An Imperfect Princess (15 page)

“Not having a
common ancestor, your genetic programming is different from the ground up. 
However, you have roughly eighty thousand perfect analogous genes in different
locations.  The humans have 26 chromosomes, Lathlians have thirty.  Like most
advanced forms of life, you run off deoxyribonucleic acid and similar
components, and your anatomy is actually almost identical.  I think the humans have
an extra organ or two and different pigments.  Lathlians have both melanins and
anthocyanins and can produce certain vitamins that humans can’t.  Humans have
melanins, but no anthocyanins, and they can produce certain vitamins that
Lathlians can’t.”  The fairy yawned.  “In short, you have about as much in
common with each other as you have with me–the same shape.  Oh, actually you’re
both baryonic matter, so I guess you have twice as much in common.”

The two
“baryonic matter” beings stared at the fairy, not quite sure what half the
words she had used meant.  Some of the terms had been in Lathlian, as there was
no English equivalent to them invented yet.

Eneria coughed
and stepped away.  “Anyway, my lord–”

“Call me James. 
In England, you are my superior.” He was also tired of the formality. 

She eyed him
warily.  “As I was saying, James, they can detect my ship from the sky.  And if
they detect me, they can find me.”

“So there’s no
way for you to hide?”

She shrugged. 
“There might not even be a reason to.  Since they won’t be able to crack the
Lathlian encryption, they might assume it was an automated distress signal from
a dying Lathlian vehicle.”  She pursed her lips.  “Actually, getting away from
the ship is the best course of action.  The soonest anyone could possibly
arrive would be several days.  Even then, Vaz would have to acquire a ship
capable of multiple jumps without recharging, which might take longer.  And if
the Konkastians decide to do something, they will take their time and strike at
the most opportune moment.  They’ll probably spend a week trying to decrypt the
message before going any further.”

“We are leaving
for London in a week,” he said, the thought of her leaving in “a few days”
hitting him like a punch to the stomach.  He had thought he was going to have
her around for quite a while, the way she discussed the vast distances between
their worlds.

“That should be
soon enough.”  She gently touched her arm to his, looking imploringly at him,
her hazel eyes full of sorrow.  “I must ask one more favor of you.  I believe I
can get the ship to start up and the suborbital engines checked out.  I can fly
it up here, but you must find me a place to shelter it where no one can see it,
and we need a plausible explanation for where it went.”  She sighed.  “I’m
lucky it was a shuttle in that respect.  A larger freighter would not even
have
sub-orbital engines–it would be too big to land on the ground.”

He thought for a
few moments, and then patted her hand.  “I know exactly where you may put your
ship.  And it is made with a leaded tin roof, in fact.”

“Oh?” Her eyes
lit up, and she smiled brilliantly at him.  She was amazing... so plain and
nondescript and ordinary, until she smiled that impossibly perfect smile.  Then
she would outshine Helen of Troy.

“The docks.”  He
could not help but smile at her in return.  “My father was an avid seaman, and
my grandfather was in the navy...  but I sold the family ships after I lost my
parents.  I will never set sail on the ocean.”  His smile faded at that
thought.  “My family’s shipping fortunes are ending with me.  I sold our stake
in the company and invested in manufacturing instead.”

She patted his
arm in sympathy. “You may never sail again, that’s true. But if you want, just
for today, you can fly with me.”

The ship was
exactly as they had left it the week before, except there were no holes in the
side or the windshield anymore, and the stubby fins were whole.  The entire
contraption looked like a flattened carriage without the wheels.  He marveled
again at the technology that allowed her to simply place her palm on a smooth
section of wall and have a door handle appear in the side.  Like magic.

“Sit there,” she
directed, pointing to the seat on the right side of the vehicle where he had
sat previously.  “If you were a co-pilot you could help run the controls, but
this little shuttle was meant to fly solo.”

He stared at the
beachhead before him, holding his breath.  This was the moment... he could
chalk everything up to now as a sign of their collective madness.  But if this
little vessel could float in the air like she described, he would never doubt
another word she said.

She sat primly
on the edge of the leather seat.  Aijo, the fairy, was lounging on the dash,
but she had transformed from a hair ornament to a crew member, and the laziness
she had previously exhibited was gone.

Eneria placed
her palm on a panel again and was rewarded a hum from the ship.  The lights
came on, and numbers and flashes began to dance across the dash.

Magic.

She reached one
dainty foot, clad in a brand new slipper, toward a pedal on the floor and
pulled a stick on the dashboard toward her with a flourish.  But nothing
happened.

“Uh oh,” she
said, trying not to panic.  James could only watch helplessly as she started to
mash buttons and pull levers, to no avail.

“Emergency
brake?” Aijo suggested dryly, and Eneria whipped her head to where James was
sitting.

“Emergency
brake!” she confirmed, a little embarrassed.  “James, could you push down the
lever that is on the floor beside you?” He did as she instructed, but it wouldn’t
budge.  “You’ll have to press the button on to–p!”

