Nina settled the pot on the coals and poked a few driftwood sticks around it. "Ardus, just because I ask doesn't mean you have to tell me anything. I was being nosy, it's really none of my business."
"You are curious, and curiosity is a prerequisite for our line of work. And, with the Dreen and human relationship still in its infancy, as well as our working relationship, there is much we do not know about each other. You have told me much about your life on Earth, it is only fair that I tell you about mine." The cakes sizzled.
"Are you sure?" she asked, tucking a stray hair behind her ear. "Athe said Dreen go dark when something traumatic happens, something that causes a lot of stress or pain."
"That is true, but I believe I am past that. Is there..." He paused. "Is there a reason you do not want to know? Do humans not talk to each other about private matters?"
Nina shook her head. "No, it's not that. I just... If something hurt you so much that it made you go dark, I don't want to bring those feelings up again."
Ardus poked a charred stick deeper into the red coals. "I appreciate your sensitivity, but I assure you I feel comfortable sharing now. We work closely together and you have asked several questions, perhaps my answer would explain some of my behaviors."
Nina shrugged. "If you want. Nia did say you were weird, even for a Dreen."
Ardus huffed. "She would say that." He took a settling breath. "Bear with me, I have not spoken of it in..." His eyes widened in surprise as he realized the passage of time. "Sea gods, has it been that long?" He rubbed his hands on his knees. "In any case, what I should start with is why Dreen can go dark. As I have explained before, our pores and the unique patterns they create on our bodies is a form of social communication – it is how we recognize each other at a distance. Going dark is not well understood beyond the physical effect of not producing light, though some theories link the physical response – or rather, the lack thereof – to stress. And losing someone I thought I would spend the rest of my life with caused me a great deal of emotional distress."
Nina sat up straighter. "You were married?" There was an odd cast to her gaze, surprise and something else, interest and...relief? Ardus frowned at the strange word. "I do not know what 'married' means."
"Oh, um," she pulled her braid around to her shoulder, running it through her hands and inspecting the end. "So, where I'm from, when people – usually two – decide they're going to be together, usually for a long time, they can sign a legal agreement to share their stuff. Sometimes they have a religious ceremony or throw a big party for their family and friends. The ceremony can be different depending on where you're from, but the whole point is to show that they've committed to the relationship."
"Ah," he bent and shook the pan again. "I see. We Dreen can do something similar, but as most have drifted away from the old rituals many choose to simply share their home. Such was the case with...with Timam and I."
"Timam? That was her name?" Nina paused, looking up at him across the fire with her head tilted slightly to one side. He saw curiosity in her face, along with something guarded. "What happened?"
Ardus took another slow breath, staring into the fire. It still hurt, but not as much as it used to. In fact, merely deciding to open up to Nina was somehow relieving the old pain, like taking off a bandage and applying fresh salve to a wound. "She died unexpectedly – well, to me it was unexpected. I found out later that she'd been hiding a long illness from me, a subtle disease of the heart. It normally strikes much older Dreen, which is why I never realized that she was ill." He hesitated often as he spoke, working through the dull stabs as the memories floated back to the surface. "I was much younger then, and ignorant. She managed her symptoms well enough that I did not notice until it was too late – she hid her symptoms from me because she knew I would try to stop her from doing the things she loved. I was... I was angry with her when I learned she had been hiding it from me, but by that point she..." He shook his head. "There was no point in it by then, she was already gone. One day she was there, the next..." He squeezed his eyes shut against a particularly painful twinge in his chest. "She died in her sleep. Even if I had known, I never had a chance to say goodbye." He looked up and the sadness in Nina's beautiful grey eyes took him back, dredging up other memories. "Nina... I have never said this before, but... Your eyes are almost identical to hers."
Nina seemed stunned. She blinked several times, and the longer she looked at him the stronger the resemblance became. He continued, "Grey eyes are extremely rare for Dreen – most are green, yellow or blue. When you first arrived the similarity startled me. One moment I was annoyed with Meem for interrupting my preparations to meet you, and the next... It was as though Timam had returned, and she was staring at me from a stranger's face. It disturbed me so much that I avoided you, unable to cope with the shock."
"That's why you were weird?"
He nodded. "Among other reasons. As I said when you confronted me I was unused to humans – I had yet to overcome my own prejudices. But yes, for a while I was deeply unsettled by how much you resemble her."
"I do?"
"Strikingly so. Would you like to see?" Ardus reached for his tablet, "If you will forgive an old man his sentimentality, I have some images."
