Rift (48 page)

Loon moved in his arms, and her eyes opened suddenly. She lifted her chin, moving her nose along the side of his cheek, inhaling him. The touch of her face against his was as soft as an insect’s wing, yet it was all he felt in his whole body. When her tongue touched his face, he didn’t dare move. He felt the slide of her tongue like a low throb of electric current, and he was instantly aroused.

He reminded himself that Loon tasted many things, and that this might be just a casual taste of her friend Reeve. Her tongue darted out in short, staccato probes.…

“Loon,” he whispered. He turned his face toward her so she would have to kiss him or move away. He waited for a moment, and when she inhaled the very breath from his mouth, he kissed her, so lightly, so gently, she could at any moment just tilt her head away, and never guess his urgency.

Then she did pull back, gazing at him. “This?” she asked, resting two fingers on her lips.

He looked at her, trying to figure it out.

At last she said, “Like Dante’s girl?”

Dante’s girl. Did she think
that
? That he would use her like a slave? “No, Loon!”

The fog fused with the night, soaking up all the
light, and every sound. “But you taste like it,” she whispered.

“Like what?”

“Like you want me.” She slipped one of her fingers into his mouth.

Her flesh was deeply fragrant, and he was breathless with her taste, the startling intrusion of her finger in his mouth. This tasting went on for some time, the tactile sensation of his tongue on her finger nearly doubling him over with longing, and then he was kissing her lips, more harshly than he meant to. By the time he got control again he would have eased off, but she had climbed on top of him in the chair and was straddling his waist, bending over him, and their mouths were joined. In another minute she had emerged from her clothes. It was then that he remembered to tell her, “I love you, Loon,” because he would have her know she was no whore of Dante’s.

She answered: “I love you, Reeve. Taste me.”

They slid to the floor, and he did. Into the deeper night of the forest he learned that, however strange she might be, and whatever her cells might know that his didn’t, they could know each other in every human way. The realization would have hit him with profound relief if he hadn’t been so intent on his pleasure and hers.

2

Loon trailed a hand up Reeve’s bare back, following the line of his backbone. The solidity of his flesh anchored her after the intoxication of his tastes. It was a kind of drunkenness, this lovemaking; she never knew what she would do next, or what he would. And it was also like a storm that, once approaching, must pass through. Reeve had stormed her senses, making her feel wondrous but helpless, and she would have held back something, some layer of herself, except that she
thought this might be her only chance to be loved in her real body. And she wanted, just once, to be loved this way.

It was very deep sharing with a man who, until a few weeks ago, had been a zerter, and a sickly one at that. But he was not helpless now. He was tanned and hardened, and had grown a proper beard. And he had a thing to do, to save Lithia from big-tech madness, a goal that might be as hopeless as her own. He was a man out of place, but he dared to go on anyway. She felt a bond to him because of that, and because of tasting him and finding him even richer than the good soil.

For this reason, she wanted to tell him, to share with him everything else.

“Reeve.” Her hand left his back, and he slowly curled up into a sitting position.

He was waiting for her to speak, and she tried, but nothing came out.

Slowly, they dressed as a sliver of moon rose over the mountains. When they had settled in to watch the lake catch the silver light, she said: “My people.”

Reeve took her hands in his, waiting. He trusted her to tell him, believing there was nothing she wouldn’t give him now. And it was true.

“I found out.” Then she told her story in the order she knew it best.

“In Dante’s prison,” she began. “The orthong.”

He urged her on. “Pimarinun,” he said.

She nodded. “I killed him.”

This was where her story began, in a strange knot of events that twisted back from Atlantis Clave to the Stoneroots, from the dungeon to a deep fissure of rock filling with snow, drowning its occupant.

That day in the awful prison beneath Atlantis, she had reached up and touched the orthong on the face. And tasted home. Late that night she went back, folding open the doors in the floor and closing them over
her head. Even in that perfect darkness, she could see the heat of the beings in each cell, shimmering in yellows and oranges, especially near the heart. She crept past these doomed creatures, and they slept on, until she reached the orthong cage.

He was waiting for her, standing there, long arms folded around the metal bars. Compared with the other prisoners, Pimarinun looked dim, radiating blue and lavender.

They stared at each other, and she found herself afraid to approach him, now that they were alone. But finally her curiosity drove her forward, and slowly she raised her fingers to his arm and touched him. At the tips of his fingers translucent slivers slid out of their sheaths, and receded. If Dante thought he had taken the claws, she’d reflected, he might have a rude surprise someday.

The orthong skin was suffused with a deep well of dark, tawny sustenance. No longer merely a tincture hidden among others, this taste was vivid, aromatic and heady. It overwhelmed. Too pungent. She drew back.

He also pulled back his arms. Then he signed:

Even in the dark he must have seen her answer:

His hand rested on her palm for a very long while.

It was then he struck the bargain, and when she agreed, he told her the story that he had to trade.

When he was finished, she understood why no one could tell her before, and why her father had died with her secret. She had thought herself human, like Spar, like Reeve—and she was, but she was also orthong. Or that was how she interpreted the story Pimarinun told her, halting and confused, using the slow and clumsy language that orthong shared with humans.

