Forests of the Night

  Nohar fell silent. There wasn't much left to say. He closed his eyes and tried to remember when he had told anyone that story in full. No one came to mind. Not even Manny, though Manny knew the story well enough.

  The smell of smoky rose was suddenly very close, and Nohar felt a tiny naked hand on his cheek, brushing his whiskers. He opened his eyes and saw Stephie's face, close to his own. Her breath was warm on the skin of his nose. Her eyes were a liquid green, nothing like the eyes of a cat—visible whites, tiny round pupils.

  Nohar had never realized how alien human eyes were.

  Her lips parted in a whisper. "Lord, how you must hate humans."

  Nohar shook his head. "No, no hate. Not for people."

  The hand left and Stephie replaced the picture, in its groove and at its forty-five degree angle. She did it in one fluid motion, stretching across Nohar to replace the picture. Again Nohar found himself admiring her muscle tone and her economy of movement.

  She sat down next to him on the bed. The springs barely noticed her weight. Her nervousness was back. Just like at the table at the Arabica. She shook her head and looked up at him. Nohar wished once again that he was better at reading human expression.

  "Nohar, would you tell me, who's Angel?"

  Back to business. "I told you, she's a lead. She saw the sniper—"

  Stephie was shaking her head again. "Not what I meant. I want to know who she is to you."

  Huh? Maybe not. "What? Only met her yesterday— We sure as hell aren't lovers. If that's what you mean."

  Stephie turned a bright red. She clenched a fist that made her knuckles whiten. "I'm sorry, forgive me. I didn't mean to offend—"

  Nohar got a sensation he often got when talking with humans. There were two different conversations here. Stephie was, he felt, about to bolt off somewhere and cry. He didn't want to be responsible for that, even if he didn't understand what was going on. He placed his hands on her shoulder. Nohar didn't know how to do this gracefully, so he just told her the truth. "I wasn't offended. But the idea of having relations with that little twitch is ludicrous."

  Nohar could tell Stephie almost laughed. She was still flushed.

  "Why ask?"

  Nohar could sense a slight tensing of her muscles under his hand. "Angel was bragging all the time while you were unconscious. I just wondered, you're such different ..."

  Ah. "Different species? I'd admit, me and her, it would be unusual, but not unheard of."

  "Isn't that bestiality? Would it be possible?"

  "Some human taboos, like nudity, can't wash with moreys for practical reasons."

  Stephie was still looking up at him, and Nohar realized he'd only answered half the question. "And, uh, some morey characteristics came out the other end of the labs remarkably similar. I think it might be linked to bipedal . . ."He trailed off.

  Great, now he was getting embarrassed.

  Stephie had a questioning look in her eyes. The flush was fading. "Who do you have, Nohar?"

  Nohar thought of Maria. "No one, anymore."

  "You're lonely, aren't you?"

  He would have objected, but he had trouble lying to people he felt something for. He nodded. "You?"

  They faced each other, on the bed. He was feeling her breath on his nose again. No longer warm, hot. Beads of perspiration were forming on her forehead. Her voice was a whisper. "My nonexistent boyfriend." She tried to laugh, but it died. "No girlfriend either."

  ' 'Why did you get so upset when I asked if you were a lesbian?''

  "Too close to what I was feeling."

  They were very close now. He could feel her pulse under the hand that still rested on her shoulder. It was incredibly rapid, like her heart belonged to a kitten or a small bird. His heartbeat was racing to catch up with hers. Her sweat was beginning to lend a tang to the air that was alien to him, one he liked. What was going on had dawned on him gradually, and a small part of his mind was screaming at him, asking him what the hell he was doing. It wasn't the time for that question.

  Her alien—human—eyes were staring deep into his own. "You saved my life. Have you ever heard of Chinese obligation?"

  Nohar had. "I'm responsible for you now."

  She sucked in a shuddering breath, and her lips touched his. He had seen kisses in human videos—but a feline skull and lips didn't move the right way for it. Even so, he tried. He let her small lips part his mouth and felt her amazingly smooth tongue alight on his own, caress one of his canines, and withdraw, to be felt, briefly, under his nose. When her eyes opened, the nervousness was gone.

