Page 14 of Alien Mine

Along about midmorning, Tiny’s laughter faded. The sun burned brightly in a robin’s egg blue sky and the wind stirred lazily through the shoulder high corn. Sweat coated Rachel’s skin and seeped into her clothes. They clung to her, along with half a garden of dirt.

She finished the last row she’d intended to weed, then stretched out her aching back, satisfied with her progress. The beans would be in soon. Corn, too, and the tomatoes. Dyuvad might like those. He hadn’t turned his nose up at anything she’d given him so far, though he acted like he’d never eaten most of what she’d cooked. What kind of a man hadn’t tasted bacon?

Maybe he was Muslim.

She tossed the last weed into the compost pile in the corner of the fenced-in area, hefted her hoe across one shoulder, and fastened the garden gate securely behind herself. No, he couldn’t be Muslim. They didn’t eat pork at all. Jews, neither. Hindus were vegetarians, or was that Buddhists?

Maybe he was just from a country that hadn’t discovered the gustatory pleasure of pan-fried bacon, was all.

Except she had this funny feeling tucked deep inside her that Dyuvad had never even seen a lot of the fruits and vegetables she kept on hand, let alone tasted them. It was almost like he was experiencing food for the first time, testing the first bite, savoring the next, wolfing down the last. Like a man who’d only ever eaten nutritional supplements or something equally tasteless.

Like one who hadn’t eaten regular food at all.

She ambled up the path from the garden to the house, around the remnants of the orchard her grandparents had planted and her parents had let go, along the outside of the fence penning the goats out of mischief. When she got to the house, a sight greeted her. Dyuvad was sitting on the porch steps holding a library book and wearing his fancy watch, a pair of shorts they’d picked up at Wal-Mart yesterday, and not a stitch besides. Kelly sat on one side of him, Tiny on the other, both dressed in play shorts and t-shirts.

Rachel paused at the corner of the house and leaned against the hoe, listening carefully. What were those three up to?

“You sure you want me to read it, Mr. Dyuvad?” Kelly asked. “I ain’t never knowed a grownup what couldn’t read.”

“I haven’t yet learned to read your language,” Dyuvad said.

“You gotta say ain’t,” Kelly corrected. “Else you sound like a teacher or something.”

Rachel stifled a laugh. She’d expected Kelly to help Dyuvad relax his language a little. Not exactly like that, though.

“Today, I am a teacher, Lady Kelly, and you are mine. Here. What does this say?”

Kelly scratched the end of her nut brown nose and tipped the book toward her. “It says the Earth is, like, a gazillion miles away from the sun.”

Dyuvad clucked his tongue. “Don’t summarize. Read every word.”

“That’ll take all day!”

“Only if you procrastinate.”

“But every word? That’s kinda hard, Mr. Dyuvad.”

“We’re both learning about the Earth, remember? And if we finish this section, maybe we’ll have time to learn another constellation before lunch.”

Kelly heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Ok, all right. Gimme the book.”

Dyuvad obligingly handed the book over. Tiny protested and crawled right into his lap, chattering away in her made-uplanguage. Surprisingly, Dyuvad answered her in kind, dropping into a guttural drawl, then tacked on, “In English, Lady Bettina.”

That startled Rachel good. She hadn’t told Dyuvad Tiny’s full name. They rarely used it, hadn’t since she was born. Bettina had been too much of a mouthful for Kelly to handle, so they’d shortened it to Tiny and the nickname had stuck.

But how had Dyuvad known that name?

Rachel shook her head, refusing to let even a whiff of unease build in her mind. There had to be a reasonable explanation, just like there was a reasonable explanation as to why Dyuvad didn’t know what bacon was and how he understood Tiny when nobody else could.

She backtracked to the shed, cleaned the dirt off the hoe, and stored it. Yup, she was certain there was a reasonable explanation for all that, and Dyuvad was going to spell it out as soon as the girls went down for a nap that afternoon.

After lunch, Rachel put Tiny to bed for a nap and Kelly to bed with a book for a nice, little siesta. She came back into the kitchen and found Dyuvad cleaning up their sandwich makings.

“I can do that,” she said.

He zipped a bag of prepackaged deli meat closed and stuffed it into the fridge. “I’ve got it. You should sit down and rest while you can.”

“I rested enough over lunch.”

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