The Lovers

by Филип Хосе Фармер

  Almost half of the crew spoke Icelandic. Their ancestors had sailed from the grim island to spread across northern Europe, Siberia, and Manchuria.

  About a sixteenth of the crew knew Georgian as their native tongue. Their foreparents had moved down from the Caucasus Mountains and resettled depopulated southern Russia, Bulgaria, nothern Iran, and Afghanistan.

  The conference was a memorable one. First, Hal was moved from twentieth place to the Archurielite's left to sixth from his right. The lamedh on his chest made the difference. Second, there was little difficulty about Pornsen's death. The gapt was considered a casualty of the undeclared war. Everyone was warned, again, about the nightlifers and other things that sometimes prowled Siddo after dusk. It was not, however, suggested that the Haijacs quit their moonlit espionage.

  Macneff ordered Hal, as the dead gapt's spiritual son, to arrange for the funeral the following day. Then he pulled down a huge map from a long roller on the wall. This was the representation of Earth that would be given to the wogs.

  It was a good example of the Haijacs' subtlety and Chinese box-within-a-box thinking. The two hemispheres of Earth were depicted on the map with colored political boundaries. It was correct as far as the Bantu and Malay states were concerned. But the positions of the Israeli and Haijac nations had been reversed. The legend beneath the map indicated that green was the color of the Forerunner states and yellow the Hebrew states. The green portion, however, was a ring around the Mediterranean, and a broad band covering Arabia, the southern half of Asia Minor, and northern India.

  In other words, if, by an inconceivable chance, the Ozagen succeeded in capturing the Gabriel and built ships with it as a model, and used the navigational data aboard to find Sol, they would still attack the wrong country. Undoubtedly, they would not bother to contact personally the people of Earth, for they would want to use the element of surprise. Thus, the Israeli would never get a chance to explain before the bombs went off. And the Haijac Union, warned, would hurl its space fleet against the invaders.

  'However,' said Macneff, 'I do not think that the pseudofuture I have just suggested could ever become reality. Not unless the Backrunner is more powerful than I believe. Of course, you could take the attitude that this course might be best. What better shape could the future take than to wipe out our Israeli enemies through means of these nonhumans?

  'But, as you all know, our ship is well guarded against attack by open assault or stealth. Our radar, lasers, audiodetection equipment, and starlight scopes are operating at all times. Our weapons are ready. The wogs are inferior in technology; they have nothing to bring against us that we could not easily crush.

  'Nevertheless, if the Backrunner were to inspire them to superhuman cunning, and they did get into the ship, they would fail. If the wogs should reach a certain point in the ship, one of two officers always on duty on the bridge will press a button. This will wipe out all navigational data in the memory banks; the wogs will never be able to locate Sol.

  'And if the wogs – Sigmen forbid – should reach the bridge, then the officer on duty there will press another button.'

  Macneff paused and looked at those around the conference table. Most of them were pale, for they knew what he was going to say.

  'An H-bomb will utterly destroy this ship. It will also annihilate the city of Siddo. And we will be honored forever in the eyes of the Forerunner and the Sturch.

  'Naturally, we would all prefer that this not happen.

  And I wish I could warn Siddo so that they would not dare to attack. However, to do so would spoil our present good relations with them and might result in our having to launch Project Ozagenocide before we are ready.'

  After the conference, Hal gave orders for the funeral arrangements. Other duties kept him till dark, when he returned home.

  When Hal locked the door behind him, he heard the shower running. He hung his coat up in the closet; the water stopped splashing. As he went towards his bedroom door, Jeannette stepped out from the bathroom. She was drying her hair with a big towel, and she was naked.

  She said, 'Baw yoo, Hal,' and walked into the bedroom, unselfconsciously. Feebly, Hal replied. He turned and went back into the front room. He felt foolish because of his timorousness and, at the same time, vaguely wicked, unreal, because of the pounding of his heart, his heavy breathing, the hot and fluid fingers that wrapped themselves, half-pain, half-delight, around his loins.

  She came out dressed in a pale green robe which he had bought for her and which she had recut and resewn to fit her figure. Her heavy black hair was piled on her head in a Psyche knot. She kissed him and asked if he wanted to come into the kitchen while she cooked. He said that would be fine.

  She began making a sort of spaghetti. He asked her to tell him about her life. Once started, she was not hard to keep going.

  '. . . and so my father's people found a planet like Earth and settled there. It was a beautiful planet; that is why they called it Wuhbopfey, the beautiful land.

