Chapter 16

"That's terrifying. That's — that's cruel."

"Cutting and slicing, and then burning it at high heat? How can anyone do something that appalling to a corpse?"

The soldiers watching from a distance conferred quietly, faces full of feeling. "On a battlefield, death is over in a moment. Here, apparently, you have to undergo that after you've fallen."

"A body scorched by an energy weapon is nightmare enough. Here it also gets eaten."

"Earth humans. What a frightening species."

Well, look at the thing squarely. A kitchen is stocked with an array of edged weapons, the work of skinning and boning goes on there daily, and the number of lives ended on the average household counter is probably not far short of what a small military engagement manages.

Worse still, those dismembered remains are then eaten, mouthful by mouthful, by people sitting around a table together, laughing and making conversation. Put that way, an Earth kitchen may well be the single most dangerous location in the universe.

Go on, Mary.

With a rich body of experience accumulated on Earth, a person can survive anywhere.

...

Mary was watching television.

By scientific measure, the most repetitive and most relentlessly rebroadcast programming in the universe, with the most tightly looped scripts, is the infomercial on the interstellar shopping channel.

In Patricia's assessment, this programming was an all-purpose treasure for domestic life, travel, language acquisition, listening practice and killing time, and she promptly added it to Mary's required curriculum in the Blood common tongue.

There was a practical reason for that channel too. Mary's waking hours ran exactly opposite to the Blood's.

She generally woke as they were going into dormancy.

She was preparing for sleep as they were beginning their day.

So she missed every daytime program without exception, and was left with the advertising channel still looping endlessly late at night.

The television here was less a television than a holographic projector.

An egg-shaped hemispherical device which, at the press of a button, put life-sized three-dimensional figures into the room.

The effect was realistic enough that Mary had two or three times reached out surreptitiously to touch the people inside it.

At present Mary sat cross-legged on the carpet with her chin in both hands, watching with great seriousness the presenter in the middle of the room — a man styled like an English butler — deliver an unbroken sales pitch for the hottest new product on Thorne: the portable sliding-lid dormancy coffin.

The shopping-channel salesmen here could certainly talk, but they didn't have the exaggerated expressions and flailing shouts of the Earth version.

The presenter in the hologram wore a tailcoat, and his gestures and stance carried a thoroughly trained elegance. A faint smile, a handsome face — put him on Earth and he had genuine idol potential.

Here he was a shopping-channel demonstrator.

Was there a species-level gap even in home shopping?

Mary sighed, set down the voice recorder she was using for vocabulary, and looked over at the row of extravagant windows along both sides of the hall.

Ever since Prince Anthony discovered she could open one of them with her bare hands, every window lock in the castle had been replaced, in minimum time, with heavy security fittings that required a specific biometric print to open by remote.

After which, never mind bare hands — give Mary a rocket launcher and she might not manage it.

Mary sighed heavily. So she really was in a cage now.

She got up and crossed the soft carpet to the window.

She hooked both hands over the frame and rested her forehead lightly against the cold glass, looking out at the white world of ice and snow.

Her breath left a soft fog on the enormous blue-violet crystal set into the window.

It was still snowing out there.

Patricia had told her Thorne had only two seasons in a year.

The long snow season, when everything sleeps, and the rain season, when a variety of dangerous organisms become unusually active.

Snow or rain, with a genuinely clear day almost never occurring, so that strong sunlight never appeared on this planet at all.

Cold, damp, saturated with fog. For the Blood, conditions were essentially perfect.

For a human being, that climate and that environment meant lethal danger.

Even if she found some way out of this castle, could she actually survive alone on this planet?

Leaning at the window, Mary hunched her shoulders against a draft, and remembered that the fur wrap she'd been wrapped in was lying in front of the projector.

That Mary had any warm clothing at all was down to Patricia's research findings.

Earth humans, unlike the Blood, who are poikilothermic, are homeothermic animals requiring a core temperature sustained long-term at approximately thirty-seven degrees Celsius.

Unable to maintain that in a cold environment, they may even fall into dangerous hypothermia.

And one of the principal methods by which humans maintain body temperature is stripping the fur off other animals and wrapping themselves in it.

Prince Anthony had decided that the thermoregulating protective suit developed specifically for Mary by the Council's research institute wrapped her too thoroughly — unattractive, and obstructive to the dispersal of certain sweet scents — and vetoed it without mercy.

He preferred the way Mary looked bundled up in fur, which he found appealing, and accordingly ordered expensive white Triskar fox pelts in from Fur, made up into a light, thick cloak, to keep Mary warm and alive.

Prince Anthony evidently also considered a fur cloak of this kind rather stylish, and had one made for himself while he was placing the order.

Prince Anthony was beautiful, expensively dressed, and his taste had long been treated as the benchmark. He was enormously popular among the Blood, and routinely imitated.

Which is to say that he was the Blood's ultimate trendsetter.

And so, after Anthony wore that magnificent fur cloak to a single private gathering of the upper class, a craze for fur swept the whole of the Blood aristocracy at speed.

For a while, business at every furrier was extraordinary, and heaven knows how many alien animals came to grief over it for no reason they could have understood.

While the source of the entire craze remained in a freezing castle, sniffing, shivering.

Behind her, the endlessly chattering shopping channel went abruptly silent.

Mary turned around in surprise to find Prince Anthony in a soft-looking purple embroidered robe, arms folded, leaning against the door frame.

His long silver hair hung loose, and those cold eyes were narrowed slightly, examining her where she leaned at the window.

Mary glanced quickly outside. The sun hadn't fully set; by rights it wasn't yet the hour the Blood generally woke.

Judging by the half-asleep, indolent look of him — had the television woken him up?

"Uh. Sorry," Mary said quietly, dropping her head.

He ignored the apology entirely, simply watching her, and asked slowly, "I see you leaning here looking out rather often. Is there something in particular out there? Or are you planning to escape?"