The line broke up as a female came over. She put her hand under my arm to steady me and guided me over to the shade where the rest of the women were sprawled. She helped me sit and gave me water, and I murmured a thanks before she drifted away.
The rest of the day went as the others before had, with quiet conversations, a little crying, a lot of groaning, some napping, and a simple dinner. Malana's cream had proved to be very popular, and though I had rejected it the night she gave it to us, I'd given in the next night and had to admit it really helped. Tonight I couldn't wait to get some of it on my skin. The level was running low and I hoped we could get more somehow.
Chapter 7 – A Trip to the Ocean
The next morning we awoke to another elaborate breakfast and as soon as we had dressed in our shifts we were loaded into the same vehicle that brought us to town, though this time it was also loaded with alien families and a dozen or more boys of varying ages whose parents who obviously doted upon them. We sat uncomfortably together, not yet feeling like mingling.
After a journey of only a few minutes, we emerged next to a big hill of sand. The boys went screaming and shrieking up and over and out of sight. The parents followed slowly, hauling chairs and baskets other things. There was a stiff breeze and the air smelled funny.
We still had no idea where we were as we climbed the hill. And then the answer lay before us.
An ocean. We were near an ocean. I'd seen one once, but didn't go close to it. They were full of toxins and sewage and they smelled awful – worse than this smell – and –
My memory was cut short by the sight of a small boy walking towards the water. A female was watching him but made no move to stop him as he waded into the foamy shallows.
I yelled something at the others and took off. The boy was closer to me than to the other aliens and without thinking I splashed into the water and snatched him up. As small as he was, he was heavy, and I struggled to carry him back to shore without letting him touch the water again. We dropped onto the dry sand as the female and a male came running up. The boy was frightened and ran into their arms. Samial arrived right behind them.
"Leina, what are you doing?" he asked with confusion on his face.
I was now confused too. "He was in the water! I had to get him out of there. Oh, no," I said as my legs began to sting and burn from whatever toxins I'd gotten on them. "You need to wash him off, quick!"
"Wash off what?" his mother asked.
Why was everyone so confused?
"The… stuff! The poison in the water! Get it off of him! I don't know if he was in there long enough to be harmed but my legs are already burning!" I was trying to stay calm enough to use my improving language skills to get the urgent point across.
Then Samial burst out laughing. I shot him an angry look. "What is so funny about my legs being eaten away?"
"Leina, the water is perfectly safe. I know it isn't on your planet, but here it's extremely clean."
"Then why are my legs burning?"
"Because it has salt in it. You got salt water in the stripes from the flogging yesterday and that hurts – but it’s harmless. It would feel better to rinse them off, though."
Actually, the stinging was already fading so I shook my head as he helped me stand. I looked over the vast expanse of moving water.
"All this water is clean?" I said incredulously. He nodded. "Why is it that funny color?"
His eyebrows knit together. "You mean blue?" Now I nodded. "That's the color of a healthy ocean. I've seen one on your planet, and it's kind of an ugly dull green."
"What's that smell?"
He sniffed the air and smiled. "Well, it's a combination of fresh air mixed with seaweed and the occasional rotting fish."
I shook my head in wonder. By now the parents of the little boy had wandered back to their blanket, no doubt telling the tale of the crazy alien woman down by the water's edge.
That afternoon ended up being one of the nicest in memory. Though we had to be careful of our pale skin in the intense sunlight, and gladly accepted the eye-shields they gave us that made everything not so unbelievably bright, we got up and started exploring. Every time a wave rolled into shore we jumped back screeching until we got tired of running and cautiously let the water wash over our feet. The boys came over and asked if we wanted to play a game whose rules I never understood, but seemed to involve a ball, a lot of running, and even more cheating. We were all laughing and having fun by the time the sun had moved across the sky and it was with real disappointment that we heard the call to gather our things and head back to the vehicle.
Later that evening as we sat outside, Joran came and sat down next to me.
"Would you like to have a child like those boys you saw today?"
"Mmm hmm," I murmured without thinking much about it.
"Then come with me. Let's go try again." He seemed almost puppy-ish in his pleading. I thought of what I'd seen today, and the number of penitence stops still to go, and nodded. He helped me to my feet and yanked me along until we were behind the building. There was a blanket already laid out on the grass.
"Very confident, aren't you?" I said dryly.
"Yes," he said. His arrogance was almost bigger than his dick.
"You will make sure I come too, right?"
He made an exasperated sound. "Yes, I'll make sure you come too. Though why you need so much extra help I don't know."
Oh, he was romance personified.
Chapter 8 – Jealousy
The next night the inhabitants of the town built a fire right outside on the lawn – an open fire that discharged soot and smoke into the atmosphere. After our initial reaction of fear I have to admit that it was rather hypnotic. The crackle and the heat soon had me dozing against the tree I was leaning on. Aliya had been sitting next to me, but left when I fell asleep, probably to look for Linal. I hoped she got pregnant soon – they were a sweet couple, though she was just half his size.
