Back | Next
Contents

THIRTY-SEVEN Selfsame Seducers

Finished for the day, Eichra Oren watched his audience and clients depart the clearing in apparent varying degrees of perplexity or satisfaction, depending on whether they were human or members of another species. Once more he felt he'd failed to help the former understand the latter, and had the whole task still before him to do over again.

Toward the opposite end of the little grassy spot, only Pulaski lingered, sitting at one end of the log she'd shared with Gutierrez, eyes downcast, fingers playing idly with a long stalk of grass. The assessor was suddenly conscious of what amounted to his orders to do his best to . . . what was the old-fashioned English expression? Compromise her.

Suppressing a sigh, he arose, for some reason stiffer in the joints than he was accustomed to being, thrust his hands in his pockets and, leaving his sword behind on the blanket he'd occupied, ambled toward the girl as casually as he could manage. He'd known that they would find themselves together after this session. Somehow knowing didn't make it any easier.

"Well, there you have it, a much more . . . `normal' sort of procedure."

"No one beheaded," she glanced up briefly, "or impaled."

Not yet, he thought cynically as he reached to take her hand, surprised when she didn't flinch or withdraw. She was without doubt the most clumsy and unattractive young woman he'd ever known. Nothing he could say or do would change that. Despite hymns of altruism sung by the Soviet Americans, he was from a culture vastly more mature, and knew that feeling sorry for the other party was no way to begin a relationship. It occurred to him that he'd felt many things during his brief acquaintances with Estrellita Reille y Sanchez and Rosalind Nguyen, but he had never once felt sorry for either of them.

Letting go of her hand, he put his own at the small of her back above the waistband of her jumpsuit, guiding her across the glade to the blanket and sword he'd left behind. A dubious symbolism, he thought, groping for some inconsequential thing to say to fill the silent air about them. The words didn't come, and she was quiet, too. Soon enough they'd find themselves making love under the tree where his office and residence grew. Without saying it, both realized it was the same place where another woman had died at his hands. He thought of Rosalind and of a novelty postcard one of the Americans had told him about: "Having a wonderful time. Wish you were her."

By mutual consent, they remained standing, silence growing until it threatened to overwhelm them. "Let's climb a tree," Eichra Oren declared suddenly, trying to seize control of his existence again. "I've been meaning to take a closer look at what's happening with my house."

"Okay." There was relief and no small amount of gratitude in her voice as she surveyed the giant before them for a foothold. It wasn't hard, even for him, encumbered by his sword and the accusing blanket. The spot they'd chosen was rough and furrowed, the barklike covering of the great green stalk, and the way it spread to the roots, almost forming stairs. Before they knew it, they'd reached the first branch and were looking down at a broad, flat, off-white shelf formed by the mushroomlike organism Eichra Oren had planted here. Various features of the house-to-be had already become recognizable: partitions, deck railing, "built-in" furniture that looked closer to being half-melted than half-grown. At the back, nearest the trunk, sat the smooth-surfaced platform of a bed.

Eichra Oren tested the fresh growth with a cautious foot, and then stepped down solidly, taking Toya's hand—unnecessarily, in all likelihood—to help her down. She held on once she stood beside him and despite himself, he was gratified. He seemed, the cynical thought arose unbidden again, to be accomplishing the vile deed with marvelous dispatch; Mister Thoggosh would be delighted. Of course Sam, who picked up slang from the Americans at a dismaying rate, would have called it "shooting fish in a barrel." For his own part, everything he said to Toya or did with her made him feel like what they called a "heel." He knew it would forever afterward, whenever he thought about it, but what were a few moral consequences among friends, anyway?

What sickened him most was the way that he'd derided the obsessive American concept of duty. Now, it seemed that the same consideration was compelling him to make unfeeling love to this vulnerable young woman, and he could see with a pitiful clarity how the prospect seemed to fill her with equal amounts of joy and terror. Great Egg, she's a virgin! He was about to hurt her, and himself, for no reason that struck him as particularly worthy, which meant that somehow he'd been corrupted by his contact with collectivism—and so had Mister Thoggosh—and it was possible that he'd never feel clean again.

