Cat Star 04 - Outcast

by Cheryl Brooks

  "Well, at least he didn't try to kiss me," Bonnie mur­mured to her new husband. "You know what they do with their tongues, don't you?"

  "I can guess," Lynx replied, shaking Vladen's hand as he passed through the line.

  "They are so weird," Zuannis agreed. "I'm not even sure I want him eating my cake!"

  "He'll probably put fingerprints all over it," Bonnie agreed. "We'd better hurry and get a piece before it's too late."

  Hatul, however, behaved impeccably during the reception, only fingering his own piece of cake, after which he and Gerna made a rather sudden departure. Seems the cake Zuannis made for the occasion tasted every bit as orgasmic as it looked.

  During the reception, Jack took a moment to take Lynx aside. "So, tell me, Lynx," she said, dropping a casual arm around his shoulders. "Been thanking those lucky stars of yours?"

  Jack's use of language puzzled most people, but Lynx even more so than the rest. "I do not understand."

  "The ones you must have been wishing on," she said. "Those must have been some damn good stars... and you know it, don't you?" Judging from Lynx's blank ex­pression, Jack knew she'd lost him and decided to make it easier for him. "How does it feel to be adored?"

  Lynx smiled warmly. This much, he understood. "I believe you should ask Bonnie that," he said. "She un­derstands that far better than I."

  "Oh, I doubt that," said Jack, noting Bonnie's expres­sion. If there had ever been a bride who appeared to adore her new husband more, Jack hadn't seen her yet— though if she'd happened to glance in a mirror during her own wedding, she would have seen the same thing. "I doubt that very much, indeed."

  Epilogue

  "Push again," Lynx urged his wife. "Once more."

  The head crowned, and suddenly the infant slipped from his mother and into his father's waiting hands. Lynx noted the sharply pointed ears and gazed into the blinking feline eyes of his newborn son. Then his two beautiful daughters followed their brother into the light. Out of the scores of babies he'd delivered, these were the first to be his own, and at long last, Lynx understood what it truly meant to feel joy.

  From

  SLAVE

  I found him in the slave market on orpheseus

  Prime, and even on such a godforsaken planet as that one, their treatment of him seemed extreme. But then again, perhaps he was an extreme subject, and the fact that there was a slave market at all was evidence of a rather back­ward society. Slave markets were becoming extremely rare throughout the galaxy—the legal ones, anyway.

  I hitched my pack higher on my shoulder and ad­justed my respirator, though even with the benefit of ultrafiltration, the place still stank to high heaven. How a planet as eternally hot and dry as this one could have ever had anything on it that could possibly rot and get into the air to cause such a stench was beyond me. Most dry climates don't support a lot of decay or fermenta­tion, but Orpheseus was different from any desert planet I'd ever had the misfortune to visit. It smelled as though at some point all of the vegetation and animal life forms had died at once and the odor of their decay had become permanently embedded in the atmosphere.

  Shuddering as a wave of nausea hit me, I walked casually closer to the line of wretched creatures lined up for pre-auction inspection, but even my unobtrusive

  move wasn't lost on the slave owners who were bent on selling their wares.

  "Come closer!" a ragged beast urged me in a rasping, unpleasant voice as he gestured with a bony arm.

  I eyed him with distaste, thinking that this thing was just ugly enough to have caused the entire planet to smell bad, though I doubted he'd been there long enough to do it. On the other hand, he didn't seem to be terribly young. Okay, so older than the hills might have been a little closer to the mark. Damn, maybe he was respon­sible, after all!

  "I have here just what you have been seeking!" he said. "Help to relieve you of your burden! This one is strong and loyal and will serve you well."

  I glanced dubiously at the small-statured critter there before me, and its even smaller slave. "I don't think so," I replied, thinking that the weight of my pack alone would probably have crushed the poor little thing's tiny bones to powder. I know that looks can often be deceiv­ing, but this thing looked to me like nothing more than an oversized grasshopper. Its bulbous red eyes regarded me with an unblinking and slightly unnerving stare. "Its eyes give me the creeps, anyway," I added. "I need something that looks more... humanoid."

  Dismissing them with a wave, I glanced around at the others, noting that, of the group, there were only two slaves being offered that were even bipedal: one re­minded me of a cross between a cow and a chimpanzee, and the other, well, the other was the one who had first caught my eye—possibly because out of all the slaves there, he was the one seeming to require the most re­straint, and also because he was completely naked.

  I studied him out of the corner of my eye, noting that the other prospective buyers seemed to be giving him a wide berth. His owner, an ugly Cylopean—and Cylopeans are all ugly, but this one would have stood out in a crowd of them—was exhorting the masses to purchase his slave.

  "Come!" he shouted in heavily accented Standard Tongue, "my slave is strong and will serve you well. I part with him only out of extreme financial need, for he is as a brother to me, and it pains me greatly to lose him."

  His pain wasn't as great as the slave's, obviously. I eyed the Cylopean skeptically. Surely he couldn't imag­ine that anyone would have suspected that his "brother" would require a genital restraint in order to drag him to the market to part him from his current master!

