Филип Фармер - The Lovers

'Shib. I do. Jeannette, I've been thinking about that very thing for a long time, but I haven't said anything. I didn't want to worry you. Tell me, are you?'

She looked him straight in the eye, but her body was shaking. 'Oh, no. It is impossible!'

'Why should it be?'

' Fi . But I know – don't ask me how – that it cannot be. But you must never say things like that. Not even joking. I can't stand it.'

He pulled her close and said over her shoulder, 'Is it because you can't? Because you know you'll never bear my children?'

Her thick, faintly perfumed hair nodded.

T know. Don't ask me how I know.'

He held her at arm's length again.

'Listen, Jeannette. I'll tell you what's been troubling you. You and I are of different species. Your mother and father were, too. Yet they had children. However, you may know that the ass and the mare have young, too, but the mule is sterile. The lion and the tigress may breed, but the liger or tigon can't. Isn't that right? You're afraid you're a mule!'

She put her head on his chest; tears fell on his shirt.

He said, 'Let's be real about this, honey. Maybe you are. So what? Forerunner knows that our situation is bad enough without a baby to complicate it. We'll be lucky if you are... uh... well, we have each other, haven't we? That's all I want. You.'

He couldn't keep from being reflective as he dried her tears and kissed her and helped her put the food in the refrigerator.

The quantities of groceries and milk she had been consuming were more than a normal amount, especially the milk. There had been no telltale change in her superb figure. She could not eat that much without some kind of effect. A month passed. He watched her closely, she ate enormously. Nothing happened.

Yarrow put it down to his ignorance of her alien metabolism.

Another month. Hal was just leaving the ship's library when Turnboy, the historian joat, stopped him.

'The rumor is that the techs have finally made the globin-locking molecule,' the historian said. 'I think that this time the grapevine's right. A conference is called for fifteen hundred.'

'Shib.'

Hal kept his despair out of his voice.

When the meeting broke up at 1650, it left him with sagging shoulders. The virus was already in production. In a week, a large enough supply would be made to fill the disseminators of six prowler torpedoes. The plan was to release them to wipe out the city of Siddo. The prowlers would fly in spirals whose range would expand until a large territory was covered. Eventually, as the prowlers returned for reloading and then went out again, the entire planet of wogs would be slain.

When he got home, he found Jeannette lying in bed, her hair a black corona on the pillow. She smiled weakly.

He forgot his mood in a thrill of concern.

'What's the matter, Jeannette?'

He laid his hand on her forehead. The skin was dry, hot, and rough.

'I don't know. I haven't been feeling really well for two weeks, but I didn't complain. I thought I'd get over it. Today, I felt so bad I just had to go back to bed after breakfast.'

'We'll get you well,'

He sounded confident. Inside himself, he was lost. If she had contracted a serious disease, she could get no doctor, no medicine.

For the next few days she continued to lie in bed. Her temperature fluctuated from 99.5 in the morning to 100.2 at night. Hal attended her as ably as he could. He put wet towels and ice bags on her head and gave her aspirin. She had stopped eating so much food; all she wanted was liquid. She was always asking for milk. Even the beetlejuice and the cigarettes were turned down.

Her illness was bad enough, but her silences stung Yarrow into a frenzy. As long as he had known her, she had chattered lightly, merrily, amusingly. She could be quiet, but it was with an interested wordlessness. Now she let him talk; and when he quit, she did not fill his silence with questions or comments.

In an effort to arouse her, he told her of his plan to steal a gig and take her back to her jungle home. A light came into her dulled eyes; the brown looked shiny for the first time. She even sat up while he put a map of the continent on her lap. She indicated the general area where she had lived, and then she described the mountain range that rose from the jungle and the tableland on its top where her aunts and sisters lived in the ruins of an ancient metropolis.

Hal sat down at the little hexagon-shaped tabletop by the bed and worked out the coordinates from the maps.

Now and then, he glanced up. She was lying on her side, her white and delicate shoulder rising from her nightgown, her eyes large in the shadows around them.

'All I have to do is steal a little key,' he said. 'You see, the meter gauge on a gig is set at zero before every flight from the field. The boat will run fifty kilometers on manual. But, once the tape passes fifty, the gig automatically stops and sends out a location signal. That's to keep anybody from running away. However, the autos can be unlocked and the signal turned off. A little key will do it. I can get it. Don't worry.'

'You must love me very much.'

'You're shib as shib I do!'

He rose and kissed her. Her mouth, once so soft and dewy, felt dry and hard. It was almost as if the skin were turning to horn.

He returned to his calculations. An hour later, a sigh from her made him look up. Her eyes were closed and her lips were slightly open. Sweat ran down her face.

He hoped her fever had broken. No. The mercury had risen to 100.3.

She said something.

He bent down.

'What?'

She was muttering in an unknown language, the speech of her mother's people. Delirious.

Hal swore. He had to act. No matter what the consequences. He ran into the bathroom, shook from a bottle a ten-grain rockabye tablet, returned, and propped Jeannette up. With difficulty he managed to get her to wash the pill down with a glass of water.

After he locked her bedroom door, he put on a hood and cloak and walked fast to the nearest wog pharmacy. There he purchased three 20-gauge needles, three syringes, and some anti-coagulant. Back in his apartment, he tried to insert the needle in her arm vein. The point refused to go in until the fourth attempt when, in a fit of exasperation, he pressed hard.

During none of the jabbings did she open her eyes or jerk her arm.

When the first fluid crept into the glass tube, he gasped with relief. Though he hadn't known it, he had been biting his lip and holding his breath. Suddenly, he knew that he had for the last month been pushing a horrible suspicion back to the outlands of his mind. Now, he realized the thought had been ridiculous.

The blood was red.

He tried to arouse her in order to get a specimen of urine. She twisted her mouth over strange syllables, then lapsed back into sleep or a coma – he didn't know which. In an anguish of despair, he slapped her face, again and again, hoping he could bring her to. He swore once more, for he realized all at once that he should have gotten the specimen before giving her the rockabye. How stupid could he get! He wasn't thinking straight; he was too excited over her condition and what he had to do at the ship.

He made some strong coffee and managed to get part of it down her. The rest dribbled down her chin and soaked her gown.

Either the caffeine or his desperate tone awoke her, for she opened her eyes long enough to look at him while he explained what he wanted her to do and where he was going afterward. After he had gotten the urine into a previously boiled jar, he wrapped the syringes and jar in a‹ handkerchief and dropped them into the cloak pocket.

He had wristphoned the Gabriel for a gig. A horn beeped outside. He took another look at Jeannette, locked the bedroom door, and ran down the stairs. The; gig hovered above the curb. He entered, sat down, and punched the GO button. The boat rose to a thousand feet and then flashed at an 11-degree angle toward the park where the ship squatted.