So comfortable. Beckoning.
Then he remembered the addictive amusements . . . back there . . . in the gray city . . . the one he had left. Something important about that.
The stuff wriggled all over his face. He wrenched away. Scraped at it with leaden hands. Gluey ropes stuck to him. Licking strands inched across his mouth, nose, eyes. He slapped at them, stripped them away. A vile reek leapt up into his nostrils: flavors like emotions—angry, vindictive, spiteful, wronged love.
He wadded up the cloying filament, struggling against waves of fleeting but sharp emotions. He dropped the fluffy, welcoming resilience and instantly regretted doing it. The pang of remorse was keen and oddly bitter. Shibo punched through to him with
Get away! Quick!
—and he was off, scrambling fast, part of him flooded with remorse, another scared.
“What was that?”
Some form of parasite. Rather sophisticated.
“You told me to do it.”
I only suggest. I cannot act.
Her hurt tone irritated him. “You leaned on me, dammit, made—”
He slammed into Quath in his hurry. As he picked himself up she sent one of her keen-edged staccato bursts that was as close as she got to sounding like human laughter.
<Afraid of the fish?> Quath had missed the whole drama.
“Those’re trouble,” Toby said lamely.
It had all been internal, he saw. Fever-ripples of contrary emotions danced across his skin where the velvet had grasped. His fresh epidermis on the back of his injured hand sent him a puckering sense of pleasure, as if the flesh was being kissed by a wide, welcoming mouth.
<Everything here is.>
FOUR
Unsettled Movement
They had run themselves out and still the seeping light did not ebb.
They were not on a revolving planet, so day and night did not make their cyclic claims. A fitful glow soaked through from exposed teeth of timestone, casting shadows among the green and yellow foliage. Toby went hard until his boots dragged, so they stopped and slept. Still no sign of anyone else. Or of pursuit.
He woke up to hear Shibo singing. Words pealed, a delicate but persistent melody, light and airy. Then he realized that his eyes were open but he saw nothing.
He blinked to restore vision. Twisted trees, big-bellied clouds, rock—his vision flickered, stabilized. He sat up, disturbed. Nothing threatening nearby. Wind sighing in the stringy brush. A sulphurous lance of light cutting a foggy glade to his left.
There was no reason for her to co-opt his senses. “What . . . ?”
I needed an outing. You were soundly asleep so—
“Yeasay, and now I’m not. No thanks to you.”
After your misadventure yesterday, I expect you could use a little help.
“Misad—oh, the purple flames? You were the one wanted to give it a closer look.”
You misremember. I alerted you to it when you were up to your chin in—
“Not the way I recall. You were at my back, pushin’ the whole time, wanting to touch it.”
You have edited out your own attraction.
“The hell I have. I wondered what it was, sure, but—”
Let’s not argue. We escaped without harm—together. That is the important point. As long as we remain together and alert, even in such a strange and wonderful place we can stay safe.
This little lecture put his teeth on edge but he kept quiet. Directing thoughts to her would just make her say more and right now he wanted inner silence, a chance to think by himself. For himself.
He went for a call of nature. While he was burying it so the smell would be hard to track, Shibo talked to him. He butted her back—pressure against a stiff wall. He struggled silently, mouth twisting, and then came the shock: he could not get rid of her. She was always there now, riding behind his eyes.
Why should you not want my help?
“Why? ’Cause I got no choice anymore.
You are too young to go forth without my aid.
“How ’bout I decide that?”
My point exactly. You can make bad decisions, you know.
“At least they’d be mine.”
We have such a closeness. Do not push me away.
Something about her “closeness” made him uneasy, but he could not find the words.
—a cloying sense of moist pressures, syrupy air that would not leave his heaving lungs, liquid running in through his nose and ears and unwilling mouth, snaky fog-feelers sweet, so sweet—
When his breathing was back to normal he tramped back to Quath. She had warmed up some of his own field grub, stock she was carrying for him.
He forgot about Shibo. The greasy excellences of the hot, oily food pushed her presence clear out of his consciousness. Which was a relief. She had been hanging in him for days now, heavy as a wet boot. He only realized this when she was subdued.
<You kicked and spoke in your sleep.>
“Uh huh. Dreams, I guess.”
<Something more.>
“How would you know?”
<Your kind conveys much through facial signals—an odd method, one we do not employ.>
“You read my face when I’m asleep?”
<I read always. This is essential to understand humans. I digitize your image, then compare with previous measurements.>
“Measurements of what?”
<Of angles and amplitudes of skin folds, color, eyebrow thickness, curvatures of mouth and eyes.>
“My God! You work pretty hard.”
<But that is merely what you do.>
“Naysay, I just give people a squint and figure out—hey, you mean that’s how I know how people feel?”
<Of course. You are designed so that none of this work is conscious.>
“But for you it is?”
<If I wish it to be.>
“And if you don’t?”
<Normally I delegate the task.>
Toby knew that thought was a net of racing electrical impulses, the dance of atoms speaking through their fleet messengers. But was that all his thoughts meant? He looked at Quath without knowing what to say.
<I have been reading for a long while now the signals which move across your face. Especially at times like now.>
“It’s Shibo. Something about her.”
<She rides upon you uneasily.>
“Yeah . . .”
<Maleness for you must always carry some anger, a ruthless density. You are impelled to unsettled movement, androgen-agitated. Your moral errors are most often a quick brutishness.>
“Hey, I’m better than that.”
<Femaleness—a convention which applies to me only vaguely—carries in your primate varieties an acute sensitivity of response. This is embedded within a composed stability, self-contained. Your females are expectant, impelled to waiting, estrogen-slow. Their errors tend to the static, the enduring face.>
“Hey, come on. That’s so simplified. Hell, I feel steady and composed plenty of times—just not lately, is all. And Besen, lookit her. She’s as kick-ass as they come, when she gets riled.”