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Subject: {ASSM} Journal Entry 245 / 0100 [ Geographic: The Misanthrope ]
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 03:10:03 -0400
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"So, you're Lisanne," said the Felinzi standing on top of the
squat, crab-like aircraft. He wore a pair of dirty, grey coveralls, and
held in his hand a dripping rag. Where she could see it, his fur was a
mottled black and white, more black than white. "The AIs said you were
looking to go out into the wilderness."
"Yep, that's right," Lisanne said, hoping that her French accent
didn't throw off the Felinzi's understanding.
"Well, take a look," he said, pointing up in the direction of
the ringworld's spin. "Unlike your little mudball, Pendor's still
wilderness in every direction. Is there anything in particular you'd
like to see?" He spoke in short, blunt tones, as if her presence
slightly annoyed him.
"Everything!" Lisanne said with a grin. "But let's start with
something the people back home want to see. What have you got that's
sexy? Very large animals, very cute animals. Any big cats we can look
at?"
"Most of what we've got is variants of what you've got. But if
you want me to take you someplace particular, I've got a few places that
I can show you. Come on in." He swung out over a ladder mounted to the
outside frame and slid down to the ground. He held out a paw and said,
"Ahamo."
He was shorter than she, this Felinzi. She suppressed an urge
to giggle; he was the first one she'd met that actually looked like a
cat she knew, her neighbor's cat from back home. He was broad of
shoulders and had that pinched, perpetually mad at the world look that
only cats can manage.
"Lisanne Keck."
"I know who you are, Miss Geographic" he said without a smile.
"Come on in." He let the door open, standing back as a step dropped
down from underneath to grant them both better access. "Welcome to my
bug."
Inside, the 'bug' was a long, boxy room filled with the orderly
life of someone who had been described to her as "one of Pendor's few
official hermits." Through an open door she could see a small cockpit
big enough to hold two people but no standing room. The room she stood
in had a bed and a desk, both mounted to the far wall, a collection of
clothes neatly hung off a rail near the ceiling to her right, and a
kitchen to her left. It reminded her of the van she had lived in near
the base of Kilimanjaro.
"Now, don't touch anything. This is just an overnight trip,
understand? I've got more interesting things to do than ferry some
Earthling around Pendor looking for something 'sexy.'" The sarcasm in
his voice was unmistakable. That was no accent. Well, she'd been
warned. "You had better sit up here with me. It can get bumpy. And
this way I can make sure you're not poking through my stuff."
Lisanne bit down absently on her lip, trying not to think of
sharp responses. He was deliberately setting himself up to be disliked,
to be rid of her. Well, she'd show him anyway. She was in no hurry to
be liked. She was in no hurry to go anywhere at all. Of the last, she
knew she was lying to herself.
She took the chair he indicated and chose to chew on a pen. It
was her one nasty habit; more than once she had had a pen explode in her
mouth, the inkwell drawn up by the regular action of her chewing until
finally it leaked over the cap. Sometimes she wouldn't notice it until
someone said, "Hey, your teeth are blue," or some other color depending
on the pen of the day. She usually noticed green ink; it had a strange,
plastic taste.
He took a pair of handgrips into his hands and started the ship.
It rose smoothly, making very little sound as it did. A louder whine
began in the back sounding suspiciously like a propeller, and soon they
were soaring through the air. More sounds of the landing gear being
drawn up and soon the wedge-shaped ship was soaring through the sky.
"How does it manage to be so quiet?" she asked.
"Magnetics," Ahamo responded. "I don't understand it much
myself. I know how to fix it if it breaks. And there's a
pusher-propeller in the rear, an ultra-high bypass fan that can get us
up to about five hundred kilometers an hour. All fusion powered."
That seemed to settle it. Lisanne changed the subject. "I was
told that you're something of a rarity on Pendor, a long-range
adventurer."
"Too many people are busy checking out what's close by. That's
probably for the best. They need to know what's nearby that's gonna eat
them, or what they can eat, than care about what's in the next terr.
Settle back for a few hours. It'll take a while."
Lisanne took his advice and his sudden quiet as a sign. He was
clear that he wasn't interested in talking to her. She leaned back,
pulled out the PADD she had been given, and began looking up different
animals to photograph and send back.
What frustrated her most was that Pendor, for all of its size,
was not exotic. There were big cats and they were definitely
alien-looking, but even the Pendorians pointed out that those cats were
descended from some Terran model only a couple million years old. The
same was true of other animals, from birds to insects to large mammals.
There was a rhinoceros-like creature with a blunt head and short, blunt
tusks in front like a boar's; there was a huge cat, not unlike a
sabre-tooth, with jet-black fur that made it clear: this monster hunted
at night.
She had hoped for something else, something a little... weirder.
And there were some, but they weren't close. Ahamo had found a sector
where the animals were what the Pendorians called "hexapedal"; all of
the mammals had six legs, or two front and four rear, and had adapted
these six legs for all manner of reasons. One that lived in an inland
ocean had become and extreme example, extending the pelvis that held the
four legs into an armored torso that protected many of the internal
organs.
That's where they were going today. To an entire ecosystem that
had become trapped behind an amazing mountainous ridge that isolated
them from other mammalian courses. That they had survived without
interference for so many millions of years was one of the more amazing
aspects to Pendor. It was a pressure cooker of alien development, but
the AIs had rigidly enforced that one requirement, that the life be
compatible with the people who would come after it. Edible, at least.
Ahamo was nudging her. "Hey, we're here."
