A Thousand Words For Stranger (10th Anniversary Edition) Read online

  Sounds—babbling, incomprehensible sounds—battered me. I was moving, yet the sounds followed. Moving, no, I was running. I couldn’t stop running over the grassless plain, pursued by voices in overlapped confusion, forcing me to run more quickly than was possible, yet never quickly enough.

  At first, the dream plain stretched featureless and flat, but wherever I passed, misty forms heaved themselves out of the ground to pace beside me, to pluck at my hands and arms. I could feel my heart pounding, as my gasping breath tried to fill aching lungs. There was no sense to this bizarre race, which was perhaps the most terrifying part of all. I willed myself fiercely to wake up or at least to turn and see my pursuers. Instead, I stumbled in the dream world and went down beneath a moving, whispering mass of shapeless weight. A scream tore from my lips.

  And from someone else’s. I jerked up in my hammock, thoroughly awake and trembling, to stare at the man once more silhouetted in the doorway. A silence filled the space between us, making me confused by what I thought or dreamed I’d heard.

  “Finally,” Morgan said, his voice oddly ragged. “I thought you’d never wake up this time.” Dropping his hands from the sides of the doorframe, he leaned against one side of it instead, his face tucked in shadow. Gradually, his breathing grew quieter. “Are you all right?” he asked, more calmly.

  “Lights,” I ordered instead of answering, squinting as the little portlight anchored to the cubby’s ceiling obeyed. Its brightness washed most of the shadow from Morgan’s face, revealed his tired-looking eyes and tousled hair.

  “Lights out,” Morgan countermanded, fading back to a silhouette. “It’s late, and we go insystem today. Good night, Kissue. And no more dreams for a while. Please.”

  After he closed the door, I ordered on the light and searched my room for a com panel or anything that might be a listening device. Morgan’s ability to notice my nightmares was becoming more than an embarrassment.

  Morgan didn’t join me for breakfast, so I couldn’t ask him how, if he’d been asleep in his cabin at the aft end of the Fox, he’d known I was having a nightmare. What I remembered about dreams didn’t suggest anyone could share them.

  I tried to make sense of the tapes until my eyes were sore and my thumb red from flipping the view advance. Time for a break, I decided, refusing to admit to myself that the walls of my tiny room were closing in or that I was noticing a slightly metallic taste to the air. If I wanted to become crew, I’d have to learn to prefer this metal-shelled home to open sky.

  But there wasn’t any reason I shouldn’t take a walk. Once out of the galley, I found myself drawn to the aft section of the Fox. I stood outside the closed door to the control room.

  He was inside.

  I turned away, though a compulsion wheedled at me to lurk outside the door until Morgan came out.

  I discovered it was possible to walk through the Fox without retracing any steps, since there were two possible routes from the engine room to the control room, one that passed the galley and the other one that passed Morgan’s quarters. A short corridor connected the two about midway down the ship.

  By my second loop, I began making up emergencies in my head, losing all sense of time in fantasies. I would find a problem that threatened Morgan’s beloved ship and solve it in the knick of time. Or Morgan would rush to rescue me. Regardless, my fantasies always ended with his deep blue eyes smiling into mine. By the time I passed Morgan’s cabin for the fourth time, I dared imagine the touch of his hand.

  I wound up dumped from my daydream by an uncontrollable hammering of my heart. I stopped, leaning against the bulkhead, wondering how much more of this insanity I could take without humiliating myself completely.

  Without consciously making a decision or plan, I found myself turning around in the curving corridor, walking slowly back toward Morgan’s cabin.

  A few more steps, then I stopped. It would be locked, I reassured myself, looking at the unmarked door. My hand trembled slightly as I touched the access pad.

  It opened and my heart took up its pounding again, driven by a strangely delicious fear. Still, I hesitated. Why was I here? Surely I’d stolen all I could reasonably hide, I thought cynically, daring my compulsion to make sense. I needn’t have bothered. My feet decided to move of their own accord. I found it simpler to agree than to argue.

