Eustus panicked. He had never considered the possibility that Reza might be homosexual. While he did not care for it personally, it was a widely accepted practice in many parts of the Confederation. “Reza… I mean, uh, if you like guys, well, I guess that’s okay, too, but…”
“No.” He turned to his friend, smiling weakly. “I am not that way. I just need to be alone.”
Eustus saw tears welling in his friend’s eyes. “Hey, are you okay?”
Reza shook his head. “No, but there is nothing to be done about it. And I will speak no more of it.” With a quick yank of a leather strap, he secured the short sword to his back. “I wish you a good time, my friend. I will see you when you return.”
Then he padded silently out of the room without turning back.
Eustus watched him go, wondering exactly what was bothering his friend so much.
While Eustus and most of the other trainees were piling into the buses that would take them to the nearby towns, Reza was running through the forest as fast as his legs would take him, which was far faster than any human being had ever run. He whispered between the trees, faster than the wind, taking in the scents of the forest animals and trees, all descended from Old Terra after Quantico had been terraformed. He smelled a rabbit, several squirrels, and some larger predators: a fox and two wolves. The sun had set and it was time for them to hunt. Like them, Reza’s vision in the darkness was as keen as those born of Kreelan flesh: another gift of the Change.
He opened his mind, going beyond mere sight and smell. He could sense the birds overhead in their nests, the strange creatures that burrowed underground that he had never seen but knew were there, the insects that clung to the ground and the leaves of the trees.
At last he reached a spot that suited his spirit, a deep cove of trees with a small creek running through it. He knelt next to a rock and became one with it, thinking nothing, sensing everything. Time passed…
When the sky was completely dark, Reza stirred. He wanted to see the stars. He lay down on his back, wondering at the countless points of light that brightened the night sky.
“Where is she?” he asked the sky in the Old Tongue. There were so many questions he wanted to ask, but there was no one to answer. He had made the only decision his Way allowed, thereby damning himself to an eternity of spiritual solitude and Esah-Zhurah to… what? He prayed to the Empress to carry his love to Esah-Zhurah in her dreams. At this moment he would have given anything to be with her, but even the Devil that Father Hernandez so feared would not be lured into making such a bargain.
Sleep finally carried him to the faraway land he had once called home.
Dawn came.
A deer neared the creek, thirsty for a drink. Reza rose silently from his sanctuary and approached it. It did not run away, for it sensed nothing to fear; he appeared only as an insubstantial shadow, no more a threat than was the mist. That was how Reza preferred it. He wished the animal no pain. Death, when it came, was instantaneous.
This was the first time he had been able to make an unhurried hunt since leaving the Empire. Reza constantly craved meat, but there was no accommodation to be found in the mess hall. Instead, he was forced to hunt in the occasional spare hour or so that was not taken up by training or commander’s call. He knew his abnormal need for meat was a result of the Change, but it was one he welcomed; it was another means of preserving in his mind the heritage he had earned, the love he now missed.
He cleaned the deer carefully and stripped it of meat, cutting it into strips to carry back with him, where he would dry and salt it. What little was left of the carcass he carried away from the stream, that the other animals could have their share, and that the water would not become fouled.
He laid out the hide and began to cure it, fortunately a swift process using the methods Esah-Zhurah had taught him long ago. Getting the proper ingredients had been very difficult, but he had finally convinced a pharmacist at the hospital to make up what he had requested. When asked what Reza was going to use the concoctions for, he had told the man, explaining the process in halting Standard, the technical terms of curing a hide not coming to him easily. Strangely, the man had not believed him, but had indulged his request anyway, the ingredients being harmless ones. Reza shook his head in silent wonder at how humans so often mistook the truth for deception.
In any case, Reza was eager to have a skin to sleep on again, even one as thin as this. The human-fashioned bed in his room was unbearable.
“Hello,
“Of course, commander,” he said, coming gracefully to attention. He had been sitting on the deerskin, reading another technical manual. He had felt her approaching long before she reached the door, but he reacted as if he had not known this. He had discovered that certain of his abilities unnerved those around him, and he had gotten into the habit of screening himself with more human reactions, difficult as they often were to emulate. “You are always welcome here.”
“Please, Reza,” she said as she stepped into the room, quietly closing the door behind her, “we are off duty now. You can relax and call me by name.”
Reza nodded, noting her clothes and the light makeup that adorned her face. She was dressed in a close- fitting scarlet blouse of pure silk, skin-tight black pants, and a gold sash tied around her petite waist. A slim gold chain hung around her neck, and her feet were wrapped in soft black leather boots.
“I thought you had gone into town with the others yesterday, when I did not find you here,” she said casually, knowing full well that Reza would not have gone. This was the first and only free weekend the trainees would have during their basic training. Very, very few chose to pass up the opportunity to go into one of the nearby towns and get their fill of booze, gambling, and sex before returning to the discipline of the barracks. Jodi had begged Nicole to go, but she had refused, insisting that Jodi go on with some of the other instructors for an outing probably every bit as wild as those the trainees had in mind, Nicole claiming she had some work to finish that could not wait.
While she did not say so, Jodi had suspected otherwise.
“No,” Reza said lightly, smiling as he shook his head. “After Eustus explained to me the merits of ‘booze, babes, and booze’ and the controversy over ‘beefcake,’ I decided to forego such pleasures for simpler pursuits.” While Eustus was sometimes an awkward young man, his vigor in any endeavor he set his mind to was not to be underestimated. “No, Nicole,” he said, his smile fading slightly, “I have no need of these things. I went hunting instead.”
Nicole sat down on Eustus’s bed, and Reza folded back into his sitting position opposite her, his legs resting on the freshly cleaned and cured deerskin that lay atop a collection of blankets that he had scrounged from somewhere. He had removed the bulky bed frame, having found it intolerably uncomfortable. Along with his long, braided hair, it was written off as an acceptable – barely – deviation from the norm, and therefore exempt from inspection as long as it was kept orderly and neat, which of course it was.
Nicole shook her head. Very few things he did now surprised her. Or so she liked to think. “It looks very comfortable,” she said, silently wondering what the animal fur might feel like against her skin. She felt the stirrings of heat in her body and a flush rising to her cheeks, and she quickly changed the subject, groping for a more delicate way of approaching him.
“I have spoken several times with Eustus,” she said as she compared the two sides of the room. Eustus had the maximum number of allowable personal effects displayed: a holo of his mother and father, another of his whole family – so many children! – and a real photograph, tastefully framed in luminous black metal, of a famous singer with the woman’s autograph.
But on Reza’s side, there was nothing but bare wall and – she stopped. That was not quite true. The silver crucifix she had given him when they were children hung from a pin directly above his bed. It made her flush with a combined sense of pride and guilt, of conflicting duty and impatient desires.
“He thinks the world of you, Reza,” she told him. “And, from what the other instructors have said, not only he but your whole platoon has been performing and learning better and faster than the others, thanks to you.”
“All of them have the warrior spirit,” Reza said, proud that others had thought and spoken well of him. It was a far cry from what they had said in his first days among them, and there remained those who would never trust him because of his unusual heritage and the collar he wore. “They simply have not yet learned to use it and control