"If...if it's okay." He nodded again and Nina stood and rounded the fire, taking a seat on the driftwood nearby. The download had finished, and he disconnected the device and opened a folder. He selected his favorite and passed the tablet to Nina. "You are, of course, much younger and smaller and obviously not Dreen, but perhaps you will understand why I was so..." Attracted, drawn, confused, shocked? "...surprised."
Nina took the tablet and Ardus watched her face go from curiosity to awe. On the screen, a Dreen woman with steel-gray eyes and skin the color of rich, red earth – save for her rust-colored face, throat and chest – held a primate on her arm, smiling as she offered it a piece of fruit. Her smile, captured forever, was stunning – the upturned corners of her mouth pulled shallow tucks into her cheeks, and her head was tilted at an amused angle as the primate reached for the fruit. In her eyes was a deep gentleness, an affection for the animal on her arm that most would feel for their own children. It was a look that still pulled at his heart all these years later. "Oh Ardus, she's gorgeous."
"That she was. I made many enemies the day we went public with our relationship."
Nina glanced at him, her eyebrows drawn together. "What do you mean?"
"As you can see, Timam was a highly desirable woman," Ardus tried not to sound smug. "She was beautiful, intelligent, magnetic. I, like so many others, was drawn to her – she had a way of making everyone in a room feel seen, while still being the center of attention herself. She had a way of seeing everything – Dreen, animals, even plants – as an individual, able to see what made each unique. She made anyone who met her feel special. If you had met her, you would understand why...why losing her has made me go dark." Ardus sighed, then laughed softly. "Forgive me, it would seem that my mouth has run away with me."
Nina shook her head. "I don't mind, she sounds amazing. How did you meet her?"
"Timam came to work at the university after the old head of the biology department retired. I worked for him in the same capacity that Athe works for me, and when the position passed into Timam's hands she inherited me after a fashion."
"Timam was your superior?"
"I reported to her, yes. I was an undergraduate then, and Timam an accomplished scientist in her own right long before we met. At first it was merely a professional arrangement, she leading the department and I acting as her hands, running her errands and keeping her appointments. But it would not be long afterwards that she, finding herself with a young, toothsome male assistant, had me cornered. I daresay we spent the rest of the evening in her office getting more, ah, familiar with each other." He smirked and Nina's eyes went wide, scandalized. Her hands flew to her mouth and she laughed.
"Ardus! In her office? I never thought you were the type!
"I was young!" he defended, grinning and spreading his hands wide. "In any case, Timam was impossible to resist. She had been tracking me for months, giving me looks and suggesting we work closely on her projects. And as I said, she was magnetic. When she finally gave me Omi's Necklace, I crumbled like a sand sculpture."
"You crumbled?"
He gave her a look. "I have not always been the stoic, even-keeled man you know, I was once a headstrong, wild-" He sat forward suddenly, shaking the griddle in the coals. "I believe these are done. Perhaps we should eat?"
֎
Nina listened as Ardus chattered on, slurping packaged seaweed soup and chewing one of his fluffy, moist kelp cakes with fish and vegetables pressed into the dough. He spoke animatedly of Timam, the biologist who had taken over the position of department head when Ardus was younger and became the woman of his life. Nina tried to imagine a younger Ardus, without the fine lines around his eyes and mouth. It couldn't have been that long ago, he talks about her like it was yesterday. He did seem more relaxed, however, as though finally breaking the seal had snapped whatever threads still kept him tense. He's comfortable talking to me about her now, I think that means he trusts me. The revelation had answered many questions, and Nina was putting the pieces together as to why Ardus did not glow like other Dreen. He had loved Timam, that much was apparent, and her loss had damaged him deeply. "So, what about this place? I saw your name on the door, and now I realize hers is there too."
Ardus looked up, finishing his bite of kelp cake. "Yes, we spent much time here. The camera traps were her project, and I assisted her with collecting and processing the footage for data. Aside from working, we would go on night swims and walks through the forest and grasslands," he sighed. "Those were wonderful times. Some days we would wake before dawn and sit on this very spot and watch the world come alive with the sunrise. She loved it here, would have lived here if the university would have allowed it. We talked of staying, of building a research base and staffing it ourselves. She taught me everything I know about living up here, staying for weeks at a time and living off of what we could find in the forest and the sea. But we had obligations, careers, a family to attend to."
Nina sat up. "You have children?"
