“This way, then,” Loga’etoo said. “Do be cautious in your ambulation. Our diminished gravity is usually perceived by humans as pleasurable, but it may also be unexpectedly hazardous in more restricted interior spaces.”
She moved off with surprising speed. In an environment that artificially simulated their own, the Krondaku displayed none of the ponderous lethargy that afflicted them on strong-gravity worlds. The children bounded and leapt along after their exotic hostess, who led them to what looked like a large hole in a raw lava cliff. It was actually the entrance to a Krondak house of worship, and they had to endure a tour of the eerie sanctuary—which seemed to be little more than a bare cavern illuminated by flickering orange grease lamps—before she finally conducted them to an open shaft in one alcove of the temple, where a cage elevator waited. They plunged downward into utter darkness, coming to an abrupt stop in a dimly lit little cave.
Leaving the elevator, Marc and his cousins followed the Krondak female as she slithered down a dank tunnel with many side branches. In addition to signs written in exotic languages, there were occasional notices in Standard English that read:
TO THE CONNUBIAL VAT – ALSO KNOWN AS THE “POOL OF THE MONSTERS”
Since coming to Orb, Marc had visited the Krondaku fairly often; but he never had any desire to see one of their trysting spots, and he felt increasingly ill at ease as he bounced cautiously along behind Loga’etoo. That men and women would experience an enhancement of their erotic response as they cavorted with lascivious invertebrates was a notion he found as repellent and incomprehensible as the other irrational aspects of human sexuality.
The cousins, on the other hand, were quickly recovering their earlier high spirits. Marc was aware of secret mental exchanges going on among the eleven-year-olds, and he supposed that the silly little fools were once again giggling and indulging in callow vulgarity. Finally the group reached a cul-de-sac with two doors. The sign on one said: VIEWING CHAMBER. The other said:
CONNUBIAL VAT ENTRY
ATTENTION, NON-KRONDAK ENTITIES!
PLEASE DO NOT ENTER
WITHOUT THE APPROPRIATE RESPIRATORY
EQUIPMENT IN PLACE
ALL ACTIVITY IS UNDERTAKEN
AT THE RISK OF THE PARTICIPANTS
Loga’etoo opened the door to the viewing chamber and gestured with a tentacle for the children to go in. They found themselves in a black-rock grotto, almost entirely filled by a dark pool. The vibes of the place were strange—scary and thrilling at the same time—and the air temperature was no longer chilly but pleasantly warm. All of the illumination came from deep within the pool, where indistinct large shapes that glowed with shifting, throbbing colors were languidly adrift. Racing swiftly and erratically among the great shining masses were a few smaller ones.
Loga’etoo’s mind spoke: We will move to a place where we will be able to survey the scene beneath the surface. Please do not speak. Many Krondaku hold their sexual congress to be sacred, as do certain humans.
Marc trailed after the others as they descended a narrow ramp. At the bottom was a great transparent window similar to that found in some Earthside aquariums. Now it was possible to see more clearly the Krondak couples, conjoined at the ventral surfaces and suspended in the dense liquid. Their huge bodies, so shapeless and hideous on dry land, had a strange rippling grace when afloat. The tentacles of the mated exotics curled and uncurled in rhythmic mutual motion, and what had once been mere ugly warts on the blotchy Krondak integument were transformed into multicolored luminescent organs pulsating in slow synchrony to the sexual tempo.
And the other, smaller lovers, the bright conjoined darters weaving in and out of the slower dance of the mated Krondaku like writhing double flames, were human.
Marc caught his breath as one golden-glowing pair soared in close to the window. He found himself fighting for self-control as the corona of their ecstatic aura momentarily touched his mind and aroused him. (The younger children, all prepubertal, felt only a fleeting sense of joy.) The lovers were nude, their bodies glorified by an intricate pattern of yellow light that overlay a deeper blue glow. They were beautiful and at the same time grotesque, for their faces were entirely hidden by breathing masks, with bulging eye lenses that blazed with blood-red radiance. They carried no air tanks, nor any other apparatus that would inhibit their freedom of movement.
There were three human couples sharing the connubial vat with the Krondaku. The psychoactive alkaloids in which they swam were absorbed through the skin, stripping them of their mind-screens along with all the rest of their inhibitions, so that their mental signatures were readily accessible. One man and woman were Ilya Gawrys and his wife Katy MacGregor. The second pair were Katy’s brother Davy MacGregor and his wife Margaret Strayhorn.
The third pair glowed with more intensity than the others, and their movements were more frenzied and complex. The man was Marc’s father, Paul Remillard, and the woman was Laura Tremblay.
“Thank you, Loga’etoo Tilk’ai, for this interesting experience.” Marc whipsnapped his coercion at the mesmerized minds of his cousins and sister and forced them to turn away from the window. “But we’d better be moving along now. The children have so much to learn about your race, and so little time.”
They’re here Fury! They must have come in on a starship today.
I’m already making my plans.
Gotcha! OGodGodGOD I can hardly wait!
NONONOnono!
Tonight. Without fail.
