He knew enough hypnotism to know that that was possible. Whether his suspicions were true or not, it was a fact that he had laid flat on his back. However, the day was not wasted. He learned twenty more words, and she drew many more sketches for him. He found out that when he had jumped into the mire of the garden he had literally fallen into the soup. The substance in which the young umbrella trees had been planted was a zoogloea, a glutinous mass of one-celled vegetables and somewhat larger anaerobic animal life that fed on the vegetables. The heat from the jam-packed water-swollen bodies kept the garden soil warm and prevented the tender plants from freezing even during the forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit of the midsummer nights.
After the trees were transplanted into the roof of the tube to replace the dead adults, the zoogloea would be taken piecemeal back to the tube and dumped into the channel. Here the jetfish would strain out part and eat part as they pumped water from the polar end of the tube to the equatorial end.
Toward the end of the day, he tried some of the zoogloea soup and managed to keep it down. A little later, he ate some cereal.
Martia insisted on spooning the food for him. There was something so feminine and tender about her solicitude that he could not protest.
"Martia," he said, "I may be wrong. There can be good will and rapport between our two kinds. Look at us. Why, if you were a real woman, I'd be in love with you.
"Of course, you may have made me sick in the first place. But if you did, it was a matter of expediency, not malice. And now you are taking care of me, your enemy. Love thy enemy. Not because you have been told you should but because you do."
She, of course, did not understand him. However, she replied in her own tongue, and it seemed to him that her voice had the same sense of sympatico.
As he fell asleep, he was thinking that perhaps Martia and he would be the two ambassadors to bring their people together in peace. After all, both of them were highly civilized, essentially pacifistic, and devoutly religious. There was such a thing as the brotherhood, not only of man, but of all sentient beings throughout the cosmos, and...
Pressure on his bladder woke him up. He opened his eyes. The ceiling and walls expanded and contracted. His wristwatch was distorted. Only by extreme effort could he focus his eyes enough to straighten the arms on his watch. The piece, designed to measure the slightly longer Martian day, indicated midnight. Groggily, he rose. He felt sure that he must have been drugged and that he would still be sleeping if the bladder pain hadn't been so sharp. If only he could take something to counteract the drug, he could carry out his plans now. But first he had to get to the toilet.
To do so, he had to pass close to Martia's bed. She did not move but lay on her back, her arms flung out and hanging over the sides of the bed, her mouth open wide.
He looked away, for it seemed indecent to watch when she was in such a position.
But something caught his eye -- a movement, a flash of light like a gleaming jewel in her mouth.
He bent over her, looked, and recoiled in horror. A head rose from between her teeth. He raised his hand to snatch at the thing but froze in the posture as he recognized the tiny pouting round mouth and little blue eyes. It was the worm.
At first, he thought Martia was dead. The thing was not coiled in her mouth. Its body disappeared into her throat.
Then he saw her chest was rising easily and that she seemed to be in no difficulty.
Forcing himself to come close to the worm, though his stomach muscles writhed and his neck muscles quivered, he put his hand close to its lips.
Warm air touched his fingers, and he heard a faint whistling. Martia was breathing through it!
Hoarsely, he said, "God!" and he shook her shoulder. He did not want to touch the worm because he was afraid that it might do something to injure her. In that moment of shock he had forgotten that he had an advantage over her, which he should use.
Martia's lids opened; her large gray-blue eyes stared blankly.
"Take it easy," he said soothingly.
She shuddered. Her lids closed, her neck arched back, and her face contorted.
He could not tell if the grimace was caused by pain or something else.
"What is this -- this monster?" he said. "Symbiote? Parasite?"
He thought of vampires, of worms creeping into one's sleeping body and there sucking blood.
Suddenly, she sat up and held out her arms to him. He seized her hands, saying, "What is it?"
Martia pulled him toward her, at the same time lifting her face to his.
Out of her open mouth shot the worm, its head pointed toward his face, its little lips formed into an O.
It was reflex, the reflex of fear that made Lane drop her hands and spring back. He had not wanted to do that, but he could not help himself.
Abruptly, Martia came wide awake. The worm flopped its full length from her mouth and fell into a heap between her legs. There it thrashed for a moment before coiling itself like a snake, its head resting on Martia's thigh, its eyes turned upward to Lane.
There was no doubt about it. Martia looked disappointed, frustrated.
Lane's knees, already weak, gave way. However, he managed to continue to his destination. When he came out, he walked as far as Martia's bed, where he had to sit down. His heart was thudding against his ribs, and he was panting hard.
He sat behind her, for he did not want to be where the worm could touch him.
Martia made motions for him to go back to his bed and they would all sleep. Evidently, he thought, she found nothing alarming in the incident.
But he knew he could not rest until he had some kind of explanation. He handed her paper and pen from the bedside table and then gestured fiercely. Martia shrugged and began sketching while Lane watched over her shoulder. By the time she had used up five sheets of paper, she had communicated her message.
His eyes were wide, and he was even paler. So -- Martia was a female. Female at least in the sense that she carried eggs -- and, at times, young -- within her.
