“It’s not like they make it at home.”
“It’s just got onion in it.”
“What’s onion?”
Rachel’s eyes narrowed. “You know what onion is . . .” She tasted another dish that Yahvi had rejected. “Oh, never mind; that’s coconut.”
“What is that and why would anyone eat it?”
Xavier laughed. “Try this,” he said, holding out a dish that had a whitish tube-shaped object smothered in other items. “It’s a plantain. Kind of like a banana.”
“I never had a banana, so . . .”
Rachel forced a smile. “Why don’t you just eat what looks and tastes good? It’s not as though you’ll starve.” Then she turned back to Pav and Taj.
Yahvi ventured a few more bites, then picked up the Beta unit and walked out. All through the day, the conference room had begun to feel exactly like the flight deck of Adventure. Which was a place she found interesting at first but soon began to loathe.
Not that the halls of the Yelahanka Air Base hospital were a great improvement over the conference room. Rachel had told her she could go “anywhere,” except for the surgeries and recovery rooms, and the loading dock, and the entrance. Well, she could probably walk up to the entrance—but she couldn’t go out.
Not that she wanted to go out. The conference room was only a few meters from the reception desk and the main entrance. Yahvi lingered there behind the door, looking through the window, watching things for a few moments. There was an Indian Air Force guard at the desk, with another pair seated on opposite sides of the small lobby. All three men looked bored; Yahvi suspected that one of the men in the chairs was actually asleep.
Beyond them, a set of glass doors showed very little, except that night had arrived.
What if she did just walk past the guards and out into the night? Then what? She knew that the hospital was located in the heart of a large base, so leaving it would require a long walk . . . possibly the longest walk in a straight line she had ever made.
What lay outside the fences and gates? Stores? A highway? Homes? Empty fields? Her parents might know; her grandfather would certainly know, but what good would the information do her? Any real “exploration” would require mechanized transport, and she had no access to that. (Until riding in the Jeep from the landing site to the hospital, Yahvi’s only experience with vehicular travel had been in the Keanu trolley while working on Substance K collection.)
She was stuck here until someone got them out, to another city, another country, another continent.
At this moment Yahvi would have been happy to get back aboard Adventure and go home. There were many HBs, especially the yavaki, who would have been perfectly happy to keep on living aboard Keanu.
A third door opened behind her, and she was suddenly surrounded by bodies and voices. Four young women, none of them much older than Yahvi, all wearing bland smocklike garb in either light blue or green.
One of them smiled. Another one said, “Hi!”
But the other two, the ones wearing blue, reacted with alarm, grabbing the friendlier pair. “Don’t you know who she is?” one of them said.
Yahvi was puzzled. Why would anyone be afraid of her? If anyone should be nervous in social encounters, it should be her. “I’m Yahvi,” she said.
“We know.” So said the one in blue who had warned the others. “Aren’t you supposed to be locked up—?”
“No,” Yahvi said.
“Like that thing in the chamber?”
So that was the problem! “Don’t be afraid of Zeds,” she said.
“It’s not just him. We wish all of you would just leave!”
And she tried to tug the others along.
But one of the girls in green wasn’t ready to leave and began arguing with the girl in blue. Yahvi could barely follow the exchange, especially since she couldn’t help noticing the way the girls had enhanced their looks. They all wore makeup and jewelry—glittery things in their earlobes, bracelets, necklaces.
And their fragrance! There was a bit of a cooking air about them (the girls in green must work in the cafeteria), but what was most prominent was a floral scent. She wanted to ask them—even the one who didn’t like her—why they did this and what were the rules, and where did one obtain these substances.
But just like that the argument was over. The two girls in blue marched out. “They’re nurse assistants,” the girl in green said. “Stuck-up.”
“I’m sorry.” Yahvi knew what stuck-up meant.
“And Surina is very religious.”
Yahvi had been hearing that all day, that “religious” humans were among those most troubled by Adventure’s mission. It baffled her. There were a few religious people among the HBs, probably evenly split between Christians and Hindus. But, as far as Yahvi knew, none of the yavaki had ever expressed a belief in a supreme being or whatever it was religions were supposed to have. Maybe that was the problem. “We’re not here to make trouble.”
“I don’t think it’s you, but where you came from.”
“And what you might do,” the other girl in green said. “With your magic powers.” She made a spooky sound, which made the first girl laugh.
“But you’re not afraid of me.”
“Well, no. I mean, you seem to be just like us—”
“Well, taller,” the second girl said. That was true: Yahvi was a head taller than any of the four girls.
“Where are you going?”
“Out! It’s Saturday night!”
Yahvi smiled. “So . . .” She had barely gotten used to “days.” Yes, the HBs used the calendar they had grown up with . . . but there was nothing special about Saturday night, or Sunday morning.
“We have dates,” the first girl said. “Well, I do.” She nudged her friend. “Her boyfriend was deployed last week—”
“Deployed?”
“Sent to the coast on alert,” the second girl said. From the expression on her face, this wasn’t a good thing.
“In case we’re invaded,” the first girl said. Her giggles suggested that she didn’t really see the danger.
“By the Reivers?” Yahvi said.
The girls looked confused. Yahvi tried to explain. “The Aggregates. The ones who control most of Earth.”
“Yes. Everyone’s sick of it,” the first girl said. Then: “Does your alien friend speak English?”
“Or Hindi?” the second girl said.
“Both,” Yahvi said. “Go by and talk to him. Tell him I said hello.” As she said it, she realized she could have allayed some of her loneliness and sense of dislocation by visiting Zeds—who was almost certainly feeling the same thing.
Then the hallway door opened again. It was the two nursing assistants, now accompanied by the guards from the lobby. “There she is.”
“You shouldn’t be out here like this,” one of the guards said.
“What, I should be in a different hallway?” She was getting angry. She looked to her two acquaintances in green; they seemed intimidated by the guards and the two nursing assistants.
“Never mind,” Yahvi said. “I’m leaving.”
She turned away and went through the doors, deeper into the hospital.
She would find Zeds and wish him a good night, even as she pondered the encounter with girls her age—how strange they were, how different their lives were.
All the while realizing that, as far as they were concerned, Yahvi was just as alien as Zeds.
QUESTION: For Rachel . . . Why did you turn Keanu around and bring it back to Earth?
RACHEL: Because I was going to be a bit too old to really enjoy the next closest destination.
QUESTION: Which was—?
RACHEL: At least forty light-years distant, or as we calculated it, based on our highest possible speed . . . really, really far off.
INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,