Inside, I showed him around. The largest bedroom was mine, and I had an office set up in the smallest one. “I used to have a housemate,” I told Kade, showing him the third bedroom. There was a single bed and a built in wardrobe in there, but not much else. “A guy called Max lived here for a year or so, but he got a girlfriend a while back, and he ended up moving in with her about two months ago.” I had no strong feelings about him moving out. It had been convenient having someone to help look after the place, particularly when I wasn’t here, but I also enjoyed the peace and quiet now that he was gone.
There was also a bathroom with built-in laundry, a small living room and a kitchen that had seen better days. Not that I did a whole lot of cooking. Left to my own devices, I tended to opt for pre-packaged meals. I just didn’t see the point in going to a whole lot of effort if I was the only one to enjoy it.
But now that Kade was here, I had a feeling that was going to change.
“Would you prefer to sleep in my bed with me, or in your own room?” I asked Kade. From the research I’d been doing, I’d learned that it was common for dimari to share a bed with their masters – in non-Alliance space, at least. And if they were being used as sex slaves, that made a certain amount of sense. But it said nothing about whether they would have chosen to do so or not, given the option.
Kade stared at me in mute surprise for a moment. Then he dropped his gaze to the floor and demurely said, “I am here to fulfil your desires. I will sleep wherever you would like me to sleep.”
I repressed a sigh. This, right here, was the problem. Every time I tried to elicit an opinion or a preference from Kade, he just reverted to the same rote statement about being here to serve me. Was it because he didn’t trust me? Or because he’d been taught that his opinion didn’t matter? Or had that brain-frying fuckery the Eumadians did actually destroyed his ability to have an opinion in the first place? I didn’t believe that last option. If the dimari didn’t care about their environments, they wouldn’t have bothered killing themselves.
“Okay,” I said, knowing I’d used the word about three million times today. “Let’s get some dinner going first, and then I’ll decide about that one later.” I didn’t know what the right answer was, with regards to the sleeping arrangements, and though it was stupid, I was hoping that something might happen during the evening that would give me some sort of epiphany about what Kade would actually prefer.
I’d done a lot of thinking about our potential sleeping arrangements, along with a number of other details about Kade’s role in my home. Plenty of people would have insisted that he should have his own room, for the sake of privacy and to avoid insinuations of sexual abuse. But since everyone else was also inadvertently contributing to their dimari’s demise, I had decided to take a mental step back and stop assuming I knew the right answers to all of these questions. Kade had to have a preference, or at the very least, an expectation about how things should be organised. I just had to find the right question to ask or the right subtleties of phrasing to get a hint from him, one way or the other.
I set the groceries on the counter and began unpacking them. Then, a moment later, I noticed Kade loitering beside the fridge, looking unusually anxious. His eyes were fixed on the groceries littering the counter, while his hands flexed repeatedly.
Ah. This one, I knew the answer to. “Come over here and I’ll show you where everything is kept,” I said, waving him closer to me. We went through the kitchen step by step; the pantry, where I put the food, the cupboards with the plates and cups, the larger, corner cupboard where I kept the cooking pans, then the cupboard under the sink where the detergent and sponges were stored. “There’s not much in the fridge at the moment,” I said, as I put the milk, eggs and cheese inside. “We can go shopping tomorrow to get some more supplies.” I tried not to leave much in the fridge while I was on rotation. Some nights, I got to come home and sleep in my own bed, but I never knew when I might be sent out on a mission and not be home again for a week or more. Coming home to spoiled milk and furry, green cheese was never pleasant.
“Do you know much about cooking?” I asked. I was working on the assumption that, whether I wanted him to or not, Kade was going to expect to do most of the cooking himself. And a large chunk of the housework as well, though thankfully, being a small place, there wasn’t all that much of it most of the time.
“Yes, sir,” he said eagerly. “I’ve been taught how to prepare food for a variety of different species…” He trailed off. “Although, not for humans,” he finished, sounding rather defeated about it.
“That’s okay,” I said, brushing right past his apprehension. “If you know the basic principles, it won’t be hard to teach you the details of what humans like to eat. Have you had chicken before?” Chickens, being the remarkable little birds that they were, had proven incredibly adaptable, and since humans had left earth, the humble creatures had spread to dozens of different planets and become a favourite of multiple species. They were one of the easiest meat animals to grow on Rendol 4.
