Филип Фармер - The Lovers

'My father, Jean-Jacques Rastignac. He was the husband of my mother and my three aunts. They all said that he was a superb lover, very experienced, very virile.'

Hal said, 'Oh.'

Until she had the spaghetti and salad ready, he watched her in silence. By then he had regained some of his moral perspective. After all, the Frenchman was not too much worse than he himself was. Maybe not as bad. He chuckled. How easy it was to condemn somebody else for giving way to temptation until you yourself faced the same situation. He wondered what Pornsen would have done if Jeannette had contacted him.

'... and so, after we'd been going down that jungle river,' she was saying, 'they quit watching me so closely. We'd taken two months to get from my home, near where they'd captured me, so they thought I'd never dare to try to get home alone. There are too many deadly things in the jungle. They make the nightlifer look like a minor nuisance.'

She shuddered.

'When we got to a village which was on the very edge of their civilization, they let me wander around in the enclosure. By then I'd learned some of their language and they some of mine. But our conversation was on a very simple level. One of their party, a scientist named 'Asa"atsi, put me through all sorts of examinations and tests, physical and mental. There was a machine at the village hospital which took photographs of my insides. My skeleton, my organs. Maw tyuh! My everything.

'They said it was most interesting. Imagine that! I am exposed as no woman has ever been exposed, and to them I am just most interesting. Indeed!'

'Well.' Hal laughed. 'You can't expect them to take the viewpoint of a male mammal toward a female mammal... that is...'

She looked archly at him. 'And am I a mammal?'

'Obviously, unmistakably, indisputably, and enthusiastically.'

'For that, you get a kiss.'

She leaned over him and placed her mouth over his. He stiffened, reacting as he had when his ex-wife had offered to kiss him. But she must have anticipated this, for she said, 'You are a man, not a pillar of stone. And I am a woman who loves you. Kiss me back; don't just take my kisses.'

'Oh, not so hard,' she murmured. 'Kiss me. Don't try to ram your lips through mine. Go soft, melt, merge your lips with mine. See.'

She vibrated the tip of her tongue against his. Then she stood back, smiling, her eyes half-closed, her red lips wet. He was shaking and breathing hard.

'Do your people think the tongue is only to talk with? Do they think that what I did is wicked, unreal?'

'I don't know. Nobody ever discussed that.'

'You liked it, I know. Yet this is the same mouth with which I eat. The one I must hide behind a veil when I sit across the table from you.'

'Don't put the cap on.' he blurted. 'I have been thinking about that. There is no rational reason why we should be veiled when we eat. The only reason is that I have been taught it is disgusting. Pavlov's dog salivated when it heard the bell; I get sick when I see food go into a naked mouth.'

'Let's eat. Then we will drink and we will talk of us. And later do whatever we feel like doing.' He was learning fast. He didn't even blush.

After the meal she diluted a pitcher of beetlejuice with water, poured in a purplish liquid which made the drink smell like grapes, and dropped sprigs of an orange plant on the surface. Placed into a glass of ice cubes, it was cool and even tasted like grapes. It did not gag him at all.

'Why did you pick me instead of Pornsen?'

She sat on his lap, one arm around his neck, the other on the table, drink in hand.

'Oh, you were so good – looking, and he was so ugly. Besides, I could feel that you could be trusted. I knew I had to be careful. My father had told me about Earthmen. He said they couldn't be trusted.'

'How true. But you must have an intuition for doing the right thing, Jeannette. If you had antennae, I'd say you could detect nervous emanations. Here, let's see!' He went to run his fingers through her hair, but she ducked her head and laughed.

He laughed with her and dropped his hand to her shoulder, rubbing the smooth skin. 'I was probably the only person on the ship who wouldn't have betrayed you. But I'm in a quandary now – You see, your presence here raises the Backrunner. It puts me in grave danger – but a danger I wouldn't miss for anything else in the world.

'However, what you tell me of the X-ray machines worries me. So far, we've seen none. Are the wogs hiding them? If so, why? We know that they have electricity, and that they're theoretically capable of inventing X-ray machines. Perhaps, they're hiding them only because they're indications of an even more developed technology.

'But that doesn't seem reasonable. And, after all, we don't know too much of Siddo culture. We've not been here long enough; we don't have enough men to do extensive investigation.

'Maybe I'm being too suspicious. That's more than likely. Nevertheless, Macneff should be informed. But I can't tell him how I found out; I wouldn't even dare make up a lie about my source of information.

'I'm on the horns of a dilemma.'

'A dilemma? A beast I never heard of before.'

He hugged her and said, 'I hope you never do.'

'Listen,' she said, looking eagerly at him with her beautiful brown eyes, 'Why bother to tell Macneff? If the Siddo should attack the Haijac – or, as you say their enemies call them so aptly, Highjackers – and conquer them, why not? Couldn't we make our way to my homeland and live there?'

Hal was shocked. 'Those are my people, my countrymen! They – we – are Sigmenites. I couldn't betray them!'

'You are doing just that now by keeping me here,' she said gravely.

'I know that," said Hal slowly. 'But it's not a gross betrayal, not a real betrayal at all. How am I hurting them by having you?'

'I don't worry at all about what you may be doing to them. I do worry about what you may be doing to yourself.'

'To myself? I am doing the best thing I ever did!' She laughed delightedly and gave him a light kiss on the lips.

But he frowned, and he said, 'Jeannette, it's serious. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, we have to do something definite. By that, I mean find a hiding place deep underground. Later, after it's all over, we can come out. And we'll have at least eighty years to ourselves, which will be more than enough. Because it will take that long for the Gabriel to return to Earth and for the colonizing ships to come back. We'll be like Adam and Eve, just us two and the beasts.'

'What do you mean?' she said, her eyes widening.

'This. Our specialists are working night and day on samples of blood the wogs gave us. They hope to make an artificial semivirus that will attach itself to the copper in the wog's blood cells and change the cells' electrophoretic properties.'

' 'Ama?'

'I'll try to explain even if I have to use a mixture of American, French, and Siddo to get it across.

'A form of this artificial semivirus is what killed most of Earth's people during the Apocalyptic War. I won't go into the historical details; it's enough to say that the virus was desseminated secretly from outside the Earth's atmosphere by the ships of Martian colonists. The descendants of Earthmen on Mars, who considered themselves true Martians, were led by Sigfried Russ, as evil a man as ever lived. Or so say the history books.'

'I do not know what you are talking about,' she said.

Her face was grave, her eyes fixed upon his face.

'You can pick up the gist of it. The four Martian ships, pretending to be merchant vessels orbiting before entry, dropped billions of these viruses. Invisible knots of protein molecules that drifted through the atmosphere, spreading throughout the world, covering it in a very tenuous mist. These molecules, once they penetrated a human being's skin, locked onto the hemoglobin in the red blood cells and gave them a positive charge. This charge caused one end of a globin molecule to bind with the end of the other. And the molecule would go into a kind of crystallization. This would twist the doughnut shaped cells into scimitars and thus cause an artificial sickle-cell anemia.