Lisanne blinked. Had she fallen asleep? She had not yet become
used to the Pendorian day/night schedule and after six months she didn't
think she ever would be. She had caught herself falling asleep at odd
moments, usually just the lulls in activity. "Where are we?"
"I parked us up high on a ridge overlooking the hexaped zone.
You asked if we could see it. This is a pretty safe place, although
lower down you'll me in the immediate reach of the pamthreats."
"Pam... threat?"
"The nastiest beast that ever lived on Pendor. At least, the
nastiest I've ever seen. Cunning beasts, hunt in packs, use decoys,
stage chases... black as night and all six legs are tuned to run like
the wind. I saw once, in the snow, a pack of them, six in all, chase
down a herd of stags. It was nasty. Two started them running in one
direction, then ran until the two of them were spent. It was like a
relay race. Then one comes out of the woods and keeps the beasts
running, and a fourth took up when she got tired. Herded 'em towards a
wide gap in the woods and then, like two missiles outta nowhere, two of
the pamthreats exploded out of the woods and just cut down two
stragglers. Absolutely amazing. Scared me outta my fur." He shook his
head. "Come on. Let's take some pictures."
She took out a series of lenses, some for wide shot, just to get
photographs of the land. She dictated into a recorder what she was
seeing. "From where I stand, the land stretches out in front of me,
clouded over as it goes further away. It's so hard to describe the
Pendorian terrain because it's not what we're used to seeing; there is
no horizon. Instead, it is a brooding land that stretches away forever.
Here, I'm looking at a 90 degree angle to the ring, and it's just an
expanse of land that wanders away from me, onward into a haze that's
pure weather. There is not a hint of pollution in the Pendorian
atmosphere. My colleague, Wolf Christiansen, has documented just how
clean Pendorian technology is, and where it is not, the waste products
are dumped into the sun and rendered into their harmless components,
mere atoms.
"Far below this mountainous cliff on which my guide, Ahamo, has
placed us, I can see three dark shapes moving. The photographs I've
just taken are of an animal Ahamo calls the pamthreat. He says it's the
meanest, most effective predator on the Ring. When I ask him if that
includes the people, he just nods." She took several photographs of the
pamthreats, finding in them the quality of sexiness she had been looking
for. She hoped there was more like this.
To her surprise, Ahamo was also taking photographs. His camera
neither clicked nor whined, but it was clear that he was focusing the
lens and taking images all the same. She figured that he was storing
them in the computer system that seemed to be everywhere the Pendorians
were.
"Let's go down into the terr," Ahamo said after a while. "Got
enough pictures?"
"No," she said with a grin. "But it'll do for now."
"Those beasts sexy enough for ya?" he said.
"Yeah," she replied.
"Good enough. Get in." He gestured back to his bug.
He floated down into the terrain and, an hour later, set down in
a heavily wooded area. "Now, if you're real careful..." A loud thunk
came from above their heads. "I let a couple of drones loose. We're
gonna look for something we call the hezz. It's a huge animal,
sometimes weighs half a ton. Covered in fur, with a mouth you wouldn't
believe. It's got six legs like everything in this region, and you
don't want to be anywhere near it."
"And you want us to look for it."
"You want pictures of it, don't you?"
"Hell, yes!" Lisanne replied. He nodded, satisfied that they
both had the same spirit together, and turned back to a bank of video
screens showing what his drones were looking at. Occasionally they
would shift color schemes and Lisanne recognized infra-red or something
like it at work.
"There's one," he said, pulling the picture into view. It was
more or less as he described, a six-legged bear with a face that came to
more of a point than on a bear, like a mouse scaled up to a bear's size.
The fur was obviously bear-like.
"Where is it?"
"About eight kilometers that way, by the river." He looked at
the display. "I've been out there. It's not a hard walk, but I don't
think we'd want to be face-to-face with an angry hezz." He stood up and
walked back into the cabin, exchanging his shoes for a pair of hiking
boots, a coat, and a large, bulky rifle. "Come on."
Lisanne followed his example. "What's the temperature outside?"
"About 17," Ahamo read. "Ready?"
Lisanne fought to get the light jacket over her shoulders.
"Ready," she said.
"Let's go, then." He opened the door and stepped out. Lisanne
followed him and stepped out into the wilds of Pendor. It was as
pristine and pure a forest as any she could imagine, a dense forest of
what were obviously pines, a small cluster of ceders in view of sight
and smell. The sound of a stream trickling nearby caught her attention,
as did the call of a bird overhead. The air was so clear she wished she
could drink it, hold it in her lungs and keep it with her, a reminder of
the kind of air mankind had enjoyed for millennia before discovering
industrial fires. An insistent wind blew at her back, pushing her
towards a meeting with the hezz, pushing around a few clouds under a
grey, overcast sky.
The walked out into a welcome mat of thick underbrush, bushes
that grew to head-height, and moss that trickled and oozed when she
accidentally stepped on it. Little creatures jumped and hopped and
buzzed about. To her, the incongruity here was Ahamo, who played the
part of alien quite well, not the insects, who could have come from
anywhere on Earth. Underneath, she understood that the bugs were the
different ones, that Ahamo was really another person in a genetically
engineered skin.
"Stop," Ahamo whispered, putting his hand on her shoulder. "Get
a picture of those." He pointed. There were three squirrels playing in
a tree. Squirrels? She grabbed her camera and quickly adjusted the
lens. They were almost squirrels; their ears were long with very
delicate hairs that hung out from the tip at some length, and like the
hezz and the pamthreats, the squirrels had six legs, two in the front,
four in the rear. And like their terrestrial counterparts, these
squirrels could jump. She photographed one brown-furred gymnast
crossing a distance of almost three meters.
