Chapter 5
Astoria
On the next morning, I tried to give him away.
“Reassign the file,” I told Seattle in my most reasonable voice. “Conflict of interest on the human side. Surely somebody up there can take one Veyathi intro.”
“There’s nobody up here.” Priya’s counterpart didn’t miss a beat. “There’s nobody anywhere. You know there’s no one else, Astoria. You cut the ribbon on the other liaison with the budget cut.”
“I didn’t personally cut anything.” I pinched the bridge of my nose as her reaction confirmed my worry.
“The protocol needs a credentialed officer to run the window. You are the credentialed officer. Declining the match does not get you out of the paperwork. I’m sorry.” After a moment, she added a familiar piece of wisdom. “Ruth always said the job has a sense of humor.”
“Ruth said a lot of things.” I hung up by slamming my finger down on the switchhook and sat there holding the receiver like it had personally offended me.
One month.
My Priya, the Portland one, leaned in the doorway with two coffees and an expression I didn’t care for. “So.” She set one coffee on my desk. “The alien.”
“Don’t.”
“Ninety-one point three.” She raised an audacious eyebrow at me.
“Priya.”
“I’m only saying, historically, when you tell clients to make sure they won’t regret any quick decisions, you don’t usually mean it as a threat.”
“Reassign him to Eugene.”
“Eugene closed.”
“Exactly.” I took the coffee. Her smirk didn’t move at all.
I did what any professional does when they’ve run out of moves to avoid a situation. I made rules. Fixed times, a fresh agenda every morning, and a clipboard, which I set on the desk between us like a wall, and behind which I fully intended to hide for four weeks.
It lasted eleven minutes.
He came down at ten and folded himself into the client chair.
His gaze danced over me as his skin did the thing.
In the office light he went from drowned-watercolor pale to a deep live blue along the jaw and the backs of his hands.
I’d met a Veyathi once before, so I understood the color was a tell he had not yet learned to bluff.
I was going to have to stop paying attention to his flirtations and attraction to me, or we were both finished.
“Right.” I tapped the agenda. “First-contact orientation. Earth customs, then on-world logistics, and I’ll need you to hold questions until the end.”
“Why twelve photographs?”
“... I’m sorry?”
“On your wall. The record says you have counseled forty people through the program.” He nodded at the frames. “Why do twelve get frames and the rest do not?”
“That is not on the agenda.”
“You made the agenda.”
“I did, and I put it right here so we could stick to necessary topics like on-planet transit. It’s quite a riveting topic, and I would love to walk you through.”
“Before we do.” His mouth tipped, warm. “The garden. Did you water it again this morning?”
“You’ve been here five days. How do you know when I water my garden?”
“I know when everyone waters everything.” His tone made it a normal fact to hold about a person. “You do it before you sit down. You do it when you have decided not to think about a thing.” A beat between words. “You are thinking about a thing.”
I set the pen down. “Are you profiling me?”
“Yes.”
At least he was honest. “Is that a Veyathi thing or a you thing?”
“Both. Your ceiling has forty-one water stains. You have counted them because two are circled in pencil. You circled them at night based on the angle and how the light filters from the lamp and the streetlights outside.”
The office became very quiet.
I set the pen flat on the desk. “You’re supposed to be patient as I go through the agenda subjects, not asking me about my office.”
“You asked what I noticed.”
“I didn't expect you to answer with observations of my ceiling.”
“You are the most interesting thing in the room.” It came out in a flat tone, the same as he used to discuss any other subject. “So I have been reading you instead of the agenda. I apologize if it is rude by human customs. I have not been on a planet with other people in some time.”
Twelve years of being the one who sees others, but never gets seen, and now, here was a hunky alien man reading my insomnia off the ceiling like a chart. Was this his idea of flirting?
“Let’s try Earth customs.” I retreated to the agenda like it would save me.
“Greetings. Humans shake hands. Firm, brief, two pumps, and then release. Do not hold on. This applies to the area you’re in, but other countries may not have the same custom.
It’s considered formal and is falling out of favor. ”
“Why would I hold on?”
“People do. Sometimes it's nerves… Also, small talk. You will be asked how you are. The correct answer is ‘fine, thanks, you?’ It is not a real question. You do not tell them about your observations.”
“That seems dishonest.”
“It’s social lubricant. The whole species runs on it.” I put my hand out across the desk to demonstrate. “Hi. How are you?”
