From a great depth O’Neill clawed his way back to consciousness. The Zylongi were bumping and jolting him down a jungle path. They had misjudged the dosage necessary to put him out. He almost wished he were unconscious; he was hot, sweaty, thirsty. The rough ride gave him a headache. Resolutely he kept his eyes closed and began to “read” the environment for the damn crowd up there in herself’s throne room—bad luck to the lot of them.
With considerable effort and many brisk commands and gentle tugs from the medical woman, they got him into a small hovercraft vehicle that whizzed along a jungle path and then over a wide body of water—a lake or a great river, he couldn’t tell which. Apparently his head was resting in her lap, a position that was intellectually consoling but in his present condition not much else.
The jungle was teeming with animal life: Kiernan’s food chain. There were a lot of little critters, quite unrecognizable to Seamus. But among them were massive bears, some suspicious-looking medium-sized dinosaurs, a flock of mastodons, and some wandering cats that seemed to be exactly like the pictures Seamus had seen of saber-toothed tigers.
Just like someone has scooped up creatures from Earth long ago, deposited them here, and then forgot about them.
Seamus had the impression that there were degrees of jungle and that the wilder critters were way off in the distance. He also noted that his captors were scared stiff of the place and in a hurry to get out of it.
Then they cut across an intensely cultivated plain, in parts of which, sure enough, there were vast herds of furry cattle. As a product of a culture whose sagas dealt with cattle raids, Seamus was affronted by the furry cattle, but he was too sick and too uncomfortable to take much pleasure in being affronted.
There were only two or three kinds of crops, presided over by robots and human technicians, with other humans—well, kind of humans—running errands for the technicians. An old and highly sophisticated system of agriculture it seemed.
Then closer to the City he “saw” wagon trains, long processions of large carts being drawn by animals that looked like squat ungainly horses. These trains streamed back and forth across the plain, bringing in supplies of raw materials, stuff that looked like metal ore and lumber, and tracking back empty for more supplies. As they drew closer to the City, they met mechanical movers, heavy, slow, and clumsy, and an occasional rapid scooter like the hovercraft they were in.
The City itself loomed up in the distance, a giant manufacturing and commercial center, the throbbing core of life on Zylong, but to Seamus’s psychic senses, a curiously lifeless place, seemingly with less human energy than the comparatively tiny Iona.
The planet was laid out pretty much the way the chart on the Lady Deirdre’s desk said it should be: a single world island in the Northern Hemisphere—tundra on the very top, trailing off into steppes, and then the plains of which the City was the center. Beneath the City—as you looked down the island—was a massive snow-covered mountain spine with a rain forest on the left, on the fringe of which was Seamus’s landing site, and deserts on the right. The precipitation obviously came from the east.
The City itself was on the bank of a meandering, sluggish river that originated in the mountains, flowed through the jungle, tumbled over a broad waterfall, and then flowed by the City into a vast delta land and then into the sea.
Sure I’ve spent my life on a titanium cylinder. I should be enjoying all these wondrous sights, and instead, I’m half-conscious and have a friggin’ headache.
Finally they landed on a platform at the edge of the City—a place so dazzling physically that, despite its lack of human vitality, it was beyond Seamus’s drowsy comprehension.
I’ll come back for it later, he promised weakly.
An armed guard helped to transfer O’Neill to a monorail car that moved him first across a grassy meadow, then along the riverbank—above the wide and slow-moving blue sheet—and then into a deep dark tunnel, where O’Neill would have been perfectly willing to have left his consciousness if that had been possible.
The medical woman was fussing over him anxiously, now, to tell the truth, bothering him with her chatter and solicitude. Can’t you leave me in peace, woman? Don’t you realize that I’m a sick man? Put my poor head on a pillow, would you please, and let me have a little bit of peace.
Then the car arose from the tunnel and into the vast and splendid City, a mass of great buildings in light pastel colors, pink and blue and green and lemon, looming on all sides.