  Lights came on automatically, but something was wrong. I panicked, thinking Morgan had somehow already found me out. Then, as my eyes sorted the odd shadows into hues and colors, I gasped, stepping into the room, my fear and doubt forgotten.

  There was barely room to turn, yet turn around and around I did. The small cabin contained the essentials: a pull-out bed, a full-sized fresher stall, desk, storage cupboards. But I noticed these details later.

  Every available surface glowed with the colors of exquisitely detailed plant life. Hints of eyes and curious noses peered from beneath multihued leaves at cupboard corners and wall joints. My color-starved eyes could scarcely absorb it all. Painting this must have taken years.

  A movement, real—not captured in paint—teased the corner of my eye and I stopped, examining myself critically in the mirrored tile of the fresher. A stranger stared back: not tall, but slim; pale skin beginning to darken in the ship’s light—except for an angry red scoring on one cheek; wispy, light-brown hair tending to slide over gray, wide-set eyes. The eyes were old, perplexed. The entire image was disjointed, awkward, as if pieces of different people were grafted together.

  I turned away from my colorless self. Against my will, I tried the handle of the first set of cupboards, my fingers grasping smooth metal overlaid by a drift of small violet flowers. Fragrance from petals in a bowl fooled the senses, added to my guilt.

  “What are you doing?” a very cold voice said from behind me. I started violently, then drew a quick steadying breath before I turned to face him.

  “I—” I began to speak, then closed my mouth. What could I say? And Morgan’s face was hardly encouraging—thin, white lines ran from his nose to the corners of his grim-set lips. “I meant no harm,” I finished rather weakly. I hadn’t known eyes could be so hard.

  “That remains to be proved,” Morgan snapped.

  I spread my hands helplessly and let them fall. His nearness overwhelmed me. I wondered if the ship’s gravity had somehow shifted. “I wanted to see where you lived.”

  Morgan drew a slow breath, then perched on one end of his desk, carefully moving the bowl of petals out of his way, that motion sending a delicate freshness of scent betweenus. His face was only slightly less angry. “Look, chit. It’s time we had a talk about something.”

  “I don’t like being called that,” I muttered, feeling blood returning to my cheeks.

  “That’s because you don’t understand it,” Morgan said disconcertingly. I risked looking up at him. Most of his anger must have faded; he seemed more thoughtful than upset. “Chit is a spacer term—just means youngest on a ship.” A pause. “But you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

  I shifted my weight and glanced longingly at the door. When I remained silent, Morgan’s face became impossible to read and his voice was deceptively feather-soft. “Where did you get the spacer gear on Auord?”

  “It was mine,” I said in a small voice.

  “No. It wasn’t. And I think you owe me the truth, Kissue,” Morgan countered, with a wave to his violated quarters, ablaze with dreams of a planet.

  I shrugged. “I found the coveralls the morning I met you.” It seemed another lifetime. “They were better than what I was wearing.”

  “Why?”

  “My clothes were wet from the rain,” I looked at him steadily, wondering, then added: “and I had to get to a starship. I thought dressing like a spacer would help.”

  Morgan’s mouth thinned. “And how did you figure that?”

  “You wouldn’t have helped me otherwise.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  I met his eyes, saw something in them that looked lik
e disappointment. “No,” I admitted. “You’ve been kind, Captain Morgan. I—” I paused, then went on: “I don’t think many people would have helped someone who snuck up on them in the dark. I wish I could repay you.”

  “I’ll send you a bill,” Morgan replied rather uneasily. “That’s enough by trader standards.”

  “Not by mine.” I took a deep breath, but before I could continue, compulsions swelled up and burst. My hand reached itself toward him. “I offer you Choice, Captain Morgan,” I heard myself say. “I offer myself.”

  My skin tingled, as if the air was charged with static. The thing in my mind, having done its worst, vanished, leaving my mind a whirl of remembered fantasies and unknown hopes, colored as flamboyantly as the walls of Morgan’s cabin.

  And now he knew.

