"I'll be damned," said Corbell.
Something rustled behind him.
He forgot the furred snake. He was sleepy, so sleepy that in a moment he knew he would pass out. But there were furtive sounds behind him, and he turned, fighting to stay on his feet.
Under a hooded robe of white cloth with a touch of iridescence in it: a bent human form.
While the cat-snake distracted him, she had struck. He saw her in shadow: tall and stooped, gaunt, her face all wrinkles, her nose hooked, her eyes deep-set and malevolent in the shadow of the hood. Her swollen hands held a silver cane aimed at Corbell's eyes.
He saw her for a bare moment while the numbness closed over him. He guessed he was seeing his death.
II
He was on his back on a form-fitting surface, his legs apart, his arms above his head. The air was wet and heavy and hot. Sweat ran in his crotch and armpits and at the corners of his eyes. When he tried to move the surface surged and rippled, and soft bonds tightened round his wrists and ankles.
His pressure suit was gone. He wore only his one-piece undersuit, on a world uninhabitably hot. He felt naked, and trapped.
Light pressed on his eyelids. He opened them.
He was on a water bed, looking at gray sky through the jagged edges of a broken roof. He turned his head and saw more of a bedroom: curved headboard with elaborate controls, arc of couch with floating coffee table to match.
These bedrooms must have been mass-produced, like prefab houses. But a tornado had hit this one. The roof and the picture windows had exploded outward.
The old woman was watching him from the arc of sofa.
He thought: Norn. Fate in the shape of an old woman. She was vivid in his memory, and so was the silver cane in her hand. He watched her stand and come toward him... and the fur boa round her shoulders raised a prick-eared head and watched him back. It was curled one and a half times around her neck. The tip of its tail twitched.
Dammit, that was a cat. He remembered a cat like that, Lion, though he'd forgotten the boyhood friend who owned it. Lots of luxurious fur, and a long, rich, fluffy tail. If Lion's tail had been multiplied by three and attached to Lion's head, this beast would have been the result.
But how could evolution cost a cat its legs?
He didn't believe it. Easier to believe that someone had tampered with a cat's genes, sometime in these last three million years.
The woman stood over him now, her cane pointed between his eyes. She spoke.
He shook his head. The bed rippled.
Her hand tightened on the cane. He saw no trigger, but she must have pulled a trigger, because Corbell went into agony. It wasn't physical, this agony. It was sorrow and helpless rage and guilt. He wanted to die. "Stop!" he cried. "Stop!"
Communication had begun.
Her name was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar.
She must have had a computer somewhere. The box she set on the headboard was too small to be more than an extension of it. As Corbell talked-meaninglessly at first, babbling merely to stop her from using the cane-the box functioned as a translator. It spoke to Corbell in Corbell's own voice, to Mirelly-Lyra in hers.
They traded nouns. Mirelly-Lyra pointed at things and named them, Corbell gave them his own names. He had no names for many of the things in the room. "Cat-tail," he called the furred snake. "Phone booth," he called the instant-elsewhere booth.
She set up a screen: a television that unrolled like a poster. Another computer link, he guessed. She showed him pictures. Their vocabularies increased.
"Give me food," he said when his hunger had grown more than his fear. When she understood, finally, she set a plate beside him and freed one of his hands. Under her watchful eye and the threat of her cane, he ate, and belched, and communicated, "More."
She took the plate behind the headboard. A minute or so later she brought it back reloaded, with fruit and a slice of roasted meat, hot and freshly cut, and a steamed yellow root that tasted like a cross between squash and carrot. As he shoveled down the first plateful of food he had hardly noticed what he was eating. Now he found time to wonder: where did she cook it? and to guess that she used the "phone booth" to reach her stove.
The cat-tail dropped from the old woman's shoulders onto the bed. Corbell froze. It wriggled across the bed and sniffed at the meat. Mirelly-Lyra thumped it on the chest and it desisted. Now it crawled up onto Corbell's chest, reared and looked him in the eyes.
Corbell scratched it behind the ears. Its eyes half closed and it purred loudly. Its belly was hard leather, ridged like a snake's, but its fur felt as luxurious as it looked.
He finished his second helping, feeding some of the meat to the cat-tail. He dozed off wondering if Mirelly-Lyra would shake him awake.
She didn't. When he woke the sky was black and she had turned on the lights. His free hand was bound again.
His pressure suit was nowhere in sight. Even if she freed him she would still have the cane. He didn't know if the "phone booth" worked. At the back of his mind he wondered if Peerssa, thinking him dead, had gone on to another star.
What did she want with him?
They worked on verbs, then on descriptive terms. Her language was of no form he had ever heard about, but the screen and mechanical memory made it easy for them. Soon they were trading information: "Take off the ropes. Let me walk."
"No."
"Why?"
"I am old."
"So am I," said Corbell.
"I want to be young."
He couldn't read expression in her voice or in the translator's version of his own. But the way she'd said that jerked his head up to look at her. "So do I."
She shot him with the cane.
Guilt, fear, remorse, death-wish. He cried and writhed and pulled at his bonds for eternal seconds before she turned it off.
Then he lay staring at her in shock and hurt. Her face worked, demonically. Abruptly she turned her back on him.
His thrashings had frightened the cat-tail. It had fled.
"I want to be young-" and blam! And now her back was rigid and her fists clenched. Did she hide red rage, or tears? Why? Is it my fault she's old? One thing was clear: She was keeping him tied up for her protection and his own. If she used the cane on him when his hands were free, he might kill himself.
The cat-tail crawled back onto his chest, coiled, and reached to rub noses with him. "Meee!" It demanded an explanation.
"I don't know," he told the beast now rumbling like a motor on his chest. "I don't guess I'll like the answer."
But he was wrong.
She freed one of his hands and fed him. It was more of the same: two fruits, a steamed root, roasted meat. She fed the cat-tail while she was at it.
The fruit was fresh. The meat was like overdone roast beef sliced moments ago. She had been out of sight behind the headboard for no more than a minute. Even a microwave oven wasn't that fast, or hadn't been in 1970. It stuck in his mind...
And he had to go to the bathroom.
She was irritatingly, embarrassingly slow to understand. He knew she had the idea when she began to pace, scowling, dithering as to whether to leave him in his own filth. Eventually she freed him, first (from behind the headboard) his wrists, then his feet. She stood well back, covering him with the cane, while he went into the middle closet.
Alone at last, with the door blocking her eyes, he let out a shuddering sigh.
He wouldn't try to escape. Not this time. He knew too little. It wasn't worth the risk that she wouldn't let him go to the bathroom again. It wasn't worth the risk of the cane.