Despite his frigging headache, he read the City to be composed almost entirely of giant towers, forty and fifty stories high, made of a substance that was either rock or very hard metal, each one designed with a distinctive shape or rather in a series of distinctive patterns in which the shape of the building seemed to match the color in which it was painted. No, the colors weren’t painted, they were somehow imprinted on the rock or metal.
They were windowless and even though it was now well into the Zylongian night, they gleamed in an artificial light radiating up from the ground at their base. There was no sign of vegetation in the City. Between the buildings were huge plazas, boulevards, and wide esplanades of an elegant, formal checkerboard pattern—all swarming with handsome people clad in a dazzling variety of garments in the style of those the police wore, some reaching to the ankles and others, in the case of young women, barely to mid thigh. Seamus was too sick to notice whether the thighs of the young women were attractive.
Dear God, he prayed, put me out completely. When I am no longer interested in female anatomy, I am too sick altogether, not long for this world, at all, at all.
Well, almost too sick. It was his impression that the thighs and butts that were displayed were a bit too thick for his tastes, not that he was in any position at the moment to be choosy.
In addition to the monorail on which he was now riding, O’Neill read tiny individual vehicles scurrying to and fro on the streets like multicolored bugs. There was also an extensive tunnel system into which the monorail plunged, though not, as far as he could see, the bugs. For someone like Seamus, born and bred on a spaceship, the City was dazzling, a glorious vista of civilized living, despite his monumental headache.
A decayed culture it might be, but, since I have to be here, I might just as well enjoy the decay—a little. Just so long as it doesn’t change me much. And of course that couldn’t happen.
The drug was beginning to wear off, and he reconsidered his wish that the medical woman leave him alone. If she insists on holding my hand and resting my head against her breasts, I’ll just have to accept that as part of the mission. So the culture’s degenerate. A little bit of degeneracy never hurt anyone.
As he snuggled closer, still trying to act like a man in a trance, his monorail car plunged once more into a tunnel, deeper, it seemed, than before. Seamus thought he could sense running water, deep streams feeding into the vast river and perhaps providing the City with water. No engineering slouches, these folks.
The woman was very comfortable indeed. There were undoubtedly others in the car with him. He sensed their presence. But it was dark.
Ah, now, Seamus me boy, take things as they come. Remember you’re supposed to be unconscious. Then the car ascended to the surface and docked in front of a huge complex of towers, pale lime in color and, his psychic sense told him, bustling with human activity.
His body must have somehow signaled his alertness. The woman’s firm breasts were, after all, a distraction and a torment. It was hard not to move just a little bit. They were, he realized, about to carry him into this complex. Then there was no chance to reflect further. He felt an instant of pain and then nothing at all.
The Lord God had heard his prayers for oblivion.
* * *
“Good morning, Poet O’Neill. You seem to be feeling better today.” The voice sounded as fragile as a tiny glass bell.
He was lying on a contour couch in a windowless room illuminated by diffused light. It was much like the dentist’s quarters on the Iona and the woman looked much like a dental assistant in her soft white wrap with light blue jacket over it.
Where am I, he wondered, and who is this cool person looking down at me with such curiosity? Am I dead? Sure I can’t be in hell because it doesn’t hurt. Maybe it’s heaven, but I don’t hear any harp music and this woman doesn’t look like an angel, though she’ll do till one comes along.
“I’ve felt worse,” he said, temporizing till he got the lay of the land. “A little weak to tell you the truth.”
“That will pass quickly.” She smiled. “You are a very interesting patient. It took six of our orderlies to hold you down at one point. We’re…” She hesitated. “I mean no offense, but we’re not used to someone of your size, Poet O’Neill.”
My size, now what the hell does that mean?
“I hope I didn’t hurt anyone.”
“Only a few bruises. We must apologize for seeming to be rough. However, you surely understand that it is not every day that a spaceship lands in our jungle. The First Ones taught us always to be courteous to guests. If we have been discourteous to you, we sincerely apologize.”
Jungle? What the hell?
Then he remembered. Zylong. They must have played their mind-probe games. Well, he was still alive so they hadn’t figured too much out.
“I see you have me programmed to speak your language,” he said, feeling stupid as he spoke. Not very smooth for a master spy.