He took my hand. Firm, brief, and then he released it, exactly as instructed. “I have not slept properly since I arrived. The room above your office carries every sound. I may need a quieter room.”
I didn't breathe for a second. “The answer is ‘fine, thanks.’”
“I know.” His mouth tipped. “You did ask.”
So he had jokes. Buried a mile down under all that stillness, aimed directly at me. Perfect. That was the one thing that could make this worse, and of course, he managed it.
Priya knocked once and put her head in without waiting, which is her version of knocking. “Sorry to interrupt. The, ah, file.” She held up a folder that was, from where I sat, visibly empty.
“I’m in a session, Priya.”
“I can see that.” She looked at Azyr. Azyr looked back, and went, helpfully, a polite social blue.
Priya’s eyebrows relocated to her hairline.
“Take your time.” Delighted, she withdrew, and I heard her walk about four feet down the hall and stop, because the walls in this building were thin and she is a professional eavesdropper.
“Your colleague,” Azyr observed, “is reading me the way I read you.”
“My colleague is going to Eugene.”
“Eugene closed.”
“I’ll reopen it.” I tapped the agenda hard enough to leave a mark. “On-world logistics. Focus.”
He focused. Sort of. “On-world logistics,” he repeated back to me, grave as a judge, “is not the thing either of us is currently thinking about.”
I got us back on script. Or he let me think I did.
I could read his emotions through his skin tones; his mind and intentions were another matter.
We did the disclosure packet. We did off-world logistics.
He answered every question I actually asked in flat exact sentences and asked three more that had nothing to do with logistics, and every time I dodged one he took the information the same way as he took an answer.
I got the unhelpful certainty he’d have the whole of me catalogued by Friday.
Then, around noon, the translator betrayed him. What the box put out, in its mild little contralto, cheerful and clear, was:
“You have built something warm here, and I would like very much to get inside it.”
We both went completely still.
“That.” He went a shade paler at the collarbone. “Is not what I said.”
“No.”
“The unit renders me poorly.”
I retrieved the pen. “The unit renders you a menace to interstellar relations.”
The blue went straight up his throat. He reached over and switched the thing off at the collar, and then, in his own slow, strongly shaped English, hunting every word down one at a time: “I said. The office. Is warm. You made it warm. That is all I said.”
And that was worse, because a machine could say anything, but a man didn't turn off his translator and struggle through his second language unless he needed me to know he had not meant the filthy thing that was misspoken.
I have never wanted so badly to climb across a desk at a person for so little cause.
I didn't climb across the desk. I put down the pen I’d been holding against my mouth and tried to remember what a disclosure packet was for.
“Ask me about the twelve.” I had apparently decided to burn the whole afternoon to the ground on purpose. “Since you want to know.”
“I would like that.”
“They’re the ones I drove to the hub myself.
I sat with each of them the night before, answered every question three or more times, hugged them at the gate, and waved until the shuttle was a dot.
And I have never once cried. Not one of them.
” I made the tactical error of meeting his eyes, which had gone soft and blue at the edges. “And you want to know why.”
He waited. I had run out of questions to hide behind.
“Because I’m the one holding the door. You hold the door for others to go onto their new adventure… you don’t get to fall through it. You just hold it. For the next one, and the next one.”
He was quiet a long moment. Then he turned the translator back on and spoke slowly.
“On my world, there is a word for the person who stands in the doorway during the wind so the others can pass. It does not translate. Your unit offers lintel. The beam that carries the weight of the wall, so the opening can exist.” A pause.
“It is load-bearing. It is not a small thing to be.”
Nobody had ever called me a structural component and made it sound like that. I looked down at the clipboard. I had drawn a heart beside the agenda and pressed the pen through its middle.
“Right.” I stood up too fast and cracked my knee on the desk hard enough to rattle both mugs and every scrap of my composure. “Good. Great session, very productive.”
“Astoria.”
“We covered a lot of ground.”
“We covered transit documentation for four minutes.”
“And it was riveting.” I herded him toward the office door, which put us closer than I wanted to be.
He looked down at me and went the deepest blue I’d seen on him yet, and didn't move. Neither did I. The radiator ticked. A bus sighed to a stop outside.
“Nine sharp tomorrow.” My voice squeaked in the most embarrassing way. “Bring questions about transit documentation.”
“I will not.”
“Somehow that doesn't surprise me.” I slowly shut the door in his lovely blurred face and then leaned my entire back against it.