"Amazing," she said.
Ahamo grumbled. "Come on. We have a hezz to see."
She followed him for over an hour, deeper into the woods. She
knew he had a reputation as the outdoorsman on Pendor, but even she
worried that he might get them lost somewhere deep in the woods out
here.
The sound of a river reached her ears, the incessant running of
water. The sound grew louder until they came upon it, a wide, flat,
fast-flowing river that streamed around bleached rocks that stuck up at
odd angles, monoliths to an aging geology. She wondered briefly how
there was any geology at all on a ringworld, a world completely crafted
by artificial hands. Was there any activity that could be considered
"geologic?" She would ask Xing to find out.
"Follow me close," he said. "We're downwind so we're not likely
to have her sniff us out. That means that we could startle her when we
come into view. I would hate to see you killed on your second day
outside of the territories."
They worked they way through the tangle quietly. Ahamo had that
strange woodsman's skill of being able to walk without making much noise
at all. She followed him along as best she could but couldn't help
stepping on twigs, fallen leaves, crunching the ground underfoot, at one
point stifling a yelp as a rock she though was solid gave way.
"You have all the grace of a mammoth!" he hissed, obviously
annoyed at her. "Come on. There." He pointed through the trees. "See
her? It's a her. They have darker fur than the males."
She looked. Up the river about two hundred meters she saw the
creature he indicated. It moved with bearlike deliberation, although it
was more like a polar bear than anything found below the arctic circle.
It was certainly a deadly-looking beast, she thought, probably capable
of killing and eating the both of them. Ahamo had his rifle unslung and
by his side but he, like her, was aiming his camera at it.
She killed three entire rolls of film watching this creature
more or less loll in the sun, occasionally raising her head to take a
sniff of the air for threats or dangers. Either she didn't scent the
two of them or she didn't care to investigate.
Something quietly beeped on Ahamo's vest. He said something in
his native language that she didn't catch, but it obviously wasn't
something good. He took out a box small enough to hold in his hand and
began manipulating buttons on its side. "We have trouble."
"What kind?"
"There's something big sniffing around my ship," he whispered.
"Let's go." He led the way back into the woods, following the little
computer he held in his hands. "It's a pamthreat. That's not good.
Either we're in its territory, or we're in the hezz's territory and
she's going to come check out both intruders. Either way, we're going
to need to get inside the ship. And stay away from the pamthreat."
He was not the quiet woodsman anymore. Instead, he was scared,
more scared than she would have thought possible from a male who just
hours ago had been radiating a confidence that bordered on arrogance.
"Stop," he whispered once while examining his little box. "Let's go
that way." She followed him in the direction he pointed, a little off
the perpendicular from the direction they had been headed, and then
again he corrected their course through the woods. "We're almost
there," he said forty minutes later. "Less than a hundred meters. The
pamthreat's about a klick that way... run!"
She took his advice almost instantly, following after him as he
crashed through the woods. He was going all out, outdistancing her
easily as he made his way through the brush. She would have lost him if
he hadn't had to blaze the trail himself. He broke out into the
clearing and literally jumped into the ship, ignoring the need for the
ladder completely. "Come on!" he shouted.
The air burned in her lungs. She was going to black out. She
made it to the steps; his hands were on her wrists, hauling her inside;
the door close behind her. "What... What happened?"
"The computer said it was coming for us." He gestured to a
monitor. "Take a look."
She looked. One of the pamthreats was right outside the door,
sniffing around, looking for the meal it had been denied. Up close, it
was a terrifying beast, over two meters long, somehow lean and
overmuscled at the same time, a panther built to military
specifications, four legs in the rear that looked like they could propel
a bullet train.
She took out her camera and ran into the cockpit, where there
were real windows. Opening up a small air inlet window, she stuck the
lens out. The noise got it's attention. It circled around to the front
of the craft and sniffed at the air, looking for the source of the
noise. She shot a dozen frames of it as it circled, looking for her,
trying to find the intruder, the food, whatever it thought she was.
"Amazing," she said again. She marveled at its rear legs; they didn't
look deformed or stuck on; instead it looked perfectly natural that this
creature should have four legs mounted in a pelvis wrapped in muscle.
"Let's go find someplace quiet," Ahamo said. "Get out of my
seat."
Sighing, Lisanne stepped away from the window and took her own
seat again. She took a moment to stow her camera before he turned the
ship back on, taking to the air in one smooth move without a jolt. He
waited until they were high in the air to turn on the rear motor and
start the propeller, by which time they had drifted a kilometer or so on
the wind.
"I never saw it. When we were running, I mean."
"I can't imagine you would until it was just a little too late.
It is strange how that one was alone," he mused. "I wonder what
happened to its pack?"
"Pride," she offered, assuming his English-- Anglic, she
reminded herself-- was incomplete in places.
"That's lions. It's a pack. There's a difference. pamthreats
form packs."
"I'll have to look up the difference."
"You do that," he agreed as they flew on. It had been a long
day, so he announced they were going to a campsite for the night. She
didn't argue with him. She was still tired. Her mouth and body hurt
from the effort.
"Are you okay?" he asked. "You don't sound good."
"I don't feel too good. Give me a second. I need to catch my
breath." She panted hard. "Whew."
"I had the drones scout me out a region to set down for the
night. I don't usually sleep in this thing. I like being outside where
I can hear the woods. It's nice."
