America 2040 - Golden World Part 24

"Sage, you don't have to say anything else," the admiral said sadly. "I accept full responsibility. It is all a misunderstanding on my part."

"Are you calling me a liar?" Sage shrieked. "You filthy-minded pile of nuts and bolts?" Now Rodrick felt a new concern. Sage Bryson had pa.s.sed a very thorough psychological screening back on Earth, but a lot of time and a lot of miles were behind them, and the danger, the strain-well, he'd been pleased that there hadn't been more adverse effects among the scientists and colonists. Sage's reaction was not the reaction of a well-adjusted woman.

"Miss Bryson, the admiral had the idea that you had agreed to marry him," he said gently. "Did you do anything to encourage that idea?"

She was very calm. She pulled herself together. She laughed. "I cannot be held responsible if Grace Monroe has allowed her creature to overload its capacity."

"No, of course not, " the admiral said.

Sage laughed again. She looked at the admiral, and there were tears in her eyes. "I thought you were my friend. "

The admiral started to speak, but he caught a motion of Rodrick's hand telling him to remain silent.

"I thought, surely, that I could be myself with you," Sage said. "All my life I've had to hide any friendly feelings I might have had for you men, because after one little smile, one innocent touch on my part, you become slavering animals." Her voice had begun to rise slightly. "You, you're not even a man, but, oooh, she did a good job on you, didn't she, planting into even a bionic brain the same filth and animal desires.

And now you reward my friends.h.i.+p by telling the captain lies."

She whirled to face Rodrick. "I haven't told you all of it," she said, eyes flaring, lips making large, exaggerated movements as if each word was pain. "I suppose he has told you I willingly undressed, exposed my body to him." Her laugh now was high, on the verge of hysteria. "I guess youmen had a great, big old belly laugh out of that. At last Sage has let her guard down. At last a man has seen Sage's body, and has touched itall over . I'll bet you laughed and laughed at that, didn't you, you sons of b.i.t.c.hes, you filthy, mother-" Her voice rose, and the obscenities poured out, a sewer puking vileness.

"But you didn't get Sage, did you, you ball-less wonder, you animated junk pile, you-"

She fell silent. She lowered her head, and, somehow, seemed to be very much younger. Her hand went to her mouth, and she covered her full lips with thumb and forefinger. "I'm so very tired. I think I will have to rest now."

She walked as if sleepwalking, smiling shyly, shoulders hunched, to slide down the wall and sit in the corner of the office on the carpet. "I don't want to play that game anymore," she said, in a soft, high-pitched, little girl's voice. "It's nasty, and I won't play. Leave me alone, Uncle Freddie. You're hurting me. I am tired." She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

"Admiral, get a medical team up here on the double," Rodrick ordered. The admiral reached for the communicator as Rodrick came around his desk. "No, use a communicator outside," Rodrick said. The admiral left on the run. Rodrick stood over Sage, looking down. Her eyes were closed.

"Sage?"

"Tired," she whispered.

"Sage, get up. Come and sit in the chair. Dr. Miller is coming. She'll see that you get some rest." He reached down and took her hands, thinking to help her to her feet, into a more dignified position in a chair. As he touched her, she went rigid and her eyes flew open.

"Get your hands off me," she screamed, neck straining, hands jerking away, then flying to narrowly miss scratching Rodrick's face. "Don't touch me, you filthy-" The obscenities were still coming from her in a hysterical scream when two members of the medical staff rushed in, the admiral behind them. The doctors took in the situation at a glance, saw the set of Sage's face, the wide, staring eyes, and the grating, throat-injuring scream of words. Sage fought fiercely, but soon a tranquilizing mister was slapped against her thigh, and within seconds she quieted, closed her eyes, and was limp as she was lifted onto a stretcher.

"Admiral," Rodrick called, as the admiral started to follow the medical team. "I don't think you'll be needed."

The admiral's face was twisted in pain. Rodrick, touched, put his arm around the admiral's shoulder. "I think she'll be all right."

