“Of course! It is ‘kissing’.”
“But we are doing it wrong, Wan. Wait. Do it again while I do this.” She protruded the tip of her tongue between almost closed lips and ran it back and forth across his closed ones. “I think,” she said, moving her head away, “that that is a better way, don’t you? It makes me feel-it makes me feel-I feel a little bit as though I were going to throw up.”
Alarmed, he tried to step back, but she followed him closely. “Not really throw up, just real funny.”
He stayed tensely near her, face held away, but his expression was troubled. Carefully keeping the pitch of his voice down, he said, “Tiny Jim says people do this before copulating. Or one person does it sometimes to see if the other person is in heat.”
“In heat, Wan! That stinks. Say ‘in love’.”
“I think that ‘in love’ is different,” he said stubbornly, “but anyway to kiss is related to copulating. Tiny Jim says-“
She put her hands on his shoulders. “Tiny Jim isn’t here.”
“No, but Paul doesn’t want us to-“
“Paul isn’t here,” she said, stroking his slim neck with the tips of her fingers to see what that felt like. “Lurvy isn’t here either. Anyway, none of what they think matters.” The way it felt, she decided, was quite strange. It wasn’t really as though she were going to throw up, but as though some sort of liquid readjustment were going on inside her belly, a sensation like nothing she had ever known before. It was not at all unpleasant. “Let me take your clothes off, Wan, and then you can take off mine.”
After they had practiced kissing again she said, “I think we should not be standing up now.” And some time later, when they were lying down, she opened her eyes to stare into his wide-open ones.
As he raised himself for better leverage he hesitated. “If I do that,” he said, “perhaps you will get pregnant.”
“If you don’t do that,” she said, “I think I will die.”
When Janine woke up, hours later, Wan was already awake and dressed, sitting at the side of the room, leaning against the gold-skeined wall. Janine’s heart went out to him. He looked like himself fifty years later. The youthful face seemed to have lines graven by decades of trouble and pain.
“I love you, Wan,” she said.
He stirred and shrilled, “Oh, yes-“ Then he caught himself and dropped his voice to a grumble, “Oh, yes, Janine. And I love you. But I do not know what they will do.”
“Probably they won’t hurt you, Wan.”
Scornfully, “Me? It is you I worry about, Janine. This is where I have lived all my life and sooner or later this would have happened. But you-I am worried about you.” He added gloomily, “They are very noisy out there, too. Something is happening.”
“I don’t think they will hurt us-any more, I mean,” Janine corrected herself, thinking about the dreaming couch. The distant chirping cries were coming closer. She dressed quickly and looked around, as Tor’s voice hailed Hooay outside the door.
There was nothing to show what had happened. Not even a drop of blood. But when Tor opened the door, fussed and worried, he stopped to squint at them suspiciously, then sniffed the air. “Perhaps I will not have to breed you, Danine, after all,” he said, kind but frightened. “But Danine! Oowan! There is a terrible thing! Tar has fallen asleep and the old female has run away!”
Wan and Janine were dragged to the spindle, filled with nearly all of the Old Ones. They were milling around in panic. Three of them lay sprawled and snoring where they had been dumped-Tar and two others of Lurvy’s guards, failures in their missions, found sound asleep and brought back in fear and disgrace for the judgment of the Oldest One. Who lay motionless but alert on his pedestal, cascades of color rippling around his perimeter.
To the flesh-and-blood creatures the Oldest One showed nothing of his thoughts. He was metal. He was formidable. He could be neither understood nor challenged. Neither Wan nor Janine, nor any of his near hundred quaking children, could perceive the fear and anger that raced through his circulating memories. Fear that his plans were in jeopardy. Rage that his children had failed to carry out their orders.
The three that had failed would have to be punished, to set an example. The hundred-odd others would also have to be punished-somewhat more lightly, so that the race would not become extinct-for failing to keep the three to their duty. As for the intruders-there was no punishment grave enough for them! Perhaps they should be abolished, like any other challenging organism that threatened to damage its host. Perhaps worse than that. Perhaps nothing within his powers was quite severe enough.
But what was still in his power? He forced himself to stand. Janine saw the ripple of lights flicker and freeze into a pattern as the Oldest One rose to his extended height and spoke. “The female is to be recaptured and preserved,” he said. “This is to be done at once.”
He stood there, wobbling uneasily; the effectors for his limbs were performing erratically. He allowed himself to kneel once more while he pondered his options. The exertion of going to the control room to set course-the turmoil in his mind that had led him to do it-half a million years of existence, all had taken their toll. He needed time to “rest”-time, that is, for his autonomic systems to retrace and repair what damage they could, and perhaps time no longer would be enough. “Do not wake me again till this is done,” he said, and the lights resumed their random flicker, and slowly dwindled to darkness.
Janine, circled in Wan’s arm-his body half toward the Oldest One, half sheltering her, trembling with fear-knew without being told that “preserved” meant killed. She was frightened, too.
But she was also puzzled.
The Old Ones who lay snoring through their trial and judgment had not fallen asleep by chance. Janine recognized the results of a sleep-gun. Janine knew also that none of her party had had one.
For that reason, Janine was not entirely surprised when, an hour later and back in their pen, they heard a stifled grunt from outside.
She was not surprised to see her sister run in, waving a gun and calling to them; not surprised that behind Lurvy a tattered Paul stepped over the sleeping form of Tor. She was not even surprised, or not very much surprised, to see that with them was another armed man she almost recognized. She was not sure. She had met him only when she was a child. But he looked like the person she had seen on the relayed PV broadcasts from Earth, and in jolly messages that came from him on anniversaries and holidays: Robin Broadhead.
15 Older Than the Oldest One
Not at his worst-not even when he was feeling older than the Oldest One himself and as dead as dead Payter-had Paul looked as bad as the pitiful creature waving a gun at him from the hatch of his own ship. Under the skungy, month-old beard the man’s face looked like a mummy’s. He stank.
“You’d better take a bath!” Paul snapped. “And put that silly gun away.”
The mummy slumped against the hatch of the ship. “You’re Paul Hall,” it said, squinting at him. “For God’s sake, do you have anything to eat?”
Paul stared past him. “Isn’t there plenty still left in there?” He pushed into the ship and found that, of course, there were stacks of CHON-food packets exactly as they had been left. The mummy had been into the water bags, had ripped at least three of them open; the floor of the ship was puddled and muddied. Paul offered a ration. “Keep your voice down,” he ordered. “And by the way, who are you?”
“I’m Robin Broadhead. What do you do with this?”
“Bite into it,” snapped Paul, exasperated-less because of the man himself, or even because of the way he smelled, than because he was still shaking. He had been terrified that it would be an Old One he had come across so unexpectedly. But-Robin Broadhead! What was he doing here?
But he could not put the question just then. Broadhead was almost literally starving. He turned the flat pillow of food over in his hands, frowning and shaking, and then bit into a corner of it. As soon as he found it could be chewed he wolfed it down, crumbs spilling from his mouth. He stared up at Paul while he jammed his mouth full faster than his teeth could deal with it. “Take it easy,” Paul said, alarmed. But he was too late. The unfamiliar food, after so long a deprivation, did what could have been expected of it. Broadhead choked, gagged and vomited it up. “Damn you!” Paul snarled. “They’ll smell you all the way to the spindle!”