  Nohar, what are you doing? He ignored the questioning voice because he needed her, human or not. He moved his hand up from her shoulder and undid the bonds that were keeping her hair in a ponytail. He nuzzled the top of her head, thankful not to smell any heavy chemicals, and began to groom her hair. The taste and texture of her human hair was different from Maria's fur. The ritual perhaps seemed as strange to Stephie as kisses did to Nohar.

  When Nohar had cleaned her hair, he began to move to her ears and the back of her neck. He expected the taste and feel of naked skin to repulse, but it was quite the opposite. The sweet acidic taste of her sweat and the smooth surface of her walnut-colored skin was beginning to excite him.

  The questioning voice shut up.

  By the time he had reached her shoulders, he realized she did have fur, of a sort. Tiny, downy hairs were scattered over her arms and her back. Somewhere along the line, he didn't know where, her blouse had disappeared.

  They both reclined on the bed as Nohar worked his way down her body. He groomed both her arms. Her skin broke into a burning flush under his tongue. He cleaned the small puddle of perspiration that pooled between those odd human breasts. When he cleaned her breasts, she began to moan loudly. Nohar thought he was too rough, so he lightened the pressure. Stephie immediately responded by locking her hands in the fur on either side of his head and pulling his face back down.

  He worked his way down her abdomen. She continued to urge him lower with her hands-

  Humans kept their hair in the strangest places.

  When Nohar could no longer restrain himself he rolled over on his back, ignoring the pain in his hip, and pulled her on top of him. She drew him in and shuddered, arching her back.

  Nohar added his voice to hers.

  It took them a long time to expend each other.

  * * * *

  Nohar awoke.

  He could still smell Stephie—between them they had drenched the bed with their scent—and he realized it wasn't a dream. Now was the time to ask the question. He opened his eyes and whispered, "Nohar, what the hell are you doing?''

  The desk lamp was still on. The small fluorescent tube was now overwhelmed by the morning light. Stephie was curled up next to him. Her head rested on his chest, spilling her black hair across his upper body. It contrasted with the areas where his russet stripes faded to near-white. In the sunlight, where his color vision reached its optimum, he could appreciate the similarity of their coloring. Her black hair and golden-tan skin formed a near-perfect match to the shading of his stripes. They both had green eyes-He had been perfectly prepared to blame last night on the emotional pit he had fallen into. But when he considered the way he was watching the light from the window curve its shadows around her tailless rear, he couldn't blame that night on any temporary condition.

  Stephie stirred, and turned to face him. "Morning."

  "Do you realize how much this complicates things?"

  He could feel her twisting the tip of his tail between her toes as she spoke. "You're as romantic as five lanes of new blacktop."

  "Please, I'm serious."

  Her foot was going up and down the undamaged length of his tail. "I know." She rolled over and sat up, looking down at him. "Is this going to be it?"

  Nohar tried to answer the question, but his thinking process was a mess. "Damn, I don't know how I feel about it. What prompted you to—with a morey—why me?"

>   Nohar damned his mouth, it was still running away with him. At the worst times. He'd just parroted one of the five stupidest questions anyone had ever uttered in any situation.

  Stephie closed her eyes. "Don't ask that. I don't know why. Until I met you, I didn't think I could care for anyone—male or female."

  She exhaled. Nohar didn't interrupt her. She was quiet for a few seconds. Then she opened her eyes and looked at him. "You've asked me twice, I might as well tell you. I was a lesbian—for about four months at Case Western I was the most radical bull-dyke feminist lesbian you could want. It didn't do a damn thing about my inability to have a relationship with another human being. I was posing as much as Phil and Derry ever were."

  She idly ran her fingers through the fur on his abdomen. "Then I met you. I was set to be lonely for the rest of my life, and you screw everything up. After I met you the first time, I couldn't wait to see you again. All during that drive from the hospital I desperately wished you were human. Last night I decided I didn't care."

  Nohar knew the kind of repulsion most humans held for moreys. Stephie had to be feeling even more confused than he did. He didn't know what to say. "I should dump you. For your own good."