  Rolling my eyes with disdain, I muttered, "Go ahead and admit it. You're selling him because you can't con­trol him."

  "Oh, no, my good sir!" the Cylopean exclaimed, seemingly aghast at my suggestion. "He is strong! He is willing! He is even intelligent!"

  I stifled a snicker. The slave was obviously smart enough to have this one buffaloed, I thought, chuckling to myself as it occurred to me that no one around here would even know what a buffalo was, let alone the eu­phemism associated with the animal.

  I blew out a breath hard enough to fog the eye screen on my respirator. Damn, but I was a long way from home! Earth was at least five hundred long light-years away. How the hell had I managed to end up here, searching for a lost sister whom I sometimes suspected of not wanting to be found? I'd followed her trail from planet to planet for six years now, and had always been just a few steps behind her. I was beginning to consider giving up the search, but the memory of the terror in her wild blue eyes as she was torn from my arms on Dexia Four kept me going.

  And now, she had been—or so I'd been informed— taken to Statzeel, a planet where all women were slaves and upon which I didn't dare set foot, knowing that I, too, would become enslaved. The denizens of Statzeel would undoubtedly not make the same mistake that the slave trader had, for I was most definitely female, and, as such, vulnerable to the same fate that had befallen my lovely little sister. That I wasn't the delicate, winsome creature Ranata was wouldn't matter, for a female on Statzeel was a slave by definition. Free women simply did not exist there.

  Which was why I needed a male slave of my own. One to pose as my owner—one that I could trust to a certain extent, though I was beginning to believe that such a creature couldn't possibly exist, and certainly not on Orpheseus Prime! I was undoubtedly wasting my time, I thought as I looked back at the slave. He was tall, dirty, and probably stank every bit as much as his owner did. I was going to have to check the filter in that damn respirator—either that or go back and beat the shit out of the scheming little scoundrel who'd taken me for ten qidnits when he sold it to me. I should have simply sto­len it, but getting myself in trouble with what law there was on that nasty little planet wouldn't have done either my sister, or myself, a lick of good.

  As I glanced at the man standing there before me, he raised his head ever so slightly to regard me out of the corner of one glittering, obsidian eye. Something passed between
us at that moment—something almost palpa­ble and real—making me wonder if the people of his race might have had psychic powers of some kind. That he was most definitely not human was quite evident, though at first glance he might have appeared to be, and could possibly have passed for one to the uneducated. There weren't many humans this far out for comparison, which was undoubtedly why I'd been able to get wind of Ranata's whereabouts from time to time. She seemed to have left a lasting impression wherever she was taken.

  Just as this slave would do, even with the upswept eyebrows that marked him as belonging to some other alien world. His black, waving hair hung to his waist, though matted and dirty and probably crawling with ver­min. I had no doubt that his owner hadn't lied when he had said that the slave was strong, for he was collared and shackled—hand, foot, and genitals. I'd been through many slave markets in my search, but I'd rarely seen any slave who was bound the way this one was, which spoke not only of strength, but also of a belligerent, and probably untrainable, nature. The muscles were all right there to see, and while they were not overly bulky— appearing, instead, to be more tough and sinewy—their level of strength was unquestionable.

  This man had seen some rough work and even rougher treatment, for jagged scars laced his back and a long, straight scar sliced across his left cheekbone as though it had been made with a sword. He had a piercing in his penis, which appeared to have been done recently, for the ring through it was crusted over with dried blood. A chain ran from the metallic collar around his neck, through the ring in his cock, to another metal band that encircled his penis and testicles at the base. The pain that such a device could inflict on a man was horrify­ing, even to me, and I'd had to inflict a lot of pain in the course of my travels—though never to someone so defenseless and completely within my power as a slave. My never-ending search for Ranata had left me nearly as tough and battle-scarred as the slave was, and I'd often had to fight to the death in order to stay alive. So far, however, I'd never stooped to torturing a slave, and sin­cerely hoped I never would. This slave owner obviously had no such qualms, and it made me want to take a shot at him, just on general principles.

  Call me an old softy if you will, but I must admit that I considered buying this slave, if for no other reason than to set him free of his restraints. I might feed him first, though—and perhaps buy him some clothes.... I cocked my head to one side as I considered him again. You're a fool if you think feeding this thing will tame it, I told myself. A bona-fide fool...

  From

  WARRIOR

  He came to me in the dead of winter, his body burning with fever. Even before he arrived on my door­step, bound, beaten, and unconscious, I knew my quiet life was about to change forever. And I was ready.

  As I stirred my potion, I heard the creak of saddle leather and the muffled thud of a body falling into the snow outside my isolated cottage, followed by Rafe's grunt of effort as he dragged the unconscious offworlder through the drifts. With a gust of cold air and a swirling cloud of snowflakes, he pushed my door open and burst inside without so much as a knock.

  The evening had begun tranquilly enough. I had just brought in extra wood from the shed, but it was snowing so hard, I decided to go back out into the wintry darkness for more. I can conjure up fire better than any other witch I've heard of, but it helps to have some fuel. Besides, I love the cozy warmth and smell of a wood fire.