And there was the so-called worm. So called? What could he call it? It could not be designated under one category. It was many things in one. It was a larva. It was a phallus. It was also her offspring, of her flesh and blood.
But not of her genes. It was not descended from her. She had given birth to it, yet she was not its mother. She was neither one of its mothers.
The dizziness and confusion he felt was not caused altogether by his sickness. Things were coming too fast. He was thinking furiously, trying to get this new information clear, but his thoughts kept going back and forth, getting nowhere.
"There's no reason to get upset," he told himself. "After all, the splitting of animals into two sexes is only one of the ways of reproduction tried on Earth. On Martia's planet Nature-God-has fashioned another method for the higher animals. And only He knows how many other designs for reproduction He has fashioned on how many other worlds." Nevertheless, he was upset.
This worm, no, this larva, this embryo outside its egg and its secondary mother... well, call it, once and for all, larva, because it did metamorphose later.
This particular larva was doomed to stay in its present form until it died of old age.
Unless Martia found another adult of the Eeltau.
And unless she and this other adult felt affection for each other.
Then, according to the sketch she'd drawn, Martia and her friend, or lover, would lie down or sit together. They would, as lovers do on Earth, speak to each other in endearing, flattering, and exciting terms. They would caress and kiss much as Terrestrial man and woman do, though on Earth it was not considered complimentary to call one's lover Big Mouth.
Then, unlike the Terran custom, a third would enter the union to form a highly desired and indeed indispensable and eternal triangle.
The larva, blindly, brainlessly obeying its instincts, aroused by mutual fondling by the two, would descend tail first into the throat of one of the two Eeltau. Inside the body
of the lover a fleshy valve would open to admit the slim body of the larva.
Its open tip would touch the ovary of the host. The larva, like an electric eel, would release a tiny current. The hostess would go into an ecstasy, its nerves stimulate electrochemically. The ovary would release an egg no larger than a pencil dot. It would disappear into the open tip of the larva's tail, there to begin a journey up a canal toward the center of its body, urged on by the contraction of muscle and whipping of cilia.
Then the larva slid out of the first hostess' mouth and went tail first into the other, there to repeat the process. Sometimes the larva garnered eggs, sometimes not, depending upon whether the ovary had a fully developed one to release.
When the process was successful, the two eggs moved toward each other but did not quite meet. Not yet.
There must be other eggs collected in the dark incubator of the larva, collected by pairs, though not necessarily from the same couple of donors.
These would number anywhere from twenty to forty pairs. Then, one day, the mysterious chemistry of the cells would tell the larva's body that it had gathered enough eggs.
A hormone was released, the metamorphosis begun. The larva swelled enormously, and the mother, seeing this, placed it tenderly in a warm place and fed it plenty of predigested food and sugar water.
Before the eyes of its mother, the larva then grew shorter and wider. Its tail contracted; its cartilaginous vertebrae, widely separated in its larval stage, shifted closer to each other and hardened, A skeleton formed, ribs, shoulders. Legs and arms budded and grew and took humanoid shape. Six months passed, and there lay in its crib something resembling a baby of Homo sapiens.
From then until its fourteenth year, the Eeltau grew and developed much as its Terran counterpart.
Adulthood, however, initiated more strange changes. Hormone released hormone until the first pair of gametes, dormant these fourteen years, moved together.
The two fused, the chromatin of one uniting with the chromatin of the other. Out of the two a single creature, wormlike, four inches long, was released into the stomach of its hostess.
Then, nausea. Vomiting. And so, comparatively painlessly, the bringing forth of a genetically new being.
It was this worm that would be both fetus and phallus and would give ecstasy and draw into its own body the eggs of loving adults and would metamorphose and become infant, child, and adult.
And so on and so on.
He rose and shakily walked to his own bed. There he sat down, his head bowed, while he muttered to himself.
"Let's see now. Martia gave birth to, brought forth, or up, this larva. But the larva actually doesn't have any of Martia's genes. Martia was just the hostess for it.
"However, if Martia has a lover, she will, by means of this worm, pass on her heritable qualities. This worm will become an adult and bring forth, or up, Martia's child."
He raised his hands in despair.
"How do the Eeltau reckon ancestry? How keep track of their relatives? Or do they care? Wouldn't it be easier to consider your foster mother, your hostess, your real mother? As, in the sense of having borne you, she is?
"And what kind of sexual code do these people have? It can't, I would think, be much like ours. Nor is there any reason why it should be.
"But who is responsible for raising the larva and child? Its pseudo-mother? Or does the lover share in the duties? And what about property and inheritance laws? And, and..."
Helplessly, he looked at Martia.
Fondly stroking the head of the larva, she returned his stare.
Lane shook his head.
"I was wrong. Eeltau and Terran couldn't meet on a friendly basis. My people would react to yours as to disgusting vermin. Their deepest prejudices would be aroused, their strongest taboos would be violated. They could not learn to live with you or consider you even faintly human.
"And as far as that goes, could you live with us? Wasn't the sight of me naked a shock? Is that reaction a part of why you don't make contact with us?"