The females started singing songs. I leaned my head against the tree and listened at first, then closed my eyes against the tears that started up. I hadn't sung anything since my mother died, and it reminded me of evenings when we sang as we cleaned and put away dishes after dinner. When my father was alive he had called us his song-birds.
Samial came over and sat near me but I didn't want to feel vulnerable or explain anything so I ignored him. The songs continued, both alien, and yet familiar, and when I haltingly asked about them, found out they were songs sung to their children. Lullabies. I guess that there is something universal about putting babies to sleep.
Adelen – or maybe it was Sophina, I don't remember – asked a question of one of the females, and she began to tell a child's tale about the years before they healed their planet. I was tired from the day and my emotions were raw from thinking about my parents and I suddenly couldn't stand to hear one more sentimental story. I got up and walked away from Samial without comment, hoping to find someplace quiet and alone to pull myself back together.
No such luck.
"Leina? Is everything OK?" He came up from behind and placed his hand on my shoulder.
"It's fine. I just need to be alone right now."
"You're not fine. Something one of your females asked is bothering you."
I spun around to him, unreasonably irritated. "Why do you call us 'females' all the time? We're women!"
He looked taken aback. "I don't know. I guess because to us you are very different – still kind of exotic. We don't look at you and see the 'women' we have known all our lives." He peered at me. "Don't you call us 'males'?"
He had me there. "I guess so. You certainly don't seem like the men I know. You're – I don't know – bigger, stronger, more brutish in a way. You certainly have more hair than us."
"Leina," he laughed, "none of you have any hair, anywhere, except the thin hair on your head. Any hair would make us seem like animals in pelts to you. I'm sure the scientists have a theory about why our races look so much alike
other than that, and I'm willing to bet that if your people had access to good food and medicine for a few generations they'd start looking more like us. I know that the babies born to your females – er, women – who have been here a few years look more like us than the ones born right after you arrive. I suspect it will be a generation or two, though, before the girls are as tall and as healthy as our women were, before this happened."
I knew he was just stating a fact, but my frayed emotions chose to hear it as a criticism. "I'm sorry! OK? Sorry my race ever tried to take over your stupid planet! I'm sorry your people were going to die out!" I flopped down on the grass, wincing as I was reminded of the state of my welted bottom. "I'm mostly sorry I ever agreed to this stupid trip! We should have all just stayed behind to choke to death on the smog. It would have been easier for everyone!"
"Leina," he said with a softness that surprised me, "We've let go of our hatred for you. Can't you let go of your hatred for us?"
His words stunned me. "I don't hate you!" I protested. "I just hate these punishments! Wouldn't you?" I challenged him.
He stared at me with his arms folded. Dammit! I wish these stupid aliens weren't so big! It's hard to feel righteous and small at the same time.
"I think you do hate us," he challenged right back. "I think you hate us because you're jealous of us."
My mouth dropped open. For an alien, he was damned perceptive. "OK. Yes. I am jealous. I know it's horrible what we did, but besides that, I'm fucking jealous that your people have so much beauty and peace and health in their lives. They'll never know the fear of violence, or the pain of going hungry, or the misery of living hand-to-mouth as most of my people do. Why do you deserve to have it all and we don't?" My anger spilled out of me now that I had given it voice.
He sat down next to me. "I don't know," he admitted honestly. "But I do know that our people went through the same thing your people are going through, and we didn't have any place else to go. We hadn't developed space travel yet. There were centuries of death and disease and planet-wide disasters before we figured out that we'd better clean up our own nest because no one else was going to do it. Your people, Leina, haven't figured that out yet. They just want to move to another planet that they'll mess up just as much as the old one."
He was right. I knew he was right. But that didn't make it any easier to see what we had wanted so desperately, and know that it was still out of reach.
He continued. "And what has any child on your planet done to deserve a life of misery? Nothing. But we are all tiny players in a big universe. There will be peace and security on your planet someday, but no, that's not fair to those who suffer right now. And, frankly, I don't think it's fair to make you pay for something you had no part in, that happened twenty years ago."
That was as close as he'd ever come to admitting that these punishments bothered him, too. We were both cogs in a bigger machine and had little choice over our fate right now.
A shadow fell over us. I looked up to see Joran standing over me. Samial threw him a look I couldn't read, then scrambled to his feet and started to walk off.
"Samial, wait!" I cried, not ready to let the conversation – or him – go.
"Leina, I hope the pleasure you seek is worth the price you may have to pay." He was gone.
***
Joran wanted to do little more than rut, and that was fine by me. Any chance I could take to get out of here. He always had a real problem with impatience, though. I can't turn on in an instant and I wasn't wet enough for him to slide in when he was ready. So he paced back and forth while I rubbed and tried to think of anything that might help. A sudden memory of being spanked on the ship brought forth a flood, and then I was able to relax enough to think about what Samial had been saying the universe being unfair while Joran grunted over the top of me. That almost made me laugh. I was thinking of one male while being fucked by another.