She nodded. It did sound nice, as long as no pamthreats were on
the loose. She watched him as he watched the display screens, peered
out his window, and manipulated the controls. He seemed to be very much
in his element here high in the sky. "Hmm. We're off the map."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that we're heading into territory that I've never been
to before, territory that I haven't mapped myself. The territorial maps
cover the area, but there's no survey." He glanced at the displays. "I
think we're going to have to just find a place to put down. Do you mind
hiking a bit?"
She shook her head. "I've got stamina. Just don't ask me to
run like that again."
"I'll keep it in mind." He banked the bug to the right and then
began easing down into the forest. He found a clearing large enough and
dropped onto the ground again. Lisanne waited to hear the machine
shutting down and found herself again surprised to realize that the
noisiest component, the propeller, had shut down long ago. It was
another thing about the Pendorians that she actively admired; their
silence. They lived in a post-industrial world; the idea of 'city
noise' was completely unknown to them. Living immersed in a world of
constant sound would probably have driven one of them crazy.
"Come on," he said. The door opened with a barely audible hum,
and again the beauty of Pendor poured into view. "It's a bit of a hike
up that way," he said. "There's a ridge up there that I can cover with
the drones and seccors I have with me."
"Seccors?"
"Security drones. Armed." He picked up a backpack and pointed
to a bundle. "Can you carry that?"
"Probably."
"Good," he said. She shouldered the bundle, finding it
surprisingly light. They set out into the forest.
Ahamo was pretty sure of his path and they soon found the
clearing he had indicated. He handed her a small hand axe. "Here.
Clear out some of the brush. If you find a rock you don't want to sleep
on, hack it out with that claw on the back."
An hour later, Ahamo had put together two sleeping bags, a
lean-to big enough for the two of them with room to spare, and a
firepit. Lisanne felt a bit guilty about. She hadn't done very much
after all. Ahamo had done most of the work. He reminded her, for some
reason, of a guide she had known many years ago in Tibet, a man who knew
the land but didn't care about the people. She had once thought,
facetiously, that people like that came from America. It was nice to
know they could be found everywhere.
"Soup tonight," he said, astounding her as he opened his own
pack and let spill all manner of vegetables. She counted a squash,
tomato, onion, celery... "What is this?" she asked.
"Just watch," he said as he took out a knife. A cutting board
that had to be just a millimeter thick seemed to materialize out of
nowhere, and she had no idea where he had stored a pot big enough for
all the food he had brought but that, too, emerged from his pack. An
onion and a smaller vegetable that smelled like a local variant on
garlic, despite its deep red color, went in first, followed by a squash
and two other vegetables that were not familiar to Earthlings like
herself. He dripped some water in from his canteen. "Now just sit back
and wait."
Ahamo sat back with his handheld terminal. "What do you think
of these?" he asked, handing it over to her. On it were clear, precise
photographs of the pamthreat pack they had been photographing that
afternoon. The image was as sharp as anything she could have managed
with her film and a pang of jealousy shot through her to realize that
the Pendorians had even made the art of photographic development
obsolete. She found the controls easy enough to understand and flipped
through what had to be hundreds of images, all shot with different
levels of zoom.
"They're nice. I hope the ones I send to Earth will be this
clear," she said, handing the terminal back.
"If they aren't, you can always get some of mine." He stroked
the screen for a moment. "There. Now you can get access to them
yourself. Just ask any AI."
She nodded. "Thanks. And thanks for being so kind to 'Miss
Geographic.'"
"Yeah, well." His big, furry head turned away. "Sorry about
the misanthropic act. I don't get along with most people, so I don't
try to get along with anybody." He looked at the pot. "Dinner's
ready." He handed her a deep cup with a spoon, and she ate gratefully.
"This is good. Really good. What's in it?"
He shrugged at the compliment. "I have no idea. Some spices a
friend gave me back at one of the towns, a few vegetables that have been
domesticated. I just throw 'em together and boil them down."
She gratefully accepted more from him, surprised at how hungry
she was. He offered her two biscuits of a kind she would have
associated with breakfast, and was somewhat let down by their staleness.
It was rare that anything on Pendor tasted less than optimum. When she
was finally sated, she put the cup down next to the fire and waited for
him to continue the conversation. When he didn't, she looked up and
said, "So, why the misanthrope act anyway?"
"Ah, you don't want to hear it."
"Sure I do. It's my job. What is it about you that makes you
want to get away from the rest of civilization?"
"If you call that civilization. You've been to Shardik castle,
right?" Lisanne nodded. "Then you've met Ember?"
"I vaguely remember her. She was talking to Wolf, one of the
other Geographic people."
"She's my daughter." Lisanne felt there was more to it than
that, so she waited for a minute. He finally finished with, "I've never
met her."
"I don't understand."
Ahamo drew a deep sigh. "Ember's mom was my lover. I never
knew that she wanted children. I know I didn't want them. But Ress
did, and without telling me she had her birth control reversed. When
she told me she was going to have a baby, I thought that was kind of
interesting. When I asked her who the father was, she said it was me
and hoped I didn't mind." He glanced up through the trees. Lisanne was
surprised at how many stars she could see. She had never appreciated
just how little of the sky the sun really occupied, or what it would
take to cause such a comprehensive eclipse.
"And you left."
Ahamo nodded. "I was going wild anyway at the time, spending
months out here. I guess she finally decided for me that I didn't want
to come back to the towns."
"Were you angry?"
