“Here we are,” he said, opening a door and ushering her and the Tendu into a large, elegant room filled with people. Quang Nguyen and his wife greeted Juna, guiding her to a comfortable sofa. Children dressed in house livery brought her appetizers, which she accepted gratefully. All that exploring had made her hungry. Another child-servant slipped up to her and took her drink order.
“Dinner will be served in about forty-five minutes,” Quang Nguyen told her.
“Thank you,” she said. “The Tendu and I were so busy exploring your lovely rain forest that we forgot to eat.”
“Would you like to meet our head ecologist?” he asked.
“Yes, I would,” Juna replied.
“I’ll go get him,” he said.
While he was gone, Juna sat back and watched the glittering crowd dressed in beautifully tailored silks, and adorned with gold and precious gems from the family’s mines here on the Moon. The name of this place, Joia da Lua, memorialized the gemstones that were this family’s initial source of wealth. She felt plain and out of place amongst all this opulence.
Quang’s wife, Abeo, came up with a handsome Asian man on her arm. “Juna, this is Hideo Tanaka Xaviera, one of my fleet captains. He’s asked to meet you.”
“I am honored to make your acquaintance, Tanaka-san.”
“I am honored to meet you, as well, Dr. Saari. Please, tell me about Tiangi. What was it like?”
Juna smiled reminiscently. “Like Earth, but greener. It was beautiful in a way that Earth has not been for many centuries. But dangerous too. I spent a great deal of my time trying not to get eaten or fall out of a tree.”
Just then Quang Nguyen brought over the ecologist, and then several other men were introduced to Juna. She was soon caught up in a whirl of introductions and flirting. Everyone, it seemed, had a man to introduce to Juna. At one point, she was formally introduced to a man by a four-year-old girl, who turned out to be his niece. She barely had a chance to talk to the two Tendu, who were surrounded by their own coterie of admirers.
The party went on until well past three o’clock. Juna tiptoed into her room careful not to wake the sleeping Tendu, slid out of her dress, and climbed into bed, tired, but still too excited to sleep. She had never been the center of so much masculine attention before. It was a heady experience. She lay in the darkness, looking up at the ceiling, and thinking over the evening.
While the attention paid her was flattering, she was not really drawn to any particular man. Yang was familiar, but his smooth, withdrawn nature didn’t attract her. She had the most in common with the ecologist, Jacques Quanh Xaviera, and had agreed to tour the forest with him and the Tendu the next day. Jacques had been in the Survey, but had retired to take over the management of the Xavieras’ various preserves.
“We’ve preserved so many rare and endangered species. Some day, we’ll be able to reintroduce them back into the wild,” he’d told her. “And I was ready to settle down. I knew I could make a difference here.”
Juna rolled over onto her side and pulled the pillow down a bit. Jacques seemed nice enough, but there was no spark there either. She had met a lot of men tonight. Perhaps in a few days, when she got to know some of them better, she would feel attracted by one of the Xavieras.
And if not, what then? She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the shadowy ceiling again. The Tendu did love it here, and it would be a wonderful place for her child…
“Siti?” Moki said. “Why are you alone? I thought you would have found someone to mate with.”
Juna sat up. Moki was standing on the doorway. “This isn’t like Tiangi, Moki. I’m not just looking for someone to fertilize my eggs.” She patted her stomach. “It’s a little late for that. I’m looking for someone I can fall in love with.”
“Why?”
“For as long as there have been human poets, philosophers, and lovers, they have been trying to answer that very question. I guess the best answer is that I would be happier in a marriage where there were bonds of love. It’s a tie that binds people together. It’s like allu-a in that way.”
“And what if you don’t fall in love with any of the Xavieras?”
Juna looked down at the rumpled sheets. “That was just what I was trying to decide, Moki. If it were as simple as finding a place where you and Ukatonen could both be happy, then I would marry the Xavieras. But the Xavieras are a rich and powerful family. They want access to the Tendu. There are good things and bad things about that. We would gain powerful protectors, but”—she held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness—“they would expect favors in return. Those may not be things that would be good for the Tendu.”
“Then we should not tie ourselves to them,” Ukatonen said from the doorway. He spoke in skin speech, his words glowing in the shadowy room.
“Even when they can provide you with a rain forest to live in?” Juna asked.
“I did not come here to live in a rain forest, Eerin,” he told her. “I can do that on Tiangi. I came here to learn about your people, and I have learned a great deal. For instance,” he said, still in skin speech, “they have listening devices in these rooms. They can hear everything you say aloud.”
Juna covered her mouth, horrified. Had she said anything she would regret them overhearing?
“I overheard Abeo and another woman discussing it,” the enkar explained.
Juna turned on a light, and found a pad of paper. “Did they see you?” she asked, sketching the skin speech symbols on the paper. The glyphs would be completely incomprehensible to the Xavieras, even if they had video cameras installed.
“I don’t think so. I was standing outside, near an open window,” Ukatonen said in skin speech.
“What else did they say?” Juna wrote.
“Abeo asked if the microphone in our rooms was working. The other woman said that it was, and that they could hear us perfectly, but that so far you’d said nothing of interest. Then they started speculating about which of the men you would choose. Quang Nguyen wants you to settle on Yang, but Abeo wants him to marry someone else. The other woman thought you would go for the ecolo-gist.”
“Thank you for telling me this,” Juna wrote. “I will not be marrying these people. We can discuss it tomorrow, out in the jungle.”
She yawned, and said aloud, “God, it’s late! I should get some sleep.”
“Good night Eerin,” Ukatonen said. “Come, Moki, let’s go to bed. Sleep well.”
Now that her decision was made, the rest of Juna’s time among the Xavieras felt almost like a vacation. She flirted with the men, explored the rain forest with the Tendu and Jacques, got to know the women, and played with the children. Despite their eavesdropping, Juna liked the Xavieras. They were witty, personable, and very intelligent. At times, she even regretted the fact that she had to refuse their proposal, but nothing happened to change her mind.
She and the Tendu spoke only of inconsequential things in their suite, reserving any serious discussion for the time they spent up in the canopy, where Juna was reasonably certain they could neither be seen nor heard.
On the evening of the last day of their visit, Quang Nguyen, Abeo, and their son Yang invited her and the Tendu for a quiet farewell dinner. Just before dinner, Yang handed her a small, exquisitely crafted wooden box.
“For you,” he explained, “a courting present. The wood is from our forest.”
“Thank you,” Juna said, her voice hushed in admiration. “It’s beautiful.”
“Here, let me show you how it opens.” He slid aside an invisible panel, releasing the lid. “There,” he said, handing it to her.
She opened it. Inside, cradled on deep green velvet, was a beautifully worked golden brooch, made in the shape of a Tendu, the red stripes along its back picked out in tiny rubies, its eyes made of emeralds. The workmanship was exquisite. The Tendu seemed almost alive. Juna glanced up and saw a flicker of amusement flash across Mold’s body, and she fought back a flush of embarrassment. It was exactly the color of a Tendu in heat.