Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

He pulled himself up into a sitting position, back resting against a great hot boulder. She lay again on her stomach, chin on clasped hands. With her scarred belly and pitifully shrunken breasts hidden, she looked almost normal; but her ribs and shoulder blades were prominent and her skin had a translucency that revealed too many of the blue blood vessels beneath. There were smudgy shadows around her eyes. Her lips were purplish rather than pink as they continued to smile at him. But she had loved him with marvelous passion, this wreck of a handsome woman, and when something within him said: She will die, he felt his heart contract with an amazing, unprecedented pain.

“Why are you here, Richard?” she asked. And without knowing why, he told her the whole story without sparing himself, the dumb sibling rivalry thing, the greedy maneuvering and betrayals that had made him master of his own starship, the ruthlessness resulting in wealth and prestige, the ultimate crime and its punishment.

“I might have guessed,” she said. “We have a lot in common, you and I.”

She had been a Deputy Supervising Engineer on Manapouri, one of the two “New Zealand” planets, where extensive marine mining made up an important part of the economy. A contract had been let for the sigma-field energy-dome of a new township to be built six kilometers beneath the planet’s South Polar Sea. An Old World company sent its people to install the dome generator; approval of each phase of the work was subject to personal inspections by Martha and her staff. She had worked with the offworld technicians for nearly six months, and she and the project head had become lovers. Then, with the generator complex three-quarters completed, she discovered that the contractor had substituted certain structural components when a shipment from Earth went astray. The substitutions were rated at ninety-three percent of the capacity of those called for in the original specs. And everybody knew how ridiculously high those standards had been set, for Manapouri had originally been surveyed by the ultra picky Krondaku. Her lover had pleaded with her. To dismantle the thing and make replacements would lose them months of time, put the job into the red and probably get him the sack for authorizing the sneetch in the first place. Ninety-three percent! That dome generator would keep running in anything short of a Class Four tectonic incident. On this stable-crust world, the chances of that were one in twenty thousand.

And so she had given in to him.

The sigma-field generator complex was completed on time and within budget. A hemispheric bubble of force flowed out from it and pushed back the seawater for a radius of three kilometers. A mining village of fourteen hundred and fifty-three souls sprang up within its security, down beneath the frigid waters near Manapouri’s South Pole. Eleven months later there was a Class Four… 4.18, to be exact. The dome generator failed, the waters reclaimed their hegemony, and two-thirds of the people were drowned.

“The worst thing about it,” she added, “was that nobody ever blamed me. It was right on the knife-edge for the oi, Jtaalspecs, with that 4.18. I knew that the thing would have held if we hadn’t sneetched, but nobody else thought to question it. It was a borderliner, a tossup, and the thing had crapped out. Tough. The generator complex was so smashed up by the quake and turbidity currents that they didn’t bother with much of a fail-analysis. There was more important work to be done on Manapouri than dredge through half a klom of sediment looking for broken parts.”

“What about him? ”

“He had been killed a few months earlier at a job on Pelon-su-Kadafiron, a Poltroyan world. I thought of killing myself but I couldn’t. Not then. I came here instead, looking for God knows what. Punishment, probably. My executive mind-set was all wiped out and I was completely switch-off. You know, take me, stomp me, use me, just don’t make me have to think… The stud farm setup I landed in after the trip from Castle Gateway seemed like a mad dream. They only take the best of the women for breeding stock. Those under forty, natural or rejuvenated, those who aren’t too ugly. The rejects are kept sterile and made available to the gray torcs and the bareneck males. But us keepers had fertility restored by Tanu physicians, and then we were sent to the Finiah pleasure dome. Would you believe there were lots of dopey broads like me who just lay there and took it? I mean, if a dame didn’t mind the basic shabbiness of being used, it was a hotsheet paradise. I understand that the Tanu women are better than the men when it comes to incendiary sex, but the men left no chime un-rung as far as I was concerned. The first few weeks were a nympho’s delight. And then I got pregnant.

“All the little expectant moms are treated like royalty by the Tanu. My first baby was blond and adorable. And I’d never had any, and they let me nurse him for eight months. I loved him so much I almost came up sane. But when they took him away, I went back on psycholine and wallowed around the pleasure dome with all the rest of the screwed-silly tarts. The next pregnancy was awful and the baby turned out Firvulag. The Tanu sire them one time in seven on humans and one time in three on their own women; but Firvulag parents never have Tanu children. At any rate, they didn’t let me nurse the poor little spook, just took him out and left him in the traditional spot in the woods. I hadn’t even recovered from him when they were trying to knock me up again. But by then, all the fun had gone out of it. I was sobering up, maybe. It’s bad to be too sane in the pleasure dome… whether you’re a human female or a human male. Too many of those Tanu blasts and you start hurting instead of skyrocketing. It happens sooner with some than with others, but if you’re the average human, after a while Tanu sex starts killing you.”

“Yeah,” said Richard.

She looked at him quizzically. He gave a small humiliated nod. She said, “Welcome to the club… Well, I had another blond baby and then a fourth. The last was the caesarian, four and a half kilos of lovely fat girl-child, they said. But I was delirious for a week, so they farmed her out to a wet nurse and gave me six whole months of peace to pull my poor old bod back in shape. They even gave me a treatment with their Skin, which is a kind of poor man’s regen-tank, but it didn’t do much good. The practitioner said my mind-tone was wrong for it, just as it was wrong for a gray torc. But I knew that I just didn’t want to get well and have more babies. I wanted to die. So one lovely night I slipped quietly into the river.”

He could think of no words to comfort her. The uniquely feminine abasement was a horror beyond his understanding, although he pitied her and raged inwardly against the ones who had used her, planted a half-human parasite inside of her that fed on her, kicked against her internal organs and belly wall, then violated her again as it burst out into the open air. God! And she’d said that she loved the first baby! How was it possible? ( He would have strangled the little bastards before they drew their first breath.) But she’d loved one, and would have loved the others, likely as not, if they hadn’t been taken away. She’d loved those pain givers, those unworthy children. Could a man ever make sense of the way of women?

And you’d think she’d never want to look at another male. But somehow she’d fathomed his own need and, yes!, needed him as well. She might even like him a little. Was she as generous as all that?

Almost as though she read his thoughts, she gave a sensuous little chuckle and beckoned him back to her. “We still have time. If you’re the man I think you are.”

“Not if it would hurt you,” he found himself saying even as he came back to life. “Never if it would hurt you.” But she only laughed again and pulled him down. Women were amazing.