many more. It can be very confusing.”

“I’ll be sure to pass that on to my congressman.”

Tagen didn’t know the word, but it sounded like sarcasm. He changed the subject. “I do not expect this, but I must ask. Do you have any…” Vocabulary stopped him. He bent and took his soiled uniform and held it up before her questioningly.

She stared at the clothes, her expression running through many degrees of ‘no’.

“I might,” she said.

So much for his ability to read human expression.

“In the meantime, I can wash these for you,” she added, reaching out for them. “Gosh, I hope they don’t shrink.”

Tagen removed his holsters and guns, and gave the rest of the uniform into her hands. The sight of his weapons halted her muttering examination of his clothes and when she looked up again, she was pale and subdued.

“Let me look around and see if Dan left anything you can wear. You’re kind of huge, so…” She rolled her shoulder in that curiously evocative gesture, suggesting the fates alone would provide.

He mimicked it, and she smiled faintly.

“If nothing else, I can order something. But of course, I’ll need to be able to open the door when the UPS guy comes.”

She had lapsed back into babble and the clarifying effects of the cool shower had faded. Tagen tried to lock his jaws against a yawn, but the human noticed.

“Sorry,” she said. “You’re exhausted. I’ll take care of these. You go to bed. And don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.”

He chose to believe her. Whether motivated by trust or weariness, he nodded and moved past her and into the hall. He went into the room of holding, still crammed full of crates and swimming with disturbed dust. She had transformed the large seating place into a bed, and it looked almost long enough to allow him to fully sprawl.

Tagen shut the door and pulled the towel free of his waist. He slung his gunbelt over the back of an unused chair piled tall with crates and sat down on the bed. It was very soft and lumpy, but the bedding was light and cool and clean. He lay back and stretched, feeling every muscle groaning in protest, before rolling onto his side.

He was asleep almost at once.

T
agen opened his eyes before his ears had finished processing the quiet rustling sounds that had wakened him. The first thing he saw was the mess—crates and dust and junk spread over every flat surface like sauce over dry bread. He could not look at it without thinking of the exhausting effort it would take to try and put the place in order and even after a full night’s sleep, he was still too tired for that.

Next, he saw the human. She was over by the door, gathering objects from among those he’d deemed too dangerous to leave in her reach yesterday. Judging from the space she’d cleared already, this was not her first trip.

Tagen sat up, holding the bedsheet at his hip, and watched her. She was nibbling at her lip, every muscle straining with the effort of being so quiet. If she were collecting the knives from the box in which they now rested, he would be concerned by this level of stealth. However, she was taking tins and jars of food. He supposed he was safe enough, although she’d proved to have a wicked aim with far lighter fare.

She glanced his way as she finished stacking things in the crook of her arm, and promptly uttered a shriek and dropped everything.

Tagen started to get up as she dropped to her knees, then remembered he was naked beneath the sheet and settled back down.

“Sorry,” she said, scooping food hurriedly into the improvised basket of her shirtfront. “I didn’t mean to wake you, I was just trying to put my house back together.”

She was nervous and talking fast. Every word but the first had been a near-meaningless babble of sound. “Slowly,” Tagen said, frowning. “Please.”

But she did not repeat herself. Instead, she went on with a whole new babble. “I’ve got your clothes out of the dryer now and it doesn’t look like they shrunk any, so I’ll bring those right up. Sorry.” She backed up and fled, banging the door shut behind her.

Tagen swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned forward, rubbing at his face. He still felt drugged by exhaustion, for all that the Earth’s sun was well-risen. He blamed the heat, which was already cemented into the air and tickling sweat out of his pores. The heat…gods, would it never end?

He opened his pack and took his day’s suppressant. They were more than half-gone now. Surely the season was nearly over. He hated to think what would happen if he actually ran out. He’d have to return to his ship then, wouldn’t he? His superiors would have to understand that. How could he be expected to complete his mission if he was in Heat?

On the other plate, it was highly unlikely that Kanetus E’Var was doing anything productive if he was in Heat, either. Collecting dopamine didn’t take a lot of effort, considering the fragility of humans in general, but it still took a modicum of concentration and skill that would be utterly eroded by the effects of Heat. So even if he had come to Earth initially, he might have turned around and gone home as soon as the weather sank in a little. Tagen could probably leave right now, secure in such knowledge.

“I hate Earth,” he muttered.

The human’s footsteps were returning. Tagen made sure his loins were covered and then straightened up and tried to look as dignified and professional as possible while wearing a sheet.

She tapped at the closed door and then cracked it open and peeked at him. “I ordered groceries because I thought you might like to eat at some point, and they’re going to be here in a few hours, so we really need to be able to open the doors, or at least the front—”

“Please!” Tagen said, more sharply than he intended, and her voice switched off at once. “Speak more slowly.”

She backed up into the hallway, looking anxious, and then crept forward and put the folded articles of his uniform on the edge of the bed. “Sorry,” she said.

And then she left again, damn it all.

Tagen dressed in quick, angry jerks. He reminded himself that the human was badly frightened and coping very well, all things considered. Yesterday, she had probably woken up with the understanding that hers was the only race in all the known universe and now there was an alien holding her prisoner in her own house. There were rescued slaves in preserves back in his corner of the galaxy who never recovered from that little shock, so he needed to go easy on her. He lectured himself severely on the human tendency to resist obedience, and counted himself fortunate that this human, at least, limited herself to throwing food and ignoring his requests to repeat herself, as opposed to, for example, poisoning him or stabbing him in his sleep. He warned himself to remember what it had been like to wander in the forest outside, and that his one human here in this isolated house was the best circumstance he could have hoped for and that he was as responsible as much as she for not ruining it.

By the time he had his pips on and his gun belt tightened, he was calm again. Yesterday had been a good beginning, but there was work yet to do.

He went in to the privy and used it with great confidence, then shaved successfully and set his hair in order. He’d lost his binding band somewhere in the woods, but he found one in the human’s cupboard that worked just as well. The face looking back at him from the mirror was an officer, a man and a commander of men. Tagen tugged his jacket straight, smiled grimly, and went back into his room.

The human wanted her doors opened. Very well. Tagen would make a gesture of trust. He found the tool by which he had sealed the doors and took it downstairs.

The human was in her kitchen, standing on the counter and scrubbing out her empty cupboards. She looked around guiltily when he came up behind her, hugging her cleaning water as though she feared he would take it from her by force. “I figured, when was I going to get the next chance?” she said. “It’s been a long time since these were cleaned.”

He doubted that, but then, time was relative when one had too much of it. Besides, if it relaxed her to spend her mornings scrubbing cupboards, who was he to stop her?

Tagen held up the tool and then laid it on the table. “For you,” he said.

“Thanks.” She looked at it longingly, then at her cupboards, and finally began scrubbing again. “I’ll finish up here first, though, but I appreciate that you probably think you’re making a big step. Was the bed okay?”