"It's my fault," the admiral said softly. "I should have realized-"

"Son," Rodrick said, surprising himself, for he was not thinking of the admiral as a robot, "the seeds of that outburst, of her mental anguish, were planted a long time before she ever met you. Don't blame yourself."

"Captain, permission to be absent from duty for a while?"

Rodrick nodded. "You're not going to do anything foolish... ?" He felt foolish himself, worrying about a robot performing irrational actions.

"No, I just want to do some thinking," the admiral said. "With your permission, I'll check out a crawler and camping equipment and spend a few days in the Renfro Mountains."

"Permission granted."

When the admiral was gone, Rodrick called Grace on the communicator and told her of the scene in his office and of granting permission to the admiral to go off by himself.

"What has that woman done to him?" Grace asked, in quick, protective anger, then, just as quickly, "No, I don't mean that. The poor woman is sick."

"Maybe the admiral should see a psychiatrist when he gets back, too," Rodrick said.

"How long did he say?"

"A few days."

"He'll be back in three days," Grace said. "He won't miss my wedding."

Rodrick felt a quick little sadness. People had the most ingenious talents for messing themselves up.

Poor Sage. Somewhere back in her childhood, it had all begun, but she'd repressed it all these years. He wondered who Uncle Freddie was, and what he had done to cause her to say, as a little girl, "I'm tired ofplaying that game."

But what was.h.i.+s excuse? In three days he was getting married to a woman he didn't love.

One thing for sure, he promised himself, as he went back to a cold cup of coffee, made a face, poured it out, and drew another. Regardless of what he felt, he would never give pain to Jackie. She would never know that he didn't love her. He didn't like seeing anyone in pain.

The admiral was finished with his packing when Baby came running smoothly past the vehicle park.

Baby was carrying three healthy, whooping teenagers-Clay, Cindy, and Tina-without a sign of strain.

She was still only a youngster herself, but she stood six feet tall on four-foot-high legs, and her entire body and tail length was reaching twelve feet.

"Whoa, Baby," Clay Girard yelped. Baby came to a stop, and the three youngsters piled off to surround the admiral.

"Where are you going?" Clay asked.

"North," the admiral said.

"What's the expedition?" Clay asked, always on the lookout for an interesting mission to try to get in on.

"Rest and relaxation," the admiral answered.

"All alone?" Tina Sells asked.

"Yes."

"Hey," Clay said, "I've been wanting to get up into the mountains to try for trout up there."

The admiral smiled. He couldn't help but feel a bit better in the presence of such youthful good spirits.

"Give me a day or so, Clay, and then I'll call and let you know how things look in the way of trout streams."

"Locate a good one, Admiral," Cindy said, "and we'll get Dad to bring us up to have a real fish fry."

"I'll call," the admiral promised.

He watched as Clay and the two girls leaped onto Baby's back, while Jumper and Cat played chase-the-tail in and around Baby's three-toed legs.

He envied all of them with all his being.

EIGHTEEN.

Earthlings had always been fascinated by the possibility of life after death, and this fascination was enhanced by civilization's advanced medical techniques. New drugs and new procedures enableddoctors to save patients who were very close to death, and pseudoscientific literature latched onto this and was full of accounts of individuals who had been "dead" and had come back to life with glowing stories of peace, bliss, and wonderful visions. Skeptics said that such feelings and visions were simply the results of the brain's temporary deprivation of oxygen, but such unbelief did not lessen the new faith of those who had experienced the visions, or those who were desperate for a.s.surance that there was something beyond the grave.

Theresita Pulaski was mildly surprised to find that therewas life after death, the death she had felt as she lay in the dust under a tree, without the strength to crawl to the river for a cooling drink of water. She felt an absence of pain. She saw visions: Her vision was blurred, as if seeing through vast time and distance, and there was a blur of vivid rainbow-hued movement, and death had two heads, one of them looking at her with kind eyes.

