Price of Ransom

  “Cruel enough. When he spoke of that time, it was with great pain. I think he was well loved there—I could guess that from what he said and how he said it. I can guess—or hope—that it was as painful a parting for his mother as for him. But imagine a human adolescent in je’jiri society. The clan member who visited us here said it bluntly: it would not be tolerated. Thus he was sent to his human kin.”

  “To become human,” Lily said bitterly.

  “I interviewed them extensively, the aunt and uncle, and grandparents. They meant well. But he was a strange child. His father had died under strange circumstances and had been the black sheep of the family as well. And they had had no inkling that the child even existed—simply had him dumped in their laps. They should have called Social Services at once, of course. But they didn’t.”

  She turned back to find refuge in Dr. Farhad’s even expression. “What did he do, at seventeen?”

  Dr. Farhad’s smile was sad. “What do you suppose he did? He had sex. No one had prepared him for the consequences. The young woman was three years older than him and healthy enough in her self-esteem to have had two previous lovers. They both died. Evidently she was disturbed enough by his behavior—not knowing, I think, that he had committed the murders—that she stopped seeing him and began a relationship with a new partner. As we reconstructed it afterward, it was the new partner who figured out the connection. This young man was not a pleasant character. Kyosti tracked them down and the young man killed the woman, thinking it would save his life. Of course it didn’t. Originally it was thought that Kyosti had murdered the woman as well—”

  “He would never have!”

  “No, so we discovered.” Dr. Farhad’s eyes gleamed as she examined Lily in the subdued light of the observation room. “I’m beginning to think you are indeed what you claim to be.”

  “So you were called in.”

  “Yes. He did try to kill himself twice afterward. I worked with him for several years. Eventually he was deemed stable enough to begin to attempt to live in the world again. I encouraged him to study medicine.”

  “You encouraged him—?”

  “It fitted his—particular talents. It gave him a sense of purpose, a mission. I was disappointed when he joined the saboteur’s network. I never thought it a job conducive to mental health. But his parole board approved, and it was his choice.”

  “He had another lover there,” said Lily, and then lapsed into quiet, remembering the story Kyosti had told her—it seemed so long ago—at Bleak House Station. How his lover had slept with his best friend to see if it was true that he would have to kill any man she slept with. “But I think she abused him, abused the relationship. She died, at Betaos.”

  “At Betaos? The famous engagement? They used to say that the blue-hair physician killed an entire chameleon—excuse me, Kapellan—battalion single-handed. One of those exaggerated legends that grow up.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Lily replied, slow. “She died there. He could have done it, if he’d gone berserk. I’ve seen what he can do, under similar circumstances. I don’t like to remember it.”

  Dr. Farhad tapped a message into one of the keyboards, and a file came up on a screen. “I see I have a great deal to fill in. Which reminds me, what more do you know about his term in Concord prison? I am deeply disturbed to hear of it. It should never have happened, not with his psychological profile.”

  “Other than that it was about twenty years—No. He told me once he’d been in something called sensory.”

  “Sensory deprivation!” Dr. Farhad lifted her hands to pull at the tight coil of her hair, lowered them once again to tap furiously into the keyboard. “That’s the worst possible treatment they could have subjected him to!” She seemed to be talking more to herself than to Lily. “It would be torture. Nothing better than torture.” She checked the screen, but whatever she wanted evidently did not come up. She resumed typing. “I’ll have their heads for this. Absolutely against procedure. Unforgivable.” She subsided into incomprehensible muttering.

  Lily drifted back to the plass wall. The je’jiri male who sat on a high counter in the middle of the room continued his tranquil contemplation of the slate balanced on one knee. He moved a hand, brushed one pallid cheek with the back of the hand. An alien gesture, precise and exotic, like a ritual whose movements make no sense to the audience.

  “I have to talk to him,” Lily said. How else will I know if he exists anymore? She left that thought unspoken.

  “I’m sorry?” Dr. Farhad glanced up from the bank before her.

  “I have to talk to him.”