  Mortified, I watched as Morgan shut his eyes briefly, as though collecting his wits. He sighed, then opened his eyes again. “I appreciate your gratitude, Kissue,” he said, his tone and expression very serious. “And it’s very natural for a younger person, like yourself, to develop— feelings—for an older person, like me, who helps a person. A younger person.”

  This sounded a bit confusing, but I grasped his meaning. He understood! Instantly, my embarrassment faded. Morgan didn’t sound upset. Perhaps this hunger was something I should feel; perhaps he felt it too. I slid my foot forward, leaning a bit closer to him. Morgan shifted back instantly. I froze, suddenly and dreadfully unsure.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, trying to sound confident. My mouth was dry; perversely, my palms were wet and I wiped them surreptitiously against my coveralls.

  “I can’t be what you want, Kissue,” Morgan said quietly.

  What did I want him to be? I studied Morgan’s face, dwelling on the curve of his mouth, the place where his throat pulsed with each breath. I imagined how his cheek might feel against mine, and my breath caught. I couldn’t help moving forward another step. The smell of him mingled with the fragrance of the petals in the dish.

  Morgan’s face turned dusky red under its tan. He twisted and stood to put the small table between us. “Kissue, listen to me. You’re still a child—”

  “I’m no child.”

  “Well, you’re no woman yet either,” Morgan countered.

  Needs beat through me, wantings, longings so intense I could barely think. I stretched out my right hand, watching it tremble. “Morgan, I need—”

  “What?” he asked gently, his blue eyes empty of anythingwarmer than sympathy, the table still carefully between us. “Do you even know?”

  I stared at him. A throbbing pain began in my forehead, intensifying until it was like a drill centered above my left eye. “Yes,” I heard myself say. “I need to offer you Choice, Captain Morgan.”

  “That’s more than anyone’s given you, isn’t it?”

  His words meant more than he realized. And did more. Emotions pounded through me, feelings I couldn’t name rushed back and forth. Overwhelmed, the compulsions fragmented, their support somehow lost. As they withered and collapsed, they took secrets I’d barely began to sense along with them.

  “I’ve never been offered Choice,” I answered at last, blood gone cold. “It wasn’t possible for me.”

  “And you believed that?” Morgan’s eyes darkened. “That’s wrong, Kissue. People must make their own choices, their own decisions. Their own mistakes, if necessary. That’s what freedom is. Hell, that’s why I’m out here, instead of sitting behind some insystem desk.”

  “You make your own choices, Captain?” I sank down in his chair, keeping my eyes on his face. “How?”

  After looking at me suspiciously, Morgan sat down on the edge of his desk. “How do I choose? Depends. I learn all I can about a situation. Then I think about my own feelings—at least if there’s time to think—”

  “You think it’s wrong for me to offer you Choice?”

  He hesitated, then said softly: “If I understand what you mean, and I believe I do, it’s not wrong for you to want someone to care for you. I’m flattered you want me as that person. But you can’t force such a choice on me or anyone. And I don’t think you’ve given yourself time to think about this.”

  “All I can think about is you!” I insisted, frustrated and confused. “I need you—”

  “No, you don’t. Listen to me, Kissue,” Morgan’s voice grew firm. “Your feelings for me are not real.”

  How did he know that? I closed my mouth over what I’d planned to say.

  Morgan raised one eyebrow and continued: “Do you know me?”

  “Know you?”

  “What’s my favorite drink?” he demanded, ticking each rapid question off on the fingers of one hand. “What kind of life have I had? What scares me? What do I dream about?”

  I tilted my head and considered him, suspecting some trick. “I need to know these things about you? Before I can offer you—me?”

  Morgan smiled approvingly. “And much more. And I need to know you. People don’t make decisions about each other, how they feel, without learning about each other.”

  “So you know these women on Auord,” I said, feeling my face grow hot again.

  Losing his smile, Morgan shook his head. “No. Of course not. I have physical needs like anyone else, Kissue. I don’t know how to explain—” he paused, then said: “C-cubes are great when you have to eat in a hurry, but nobody would live on them unless they were starving.”

