'Marco,' she demanded, 'why are you talking to me in Rhuian?'
'I didn't want to startle you. Do you want to go in now?'
'No. But I will anyway.'
'Lamb to the slaughter,' said Marco in Anglais.
Tess snorted in disgust and walked in. Charles noted her immediately, of course, and stood up. Formally, he introduced her to Rajiv and Joanna and Ursula, and Maggie introduced her to the two other actors, Gwyn Jones and Hal Bharentous. A moment later, Tess realized that Marco had not followed her in. She glanced out into the darkness, but could not see him, lurking or otherwise. She sat down on a camp stool and wondered what in hell she was going to say to these people.
'You're looking well, Tess.' David sat down beside her. He smiled, awkward, and Tess was so thankful for the sight of a familiar and unthreatening face that she smiled warmly back at him. 'You're looking very-' He hesitated. 'Very well. Very different.'
'Thank you, David. It's been a long time. You're looking well yourself. Lord, it sounds strange to hear myself speaking Anglais after all this time.'
'How do you like it out here?'
He was kind, really, to make this kind of small talk, to try to set her at ease. But David had always been kind, and Tess recalled his sojourn at Prague, their six-months-long love affair with fondness for what he had given her: confidence that she was attractive in and of herself. Without him, she might have spent her whole life believing that any least bit of attention paid her was only on account of Charles. He had recalled her to the self-respect she'd had as a child; for that, she would always be grateful to him.
'… and how did you get that scar?' David asked and, daringly, lifted a hand to touch her cheek. Tess had a sudden, vivid memory of the time they'd taken one of the ducal shuttles into Earth orbit and tried to make love in freefall. He met her gaze and she knew, immediately, that they were thinking the same thing. They both laughed.
'Sojourner warned us, didn't she?' Tess said. 'But we refused to follow her instructions. How is she, anyway? Do you know?'
'She's doing very well. Handfasted to an aspiring young diplomat named Rene Marcus Oljaitu. After she finished her dissertation two years ago, she talked Charles into letting her and Rene apprentice to the Keinaba house.'
'Well. Good for Sojourner. Firsthand xeno experience, and they'll be the first humans placed directly inside a Chapalii house, even if it is only a merchant house.'
'Don't underestimate the Keinaba, Tess.' Charles placed a stool beside her and sat down. 'They're one of the richest merchant houses in the Empire.'
'But, Tess,' said David, 'you never did tell me how you got that scar. In a battle?'
Others stood around them. Of course, she was the curiosity of this little gathering, the center, the focus. They'd had each other on the long journey, and now they had her. 'No, it's-' She hesitated. How to tell them: it's what the men do when they marry their wives? Thrust in among her own people, she recalled her own reaction when she first found out about the mark of marriage. It was barbaric. It was mutilation.
What would they think of her, knowing that she had allowed herself to be mutilated? What did they think of her in any case, sitting here with her jaran clothes and her long hair braided in jaran style, looking quite jaran, except for her brown hair and green eyes and her unusual height, for a woman? Like an actor, desperately trying to live a role not meant for her.
'It's nothing,' she said finally. Charles was looking at her approvingly. What did he think? That she knew better then to jeopardize his position, and her own, by revealing a marriage that would ruin her status within the Empire and perhaps cause him to face ridicule and shame? Shame, which was fatal. Or could he even imagine what the scar represented? That she had marked-mutilated-her own husband, quite against jaran custom, in return?
She didn't belong with these people anymore, these people from her impossibly distant past.
'May I please?' Maggie dislodged David from his seat. 'Tess, look at this.' She handed Tess a flat rectangle, smooth of surface, curved at its edge. 'I took the abstract you wrote for Charles and applied a rather primitive translation program to it. For khush, you know.'
Tess stared at the computer slate in her hand. An illegal slate, brought downside, brought with the party. Of course Charles did not fear Ilya. He must have weapons with him, just as Cha Ishii and his Chapalii party had hidden weapons with them, four years ago, when they had made their illicit journey together across the plains with Bakhtiian and his jahar.
Then a word caught her eye. 'That's wrong.' She tapped a few keys, and found the program structure, and recoded a few lines. 'No, it's fine, Maggie, but you're right, it's a primitive program for this kind of translation work. And the abstract I sent to Charles was limited in and of itself, since I had to hand-write it. And it was a preliminary draft, in any case, and very rough.'
'Here, my dear.' Cara Hierakis leaned in and offered Tess a cup half-filled with some dark liquid. 'I brought a good supply of Scotch with me. Will you have some?'
'Scotch?' Oh yes, Scotch.
'I suppose,' said Ursula, drifting by on the edge of the conversation, 'that they drink fermented mare's milk out here.'
Tess blinked. 'At festivals. How did you know? They call it-' She took a sip of the scotch, made a face, and huddled back over the computer slate, seduced by its promise. 'Oh, if I only had a modeler, I could compile a full translation model in all media, networked through… Hell, through Rhuian, Anglais-not Chapaliian, of course, the Protocol Office doesn't let you interlink Chapaliian-Ophiuchi-Sei.'
'But we do have a modeler with us,' said Maggie.
'You do! This is wonderful!' At that moment, Tess glanced up to see that everyone was beaming at her in relief, as if they had only now been reassured that the poor misguided thing had been rescued from the barbarians intact.
At that moment, Tess decided to get drunk.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
That Charles seemed willing to sit by and watch his sister drink herself into oblivion appalled David. There she sat, the center of attention, tossing off the Scotch as if it were water. What drove her he did not know, but he recognized well enough the desperation the action stemmed from.
He sidled over to Diana, who was talking to Jo Singh and Rajiv on the outskirts of the group. She glanced his way, excused herself, and met him on the edge of the carpet.
'Diana, you seem skilled at creating diversions-'
She looked past his shoulder at Tess. Tess was laughing at something Cara had said even while her hand groped for her cup again. 'I can see that an exit is called for.'
'Bless you, Diana. Did anyone ever tell you that you're a angel?' She flushed abruptly and, to his surprise, looked embarrassed and unhappy. 'I'm sorry. My stupid tongue.'
'No, it's not your fault. But David, she looked so marvelous riding in on that horse, so… so competent and adventurous and confident. Did you hear the way she lit into Maggie's program? Nicely, of course, but it's clear she's brilliant with languages.'
David chuckled. 'The Rhuian complex we all learned from was written by her at the age of twenty-one.'
Diana's eyes widened. 'Is that true? I've never learned a language faster than through that matrix. It made the connections so obvious. But then why is she-' She hesitated, and David could see that she very much wanted not to say anything negative about Tess Soerensen. He glanced back to see Tess shift on her stool and almost overbalance and fall off. Cara steadied her and shot Charles a meaningful glance, but Soerensen ignored her.
'I don't know. But I remember when I won top honors from middle college and the accelerated slot to apply to the Tokyo School of Engineering-which is the most competitive, the best of the best-and they threw a big party for me at my village. I felt like a fraud, because I hadn't worked as hard as the other kids in my region and the ones at Yaounde College. All their praise sounded cheap because I knew the truth even if they didn't. So I got