Davy had been right, as usual. All of the lingering traces of her trauma, to say nothing of the weariness after that interminable journey from Earth, had been washed away as they made love for hour after fantastic hour in the Pool of the Monsters. Margaret’s erotic tastes had never leaned toward group sex, and at first she had balked when Ilya and Katy proposed the perfect remedy for what ailed her.
“But there’s nothing crass about it,” Margaret’s sister-in-law had said, with gentle seriousness. Katy was a tiny woman with delicate features whose rejuvenated form was as frankly and deliciously plump as that of an archaic Venus. “In the Pool of the Monsters, you’re so wrapped up in your love that you have no sensation at all of being part of an orgy. The mating Krondaku and whatever humans are there seem only to be dream images made of colored light. The exotics drift around slowly like monstrous star clusters, and the humans are golden meteors, and the only input your mind receives from them is beauty and harmony.”
“And besides,” the saturnine Ilya had put in pragmatically, “the humans wear masks. One effectively becomes something else before entering the connubial vat …”
Davy had urged that they give it a try, and finally she had agreed. There had been another, oblivious pair of human lovers already in the pool when the four of them arrived; but to spare Margaret’s lingering squeamishness, Davy had blanked out their identities with a psychocreative screen, so she had no idea who they were. Not that it would have mattered.
For nearly eight hours she and her husband had experienced unflagging bliss. When it was over (Ilya and Katy and the anonymous human pair having long since departed) and he led her out of the pool, they took off their masks and together showered off the last traces of the psychoactive liquid. Margaret was surprised to discover that she was not exhausted at all, but invigorated and—yes—almost unable to bel
ieve that the amazing experience had been real.
Davy had taken her then to their new apartment in the human enclave called Ponte di Rialto. There were some formalities of arrival to be taken care of; so Davy went off to deal with them, leaving her to do a leisurely unpacking of the luggage they had abandoned so precipitately at the spaceport earlier in the day, when Ilya and Katy, who had welcomed them to Orb, had hatched their therapeutic scheme.
Margaret pottered around, still in a state of postcoital languor. After she had put their things away, she found out who their neighbors in Rialto were and admired the view of the so-called Grand Canal from their balcony window. She was surprised to note that the gondoliers poling along the watercourse were living nonoperant humans, not robots. Then it occurred to her to check out the apartment’s kitchen, since cookery was one of her minor passions.
It was well equipped, if not very large. Virtually any sort of fresh comestible could be summoned up from the Central Distributory of Goods to the little domestic convenience station built into one of the kitchen walls. There was a solid-waste disposal system there as well, much more efficient-looking than the complicated ones at their flat in Concord or at the Midlothian country house. The machine evidently recycled nothing but seemed simply to convert all refuse to its elements. No doubt the accumulated dust and gases were then reassembled by the arcane creativity of the mysterious lords of the Galaxy into tomorrow’s fresh musk-melon, Ryvita, or leg of lamb—to say nothing of lipsticks, pocket handkerchiefs, and other smallish items, which could also be ordered up from the extensive menu of the Distributory.
Margaret checked the contents of the kitchen cabinets and was happy to see that they had an ample supply of both Darjeeling and Spiderleg teas—respectively the favorites of herself and Davy. She put a china teapot full of water into the microwave to boil and sat down with a note-plaque to make a grocery list.
And then the back doorbell tinkled.
Come in! she said absently, using the declamatory mode.
The door opened and then closed again. Margaret looked up with a puzzled frown and then burst out laughing as the cloak of invisibility fell away.
“Well, of all things! Whoever are you lot—a welcoming committee?”
“Yes,” said Hydra.
This time, its attack was swift and efficient.
But before her mind was destroyed she was able to utter a formless farspoken scream of agony on her husband’s intimate mode—together with one single intelligible word:
Five.
Paul came back to the apartment in Golden Gate very late, long after Marc was in bed and nearly asleep. Lucille was still there, playing five-card draw with Herta, the operant nanny, and Jacqui, the non-operant housekeeper. Jacqui was ahead by seventeen dollars. The two metas would never have dreamed of using their farsight to view the cards. Marc heard his father dismiss the two employees and ask Grandmère to stay for a moment. His voice had an abnormal timbre.
Marc came fully awake, his farsenses alert.
Paul’s composure was so shaken that he neglected to use Lucille’s intimate mode, blurting out the terrible news en clair, in ordinary mental speech:
It’s Margaret. The Magistratum reached me at Laura’s place with the news. I rushed right over to Davy’s apartment in Ponte di Rialto but he wouldn’t see me. He wouldn’t see me—
Paul fortheloveofGod what’s happened?
Margaret … she’s dead.
Oh no—
There was a suicide note. Handwritten. She said she couldn’t take the pressure—Davy’s nomination to the Concilium, his candidacy for First Magnate. She also said she couldn’t bear to bring up their unborn child in a world dominated by nonhumans. And then she evidently shorted out the fail-safe switch on the waste decompositor. And climbed in.
21
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
DENIS DID NOTHING.
Or rather, he did nothing to harm either me or Teresa.
