The Course of Empire(87)

Her cheeks heated. "Might I ask what this is all about, Governor?"



"No." His red-gold face was quite bland. "If I ask you to show off your movement skills, then you will do so."



Remember Brent, she told herself. Then, as now, the Governor didn't need a good reason for the things he did. The Jao had absolute power here and Oppuk was the embodiment of that power. If he said "move," then she would indeed move and hope it was good enough.



She performed bemused-reverence, as he had demanded, then benign-indifference, awed-respect, eagerness-to-be-instructed, changing every thirty seconds, then every twenty, every ten, her heart hammering, her body drenched in perspiration. As soon as she settled into one posture, she was considering the next, how best to make a graceful transition, how to economize, so that the curved fingers of one posture could move but slightly into the cupped hands of the next. Change and change and change. She was no longer thinking, just becoming, over and over again. For poor lost Brent, she thought. For her family. For all of Earth. She would be good enough. She would not fail—



"Enough!"



Startled, she looked up and met Oppuk's glittering green-black eyes.



"Who instructed you?"



"No one—formally," she said, out of breath, muscles jumping from the strain. "I watched Banle and the other Jao who came and went in our household."



"You do mirror the Narvo style," the Governor said, "though crudely." He stared over her head, seeming to see something that wasn't there. "It will not do. If you must move like a Narvo, then you will learn properly and do us credit."



She waited, not knowing what was required of her.



"From now on, you are attached to my household. I will acquire a movement master for your instruction. There must be one or two on this benighted planet." He glared at her. "You will learn and learn well, so that in the end you may be of the most use."



"In the end?" she echoed hopelessly, knowing a Jao would never deign to explain himself.



"I have plans," Oppuk said. "You will learn how you fit into them when the flow is right for you to be of use. Until then—" He glared at her, fierce-warning written into every line of his massive frame. "You will apply yourself diligently!"



Or it would be Brent all over again. She understood perfectly. She would refine her skills until she could serve the Governor's plans.



Either that, or she would die.

* * *



But for the color of the sky, blue instead of ice-green, and the brightness of the sun, Aille might have thought himself back on Marit An. The briny scent of the sea here was very close to that of his homeworld, the sound of waves breaking on the rocks so reminiscent of those below his natal compound, he could close his eyes and see every detail again in his mind.



If he had been Governor, this was where he would have made his palace, not on that dusty, landlocked patch of ground in the center of the continent. Why had Oppuk felt it necessary to deny himself the sensual pleasures of such a coastline?



Yaut wandered up beside him, then gazed out over the restless white-topped sea. "Enticing," was all he said, but the twitch of his ears, the dance of his whiskers expressed longing much more clearly than mere words.



"Indeed," Aille said. His own body was eager to experience that wild surf, but he didn't delude himself that Oppuk had brought them all this way merely to enjoy themselves. Though this trip was supposedly in his honor, they had come to prove something—to him, perhaps, to the rest of the Jao stationed on Terra, highly likely, and to the indigenous population, most certainly.



The Governor was under great stress and his increasingly unsane reactions made the stress worse. It was now obvious that Oppuk krinnu ava Narvo felt trapped, here on Terra. And well he might, Aille thought, at this stage of life when he might reasonably have expected to be called home. For a scion of his age and status to remain unmated, far from his kochan's marriage-groups—such would be hurtful to any, much less one who had once been the namth camiti of great Narvo.



The vessel that would take them out on the whale hunt would not be here until next-light, Aille had already been told by a member of Oppuk's service. With experienced eyes, he examined the horizon now, seeing dark-blue clouds lying low and faraway, then gauging the height of the waves assaulting the jagged black rocks below. His nose wrinkled, sampling the wind. "Storm," he said to Yaut. "We may not be going out tomorrow, even if the vessel does arrive."



"Indeed," Yaut said, raising his own nose into the wind-borne spray. "It would be wise, however, to allow some other voice to convey that probability. 'Killing the messenger' is an unsanity which seeps down from above."