Robert Silverberg - Those Who Watch

And there was the sense of challenge. Could he seduce her as he seduced so many of his own kind? Would his present body function properly? How successful would he be? Would he give her pleasure? Would there be pleasure for him?

A game, then. No emotional content. Seduction for its own sake, pursuit merely to find out certain aspects of his present condition.

That was not love, Vorneen knew. That was sport.

How then, had this unwanted, unexpected, troublesome element of emotion entered the situation?

It had begun sometime during the second week of his stay with her. He could reconstruct the outline of the process, but not the emotional sequence. He knew what he had done, but not how, or why. Especially not why.

From the day of her visit to the Contact Cult office, Vorneen had been fully aware that she knew of his extraterrestrial origin. Of course, she must have realized what he was almost as soon as she had begun to care for him; she was an intelligent woman, and his body was only an approximate imitation of an Earthman’s, beneath the surface. She could gather from the metabolic evidence alone — his body temperature, his lack of any need to excrete wastes — that he was an alien. But until that day, Kathryn had given no outward sign of any awareness. He had seen the look in her eyes, though, when she tossed the bundle of Contact Cult literature on the bed. He had listened to the words between her words as she told him of her visit to the cult’s headquarters. Unmistakably she had been telling him, “Those people are frauds, but I know what a real alien is like, because I’ve got one living in my house!” So the pretense was over. She did not make a point of exploiting her knowledge; she never said a word about his origin, or asked a question; but she knew, and he knew that she knew, and now they were beyond a certain barrier that had separated them.

Still, she remained aloof. She continued to sleep in the other room. When she bathed him or dressed his broken leg, the sight of his nude body clearly disturbed her. Vorneen expertly diagnosed her sexual dilemma, though his insight was purely intuitive, and not related to any pattern he had ever known among Dirnans. She desired him, and yet she was afraid of him — afraid of her own desire for him. So she kept away.

The first time, when he had suggested she get into bed with him, he had been in real pain, still battered and bruised from his landing, still shocked and dazed over the almost certain death of Glair and the possible death of Mirtin. He had wanted warmth. He had wanted closeness. Well, she had refused that; but she had held his hand, and that was good enough.

After that, though, he had wished for something more than that. He wanted her close enough so that he could work his wiles of seduction on her. But that, naturally, she would not countenance.

He wished he knew more about local sexual beliefs. He had studied Earthman tribal taboos during his indoctrination sessions, of course; and during his ten years of observing these people from the sky, he had come to know a bit about their thinking on the subject. But there were gaps, and just now they were turning out to be distressingly large gaps.

Her mate was dead. Her husband; they had only one mate at a time, always of the opposite sex, in a socially accepted sexual group here. She was a “widow’. Were widows required by custom to remain chaste for a certain mourning period? If so, how long? Her husband had died a year ago.

There was a child in the house. Was sexual intercourse prohibited within a certain distance of a child? Was it necessary to send the child away, or to go themselves to some permissible place to perform the act?

What about religious rites? Did they invariably precede any physical consummation?

Vorneen did not know the answers. Privately, he suspected that Kathryn was free to give herself to him any time she pleased, and that she could not bring herself to do it.

Certainly she was modest. Her attitude toward his own nakedness was complex, for he had learned that she once had belonged to a social caste — nurses — in which young women were allowed to view and handle ailing males without inhibition. So her half-veiled reactions to his body sprang from some conflict of desires within her, not from any violation of tribal taboo.

She kept her own body concealed from him. In the many days he had lived here, Vorneen had seen Kathryn’s nakedness once, and that only by accident. It had happened after dinner one night. Vorneen was reading; the child was sleeping; Kathryn was in the bath. Suddenly the child awoke from some frightening dream and began to scream. Vorneen, immobilized in the bed, could do nothing. But Kathryn had left the bathroom door open so that she would hear just such a sound. Vorneen saw her rush across the corridor, naked and glossy with moisture, momentarily visible in front of his open door as she raced toward Jill’s room. After comforting the child, she retreated just as swiftly. But he had seen her. Her body was quite different from the one Glair had chosen for herself. Glair had made a serious study of North American sexual preferences, and had designed a body crafted for maximum erotic appeal. Kathryn, since she had to make do with her own genetic heritage, fell short of Glair’s opulance. Kathryn was taller, with long, thin legs, flat buttocks, small breasts. Her body seemed built for speed and strength, rather than for softness.

Vorneen did not object to that. The criteria by which Glair had designed her body did not happen to be his criteria for feminine beauty; Earthfolk were so alien in form to him that he had no such criteria at all. To him Kathryn was just as beautiful as Glair. More so, perhaps, since Kathryn was authentic, Glair only a sleek replica.

He wished Kathryn would be less prudish about her body.

He wished she would step into his room one night, in-candescently nude, and give herself to him.

It happened, of course. But it happened without planning and with little employment of his bag of tricks.

His broken leg was knitting rapidly, and he felt the time had come to test its strength. He had lolled in bed long enough. Since his suit’s communicator had been shattered in his landing impact, he had to get up and around if he hoped ever to be picked up by a rescue team, and it seemed to him that his leg might already be able to support his weight. One night after Kathryn had gone to sleep he pushed the coverlets back and swung both legs over the side of the bed.

An instant of vertigo swept through him. This was the first time that he had tried to come to a true sitting position in bed. He gasped and clung to the edge of the mattress for a moment while bis body adjusted itself.

Then, delicately, he placed the soles of his feet against the floor.

Vorneen sat quite still. He pictured the broken leg buckling and snapping the moment he exerted pressure on it. His entire outer body might be artificial, but it was linked neurally to his inner Dirnan self; as he had had ample opportunity to discover, he felt real pain when he injured his unreal housing. Perhaps it was best to wait another few days?

No.

He moved his center of gravity forward, clung to the table beside the bed, and pulled himself to his feet. Gently, gently, gently---How was the leg? Supporting him? Yes!

A moment later a wave of dizziness convulsed him like the power of a winter storm.

His body seemed to be falling apart, each limb dropping away from the core. Vorneen cried out and took a wild plunging step with his good leg, then a half-hearted sliding step with the injured one, and finished the maneuver standing in the middle of the room, quivering violently and grasping the back of a handy chair for support. He thought the floor would open wide and engulf him. He could not see for dizziness. He shifted all his weight to the good leg, so that it fired angry protests to his neural center at being imposed upon in this fashion after such long inactivity. His broken leg was whole again, but he had not allowed for the weakness of his muscles, the chaos in his nervous system, that had come upon him from so many days in bed. Momentarily bewildered, he could not even summon the presence of mind to begin shutting down ganglia.