Authors: Jo; Clayton
Lamarchos (35 page)
She pulled her hand down and lay staring up at curtains more guessed than seen. Beside her she could hear the soft inhalations of the sleeping nayid. Impulsively she touched the smooth skin on his shoulder, the feel of the warm flesh confirming the peace within her. She closed her eyes. “Well,” she breathed. “Here you are again.” Amusement and irritation were almost equally mixed in her. “Where were you when I needed you?”
An image formed behind her eyes. She found herself looking into a polished white room with stainless steel accents. Several nonhumans wrapped in spotless white milled around a woman's nude body stretched out face down on a narrow steel table. Her skin was a pale gold that seemed to glow in the sourceless light. Her red hair flowed in a gleaming waterfall over the end of the table.
The gray wrinkled sophont lifted a rubbery tentacle, a scalpel sparking silver highlights as he slit open the skin just below her left shoulder blade. A second tentacle delicately inserted a small disc into the wound. Abruptly her head reeled with vertigo as the disc swelled until it filled her consciousness. The scene clicked off into blackness, then on again with the disc vibrating behind her eyes, again blackness, disc, blackness.â¦
“Yes, yes. I understand.”
A ripple of sound like a laugh answered her. Then the scene changed. A blind groping through blackness. This way. That. Working a tortuous road through blackness toward a light intuited rather than seen. A bright flash. Then, at last, a relaxation into a narrow freedom.
“Ah. Can you help me now?”
A feeling like a mental shrug. Once again the image of the disc floated in the forefront of her mind. Strong interrogation.
A hand touched her shoulder. She opened her eyes. Mouth pinched with worry, antennas swaying gently, Migru bent anxiously over her.
She smiled. Reaching up she caressed his cheek with her fingertips. “Don't fuss, Migru.”
“Not Migru.” His face twisted with distaste. “My mother named me Burash. The other ⦠the old queen ⦠you understand?”
“Burash ⦠” she murmured drowsily.
He lay back and began touching her again with gentle affection. “Growing up ⦠mmmmh ⦠it was a good time. For you?”
She nodded.
“I had two sibs ⦠most of the time nayids come in threes, narami. We were inseparable. Like a sun with two shadows, mother said. Kanuu led. Being female she was always the strongest, mind and body. Gammal ⦠he had a mind like wildfire.⦔ He sighed.
Something kept nudging at Aleytys as she lay warm and content, listening to him ramble on about his childhood. Lazily she fished for the elusive thought.
“Burash!”
He broke off and pushed up onto his elbow. “What is it?”
“You never finished telling me about the queen egg.”
“Leyta.” His voice was low, his mouth curled taut, unhappy. “Why not just forget it?”
“No.” In her head she felt the subtle agreement of the diadem. She wrinkled her nose, suddenly realizing that her orgasms had been shared by the rider in her skull. Then she shrugged off the brief distaste and returned to the probing. “I need to know. I need all I can learn about this place.”
Burash pulled away from her to sit with his back against the headboard of the bed. “This won't help you.”
“Tell me.”
“Your people and mine,” he began slowly. She could see his graceful antennas sweeping back and forth like a marvelous metronome. “We are alike in the way we manage impregnation of the female.”
Aleytys chuckled. “Yes.”
He tapped her nose. The strange huge eyes skewed her perception of his expressions so that she was never sure just what they meant, but she felt warm and protected. “After coupling,” he went on hesitantly, “our females walk another road. When the female is made fertile.⦔ His hand reached out and closed around her fingers. “She produces eggs, three usually, and implants them in the flesh of a living food source. In these days this is usually a specially raised immeru.” He said thoughtfully, “That's a long-haired beast with long curving horns, a graceful and loving creature.” He smiled reminiscently. “Gentle and loving. In our early days as a thinking species she would use the fertilizing male as host.” He grinned and bent over her, brushing the hair from her startled face. “The change, needless to say, has my enthusiastic approval.” He chuckled. “Turn on your stomach, narami. Let me relax you a little.”
She felt a little chill down deep, but turned over. “Go on,” she muttered, her voice disappearing into the pillow.
He began smoothing his hands over the taut muscles in her back, then started working up and down her shoulders, hitting the muscles with a series of light taps. After a minute he began talking again. “The queen is different. I was born on Sep. That's a big island about a hundred stadia off the coast of this land. A thousand years ago all the nayids there were lived on Sep.”
She stirred impatiently. “The egg.”
“Yes.” He laughed briefly, unhappily, and tapped her on the buttocks. “A little patience, narami. Listen.” He began working on her spine. “All my people by this time had changed, male and female able to exist in amity. All but the queen. She was different. Mortal like us all, but somehow.⦔ He worked quietly for a moment on her neck and shoulders. “Somehow her last egg was the old one born over, memories and personality intact.”