She floated without pain or worry. Her body had no needs. There was no time. From a high place she looked down on beauty and wonder and the warm sun and the wide, peaceful river. There were soft, soothing hands on her. If this was death, it had always been totally underrated, even if she couldn't ever seem to bring anything into definite focus... not even the beautiful visions of being loved with a skill and intensity that reminded her of the nights she'd spent with Yuri. She was lifted, loved, and loved again, experiencing either endless o.r.g.a.s.ms or sweet, total s.e.xual desire for it all to begin again. When she was no longer dead, she missed those times with a strength of yearning that caused her to shake as if with a jungle fever.

Rain pounded down on a thatched roof. Through an open window she saw the long stringlike fronds of a nut tree dripping in the downpour, and for an awful moment she thought that she was back in the jungle.

She sat up with a start. She remembered her wounds and tried to move her left arm. The arm felt slightly weak, but when she looked down, there was no blood, no gaping tooth tears, only barely distinguishable scars. And her skin was not bronzed, but was her natural Slavic swarthiness. There was a funny little dizziness in her head. She began to concentrate on her surroundings: walls of horizontal logs c.h.i.n.ked with mud, open windows, a floor covered with a thickness of fresh leaves, a bed of fronds under her, a ceramic vessel on a wooden table beside the bed, water, and nothing much else in the small room.

She shook all over, and her body cried out for something. She seized the ceramic jug and drank deeply, but the need was not satisfied. Sliced fruit beside the water container eased the shaking only a bit, and then she felt as if she wanted to scream and run. so she got off the bed, falling back to catch herself with her hand. She was very weak.

The doorway was covered by some kind of animal hide. She pushed it aside and looked out onto the muddy clearing surrounded by thatched-roof log huts. Nothing moved but the falling rain and the trembling fronds of the trees.

The rain was chill, but she walked into it, her bare feet sinking into the mud. Her nude body s.h.i.+vered with chill, adding to the other tremors, which seemed to come from deep, deep inside. She walked to the nearest hut and pushed aside the leather covering. An oil lamp was burning on a table, and by its light she saw a thin, sticklike thing rise quickly from a bed like her own and turn a hard-surfaced, gleaming head with yellow, faceted eyes the size of coffee cups toward her. A stream of clicks and whistles came from the thing's wide mouth, which opened in a slit below a s.h.i.+ny, visorlike beak. The being pointed a three-fingered hand and made sounds, and Theresita turned away, letting the covering fall back over the doorway.

She walked toward the open end of the village enclosure and emerged into a grove of broad-leafedtrees. No one tried to stop her. She hugged her arms over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the chill rain and walked toward the sound of surf until, topping a dune, she saw an ocean with a broad sandy beach and, in orderly rows, huge, hulking, blunt-ended, cigar-shaped, lighter-than-air craft swaying ever so slightly on mooring ropes. She walked toward the airs.h.i.+ps, whose wooden gondolas rested on the ground, and a sticklike being reared up from a gondola. The thing made sounds and pointed a three-fingered hand back toward the village.

She didn't know why she was shaking so. She was in no mood to be ordered around by clicking, whistling, insectlike stickmen. She told the thing so in Russian, with appropriate profanity from her early days in the Red Army. Other heads popped up from the gondola. The first one leaped out and ran toward her. She held her ground. The stickman stopped in front of her, pointed back toward the village, and clicked and whistled.

She pointed toward the strand. "I don't know about you, Comrade Mantis"-for the thing reminded her of a member of that insectivorous hunter of Earth-"but I am going for a walk along the beach." She turned away and started walking. She felt a hard hand on her shoulder and was jerked around with surprising strength. A stream of sound issued from the slit mouth. In sudden anger she knocked the hand from her shoulder, and when the insect man made louder sounds and lifted one hand, three-fingered fist clenched, she went into a crouch and watched the blow coming, went under it, seized the arm, and sent the stickman tumbling over her shoulder.

A wailing sound came from the mouth, and a dozen stickmen came running from the nearest airs.h.i.+p. She had no place to run. She stood her ground and sent three of them moaning to the ground before she was swarmed under by sheer numbers.

