Before Ralidux could protest, the image faded from the octagonal plate and Clyon’s voice faded from the receiver, leaving the beautiful black man alone with his thoughts.
The very next morning, Ralidux dispatched two attendants to the chamber where the specimens were penned, with a written order to deliver two of the specimens into his personal care. An hour later Janchan and Arjala found themselves imprisoned in an opaque cell for two on a higher level of the citadel. The captives were unaware of the scrutiny of Ralidux.
Their sudden separation from Niamh and the ancient philosopher aroused in both inward trepidations upon which they did not care to dwell. It had been bad enough, when Katistus had carried off Zarqa the Kalood for the grisly purpose of dissection. But now, to be removed from the common cell indicated they were about to be subjected to torments all the more loathsome in that they were undefined and even unimaginable.
Arjala curled in the far corner of the cubicle, a woeful and sullen figure. Janchan, striving to relieve her of her unspoken fears, put the best interpretation on the events he could, and tried to hearten her through optimism.
When this failed, he made her as comfortable as he could, saw that supplies of food and water were within her reach, and squatted before the entry panel as if on sentinel duty.
Through a cleverly concealed spy-hole, Ralidux observed the way in which the male tended to the female in a solicitous manner, and, seemingly, mounted guard over her nest. These seemed to him to possess all the earmarks of a refined and even civilized intelligence. He would have much preferred it had the two specimens squalled and capered about, jabbering like frightened brutes. Their economy of gesture and restraint of deportment, together with the obvious solicitude tendered to the female, roused within him again those nameless and heretical forebodings against which the senior savant had issued stern warning the night before.
After a time, Ralidux inserted a slumber-inducing essence into the air system of the cubicle. Disdaining the use of attendants, once both specimens had succumbed, he then entered himself and studied the form of the sleeping female. Her garments were rags and her ornaments seemed to his taste barbaric baubles on a class with the colored pebbles or vivid feathers found in a jackdaw’s nest or a pack rat’s hoard. Yet her features were symmetrical and her limbs delicately curved. Had it not been for the unearthly tawny amber hue of her flesh, so unlike his own rich jet hide, and for the weird floating mane of silken fur which hid her scalp and flowed uncleanly down her back and shoulders, she could almost have been a human being.
He examined her curiously, with an inner excitement he was hardly aware of, noting the voluptuous curves of hips and thighs and the soft rondure of her magnificent breasts. Something stirred to life within him—something which he had never previously experienced, and something which he found strangely disturbing.
There were no female members of the race of the Skymen. According to authentic doctrine, the race had always perpetuated itself by cellular fission and the cloning process, followed by laboratory incubation. The decree of the Council of Science had been intact from time immemorial, that the race was devoid of the female component, and that the division into sexes and reproduction by brute copulation were marks of the beast, known only to the lower orders of mammalian life. Whence, therefore, this strange excitement that welled within him? Whence this trembling urgency, this curious hunger to touch—to caress and fondle? Why did his heart race, his temples throb, his breath come in fast, hot panting?
Leaning over the sleeping figure, his nostrils distended so as to drink in the warm perfume of her naked flesh, Ralidux without realizing it extended his hand and almost stroked the silken hair of the unconscious woman.
A moment later, he snatched his hand back, arresting the half-completed gesture. The tips of his fingers tingled, as if he had nearly touched live coals.
Abruptly, he turned about and left the cubicle, closing the entry panel behind him. The excitement within him shook the very core of his being with a violence akin to nausea. He mixed and drank a potent beverage to calm his pounding heart and cool his blood, and resolved to have the specimens removed from their isolation in his private laboratory and returned to their pen in the central citadel.
But not now… tomorrow, perhaps …
Strive though he did to involve himself in other matters, he could not erase from his mind the speculation that if the female were painted black, her pate shaved of its unseemly growth of animal fur, she would resemble in almost every detail a human being of his own species…
A… female… of his species.
Now, why should that thought cause him such strange excitement?
Chapter 15
The Madness o f Kalistus
After Kalistus saw the winged, golden-skinned creature safely installed in the private laboratory which adjoined his own apartments, he dismissed the attendants with a curt nod and bustled about, gathering his instruments.
Zarqa the Kalood watched his every movement with close attention. The instruments which Kalistus selected from wall cabinets bore no resemblance to knives or scalpels, but were calipers and measuring devices of similar nature. By this, the Winged Man perceived he was not at once to be subjected to the horrors of the dissection table.
The black savant began noting the width, length, and circumference of Zarqa’s limbs, tracing his skeletal system and outlining his musculature on a drawing tablet, after studying the interior of the Winged Man’s physique through glowing lamps obviously identical with the penetrative rays previously employed.
Looking up abstractedly from his instruments, Kalistus found himself looking directly into the eyes of the experimental subject. They were in nowise human, those eyes, lacking the whites. They were large and purple and luminous, and the expression in them was one of habitual melancholy.
If the eyes of a beast can be said to have expression, thought Kalistus wryly, in comment on his own poor choice of phrase.
I am not a beast but a sentient being such as you, yourself, was the next thought that flashed through the mind of Kalistus. He blinked bright quicksilver eyes, with an involuntary shiver. The thought had come from nowhere, a cool, alien message impinging upon his own mental processes as if by telepathy.
That is the correct term for the mental transmissions the members of my race use for communication. We lack the organs of audible speech, and, you will observe, the organs of hearing as well.
In weird juxtaposition to this peculiar sequence of thought, the winged creature touched with long fingertips its temples, where the ears would appear on a human being. The fingers touched nothing but smooth golden hide tightly stretched over unbroken bone.
A prickling of awe, not unmixed with superstitious fear, went through Kalistus. He sat, staring rigidly at the tall, ungainly figure in the cage. Mad—I’m going mad, he thought dazedly.
Permit me to correct you. You have been mad, like all your race, who have for untold generations resisted the arguments of evidence and reason, persisting in their insane delusion that the manlike denizens of The World Below are mindless beasts, whereas in fact, they too are sentient beings, and your own distant descendants, or at any rate, the descendants of a common ancestor.