Ibyabek Page 5

  “I like some things about it,” Sarham said eventually. “I like the - but there’s - I think I’m having a better time than Mom.”

  “You keep stopping in the middle of talking,” Kyeo said, which was unspeakably rude, but if Sarham was going to leave anyway -

  “Yeah. I know.” Kyeo hadn’t been expecting Sarham to acknowledge it. Not only did he do that, he went on: “I got a lot of instructions about how to be polite here, and it’s often really hard to think of anything polite to say. Especially since I don’t like lying.”

  “You don’t like lying?” Kyeo wasn’t sure he’d heard right. It was like someone asserting they didn’t like the sound of their own heartbeat.

  “Well, I usually don’t have to do it!” said Sarham, pressing his hands against the sides of his head. “I’ve been on eight planets and twenty continents and this is the first one where I have to lie all the time so I don’t offend anyone! I’m not even actually supposed to tell you I’ve been that many places!”

  “You’re not going to offend me,” said Kyeo, and he didn’t even know if that was a lie, but he was suddenly, desperately, searingly curious to know what had been going through Sarham’s mind in all those pauses, what Sarham wasn’t saying in all those silences.

  “Even if I’m not you’re probably reporting on me to your father or somebody on anything I say,” Sarham said, stopping in the middle of the field.

  “No I’m not,” replied Kyeo automatically, and Sarham answered him with a look so withering that Kyeo suddenly felt like no one had ever actually looked at him, ever before in his life, and this first occasion of being looked at was like plummeting off a cliff, surrounded only by air on all sides, nothing solid but himself and himself worryingly liquefied by Sarham’s eyes.

  Sarham’s expression softened at something he saw in Kyeo’s face. Kyeo swallowed what might have been an embarrassing gurgle.

  With a sigh, Sarham reached out and - brushed his thumb over Kyeo’s cheekbone. Kyeo experienced a sudden sympathy for anyone who didn’t like the sound of their heartbeat. His was oppressively loud at the moment. “Wh-” he said.

  “You had a bug on your face,” said Sarham, coloring slightly.

  “Oh,” said Kyeo stupidly.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Sarham.

  “Having a bug on my -”

  “You didn’t have a bug on your face. Sorry. Getting too used to lying.”

  “- not having a bug on -”

  “It’s not your fault that you’re reporting to your father or that you’re lying about it,” said Sarham. “It’s not your fault that I don’t like it here. I like you, it’s just - it isn’t your fault.”

  Kyeo was no longer entirely clear on what this conversation was about. He put his hand on his cheek where Sarham had touched it as though to feel for a bug bite.

  “Sorry,” Sarham said again. “I shouldn’t have.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Kyeo.

  “I’d still appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to your father. - I mean, if that won’t get you in trouble. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “I can tell him I had a bug on my face. If he was looking out the window with binoculars, which he wasn’t,” said Kyeo rashly.

  Sarham glanced back at the village. He tromped out farther across the field, and Kyeo followed him.

  They walked for another ten minutes in silence.

  When they’d gotten to an area with more trees, Kyeo spoke up. “Why doesn’t your mother like it here?”

  “She… well, she’s not getting quite the same kind of hospitality I am, right, because she’s a woman,” said Sarham slowly. He found a fallen log and sat on it.

  “…what, does she want to be a man?” Kyeo sat beside him after far too long dithering about how much space to leave between them.

  “No. Uh, she wants - I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “Is this about you thinking I’ll tell my father?”

  “Yes. But I also don’t know how to explain it. Things are so different off Ibyabek in so many ways that it’d be hard to know where to start even if I could just trust you and not worry about it.”

  Kyeo wanted to tell Sarham he could trust him. But if he just said that Sarham would probably look at him again. And he couldn’t say it would never get back to Suor, that it was safe, that it would never be a bad idea to tell Kyeo everything that went on in his head in all his quiet moments. It would be a lie. And Sarham would know better, and probably he wouldn’t pretend it was true even if Kyeo really really wanted him to.