“That was no great difficulty, Poet. Our tongues have common ancestors. Yours … let me see…” she consulted a clipboard “… is related to Proto-English and Old Gaelic mixed with some unusual Teutonic features, while ours is of the Romance variety. We could have communicated without programming you if you had used the translator you carried on your belt.”
O’Neill looked down. He was clad in a Zylongian kilt that matched the gray color of his tattered poet’s gown perfectly. His translator was gone—probably being analyzed by some electronics technician.
Then he remembered the woman. The medical person. There were gold stripes on her white uniform, considerably more elaborate than her jungle dress, but still leaving little doubt about her attractions. The stripes spanned ample but neatly shaped breasts and then ran down her flanks, emphasizing, more than any Taran daytime fashion would have dared, the curves of her body. There was more gray in her hair than Seamus had realized, and more delicate lines at her throat. Still, she was more than adequate. Indeed, maybe even proper.
I’ve never been in love with an older woman before. It might be an interesting experience.
Seamus O’Neill, get your mind off such things. You’re here to be a spy, not to be involved in ridiculous love affairs.
Go ‘long with you. Having love affairs is part of being a spy, isn’t it? Certainly your spies have a good time in all the books you’ve read in the monastery library. And herself didn’t say no.
She didn’t say yes, either. And you know what the Rules say.
Only if invited. But what if she invites me?
“I am sorry,” the woman went on, uneasily fingering her clipboard, “that we may have seemed to be unconscionably, ah, brutal with you. It was necessary or…” she hesitated uneasily “… it was thought to be necessary. I trust you will accept my apologies, both official and personal.”
“Well … Doctor?”
She nodded as though her title was unimportant.
“My mother taught me never to make a false move with a spear pointed at my heart.” He tried his most roguish smile, but his lips barely parted.
She laughed, revealing teeth that were slightly but prettily pointed. Carnivorous ancestors, indeed. Score one for the Lady Deirdre.
“Poet O’Neill, we have very few visitors to Zylong. Three days ago there were mysterious energy forces at the outer rim of our sensor system. We did not know who or what to expect. Some of our more superstitious people remembered an ancient legend about a red-bearded giant god who would come to destroy Zylong. Even we scientists were disconcerted by the image we received of you when you landed. Yes, I am a doctor. My name is Samaritha and I am Director of Biological Research at the Body Institute.”
So, they had sent the big brass out for me, gorgeous brass at that.
“I’m happy to meet you officially,” he tried to respond in kind, “and to know that I have been in the care of a distinguished scientist.”
She colored deeply, still abashed by him. Well, that can’t hurt now, can it?
“I hope,” she said, frowning, “that you do accept my apologies. I greatly regret what was done to you. It was most inhospitable.”
She was serious. The apology was not just a formality. Had there been disagreement about his treatment? Did she represent a scientific subcommunity that was in partial dissent from whoever controlled this place? Or was this merely deeply ingrained courtesy?
So far two mistakes for Podraig and the Captain Abbess. The Zylongi had picked up traces of the Iona, and somewhere in their mythology lurked a red-haired giant. Nice going, fellas, he thought. If you’ve made any more, you can forget about O’Neill.
Aloud, he said, “I accept your apologies, Doctor Samaritha. If one is to be examined as I have been, it is at least consoling to know that it has been done by a competent and gracious woman.”
She now was so embarrassed that she seemed ready to run from the room. “You do have a poet’s skill with words, Poet O’Neill.”
They’re great ones for titles around here, aren’t they?
“If you’re a biologist, then you’ve at least discovered that I’m not a god—despite the red hair.”
“You are interesting biologically … I mean you are much like a Zylongi and yet different in some ways. My colleagues find your data fascinating.” She had him at a disadvantage—after all, she had taken off his clothes and not the opposite (except, of course, in his imagination and that didn’t count). But she still wouldn’t look at him. Women had been avoiding his eyes lately.
“In addition to being biologically interesting, what else did you learn about me?” O’Neill inquired. “I have the feeling you didn’t miss much.”