Freed from the
moorings of gravity, the shuttle shot straight into the air.  Everyone was
thrown about for a few horrifying moments until Eneria shoved the joystick on
the dashboard back down.

“Whoops, forgot
about that,” she said sheepishly.  “That’s what caused me to crash, you know. I
pulled it too late.  This ship was not designed to descend from orbit to
surface unaided.  Had I pulled the brake ten seconds earlier, I would have
landed gently and floated to the beach instead.”

James was too
stunned by the view outside to answer.  They had risen only a few hundred yards
above the land, but he could see nearly the whole of his estate, the village at
St Ives in the distance, and several miles of the coastline in either
direction.  The view was breathtaking. He leaned forward, noting each outline
in the beach head that marked the edge of his land.

“Can it... go
higher?” he said, devouring everything he saw.

“Of course.” 
She pulled the joystick again and this time they rose gracefully into the air,
further and further.  He could see all of Cornwall, and it was rapidly
expanding to show the entire southern border of England and the northern border
of France with the channel in between.

She slowed them
to a hover and sighed wistfully.  “Such a lovely planet.  Lathlor was mostly
ocean, with only two large continents and millions of islands.  I think that’s
why our world government unified earlier than the theory of civilization said
we would.  Your world, on the other hand, has so much land that it will
probably take another thousand years for that to happen.”

“I see,” he said
absently, not really hearing her.  He could not put it into words, but somehow
he instinctively knew he was seeing something that no human from Earth had seen
before.  A cartographer would look at this view and weep, for it made his work
into truth.  An artist, a poet, a writer could draw inspiration from this for
years.   The world from above was blue and green and white.

“Sorry,” she
said meekly, and sat in silence, enjoying the view along with him.  After a
while, though, she grew fidgety, like Marilyn while studying a lesson on
Latin.  He got the sense that a view like this was nothing extraordinary for
her.

“If you can
reach this far into the sky,” he found himself asking, “then why don’t you just
go home?”

“Because home
would take me a thousand years to reach, if I went at the maximum speed this
ship can push.  In order to go home and still be alive, I need to reach speeds
that go many times faster than the speed of light.  And the only way to do that
is to skip through dark matter.”

“Dark matter?”

“Your language
has no words to describe it, nor any concept.  I suspect that is what it will
be called, because that is the way it is generally first described by
physicists who study it.”  She bit her lip, a habit he noticed she had when she
was concentrating.  “If you throw a stone into the water, it will sink slowly. 
But if you throw it at the right angle, with the right velocity, it will skip
across the surface.”  She used her hands to illustrate.  “Imagine space and
time and all the dimensions within it as the surface of water.  A dark matter
engine allows us to skip across the surface, avoiding all the tedious travel in
between.”  She dropped her hands demurely onto her lap.  “However, the amount
of energy needed to start that sort of skip is tremendous.  If I were to pedal
on your velocipede for a year straight, I might be able to store up that much
power.” 

“Not happening,
then.”

“No.”  She
looked at the Earth below them again.  “I would not mind staying here, if I
knew I could be safe.  But I am so used to being on the run... and I am so
dangerous to the Empire that they will chase me to the very heart of the galaxy
if they need to.”

“But if you knew
you could be safe, you would stay?” he heard himself ask.

“Perhaps.”  She
fingered her pendant and laughed a little.  “After all, I’m fabulously wealthy
here, and I can practice my talent for jewelry making to an appreciative
audience!”

Even he had to
chuckle at that statement.  She
was
a surprisingly talented jeweler.  He
had been shocked to learn she had made the pendant herself in only a few hours.

“We should go
back,” Aijo warned the pair of them from her lounge on the dash.  “Just because
you sent that message hours ago doesn’t mean they didn’t already send a patrol
ship after you days ago, and a flying shuttle on a primitive world is a sitting
duck.”

“All right, all
right.”  Her hands danced across the instrument panel, and he again admired
their delicate grace.  For someone who worked so hard to stay alive, she had
the hands of a lady.  Then again, the smooth buttons on this dashboard were a
far cry from ropes and the steering wheel of an ocean going vessel.

“Stealth mode
on,” Eneria said in Lathlian, and another series of lights came on the dash.

“What did you
just say?” he asked her.

“It makes us
more difficult to see,” she explained, and he had no choice but to accept that
at face value.

They descended
smoothly again, probably causing anyone looking at the sky in Cornwall to gasp
as an object, however disguised, came from the heavens in midafternoon. In only
a few moments, they were once again on the beach, hovering a few inches above
the sand.

“Where is the
boat dock?”

“About a mile up
the coast, behind the estate.  The marina has a leaded tin roof.  No one goes
there anymore, so you should be able to settle this vessel on the dock itself.”

She did so, and
they left the shuttle there, covered in the oilcloth.  When the ship was
underneath the blanket, it actually looked like a slightly more normal
craft–except that boats belonged in the water, not on top of the dock. They
then walked up an old path back to the main estate.

