“But then my draft notice was posted, and I decided to join the Marines. I figured it was a better shot than the Navy. No offense, ma’am.” Jodi shook her head. The two of them had shared times that had long since dissolved any seriousness in jibes about their rival services. “After the papers were signed, I felt good about it. My folks and little sister would have money to make ends meet, and I’d get to see something of the outside, which really began to appeal to me after a while. And fighting, that was something I’d always been good at, since I was a little kid. And if I was going to be fighting the Blues, so much the better.”
He looked at Reza. “It wasn’t like I thought it would be, though. Boot camp went by in a flash, all of us so busy we didn’t have time to think about anything but making it through the next day.
“But when I reached the regiment and saw what the war really meant to a grunt like me, to all of us, I suddenly realized that I’d probably never see home again, except maybe in a box. It hit me just like that. That night, while we were waiting to ship out to the fleet, I went off by myself a little ways and knelt on the ground, just like Reza there. I looked up at the sky, but damned if I could figure out which star was home, where Mom and Dad and Lucille were. All I wanted then, more than anything in the world, was to be at home, sitting in the kitchen and having dinner with my folks, or maybe having a beer with Dad out on the porch, a thousand other little things. I wanted to be home so bad that I just started bawling like a baby.” Braddock was silent for a moment, taking the time to look at the stars himself. “Since then, Father, I’ve seen a thousand other guys and gals do the exact same thing. He might be praying all right, but if he is, my money says that it’s not inspired by guilt from his work this morning. If he’s praying, it’s a wish to wake up from all this and be at home, wherever his home might be, tucked into a nice warm bed.”
The three of them were silent with their own thoughts for a while.
“Well, folks,” Braddock said, finally breaking the spell and stretching out with obvious pleasure on the heavily padded bedroll, the first real chance to sleep that he could claim to have had for the better part of a month or more, “I think I’m going to shut down for the night. I don’t know about you, but this Marine needs his beauty sleep real, real bad. ‘Night, all.”
“Goodnight, my son,” Hernandez replied. He, too, was tired from the ordeals of the last weeks, and today especially. His mind was wound tight as a clock spring, but his body needed rest. “I think I will avail myself of sleep, as well. Goodnight, Jodi.”
“Goodnight, Father, gunny.” Jodi sat at the fire by herself for a while, still thinking about what Braddock had said. That Reza might be homesick had not occurred to her. She had naïvely assumed that Reza would be happy to be back in the Confederation, among his own people. She saw how precious the old letter from Colonel Hickock was to him and the respect he had shown Braddock after Reza understood that Braddock was a Marine.
But believing that Reza should be happy to be “home” again had been silly, she understood now. Whatever Reza was thinking, it could hardly be from a perspective akin to hers. After all, how long had he been under the Empire’s influence? Since early childhood? Since birth? And what – if anything – was left inside him that someone could point to and say, “That is human”? What did he really have in common with anyone in the human sphere, other than his genetic origins?
It was these questions that brought on a sudden wave of compassion for the dark, silent figure kneeling a few meters away. In the short time since he had been among them, he had demonstrated powers that made Jodi wonder if her disbelief in the supernatural, benign or otherwise, might be unjustified, and she wondered with uneasy curiosity at what other secrets might yet lay cloaked behind his green eyes. But for all that, he still boasted at least some of the frailties of his kind. He could shed tears of sadness, although she did not know exactly why he might be sad. Looking at him now, she knew that he could feel loneliness, too, just as Braddock had thought. Severed from the culture he had grown up in and whomever he might have been close to, how could it be any other way?
Quietly, so as not to disturb Braddock or the snoring priest, Jodi got up from her bedroll and went to sit beside Reza.
“Listen,” she said softly as he turned to her, the pendants on the collar around his neck glittering brightly in the glow of the fire, “I know you can’t understand what I’m saying, but I want you to know that you don’t have to be alone.” She reached out and found one of his hands. With the armored gauntlet and its rapier claws, it seemed huge and menacing against her tender flesh, but she held it anyway. “I don’t know why you’re here, or what or who you left behind. I hope that maybe you’ll tell me those things someday, when we can speak in a language we both understand, because I really would like to know. Because I care. And there will be others who will care about you, too, and will be your friends.” She touched his face with her other hand. There were no tears there now, just his glowing eyes. “I’m sure life won’t be easy for you,” she went on. “It never is for people who are different from the others around them, and you’re different from every other human being who has ever lived. But you’re still human, and that’s what counts most. It’ll be enough. I know it will.”
She heard a tiny click, the same strange noise as when he had been holding her in the rectory, as he took off one of his gauntlets and clipped it to his waist. He took her hand in his, flesh against flesh, and did what Jodi thought was the most extraordinary thing.
Shyly, like a bewildered teenage boy on his first date, he smiled.
Jodi dreamed. Her nose was filled with the heady aroma of meat cooking over an open fire, and saliva flowed in her mouth like the warm waters of a deep subterranean river. Her stomach growled in her dream, and she moaned with almost sexual pleasure at the prospect of feasting on a thick, juicy steak, even one out of the shipboard food processors.
The dream, strange though some might have considered it, was rooted in one of Jodi’s deepest desires since she had been marooned on Rutan. Penned up within the village walls for most of their stay, unable to hunt because of the threat from the Kreelans, the Marines had been eating little more than the stored bread, beans, and some vegetables of dubious origin. The Rutanians, being vegetarians, found this no great hardship, but Jodi and many of Colonel Moreau’s people had become almost desperate for the taste of meat, especially when edible game was so plentiful in the nearby forest. Father Hernandez had chided her that it was an addictive vice akin to overindulgence in alcohol, and Jodi had not argued the point. If he and his people were content to live eating nothing but what came directly from plants grown and harvested by their own hands, Jodi would be the last to condemn them. But she and many of the others wanted something more.
She turned over on her side as the object in her dream floated into crystal-clear focus: a thick tender sirloin, this time not lean and healthy, but edged with a centimeter of delicious fat. Its plate-sized sides were streaked with the charring marks from the grill and carried the scent of the rare mesquite charcoal used to cook it.
Her stomach growled so loudly that it woke her up. Up to that point, the dream had been more satisfying and pleasurable than any sexual fantasy she could recall, if not because of its vividness, then perhaps because she had not eaten since the afternoon two days before.
“Oh, shit,” she moaned, putting one hand over her empty belly, wishing she were back in the village rather than out here. But even though the villagers had all peacefully returned to their homes and the village was quiet, there was still a great deal of uncertainty regarding Reza. In light of that and Jodi’s unusual orders regarding Reza’s safety, she, Braddock and the priest had decided to remain in the tree grove – surrounded by the remaining Marines – to await the arrival of TF-85 and keep Reza company.