  There was a hopeful note in her voice. "Why don't you?''

  Nohar thought of Maria. "I may be stupid and self-destructive, but I'm not going to do that to you."

  Stephie gave him a hug that made him forget moreys weren't supposed to get involved with pinks.

  He left Stephie to clean herself up and hobbled down to breakfast. As loud as they had been with each other, there was no question Manny and Angel knew what had gone on with him and Stephie last night. They didn't mention it.

  He walked into the kitchen and found Angel watching Manny with rapt attention. Manny was involved in one of his passions, cooking. Angel actually seemed interested in Manny's omelette-making procedure. She wasn't even wrinkling her nose as Manny started adding raw hamburger to the cooked sausage. They both seemed to avoid watching his entrance.

  "Found a disciple, Manny?"

  Manny added the sausage/hamburger mixture to the omelette in the large skillet and folded the eggs over perfectly. "Don't make fun of an appreciation of good food, even if she's never heard of olive oil."

  Manny got out a platter and let the omelette slide out on to it. Angel was trying to act spellbound. "Doc, how you keep the eggs from sticking?"

  "You just have to remember not to start with a cold pan-"

  Stephie came down, interrupting what might have been an endless speech—Nohar had always seen Manny's cooking as obsessive. Nohar noticed, with some pleasure, Stephie wasn't put off by the lack of clothing on him and Angel. Stephie, however, was fully clothed, and she'd worn the outfit long enough that it was beginning to broadcast her scent on its own, even over the sausage.

  Manny cut his omelette speech short. "What will you have? We have a vegetarian and a carnivorous version."

  "Could you do both?"

  "No problem—"

  Nohar and Angel had the same reaction. "In the same omelette?"

  Chapter 15

  Stephie sat on the recliner as Nohar searched the boxes in the attic for something to wear. Nohar's mind had drifted back to MLI, Binder, Hassan, and the Zip-heads. Somehow they were connected and he still had no easy way of fitting the pieces together.

  "The answer has to be in those financial records."

  Stephie sighed. "I know. That's the third time you said that."

  Nohar pulled out a relic of his gang days, from before he'd left school—and Manny. It was an old denim Hellcats jacket. It still fit and it was big enough to hide the Vind when he wore it. "Are you sure that you never saw or heard anything that would help me?''

  She shook her head. "I don't care what they wrote down on my job description. They never let anyone near those records. It was a tight little group, the five of them. Even though Derry trusted me, no one got into the inner circle who wasn't there back in '40."

  "Trusted you?"

  "Yes, not to screw up the campaign machine. He knew me from my radical phase at Case. It's a tight little community, even for the ones who are still in the closet. I managed to convince myself that I was helping him out. Found out it was Binder's idea much later. By then I was used to the life-style."

  "Why didn't Binder just let Johnson go?" The potential for a media explosion was even worse with Johnson in the campaign, than if he left under a cloud.

  “I don't know. Derry never expressed any great love of Binder, but he also never gave any indication of ever being willing to resign. Believe me, I tried to talk to him about it. He was always evasive about why he stayed.”

  "What about Young and Thomson?"

  “Young was never willing to talk about anything but business. I think he resented me. Thomson, I don't know, he's slick and never says an ill word about Binder or the campaign—but he acts like he knows some joke the rest of the world doesn't."

  Still batting zero for hard information.

  Nohar pulled out a T-shirt. It was the only black one, but it had a yellow smile-face on it. Stephie repressed a giggle.

  Nohar frowned as he pulled out the most intact set of jeans. They'd still been using the human model for morey clothes when they'd made it. The seams on the legs were split so his legs could move, and there was a slit in the ass for his tail. He pulled them on. "And nobody ever discussed Midwest Lapidary, or morey gangs?"

  "You must be kidding." Stephie had reached over and pulled the Hellcats jacket off of the bed. The denim covered her legs like a blanket, and she ran her fingers over the embroidery. "How come you get to ask all the questions?"

  Nohar pulled the shirt over his head. It ended up twenty centimeters short of his waist. "What do you want to know?"