* * *

Toya gasped. The muscles of Eichra Oren's arms felt like oak where her shoulder blades lay across one of them as the other swept behind her knees to lift her off her feet and lay her down on the low platform. Fine hairs on the back of his hand glistened like gold wire as he reached to her throat for the toggle of her ship-suit zipper and pulled it as far below her waist as it would go. In an instant she lay exposed to his eyes and hands as she had never been to any man, naked from the over-prominent knobs of her collarbones to the first fair curls a handspan below her navel. A single syllable from her lips could make this into rape or something else. Whatever she said, it wouldn't stop what was happening, or change (very much) the way she felt about it.

She reached to lock her fingers into the thick bronze hair at the back of his neck as he pressed his mouth against a small, flat breast she was afraid might disappear altogether if she put her hand behind her own head. Even as she responded to his fingertips pressing their demands into her flesh, she was astonished at what she was doing. A warmth grew, somewhere between her knees and her waist, spreading upward and outward. Asked to describe herself, she'd have said "tech sergeant," and perhaps "amateur paleontologist" after that. "Woman" would never have been her thoughtless, automatic response.

He rolled aside and slipped a hand into her open coverall between her thighs, probing with a finger. A wave of shock and heat went through her, her blood sizzling in its wake as if it were carbonated. She felt limp, weak, about to slide off into sleep, but she was wide awake and focused in a way, and in a place within her mind, that she'd never seen before and never knew existed.

All of her adult life, until just a little while ago, it had been her expectation that she would always be a virgin and would die, at whatever age, in the same unenviable state. She'd never dared dream of this, of finding this kind of happiness. (And she realized as, step by step, he claimed her body in his methodical, relentless way, that she was happy.) It wasn't a matter of having tried and failed. The fact was, fearing humiliation, she'd never tried at all. Such a thing had never consciously occurred to her. If it had, she wouldn't have had the courage. Nor was it that she'd been rejected by men. They hadn't ever noticed her enough to reject her.

Now, on this little island in space, deep within an alien forest, all of that seemed to be changing. Toya never remembered how Eichra Oren got her arms out of her sleeves or the rest of the jumpsuit off her. All at once, he was above her and between her legs. She felt herself parting, felt pressure and a little pain, then wave after cool, white-hot wave of something wonderful and far beyond her power to describe.

Life, it appeared, was full of surprises.

* * *

"Well that was certainly educational."

Sam approached Eichra Oren where the man sat once again at the base of the canopy tree, lost deep in what he felt was a miserable substitute for thought. He was more than a little surprised, given the circumstances, that he'd been physically capable of doing what he'd just done. He was especially disturbed about where it had been accomplished, if "accomplished" was the word. Too many memories, all of them bad, lived here.

Having made love to Toya three times and sent her, dazed and happy, on her way back to the human camp, he'd immediately begun to feel guilty and to despise himself both for the deed and for the feeling it evoked.

"Wonderful," he told the dog, using the language of his people and the implant of the Elders. To an eavesdropper, the two would have appeared to be contemplating one another silently. "Did you watch the whole thing?"

"Would I violate the privacy of a fellow sapient?" Sam sat down beside his human friend, then stretched at length on the grass. He sighed. "Despite your late success, this hasn't been a very lucky assignment, has it, Boss?"

"I feel," Eichra Oren shook his head, "that I've been forced by circumstances to revert to a more primitive philosophical state here."

His canine friend gave the little bark that served him as a laugh, "Bullshit."

"Thanks." Eichra Oren paused, thinking. "You're quite correct. It takes every scrap of honesty, integrity, character, and self-discipline I have, not to blame somebody else—say the Americans—for what seems to be happening to me here. What stings is that this is the very feeling my profession is supposed to help people overcome. Do away with."

Sam yawned, apparently unsympathetic, and rolled to scratch behind one ear. "Somebody told me the other day that California is the only place in the universe where people feel guilty for feeling guilty."

"More than that," the man ignored the dog, "I dread the moment when my assignment here is finished and I have to break things off and hurt her."

"And despite yourself, you're already mentally rehearsing the tragic scene?" The dog yawned again. "Gimme a break, will you? All you're doing is smelling smoke and looking for a fire escape. You can't help it, Boss, it's a reflex. Individuals of my species chew their legs off when they're caught in a trap. In your case, I guess you'd have to chew off your—"

"What rankles most," the man interrupted, "is that the damage I'm inflicting on Toya and myself is all for nothing. The one I'm really angriest at, besides me, is Mister Thoggosh. At him I'm very angry. And before you say a word, Sam, don't bother trying to talk me out of that minor satisfaction."

