Nona stopped beside the creature. Air from the thing’s outflow stirred the turf by her feet. The stalked knobs reached out farther, wiggling.
Now Darius saw something else. The thing did have eyes. They were on the three central stalks. They were watching Nona. So it knew she was there. What else did it know?
Nona slowly reached out. Her left hand came toward one of the knobs.
Suddenly that knob jumped outward on its rod and smacked into her hand. Nona, still pacified by the horse, did not jerk away. She remained calm, her hand holding the knob.
Something happened. The ambience of telepathy faded. It was like stepping out of a warm chamber into the chill air of a barren plain.
Darius looked at Colene. She seemed as concerned as he was. She put her hands to her head, as if something was missing from it. Then they both looked at Seqiro.
Now the horse was just a horse. Darius noticed how Seqiro, eighteen hands high at the shoulder, dwarfed the girl, who was only fifteen hands high at the top of her head. But the horse’s brown mane exactly matched Colene’s brown hair. They were a matched set in that respect, and in age: Seqiro was also fourteen. The girl loved horses, and Seqiro loved girls. Seqiro linked them all, telepathically, and liked them all; he assumed the qualities of whatever mind he was in touch with, borrowing its intelligence. But Colene was his first love. If there were to come a crisis, and Seqiro had to choose just one of them to save, she would be the one.
Colene spoke. This time he heard it in her actual language, without the translation to his own. Normally the horse relayed the thoughts, and each person’s mind did the rendering, unconsciously; now those thoughts were not there. But Darius had spent time with Colene in her reality, when they first met, and had come to learn some of her language. He could translate it, approximately, when he concentrated.
“Seqiro—are you all right?” she was asking. Or “Are you well?” or “You have not been harmed?”
“He—all—well,” Darius said, picking from his memory of her vocabulary. “He—help—she.” For he was tuning in on the horse, as he might for a drawing of emotion, and realized that there was no problem. Seqiro was merely devoting his entire mental energy to the purpose at hand: Nona’s rapport with the creature. It had to be a considerable challenge.
Colene looked back at Nona, and Darius followed her gaze. The woman stood unmoving, her eyes blank, her hand on the knob. But the creature was moving, slowly: it was settling to the ground. The swish of air diminished, and then faded out, as the bony lower fringe of the creature came to rest on the ground. The three eye stalks retracted until they were mere spots on the surface.
“Xxxx yyyyyy zzzzz,” Colene said, incomprehensibly, amazed. She was using vocabulary too sophisticated for Darius to decipher. Then, realizing, she turned back to him. She concentrated visibly, and he felt a faint touch at his mind. She was trying to use her own very limited telepathy.
So he stepped to her, embraced her, and focused his mind on hers, as if he were about to draw her emotion. But he only touched her awareness, without taking hold of it. That facilitated the contact, and amplified her projection.
Innocent woman and fantasy horse, she thought. Then, realizing that she was getting through, but not sufficiently, she clarified the concepts. Young woman, girl, never done sex—
“Virgin,” he said, grasping the concept. Virgin with one-horned horse, she thought, then spoke the word: “Unicorn.” Only virgin can tame unicorn. Nona—
He nodded. Nona, unlike Colene, was a virgin. This suggested a certain mental innocence. Sometimes only the truly innocent could approach a creature others knew to be dangerous. Somehow the creature might know, and not harm her. As he reflected, he picked up more of the background from Colene’s reflections. It seemed that there was a certain ironic humor to the myth: unicorns were extremely rare. In fact they did not exist at all. The implication was that human virgins were similarly rare. That concept was tinged with grief and anger, for Colene herself had found out how a virgin lost her innocence. It had not been by her choice.
So it was Colene’s judgment that Nona was taming the monster. With the help of all Seqiro’s mental power. All he and Colene could do was not interfere. They would just have to wait for it to happen.
They were, in effect alone. He was holding her close. He brought his head down. She lifted her face. They kissed.
Colene had never been strong on subtlety. She grabbed on to his shoulders, heaved herself up within his embrace, and wrapped her legs around his torso—while holding the kiss. She opened her mouth a little and stuck her tongue through. He was so startled he almost dropped her. She laughed—still without breaking the kiss.
But he was learning her ways. He slid a hand down to her upper thigh and tickled it through the cloth of her trousers. She squirmed, but he continued more vigorously, crossing the buttock, until she had to break the kiss and grab his hand. “No fair!” she cried, trying to act outraged as he let her slide down to the ground. He needed no telepathic translation of that expression. She was still young enough to consider herself duty-bound to react to tickling, especially in places where it wasn’t supposed to be done.
She made as if to punch him in the groin. He made as if to grab her by the hair. They were feinting, looking for a pretext to kiss again. Colene was also, in her fashion, trying to seduce him. Fortunately he was more experienced than she in this respect, and was countering her ploys emotionally as well as physically. He never forgot that though they loved each other, she was too young. By the standard of her culture she was not supposed to be ready for sexual interplay. That standard had been violated, and the violation had caused her much emotional mischief. He intended to see that it wasn’t violated again. Perhaps when they reached his reality, it could be determined whether she could be considered a new citizen, governed by the more permissive standards his people enjoyed. So that she would be allowed to choose for herself. Because he would like nothing better than to let her seduce him, if—
Then Darius heard something. It was a honk. He held up a hand, flat, signaling her to desist.
She had heard it too. She looked in the correct direction. Nothing was visible.
Then they heard a faint hissing or swishing, as of moving air. Something was happening in the distance, out of sight. What could it be?
Colene was the first to catch on. She pointed to the creature with Nona. She pursed her mouth and blew air out. Then she pointed to the unseen noise. Another of that kind of creature?
Darius suspected that it was. Now he heard more hissing, from another direction. Then from a third. There could be several such creatures drawing near.
The creature they had met had invoked the anchor. That could only have been for serious reason. It was possible it was a criminal, trying to flee where the local law could not follow. But it was also possible it was a martyr, deserving of assistance. Regardless, it was the anchor creature, and no one else could release that anchor, so they were stuck with it. Better to get to know it, as Colene had said.
But they wouldn’t get much chance, if others of its kind came and captured it. Others were indeed coming; now he saw one steaming in from the forest, gliding across the land at what must be its traveling speed.
There was a honk from that direction. “First blood,” Colene muttered, and again he didn’t need a translation. The prey had been sighted, and soon all of them would be here. Indeed, another appeared, sliding at the same velocity. Darius judged that he could outrun the things, but he wasn’t sure that they wouldn’t accelerate and outpace him.