  Stephie looked up. Her fingers still traveled over the demonic feline form that graced the back of the jacket. "Well, you called Bobby your first and only pink—"

  Nohar felt like he'd gotten blindsided by a baseball bat. "No. That's not—I mean . . ."

  She laughed. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to sound accusatory." Stephie stood up, leaving the jacket on the chair. "I was just wondering who Bobby was."

  Nohar was still recovering. "Bobby, Bobby Bittrich. I met him when I was trying to make it through high school. We were both sort of misfits— Though as we got older, he fit in more and more, and I fit in less and less ..."

  He lapsed into silence.

  Stephie walked up and put her hand on his arm. "Are you okay? Did I hit another bad memory?"

  He shook his head. "No, not at all."

  He grabbed the jacket and hobbled down the stairs. He was wondering why he hadn't thought of it sooner. Stephie was following. "Where are you going?"

  "I have to call Bobby."

  "Are you sure it's the time to look up old friends—"

  Nohar didn't answer until he got down to the comm. "I think he might be able to help me."

  He switched off the news. "Move it, Angel—"

  Angel said something unkind in Spanish as she moved off the couch. "Damnit, Kit, you could ask."

  She stalked off to the kitchen, probably to take out her aggression on some poor vegetable. Nohar ignored her as he called the number for Robert Dittrich. It buzzed once, then he got a test pattern as the home comm forwarded the call.

  "Budget Surplus, can I help—" Bobby displayed a rapidly growing smile of recognition.

  Nohar was happy to see a friendly face. "Christ, what's going on with you? The Fed is looking for you—"

  "I need your help as a prime hacker."

  "You know I never engage in illegal activity—" Bobby winked.

  "Can you help?"

  "Come down, we'll talk."

  Stephie's car was out of the question. Everyone—the cops, the Zips, MLI—everyone would know it on sight. Nohar called a cab.

  Angel didn't object when Nohar left. She seemed a little resentful. Nohar supposed he'd been a little too curt with her, but he had oth
er things on his mind.

  The cab that showed up in front of Manny's house was an anachronism. It was a prewar Nissan Tory. The thing was almost as big as the Antaeus, but the huge hood covered batteries and a power plant that took up nearly half the car's volume. Nohar got into the back of the cab before he realized it had a driver.

  A black human woman, her hair dyed red and strung into dreadlocks, was staring at Nohar with a wide-eyed expression. Nohar decided it had been too much to ask them to send a remote into this neighborhood.

  "Shee-it." She was articulate, too.

  "Don't tell me, you've never given a ride to a morey before."

  "Dispatch didn't tell me no—"

  Nohar slipped his bank card into the meter and tapped out his ID on the keypad. In addition, he typed in one hell of a tip. He could afford it. "Well, I didn't tell them. Is there a problem?"

  She saw the numbers come up on her display. She spent a few seconds composing herself. "Sorry Mr. Rajasthan, didn't 'spect someone like you 'sail. Where you going?"

  Money was a great equalizer.

  Budget Surplus was a dirty little marble-fronted warehouse that hugged a nook between—really under—the Main Avenue bridge, and one of the more obnoxious mirror-fronted towers of the West Side office complex. It took more than a little creativity to find the grubby dead-end street that was the only access to the building.

  The cab pulled up and Nohar typed in a hundred, on top of the tip. “Will waiting for me be a problem?”'

  The cabbie shook her head. "No problem at all. Take your time."

  Nohar stepped out of the yellow Tory and felt like he'd been abandoned at the bottom of a well. One side was the warehouse, one side the black-dirt underside of the bridge, the other two sides flat sheets of concrete forming the foundation of the office building— whose doors would open on more wholesome scenery. When Nohar entered the building, it no longer seemed small. The interior was one huge room. Windows made from dozens of little square panels let in shafts of bright sunlight. Despite the sun, the corners of the building were covered in darkness. Standing in the light, Nohar found the shadows impenetrable. Endless ranks of metal shelving dominated the space, tall enough to barely give clearance to the slowly rotating fans hanging from the corrugated ceiling.