Chapter 15
Her father would be horrified. That thought kept rattling around inside Caitlin’s head. Benjamin Wilson Stockwell would hear of this travesty, even before she could tell him herself. Although he would disapprove, he would be powerless to prevent it. And all the while, he and everyone else would know she had opened her big fat mouth at a delicate moment and made things worse. Caitlin was so tense—anger and frustration that had been building for so many years—that she’d been taken completely off-balance and blundered badly.
If she’d just kept quiet, Oppuk perhaps would not have been interested in such a purely human pursuit or forgotten about the whole affair before it could be organized, but now—
She stared dumbly at the Governor’s twitching nose until Kralik took her arm and tactfully guided her away. “A whale hunt!” he said, grimacing. “I don’t think there’s been one for years.”
She felt cold, even though the room was stifling.
“Be practical, Caitlin,” he said in a low voice. “It’s no worse than most of what goes on under Jao rule, and not nearly as irreversible as when the mountain climbers provoked them into plastering Everest. It’s only one whale. The ecology will survive that.”
She nodded, managing to keep walking until they reached a bench next to a rushing artificial waterfall that fed into the main pool. Kralik settled her where she was bathed in the music of water flowing over rock. Kinsey joined them there. After Caitlin introduced him to Kralik, the professor disappeared back into the murmuring crowd in search of “punch,” though she well knew he would find no such thing at a Jao function.
“Tell me of these ‘whales,’ ” a deep Jao voice said.
She glanced up from clenched hands into the distinctive vai camiti of the guest of honor. “I—” Her voice failed her.
“That is a posture of distress, is it not?” Aille indicated her hands. “I have sometimes noted it among those in my service, as well as a number of the human workers engaged in the refit operation. Why does this ‘whale hunt’ distress you?”
Caitlin took a deep breath. “It does not matter,” she said shakily. “The Governor requires a whale hunt, so one will take place.”
He was big and broad, the nap on his skin a rich gold and still dark with damp from his swim. Inside the broad stripe on his face, his eyes crawled with iridescent green like lightning playing across some distant alien sky. Even to human eyes, he was a handsome figure.
Two members of his personal service stood before him, as was proper. One was Jao, short but powerful-looking. The other, strangely enough, was human. Like Caitlin herself, he was blond, but his hair was straw-colored rather than dark-gold. And though his body was whip-thin, he looked very fit. She tried to catch the man’s eye, but he quite pointedly would not look at her.
“Tell me of your Pluthrak homeworld,” she said, in an effort to change the subject. “I don’t recall a member of your kochan being assigned to Earth before.”
“There is no one homeworld for us. Pluthrak is spread across twenty-nine planets,” Aille said. The lines of his body flowed from polite-inquisition into what she thought was wistful-remembrance, without the slightest awkwardness or any indication of conscious attention. “The kochan-house that spawned my birth-group was located on Marit An, a green and gold world whose oceans possess almost the same fragrance as this room.”
Personally, she thought the room reeked of decaying seaweed and fermented fish, but kept the observation to herself. “Twenty-nine worlds,” she said. “Isn’t that a lot, even for a great kochan?”
“It must seem so to a species that has never possessed more than this one world,” he said, his ears dancing through a multitude of expressions too rapidly for her to decipher any of them, “but we do not maintain a high population on any one world, which would make it an attractive target for the Ekhat. Jao breed for ability rather than numbers, in any event.”
Unlike humans, Caitlin thought—who according to Jao opinion, bred like rabbits, yielding to sentiment and lust where practicality should have been employed.