The slick black band on his right arm itched as sweat pooled beneath it. He had to make himself leave it alone, stand silent as a Jao, as though he weren’t sweltering in the goddamned August heat.
Chapter 17
Despite Banle’s assertion that Oppuk couldn’t even wait a minute for Caitlin to brush her hair, the two of them stood out in the hall for three hours before she was admitted into an audience she had not sought. Jao rarely misjudged temporal flow to that degree, and Caitlin suspected Banle had known they would not be needed until then. It was just one more not-so-subtle display of power on the Jao governor’s part.
It was petty, too, in that respect quite atypical for Jao. Caitlin would give Terra’s rulers that much: as a rule, they were less prone than humans to the bureaucratic mindset that enjoyed rubbing inferior status into subordinates through trivial measures like keeping someone waiting. Oppuk, unfortunately, seemed to combine the worst traits of both species.
At length, a human servant emerged through the doorfield’s blue shimmer, eyes downcast, and indicated with a small motion of his hand that they should go in now. Relieved to finally be doing something, Caitlin stepped forward. But even before she touched the field, she could tell it was still set at a fairly high frequency, almost too solid to pass through. She laid her palms against its scintillating surface and felt the resonance in her bones.
“Go!” Banle said, hanging back, determined to have the place of honor this go-round.
“Just a minute,” Caitlin said, then turned to the servant, who was waiting, silent as a shadow, by the wall. There was a bruise on the man’s face, she suddenly realized. “Can you turn it down—”
Banle seized Caitlin’s shirt at the nape of her neck and shoved her through. It was like being forced through concrete that had almost solidified. Caitlin struggled to breathe, caught for a second in the middle, then staggered on through as Banle’s superior strength prevailed. They both emerged into a small room, comfortably dim and cool. Evidently, she thought, trying to control her ragged breathing, Oppuk wasn’t showing off his ability to tolerate sun today for the locals as he had been yesterday at the reception.
The humid air was thick with a bitter smell akin to the stench of rotting seaweed, causing her eyes to burn. She eased out of Banle’s fingers and took up a strictly neutral stance, which she hoped would not give Oppuk the opportunity to find offense. He was very fond of being offended, was Oppuk krinnu ava Narvo.
She’d had an older brother once, lanky, flaxen-haired Brent, who had told her jokes and taken her riding on his horse, but no more. Four years after the Occupation began, Narvo had requisitioned him from her father to be trained as a translator, then hadn’t approved of his accent, after having him instructed in Jao. “Simply barbarous,” the Governor had been reported to say, before swinging a massive fist and crushing her brother’s cervical vertebrae. She’d been six that year, but she still remembered the terrible emptiness of her house, along with her parents’ grief. The body was never returned. Governor Oppuk had disposed of it for them, as a “courtesy.”
The big Jao was seated before another one of their pools, watching the water trickle in from an overflow channel. He was quite naked, though she knew no Jao ever took notice of such things.
“They are all connected,” he said in the complex tones of his own language.
She composed her limbs into an uncomplicated neutral stance, one just short of outright indifference, and prepared to wait. Either Oppuk would make sense, or he would not, but trying to hurry him would not be wise.
“The pools,” he said finally. “I thought it would be amusing, to create an entire indoor waterway. We do not have anything that ambitious even in the biggest kochan-house back on Pratus.”
She abandoned neutrality for polite-interest, but dared nothing stronger. “The pools run from room to room throughout the palace?”
He rose and prowled the length of the artificial stream, then stared at the wall through which it disappeared. “If you threw a dead body in at the beginning,” he said, “it would float unencumbered to the opposite end, before meeting the pumps and filters. I had it designed that way, less trouble for the servants.”