“Huh?” She lifted her head and gaped at him.
He pressed her head back down on the pillow. “Just listen, Leyta. Relax and let it flow over you.” He smoothed his hands rhythmically up and down the length of her back. “The queen egg has another peculiarity. As soon as it's implanted, the grub absorbs the genetic potencies of her host, giving her, in effect, three parents.”
Aleytys blinked, her eyelashes scraping across the quilts. “Why me?” she murmured.
Unhurriedly he smoothed her hair back from her face and neck, touching the thick shining strands with firm gentle fingers. “My people finally rebelled and drove her from the island along with her most fanatical followers. We couldn't manage to give her the death she deserved but we drove her from our island. She came here, built the city, took the hiiri, met the starfolk and here we all are.”
Aleytys turned over and scanned his face. “Why me?”
“She needed choice meat.”
Aleytys gasped.
“You asked,” he said tautly. “These are difficult times for these river pigs. That jealous old bitch slaughtered any of her daughters who showed the least bit of strength or intelligence. When she knew the next egg would be the last, would be the carrier of her essence, she sent the kipu searching for a special host. And the kipu found you. Strong, young, empath, healer, linguist, psi-potent to an almost unmeasurable degree. The perfect host.”
Aleytys shuddered. “How do you know?”
He stroked a finger down her cheek, then curled a strand of hair around his wrist. “A harem's a hotbed of gossip.”
“Harem?”
“The queen's bedmates, narami.”
She twitched her nose. “How could you?”
“I live how I must, narami. And there are drugs.”
“And me?”
“A joy and a delight.” He bent down and kissed her lightly, then pulled the sheets and cover back over her. “You're tired. Why don't you go back to sleep, narami.”
“Not yet.” She pulled him down beside her. “Tell me the rest, Burash.”
He slid his arm around her shoulders and held her against him. “It isn't good telling, Leyta.”
She said nothing.
After a minute he began again. “You saw the egg. You saw them put it in your leg. As soon as the opening was sealed the egg began changing, triggered by the blood and warmth. Within an hour it had sent out a thousand thousand cilia through your body so that even the cleverest surgeon couldn't clean them out and it dissolved itself into a hundred nodes scattered around the webbing.” He spoke very rapidly, sliding the words out with a desperate casualness as though he were not pronouncing sentence on her.
“The nodes grow but not much.” His voice lowered so she had to strain to hear it. “She develops detail but remains small so that she does not inconvenience the host. She acts as a symbiote, taking food in return for comprehensive care of the host's well-being, doing this by instinct rather than conscious decision. For a year.⦔ He stopped again and pulled her tight against him.
Aleytys found it hard to comprehend what he was saying. The words dropped like rain onto her head, cool and quiet. She finally registered his silence. “After a year?”
He sighed. “She reels in the cilia and reassembles herself.” He went silent again, then began speaking faster than ever so that some of the words escaped her entirely. “Changes ⦠and goes ⦠dormant ⦠one week ⦠transforms ⦠larva ⦠paralyzes the host ⦠eats her way free ⦠eats prodigiously ⦠consumes ⦠flesh, blood, bones ⦠doubles in size hourly ⦠half adult size when ⦠host body gone ⦠body alters radically ⦠casts off old skin ⦠emerges ⦠young nayid queen ⦠leaving the patterns of instinct for the life of an intelligent being.”
Aleytys pulled back and stared at him, her tongue slipping around dry lips.
He caressed her face with fingertips like butterfly wings. “Don't, narami, don't think about it. I told you it wouldn't help you. You've a year, a whole year. There'll be no pain. You'll never feel any pain.” He held her shuddering body in tender arms, rubbing his hands up and down her back until her cold skin warmed and the knotted muscles softened. “Do what you want, Leyta. Don't waste your spirit fighting what you can't change. It's done. Go to sleep now, my soft soft narami, go to sleep. You'll feel stronger, wiser tomorrow, tomorrow ⦠tomorrow.” He held her close until she sank into a heavy exhausted sleep.
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About the Author
Jo Clayton (1939â1998) was the author of thirty-five published novels and numerous short stories in the fantasy and science fiction genres. She was best known for the Diadem Saga, in which an alien artifact becomes part of a person's mind. She also wrote the Skeen Trilogy, the Duel of Sorcery series, and many more. Jo Clayton's writing is marked by complex, beautifully realized societies set in exotic worlds and stories inhabited by compelling heroines. Her illness and death from multiple myeloma galvanized her local Oregon fan community and science fiction writers and readers nationwide to found the Clayton Memorial Medical Fund.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1978 by Jo Clayton
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3840-9
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
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