Probing through Lomas' flesh, she found two more, one of them smaller and more vigorous. "A male!" she said happily. He would be dead before I would. He would be through his metamorphosis and screwing everything that would hold still before his sisters even had limbs. He was the only one to make a serious effort to bite T'Gatoi as she placed him in the achti.
Paler worms oozed to visibility in Lomas's flesh. I closed my eyes. It was worse than finding something dead, rotting, and filled with tiny animal grubs. And it was far worse than any drawing or diagram.
"Ah, there are more," T'Gatoi said, plucking out two long, thick grubs. "You may have to kill another animal, Gan. Everything lives inside you Terrans."
I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together—a kind of birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn't ready to see it. Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn't not see it. Closing my eyes didn't help.
T'Gatoi found a grub still eating its egg case. The remains of the case were still wired into a blood vessel by their own little tube or hook or whatever. That was the way the grubs were anchored and the way they fed. They took only blood until they were ready to emerge. Then they ate their stretched, elastic egg cases. Then they ate their hosts.
T'Gatoi bit away the egg case, licked away the blood. Did she like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard—or not die at all?
The whole procedure was wrong, alien. I wouldn't have thought anything about her could seem alien to me.
"One more, I think," she said. "Perhaps two. A good family. In a host animal these days, we would be happy to find one or two alive." She glanced at me. "Go outside, Gan, and empty your stomach. Go now while the man is unconscious."
I staggered out, barely made it. Beneath the tree just beyond the front door, I vomited until there was nothing left to bring up. Finally, I stood shaking, tears streaming down my face. I did not know why I was crying, but I could not stop. I went farther from the house to avoid being seen. Every time I closed my eyes I saw red worms crawling over redder human flesh.
There was a car coming toward the house. Since Terrans were forbidden motorized vehicles except for certain farm equipment, I knew this must be Lomas's Tlic with Qui and perhaps a Terran doctor. I wiped my face on my shirt, struggled for control.
"Gan," Qui called as the car stopped. "What happened?" He crawled out of the low, round, Tlic-convenient car door. Another Terran crawled out the other side and went into the house without speaking to me. The doctor. With his help and a few eggs, Lomas might make it.
"T'Khotgif Teh?" I said.
The Tlic driver surged out of her car, reared up half her length before me. She was paler and smaller than T'Gatoi probably born from the body of an animal. Tlic from Terran bodies were always larger as well as more numerous.
"Six young," I told her. "Maybe seven, all alive. At least one male."
"Lomas?" she said harshly. I liked her for the question and the concern in her voice when she asked it. The last coherent thing he had said was her name.
"He's alive," I said.
She surged away to the house without another word.
"She's been sick," my brother said, watching her go. "When I called, I could hear people telling her she wasn't well enough to go out even for this."
I said nothing. I had extended courtesy to the Tlic. Now I didn't want to talk to anyone. I hoped he would go in—out of curiosity if nothing else.
"Finally found out more than you wanted to know, eh?" I looked at him.
"Don't give me one of her looks," he said. "You're not her. You're just her property."
One of her looks. Had I picked up even an ability to imitate her expressions?
"What'd you do, puke?" He sniffed the air. "So now you know what you're in for."
I walked away from him. He and I had been close when we were kids. He would let me follow him around when I was home and sometimes T'Gatoi would let me bring him along when she took me into the city. But something had happened when he reached adolescence. I never knew what. He began keeping out of T'Gatoi's way. Then he began running away—until he realized there was no "away." Not in the Preserve. Certainly not outside. After that he concentrated on getting his share of every egg that came into the house, and on looking out for me in a way that made me all but hate him—a way that clearly said, as long as I was all right, he was safe from the Tlic.
"How was it, really?" he demanded, following me. "I killed an achti. The young ate it."
"You didn't run out of the house and puke because they ate an achti."
"I had… never seen a person cut open before." That was true, and enough for him to know. I couldn't talk about the other. Not with him.
"Oh," he said. He glanced at me as though he wanted to say more, but he kept quiet.
We walked, not really headed anywhere. Toward the back, toward the cages, toward the fields.
"Did he say anything?" Qui asked. "Lomas, I mean." Who else would he mean? "He said `T'Khotgif."
Qui shuddered. "If she had done that to me, she'd be the last person I'd call for."
"You'd call for her. Her sting would ease your pain without killing the grubs in you."
"You think I'd care if they died?»
No. Of course he wouldn't. Would I?
"Shit!" He drew a deep breath. "I've seen what they do.
You think this thing with Lomas was bad? It was nothing."
I didn't argue. He didn't know what he was talking about. "I saw them eat a man," he said.
I turned to face him. "You're lying!"
"I saw them eat a man." He paused. "It was when I was little. I had been to the Hartmund house and I was on my way home. Halfway here, I saw a man and a Tlic and the man was N'Tlic. The ground was hilly. I was able to hide from them and watch. The Tlic wouldn't open the man because she had nothing to feed the grubs. The man couldn't go any farther and there were no houses around. He was in so much pain he told her to kill him. He begged her to kill him. Finally, she did. She cut his throat. One swipe of one claw. I saw the grubs eat their way out, then burrow in again, still eating."
His words made me see Lomas's flesh again, parasitized, crawling. "Why didn't you tell me that?" I whispered.
He looked startled, as though he'd forgotten I was listening. "I don't know."
"You started to run away not long after that, didn't you?" "Yeah. Stupid. Running inside the Preserve. Running in a cage."