  From her place by the fire, Desdemona gazed up at me with narrowed eyes, nodding her agreement. I trusted her feline intuition to alert me to danger, but Desdemona had given me no warning. Yawning, she stretched and let out a loud purr before curling up once more.

  Reassured, I pushed open the heavy wooden door and peered out into the thickly falling snow. Big, fluffy flakes drifted by in the beam of light, floating gently but inexorably to the ground. It was already a handspan in depth and more was on the way. But there was some­thing else in the air tonight—a strange feeling, herald­ing something altogether new and unexpected. Not a feeling of dread or fear, but something that whispered of the fulfillment of a promise. It hung there, on the edge of awareness, teasing me with its elusive aura. Just what—or who—it was, only time would tell. Time and the gods.

  My woodshed was only a few paces from the door, though with the snow it seemed farther than usual. Treading softly, I sank into the snow with each step, feeling my way through the darkness. The door to the shed creaked open on its rusty hinges and I glanced up at the lantern, shooting fire into the wick, instantly il­luminating the interior with a warm glow.

  I had plenty of wood stored there for the winter; the people of the forest saw to that. I was too important to their well-being for them to ever let me freeze or starve, and offerings appeared almost daily on my doorstep— sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, but still they came without fail. I reminded myself frequently that one day they might not, and was, therefore, frugal with whatever I had. I knew full well that my honored status could vanish on a whim, and I wouldn't have been the first of the chosen ones to be cast out to starve. It was a tenuous existence, to be sure, but one for which I had been born and bred.

  Stacking the new logs on my arm, I made my way carefully back through the snow to my house. Although the right to own property was denied most women on this world, it was my house and had been my mother's before me, and her mother's before her, time out of mind—never once having a male to claim ownership. Our children had fathers, of course, but we seldom mar­ried—at least, not in the traditional sense—and there­fore traced our lineage through the female line. The one child we were granted was of the utmost importance, for it was she who would continue our work and our traditions—and that child was always female. Always.

  Desdemona purred her greeting as I came back inside and dumped the logs by the fire. I had three days' worth of wood there already, but the snow was deepening quickly, so I thought I might as well bring in more. Paus­ing by the door, I listened. There was barely any wind, and the snow fell silently until, just on the fringes of my hearing, I was at last able to hear what I'd been waiting for: hooves in the snow, and heavily laden, by the sound of them. A rider was coming, but that was not all.

  I could hear the effort the horse was making as he strained to climb. He was coming from the east, and I could place him now. It was Sinjar; I sent a greeting of thought out to him and heard him nicker in reply. We knew each other well, for his master, Rafe, had been my lover once. Too arrogant now to trouble with the likes of me, he'd been charming enough in his youth. I'd known that Rafe wasn't the one—had always known, even from the beginning—but loneliness sometimes drives one to seek out solace in places where happiness can never be found. It had been over for many years; Rafe had a wife and sons now and had never once strayed back to my bed. That it was for the best, I was well aware, because he had become too powerful and had too much to lose by consorting with a witch.

  Sinjar's thoughts reached into my mind. "I'm tired and hungry, " he said. "They are heavy. " "They?" I asked.

  "The master and another, " he replied. "Sick and hurt. A slave, I think. He is... strange. An offworlder. "

  "I'll have food and water waiting for you, Sinjar, " I promised.

  "Good. It's not far now. I'll be glad to see you again, lisana.

  "And I, you. "

  Returning to the shed, I gathered up buckets and feed and carried them back to the house, filling one of them with water from the pump by my door. Rafe might want food and drink as much as his horse did, but he would have to ask for it when he arrived.

  Rafe and I had not parted company on the best of terms, though he did use my talents when it served his purpose. He must need my help very badly to come out on a night like this—and for a slave, no less. An offworlder, which didn't bode well, for my skills and medicines were sometimes useless with other species. My knowledge had grown with time, but there were still those whose physiology was too different to respond to my treatments. Many of the basic principles were the same, but they were
usually strangers, and often didn't trust me completely, which was half the battle. This one might already be beyond my aid, for I could sense some­thing ominous about him, a life-force on the wane. Rafe may have been too late.

  I set Sinjar's food and water down and went inside, leaving the door unlatched, and gathered what herbs I thought I might need. Water was already hot in the kettle hanging from a hook over the fire, and I mixed the pun­gent potion in an earthenware bowl on a heavy wooden table that was probably as old as the cottage itself. Pow­dered comfrey root mixed with sage and rosemary tea would help to heal his battered body, but an infusion of thyme, lavender, rosemary, and vervain would help restore the will to live, which I could tell even from a distance was the chief problem afflicting my newest cli­ent. I doubted that many slaves would prefer death to slavery, but some might. Rafe was a stern man and could be an exacting master. On the other hand, Rafe would presumably have paid good money for him, and see him as an investment to be protected. He wouldn't be coming at such a time if it didn't matter to him.