Scratched and bruised by the hard exoskeletons of the stickmen, she was carried, kicking and cursing, back to her hut and tossed bodily in to land on the soft floor. She leaped up, ready to fight, but the flap fell into place and she sat down on the bed, breathing hard. A few minutes later the flap was lifted. There was something different about the stickman who stood in the doorway-the abdomen was fuller, the rump rounder. This one held a braided leather whip in one three-fingered hand and used it to indicate that Theresita was to come outside.

It had stopped raining. She followed the stickman-or woman, she felt-to a wooden hut larger than the others at the center of the village compound and went inside. Other insects-she would begin to think of them in that term-were taking down squirming gelatinous-looking sacs hanging from pegs along all four walls. The one with the whip gestured, and Theresita duplicated the actions of the others, lifting two of the squirming sacs, which she realized were larvae, down by a looped handle at the top. She followed them outside and hung her two sacs on a pegged rack in the full light of the sun.

She was already turning away when the whip lashed across her calves smartly. It was not too painful, but she leaped toward the whip bearer, caught the lash in midair as it came at her again, and jerked hard, bringing the thing toward her so that she seized it by the neck, jerked the lash out of its hand, thrust the lash up against the yellow, glaring eyes, and said, "Do that again and I'll break every bone in your body."

She shoved the thing away, threw the lash to be caught in the thing's hands, and turned to go back to the big hut for two more of the squirming sacs.

As soon as all the larvae were transferred from the hut to hang squirmingly in the sun, most of the females- Theresita could tell the difference by the shape of the abdomen and the bulging rumps of the stickwomen-started drifting away toward the beach. Theresita looked questioningly toward her guard, the one with the whip. "Shall we go get some sun, sweetie?" she asked, pointing toward the beach. The female clicked, pointed. They walked together to the strand to find the others digging happily in the wet sand left behind by the outgoing waves, plucking out circular things that they cracked with their rows of solid, serrated teeth. The one with the whip pointed and whistled. Theresita walked to the edge of the surf, waited for a wave to recede, saw frantic movement in the sand, and picked up a round bivalve. She opened it with her fingers and saw a piece of white flesh the size of a peanut. She sampled it. It tasted like oysters.

The sh.e.l.lfish feast continued for a long time, and then the stickwomen sauntered away toward the grove, Theresita and her guard following, to pick fruit and nuts. Before the sun went down, the larvae were moved back into the large hut where a fire smoked, sending part of the column of smoke through a hole in the roof, but spreading most of it inside. The community's males joined them there, and the fruit and nuts that had been gathered were shared. Theresita thought she was beginning to pick up a word or two of the whistling, clicking language of the insects: A muted click and backward movement of the head meant yes. The muted click partly whistled, the head thrust suddenly forward, meant no. They called themselves Whorsk.

Three females began to sing. It sounded somewhat like crickets, but more melodic and varied. A male leaped to the center of the rough circle that had been formed. His movements were very graceful, slow, and sinuous. A female joined him. Others joined in the singing. The couple dancing drew closer. The female's rounded rump seemed to swell, and when a long, pointed protrusion appeared from the male's groin, the singing grew more frenzied. The dancing matched the music's pace until, with a sweet whistling sigh, the female leaped high, came down on her hands and knees, and displayed a rosy opening in her swollen rump. The male, with an equally sweet whistling cry, inserted his long, pointed organ there and began to sway ecstatically, while the singing softened and slowed. One by one, other couples joined, until Theresita was the only unjoined ent.i.ty in the room.

She walked out amid the soft hummings and whistlings and clickings and went to her hut. Communal though the joinings were, as alien as they were, she was reminded vividly of that dreamlike state during which she herself had been joined with a male.

Question, comrade, she was thinking.How can it be so vivid, that memory? How did these bug things heal you? You've seen enough mortal wounds to know that you were bleeding to death there beside the river. And what is this interior trembling, this all-body hunger that is not satisfied by food or water ?