"No," Ahamo said, and his voice told her everything else. But
he put it into words anyway. "I was sad. Sad that anyone who I had
trusted into my bed that much could use me so easily. Without even
asking. 'Would I mind?'," he snorted. "If I'd wanted to be a
father..." He let the thought trail off. "I guess if I really hadn't
wanted to be a father, I would have had the operation, right?"
"But that's permanent."
"On your world, maybe," he said. "Here, a vasectomy involves
installing a shunt with a valve. Just take a small magnet to the valve
and you can pull it open or shut it at will." He shrugged. "So, here I
am. Exiling myself to the middle of nowhere because I don't want to get
used like that again."
"Sounds so lonely."
"It is," he muttered, looking down. "But every time I think
about going back, I can't find the heart to want to. I've gotten used
to being out here. Being lonely. You're more company than I'm used
to." He took a deep breath again, let it out audibly. "And it's really
hard that there's someone out there who I think I should meet, but I'm
afraid of what she'll expect of me if I do meet her."
"You mean your daughter."
He nodded. "I don't want to be her father. But I'd like to
meet her. Get to know her. It's funny how we like to talk about how
distant we Pendorians are from you Terrans, but now that I'm starting to
read what you Terrans have to say and comparing it to our own way of
living, we're not so far apart. I like it here. I don't think I'd like
it on Earth. But that doesn't mean we're so different."
Lisanne nodded. "I'm starting to like it here myself." She
leaned back against the tree she had been using as a rest. "Not like
you, though. Not out in the middle of nowhere."
He held out his hand. "Hamo Agrusso." The 'g' sound came out
as the kind of strangled noise only a cat could make. "I'm pleased to
make your acquaintance, Lisanne Keck."
"I'm pleased to make yours," she said.
In the morning, they flew to another location and decided to
walk up a riverbed filled with stones and no real river flowing in it,
although here and there Lisanne could hear water trickling under the
sun-bleached white stones and bone-pale branches that littered the bed.
"It must be a dry year," Ahamo said, pointing to the edge of the river.
"If you look up there, you'll see how high this can get when the water
really gets flowing."
Lisanne followed his finger and saw where the treeline suddenly
veered upwards, roots and branches exposed underneath by the eroding
action of a violent spring stream.
They walked for four hours. Coming around a corner, Ahamo
muttered, "Or, there could be an alternate explanation for why the
stream doesn't run much at all."
The mountain here had given way, an avalanche of rust-colored
shale that now stood frozen in half-tumble down the hillside. The
stream had been something of a victim of the action, torn away with the
avalanche. Only a tiny fraction of it still reached the old bed that
Ahamo and she had been climbing along.
Crossing the shale field was one of the most harrowing
experiences Lisanne could remember. At any second the ground threatened
to give way underneath her feet and carry her down a hundred meters to
the trough where the avalanche had halted. It took them nearly an hour
to cross the two hundred metres or so of ground, and when they got to
the other side they kept going. The stream ran strong here, but still
many of the rocks were exposed. She could cross it without getting wet.
Or she could find a large gap and dive in.
"Stop," Ahamo said, putting his hand behind him. He eased his
rifle off of his shoulder as the two of the melted back into the brush
alongside the stream. "Another hezz." He pointed. "They live along
streams like this, but my probes didn't detect this one. We need to
head in."
She nodded. "Let me take pictures," she whispered.
"Be careful about it."
She unstrapped the camera and pointed it up the river. The hezz
had his (her?) head down between two rocks and was pawing at the river.
Its paw came back up and Lisanne saw a furred animal hooked on the end.
"Does it have an opposable thumb?" she asked.
"I've never gotten close enough to look. You'd have to ask the
fellow who first found this region if he knows any more than I do."
"I thought you found it." She was taking pictures like mad,
sure that she saw not one, but two opposable digits on opposite sides of
the hezz's main paw.
"I'm not the only one who comes out here," he said. "I'm just
the only one who stays out here." He chuckled low.
"Oh." She took a few more photos, killing the roll of film, and
then said, "Let's get out of here."
He nodded. The headed through the brush, picking their way
uphill. There was nothing in the way of a trail; this was the most
virgin country that Lisanne had ever picked her way through and she was
glad that she had brought clothes for the occasion. "This is all within
a day's flight of the center of Pendorian civilization," she said aloud.
"Yep. We're just in the next Terr over from Tinko Terr."
"But the course of evolution here is so different."
"No, not really. Just means that a hexapedal mutation occurred
early on in the progress of some small animal and has been an advantage
here ever since." He pointed at the sky. "For all we know, Crete
wanted it that way."
"'Crete?'"
"Crete is what people call the AI that ran Pendor during the
Great Sleep. Some people think Dave or Hal was Crete, but there's some
hints in Shardik's notes that say elsewise." Lisanne nodded, familiar
with the story of The Great Sleep, when Pendor was seeded and allowed to
blossom into a fully evolved world. "Crete did a lot of things to keep
Pendor the way it is. Crete, according to Shardik, knows that there's
no conscious life on Pendor except for what Shardik put here."
"Does Shardik call it Crete?"
"No. He doesn't even say it's an AI. Most people think it was
Hal, though."
They walked through the day. Lisanne took photos of six-legged
deer that could jump with amazing power, more six-legged squirrels, even
a six-legged lizard-like creature two feet long. "The birds aren't
hexapeds. Why?"
"Are you hungry?" Ahamo asked.
"Why?"
"Well, to answer your question we'd have to shoot one down and
cut it up to see if it's got vestiges of six limbs or if the birds came
over the mountains by themselves."
Lisanne nodded. "Think you can hit one?"