"Wouldn't dream of it. I know your opinion of the professional methods appropriate to this assignment, Boss. I share them. They don't include sucking face and parts south with a female you don't care for."

Eichra Oren grimaced. "They're corrupting you, too, Sam. That's about the most disgusting turn of phrase I've ever heard."

"For the most disgusting situation we've ever found ourselves in?"

"Well, it does seem that Mister Thoggosh is requiring me to play the game, as the Americans put it, with one hand tied behind my back." He plucked a blade of grass, put it in his mouth, and thought of Rosalind and Toya, Toya and Rosalind. "I can't protect the Elders' damned precious secret unless I have an idea what that secret is. On more than one occasion, I've all but begged that old bag of ink to be more open with me. He seems to regard this whole matter as something personal, something reserved exclusively to the Elders, something they apparently believe doesn't involve any other species."

Sam looked up. "Boss, have you ever suspected that your present `assignment' is just a convenient way of keeping you out of Mister Thoggosh's figurative hair?"

"More than once," the man conceded. "On other occasions, I suspect that something even more sinister might be happening. . . ."

Sam grinned, "You show me your paranoia, I'll show you mine."

"Well," he spat out a bit of leaf and frowned, "you'll remember that we made as detailed a study of this culture as time permitted. And in the course of that study, we ran across all sorts of bizarre ideas either abandoned long ago by the Elders, or never invented by them in the first place. Among them, you'll recall, was this infantile tendency, present in most primitive cultures, which these particular humans don't seem able to outgrow. They believe things without sufficient evidence—often in the face of proof to the contrary—simply because they want to believe them."

The dog responded sourly, "We're talking Yahweh and Company here?"

Eichra Oren nodded. "That infantile tendency's most conspicuous result is the survival and proliferation of religions, long past the period when, in any other culture, they ought to have begun to wither and die."

Sam shook his head, a human gesture. "Looks to me, Boss, like the situation's worse than that—a matter of permanent, deadly fixation at the most primitive stage of cultural development."

"I don't think we contradict one another," the man said. "Look: with these people, mysticism forms—with altruism and collectivism—a tight, mutually supportive, impenetrable network of roots that bind the human mind and make its further progress impossible."

"And all you're hoping now—" Sam's tone fell to a sudden and uncharacteristically serious level. "Pardon the, uh, over-pertinent comment, Boss, but nobody could help observing your confusion and unhappiness. You only hope that the condition isn't as contagious as you fear it might be."

Eichra Oren closed his eyes, breathed in deeply, and exhaled, relieved to hear the words. "Something like that, yes."

"Ain't likely," the dog argued. "One thing separating you from your fellow apes here is the history of your people with respect to mysticism. How many times have I heard your own mother say that their most popular religion was pretty feeble and uncomplicated to begin with, and that it was already feeling the discouraging effects of early scientific progress by the time the Continent was Lost?"

"Yes, my fellow apes, as you charmingly put it, are comparing what they call `Antarctica' with England in its early nineteenth century, when their culture should have started shedding its religions. I don't know what went wrong. For my people, the polar reversal and climatic disaster finished off anybody's faith in benevolent deities. And among those refugees who were `collected,' exposure to the rational philosophy of the Elders did the rest."

Sam snorted. "Whereas it would probably have made these jerks even more religious. So what's the point, if you don't mind me asking—or even if you do."

"Nothing I can put a finger on, just the general feeling of a bad situation. I'm beginning to suspect our Mister Thoggosh—and you'll appreciate how deeply this dismays me, especially since it's none of my business—of something like a religious motivation. In every respect, Sam, this disquieting affair smells of the irrational. And that from someone with a nose a million times less sensitive than yours, my canine friend." He shook his head. "It's uncharacteristic of the Elders in general, and of Mister Thoggosh in particular."

"Religious motivation?" The dog looked him in the eye. "I'd say that rancid old mollusc's behavior is uncharacteristic of the normal relationship between himself and you, and that's what worries you."

Eichra Oren stood up. "One way or another, Sam, I've come to a decision. I'm going to ferret out the secret on my own. With respect to what Mister Thoggosh wants, that will put me closer, faster, to anyone else trying to do the same. Also, and this is no small consideration, it'll satisfy my professional and personal curiosity."

Sam got to his feet as well and wagged his tail. "Make that on our own, Boss, and you've got a deal!"

 

Back | Next
Contents
Framed