She slept. The day following, and the day after that, and the day after that were much the same. She began to enjoy the sweet singing that prefaced the nightly communal orgy. She began to pick up words.

Her attempts at reproducing the clicks and whistles of the insects speech were greeted with what she came to know as laughter. One night two of the females with whom she spent the days pulled her out onto the dance floor and teased her good-naturedly into trying to duplicate their slow, sinuous dancing.

Loud clicking, which indicated approval, greeted her efforts, and she, laughing, began to do a rather raunchy Earth-style b.u.mp and grind. A male leaped onto the dance floor and started trying to copy her movements, and when his organ began to extend and swell, she gave a series of laughing clicks and pushed him away, then took her seat, staying out of the circle until the first ritual coupling had been performed.

She had lost track of time. A group of Whorsk arrived, and there was a huge celebration. The newcomers had a variety of fruits, nuts, and nuggets of crude copper for trade. She gathered that they had come across a piece of ocean and was impressed. She climbed into a gondola and tried to pedal the wooden pedals, which drove the airscrews. She managed to make the four-bladed wooden propeller rotate, to the good-natured clicking approval of those who were watching. Then the trading visitors left. Question, comrade. Where do they get the hydrogen to fill the bags? The only signs of technology she saw were wood-fired kilns for making pottery from a type of clay that the males brought in from the west and the much-valued bronze heads of spears, arrows, and axes.

One day she saw a group of males, armed, leaving, headed west. She suspected that the big river was in that direction, so she ran after them, thinking to join them, to see where the river reached the sea. After all, she'd spent a lot of time on that river. It was, in her mind, her River. The males, headed by the one she'd come to recognize as the village chief, formed a defensive group, pointed spears and arrows at her, and ordered her back to the village.

Her conversation had reached a point where she could ask a female, "Go men?"

"They go to the river."

If you go, you will die, was the answer, with a rattling warning.

This, of course, made her more determined than ever to go to the river. She had concluded that her interior shaking, had been a sure symptom of drug withdrawal. If so, that would explain those dreamy days and nights when she was "dead," when she was healing. Obviously, the insect people did not have the skills to heal her alien body. They had no drugs; they lived simply, except for the incredible airs.h.i.+ps; their food and drink came from nature; they had no organized agriculture. Somewhere, over on the big river, were beings who had a drug that would keep a human being in a dreamlike state for a very long time, long enough for some very severe wounds to heal, and yet not make that human too dependent on the drugs.

Theresita's first attempt to sneak away to the west showed her that she had underestimated her captors.

She left just before dawn and had not gone two hundred yards before she was quickly and silently surrounded by a group of warriors, who escorted her back to her hut at spear point and admonished her in no uncertain terms, although she did not understand all the words.

But, d.a.m.n it, somewhere there was a man, a real man, who had used her body so lovingly and skillfully that the memory was stronger than the drugs, which had, obviously, had the effect of making her forget everything but odd, inexplicable flashes of s.e.xual ecstasy, rainbow lights, and an odd beauty.

One morning the door flap was lifted by the female who had been Theresita's constant companion. She was carrying a soft, well-cured fur, which she handed to Theresita. It was tawny green and had been fas.h.i.+oned into a simple sleeveless garment, open down the front. She slipped it on. The nights had been growing so cool, she had been pulling the fronds and leaves of the bedding atop her. There was a belt with the garment, made from the tail of a beast. The fur extended to midthigh. For the first time in a long time she was clothed. It felt rather peculiar, after so many months of nakedness.

"You killed akkkee ," the female told her.

"I kill?"

"You killed." The name of the beast she'd killed on the river was not translatable. It was a syllable like kkkee .

"Who fix me?" she asked.

"... people." Something people. What people? She did not have the words to pursue the question.

"You were brave," Theresita was told. "So you live."

She had been brave. She had killed akkkee . So she was allowed to live.

By whom?

"I live because of Whorsk?" She could come fairly close to p.r.o.nouncing the name the insect people called themselves.

"No... people."