“Even as sterling a representative as yours?”
“Shut up. Now if they got to check out the women -”
“They do.”
Jay forced his mouth closed. “Where do they get to look?”
“The left nipple is pierced.”
“Oww… Wait a minute, why are women coming into a harem?”
“Takisian boys don’t leave until they’re fourteen. Also,” Mark gave the shorter man an ironic glance. “Takisians aren’t as fucked up about sex as we are, man.”
Jay tried to picture Tisianne – male or female – in the midst of a lesbian orgy. Found it wasn’t that hard a stretch. Now that he was actually inside the forbidden zone, Jay found it wasn’t all that exciting. That wasn’t to say that the women weren’t exciting. Whatever else might be said about the psi lords of Takis, they sure as hell bred Miss America beauty queens. Unfortunately, an awful lot of them had shapes more reminiscent of overstuffed armchairs than bathing beauties… but those faces. Maybe it was just the result of an overactive imagination, but Jay felt as if he were being damned with every look. He was glad they thought he was a eunuch. A fertile man might be in danger of his life.
“Are they ever not pregnant?” Jay whispered.
Meadows looked at him in surprise. “Most of the time. Otherwise they’d be up to their eyebrows in baby Ilkazams.” Mark eyed him shrewdly. “You’re disappointed.”
“I guess I was expecting the shiver of beaded curtains, eunuchs slipping past with poisoned goblets, or on some secret mission -”
“Don’t we qualify?”
Meadows had him there. The tall ace paused at a door and lightly knocked. Cillka answered. Quick assuring nods were exchanged.
“Right, then.” When she smiled, she had a habit of catching her lower lip between her teeth. It gave her a vixenish, impish look. Reaching out, she tugged a ribbon. The embroidered vest released and slithered to the floor. “All in working order.”
Taking Jay by the lapels, she tugged him through the door. It didn’t take much urging. “You.” A light finger to Meadows’s chest. “Better get around to Tis.”
“Is she all right?” Alarm quickened the normally hesitant voice.
“Fine… well, as good as can be expected.” Mark stood in the hail like an orphaned puppy. “We’re monitoring. I’ll have our magician to the suite when Tis gives the word.”
Meadows wandered disconsolately away. Cillka turned that smile back on Jay, pushed the door closed with a suggestive wrist flick. Jay’s mouth went dry.
“Disrobe, dear one, while I get dressed,” she said.
“I thought the idea was to undress.”
Her head snapped around. “You’re not neutered. I would never consider it. I am Zal’hma at’ Irg of the House Ilkazam. I do not mix my blood with that of inferior beings.”
And suddenly she wasn’t so beautiful anymore. Jay’s ardor dropped like his softening penis. He dropped into a chair muttering, “’Scuse me, massa, for a minute there I almost forgot I was a nigger.”
“How you doin’?”
Tis paused in her slow, careful pacing back and forth across her suite. “Not too badly.” In a dry, pedantic tone she added, “Did you know the average labor lasts sixteen hours?”
“Don’t be clinical, talk to me.”
“And what should I tell you? It hurts? Well, it hurts. I know it is going to hurt a hell of a lot more before very much longer.”
“So should we go now?” Mark was nervously wringing his hands. Tis wanted to scream at him to stop it.
“No, it has to be hard labor.” She gripped her elbows, walked again. “I would not wish to impose upon the hospitality of Jay’s lady for too long.”
“You’re really weird, man, when you get all Takisian and toplofty.” Mark moved to her, placed his hand on her shoulders. “What is it you’re really saying? Really feeling?”
Lightly she traced the bony arch of his beaky nose. “This woman is my subject. The first I’ve been permitted to see since my return. And I’m embarrassed. I come to her rolling in the straw like a birthing farm animal. Ideal take it, I’m her prince. How can I rule her without her respect?”
“What makes you think you’re going to lose it? Jeez, Doc, there’s not many men who’d do what you have to protect their child.”
“Most men don’t end up in such a ludicrous position.”
“Doc, if you were an ace, getting into weird scrapes is, like, definitely your superpower.”
“How very disheartening. Where do I go to cash it in?”
Her breath suddenly seemed to get pinned somewhere between chest and mouth as a particularly sharp contraction rippled through her belly. There was a nervous, questioning blast of confusion from Illyana. Tis wanted to scream at the infant to wait. I’m not ready yet. Do we have to do this? But the body, urged by the drugs, had begun its autonomic function. Neither of them could back out now.
Tisianne forced a rictus of a smile. “Shouldn’t be too long now.”
Something touched his neck. Jay bellowed, flopped like a hooked fish in his armchair. Snorted awake. The fringes of the nightmare were receding like wind-torn clouds. Cillka was bending over him.
“It’s time.”
“Goddamn, it’s about damn time.”
Getting out of the chair revealed aches and cricks in muscles he didn’t even know he possessed. Jay groaned, stretched, shook back a sleeve to check his watch. Two A.M. or the Takisian equivalent thereof. He knew the days were slightly shorter on Takis. It was too frustrating to figure out. Maybe it meant he was living longer to have extra -
The memory of the preceding night and day finally penetrated. Memories of bone-aching boredom. Meals had been the highlights. He thought he’d eaten eight just to pass the time. Guiltily he recalled that Tisianne probably hadn’t had such an easy, boring day and two nights.
“Poor little thing. Isn’t this kind of a long time?”
“The body’s small, it’s the first, and… he’s resisting.”
She led him into the corridor. Pandasala and Tri’ava fell in behind like flanking guards. They looked tired. Cillka snatched the query from his mind. “No one is due to birth tonight. We’re having to block Tisianne’s pain from the women’s quarter lest someone alert Zabb. It means we absorb it. It’s not easy.”
“Yeah, and you get to divide it six ways. How much more pleasant for Tisianne.”
The doors to Tisianne’s suite opened when they were a foot away. Roxalana playing door guard. Only a single lamp was lit. In the shadows Jay heard a desperate panting. He remembered rabbit hunting with an uncle one autumn. He had wounded a doe and trailed the blood into the woods. The sounds emerging from beneath the bush were very reminiscent of this.
The other three sisters abandoned him. Roxalana softly closed the door. Jay found his knees were shaking as he approached the bed. Mark had his arm around Tisianne’s shoulders as if he’d just assisted the girl onto the edge of the bed.
Jay wanted to say something, but the words seemed to be jammed up somewhere in the back of his throat. Tisianne looked awful. Her face had gotten very puffy in the final weeks of the pregnancy, and with its current ashen color it looked like three-day-old dough. The pale eyes were bone dry, but rimmed by red, and the gilt hair had lost its glitter. It hung like dirty cobwebs around her shoulders. Jay did some mental arithmetic and figured that the alien had been in labor around thirty-seven hours. Small wonder she looked like shit.
Roxalana plucked a package from a table. It had been wrapped in a glistening rainbow paper and tied with gold and silver ribbons.
“She’ll need clothes. There are also several changes of diapers, and a breast pump and self-heating bottles.” Jay swallowed hard. His part in this was suddenly starting to look a lot more complicated.
Mark accepted the bundle and shifted Tisianne’s medical bag to his other hand. “Send me first,” he instructed Jay. “I can make sure things are ready for the Doc. Give me, say, five.”