Then he would register her and use the gun on her in the same way, would take his pleasure for a while, in making her suffer.
Then she would be his.
In the morning Hesper woke by the embers of the fire, rose and stretched. The air was slightly misty, the sun (a yellow sun, like her own at home) about twenty degrees off the horizon.
After weeks of being cooped up in the police cruiser and breathing its stale air, the freshness of the day was invigorating. She began to feel cheerful, a contrast to her mood of the night before. Lacey blew on the embers, adding dried grass and bleached wood. The fire started, and he began to cook a long-eared quadruped he had been saving for breakfast.
Pout squatted on the ground, watching the proceedings and blinking soporifically. He looked so pathetic Hesper felt she could have taken her scangun off him at any moment, but she did not try it. It had already become clear Pout was not as helpless as he looked.
The kosho did not seem to have moved a finger since she had seen him the night before. Still he sat cross-legged, spine erect, clad in all his accoutrements. The effect was weird. Curious, Hesper left the group and walked slowly towards him.
Sinbiane appeared by her side, strolling along with her. “Lady, what were you doing in space?”
She stopped, looking down at him. “Fighting a war,” she said. “Escoria has rebelled against the Empire. Didn’t you know?”
Wonderingly he shook his head. “So is Escoria free from the Empire now, lady?”
“No. We lost. The Simplex knows what will happen now.”
“It won’t make much difference here on Earth, lady.”
Hesper stepped closer to the kosho and stared at him in fascination. His eyes were closed, as she presumed they had been since she arrived. The bony cast of his face was accentuated by the way his shiny black hair was swept back and tied in a bun at the back of his head. It was like looking at a statue.
But what was really striking was his collection of weapons, arranged all over the harness he wore over his simple white gown. At his waist, stretched out now along the ground, was a mortar tube which she recognised as capable of throwing a bomb a good few miles. On his back was a whole rack of rifles whose muzzles projected above the back of his head like railings (this puzzled her a little: she would have expected them to be carried stocks uppermost). She was also amused to see, half-hidden beneath the rifles, the flat shape of a curved sword scabbard.
At chest, belly and thighs he carried an armoury of smaller weapons, grenades, bombs, ammunition pouches and fletched hand-thrown darts. Hesper had never seen, even imagined, such a warrior.
“Why does he stay like that?” she murmured to Sinbiane.
“Is he asleep?”
“No, lady, he is not asleep. He has depersonalised his consciousness.”
“What does that mean?”
“It is a state of perfect repose, lady, even deeper than sleep. But he is not oblivious.”
“He’s still aware of his surroundings, then?”
“Only as you are aware of your little toe, lady.”
It was some sort of trance state, Hesper decided. “Does he stay like that all the time?” she asked.
“Whenever he does not need to act, lady. ‘Between actions, timeless being.’ I can do it too, but uncle says boys should stay active.”
“Uncle?”
“This is my uncle, I may be a kosho one day.”
“If koshos are such wonderful warriors,” Hesper said bitterly, her voice rising, “why don’t they fight with us against the Empire?”
“A kosho is a perfect individual, lady. He does not fight for causes. He fights because every act is a conflict with nature.”
“What?” This mystical talk, especially coming from someone so young, confused and annoyed her. “Then why is he a camp follower of—that?” She jerked her thumb to indicate Pout. “Does the ape have him screwed down too?”
“He is beholden to the chimera, lady, that is true.”
“Just what is it about that creature?”
The boy did not answer for a moment. He seemed to be hesitating over something. “Lady,” he said suddenly, “was it your battle that interfered with the moon?”
“Moon? What moon?”
“We have a moon here, lady. I have lived on Earth all my life and it has always been the same size—about the size of the sun. Its phases have always been regular too. But lately something had been going wrong. First, a few weeks ago, it shrank to only half its proper diameter. Then it started growing. The night before last it was about ten times as large as the sun; last night it was more like twenty time. It isn’t following its proper cycle, either.”
She did recall a satellite, an unusually large one for the mass of the planet, registering on her egg’s screen in the last few seconds of her approach. It had seemed disproportionately close to its primary, at that.
She hadn’t seen it since landing. Presumably it was on the other side of the planet from the sun at present, only appearing at night when she had been asleep.
She frowned. The boy was talking nonsense, of course. He had either been dreaming or he didn’t understand the satellite’s orbit.
“No,” she said slowly, “our battle didn’t have anything to do with your moon. It was out among the stars.”
“Then I wonder what is happening? Well, shall we have breakfast, lady?”
She accompanied him back to the fire, where Lacey gave her a piece of meat from the quadruped (which he called a rabbit). The flavour was novel to her; discovering she was ravenously hungry, she gulped it down and wished for more.
Pout himself then scattered the fire, stamping on flame and ember with his bare feet, and ordering the group to begin the day’s march. In single file, Pout in the lead,: they set out to the west.
Hesper glanced behind her. The kosho who had not shared the breakfast, and to whom no one had spoken, rose from the ground, picking up a small mat which had protected his buttocks from the ground and tucking it away somewhere on his person. He walked well to the rear of the rest of the line, and shortly was joined by Sinbiane.
Pout proved to be an indefatigable pace-setter. The sun rose high in the sky and became hot, until Hesper, perspiring and fatigued, began to strip off, unfastening the one-piece sheen suit they had adopted as uniform aboard the Shark, quickly following that by pulling off her undervest. Her boots she put back on and strode along in those and her underpants, carrying her other clothing in one hand.
Pout, glancing back, saw her so disrobed and reminded himself of his plans. A hitch suddenly occurred to him. The boy Sinbiane had assured him they were only a day’s journey from the great level plain where the moving cities were. If they found a city before he had set his seal on her, there would be nothing to hold her to the group…
True, there would be plenty of women in the cities, and perhaps female apes and man-ape chimeras too. Still, the snag tussled in Pout’s mind with his impatience to reach the plain.
The little band he had around him satisfied one aspect of Pout’s nature: his desire to revenge himself on the world by dominating those around him. But he found his vagrant life of the past few months insufficient. Getting food was too difficult. And it became boring, day after day in the wilderness. His lust for life demanded closer, more colourful horizons.
He was able to resolve the difficulty when, near the end of the day, the land sloped down to meet the expected plain. They all stopped to stare when they had a good view of it, for it was just like a grass sea, completely flat as far as the eye could perceive, the more hilly terrain they had crossed curving round it in coves and headlands.