He picked up his rifle. "Are you kidding? I can't miss." His
rifle emitted a soft, low tone as he scanned the sky. A row of birds
flying in a straight line flew by, off in the distance. The tone rose
in pitch and then beeped. He fired.
Silently, one of the birds tumbled from the sky. "Come on.
Before some scavenger finds it." They took off through the brush,
crashing over bushes and brambles. Ahamo kept looking at the same small
box in his hand that he seemed to use to keep track of everything.
"Right up ahead."
They came upon a six-legged animal with greenish-brown fur and a
humped back sniffing the bird with interest. "Shoo," Ahamo said. The
animal hissed at him. Ahamo hooked his boot under the creature's
midsection and sent it sprawling. The creature turned and hissed again,
apparently unhurt by Ahamo's gesture, and then, deciding that it was on
the losing side of a battle with two large predators, took off.
Ahamo picked up the bird and examined it closely. He sniffed
it, waggling his whiskers. "Smells okay."
He bled the bird carefully and then hung the creature off his
pack. "We need to put a few klicks between us and the blood," he
explained. "In case the hezz scents it." He pulled out that small
handset he had examined earlier and ran his finger over it carefully.
"The drones will tell me if we're getting close to one. It was foolish
of me to not release the drones earlier. Shoulda known there'd be a
hezz on the river."
They walked on until first flash, what the Pendorians registered
as dusk, and decided to make camp. Again, Ahamo did most of the work,
but soon they were eating roasted... Lisanne didn't know if this bird
had a name. It didn't have any real resemblance to anything she knew
from Earth. It didn't look like a goose or a duck. The color was all
wrong, an almost grass-green color that must have made it invisible if
it roosted in trees. There wasn't much meat on it; enough to feed the
both of them, but that was about it, especially after Ahamo tossed some
more of those vegetables he carried with him into a flat pan and roasted
them up as well.
Ahamo examined the bones he had extracted from the bird
carefully after dinner. "Nope, must be a migratory animal. See? No
evidence that there were ever more than four limbs to this critter."
Lisanne took photos of the entire operation, and more of her
guide. Ahamo seemed to enjoy the attention she gave him as she
documented their camp life and the autopsy of their dinner. She made
notes in her notebook, wondering what Ahamo would think of her
assessments of him when he finally read the finished report that went
out to the hands of millions of readers.
She liked looking at him. He wore loose pants and the kind of
vest typically found on Terran fisherman, the kind with a dozen pockets,
not all of them visible. The vest did nothing to cover his upper torso,
which was handsomely apportioned and muscular in all the right places,
for a human or a Felinzi. His ears flickered only occasionally, he did
it deliberately when speaking whenever he was making a point. He had
this little tic, though, where he would tilt his head to the right and
push his chin out just a hint. She had yet to see him smile, though.
She knew what a Felinzi smile looked like, but not on him.
He saw her looking, and gave her a grin. "I don't suppose
you're looking at me with a camera eye."
She blushed. "Sorry."
"That's okay. It's just been a long time since I saw anyone
giving me that kind of eye in a while."
"That's what happens when you live out in the middle of
nowhere," Lisanne said with a grin. Then her smile faltered. "Sorry."
Ahamo sat back down, this time closer to her. Lisanne felt like
she would melt in his direction, fall into this reassuring woodsman and
just become a part of him. It was a peculiar sensation for her. She
wasn't the sort of person to get romantically involved with the one
person she had access to, but Ahamo was a combination of reassurance and
loneliness that spoke to her and to which she wanted to respond.
But he just smiled and offered her a cup of something warm.
"Tea?" he offered.
It wasn't like anything that passed for 'tea' on Earth, but it
was tasty, and as she drank it she felt a curious warmth easing into her
limbs. "What is this?"
"It's a sleeper's tea that someone found a couple of years ago.
There are people near the town who do nothing but go out, grab a few
leaves, test it for obvious poisons, feed it to their rabbits and such,
and if it's safe, they try it for themselves. It's a little more
scientific than the way you Terrans went about finding useful herbs, but
it works."
"Just for sleep?"
"Just for sleep. It's calming. You looked like you needed it.
It doesn't work very fast, though, and when you finally do fall asleep
it burns out of your system very fast so you can work up quickly. Just
in case a hezz or pamthreat walks by." He grinned. "You walked the
whole trail pretty strongly for a human who almost blacked out after
that run yesterday."
"Maybe it was just all the time we spent in space. I didn't do
enough exercising." She sighed. "I keep forgetting to do the important
things."
"Like?" Ahamo asked, innocently enough.
She was silent for a few minutes. Did she really want to tell
him? Well, she'd gotten herself into this. "I forgot to have children.
I was so busy doing my career, taking pictures, that I entered menopause
without ever having kids."
"You couldn't have them now? How about a gift child?"
"Gift child? What's that?"
"Did you know that we're genetically engineered?" She nodded.
"Well, there are weird behavioral patterns in human beings. Take the
difference between males and females. Males are programmed to have sex
and love their children, but they're not really programmed to have
children. Does that make sense?" She nodded. "Women are different.
They have an instinct to 'have children,' probably because there's no
question that those children are theirs. Pendorians are different. The
instinct to 'have children' is actually very rare in Pendorian females.
It's a mechanism that keeps Pendorians having sex and using birth
control." He grinned at the obvious irony.
"Anyway, there are just as many people who think they want
children but who realize after they've dropped one that they can't
handle the responsibility. That's where gift children come from.
People who want to raise children put their names into the gift child
registry, and people who make children put their children into the
registry. It all works out."