The beautiful doctor flushed again. “I am sorry, Poet O’Neill, that the probe had to be so thorough. To violate someone’s modesty without permission is a terrible offense. I must ask again that you forgive me.”
“As many times as you ask—” he turned on all his Taran charm “—I’ll forgive you, Doctor—and a few times extra for good measure.”
She laughed, reassured, and actually sat down on the hard chair next to his couch. “Do you feel well? Sometimes the probe has uncomfortable aftereffects. Here, let me check your pulse.”
She checked it by touching his throat rather than his wrist. Wow, O’Neill thought as she leaned over him, if someone has to take off my clothes and inspect my biology, she’ll do nicely.
Still no hint of whether they had broken through with the probe. “So you found that I was ungodlike. I hope you found that I was not about to destroy your world.”
She glanced at a disk on her jacket. “A bit slow by our standards.” Her fingers seemed to linger a tiny bit longer than necessary on his throat. “But apparently quite acceptable for your biology.… We find you to be utterly and completely harmless.” She consulted her record board again. “Poet Seamus O’Neill, an exile from Tara—for certain infractions that need not concern us—space minstrel, wanderer from world to world, entertaining as he goes. Low on his luck, lower on fuel, and lowest on food. We welcome you to Zylong. We are sorry that our first meeting with you was inhospitable. We will try to make your sojourn here pleasing.”
She finally glanced at him and smiled. O’Neill felt his heart do some odd things. She looked back at her record board and blushed. “I wonder if I may ask you a question that is perhaps inappropriately personal. It … it is not strictly within the limits of my professional discipline. But I fear that our students of behavior would never dare ask you.”
“Ah, there’s no harm in that.”
“We noticed, we could hardly help notice that you kissed me in the jungle before I, ah, sedated you.”
“Did I now?” Seamus O’Neill, you’re a damn fool. Violating one of their taboos the first thing you do on this heathen world.
“Is that acceptable behavior in your culture?” She had turned a dusky purple. Sure she’s terrible pretty when deeply embarrassed.
“Well, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with a little kiss. If it’s not done here, I’m apologetic altogether.”
“Of course we kiss, but in the privacy of the chamber, and only with our mate or our promised.”
“We do that too,” Seamus decided to temporize.
“But we had not been formally introduced. We are not mated or promised. Was it therefore appropriate by your cultural norms?”
“Well now…” You might as well tell the truth. “ “You seemed afraid of me and I wanted to let you know that I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I see. That was very kind of you. I was frightened and you did, ah, reassure me—” She looked like Eve might have after she ate the apple: her averted face and her body, leaning inward in self-protection, hinted at a mixture of fascination, fear, and guilt. “—as well as astonish me. It was a disturbingly erotic experience.”
Was it now? “Forbidden fruit?” he asked, thinking of Eve.
“I have been asked by many—” she was studying her clipboard intently “—what the experience was like.”
“And…?”
“I laugh,” she laughed, and was radiantly beautiful, “and say that it was like being kissed in public by any red-bearded god.”
What did Murtaugh MacMurtaugh say in their ethics class? Nothing is more pleasant than violating mores in the search for truth.
“I’m sorry if I caused you any embarrassment,” he said, meaning about half of what he said.
“In your culture, then, such signs of affection are permitted between doctor and patient?” She was making notes on her clipboard.
Now Seamus’s big Irish tongue got him into trouble, big trouble. Most of the problems that would later arise resulted from the tiny, wee fib he told.
“Nothing would be thought wrong with it at all, at all. Sure doesn’t the research literature show it facilitates the healing process, if you take my meaning.”
A harmless exaggeration. He didn’t expect to be taken seriously.
“Really?” she looked up from her notes. “I could see that it might.…”
“No more than two or three times a day, however.”
After all, it was a very chaste kiss.
“Really!” She made another note. “How very interesting.”
“Some of the scholar folk have done research which indicates that it helps the recovery process, speeds it up something terrible.…”
Well, if they haven’t done it, they ought to have.
“How extremely interesting!” Another note, now with eyes anywhere but on him.
