Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

But the alien unexpectedly pulled back, its streamlined face cramping into what could only be described as a grimace. It retched.

"Achkt," it spat, utter shock in its eyes. "Gaack." It sprang back, sniffing Karr in dismay. Then, gagging, it bounded across the fallen tree, up the peninsula, and out of sight into the jungle.

Karr collapsed, confounded, panting, holding his neck? and thanking his lucky stars for the unforeseen blessing of tasting really, really bad.

XI

The fugueship is a kiss, a musky kiss on her nude skin, a kiss sweet with fugue and pungent like an outworld spice.

That's how it is in her dream.

Kissing-lip doorways draw her deeper, wrap her in their moist forgetfulness. The kiss steals away what was Before. The kiss is Sanctuary. The kiss takes her away from the danger of her world.

Soon it will take her to secret places.

Naked and nameless, geldings line the love-passages, heads bowed, embarrassed hands over limp nothings. In the past they have taunted her. They have punished her with their bitter nothings. They have tried to tell her that it is she who is inadequate, and not them. But she knows better. She has read. Beyond her world, there are no geldings.

She ignores them.

The kiss is on her. The kiss will show them what to do with a real woman.

Curves on curves, caress on caress. Steamy tongue-shapes lure her to the center of the ship. To the ruby womb. She feels the heat of it in her nipples and throat.

He is standing there.

In white.

And he knows what he wants: her.

Fingers interlock. Naked, charged flesh presses against muscles under crisp pressed fabric. Hot breath on face. Then contact. Firm lips on hers, touching. Not flinching. Lingering. Tasting.

Darting in and out. Savoring.

This is the kiss for her.

And all the geldings can do is watch.

She feels the heat. She is the heat. Wet heat. He is the heat. Hard heat. He moves, she moans.

She parts the white uniform, hungry for what she needs. She grabs. He shoves her legs apart.

They are connected.

Willowy legs over thrusting buttocks. She arrives where the kiss will take her. To the secret place. She arrives. Such feeling! She almost faints. She takes his gift. And arrives. And arrives.

And arrives ...

? from the black book of J. Tesla

Impossible!

A naked man, who Jenette had never seen before, motored by the shore on a strange craft, which she had also never seen before.

Jenette and Arrou were hiding under droobleberry bushes at the edge of FI-716, disconsolate after their first abortive Feral encounter and trying to figure out what to do next. Hiking through dense jungle in search of Ferals would only get them killed. Jenette needed a different, safer way to locate Ferals.

Those problems were forgotten at the sight of the naked man.

The encounter had begun with a peculiar hum. Arrou heard it first, the prickling of his ear pits alerting Jenette to possible trouble. Then she heard it herself.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"Machine."

Jenette at first assumed the noise was a deep colony patrol, sent by her father to bring her back. And, although the idea of being whisked away from the dangerous island appealed to a certain part of her, Jenette resolved to hide from the vessel. However, the noise did not really sound like a crawler or any other kind of Enclave vehicle. Jenette pushed aside her fear, and several bunches of swollen mauve berries, and found herself staring out from the island at a wholly improbable boat.

The vessel's general appearance was that of a wreck. Torn composite fibers and bent metal fringed a shallow, flat rectangle, fifteen yards wide and thirty long. Massive charred cowlings, fat at the bottom and tapered on top, sat at the four corners. Jenette guessed some sort of propulsion units were concealed within. There was a shattered cockpit at the front and a pile of junk in the center, and the whole thing was leaking so badly that an ankle-deep lake sloshed inside the shallow sidewalls.

But more important than the craft itself was the man. Jenette knew every one of the Enclave's three thousand human colonists on sight? and he wasn't one of them.

Hence, the impossibility.

"We don't have anything like that, do we?" Jenette asked rhetorically.

"We should," Arrou said, enraptured by the strange vehicle. "Big engines."

The craft quickly passed out of sight. Jenette scrambled forward and leaned over the bank as the vessel disappeared around a bend of the shoreline.

Arrou fidgeted. "What do?"

Jenette sputtered, still in shock from the sight. "Don't let him get away!"

The words hardly left her lips before Arrou bounded off through the bush. Jenette followed as best she could.

Karr rummaged through a heap of salvage on deck, flipping over what was left of the ejection couch and digging into a survival kit attached to it. He unzipped a small packet and poked it inside out. On contact with air, the fabric expanded into a wet simulacrum of a Pilot uniform, which Karr needed now that the vicious alien had destroyed his ghimpsuit. Already Karr was feeling the heat of the yellow sun above and he didn't want to get burned. He waited impatiently as the memory-cloth cured, his brows drawing into an unhappy glower at the remembrance of the last two days.

Karr had awoken on the morning of day one, bobbing in CG-423-B's strange chrome sea, suspended by a survival raft that had inflated out from compartments on the back of his kilnsuit. Torpid waves rolled from horizon to horizon with no sign of land, lifter, or fugueship in sight. The warm water surrounding him reminded him of being enfolded in Long Reach's brain, and for a while, as it dawned on him that his magnificent ship was gone, he did nothing but despair. The creature that for so long had been his sole companion, the very reason for his existence, was dead.

And what good was a Pilot without a ship?

Karr would gladly have given his life for Long Reach to live, but of course there was no bartering with Fate. No matter that he felt his life was over. No matter that he had trained all his life, believing his choice a noble task, forsaking any human contact, family, friends? forsaking time itself as the centuries stole away. No matter that he had roots nowhere and that it would have been better if his kilnsuit had cracked on ejection so that he could drown at the bottom of the silvery ocean. None of that sacrifice brought his fugueship back from the dead. That was the terrible truth. His helmet began to fog.

Lindal Karr, who had not wept at the loss of several thousand units of human cargo, who had not shed a tear for twenty million lost souls on Sheldon's World, took his helmet off and wept at the loss of his ship.

And his tears became flower petals ...

Or so it seemed.

Wherever his tears fell on the quick-silver waves, clouds of rich indigo birthed into the air, swarms of insects fluttering up, twirling on tissue-paper wings, out of control, joining and mating for a few stolen minutes of life and then, spent, snowing back onto the waves like flower petals. The cycle repeated over and over, sometimes near Karr, sometimes in a chain reaction that swept far away, the ocean surface stippling as if from invisible rain, chasing itself before a wind of fairy-like procreation and death. Such was the pace of life on that alien planet, but Karr neither counted the endless cycles nor marveled at the fragile beauty. He remained un-moving, inward-locked in misery.