  'According to my father, there are about thirty million living there on one continent. My father was not content to live the life his grandfathers had lived – tilling the soil or running a shop and raising many children. He and some other young men like him took the only spaceship left of the original six that had come there, and they sailed off to the stars. They came to Ozagen. And crashed. No wonder. The ship was so old.'

  'Is the wreck still around?'

  'Fi. Close to where my sisters and aunts and cousins live.'

  'Your mother is dead?'

  She hesitated, then nodded. 'Yes. She died giving birth to me. And my sisters. My father died later. Or rather, we think he did. He went on a hunting party and never came back.'

  Hal frowned, and he said, 'You told me that your mother and aunts were the last of the native human beings on Ozagen. That isn't so. Fobo told me that there are at least a thousand small isolated groups in the back-lands. And you said once before that Rastignac was the only Earthman to get out alive from the wreck. He was your mother's husband, naturally... and incredible as it sounds, their union – one of the terrestrial and an extraterrestrial – was fertile! That alone would rock my colleagues on their heels. It's completely contrary to accepted science that their body chemistry and chromosomes should match! But – what I'm getting at is that your mother's sisters had children, too. if the last human male of your group died years before Rastignac crashed, who was their father?'

  '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.

  15

  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.

  'The lab-created anemia was much swifter and more certain than the natural anemia, because every blood cell in the body would be affected, not just a small percentage. Every cell would soon break down. No oxygen would be carried through the human organism; the body died.

  'The body did die, Jeannette – the body of humanity. Almost an entire planet of human beings perished from lack of oxygen.'

  'I think I understand most of what you have told me,' said Jeannette. 'But everybody, they did not die?'

  'No. And at the beginning, the governments of Earth found out what was going on. They launched missiles toward Mars; and the missiles, designed to cause earthquakes, destroyed most of the Martian underground colonies.

  'On Earth, perhaps a million survived on each continent. With the exception of certain areas where almost the entire population was untouched. Why? We don't really know. But something, perhaps favorable wind currents, bent the fall of virus away until the virus had fallen to the ground. After a certain time outside of a human body, the virus died.

  'Anyway, the islands of Hawaii and Iceland were left with organized governments and a full population. Israel, too, was left untouched, as if the hand of God had covered it during the deadly fall. And southern Australia and the Caucasus Mountains were spared.

  'These groups spread out afterward, resettling the world, absorbing the survivors in the areas which they took over. In the jungles of Africa and the Malayan peninsula, enough were left alive to venture out. These reestablished themselves in their native lands before colonies
from the islands and Australia could take over.

  'And what happened to Earth is destined to happen here on this planet. When the order is given, missiles will leave the Gabriel, missiles laden with the same deadly cargo. Only, the viruses will be fitted for the blood cells of the Ozagen. And the missiles will circle and circle and drop their invisible rain of death. And... everywhere ... the skulls–'

  'Hush!' Jeannette put her finger on his quivering lips. 'I don't know what you mean by proteins and molecules and those – those electrofrenetic charges! They're way above my head. But I do know that the longer you've been talking, the more scared you've been getting. Your voice was getting higher, and your eyes were growing wider.

  'Somebody has frightened you in the past. No! Don't interrupt! They've scared you, and you've been man enough to hide most of your fear. But they've done such a horribly efficient job that you haven't been able to get over it.

  'Well–' and she put her soft lips to his ear and whispered – 'I'm going to wipe that fear out. I'm going to lead you out of that valley of fright. No! Don't protest! I know it hurts your ego to think that a woman could know you're afraid. But I don't think any the less of you. I admire you all the more because you've conquered so much of it. I know what courage it took to face the 'Meter. I know you did it because of me. I'm proud that you did. I love you for it. And I know what courage it takes to keep me here, when at any time a slip would send you to certain disgrace and death. I know what it all means. It's my nature and instinct and business and love to know.

  'Now! Drink with me. We're not outside these walls where we have to worry ourselves about such things and be scared. We're in here. Away from everything except ourselves. Drink. And love me. I'll love you,. Hal, and we'll not see the world outside nor need to. For the time being. Forget in my arms.'

  They kissed and ran their hands over each other and said the things lovers have always said.

  Between kisses, Jeannette poured more of the purplish liquor, and they drank this. Hal had no trouble swallowing it. He decided that it wasn't the idea of drinking alcohol so much as it was the odor that sickened him. When his nose was deceived, his stomach was also. And every drink made it easier for the next one.