Once his seekersense had zeroed in on me, he could use EE—excorporeal excursion—to view me fully in an out-of-body trip and talk to me mentally in that precise, unhurried way of his without fear of exotic eavesdropping. He calmed my panic, reassured me that he had no intention of calling in the Milieu gendarmes, told me what had happened to Marc, and even advised me to get a move on butchering my moose, since a much larger winter storm was heading my way from out in the Pacific Ocean and would probably hit Ape Lake within forty-eight hours.
“Well, then,” said I, feeling cocky as all hell once it had sunk into my mind that I was not about to be handed over to the law, “perhaps you’d be so kind as to consult your library and tell me the best way to cut this monster up into steaks and chops tout de suite. I’ll be damned if I can remember what the books said.”
Yes, I can do that easily.
“If there’s another blizzard coming, maybe I just better whack off a haunch or something and get on home and leave the rest of the animal here to pick up later.”
Denis said: That might not be such a good idea. Wait a minute while I look up the procedure.
I sat there on my heels while the Nobel Laureate and Emeritus Professor of Metapsychology, who was at that moment in his office in Hanover, called up the reference on his computer. I had no doubt that he would find what he was looking for in Dartmouth’s extensive database. After a few minutes, he said:
You can’t just leave the moose carcass. Either scavengers will get it, or it will freeze into a rock-hard mass that you could never cut up later. No … you’ll have to bleed and skin the animal now. Remove the entrails and salvage the edible organs—heart, liver, and kidneys, at least. Then cut up the rest of the meat as quickly as possible into smallish portions and cache most of them for your later trips.
“Listen, it would take me two days just to build a cache!”
You don’t have to build anything. Just hang the meat up in trees. How cold is it there?
“We forgot a thermometer.”
All right, I’m farsensing your ambient atmosphere and comparing its temperature with that in my office … About minus sixteen Celsius. That should freeze your meat quickly enough to retain its quality if you cut the pieces smaller than two or three kilos. You won’t need the entire moose carcass, of course. Only about a hundred kilos of meat and fat, if you and Teresa and the baby intend to return to civilization immediately after the birth … But wait: You really can’t come out of hiding until the pardon is pushed through. Humanity will no longer be wards of the Simbiari Proctorship after the inauguration, but their arm of the Magistratum still has legal jurisdiction until the Human Polity reconvenes. I’ll have to consult Anne on the legalities—
“No!” I shouted wildly, shaking my knife at the gray sky. “Don’t you dare tell anybody we’re alive! Not Anne, not Paul, not even Lucille!”
Rogi, they already know.
“Oh,” I said, deflated.
He explained how the family had found out, and why they decided to do nothing about it.
“If Paul did agree with the others not to press the search for us,” I said, “then I don’t care whether you consult with him or any other family member you please. Just try to figure out a way to get us home as quickly as possible without having us land in some exotic jail.”
I will. But it will have to be after the birth, when the child is legally a separate entity from his mother.
“You and all the rest of the family will be on Concilium Orb when the baby’s born, and it’ll take weeks for you to get back to Earth—”
Don’t worry about it, Uncle Rogi. Paul and I will find a way.
“Okay. I’ll salvage all of the moose I can, and we’ll have food to last until spring. We’ll get awfully sick of venison stew, but we’ll survive.”
We’ll get you out of there long before that … H’mm! I’ve found an interesting book in the data bank entitled Moose on the Table, by one Swede Gano, with recipes. I can farspeak them to Teresa. By the way, exactly where is she?
br /> I hesitated, then realized it was ridiculous not to answer Denis’s question. He could body-scan the area and find her easily enough now, even without my help. And of course, I really did trust him. “She’s in a cabin at Ape Lake, about six or seven kloms up the creek. But will you let me break the news to her about you finding us? She’s—she’s a little leery of you, Denis. Not to make too big a point of it, but you do come on strong without realizing it. You wouldn’t want to upset her.”
No. I understand.
“You could take a look at her and let me know if she’s all right, though. I can’t scan through rock worth a damn.”
I’ll be glad to … She seems fine. And so is the—Jesus!
“Denis! What’s wrong?” My stomach had done a backflip as he cried out in shock. For at least two minutes he was silent. Then I felt a kind of mental shiver, and he said:
The baby. My God, the baby.
Oh-oh. “He sort of screens himself when I’m around, so I haven’t really experienced him yet, if you know what I mean. I take it you got a peek at what his mind’s really like.”
Rogi, I touched that fetus for the merest instant, with my lightest probe. And he locked on, traced my position, rummaged through his mother’s memories to identify me, said, “Hello, Grandpère,” and slammed down the strongest screen I’ve ever encountered in a human mind. Even stronger than Marc’s. I’m—I’m completely at a loss.
“Well, well.” So was I. “So the little guy’s really got the watts, has he?”
He’s got something extraordinary … I won’t try to touch him again. I’ve got to think about this. I’ll leave you now—
“What about this damned moose?” I cried. “At least send me a meat-cutting diagram so I know where the frigging tenderloins are.”
Denis said: Of course. I’m sorry … [Image.] There. Complete instructions for butchering. Uncle Rogi, I’d like to talk to you later at more length. I’ll return to you this evening after you’ve made camp.