Lisanne said, "So it's something like adoption?"
"I guess that's the word you humans would use for it. Something
like that, anyway. We're a lot less formal about it than you Terrans.
No laws get in our way, just good common sense."
"Hmm." With curious pleasure she let her head drop down onto
his shoulder. "Sounds nice. Thanks for the trip, Ahamo."
She felt his hand in her hair, tousling it gently. A loose
strand fell into her mouth and she blew it out of the way. "What a
curious pair we've turned into."
"Ah," he said, "You're nice enough."
"Here we are, the lonely hearts. You not wanting to give up
your sense of freedom to a full-grown daughter, me a failure at not
getting children when the getting was possible."
She felt his head turn, kiss her hair. "Are we lonely tonight?"
"We don't have to be," she sighed. "We're not all that lonely
right now."
His hand caressed her arm, and she felt that wonderful urge to
sink into his embrace again overtake her. She let it happen, let his
arms surround her. The feel of his muzzle on the back of her neck felt
so good that already her belly was warming, preparing her.
His body was a mass of muscle covered by short, black fur with
splotches of white, and she thought she could feel each and every fiber
of it tighten and relax with his movements. Every movement communicated
reassurance to her even as his tongue licked at her ears. "I shouldn't
be doing this," he growled softly.
"I can't get you into trouble," she whispered.
"You can't. But you can lead me back to it."
She turned in his arms to face him. "Is that what you're really
afraid of? That if you let yourself feel intimate just one more time,
you'll be ready to let someone like Ember's mother take advantage of you
again?" She reached up and touched his cheek. "I'm not her."
"I know you're not her. That doesn't make it better." His
hands gestured in the air but Lisanne couldn't make out what he was
trying to communicate with them. "I just want to be left alone."
"No you don't. You just don't want to get hurt again." She
laughed. "I hope you won't take it as an insult when I say that's very
human."
He looked up at her, his muzzle parted in a big smile. "That's
the nicest thing anyone's said to me in a long time," he said. "You
wouldn't believe..."
"No, I probably wouldn't." She reached up with both hands and
pulled him close to her, pressing her mouth to his muzzle. It was a
gesture that surprised both of them, Lisanne mostly because she would
never have consciously thought of trying to kiss a cat like this.
But both of them relaxed into the kiss almost immediately, and
seconds later they were exchanging kisses of the sloppier kind. Ahamo
hadn't forgotten how to kiss, Lisanne noticed as warm desire seeped into
her. The kiss made her desperate to know what was under that jumpsuit.
She learned quickly that he was expecting her to lead. "We'll
need a bedroll," she said.
Silently, Ahamo reached behind the log they had been sitting on
and pulled out one of the rolls.. With a casual pull on the strings it
rolled out onto the ground, and after running a finger along the seam it
opened up into a blanket big enough for the two of them.
Lisanne pounced on him then, pushing him down onto the blanket,
her mouth on his, her body pressed against his. The surprised look on
his face gave her a moment's pause, but the grin that followed told her
that she was doing just the right thing. She pulled down on his zipper,
from his left shoulder down to his right knee, peeling him like a prawn
as he shrugged off the outer layer of his clothes. "You wear boxers,"
she said with a grin.
"Yeah. I don't like the heat you get with briefs." In the
light of their fire he was a beautiful animal of a man. His broad chest
and muscular biceps were like nothing she had seen in Felinzi yet, but
for a man who lived out in the wild, she reasoned, there must have been
a lot of opportunity to build muscle. As he pushed off the briefs as
well she got her first good look at his cock. If anything, its normalcy
was off-putting; she had expected an alien penis on an alien cat, but
Ahamo was hung normally both in size and in shape. The head of his cock
was, if anything, a little narrower and flush with the shaft than on a
human, but there was nothing about it to suggest that they would be
incompatible.
Ahamo stripped off the last of his clothes and, completely
naked, turned over and rose to sit beside her. He wasn't quite as agile
as a full-bodied cat, nor was he as awkward as the average man she had
known through her life. But she had a glimpse of his broad, powerful
back and the slim build of his waist and reflected that even on Pendor
there were degrees of perfection.
He was watching her and she realized that he wanted her to take
her own clothes off. She sat down to place her boots is his lap.
"Untie me?" she asked as she pulled her t-shirt off over her head and
opened the buttons of her jeans. Ahamo pulled at the laces and had her
boots off in a flash. She took her bra off and tossed it aside. The
two of them pulled off her jeans together, and then she tossed aside her
panties.
The fire crackled and somewhere in the distance an owl, or the
local equivalent, hooted. For a second the dim firelight and the sound
of the wind filled the space between them, the warm night not quite warm
enough on her skin.
She reached out for his hand and the two of them pulled close to
one another. She looked into those big, slitted eyes, those beautiful,
feline eyes, and then she heard another noise, the sound of purring,
purring on the scale of a lion, a jaguar, a predator. Another sound
became her own heartbeat, loud in her ears.
It was still her turn to lead. She guided him back down to the
blanket, his body now stretched out before her. His body was firm and
strong, and not at all what she would expect in a mel older than she.
She reached down and touched his thigh, and he quivered in anticipation.
She watched his erection grow in anticipation of her touch, and she did
not disappoint him. She touched his balls, her fingers sliding under
the sac and lifting it, touching the soft, furred bag that held his
testicles. Her hand slip up, feeling a ring of spongy, furred flesh at
the base of his cock that must have been the retracted sheath she had
read about. But his cock was an ordinary six or so inches of pale,
white skin, bobbing before her eyes, throbbing in time with his
heartbeat.
