“How do I love you?” she asked in Linyaari. “Let me count the trails! I love the very ions scattered behind your vessel. I love the fragrance of the grains on which you sup. I love the-”
“You do?” Aari asked, comprehending that what she said was complimentary if not particularly coherent, evidently not code, but her own pent-up feelings. Her tone of voice was rather declaiming and he could not read her at all. But then, there were times when that happened to him. “But-I have no horn.”
“I love the horn you do not have and the horn you used to have and the horn you will have again,” she continued, rather than answering him. “Come, my love, let us wander into a secluded bower and there take our ease, if you know what I mean?” Very un-Khornya-like, she waggled a silver-white eyebrow and winked at him. He wondered if perhaps Hafiz’s gardens had inadvertently been planted with a stand of what was called “loco weed” in the ancient Zane Grey novels of the wild western America.
Either that or it was some peculiar female mating ritual his mother had neglected to tell him about. Well, there was no time to consult her now. Khornya was wafting away and he could not let her wander around this huge alien compound in such a state. Someone might take unfair advantage of her. He rose to follow her.
She flitted ahead of him like one of the ectoplasmic entities of the wraith-haunted ruined -world of Waali Waali his parents had taken him to as a child. Back in the early days of terraforming technology, a powerful company had rapidly terraformed planets, raised great cities upon them, and settled whole transplanted civilizations upon their surfaces, where they thrived and bred, loved and warred for several eons. And then the terraforming destabilized, the ice caps melted, the seas froze, the mountains erupted, and the ground opened and buckled. The cities were ruined and the people were killed, but the heavy gravity kept them bound to the surface, which had an indelible memory of the former grandeur of its cities imprinted upon its ruins. A similar, more tangible memory of its inhabitants, now bodiless spirits seeking some solid vessel in -which to be reborn, flickered about the ruins in the same “way Khornya’s white form was now kindled, now quenched, as she wound her way through the ornamental back alleys of Hafiz’s compound.
He could only follow, the winds and rain of Dr. Hoa’s climactically generated monsoon soaking through his mane, his steps clicking quickly up cobbled steps leading through narrow passages and by doorways shrouded -with night-velveted rugs and blankets, their patterns picked out golden with the light of the holo-torches from the main thoroughfares. Suddenly he saw Khornya’s -white form disappear through a doorway and he found it, concealed by a waterfall of luminous beads, then he too quickly entered.
He threaded through -what seemed a maze, except that instead of blank walls, there were more often curtains, blankets, rugs, beads, and once, the side of a large gray beast with flapping ears, long curving fangs, a nose like a snake, legs like pillars, and small, disinterested eyes that regarded him mildly, then returned to contemplating the infinite. Aari passed the beast, but when he looked back, all he saw was blackness.
He began to -wonder and to fear. Perhaps he was still in the Khieevi torture machine, and his mind -was playing cruel tricks on him, all of this a mere illusion to build his hope, to give him a dream they could cruelly dash? But—well, no. He didn’t hurt. That was a sure sign there were no Khieevi. When he had been with the Khieevi the pain -was always -with him and now there -was nothing but his body, feeling whole and quite astonishingly alive, and the night, and Khornya flickering ahead of him, a beckoning candle.
Abruptly, her white form twinkled out ahead of him and then, much farther than he thought she could have gone in such a brief instant, he heard her call, “Aari?” in a rather plaintive and childish voice. He rushed forward.
“Khornya? “
“Aari, where are you?” she sounded not frightened but anxious.