“How many days have I been here in your hospital?”
“We call it a Body Center.” She finally looked at him. “Two days. This is the morning of the third.”
“That means—” he was only joking, really only joking “—that you owe me four, maybe five kisses. I’ll have to be catching up.”
“How astonishing.” She made more notes, scribbling rapidly. “That’s fascinating. I must share this with my anthropological colleagues as soon as possible.”
The devil made Seamus Finnbar O’Neill do what he did next.
He reached out from his couch, grabbed the woman’s arm, drew her toward him, put his other arm around her waist, and brushed his lips against hers—briefly, but twice.
“Now you only owe me two.” She wore some sort of thin but firm corset garment underneath her wrap. He permitted half of his hand to slip down toward her rear end; and delightfully solid it was too.
She did not resist or pull away.
“That is not our custom,” she said blandly, her lips trembling, and delightfully solid lips they were too. “It is not, however, unpleasant.” She drew several strong lines under some of her notes. “Ought I to thank you?”
“That depends on whether you liked it.”
“Of course I liked it, Poet O’Neill. I am not immune to human reactions, even if I am a Research Director.”
“Well, I’m glad of that anyway.”
Careful, Seamus me boy. Your big mouth might be getting you into trouble. This woman loves sinning something terrible.
Time would prove that an understatement.
She scribbled frantically.
“And what would you folks be planning to do with me next, lock me up in a cage, where the common folks of Zylong can come and stare at the red-bearded nongod?”
“Of course not.” Her dark eyes flashed dangerously. “We are not savages. You will be our guest until your machine can be repaired. We have no such machines here, so it may require some time.” She tucked her note pad under her arm and edged toward the door. “Where you will be housed has yet to be determined. In a short time Technician Londrau will escort you through our Health Center. Is that acceptable?”
“Anything you say, ma’am.” He sighed loudly and patiently.
She paused at the door.
“We will ask many questions, you should not think this hostile.”
“I guess I am a questionable phenomenon.” He smiled his most charming smile.
“Quite.”
Swiftly and gracefully she glided back to the couch, bent over him, and touched his lips with hers, permitting Seamus an extensive, if very brief, view of her breasts. Twice.
“I believe we’re even now, Poet O’Neill.”
“For the last two days,” he stammered.
“We shall see about the future.” She vanished through the doorway.
I think I’m in deep trouble. I’m nothing more than a horny adolescent male. God won’t hold it against her. But no good can come of violating your most powerful mores. Murtaugh again. Still, she wanted to do it.
Well, Podraig said the culture hereabouts was falling apart. Maybe I’ll have to kiss every lovely woman on the planet as part of my spying mission. Sure she practically forced me into it. He pondered with satisfaction the possibility of Zylong being a vast harem for himself and decided that it was a fantasy he ought not to encourage.
The Lady Abbess would not be amused. No, decidedly not.
Technician Londrau was an enthusiastic young man with a voice as flat as the Iona’s computer, if not a comparably foul mouth. However, the exhausting tour that he conducted of the Health Center took Seamus’s mind off his lovely boss—more or less.
It was an enormous complex of buildings, housing various hospitals and research facilities with massive banks of equipment and a huge staff of workers, much larger, it seemed to Seamus, than the work required.
For the first time, he began to feel not only like a foreigner, but an uncultivated one at that. There were at least twice as many workers in the medical complex as the slightly more than five hundred monks, Wild Geese, and pilgrims on the Iona. While, as far as Seamus could see, the Zylongi had no greater medical capabilities than did the tiny medical staff of the monastery, they put a lot more of their resources into health care.
Of course, he told himself, they have more money and more people.
The trouble with you, Seamus O’Neill, is that you’re a peasant who has spent all his life with eccentrics, characters, oddballs, and other related peculiar types. Sure they’ve shown you the films and the pictures and made you read the books, but your world has been alloy hull and half a thousand people for the quarter century you’ve been around. Now you’re in a great city of a mature and sophisticated civilization. You’ll gawk every time you turn around if you’re not careful. Once they become accustomed to your height and your great, terrible red beard, they’ll see you for the bumpkin you really are. Especially if you keep kissing their mature Research Director types.
