'I don't fault you, Charles. I never said that. You're doing what you have to do. I don't think there's anything else you could do. Like Cara-her research is the heart of her life. Everything else is a hobby.'
'Including me?'
Tess bent down to pick up the tumbler and drained it in one gulp. The heat of it seared her throat, but the burning gave her courage. 'Including you. That knife cuts both ways. It's why the two of you are so well- matched.'
Now Charles did smile, and Tess relaxed slightly. 'I see my baby sister has grown up.'
'I'm a little older. Not much.'
'And yet, you married a man who has dedicated his life in the same way I have dedicated mine.'
'Yes.' Her smile was sardonic. 'The prince's sister must marry a prince. There was another man I fell in love with, another man of the jaran, but I would never have married him. Once I met Ilya…' She shrugged. 'In the end, I suppose it was inevitable.'
'How old is he?'
'By their calendar, which runs in twelve year cycles, he's thirty-seven.' She gave an ironic nod toward the clock. 'However accurate their time-keeping is.'
'But, nevertheless, well into the prime of his life. He'll die, Tess.'
It was like being slapped. All she could do was try to hit back. 'Are you willing to wait him out? Knowing he'll die soon enough and then you can get me back?'
'I meant,' he said mildly, 'that he'll die sooner than you will, barring any accidents. Much sooner.'
She twisted her hands together and glanced back at Dr. Hierakis's tent. Cara and Ilya stood talking together outside the tent, and as if he felt her gaze, Ilya turned their way, looking at her as he always looked at her, so intently, so intimately, that her own feelings rose fiercely to meet his across the gap. With an effort, she turned back to Charles. 'Don't you think I know that?' she asked bitterly. 'Don't you think I remember that every damn morning? And every night, after he's fallen asleep?'
'I'm sorry,' said Charles, but whether for her pain or for the specter of Ilya's premature death, by their standards, she could not be sure.
Cara and Ilya returned. 'But surely you'll ride with the army,' Ilya was saying. 'There is so much more you can teach my healers.'
'I don't know. Charles?' Cara sat down again, but Ilya remained standing.
'I need to go to the shrine of Morava,' said Charles.
Ilya's gaze flicked from Charles to Tess and back to Charles. 'I can send a small jahar with you, if you wish to ride north now. Then you can follow us south, if you will, or return to the coast and sail back to Jeds, if that is your desire.'
'I need to take Tess with me to the shrine.'
'That is impossible.'
Charles stood up. 'Of course it is not impossible. I need her to translate.'
'I remind you that you are in my camp.' Ilya's voice dropped and its very mildness was threatening.
Charles smiled.
Tess had a horrible premonition that Charles was about to say something rash-something like, / remind you that you are on my planet-and she jumped to her feet and placed herself between the two men. 'Stop it. Damn you two, stop it. I'll make my own choice. Sit down.'
Neither sat. No one spoke. Tess did not know what to say, so she simply stood there, feeling the force of them one on each side. Like Jiroannes through the bonfires, she felt the pressure of their attention on her, the force of their equally strong personalities brought to bear on her, and she was caught in the middle. If she had ever thought for an instant that these two men could compromise, then she had been sorely mistaken.
'Someone's coming,' said Cara.
Ilya turned. A man ran toward them. He halted beyond the carpet, outside the awning's overhang. 'Bakhtiian. A messenger has come in from Sakhalin.'
'I'll come.' Ilya nodded at Dr. Hierakis. 'Doctor. If you'll excuse me.'
'Of course.'
'Tess?' He put out his hand.
She did not move. 'I'm not done here yet. I'll come along in a while.'
He froze, tensing, then jerked himself around and strode off with the soldier, vanishing into the darkness.
'Tess,' said Charles, 'sometimes I think I would be doing you a service simply to take you forcibly out of here.'
'Don't you dare! You're no better than him, you're just a damned sight cooler about it. And if you're so damned righteous, then why are you flouting your own interdiction laws?''
'I beg your pardon?'
'Francis Bacon. Or had you forgotten so quickly? And you let the Bharentous Repertory Company come here. However much you claim to be preserving Rhuian cultures, you're already corrupting them.'
Charles blinked, looking surprised at the vehemence of her attack. 'Tess, inevitably Rhui's interdiction will be lifted. In a cautious way, I'm trying to prepare for that.'
'Gods, you've already thought about it. You're doing it on purpose. Do you have a timetable set, too? When do the sea gates open?'' She was so angry that tears came to her eyes.
His voice cooled to a chill. 'If I hadn't intervened, Rhui would have been raped. Which do you prefer? Quick and ugly, or giving them a chance to meet the change on their own terms?''
'Oh, hell,' said Tess, wiping at her eyes. 'I'm sorry.''
'Charles.' Cara stood up. 'I want to talk to Tess a bit, alone, and take a few tests. If you'll excuse us.'
He muttered a word under his breath, then turned and stalked into his tent.
'That's one thing that always encourages me about humanity,' said Cara, taking Tess's arm and leading her across to her tent, 'that in the midst of all our nobility we can be so incredibly foolish. And petty. And otherwise damned asses.'
'Thank you.'
Cara snorted, amused. 'The comment wasn't actually meant for you, my dear.' She guided Tess into the tent and snapped her fingers. A light flicked on, hidden in the ceiling. Cara pushed through into the back compartment of the tent, where a diagnostic table stood next to a counter laid out in neat lines with a field laboratory, a lacework of metal and plastine and glass. 'Now. We have some serious discussing to do, my girl, and I need to do a full diagnostic on you. Sit.'
Tess sat obediently on the table. 'Cara, is it too late? Can you give Ilya treatments to make him live longer?'
Cara turned from the counter and regarded Tess. Something lit in her face and was, as quickly, smothered. 'Ah,' she said, and turned back without replying, busying herself with the equipment.
'But can you?' Tess demanded.
'I've had to relearn a good deal about the human life span, a great deal we've forgotten these last one hundred years, now that we live out a full one hundred twenty years, all of us. Did you know, Tess, that with their year being longer than ours, Rhuians normally live longer lives than Earth humans did before the advent of decent medicine in the twenty-first century? I once thought they were some kind of amazing parallel evolution.''
'But the cylinder I got at the shrine of Morava-'
'Yes. It proved that they are descendants of Earth, brought thousands of years ago from Earth to Rhui by the Chapalii duke, the Tai-en Mushai, to populate this planet. One wonders if he killed off some developing intelligent indigenes in order to make room for our kind. But in any case, he altered the humans he brought. He made them more-efficient.''
'But they still age more rapidly than we do.'
'Indeed. Bakhtiian can expect to live another thirty or forty years, all else being equal, but you can expect to live another ninety, and you won't age appreciably for a long long time. As in the old folktales of elves and humans, we would seem eternally young to them.'
'Then you're saying there's nothing you can do?' Her voice caught with fear and grief.
'This planet, and whatever the Mushai's engineers did to them, has altered their chemistry from ours. The
