But that didn’t necessarily make her a mean or demanding master. As she’d rightly pointed out, domestic servants thrived in a busy house with plenty of organising to do. So finally, I nodded. “Fair enough,” I said, feeling another small piece of the weight on my shoulders ease off. “Let’s get Soka and Colonel Henderson back in here and get Toz ready to be activated for the bonding.”
Half an hour later, I was watching Kade as he stared at the image on the screen. He was wearing a look of satisfaction, as he watched the newly bonded couple get to know each other. Helen was sitting at the table in the conference room with Toz, showing him pictures of her children, via her comm. Toz seemed utterly enthralled. He was leaning forward, pointing to various details in the photos, smiling all the while. That was one of the things that had made me want to give Helen a chance, for all my initial doubts about her. From the descriptions in Toz’soperations manual, he’d been trained specifically to help raise a family’s children, and I’d imagined how disappointing it would have been for him if he’d ended up in a family without any. It was a simple equation; if he loved Helen’s children, then Helen would love him. It was as much as I could possibly ask for.
CHAPTER SIX
AIDEN
“Excuse me, Commander Hill?”
I looked up from the list of names I was staring at, then yawned. “Sorry,” I apologised to Soka, waiting in the doorway of my office. “It’s been a long day.”
“And we’re makingamazingprogress, so I dare say all the hard work is paying off.” That was Soka, through and through; always focusing on the positives, but in a way that never dismissed the effort it took to get there. It was one of the reasons everyone around the base loved her.
“But on the topic of hard work, your next appointment is here. Kana, Torry and Steve. They’re waiting in meeting room two.”
I nodded and downed the last of my coffee. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, but after the day we’d had, I didn’t think the extra caffeine would stop me sleeping. As it was, it might be just enough to keep me functioning for another couple of hours. Because while Soka was right – wehadmade a huge amount of progress today – the work was far from over.
“All right, what are we doing next?” I muttered, looking up the names Soka had mentioned in the long list of messages I’dreceived today. “Kana, Torry… Oh! Right, yes. They’re the ones who are looking at taking the erotic companion,” I said to Kade, who was sitting beside me, looking as alert as ever. Some days, I seriously wondered how he did it. Vangravian metabolism wasn’t all that different from a human’s, but he seemed to have a level of stamina that I could never match, even on my best days. Later tonight, though, he would certainly crash, just the same as I would.
“All right, let’s go see what they have to say for themselves.”
“These people are not part of the database, are they?” Kade asked, as we headed out of my office and back to the meeting rooms.
“No, they were recommended by Delliwari Hanveg. You remember her dimari, Kit, from back in January?” Kade nodded. “So they’re friends of hers. Given that she already owns a dimari, she says she’s given them a good rundown of their emotional and sexual needs, and both she and they think they’ve got a good shot at being able to care for Nol. Right now, that’s all I know about them.”
We arrived at the meeting room, and I paused outside the door to brace myself. It wasn’t just the long day that was wearing me down. After a year of dealing with more than my fair share of idiots, I was always leery about introducing new people to the idea of adopting a dimari. Far too many of them had misguided notions about how easy it was going to be. They never seemed to understand that the complexities of dealing with consent, in a slave who had been trained to respond to the slightest sexual hints on a hair-trigger, was a nightmare even at the best of times.
Figuring I was as ready as I was going to get, I opened the door and stepped into the room. “Good afternoon,” I greeted the three people sitting around the wide table. “I’m Commander Aiden Hill, and this is Kade, my dimari.”
Our visitors were a mixed group – one human, one Solof and one Wasop. They all stood up, offering their hands. “Hi, I’m Torry,” the Solof woman said. “And this is Kana” – she pointed to the Wasop man – “and Steve.” The human man. “Thank you so much for meeting with us.”
I nodded, moving to take a seat opposite them. Kade automatically sat beside me. “Thank you for coming. I appreciate you making the effort on such short notice. I spoke to Delliwari at some length this morning, so I understand she’s given you a fairly good idea of what adopting a dimari involves. But that said, I’d still like to go over some of the finer details with you, and hear a bit about your lives and how you see a dimari fitting into that picture. And you’ll also have the opportunity to ask any questions you have. Kade is a veritable fountain of information when it comes to the dimari,” I added, with a faint smile, “and there is absolutely no topic that’s too taboo to ask about. We’re dealing with an erotic companion, after all, and as Delliwari explained to you, that means that Nol is highly focused on sex, while at the same time, Alliance laws are very explicit in the need for consent, regardless of Nol’s status as a dimari.”
Whatever this odd little trio said next would be telling. I hadn’t yet got a feel for how they fit together, and I’d had plenty of meetings like this cut short very quickly because the participants made some comment right off the bat which effectively nullified the stern warning I’d just given them about consent.
