String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [99]
“I’ve been trying to find the words to explain,” Kaytok said. “This isn’t something I talk about a lot.” They walked on in silence for a hundred meters before he continued. “After Gora and his ten thousand departed and we didn’t hear anything from them for a while, everyone who stayed behind started to pretend that nothing had happened.”
“Including your mother?”
“Eventually,” Kaytok said. “Yeah, her too.” A defensive note crept into his voice. “You have to understand what it was like. When Gora was here, everything must have sounded very reasonable, but after he was gone, it was just…just…”
“Embarrassing?”
“Right. Embarrassing. I wasn’t sure if your species understood that emotion.”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
Kaytok replied, “Because you can’t sense each other the way most Monorhans can.”
“Well, we do understand it. Some of us very well. I know something about being part of a family where one of the members was a perpetual embarrassment.”
“You’ll have to tell me later.”
“Maybe. After you’ve finished the story about Sem.”
“Right,” Kaytok nodded. “Sem. Okay. The short version: When I met her, she was the only person who ever acted like my grandsire wasn’t a complete lunatic, like he might have had some worthwhile ideas.”
“But I thought that’s what you’d thought.”
“By that time, I’d come around a little. His ideas didn’t seem so crazy, especially because by this time the environment had begun to disintegrate. Sem liked to listen to my stories about him, even asked to see some of his notes and programs.”
“You said this was back in your…what do you call it? University days?”
“Yes, when I was a scholar, where people from different tribes, different cities, mingled freely. Sem was a special case, of course, because she was in training to be a rih-hara-tan.”
“That’s like a priestess,” B’Elanna said.
Kaytok shook his head. “I’m not sure what that word means. The translator can’t find a word that means the same thing. She was in training to become the leader of the tribe. Yes, that involves religion—I get that connotation from the translation—but it’s much more than that.”
“How did you meet someone like that?” B’Elanna said. “Wouldn’t she be kept safe, kept away from…?”
“The people she would serve?” Kaytok asked. “No, it doesn’t work that way here. And, besides, she wasn’t the only potential rih-hara-tan. Each tribe has several. They’re trained from birth, but no one knows who will be selected until the previous one dies or resigns.”
“Oh,” B’Elanna said. “I see. That’s very…sensible.”
“I’m glad you approve,” Kaytok said, not without sarcasm. “So, anyway, yes, we were both young, which is the excuse I use for how stupid I was.”
“Why were you stupid?” B’Elanna was beginning to regret pursuing this line of questioning. Kaytok was getting increasingly agitated as he continued his tale, but curiosity had taken hold, as well as an intuition that Kaytok’s past was somehow entangled with the problem Monorha currently faced.
“Because I should have figured out that she was just using me,” he said, head bobbing on his long neck. “One day, she left her dataset on and her personal log was open.”
“Her personal log?” B’Elanna asked, almost amused. “You mean, like a diary? You read your girlfriend’s diary?” Some things are the same all over the galaxy, she decided.
“I thought she meant me to,” Kaytok said, struggling to sound reasonable. “You have to understand—Sem was a very controlled person. She didn’t do things by accident.”
“What did it say?” B’Elanna asked.
“I don’t remember exactly,” Kaytok said. “This is all a long time ago. But essentially what it was about was that she hadn’t found something she was looking for, that she was tired of trying to find it and was weary of me.”
“ ‘Something’?” B’Elanna asked. “You mean, like an emotion, an attachment, or do you mean a thing? It sounds like you’re talking about the latter.”
“When I read it, I thought she meant an emotion, but later I wasn