Engineman - Eric Brown [74]
L'Endo squeezed her fingers.
"His... passing?" she echoed.
"A time of celebration, of joy at his attainment. More than anything, he wishes you to attend. He wishes to share with you his joy as he leaves this life. He wishes to convince you..."
"In five days..." she began. "But how can you tell?"
"In five of your days, L'Endo will release his hold upon life and pass from us. He feels it within him, he feels that then the time will be right."
She was in a dark cave with two aliens, she told herself, one of whom, a friend for the past four months, was dying of some horrendous wasting plague, and yet all she could feel was... was joy.
She wondered if it was her way of coping with so much grief, but she searched within her and found no such emotion, only the strongest communion with anyone, alien or human, she had ever experienced. Closer to L'Endo than ever before, she shared in his rapture, and felt blessed.
"I'll be honoured to attend his passing," Ella said.
The old Lho translated her words, and L'Endo lay back on the skins with what might have been relief.
Then she took her leave of the dying alien, and the oldster arranged to meet her in five days, and then led her back to the lagoon and said farewell.
For the next few days at home, her life seemed dull and lacklustre. She contrasted the materialism of colony life with what she had experienced with the Lho, and felt cheated. She could never become a Lho, but she could leave the Reach, start a life of her own. She anticipated the time, in three months, when she could legally leave school and the clutches of her father.
In the meantime, she wanted only to re-experience the communion she had shared in the cave with L'Endo.
Then, two days before she was due to attend his passing, her father appeared on the patio above the lagoon where she was swimming. "Ella - my study, this minute."
She shivered, despite the sunlight. He spoke to her rarely, and an official summons to his study could only mean that in some way she had transgressed. She dried herself and dressed quickly, trying to think what she might have done wrong, then hurried inside. The sooner she got this over with...
Her father was seated in a swivel chair behind his desk. To his left stood Conway, her minder. He was dressed all in black today and held, by his side, Ella's metallic-backed diary.
She wanted to scream that they had no right intruding in her private affairs, but she had no intention of giving them the satisfaction of seeing her upset.
Then she realised the subject of the latest entries...
Her father held out a hand, and Conway placed the diary upon it; a set-piece surely rehearsed. He flipped through the pages, came to the last entry and paused, reading it.
Then he closed the diary and laid it very precisely on the desk before him. He looked up at Ella.
She could never guess what her father was thinking. The expression on the only readable part of his face was forever stern, unsmiling.
He tapped her diary with his forefinger.
"This is not permissible, of course," he said. She tried not to smile to herself. He could never address her without resorting to a stilted legalese, as if he were a prosecuting lawyer and she the accused.
"Quite apart from the fact that contact between humans and the Lho is proscribed by colonial edict, there is the very considerable health risk to take into consideration."
She tried to out-stare him, tried not to redden - an impossible combination. She looked away, through the window at the sloping garden leading to the summit of the plateau, and felt herself colour.
She had used phrases like love and feel one with about the Lho; the admission of which emotions made her feel vulnerable in the face of her father's withering cynicism.
"As you know," he continued, "the Lho have succumbed to a devastating plague. As yet, its full implications are not known."
Ella interrupted. "I've known L'Endo for months and I'm not ill..." She felt a dull certainty about where all this was leading.
"That does not alter the fact that I cannot