The three of them glanced at each other, and they all nodded somewhat meekly. Okay, that wasn’t the worst start. “So first of all,” I said, “I’d like to hear a bit about you. Your living arrangements, your occupations, why you would consider adopting a dimari and how you would see your circumstances as being beneficial to Nol.”
“Sure, yeah, absolutely,” Torry began, and I was rapidly getting the impression that she was the unofficial spokesperson for the group. I made a mental note of the idea that I was going to have to get the other two talking at some point, to make sure they were all on the same page. “So the first thing to explain, I suppose, is that we’re a triad. We all date each other, we live in the same house, we share all the chores and the finances, all that sort of thing. And we know a certain amount about the dimari from watching Delliwari with Kit. So when she told us there was one needing a home, I suppose one of the first reasons to adopt one is because we know more about them than the average person. I’m not saying we’re experts, by any means,” she added hastily. “But we visit Kit on a regular basis and we’ve all done a fair bit of reading on the slave trade and how it’s been affecting people on Rendol 4 who’ve found themselves bonded to a dimari. There were a few notable changes to our cultural norms when the Culrads joined the Alliance, and we’re all kind of… Well, Kana studied art at university, I majored in Alliance history and Steve minored in psychology, so we’re all very interested in the ongoing social development of the Alliance. And since we allied with the Culrads, there’s been a lot more noise in the media about the dimari. And, I mean, leaving aside that fact that the slave trade is an awful thing, it’s actually very interesting to read about.” Almost as soon as the words left her mouth, she was flushing and fidgeting. “Sorry, I think that came out wrong. I don’t mean that we can just dismiss the fact that they’reslaves, you know? Butintellectually,it’s still...”
“It’s okay, I understand what you mean,” I jumped in, wanting to let her off the hook a little. “Talking about the slave trade is a very complicated thing. But you’re right, from a purely academic perspective, it’s very interesting.” I was developing a rapid like of Torry. She’d started off the whole conversation with a degree of concern for dimari welfare and an interest in politics.So far, there had been no mention of sex, no expression of how great it would be to have more domestic help, no hint of an exploitation mindset whatsoever. It was still early days, but it was as good an opening as I could have asked for.
“So, uh… anyway, that was our first thought, you know, that we’re a step up from complete novices, so we’ve got a decent shot at giving a dimari a good life. And the second bit is… well, I guess this is the part that gets awkward, ‘cos we’re going to be talking about sex a lot.” It was a necessary part of the conversation, but the apologetic way she was bringing it up maintained my tentative trust in her intentions. “It was brought up first by Delliwari. That’s why she called us. Because an erotic companion needs a lot of sex – or, at least, that’s what she said?”
“Yes,” I confirmed. “They’re trained to expect sex an absolute minimum of once a day, and fairly often, quite a lot more than that.” I just left it at that, a short explanation of the bare facts. If we ended up going ahead with their adoption of Nol, I’d give them a lot more information, but I was still feeling out their intentions at this stage.
“So… we’re a triad. There are three of us who could be fulfilling Nol’s sexual needs, so from a purely pragmatic perspective, that’s a lot easier than one person trying to manage that by themselves. And the other thing Delliwari said – andpleasejump in if I’m getting any of this seriously wrong, I’m just going by what she told us – is that the dimari very much want to believe that…” She trailed off all of a sudden, her gaze drifting sideways to settle on Kade. “Um…”
I had an inkling of what she was going to say next, but I waited, wanting to see if she could figure out how to say it. It wasn’t the first time I’d been deliberately difficult or manipulative in one of these interviews, but I had an hour or two at the very most to figure out if I was comfortable sending a dimari to live with these people, and putting a bit of pressureon them wasn’t the worst way to see how they responded to stressful situations.
“Is there… Um… You said that… Uh… You said there wasnotopic that was taboo in front of Kade,” she stammered out. “Um…”
Kana spoke up then, apparently having an easier time of finding the words than Torry was. “Kade, you’re clearly aware of the process involved for people to adopt a dimari,” he said to Kade. That instantly got him two solid points in his favour, firstly because he’d managed to work out what Torry was trying to say from her abortive rambling – which spoke of a partnership in which the participants knew each other very well – and secondly because he’d addressed the question directly to Kade, rather than to me. “So according to Delliwari, most dimari arebought, rather thanfound.”
I knew exactly where he was going with this now, and they’d done a good enough job of expressing it that I once again decided to cut them some slack. “Kade is entirely aware that dimari on Rendol 4 are found, rather than bought. He himself was found, and we’ve had some long conversations about that. You can say whatever you need to in front of him.”
Torry breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Okay, good. I just didn’t want to go blundering in if he didn’t know that. But Delliwari said that a dimari wants to believe that they’ve specifically been chosen and bought intentionally. She said they get very upset if they’ve just been abandoned on a hill somewhere and some random person comes along to claim them.”
“They do, indeed,” I confirmed, and I was impressed to find that Delliwari had remembered that information from my instruction manual and thought to pass it along.