  “Do you speak any je’jiri?”

  “None.”

  The doctor stopped typing. “How will you communicate?”

  Lily was silent, staring down at Kyosti. There was one way they could communicate without words—and she shuddered. How would it be to make love to an alien, a foreign creature who lacked the least trace of the safe familiarity of humanity? Who could hunt its prey across years and uncounted distance, driven on by forces as strong as those, the same as those, that drag the tides in tune to the movements of the planets, all for the simple pleasure of ripping out the prey’s throat with its bare teeth. If he grinned now—that remote, unreadable je’jiri grin—would he show canines? How did they make love, if they made such a thing at all, bonded for life without choice?

  “I have to try,” she said, her voice so shuttered as to be almost choked.

  At first Dr. Farhad did not reply. Her silence seemed considering, not disapproving. “The room to the left,” she said at last, “is a close observation room, separated from the one he’s now in by plass. He can see you from there. I want you first to go stand in that room so we can observe his reaction. After that, I’ll consider letting you into the room with him. I should add, I control access completely to his suite. It’s coded both to my voice and my retina.”

  “All right,” said Lily, short, because if she said any more she would begin to talk herself out of this. She turned away from the wall and let Dr. Farhad lead her below. The doctor motioned her to enter the close observation room alone and then disappeared upstairs. Lily entered slowly, hesitant but determined.

  He noticed her movement immediately. He looked up. Saw her. His eyes—deep blue, with a far hint of green—met hers, and they stared at each other. There was no sign of recognition whatsoever on his face. His gaze dropped away and, disinterested, he returned to his slate.

  Lily felt like she had been slugged in the abdomen. Her breath didn’t feel right, taut and uneven. She wanted to cry.

  Dr. Farhad’s voice, disembodied, carried out from the speaker in the panel next to the outer door. “You’d better come back up.”

  “No. Let me in with him.”

  “I can’t do that. Surely you understand, Captain. The risk—”

  “He won’t hurt me.” Her palms felt damp and hot. Unconsciously, she had clenched her hands; she forced them open. “You have to let me in. Don’t you understand? There’s only one way I can possibly reach him.”

  Silence from the panel. Some minutes later Dr. Farhad appeared personally in the room. Her movement attracted Kyosti’s notice. He looked up, examined her, and with equal disinterest looked down again. Her face, as she searched Lily’s expression, was somber. “Are you sure?”

  “No,” Lily snapped. “I’m not sure at all. I’m terrified at having to touch that—that alien out there, but if Kyosti is in there, if there’s any hope of getting him out again, I have to try.”

  Dr. Farhad sighed, heartfelt and, strangely enough, compassionate. “Let me call two more fellows, in case there is any—problem. In case we have to intervene.”

  Lily flushed. “You’re not going to—watch?”

  “No, my dear. Through that curtained door there are private sleeping quarters. But the initial encounter—we must be cautious.”

  “Agreed,” Lily conceded, not without relief.

  “I’ll be right back.”


  The assistants took less time to arrange than Lily had feared. It gave her less time for second thoughts. Quickly enough, Dr. Farhad returned and placed her hand on the panel next to the inner door, stood quite still, staring at nothing, and then turned back to Lily. Unexpectedly, she reached out and touched Lily’s hand with her own, a smooth, cool meeting. She said nothing, just stepped back. The door slipped aside. Lily stepped through. It shut behind her, sealing her in.

  Kyosti looked up. So close, with nothing between them, the inaccessible alienness of his entire being struck her with double force. This was not Kyosti. She was alone in the room with an unknown, unpredictable je’jiri male.

  Then he tilted his head from side to side, and scented her. His eyes were half-shuttered as he concentrated on smell. He uncrossed his legs. She took an instinctive step back, away, but he only slid off the counter with precise grace and stood there, examining her less with his gaze than with—

  She shivered but held her ground. The sense of being thoroughly inspected without sight unnerved her. She felt the prickle of sweat at the back of her neck. Realized that he would know of it as well.