"She did, a son from a previous relationship, but I would consider him my own."
"Where is he? Do you still talk?"
Ardus gave her an odd look. "You know him, he works for me."
"Athe?" Nina frowned. "Athe's your stepson?"
"Pardon?" Another word he didn't understand, probably not part of the Dreen vocabulary in the same way 'married' wasn't.
Nina elaborated, "The child of your partner, but not your biological son."
"Then yes, I suppose you could call him that."
"But, that means..." Nina suddenly realized, "Oh! Athe's mother was your mentor!" It was so long ago she'd nearly forgotten, but it explained why Athe had been so reticent to speak of her. And why his name had appeared in the cabins. He must have come up with them a few times as a kid. "Wait, Athe's your age, isn't he?"
"No, he is..." Ardus thought about it. "He is twelve years younger than I am."
"Oh, so Timam was a young mother."
That made Ardus laugh. "Hardly, she was sixty-two when we met."
"Sixty-two? Is that how old she was in the picture you showed me?"
"No, no," Ardus smiled in fond memory, "Timam was seventy-six in that image. We had been together nearly fourteen years by then."
Nina's brain scrambled to do the math. "Hang on, if she was sixty-two when you met, how old were you?"
"Twenty-five."
Aha, a cougar! She had good taste. "Okay, so, if you don't mind me asking, how long has it been since she...passed?"
"Almost eighteen years."
"Oh..." He's fifty-seven? Old enough to be my dad... Nina picked up her bowl again and stole a glance at his arms, his face and neck. Damn, he still looks good though...like, really good. "Right, so, how did Athe take to having a stepfather so close to his age?"
Ardus shrugged, his huge shoulders rolling. "There were...difficulties. He was still upset about his mother and father parting ways, and he spurned my efforts to be a parent to him. He was not very fond of me in the beginning, so we settled for ignoring each other for a time."
Nina chuckled. "I can't imagine you acting very fatherly towards him."
"He came around eventually, when he had matured some. We had – and still have – more of a sibling relationship than that of father and son." The corner of his mouth drew into a grin. "Though sometimes he calls me 'Apa' to annoy me."
"So, when Timam... passed on, you two just had each other."
The big Dreen nodded. "That is so. It was understood that we were to look after each other, and as it turned out Athe had to look after me more than I him. If it were not for Athe, I might not have recovered enough to resume working – it took him hammering on my door each morning to get me out of bed long enough to remember that I had responsibilities."
"He does care about you," Nina said, thinking about the subtle jabs, the coded words, Athe pestering Ardus to get out more and interact with people. "You must have made a good impression while you and his mother were together."
"I should hope so, I was with Timam for decades longer than she was with his father."
"Decades?" Confused, Nina cocked her head again, looking for more signs of age. If he looked young at fifty-seven... "How long were you together?"
"Thirty-five years," Ardus took another cake from the griddle and bit into it. The lines around his mouth and eyes, barely visible and even less so in the fading evening light, stood out even less than his darkened pores. She barely noticed them, forgot they were there. Until now. "Wait a minute..." Nina calculated. "Twenty-five, thirty-five..." The number in her head seemed too large. Finally, she asked the question that had been bothering her for months:
"Ardus... How old are you?"
Without looking up from his cake, Ardus answered. "I will be seventy-nine this spring."
Nina's bowl dropped from her hands, soup spilling on the sand and sizzling in the coals. Ardus looked up at the sound and smell of burning seaweed wafting up in the smoke. She stared at him, his arms thick with muscle, his belly flat and his chest broad and hard. "Hang on," she rose on shaky legs and stood in front of him, bending for a closer look. His eyes were clear, his skin taut and smooth, the lines around his large blue eyes so fine they were barely visible. Even those around his mouth could hardly be considered deep, merely the product of repeated smiling, frowning and speaking. For someone approaching eighty, he looked half that. Ardus leaned back slightly, startled. "Nina?"
"How?! I thought you were forty, fifty at the most!"
Ardus made an uncomfortable face, half an embarrassed smile and half distress. "Nina, you know Dreen can live up to two centuries. You...you thought I was forty?"
"Well, yeah," Nina realized how close she was, as close as they had been when they'd spotted the herd of striders. She backed away quickly. "I knew that, but..."
The Dreen's eyes narrowed, hairless brows drawing together. "You have read my work, how could I possibly have produced so much in half the time? How could I have gathered as much experience as I have, influenced the field, changed practices... How could I remember the Greeting if I was little older than yourself?"