Among the orthong a story was passed, but never
openly, of Tulonerat, chief of all the orthong. She was very old, having long been in the stage of retreat from the world. But among the orthong, transition from one ruler to the next was always difficult, and its uncertainties were put off for as long as possible. So it fell to Tulonerat the duty of traveling to the place scouts thought suitable for habitation, now that orthong numbers were sufficient to establish a new outfold. In her dotage, she fondly brought along on the journey a favorite in-between, Divor. Such immature ones, no longer children but not yet adults, never left the keeping of stern orthong masters, whose responsibility it was to teach them deep knowing before they killed someone or damaged the outfold. But Tulonerat would have her way, and the party traveled through the Stoneroots eastward to the deciduous forests beyond.

Whether the journey was successful or not, Pimarinun did not say, but he told of the return journey, where Loon’s story began. The in-between child was, as they so often were, willful in the extreme, and would taste everything she came upon, until the party was several weeks delayed. But still Tulonerat indulged Divor. By this time Tulonerat was spending her days in contemplation, and they carried her in a covered chair, air travel not being suitable for a journey of this import, and ever distasteful to females under any circumstances. Thus it was that the snowstorm came upon them, high in the mountains, with blasting winds, and in the midst of this, Divor disappeared. Frantic, Tulonerat sent her servants into the storm to search, but everything had the taste of snow, and her soldiers were blind to Divor’s trail.

She was found, eventually, not by Tulonerat but by two humans returning from a trading mission, who were also surprised in the open by the storm. These two, a man and a woman, found Divor wedged deeply in the cleft of a split rock. Because she had spent a long time pushing snow away from her upper body so
that she would not be buried, by the time they found her she was weak. Fatefully, the humans lowered a rope. Divor had little strength left to hold on, but she fastened it about her upper body, and after several hours they managed to tug and haul her to safety. They fashioned a lean-to and tried to nurse her terrible injuries, and during this time she lashed out in pain and rage and, delirious, did great damage to the woman who nursed her.

The orthong search party heard the howls of rage of the human man. When they found Divor, bloodied and weak, their claws came out. As they moved to kill the humans, Divor prevented them, urging them to make fair payment for her rescue. Shamed by the child’s good judgment of the trading obligation, the orthong worked the woman’s wounds. It was then they realized that she was pregnant, and that her issue was even now undergoing terrible damage from the molecular changes unleashed by Divor’s claws.

Those who repeated this tale held that healing the woman’s outer injuries would have been sufficient, and that the fetus should have been left to abort. But the orthong party did not wish such an ill omen on this venture, and brought the human couple to Tulonerat for judgment.

Tulonerat had made herself comfortable in a cave they had found and, in deep trance, had little motive to travel anytime soon. So, though it was hardly worth her concern and effort, she decided to heal the woman and her embryo. Learning all this entailed of human chemistry, she became fascinated and finally obsessed with discovering the many subtle points of human proteins and genes. All this unfolded because Tulonerat’s skills were profound, and she could, by pressing her hand on the woman’s torso, discern the smallest details of her chemistry, and alter them.

Even so, it took days. She asked the human woman what special thing she wanted for her daughter, and
the answer was
a long life
. Tulonerat would have also made the child beautiful, to save her from the disfiguring human features so repulsive to the orthong, but the mother made a great fuss over this suggestion, and Tulonerat acquiesced. Then she formed the embryo to live and thrive in ways humans could not in what Lithia was becoming, and these ways were similar and not similar to those of the orthong, who were well adapted, but not yet perfectly. She set this limit: that the changes were for the child only—not for the mother, and not for any future issue of the child. So it was a child for a child, a fair compensation in Tulonerat’s mind, however much it was a scandalous one among her party.

And then, growing bored at last, Tulonerat called for her chair, and the orthong party left, thankful to be rid of any further obligation and eager to get Tulonerat back to the outfold, where her whims and casual regard for the practical world would do the least damage.

Pimarinun never said Loon was the child Tulonerat changed. Nor could he describe the mother and the father in any way that she recognized. But she knew. She had seen the terrible scars on her mother’s chest, milky lines wandering from neck to navel. Even without her mother’s scars, however, Loon would have known that she shared with Pimarinun some primal vein of being.

And then he had asked her to kill him. He showed her where to strike him, after convincing her that he could not, in good honor, kill himself either directly or indirectly, by starvation. He thanked her for delivering him from the degradation of Dante’s keeping.

It was a long while before she could bring herself to kill so magnificent a creature. But finally she found among the rubble of the underground prison a rock large enough. Then she waited for Pimarinun to back up against the cage, his head between two of the bars, his bare neck bent forward slightly.

When it was done, she wept, her hand resting on his body until all the colors had fled. As she sat there, she thought of her foolish hope that there was a home for her, people like her. There were no other people like her. And of the ones most like her, she had just killed her first acquaintance. Shortly before dawn she crept back to the upper dome and washed off Pimarinun’s blood.