  He moved. She held. In a slow, broad arc he circled her. Once around, he circled again, closer this time. And a third, bearing in, so close now that she could with one step reach out and touch him.

  “Kyosti.”

  He halted, hearing her voice, and cocked his head to one side as if trying to make sense of her word. Then he spoke, just a few words, but the language meant nothing to her.

  “Kyosti,” she repeated. “Can you understand me at all? Do you know who I am?”

  He circled her again, keeping a static distance. Stopped in front of her. There was something in his eyes—not, she thought, any recognition of her as Lily, but a recognition of what she was to him. He looked up at the blank wall above that concealed the one-way plass. Clearly, he was aware that Dr. Farhad and her observers existed on some unseen plane.

  He turned deliberately and walked with a predator’s easy grace across to the curtained door. Pushing the fabric aside so that it gathered in his hand, he stepped into the gap and paused, half in one room, half in the other. Behind him, she could make out a pallet arranged neatly on the floor of a small room. He waited, expectant but not impatient. The unearthly pallor of his skin gave him a weird and inhuman attractiveness, set off by the unexpected brilliance of his hair. He was startlingly and beautifully exotic. And she understood truly for the first time how a human, despite full knowledge of the consequences, might succumb to the lure of such forbidden fruit.

  Her footsteps, on the carpeted floor, made scarcely any sound at all, however heavy and deliberate they felt to her. As she approached him, he moved aside to let her pass into the private room. She felt the heat, the presence of him, so near to her as she slid through the arch, but he did not touch her. She restrained herself from glancing back toward the one-way plass wall.

  The room she entered was small: a single pallet and a shut door that led, she expected, to the washing cubicle. She felt him approach behind her, felt him half a hairbreadth away. His breath stirred her hair. She shivered again, but this time not out of fear. She turned.

  He dipped his head, brushing her cheek with one side of his face, like a scenting ritual. His skin felt cool and dry. Pausing, he waited again, as if in this ritual it was now her turn to respond.

  She hesitated. The heightened pull of her body toward his, so close as they stood, seemed absurdly strong, as if at any moment, kept apart, her muscles would start to tremble. However alien he now was, the intensity of her attraction to him was both bitter and sweet to her. She lifted one hand and pulled it through his hair, savoring the soft, thick texture. His breath caught. Catching, it caught hers as well.

  After that, even if she had thought of talking, she would have had neither the time nor the breath.

  And he spoke finally, a word she knew, long after events had progressed to their conclusion, lying on the pallet, when he held her as closely as it is possible to hold someone and still be two separate people. His eyes shut, he said something that she did not understand at first, until he shifted so that his lips brushed her ear, and he spoke again, a murmur: “Lily.”

  15 “tears seven times salt”

  SHE WOKE, ABRUPT, DISORIENTED. Began to move, but someone had pinned her. That damn Windsor: she began to twist away.

  Stopped herself, because it was not Windsor. She was naked. And next to her—her heart raced, making her dizzy. An alien. Void help her, a cursed je’jiri. How in the Seven Hells—She caught herself in a series of gasps as she remembered. Even in the way he slept, he looked not human. He stirred, disturbed by her movement, stretched while still caught in that unmeasurable zone between sleep and waking, and opened his eyes to look directly at her.

  A je’jiri’s gaze, feral but calm. The green tint to his blue eyes seemed especially pronounced, brought out somehow by the blue tips of his hair that lay in disarray about his face. Then he smiled.

  If she had felt disoriented before, she felt it doubly now. It was a human smile. It was Kyosti’s smile, set off against his je’jiri looks.

  “I had the worst nightmare,” he said, so smoothly that at first she did not understand him because she expected not to. “Jehanists were about to kill you. They shot you”—his voice shook—“Mother’s curse on them, and I went crazy—” He moved suddenly to press his face against the curve of her neck and shoulder. “Thank the Mother, it was just a dream.”