Nina hesitated. He was right, of course, the sheer number of papers, dissertations, chapters, forwards, the pages and pages of footnotes and analyses with his name attached... A lifetime of work – for a human. "There...there must be a delay in translations, or someone translated a bunch of your papers and released them all at once. I thought... I thought you were releasing something new every quarter, that's when the publications would come out."
Ardus shook his head slowly, his beads and wire-wraps winking in the firelight. "I wrote my first analysis of northern tide-pool ecology when I was thirty-six; I have been publishing my research since before you were born."
Nina sat down hard on the sand beside the Dreen's huge clawed, webbed feet. Just the night before she had lain awake with her imagination – and her hands – busy. She had been thinking about how he'd climbed the lurefruit tree with only his claws and his strength, how he'd assisted the hydrofoil pilot with hauling the craft ashore, the muscles in his arms and back rolling under his blue skin like sea-swells. Thinking about his huge, powerful body and his oddly handsome face, his deep blue eyes glittering with intelligence and wit, and his enormous hands strong enough to break bone but so gentle he'd carried her home and not even left a scratch. All those dirty thoughts, every fantasy... Nina almost gasped in horror. I've been masturbating to a senior citizen! Her face heated, and she hoped the Dreen would mistake her mortification for surprise or shock. She looked up when she heard her name – Ardus had leaned down, his elbows on his knees.
"Nina, I hope that my...age...will not change how we work together. You have already shown me what humans are capable of, and I assure you I am invested in helping you achieve your goal of bringing the Dreen perspective back to your home so you can try to repair it. I do not exaggerate when I say I believe you are capable of changing your people's worldview, because I see so much of myself in you. You are as I was when I began my career – strengthened by your ideals, emboldened by opportunity, eager to change not only common practice but your own outlook. I see a resilience in you that I wish I had possessed when Timam passed – you have lived all but the last few months on a planet so damaged by its own life that I am continually amazed at how you maintain such a powerful hope for the future, while I could hardly get out of bed for months. You have completely changed how I view humans, both as a species and as individuals. What fears I had after the incident at the Port are all but gone now, I have learned that not all humans are closed-minded and destructive. Through you, I have learned that humans and Dreen are more alike than we differ. I hope that..." He paused, and Nina saw a flicker of some emotion in his large eyes – or was it just the grey-pinkness of his nictitating membranes, lost in the growing dark of a Dreenai nightfall? "I hope that our differences do not stand in the way of further progress."
Progress... How many times had they talked about progress? Looking up at the huge dark Dreen she perceived more with her heart and mind than her eyes that there was so much more than their careers riding on this... Deep in her chest Nina felt a subtle shift, a subconscious deviation from an easier path towards a new future. There would be those who fought back – there always were – but like the ocean pounding even the largest of boulders to sand change was inevitable, the only force in the universe that remained constant and unstoppable. Nina made her decision.
"Ardus," she said, "you once told me that evolution can be a choice. I agree with your hypothesis," she let herself smile, and was rewarded with one of Ardus's in charming response. "My species is young, I'm young, and we both have a long way to go, but if that doesn't deter you from working with me then I won't let it change how I see you."
"Well," Ardus straightened, "that is a relief."
"There's just one thing." Nina stood, brushing sand from her legs. Ardus blinked, an unreadable expression on his strange face. "What is that?"
"Now you're going to have to deal with me calling you 'old man'."
Ardus balked loudly, "I am not that old! By Dreen standards I am not even middle-aged yet – I may live another century!" He frowned, but his eyes danced.
Nina giggled at his feigned offense. "Uh-huh, sure thing old man." She picked up her bowl and kicked sand over the spilled seaweed. Retreating to the water-line she rinsed the bowl and scrubbed it clean with a handful of the gritty black sand. A bioluminescent crustacean, disturbed by her digging fingers, flashed green and wriggled deeper to escape. Turning back to the fire she caught him watching her, his eyes made brighter by the fire. He was hard to miss even in the fading light, a tall dark shape against the pale bluff face. Her shadow stretched out from the water towards him, drawn to Dreen size by the setting sun at her back. The sea wind blew her braid over her shoulder and as she pushed it back behind her neck, her hand lingered at the base of her throat. She watched as he reached up and tugged at the collar of his tunic with a gesture that mirrored hers, subtle but quite obvious now that she knew what to look for. So that's how it is? Well, I'm not afraid to evolve.