“Yes, sir,” Kade replied.
“And did you like it?”
Kade hesitated, his eyes flitting from side to side, before he stated, “Yes, sir,” in a monotone.
Sooner or later, I was going to figure out what he actually meant with these flat statements and automatic answers.
“Have you ever tasted a lemon?” I asked next. The meal I was planning on preparing was a fairly simple one, both because I was too tired to make anything complicated, and because it would be easier to teach Kade to make something straightforward to begin with.
“No, sir,” he replied.
“Well, I wouldn’t recommend tasting one by itself. They’re very sour. But mixed with cream, they can add a beautiful little zing to a meal.” I filled the kettle and got it heating the water to cook the pasta, then showed Kade how to chop the chicken and zucchini. He paid close attention, asking a few questions about the garlic and how to know when the pasta was finished, but fifteen minutes later, we had a meal – chicken and zucchini in a creamy lemon garlic sauce, served over wholemeal fettuccini.
“There you go. Your first human meal,” I said with a smile, as I carried the plates to the table. I had asked Kade to set out cutlery and to get us each a glass of water, but he hesitated as I set the plate down at the empty space across from me. “Please sit down,” I said, indicating the chair. “I know some dimari are expected to eat after their masters, but since it’s just the two of us, I think that would be unnecessarily formal. I would prefer that we eat together.” Would laying everything out with the reasoning behind it make him more accepting of the entirely casual way I would be running this house? This was one of the places where his ‘I’m here to serve your desires’ attitude might actually come in handy. If my desire was clearlystated as wanting him to share the meal with me, would that bypass any of the strict rules he’d been taught? If I balanced that with clear expectations of which household duties were his, and provided him with meaningful work at the base, would that be enough to maintain his mental health? Or was there some other ingredient that I was missing? Well, I still hadn’t solved the puzzle of where he was supposed to sleep, so I wasn’t going to start congratulating myself too soon.
Kade ate without complaint or hesitation, and I watched him surreptitiously throughout the meal. He had no problem using a knife and fork, though I knew that not every species used similar utensils. The Derelians ate everything using spoons. The Wasops skewered their food on pointed sticks. The Basuba ate exclusively with their hands, eschewing utensils entirely.
By the time the meal was finished, I was yawning, a week long trek plus my lack of sleep last night catching up with me. I’d installed a dishwasher about a year after I’d moved in here, and I was thoroughly grateful for that now. I scooped the leftovers into a plastic container and put it in the fridge – with Kade carefully watching my every move – and then I showed him how to stack the dirty plates and pans in the dishwasher. I explained how to turn it on, but also said that we wouldn’t bother tonight, since it wasn’t full enough yet. No doubt he would rapidly take over the task of keeping the kitchen clean.
Once everything was put away, I turned to Kade, carefully considering my next question. “What did you think of the food?” I asked. I’d figured out by now that if I asked him if he’d liked it, he would just say ‘Yes, sir’. I was developing a theory that he had been trained to agree with almost everything his master said, and I needed to find a way to bypass that little quirk. Perhaps an open ended question would give me more insight into his true opinion?
“The chicken was cooked more thoroughly than the way the Rentrals like it prepared,” he said, after giving his answer some thought. “I enjoyed the way humans cook it.” I fought not to cringe at the implications of that statement, and his earlier bland reply to the question of whether he liked chicken suddenly made sense. If he’d been made to eat it raw, or only half-cooked, I could understand his dislike. And that, in itself, was informative. The flat ‘yes, sir’ in response to that question had, in fact, meant ‘no’.
“I have not had garlic before,” Kade said as well… but that seemed to be the end of anything he had to say about it.
“And what did you think of the garlic?” I asked.
He hesitated. “It is quite a strong flavour.”
He didn’t like garlic. Okay, noted. I wanted to ask more questions – Had he liked the lemon flavour? Did he like pasta, or was it too squishy for his tastes? – but I was tired, and I was concerned that pushing him too hard allat once would do more harm than good. I had a few answers and the beginnings of a method to tease more information out of him. That would do for tonight.
“We both need to have a shower, and then I need to get some sleep,” I told him. “I’ll get you a comm-screen as well. There are plenty of books in the military library that you can read, if you’re bored at any point.” Just because I wanted to go to sleep didn’t mean that he had to. “You can change the language of the text using voice activated prompts, so it should be able to display in Eumadian script.”