  “Sorry,” said Sarham, when it had been too long with neither of them talking.

  “It’s -” What had Sarham said before. It had been a nice thing to say, like he might have looked at Kyeo but that didn’t have to mean everything was ruined forever. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Thanks,” said Sarham.

  They sat, watching the trees move in the wind, Kyeo wasn’t sure how long. He tried to think of something to say that would be light and easy to talk about. His father was good at that when he was at work. His father would just chain from topic to topic, one minute finding metaphors in flower arrangements and in another meditating on the implications of the exact word choice in a philosophical maxim and the next learning his conversational partner’s entire family tree even though none of those people would ever matter to him at all, filling the air, developing rapport, never offending and never giving away too much and never getting looked at.

  “Do you mind if I sing?” Kyeo asked finally.

  “You sing?” asked Sarham, sounding oddly delighted. “Go ahead - please -”

  Kyeo was now somewhat concerned that Sarham was going to listen the same way he looked, but he’d gone and suggested it, so he followed through. The melody line to Anthem of the Bright Way was simple but had room for flourishes, if you were singing alone and wouldn’t disrupt the group, so he added little figures in the middles of lines, showing off.

  When he came to the end of the last verse Sarham was smiling at him. Kyeo smiled back, a reflex that belied how he felt about the matter - or maybe it didn’t belie it, Kyeo didn’t know because he couldn’t identify the feeling. The nice thing about not caring much about lying was not needing to aggressively identify the truth. “You like it?” he asked, sounding too quiet, but there weren’t many other sounds out in the woods, probably Sarham could hear him.

  “If I sort of - pretend I don’t speak Ibyabekan and let the lyrics just be sounds - I love it,” says Sarham.

  “What’s wr- should I not ask what’s wrong with the lyrics -”

  “You shouldn’t ask what’s wrong with the lyrics. Sorry,” said Sarham. “Would you sing another one?”

  Kyeo sang another one, and another one, and another, and he was running out of songs he knew all the words to but Sarham was still smiling at him. Kyeo broke out a song he’d made up himself when he was thirteen, stumbled through it quickly, hoped Sarham wasn’t trying to interpret the lyrics to discover that they were about getting a plum for his birthday. It was a stupid thing to write a song about, it had just been a very good plum. Then he remembered how to begin Stars of Ibyabek and sang that, and then he noticed that Sarham had scooted closer along the log. Their hands were almost touching.

  Kyeo observed that, and then kept observing it, and then stared some more, as though written explanations would appear across their knuckles any moment, or -

  “Sorry,” said Sarham, standing up suddenly.

  “- what for -” said Kyeo, lost.

  “You’re - I shouldn’t - you didn’t exactly decide to be here, right, you have an assignment, and also I think here it might actually be - never mind the details, just, I’m sorry, I’ll get ahold of myself.”

  “I like this assignment,” said Kyeo defensively.

  “That’s -” Sarham struggled with something privately for a moment; Kyeo watched it happen on his face, but like the lyrics of the anthem it didn’t resolve into meaning. “I’m glad,” he said finally. “That you don’t mind hanging out with me.”

  “I like you,” Kyeo told him.

  “I’m glad,” Sarham murmured.

  “It’s not just that I’m comparing to last summer making bricks -”

  “Making bricks?”

  “- well, someone has to, that’s what I did last school break.”

  It occurred belatedly to Kyeo that this was not one of the things he was supposed to say, it didn’t have the right tone to it - even if he’d never been given a list of things he was forbidden to mention, he usually had a sense for it, and the sense had failed him. He wouldn’t have forgotten about that if Sarham had just asked him what he’d been doing last summer. If Sarham had asked him what he’d been doing last summer, he would have said he hung out with his friends and went to the movies a lot and threw a holiday party. But scrambling to clarify that Sarham had more than lackluster competition in his favor had silenced the alarm that told him what things were and were not showing off Ibyabek to best advantage.

  Sarham was looking at him again, with a sort of urgent sadness, and Kyeo’s gaze flinched down at his own knees, not sure how to bear it.