Ah, sure they weren’t really that powerful kisses. Just little pecks, if you take my meaning.
“These are the hordi on which Director Samaritha is doing her most important research,” Londrau droned on. “See how clean their quarters are and how well they are treated. The Director is teaching them to read and communicate. They are not the domestic strain who act as our servants, but the wild species from the desert and the jungle. Yet note how quiet and happy they are.”
The hordi were diminutive creatures, a little more than four feet tall, and indeed looked much like the protohominids in the textbooks in Seamus’s biology courses. About a dozen were eating and sleeping and playing with and nursing their young, huddling together in a large area that had been arranged to look like a jungle habitat. Indeed, they seemed placid and gentle, unperturbed by the four white-clad technicians who were monitoring them.
“We do not even need cages,” Londrau boasted. “They are all very fond of Director Samaritha.”
“That shows good taste on their part,” O’Neill agreed. “Obviously they are an earlier stage of the evolutionary process. Prehominids.” Probably the natives of the planet. They had managed to survive along with the colonists from Earth, the ancestors of the Zylongi. Of course, on Earth, the various pre- and protohominids had survived for aeons, side by side, if in different ecological niches. Till Cro-Magnon man occupied all the niches.
“Certainly not.” The Technician fought to control his temper. “They are obviously unrelated to us.”
“I see,” said Seamus, who did not in fact see at all. There were enough traits of these docile, attractive little creatures in the Zylongi to leave little doubt that there had been cohabitation sometime in the past. Samaritha’s faintly pointed teeth, for example. Nothing wrong with that, but why deny it?
The more fascinating question was why the prehominids on Zylong were so similar to those who had apparently once existed on Tara. Parallel and unrelated processes? Or had some prehistoric visitors brought species from Tara to this world, where they had survived long after their species had become extinct on Earth?
If the Zylongi had such hangups about their prehominid neighbors that they denied the mixing of the two species, they could hardly be expected to know the answer to that question—not that it was particularly important for Seamus’s purposes to learn the answer.
“You perhaps have noticed that they are not naked?” Londrau’s singsong voice interrupted O’Neill’s reflections.
“Ah, aren’t they now. Sure ‘tis a good thing you called my attention to it. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”
This guy is beyond belief.
“It is very interesting. Once they have learned to communicate with us, they wish to clothe themselves. We permit it, of course. They seem to learn shame with the power of communication.”
“Or maybe just imitation.”
That stopped Technician Londrau cold. “What a very interesting speculation.” He scribbled a note on his pad. “Fascinating.”
Seamus considered whether he would want to engage in sex with the slender little female hordi, nervous darting creatures with pert breasts and slim hips. They were appealing enough, he supposed, if you didn’t have your own women around or if you found excitement in brutalizing the frightened and the powerless. Since Seamus didn’t enjoy the latter much, even in fantasies, he decided that the little critters were not much threat to his virtue.
Well, didn’t you enjoy the doctor’s fright?
Yeah, but she’s not powerless. I am.
More or less.
As the tour continued, Seamus noted several more interesting phenomena. First of all, only a few members of the staff seemed to be working very hard. The energetic types like Samaritha and Londrau were far outnumbered by those who didn’t seem to be doing much at all, save for filling out forms and sitting at desks watching what seemed to be video monitors. They moved slowly and did not seem particularly interested in their work. They were, however, quite interested in him. An ever-changing band of gawkers followed him through the spotlessly clean, indirectly lighted pink and beige corridors and rooms of the medical complex, chattering away about him, just quietly enough so he could not hear them.
“Begone, you curious rabble,” he had shouted at them once, more or less for the hell of it, waving his arms in a mighty theatrical gesture.
That band of gawkers fled in terror, to be replaced a few moments later by another crowd.
“That was very amusing,” Londrau commented in a tone of voice appropriate for an obituary, making an inevitable note. “You frightened them.”
“Just gave them something to talk about,” Seamus sighed.
