At the edge of the firelight she could make out the smoldering ruins of the little ville. A group of scrawny, white-limbed figures rushed from the deep shadows, bearing more fuel for the pyre. Some carried great armloads of thatch, broken pieces of furniture, piles of the pathetic personal belongings of the ville’s inhabitants- lice-infested straw beds, flea-ridden furs and coarsely woven blankets. Others ran forward in pairs, dragging limp human bodies between them by the heels or wrists. Four of the pale firebugs carried a struggling, screaming, dismembered hog. With all its legs torn off, it looked like an enormous, grotesquely bloated, pink grub.
Into the great fire went the thatch, the people and the pig. Fountains of sparks shot into the black sky, then the night echoed with overlapping shrieks of agony-the great sow wasn’t the only still-living thing that had been tossed into the blaze. Trembling charred hands reached out through the curtain of fire, clutched at nothingness and fell back.
Mildred’s human spirit retreated in horror from the sight, even as her strange new body delighted in it, spinning and capering in ecstasy. In her wild exuberance she collided with a fellow reveler. The impact bounced her from the dance track at the edge of the bonfire. She stumbled and slipped on the muddy ground. As she caught herself with a hand, she looked up.
Fifty feet away, at the edge of the light, stood another figure, impossibly tall and as still as a statue. Obviously, enormously male, its gleaming, oiled body was hairless and naked, but for a knotted loincloth and combat boots.
“Kaaa…” she said automatically, the sound rippling up from her throat like the purr of a cat.
What the cry meant, Mildred didn’t know.
But it felt delicious.
The grant had odd, piebaldlike markings on his skin: brown cloud shadows crawling over his snowy whiteness. A bandolier of black-tipped cartridges hung across his massive chest and shoulders-ammo for his weapon, the mother of all shoulder-fired blasters. In his hands the M-60 machine gun looked like a child’s toy.
He didn’t have the look of kin, Jior the familiar, rank-sour smell.
He looked and smelled like the god he was.
Mildred prostrated herself before him, pressing her face deep into the mud. Kill or die-mere was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. When she raised her face, he
gestured sharply with the machine gun, acknowledging her supplication and releasing her from it
“Kaaa…” Mildred purred, crawling backward on her belly.
When she rose and turned again to the pyre, a great plume of sparks shot skyward. Her kin had just fed it more fuel. Fresh screams cut through the throbbing roar. Mildred’s body responded to the sudden surge in heat with an instant jerk-dance. Then something bounced out of the fire, landing almost on top of her feet.
A baby.
It writhed in its own miniature ball of flame, screeching like a teakettle.
A pang of human conscience pierced her mat-trans dream state. For a second Dr. Mildred Wyeth, the trained physician, the care giver, fought for control. Though she felt the baby’s pain and wanted to save its life, she also felt an opposing and even more powerful need: to kill all those not kin, to burn the corpses and stomp the dry bones to powder. The woman struggled to make the alien body respond to her will, but it was as if her true, human self was stuck to flypaper-she could only drag herself a short distance before she was pulled back, exhausted. And before she could reach the dying baby and put out the fire, another pale and scrawny figure stepped up and kicked it back into the heart of the blaze.
Mildred tried desperately to wake up, to end the nightmare, but to no avail. Buffeted by the heat, she
continued to dance like a automaton, drool sliding down her chin and throat and glistening between her rock-hard breasts.
KRYSTY DREAMED she was climbing, hand over foot, up an incredibly steep incline. She moved joyously, as light and quick as a spider across a great, mist-shrouded, gray cliff. As she scaled the face, reality began to shift and skew. The incline’s sheer, vertical surface started to sway and ripple under her weight. It felt more like a net ladder woven from rope than a mountain of rock. As she continued upward through the blinding fog, she realized that it wasn’t made of rope, either. The hand-and footholds she climbed were warm and smooth, and electric to the touch.