  “C-cubes?” I repeated, startled more than helped by his analogy.

  “Forget the cubes,” Morgan said, shaking his head with mild exasperation. “What I’m trying to say is that what sends me to a portside brothel is not what you are feeling for me.”

  I frowned. “I don’t see any difference.”

  This time, it was Morgan who leaned closer, and I who pulled away. “Trust me,” he said, sitting straight and spreading out his hands. “You aren’t looking for a partner for sex, Kissue. You’re looking for someone to be attached to emotionally, someone who cares for you.” Morgan looked somber, his eyes shadowed as if by a memory. “That’s love, Kissue, and it’s not something you can just ask for from another person.”

  Love? The word resonated with meanings, most of them strange, none describing the drive I’d felt, the emptiness still inside me. I looked down, staring at the petals in the bowl in an effort to collect myself.

  It didn’t matter why or how, I thought. I had exposed my innermost self to the only person whose opinion mattered to me. And he showed me the truth. I was a shallow, selfish thing. He was right to reject me.

  “Kissue?”

  I couldn’t look up. My hand half-traced a gesture between us in the air before I stopped it, confused to find my fingers moving on their own, clenching them into a tight fist. “That’s not my name,” I heard myself say.

  “Oh,” Morgan didn’t sound surprised. I peered up at him through my hair. “What should I call you then?” he asked with a slow smile.

  My name. I’d left it behind in the dark, lost it that night—or had it been stolen? Shivering, I fought the panic that rose with any attempt to remember more. Dangerous. Dangerous. “Kissue will do,” I said numbly, standing up and moving to the door.

  Morgan moved quickly to block my way. “Wait.”

  There was a green pen and four small tools sticking up in his chest pocket. “My name is Kissue,” I told his pocket firmly.

  “You said it wasn’t.”

  “Let me leave,” I ordered.

  His hands went to my shoulders, resting there like weights. “I thought you wanted to stay,” he said very gently.

  I dragged my eyes from the pocket to Morgan’s face. Moments ago, I’d fantasized about standing like this, gazing up into his vibrant blue eyes. But my fantasy hadn’t included this horrid vulnerability, this confusion.

  My face must have shown both quite clearly. Morgan carefully lifted his hands away and moved back. “Tell me your name,” he said quietly but firmly, still patently intending to guard the doorway.


  “I don’t know it.” I sank back down in the chair, its arms coated with a pattern of winter ice. “I don’t know who I am. Or what.” I went on, words now flooding out of me as if a dam had burst. “I might even be a spacer. Nothing’s as it should be, I—” I waved my hands downward. “I’m not as I should be.” Rubbing my forehead helped numb the throbbing there, a pain that intensified the harder I tried to think.

  I continued: “All I know of myself begins in darkness—a storm, the rain. The night we met on Auord, to be precise, Captain. I begin then.”

  “What can you remember?” a gentle prodding, no more. “Can you tell me what happened that night?”

  “Sounds—I can’t identify most—angry sounds, an explosion. Danger. So wet and cold—” I squeezed my eyes shut, the better to isolate every random recollection. “Running. I knew I had to run, to get away, to find my ship. Someone, someone stayed behind. I don’t know if it was to give me time to escape, or if he was the one I ran from,” I sighed, frustrated.

  “Escape—from what danger?” I realized I’d heard the question more than once, and opened my eyes to look for Morgan. He’d left the doorway and was again perched on the table.

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. “Sometimes I remember fragments of a face; mostly I remember some terrible, formless danger, then running, walking . . . rain.” I tilted my head, about to tell him about the compulsions that had kept me on my feet past endurance. The words were pulled away from me before I could form them.

  “I knew I wasn’t safe on Auord,” I said instead. “I found these clothes and, when it seemed you could lead me to a ship, I followed you.”

  “Out of all the ship owners carousing in Port City that night, you followed me,” he echoed, but as if to himself. There was an odd bitterness in the set of his mouth. An old memory, I decided, inclined to be envious. Morgan said more briskly, “What can you remember about your belongings?”