“Of course,” said his guide, scrawling away. “Fascinating.”
Secondly, there were only a few elderly people in the Body Center. Either they were treated elsewhere, or Zylong had another way of dealing with the old. Seamus did not like the implications of that at all but decided not to ask about it, not yet.
Finally, while the Body Center was clean, neat, airy, and well illuminated, it didn’t seem to work very well. Many of the lifts were not functioning. Banks of terminals were not lighted, the workers staring idly at the empty screens. Several large machines—for the making of blood and nourishment he was told obscurely—were also inactive. Each time it was explained to Seamus that these mechanisms were “temporarily waiting repair.”
Now on the Iona, most everything was messy, as the Lady Abbess constantly complained. The Tarans didn’t mind mess at all—not so long as they could take their three showers a day. In fact, the more mess the better: it was a sign work was being done. Sometimes when you were a little lazy, you’d make a mess just so your fellow pilgrims would think you were working, a technique at which Seamus O’Neill was, to tell the honest truth, extremely skillful. Yet all the machinery functioned, even if it wasn’t needed. A Taran took any nonworking machine—even if it was a tertiary backup mechanism that had never been used in the whole pilgrimage—as a personal insult, a challenge to his or her integrity and honor.
Overstaffed and with broken-down equipment, he summarized for himself and anyone who might be listening on Iona. Of course, they may have the resources to be able to afford both.
“You benefited from the tour?” Samaritha demanded when she found him later, reclining, half-asleep, on his couch.
“Fascinating,” he replied. “Incidentally, one question. What is the meaning of the metal—I’d call it silver—band many of you wear around your neck?”
“This?” She touched her band shyly. “It is our mating band. On the day my man—the Music Director—and I were formally mated, he put this link around my neck. And I a similar one around his. It represents—” she hesitated “—a chain of love which is to bind us together for life. Do you not have a similar custom?”
“We use rings, same symbolism, however.”
“Interesting … you do not wear such a ring, Poet O’Neill?”
“When one is a space tramp like myself, how would one find a woman? And what kind of a woman would mate with me anyway?”
His self-pity was so convincing that he almost believed the story was true.
“Interesting.” Yet another note. “And lamentable, of course.”
“Terrible altogether.”
“Now as to your residence during your sojourn with us.” She became very official. “You may rest for several more hours. At sunset you may come to the living space of Music Director Ornigon and make your home with us. The Committee has decided that he and I will be your hosts. We will take refreshment there. Technical Student Horor, our son, may join us, and perhaps the Secretary and the Guide will visit us briefly. Some companions of our quarter will take nourishment with us. Afterward there will be a contest. Does this meet with your pleasure?”
She sounded like Podraig reading out a program. “And if it doesn’t?” he said dryly and not too politely.
Her eyes locked with his again in the same vulnerable plea that he had seen at the landing site. There was a fleeting moment of shared desire. She looked away—more slowly this time.
So, I trouble you just as you trouble me? O’Neill thought. She was the kind of woman you wanted to take in your arms. He imagined the frightened, eager beating of her heart as his hands tightened around her. Slow down, Seamus. This is a flirtation, nothing more. Remember that, you dummy.
“I am afraid, Poet O’Neill, that I do not understand,” she said slowly, as though quite mystified. “Perhaps we should postpone the scheduled events?”
O’Neill assured her that whatever events she wanted to have today were just fine with him. She left the room—or was it a cell?—still puzzled by the Taran’s response.
The lovely doctor spoke formally. Was that the way the Zylongi always talked? She accepted that he was a down-and-out space tramp—at least she said she did. A “Director of Research” and a “Music Director” (her husband?—she had spoken of their son) were obviously important people. Why would they host a space bum? The “Secretary” and the “Guide” must be very important, too, otherwise why would a brief visit be described with such awe? Why would such personages waste their time with someone who was no threat? The first stirring of suspicion began to poke at the back of his brain. The good doctor knew more than she was telling.
He wondered if the refreshment had a bit of “the creature” in it. Sure a wee touch of it wouldn’t hurt a bit.