  It was growing dark. “We might trip if we wait too much longer to walk back,” Sarham said, looking up through the leaves of the trees.

  “All right,” said Kyeo.

  They stood up and started toward the village, both watching their feet as though very concerned about stepping in burrows or stumbling over stones. “What’s making bricks like?” asked Sarham softly.

  “It’s fine, and now whenever I see a brick building I wonder if I helped. You get clay all over yourself though,” said Kyeo. And he’d seen someone break a toe dropping a brick on it, but he was paying attention to what came o
ut of his mouth, now, so he didn’t say that.

  “Huh,” breathed Sarham.

  They entered the guest house, wiped their feet at the door. Suor glanced at them, then over the next minute steered the conversation among the adults from something about native Ibyabekan birds to the late hour, and motioned for Kyeo to come with him, when they’d been excused for the evening. Suor put his hand on Kyeo’s shoulder to steer him out.

  * * *

  In the car, there was silence. Kyeo couldn’t think of anything to say, and Suor apparently didn’t care to - Kyeo wouldn’t believe that he couldn’t; if nothing else he could have summarized whatever Kyeo had missed about native birds.

  The chauffeur let them out at the Sebe Luk home. When Kyeo tried the lightswitch on the way in it didn’t work; Suor fetched a candle. “Son,” he said, as Kyeo was about to slip up the stairs rather than sit up by candlelight, “stay a minute.”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “On philosophically troubled planets,” Suor said after a hesitation, “there’s a common malady, one you probably haven’t heard of - Ibyabekan doctors know how to manage it and it so seldom appears when children are raised right. But your new pairmate hasn’t had those advantages.”

  “- I haven’t noticed him being sickly,” said Kyeo. Slender, but just like he didn’t do physical work much, not like he was wasting away. Dark, a little, but not so much so that Kyeo would have completely missed it if he were flushed with fever or wan with fatigue.

  “Not physically. It’s a philosophical issue, not a physical one,” said his father. “Of course, I’m not a doctor myself. I may be mistaking something else for the condition. But if I’m not, then it represents a unique opportunity for you.”

  “If Sarham is sick, shouldn’t we take him to a hospital?”

  “His parents wouldn’t allow it,” said Suor. “They’re suspicious of anything they haven’t paid for, foreigners, they’d make an incident of it. It’s not likely to kill him, you needn’t be too worried.”

  “Father, what do you think he has?”

  “I suspect,” replied Suor, “that he’s interested in -” he waved a hand with a vague gesture Kyeo had never seen him make, “the simulation of a sort of mock marital relationship with boys, insofar as that’s possible, and he’s gotten confused by the pairmate arrangement. It’ll rattle his judgment if you encourage that a bit, and he may tell you things as though in confidence.”

  Kyeo took an embarrassingly long time to decipher what that meant. “En…courage… him?” he asked haltlingly. Encourage him how - encourage him to do what, and how much of it, and -

  “I didn’t promise you an easy assignment,” said Suor sharply. “Intelligence from United Kular could be essential to the continued survival of Ibyabek. Not everything done to protect our home planet is comfortable, you may as well learn that now and not in military training later on.”

  “I - I’m sorry, Father, I didn’t mean to complain,” said Kyeo, abashed, cheeks burning, “I just -” He did not want, he realized, to ask his father in exactly what way he was meant to encourage Sarham to conduct a mock marital relationship. “I think I follow you,” he lied, he’d figure it out later, “is there anything specific that Ibyabek hopes to learn -”

  “Outer Sohaibekan monitoring of their trojan asteroids,” replied Suor. “What equipment and personnel they have on that. Whether United Kular is supplying or could be persuaded to supply Outer Sohaibek with weapons and materiel, ships and troops, or any other aid in the event of a shooting war. Developments in technology as relevant to the balance of power in our system. United Kular’s alliance status with Outer Sohaibek, Xeren, Olach, anyone else he knows about. Any movements at the base on Riakebek - that’s their big moon, not the little one.”

