Titus’s arm went around Inea’s shoulders. “You only spoke to her?”
“I only spoke to her. You see, I thought the key fact was that a particular living orl provides its luren with a vital central nervous system stimulation, a personalized bioelectrical signature, that the luren may come to crave.
“From what Abbot said about you, I thought that’s what you hadn’t understood and so you were resisting a tie to Inea and sickening for lack of her blood. But I was wrong about your motives. I can see that now, in what’s happening between you– and in your outrage about it. You knew very well what would happen, and had set yourself to avoid it. What I still don’t understand is why.”
“Orl are animals. You don’t have to wait for their consent to have your way with them. And you don’t have to deal with having consent withheld or delayed. You don’t have to worry about overtaxing them because they’re replaceable. And you don’t have to contend with your own guilt if they break your patience and your hunger rules you.”
“Ah. Well, consider this. A luren’s own signature changes, attunes to his herd-uh, string, as you say. It’s like Mirelle’s kinesics, only more so. That mutual attunement is what makes Marks so much stronger than yours, and so inviolable, not Sneer power of Influence, as Abbot assumed, and not the power Blood Law. The mutuality of the orl tie between human and Earth-luren, should solve the consent problem.”
Suddenly, a covetous note beneath H’lim’s scientific tone jarred Titus into associating a dozen things H’lim had said and done. There’s some kind of stiff penalty for a luren who takes blood from a human, and that taboo makes luren crave humans even if the blood isn’t compatible. It fit. H’lim had refused Abbot’s stringer in favor of cloned human blood because he wanted to go home, and they had some way to tell if he’d used a human as an orl. Must have been a letdown to find human blood so vile, but he’s still wondering what it could be like.
Inea tugged at his sleeve. “He explained it all to me, Titus. With Earth’s luren, the ability to make the orl-tie is vestigial. But you and I, Titus, we have it. I know we do.” Her eyes shone. “I’m going to make it as beautiful for you as you’ve made sex for me.”
He hugged her closer. “I don’t care what you call it, Inea, it’s not a healthy thing. I’m going to break it. I’m not going to take your blood again. Not ever.”
“Titus,” said H’lim, “your fears are groundless. One never harms an orl one is tied to.”
“A luren doesn’t harm such an orl, perhaps, but you’ve a lot to learn about humans and Earth’s luren.” Titus remembered all too well how he’d felt about the humans he’d fed on and then killed. They’d even enjoyed it.
“Why are you holding her like that?”
Titus jerked away. Inea nestled closer and he froze, aware of his need to possess having gone far beyond the normal sexual need of a male. Just holding her, he was soaking ectoplasm from her.
“You see, that’s what I missed! I never saw you two, only Abbot and Mirelle, and there’s no tie there, despite his practices. But when Inea told me how ill you’d get on orl blood, even after I’d filtered out the irritating component, I realized what brain site that component stimulated-the vestigial orl-tie site! You were sick because you resisted the natural completion of that tie. But what I didn’t grasp is that this isn’t exactly the same as an orl-tie. You see, Abbot was instantly and repeatedly sick because his brain receptors differ from yours, so his nutritional absorption is different, and so he reacted to other trace chemicals as well as the absence of various human blood components.”
H’lim interpolated, “I don’t think Abbot can survive on cloned blood. The differences between the Residents and the Tourists may be physiological, not philosophical.”
I hope not! thought Titus, clutching Inea. If so, it would come to a war of extermination when it was discovered there was no way to persuade the Tourists to stop killing humans. “Abbot’s been controlling his appetite.”
“At a terrible cost,” agreed H’lim, pacing back and forth, warming to his topic. “I wish I knew enough math!”
“Surely, I know enough math! You got it all from my mind.”
“Just words I don’t have the concepts for!” Waving his hand in a gesture Titus recognized from a favorite physics professor he’d had for three courses, H’lim continued, “The difference between what you and Inea have and an orl-tie must be at the ectoplasmic/Influential interface.” He wagged a slender white finger at Inea. “If you knew how, you could augment Titus’s power to Influence! No orl could ever do that! But I’d wager it can’t be done to a genetically purebred luren.
“Even without access to my library, I swear there’s nothing else like it anywhere. But there really isn’t so much on the genetics of consciousness or the conservation of volition-”
Genetics of consciousness? Sometimes H’lim put words together grammatically and still uttered nonsense. As usual when that happened, he lapsed into luren terms. This time, as he paced back and forth, his lecture sounded like a physics lesson on the relationship between space and time, conscious will, metaphorical vision, and the life force. At the same time he seemed to be talking about the evolution of human brain chemistry as the result of the “genetics of volition.” He mixed up orl-tying with ectoplasm absorption and cross-linked them to Influence, but Titus only understood every third word, and missed half the tenses. He can’t be saying that all of Earth’s biology is the product genetic engineering, that the nature of human brain chemistry done to us!
“Which is of course,” concluded H’lim, “why human stringers having sex with each other is insufficient to replenish the human, and the luren must service his string.”
“Of course,” said Titus dazedly in the luren language, glad Inea didn’t know a word of it. How could he ask all the questions surging into his mind?
H’lim came out of his creative reverie, and reverted to English. “So now you understand, Titus, why you don’t have to be afraid. She can defend herself handily.”
“Against what?” asked Inea blankly.
“Against Titus.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Or against Abbot, or any Earth luren.” He shrugged.
Titus interrupted, “H’lim, you’re a galactic-class geneticist, not an Aikido instructor. She may have the genetic potential, but she doesn’t know how to use it and there’s no teacher. Besides, I don’t attack people I love, and that’s that. I won’t take any more of her blood.”
“That’s beside the point. Don’t you see, this means Earth might become the richest planet in the galaxy! What we have here is genetic coding for enhancing-oh, I don’t know your terms! Just take my word for it, this could be the key to a giant leap forward in space-faring technology. It’s so basic, it could solve the biggest riddle in the galaxy. But even if we can’t work out the applications immediately, it’s sure to win the w-” He broke off to stare into infinity.
“Sure to what?” prompted Titus. His mind was spinning. He’d just gotten more information out of H’lim in the last ten minutes than he had in the previous ten days, but he felt less informed than at the moment he’d fathered the alien.
H’lim is an ambitious adventurer who is working everything out as he goes along. But that assessment told him nothing except what he’d already known. He didn’t dare trust H’lim’s word that it was safe to send his message. It was a good thing that he’d pulled out Abbot’s Array transmitter.