By the time the female was thoroughly dead, the mass had differentiated into a swarm of small maggot-like creatures, which began to feed on their mother’s corpse.
Bemer turned away from the display. It seemed a hideous process, though no doubt the beasts saw it differently. He thought of Candypop, lying empty and dead under Cleet. How could Cleet do such a thing?
Cleet took the skeins from the box labeled HYAENA EXTRO-BRUNNEA. He looked at Bemer, mask unreadable. His eyes closed for a moment, then opened, and an uncertainty lay under the glittering anticipation in them–or so it seemed to Bemer.
«Never mind. Never mind,» said Cleet, with a violent shake of his head. «After we’re finished, I’ll let you go. Back to your cave and your brazen woman and your superstitions. You did your best, such as it was.»
Abruptly, Berner understood that Cleet was telling the truth. His heart gave a great stumbling leap in his chest, but he didn’t speak.
«When I’m gone... remember me, hermit.» Cleet smiled, almost sweetly, and allowed the door to fall shut.
Berner spoke to the door. «Yes, I’ll remember.»
Berner watched from the beginning, compelled, his heart pounding.
Cleet went to her. He parted the hair at the nape of her neck, mated the per- sonaskein to her receptacle. Instantly she rose to all fours, moving with an alien quickness. Cleet snapped in his own skein and fell into the same gangling crouch.
The holoprojectors picked up the data stream from the now-active skeins and the deck transformed into a narrow murky cavern. Slabs of rotting wood and crumbling plaster reached into a darkness far above, and the air was almost palpably damp. Berner’s perspective twisted subtly, and he seemed to be looking into a dimly lit space between some giant’s walls.
Candypop was circling Cleet now, and he swayed rhythmically, waiting for her. The golden mask displayed eagerness, pure and uncomplicated.
Not until she sprang at him, and pushed her body under his, did Cleet begin to seem confused. His eyes flicked from side to side; the mask shimmered with mild puzzlement. But the personskein gripped him as strongly as it did her, and he thrust into her, his body straining. He shuddered, pressed himself to her, clinging, pumping.
Cleet seemed to shrink a little, as if he were pouring some essential part of himself into her, and she in turn seemed larger, becoming, even while she writhed beneath him, the dominant figure.
He slid away from her to lie gasping, and now confusion rose up to cloud the golden mask. He seemed to realize that something had gone awry.
Candypop turned and looked at Cleet, eyes alive with a new hunger.
Cleet began to rise, reaching for the skein at the back of his neck.
She sprang; she buried her strong teeth in his throat. Blood spurted; he fell back. He flailed at her ineffectively, eyes impossibly wide, mask convulsing. Blood covered both bodies.
Cleet gathered the last of his strength, threw her off, and pulled the personaskein from his neck. He crawled toward the window, glaring up at Berner with burning eyes, rage contorting the mask into a dreadful shape.
Berner was frozen, hands twitching against the glass. Cleet would kill him in some terrible way, and the woman’s suffering would continue. How foolish he had been, to think that he could trick so powerful and elemental a being as Cleet.
But as Cleet reached the door and tried to stand, his vitality failed him. The terrible eyes went cloudy and in a moment had emptied of everything but a dim perplexity. He slid to the floor, and Candypop leaped onto the body.
Berner turned away when she began to feed. He tapped the faceplate of the chamber into which he had switched the Hyaena Extro Brunnea skeins. The faceplate lit, displaying the name of the species that the woman now emulated: LATRODECTUS MACTANS. He tapped it again and watched the spiders copulate, the slender male riding the female’s huge black abdomen. He watched the female kill and eat the male.
He was grateful for the soundproof door.
A few minutes later, her personaskein timed out, and she collapsed on Cleet’s orn body. Berner went forth, removed er skein, and crushed it under his heel, grinding it into small bits of plastic and metal.
The boat was dying as he carried her out. The stairfield flickered and whined, visibly unsafe. He used the emergency ladder instead, moving slowly and carefully, her weight across his shoulder. On every bulkhead he passed, screens bled data and went black, and he could hear the rattle of solenoids as the systems shut down. By the time he reached the lock, which had opened as automatically as the mouth of a corpse, the boat was dead and silent.
IT WAS TWILIGHT, BY A HAPPY COINCIDENCE, but Berner was surprised by the heat the ground still held. Sweat poured from him and mixed with the blood that covered Candypop. Before he had reached the cave, he was gasping, and her body threatened to slip from his cramping arms.
But he carried her into the cave and laid her on the mats, which had grown dusty during his absence.
He fetched a basin of water from the spring at the back and had washed away most of the blood by the time she woke.
She struggled to her knees, looking at him with wild wide eyes. Then she vomited up her last meal.
He wiped her face and helped her to the hammock before he cleaned up the mess. She hadn’t spoken; he wondered if she would ever speak again. He carried the bloody mat outside.
When he returned she was sitting up in the hammock, long legs dangling. Her eyes had cleared, and she gave him a small haunted smile.
«He’s dead?» she asked, as if she couldn’t remember.
«Thoroughly,» he answered. He arranged a pile of spare mats in the corner by the spring and lay down, taking off his sandals.
After a while she lay back. She fell asleep long before Berner did.
He fell gratefully back into his old routine, though he no longer performed his daily devotions; his former faith now seemed childish. Candy pop stayed in the cave for the first few days, silent and still.
One morning she came to him in the fields, wearing a smock he had given her. She looked both older and younger, somehow. She stood and watched him loosening the soil in a bed of posole seedlings.
«My name isn’t Candypop,» she said, finally.
«Oh?»
«It’s Kariel,» she said. «Kariel Antrine. I’d almost forgotten.»
«A nice name,» he said, concentrating on his work.
Another silence fell. The sun rose, and Berner sweated over his seedlings.
«I’m grateful to you,» she said, in strangely resentful tones.
«No need,» he said. «I was saving myself as well.»
«He wouldn’t have killed you.»
«That’s not what I meant,» said Berner.
«Oh.» But the resentment was still there, and it puzzled Berner.
She seemed to searching for the right words. «Listen,» she said. «Cleet told me... that you’ve been celibate for 30 years.»
«True.»
«I’m afraid you’ll have to wait another 30 years,» she said, all in a rush. «At least.» She seemed both angry and embarassed.
He smiled at her and leaned on his hoe. «I understand. But I don’t think it’ll be quite that long. The circuit ship is due in four years or so, and then we can both get out of here.»
Kariel had apparently been holding her breath; she let it out and gave him her first true smile.
He basked in that radiance for a long moment, and then he went back to his hoeing. □