  Kyeo nodded at this list, nod nod nod over and over again like acknowledging an item would make it be the last one, but Suor went on; there was a great deal, it turned out, that Ibyabek wanted to know.

  “And son,” Suor said, finally, “this philosophical problem the Peng boy has. It may be catching. Keep an eye on yourself, but you can always go see a doctor about it later. As I said it isn’t life-threatening.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Kyeo.

  “That’s all. Good night,” Suor told him, and Kyeo fled up the stairs.

  Later, he lay awake in bed, turning over this terrifying conversation in his mind. Kyeo determined that it was apparently within his power to generate ideas of how to encourage Sarham. Once he’d managed to fall asleep, his brain continued to produce suggestions, each less plausible than the last, and when he woke up he was glad the water in the shower ran cold.

  * * *

  Kyeo and Sarham were sitting in the woods again. Kyeo had suggested it because he’d had, the previous night, a mortifying dream in which he’d fumbled an attempt at encouragement and a Morale Corps shopgirl had come over to show him how it was done. Mercifully, he’d forgotten the rest of the dream, but he was pretty sure none of it had taken place in the woods.

  “How old is the terraforming around here?” Sarham asked, touching the bark of one of the larger trees.

  “This part of the planet? A hundred years,” said Kyeo. It was probably more than eighty, anyway. “There are younger parts where you wouldn’t find trees this big but Bright City’s the oldest settlement.”

  “Someday I want to go to Earth,” said Sarham. “There’s stuff that’s thousands of years old there. Trees. Buildings.”

  None of Kyeo’s ideas had begun with segueing from a conversation about how old things were on Earth of all places. In retrospect, he was probably going to have to work with something more like this than like finding a pond to fall in and having Sarham rescue him and finding it necessary afterwards to get out of their wet clothes “to dry off”.

  “You seem preoccupied,” Sarham said, which was worse.

  “I heard,” said Kyeo, “that -” He could not finish this sentence with “that you have a philosophical problem”. “That on Kular sometimes -” He’d meant to go on “boys kiss each other” but his father had not exactly said that, and lying about what he’d heard was fine but having some totally laughable misconception about what philosophically troubled boys got up to was not. Perhaps he had invented that in his own philosophically troubled brain and really boys on United Kular just did - he had no idea.

  “Lots of things happen on Kular sometimes.” Sarham tilted his head. Kyeo was staring at his mouth. Kyeo was trying to make up an alternative hearsay. On Kular they drink raindrops when their plumbing breaks rather than have it fixed out of public money. On Kular they translate all their imported movies so that there’s Kularan propaganda added in. On Kular…

  “Never mind,” said Kyeo.

  “On Kular,” Sarham said after a pause, “we can get on the skylace and see all of it, whenever we want.”

  “I’ve seen the skylace,” said Kyeo. They covered computer and skylace use in school. Kyeo had learned to get reading and listening material in Kularan Creole for his language class off a couple of sites, and for one term they’d had a system for submitting classwork that way but they went back to hard copy after that. He could look up pictures of wild mushrooms and native grasses and see if whatever he was looking at was all right to eat it. There was some way to get music off it that Imyu had figured out but Kyeo hadn’t gotten the hang of it, there were too many bypasses and things that if you clicked on them took you to the wrong place and logged an alert into the system. “What do you mean whenever you want?”

  Sarham reached into his pocket and pulled out a glassy rectangle with ribbons of color on its back surface. “My parents brought backup lenses,” he said. “In case theirs broke and they couldn’t get, uh, Kularan-style replacement parts that would fit them, here. Since they need to be in touch with home sometimes.”

  Kyeo was too fascinated by the object to ask what was wrong with Ibyabekan electronics. Ibaybekan ones were plasticky and had more buttons and they were usually gray. This one looked like a white glass marble from a museum, rolled out flat and stretching its candy-pink streaks into pressed twists, and it wasn’t even lit up yet. “So that isn’t yours?”