  He held her a moment longer. She could not find a voice to speak with. Lifting his head back from her, he raised a hand to stroke her hair. Caught sight of the hand, of his skin—and stopped dead, staring. His eyes widened. Human surprise. On his je’jiri face, the human mannerisms looked incongruous, unbelievable. His gaze traveled down his arm, down his body, to where his legs tangled in with hers.

  The silence stretched out until it was like a tight string strung out in the air, ready to snap. He disentangled himself from her and got up, stiffly, and went into the, washing cubicle. Lily sat up. Pulled on her tunic, and followed him.

  He was standing in front of the mirror, hands on either side of it, palms flat on the wall, staring at himself. Confusion compounded his shock. His eyes flicked, a brief movement, seeing her reflection appear.

  “What happened to me?” he asked, hoarse.

  “Kyosti,” she began, tentative, not knowing what to say.

  He turned abruptly away from the mirror and stalked out of the washing cubicle back to the pallet, settling himself with instinctive ease into a je’jiri cross-legged seat on the padding. That fast, she thought, he reverts. Without thinking he walks and moves as if he were still one of them. Corrected herself: because he still is one of them.

  Eyes shut, he concentrated on something far removed from her and this room, as if listening for a sound that had heretofore eluded him. He scented again, that side-to-side tilt of the head so natural to je’jiri that it defined them. When he opened his eyes, he addressed her in a foreign tongue, easily, fluently, with no awareness that she might not understand him.

  “I can’t understand you, Kyosti,” she said quietly. “You have to speak Standard.”

  He gazed, unblinking, blank, at her. She waited, frozen, suddenly convinced that she had lost him again, and then something sifted through his consciousness and his expression changed.

  “Lily,” he said. It was like touching an object to be sure that it was no hallucination. He hesitated, tried the word again. “Lily.” His accent had changed. Now her name sounded, on his tongue, as if the syllables did not come naturally to his lips.

  “Yes,” she replied. The pain of watching him struggle was so acute that it seemed physical. “Kyosti, you’ve been ill.”

  “You’ve-been-ill,” he echoed, enunciating each word, mimicking her pronunciation. He shook his head, trying to free something. “Today is three Terce. Today should be three Terce. Today is Seven Sextant.” He hesitated again, then asked her a questi
on in the foreign language.

  She moved to sit down beside him. “Kyosti. I can’t understand that language. You have to speak to me in Standard.” Reaching out, she put her arms around him. He relaxed into her embrace, stilled, head resting between the curve of her shoulder and jaw.

  Jerked away abruptly. “Pinto!” he cried. He scrambled to stand so quickly that he stumbled, catching himself, and headed for the curtained arch, tense and oblivious. Lily pushed up and tackled him. He kept trying to go forward. She got a leg under him and flipped him onto his back, pinning him. Sat down on his abdomen, pressing his arms down on either side of him.

  “Kyosti! I didn’t sleep with him! I didn’t sleep with him. One kiss does not constitute—” She broke off, realizing that she was yelling, as if he was deaf. He stared at her. She could not tell if he comprehended her words or not. It suddenly made her furious, that she had searched this long, diverting so many resources, and that she had not simply gotten Kyosti back without any additional cost. It didn’t seem fair. “What kind of person do you think I am?” she demanded. “Do you think I would threaten him like that, by sleeping with him?”

  He was no longer tense under her. He looked, if anything, bewildered. It was not an expression that reassured her. “I’ve been ill,” he said quietly, as if the concept was new to him. “I’m missing days. Weeks. What happened to them?”

  His confusion was so unlike the Kyosti she knew that it hurt her, to see the uncertainty in his face, to hear the clipped, measured way he spoke Standard, as if it were a foreign tongue that he spoke only for her benefit. She did not know how to answer him for fear that what she said might shatter the tentative control he had found.

  “I think you ought to speak with Dr. Farhad,” she said.

  “Dr. Farhad,” he echoed. “I know her.” He sounded unsure.

  “Yes. You know her.”

  “Can she tell me what happened, to the weeks that are missing?”

  “Yes.” Lily hoped her voice sounded more confident than she felt. “We’ll get properly dressed and then we’ll go call her.”