The warm spring
day was actually pleasant and conducive to a walk, and he distracted himself
from the inexplicable attraction to her by explaining the lay of the land to
her as well as his knowledge of natural history and botany of this world.  She
soaked up every fact rapidly, explaining quite a few things to him in turn that
he would never have guessed regarding the mechanics of life.

“I thought you
said you were a math person,” she said with a sly smile.

“At the
university I attended, the clergy all viewed the study of natural history as
understanding God’s plan for us.  Mathematics, astronomy, botany–all are part
of the mysterious whole.”

“You are not a
religious man, however,” she commented.  “Else I suspect I might have been
called a demon and exorcised, based on what I now know of your religion here.”

James raised an
eyebrow.  Where had she picked up that bit of knowledge? “No, I have never been
especially religious.”  He looked at the spring trees, the flowers along the
path that were blooming.  “But I see God in nature, as do most of my
colleagues.  Are people on your world religious?”

“Some of them,”
she admitted.  “My mother was raised in a monastery and she is still deeply
religious.  Her order worships the Gods of the Four Seasons, both the male and
female aspects, although as a strictly female order, they generally ignore the
masculine God.”  She opened her arms, gesturing to the sea and meadows in the
distance.  “Lady Spring, Lord Summer, Lady Autumn, and Lord Winter.  There are
other religions on the planet as well; it is considered a holy site for at
least a dozen religions.”  She giggled.  “It’s said to be something in the
atmosphere.  It makes people have visions.” 

“It sounds a lot
like our situation.  We have three great religions that all fight over the same
Holy Land.”

“There’s not
much need to fight over a planet that was mostly uninhabited.”  She tipped her
head to the sky and studied the clouds.  “But my belief in the Lathlian gods
was lost when the world itself was lost.  They were supposed to protect us,
guard us.  I do not feel that any benevolent gods could condone such a
tragedy.”

He had felt much
the same way on the night he learned of his parents’ death. “So you are an
atheist.”

“That’s not
quite true,” she argued, reaching out to touch a petal. He got the feeling that
the conversation was making her uncomfortable.  “I believe that if there is any
higher order to the universe, it takes no interest in us on a personal level. 
Even the Lathlians believed in a god higher than the Four Seasons, although
that God was so high up they viewed the seasons as sort of an intermediary.” 
She plucked the flower and sniffed it delicately. “And then there are the
Pharinae, who have occasionally been mistaken for gods on any world they inhabit.” 
She poked the fairy sitting in her hair with the flower, causing Aijo to stir
lazily, even though the flower went straight through her transparent body. 
James felt odd; he had forgotten she was there.

“It’s not our
fault people mistake us for supernatural beings,” Aijo complained.  “We’re just
a different type of people.”

“She would look
very supernatural to anyone on Earth,” James agreed.

“So would a
flying ship!”  Eneria pointed out with a grin.

Laughing, they
approached the house together.  Eneria was feeling safer than she had in a long
time. She had run the spectrometer, and Aijo had confirmed that the leaded tin
was enough to completely block the radioactive signature from the ship.

The Konkastians
had one less lead to go on.

Eneria had learned
that James did his best to entertain the girls in the evening, even if it wasn’t
something they might actually find enjoyable.  Clarissa had declined this
evening, citing a headache, leaving only Marilyn and her pet animal.  They were
gathered in the garden as he fiddled with a primitive telescope that was
surprisingly well made.

Enny didn’t
quite know what to make of Galileo.  She had never met a race that kept
carnivores as pets.  He had a mouthful of sharp teeth and needle sharp claws,
but he seemed well-behaved enough, and tolerant of the abuses of his mistress. 
And she had to admit he was beautiful.  He had no discernible scent. He had
silky soft fur, which he kept spotless on his own initiative, a beautiful
copper and black coat with a white patch under his chin and a golden underbelly.
His eyes were a warm lemony yellow that narrowed into slits in the sunlight. 
Marilyn had coaxed her into petting him, and he responded with that friendly
rumbling sound she’d heard him make before.

Still, she had
seen him eating a living snack in the dining room earlier–he seemed to function
as a sort of primitive pest control for the household.  The sight had killed
her appetite. Perhaps
that
is why they kept the carnivorous creatures
around, she thought, as her stomach grumbled.  Who needs mousetraps when you
have a friendly creature around that eats mice?

“This was a gift
from my mentor William Lassell,” James explained to her as he fiddled with the
brass tripods.  “He is a great astronomer and I had hoped to spend some time in
an apprenticeship with him, but that was... before.”  He glanced over at
Marilyn, who was forcing Galileo to dance on her lap, so she hadn’t been paying
attention.

“It seems to be
quite well made,” Eneria commented.

“He makes all
his telescopes himself.  He has plans for a very large one to be able to peer
even deeper into the skies than ever before.”  He looked up at the stars, and
Eneria joined him.  She felt a stab of melancholy.  She was millions of miles
away from home.  None of the constellations were even remotely familiar. 
However, she spied a long fuzzy patch that looked vaguely like the sky she
knew.

“That large
splash of stars that arcs across the sky,” she said, sweeping her arm along the
ecliptic.  “What is it called?”