Joran finished with his usual roar while I cringed at the noise, and then once more instructed me to stay flat with my legs together so his "essence" – I swear that was the translation of the word – wouldn't spill out. I obliged, gazing up through the trees after he left and thinking. It's so easy to look back at your own history and see the sweep of it – the big movements, the major events – and forget that there were millions of individuals caught up in the currents, trying to live their lives, who had no responsibility for the pain they had to go through, and no perspective to ease their suffering. Yet they had experienced happiness at times, and lived through the sadness, and somehow made it through their lives.
Maybe that gave me a little perspective. I don't know. But I was tired of laying here, and so carefully avoiding Joran, who would have bellowed at me to lie back down for at least another hour, I made my way back into the room with the cots.
***
And so the Tour went on. Every five days a new town, and a new and devious punishment that had us in pain for days. I'm not going to go into detail about all of them – even now they are uncomfortable to remember, and for some of the other women the fear of pain grew with each stop until they were almost catatonic. We all helped and supported each other, managing to make it through each stop and cross one more off the list. The males watched us closely. I asked Samial if any woman had ever had to be removed because she was too traumatized, and he admitted it had happened in the past, but she would get the help she needed to recover.
After each punishment we were welcomed into the community as though we were long-lost sisters. We saw amazing natural wonders, we were treated to music and dancing, we were showered with small gifts, and in between all that we studied. We learned about culture and history, we studied the animals in each region, and we went on walks through gardens and practiced naming the most common flowers. The sheer diversity of everything was stunning – nothing like back home, where we had done an excellent job of driving many animals to extinction. I could see why my people had been desperate to make a grab for this green world, and why we didn't deserve it. I felt sad that we had tried to ruin it with our greed and I suppose I was starting to understand their feelings, given what my people had been trying to do.
About half of us had someone we would "lie with", trying to get pregnant and leave the Tour early. Some of the women had no interest in the males available and planned on going to the breeding home after it was over. There they would have embryos from an alien male and female implanted in them. Those babies would be given back to their biological parents after birth. Those of us who were going to go through with the auction to get a mate would, with luck, conceive with their own eggs and their mate's, um, essence as Joran described it, and those babies would be theirs to raise.
Caran had been "lying" with Septin since almost the first night, so it was with screeches of joy that they saw the little stick in her hand turn purple the morning of the fifth punishment, meaning she was pregnant and excused from the rest of the Tour. As they danced out the door together the rest of us stared at our unchanged sticks and prepared for the day ahead.
Chapter 9 – Adelen Runs
The night after the fifth punishment – a caning that left purple welts all down the back of our legs – we all slept restlessly with the unusually fierce pain. Somewhere in the very darkest part of the night I woke to see a shadow pass by the bed. The shadow paused and I realized it was Adelen. I called her name softly and she spun around.
"You scared me!" she accused.
"Sorry. Where are you going?"
She didn't answer and my stomach lurched.
"Adelen, what are you doing??" I reached out to pull her back and she sat down on the edge of the bed.
"I can't do this anymore, Leina. I just can't. I should never have come here."
"You're going to try to escape?" I asked as quietly as I could.
She looked at her hands and picked at a nail.
"You do remember what they told us about escaping? And about the wild animals here, too?"
She looked at me. "I don'
t believe the stories about the animals. There can't possibly be as many as they claim. As for the other – I'll just try to get as far away as I can."
"Adelen, this is not a good idea! This Tour won't last forever, honey. Every time we go through this we see that we'll survive! We're halfway through! Think of what's at the end!"
She shook her head. "I can't see that far right now. Every week I get more and more afraid of the next week. I'm sorry, Leina. Please don't say anything until they realize I'm gone?" she begged.
I sighed. "I would never do that. You are really sure you want to do this?"
She nodded.
I squeezed her hand. "Good luck. Be careful. I think those animal stories are true." I lay back down and pulled the covers over my head so that I could honestly say I hadn't seen her go. I felt her get off the cot and then I heard nothing.
It was a long time until morning and I know I slept little, so I was tired and sore when breakfast arrived. I saw Kinin come in and do his usual sweep of the room and knew that he was about to realize she was gone. I did the only thing I knew to do. I knocked the water container over onto the table.
As water doused all the food, there were shrieks of dismay. I pretended to be horrified at my clumsiness and began trying to rescue the food from a watery grave. Towels appeared, water was drained into the sink, and fifteen minutes later most of the food was in place and still semi-edible, though there were grumbles and dirty looks thrown my way. I was breathing a sigh of relief that Kinin seemed to have left without completing his count, and I hoped I'd bought Adelen at least a little more time.
Without warning a hand clamped my wrist and I jumped in fright. Samial stood next to me, glowering. "I think we need to talk," he hissed. He pulled me over to a corner as my heart dropped into my stomach.
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