Martia put the larva down and stood up and walked over to him and kissed the tips of his fingers. Lane, though he had to fight against visibly flinching, took her fingers and kissed them. Softly, he said to her, "Yet... individuals could learn to respect each other, to have affection for each other. And masses are made of individuals."
He lay back on the bed. The grogginess, pushed aside for a while by excitement, was coming back. He couldn't fight off sleep much longer.
"Fine noble talk," he murmured. "But it means nothing. Eeltau don't think they should deal with us. And we are, unknowingly, pushing out toward them. What will happen when we are ready to make the interstellar jump? War? Or will they be afraid to let us advance even to that point and destroy us before then? After all, one cobalt bomb..."
He looked again at Martia, at the not-quite-human yet beautiful face, the smooth skin of the chest, abdomen, and loins, innocent of nipple, navel, or labia. From far off she had come, from a possibly terrifying place across terrifying distances. About her, however, there was little that was terrifying and much that was warm, generous, companionable, attractive.
As if they had waited for some key to turn, and the key had been turned, the lines he had read before falling asleep the last night in the base came again to him.
It is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled...
We have a little sister, And she hath no breasts: What shall we do for our sister In the day when she shall be spoken for?
With thee conversing, I forget all time,
All seasons, and their change, all please alike.
"With thee conversing," he said aloud. He turned over so his back was to her, and he pounded his fist against the bed.
"Oh dear God, why couldn't it be so?"
A long time he lay there, his face pressed into the mattress. Something had happened; the overpowering fatigue was gone; his body had drawn strength from some reservoir. Realizing this, he sat up and beckoned to Martia, smiling at the same time.
She rose slowly and started to walk to him, but he signaled that she should bring the larva with her. At first, she looked puzzled. Then her expression cleared, to be replaced by understanding. Smiling delightedly, she walked to him, and though he knew it must be a trick of his imagination, it seemed to him that she swayed her hips as a woman would.
She halted in front of him and then stooped to kiss him full on the lips. Her eyes were closed.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second. She -- no, it, he told himself -- looked so trusting, so loving, so womanly, that he could not do it.
"For Earth!" he said fiercely and brought the edge of his palm hard against the side of her neck.
She crumpled forward against him, her face sliding into his chest. Lane caught her under the armpits and laid her facedown on the bed. The larva, which had fallen from her hand onto the floor, was writhing about as if hurt. Lane picked it up by its tail and, in a frenzy that owed its violence to the fear he might not be able to do it, snapped it like a whip. There was a crack as the head smashed into the floor and blood spurted from its eyes and mouth. Lane placed his heel on the head and stepped down until there was a flat mess beneath his foot.
Then, quickly, before she could come to her senses and speak any words that would render him sick and weak, he ran to a cabinet. Snatching a narrow towel out of it, he ran back and gagged her. After that he tied her hands behind her back with the rope.
"Now, you bitch!" he panted. "We'll see who comes out ahead! You would do that with me, would you! You deserve this; your monster deserves to die!"
Furiously he began packing. In fifteen minutes he had the suits, helmets, tanks, and food rolled into two bundles. He searched for the weapon she had talked about and found something that might conceivably be it. It had a butt that fitted to his hand, a dial that might be a rheostat for controlling degrees of intensity of whatever it shot, and a bulb at the end. Th
e bulb, he hoped, expelled the stunning and killing energy. Of course, he might be wrong. It could be fashioned for an entirely different purpose.
Martia had regained consciousness. She sat on the edge of the bed, her shoulders hunched, her head drooping, tears running down her cheeks and into the towel around her mouth. Her wide eyes were focused on the smashed worm by her feet.
Roughly, Lane seized her shoulder and pulled her upright. She gazed wildly at him, and he gave her a little shove. He felt sick within him, knowing that he had killed the larva when he did not have to do so and that he was handling her so violently because he was afraid, not of her, but of himself. If he had been disgusted because she had fallen into the trap he set for her, he was so because he, too, beneath his disgust, had wanted to commit that act of love. Commit, he thought, was the right word. It contained criminal implications.
Martia whirled around, almost losing her balance because of her tied hands. Her face worked, and sounds burst from the gag -
"Shut up!" he howled, pushing her again. She went sprawling and only saved herself from falling on her face by dropping on her knees. Once more, he pulled her to her feet, noting as he did so that her knees were skinned. The sight of the blood, instead of softening him, enraged him even more.
"Behave yourself, or you'll get worse!" he snarled.
She gave him one more questioning look, threw back her head, and made a strange strangling sound. Immediately, her face took on a bluish tinge. A second later, she fell heavily on the floor.
Alarmed, he turned her over. She was choking to death.
He tore off the gag and reached into her mouth and grabbed the root of her tongue. It slipped away and he seized it again, only to have it slide away as if it were a live animal that defied him.
Then he had pulled her tongue out of her throat; she had swallowed it in an effort to kill herself.
Lane waited. When he was sure she was going to recover, he replaced the gag around her mouth. Just as he was about to tie the knot at the back of her neck, he stopped. What use would it be to continue this? If allowed to speak, she would say the word that would throw him into retching. If gagged, she would swallow her tongue again.
The Book of Philip Jose Farmer Page 6
