Companions. That was too gentle a word. Accomplices. That, perhaps, was a better one. They were not E’Var’s prisoners, or at least, not fully. Who but a human could tell E’Var the nature of this ‘movie theatre’ and then direct him to one? They were helping him to hunt. They were driving him around in their own groundcar. They were feeding him, sheltering him.
What had he promised them in exchange? Perhaps life and nothing more. And perhaps Tagen was being too harsh with these unknown females. E’Var had surely not asked for aid. He had abducted them. Raped them. Killed others in front of their eyes. And they were human, smaller and weaker than Jotan, unaware that they were not alone in the universe until the moment that E’Var had stolen them. Tagen supposed he could not condemn them for surrendering to E’Var’s will. Not fairly, anyway. He really was a rotten officer.
Tagen touched a claw to the black circles marking E’Var’s killings. East and east and east on foot. Well east, in the groundcar. Then North and then all over. There were great blocks of time unaccounted for, but if there was a pattern here, it evaded Tagen’s eye.
He leaned back with a sigh, pulling Grendel high onto his chest and massaging the cat’s ears. From back in the bowels of the house, he could hear a muffled thump and rattle of Daria at work. It was a soothing sound, but the map before him kept catching his eye and tightening his claws. If only he knew how E’Var was guiding himself around Earth. The humans who accompanied him were navigating the groundcar, but it must be E’Var himself telling them where to go and Tagen couldn’t believe it was purely at random. That was just too stupid a way to hunt, and stupid hunters get caught a whole lot faster than it had taken Uraktus E’Var and his crew.
Tagen put the cat onto the floor and stood up before Grendel could leap back onto his lap. The animal gripped at his knee and wailed, but Tagen unhooked its tiny claws with a firm hand and stepped over it and out into the hall. He needed Daria’s eyes. Her insight, her Earther experience, her wisdom, her…just her.
Tagen followed the sounds of movement to the utility room and there found Daria rummaging through her tall shelves. She was dressed scantily, uncharacteristic for her but quite a pleasant surprise for him. Her legs were mostly bared beneath shortcut jeans and she had a white shirt tied just below her breasts to expose her midriff. Her long hair was shaped into a rope that hung well down her back and swayed like a Kevrian tail with every movement. Tagen leaned against the doorjamb and admired her, thinking how eerily beautiful it was to see light and shadow playing through all those uniquely-human curves.
He made no sound, of that he was sure, but his stare must have grown some weight of its own because she peeked over one shoulder and saw him, startling just a little before laughing selfconsciously.
“What are you doing, just standing there and looking at me?” she asked.
“Yes.” He smiled, and let her see him run his gaze down to her heels and back up, savoring every part of her. “A most worthwhile pursuit. And what are you doing?”
“I can’t find anything since we put this stuff away,” she said, as though apologizing. “I must have re-organized this place ten times—”
“At least.”
“—but I still can’t remember where I put everything. Oh!” She stepped off the little bucket she’d been using for a step-up and displayed her prize: a long-armed set of shears. “I need to prune the trees,” she said.
“Need you?” he sighed, but he came down into the room to join her. “Then I will help.”
“Aw, you don’t want to go out there and work,” she said, but she looked pleased. “Stay in here where it’s cool.”
“It is cool enough,” he replied, tossing his shoulder in that fine human shrug. “And I may as well occupy myself with other tasks. I have never found a way to accustom myself to leisure.”
“Me, neither.” She handed him the shears and opened the back door.
“I warn you, my motives are less than pure.” He arched a brow at her with mock seriousness as he stepped out beneath the sun’s cloud-smothered gaze. “I hope that when you see how I labor on your behalf, you will be desirous to mate with me.”
“It’s working.”
“Ah, well then. I shall work the harder.”
She made a point of showing him how to operate the shears she called ‘pruners’, and then took him to her garden, where a tall step-up already waited. She tried to explain what was to be done and Tagen let her, but he had done this before, if not on quite the same trees.
“It’s the wrong time of year for this, I would think,” he commented as he took his first cuts.
“I know. But it’s easiest to tell which branches are dead when there are leaves on them. In the winter, they all look dead.”
“Do they?”
“Don’t the trees on Jota drop their leaves when it gets cold?”
“Only a very few, toward the planet’s mid-point. I suppose our trees have accustomed themselves to cold over the past several billion years.”
“I guess your winters are a lot colder than ours, too.”
“I would not know, having never experienced one of Earth’s. One can only assume, since your summers are so hot for so long, your winters must be mild. In ancient times, Jota’s winter storms were of killing force.”
“Not anymore?” she asked. “What happened, global warming?”
“In a sense. Global climate control.”
“Gosh, that must be nice. Do you use it to keep your summers from getting too hot, too?”
“No,” he said, glancing wryly back at her. “For some unknowable reason, our government thinks it would be a good idea if we bred once in a while.” He paused to move the ladder to a new tree, and Daria followed after gathering the cut branches into a neat pile. “Humans don’t have a breeding season, do they?” he asked. He’d been wondering for some time.
“No, they—Hey, contractions! Way to go, Tagen!”
“Thank you. I have been studying very hard.”
“No, to answer your question, humans don’t have a breeding season,” she said, smiling. “I think a lot of babies get conceived in the winter, but that’s probably just because we get snowed in and get bored. Men are fertile all the time around here. And women become fertile once a month for about a week at a time.”
“Truly? So often? Do you know when you are fertile?”
“Not exactly, but we know right afterwards when we’re not, so we can kind of guess if we keep track.” Her face drained suddenly of color and she jerked back, her hands flying to her belly. “Oh God!”
He took her fear at once and came off the ladder to console her. “No, no, Daria. It is not possible for our kinds to produce young.”
“How do you know?”
“Because…” He let his hands fall from her shoulders and looked up at the stars for strength, invisible behind their curtain of blue. “Because it has been tried,” he said, and sighed. “Daria, there are things I have not told you.”
“It’s not just the drug, is it?” Her voice was soft, numbed by understanding, but the anger he feared most did not come. Her fingers slipped through his and she came close against his arm. “He’s taking us back, isn’t he? He’s taking people.”
Tagen looked at her hand in his, her cunning little fingers, so slim and graceful. He looked into her eyes—green and blue and white—all the colors of her Earth.
“What does he do with them?” Daria asked.
“All that can be done,” he answered, as gently as possible. “He…and others like him…sell humans to become…I do not know the word. They are forced to work.”
“Slaves,” she said. Her gaze drifted from his, staring in horror at some empty point in space. “The word you’re looking for is slaves.”