by Speer, Flora
No Other Love
by
Flora Speer
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2013, 1993, by Flora Speer
Smashwords Edition, License Notes.
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For my brother, David De Groodt,
who asked for a story about the lost
city of the telepaths.
PART I
The Explorers
Chapter 1
Only Herne saw the woman.
He stood up so suddenly that his companions turned to look at him, four surprised faces illuminated by the campfire. Even Merin lifted her head at his abrupt movement, her white coif shining in the firelight.
She sat a little apart from the others, her self-imposed isolation arousing Herne’s curiosity. He had been idly imagining what color her hair was beneath the neat folds of the coif - from her eyebrows and lashes he would guess it was a light brown – and wondering if her body was as delicately made as her facial bones suggested. It was hard to tell about her figure when she wore an oversized orange treksuit every day and never changed into lounging clothes as the other colonists did. Withdrawn, self-sufficient, interested only in the performance of her duties; that was how he would describe Merin if anyone were to ask his opinion of her.
Sensing that she was aware of his attention, he looked away from where his fellow explorers sat, glancing instead toward the ruins of the old city of Tathan. The wind sweeping down from the high plateau and across the wooded plain caught at the leaping flames of the campfire, sending patterns of light and shadow along the sleek body of their shuttlecraft and onto the broken buildings just beyond it.
Herne was a physician, not an archeologist or an historian, but after seeing the maps made by the first explorers, he had felt a compulsion to join this second expedition. The need was so strong and so unusual that he had volunteered to come along. The city had proved to be nothing but a pile of half-buried rubble. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had expected of Tathan, but he was disappointed.
It was while he stared at the shadowy remains of the city and asked himself what he was doing there that he saw the woman.
She stood between a stone pillar and a tree, where the two soaring shapes formed an enclosed niche. She was deep in the shadowed area of the niche, and for an instant he thought he could see right through her. Wondering if what he was seeing was some trick of the firelight, he blinked twice. She was still there, and solid now. Real. Substantial. But she could not possibly be there.
She was slender, her willowy grace barely concealed by a flowing white gown. A short, gold-colored cloak was draped across her shoulders to float behind her, its edges lifted by the wind. Light golden-brown hair tumbled in lustrous curls reaching to below her waist. Her eyes were shadowed, their color indiscernible at such a distance, but he could see curving light brown brows and darker lashes. She was an apparition designed to capture the full attention of any man, and Herne could not tear his gaze away from her. She lifted one hand, beckoning to him. He thought he heard the sound of laughter. Herne rose with a swift motion, took one step toward the woman, and then stopped as good sense overcame impulsiveness.
“Did you see something?” Tarik asked. “You have an odd look, Herne. What’s wrong?”
“The woman. Right there.” But in the second or two it took for Herne’s eyes to flick to Tarik’s face and back to the niche, the woman had disappeared. “She was standing there.”
“What woman?” Osiyar said. “I saw no one.”
“Really, Herne,” said Alla, “I wish you would try to stay awake while we are planning our work for tomorrow. You were dreaming. All of our scanning instruments show no life in this area except for vegetation and a few small animals.”
“Merin,” said Tarik, “did you see anything unusual?”
“ No.” Merin’s voice was soft and low-pitched as always. “I’m sorry, Tarik. I was watching the fire and listening to your discussion. I saw nothing.”
“She was there,” Herne insisted.
“Describe exactly what you saw,” Osiyar commanded.
Herne did, including his first impression that the woman was nearly transparent. Even in the flush of firelight he could see Osiyar’s face grow pale. Tarik saw it, too.
“Who is she?” he demanded of Osiyar.
“By her white gown and gold cloak she must be the one my ancestors called Ananka,” Osiyar said after some hesitation. “She is one of the Others, the spirits of this world. They were here before my ancestors settled on this planet. There was such an entity in the sacred grove near my old home in Ruthlen. I can tell you no more than that because as a mere High Priest, I was never admitted into the most arcane mysteries, which were reserved for women.”