She lowered her head to his cock. His smell was strong and
pleasant, the way cats should be, and there was nothing to suggest that
he hadn't taken a shower since yesterday. She wouldn't have cared
anyway.
The taste of his cock in her mouth was a sudden jolt of
unreality. She wasn't sure if it was the sudden feel of it or the
proximity but suddenly she was completely enraptured with the idea of
sucking him off. His cock slipped along her tongue and effortlessly she
took most of the length of it into her mouth, gagging only as she got
within reach of the base. She pulled off of it, letting her tongue play
along the length of his shaft, caressing the tip, before plunging down
again, sucking him into her throat. His whole body was already wound
up. "Lisanne," he moaned. "It has been so long. I'm going to come
soon."
She rose off of his cock and wrapped her hand around it,
stroking it slowly. "This soon?"
Ahamo didn't reply with words but instead, to her surprise,
arched his back and came with a grunt, dribbling white semen to flow
over her fingers. "You were close!"
"I told you. Tried to, anyway." He gave her a weak grin.
"Give me a minute and we can do something else."
"Promise?" she said.
"Yeah." He sat up and reached into his backpack for a small
washcloth. He handed it to her so that she could clean herself first,
then proceeded to wipe down his own fur, getting up as much as he could.
They sat for a while, he with his arms around her, holding her
as they faced the slowly ebbing fire. Sparks flew up into the night,
past the tall pine trees that did not successfully block her view of the
stars. "Stars."
"What about them?"
"When I heard this was a ringworld, I thought I might not see
the stars. But the shadow ring only blocks out the sun, and the sun
takes up only a little bit of the sky. But why doesn't the sunlight
wash out around the shadows?"
"Because there's no air at the shadow ring, Lisanne," Ahamo said
in a voice that conveyed patience. "Air is what causes the washout
inside the atmosphere; it's something for the light to reflect off of.
Without it, the blackness of the shadow is perfect."
"Oh," she said. That explained the brilliance of the stars
overhead, even as they seemed to twinkle ever more fiercely than the
stars on Earth. "Is the atmosphere thicker here?"
"A bit," Ahamo said. "Quite a bit, I think. You might be at
double Earth's pressure here. But don't worry. We got to your planet
without any trouble; I'm sure that you'll be able to return without any
either."
Lisanne nodded. She squirmed against him; the cool night air on
her shoulders, the warmth of him against her back and the heat of the
fire against her breasts and face were all so stimulating. His hands
reached up idly to touch her small, drooping breasts. His fingertips,
surprisingly soft, stroked at her nipples and made her feel lightheaded.
"Ahamo?" she asked. "Do you think you're ready for me?"
"I could be," he said, and even as he said it her suggestive
hint had reached down between his legs and encouraged his cock to stand
up and be noticed. She felt something familiar prodding against her
lower back. She turned to face him, her hand on his shoulders guiding
him as she lay down on her back. His cock slipped into her with only
token resistance.
Lisanne moaned as her cunt enveloped him. His cock was just the
right size. Ahamo began a gentle in and out motion. The right side of
his body was in darkness; the left illuminated by the fire, the whole
waving above as his cock repeatedly thrust within her. It had been too
long since she had had a lover, and she knew that it was the same for
Ahamo too, but the thrusts were sweet and skilled. She didn't want him
to go harder or faster, she just wanted him to keep on going until he
had had his pleasure. For her, the tingling in her fingers and at the
tip of her nose were enough to tell her that she was going to come soon,
too, the gentle kind of climax she always had. It would be more than
enough.
Ahamo surprised her by dipping his head down. His body was
pressed against hers now, his fur stroking the length of her body, her
breasts, her nipples; he was purring loudly, satisfaction and the quest
for release all in that single sound. His head was by hers. He licked
her cheek.
She wrapped her legs around his torso and encouraged him into
her. "You are the most wonderful..." he gasped softly, leaving the
words unfinished. Lisanne made noises of her own, sounds to spur him
on, ask him for more. And he gave more, making love to her body with
the kind of gentleness she wouldn't have expected from a carnivore. But
he was more than just a carnivore.
Lisanne's own climax sneaked up on her as it always did. She
had but a second to recognize it before it washed over her, expressed in
a gasp and a tremble and, always, tears. Ahamo came a few seconds
later, a loud growl of pleasure and a release of strength that was, like
his lovemaking, reined in to keep from hurting her, not that he would
have done that with twice his strength.
Ahamo withdrew. They lay together next to the fire, his head on
her shoulder, his face towards the light. "Thank you," he said in soft,
earnest tones. "I don't know why I avoided that for so long."
"You had your reasons," she whispered. "But that was wonderful,
Ahamo."
"I'm glad. I'd hate to think I was bad at it. Or out of
practice."
"You were neither," she sighed, looking back up at the sky and
the stars. There were so many, and they were so clear. It would take a
long time for her to visit all of them, she thought, and part of her
wanted to do just that. "Thanks for being so kind to me during my first
days here." She kissed his furred cheek just below one ear. "I'm
starting to like it here."
He grinned. "Good. I might even come to like having you here."
The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., and Related Tales
Copyright (c) 1989-2000 Elf Mathieu Sternberg.
Distribution limited to electronic media not-for-profit use only.
All other rights are reserved to the author.
--
Elf M. Sternberg, rational romantic mystical cynical idealist
http://www.halcyon.com/elf/
Fast food restaurants are like gay bathhouses in San Francisco,
places where people go to engage in high-risk behaviors.
- Greg Critser
--
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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