The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [25]
It was hard to mourn properly when one had no body to grieve over. Selar had comforted her by telling her that Thev, in all probability, had had no time to realize what was happening; his ending must have been virtually instantaneous. It had been Selar who had come to her quarters to tell Thala that her father had died. She had been direct and honest, but beneath the matter-of-fact Vulcan delivery had been concern and kindness.
And since Thev’s death, Selar had been there every day, sometimes for only a few minutes if she had many patients, but never missing a single time. But soon, even if Thala were to be allowed to stay aboard the Enterprise, Selar might not be here. The thought was enough to make the Andorian girl want to keen aloud again.
But after a moment, the child swallowed, then squared her small shoulders resolutely. If she allowed herself to think about never seeing Selar again, she wouldn’t have the resolve to do what was necessary.
Grasping the smoothly carved statue with one hand and its base with the other, Thala twisted. The sculpture came apart. It was hollow inside, and she turned the top piece so that its contents cascaded down into her hand.
The cool feel of metal, the faceted hardness of jewels, her mother’s antennae webs filled her hand. Slowly, carefully, Thala counted the jewels one more time.
Sixteen natural Rigellian sun crystals, ranging in size from a quarter-carat to nearly two carats. The stones were not particularly rare, but she had been assured that they were flawless and of excellent color—a brilliant reddish orange, the color of one of the Rigel system’s stars. They were set in old-fashioned settings of oriri, an alloy of gold, copper, and iridium that her people prized greatly.
The Andorian girl had only a vague idea what the stones and the metal were worth on today’s market, but she was certain that they would bring enough to buy her passage to Vulcan and keep her there for long enough to get a job.
Thala planned to work as a translator-scribe. She spoke three languages fluently—Andorian, Vulcan, and English—and people were always needed who could transcribe and translate. Despite the invention of the Universal Translator a century ago, many Vulcan or Terran merchants still preferred to have a living being act as interpreter during trade negotiations. They claimed that translations rendered by living interpreters more accurately reproduced the other speaker’s subcontext and inflection—elements that could prove crucial during delicate bargaining sessions.
And once she was on Vulcan and had earned enough to support herself without working for two years—Thala had only a hazy idea of how many years the attainment of this goal would take—then she would begin classes at the Vulcan Science Academy. And she would see Selar again. They could be … friends.
Thala thought of how long that might take, and her throat tightened, but her mind was made up; nothing was going to shake her resolution. She would not go to an Andorian world.
On her homeworld she could hope for nothing but a bare, friendless existence in an institution, surrounded by those who, unlike her, had not been trained to surpass their limitations. Andorians who bore disabling illnesses, wounds, or other imperfections were thought honorable only if they did not burden the living with their presence or their care.
An institution was certainly her most likely fate, but if she were very, very lucky—although to Thala it seemed luck only in the blackest, most ironic sense of the word—she might be spared the institution and be adopted by one of the clans that had lost population to one of the planet’s endless blood feuds. Her blindness was not the result of any genetic cause, and so she might be deemed fit for such an adoption, because in a year or so she would be old enough to bear and nurture young. She would be placed in one of the clan’s hive harems, impregnated with boy babies by selected males