“Ananka,” Tarik mused. “The name is familiar. Something to do with Old Earth, but I can’t recall just what.”
“Ancient Rome,” Merin said in her quiet voice. “She was one of the Fates, who formed the destinies of men.”
“Of course.” Tarik smiled at his colony’s historian, who gave no sign of response, but sat with downcast eyes, looking at the fire. “I remember now. Thank you, Merin.”
“What could a period in Old Earth’s distant past have to do with Dulan’s Planet?” Alla asked. “Did Herne actually see this creature, or was he dreaming?”
“Perhaps we’ll find the answers to those questions tomorrow, when we begin serious explorations,” Tarik said before Herne could protest again that he had not been imagining anything. “Since we can see nothing there now, and it is too dark to search for evidence, I think we should douse the fire, retire to the shuttlecraft for the night, and set the scanning instruments to sound an alarm if anything, living or mechanical, approaches us before morning.”
* * * * *
Merin told herself that she had not lied to Tarik. She really had seen nothing in the dark area beyond the fire. But she had not been staring into the flames as she had claimed. She had been watching Herne.
From the first day she had met him, Herne had piqued her interest, in part because she sensed that he was as secretive about himself as she was forced to be on the subject of her own past life. She was skilled in the technique of observing people without revealing that she was watching them, and she often watched Herne.
He was a fascinating subject for study. His thick, ash-brown hair, cropped short to suit Jurisdiction service regulations, had a tendency to curl when the weather was damp, or when he ran his hands through it in frustration, a frequent gesture with him. His rugged face and fine grey eyes might have led others to call him handsome had it not been for the tense quality of his posture, which combined with the peculiar alertness of his expression to give him the appearance of a tightly leashed animal who, once attacked, would fight to the death without asking for or granting quarter. He would carry that watchful, wary attitude with him forever, Merin felt certain, because he was from the planet Sibirna. One of the most terrifying Races of the Jurisdiction, the Sibirnans were almost as fierce and warlike as the Cetans. But from her observations, she knew there was more to Herne than the stereotype of his people.
“Are you sure you saw nothing?” he demanded of her.
“I have already said not,” she responded, fixing her eyes on his feet. “I was watching the fire and listening to the conversation, just as I told Tarik.”
Silence fel
l between them. Merin knew he was looking hard at her, trying to discover if she was telling the truth. He made a sound of disbelief before he left her to help Tarik douse the fire. Merin remained with her gaze still on the place where Herne had stood, the half lie heavy on her conscience. She wondered if the shiver up her spine was the result of not telling the entire truth, or if it had been caused by the entity Herne had seen, or whether, just possibly, it was because she knew he had been watching her while she watched him.
Chapter 2
Herne…Herne…
He wakened in the folded-down navigator’s seat that was serving him as a bed. Lifting his head, he looked around. By the pale green light of the scanning instrument he could see that everyone else was asleep. Alla lay next to Osiyar with one arm flung over him in a possessive way. Tarik was across the aisle from Herne, in the pilot’s chair, now converted to a bed like Herne’s. Farther back, in the seat next to the cargo bay door, Merin was distinguishable by the white coif she never removed. The only sound was the faint humming of the scanners. Yet someone had called his name.
Herne…it is time…
He rose from his bed and stepped outside the shuttlecraft. The night had grown colder. He shivered as he turned toward the place where earlier he had seen the mysterious woman.
She stood there again, in the same spot, but the ruined pillar and the tree, and the dark niche, were gone. Instead, a low building faced with smooth white stone confronted him. Where the niche had been there was now an arched opening, shining with golden light from within. As she had done before, the woman beckoned, and this time Herne followed her.
They entered a long, columned hall of shining white. The center half of the roof had been left open to the sky, and in the exact center of this area was a pedestal of white stone. On it, twice as tall as a man, stood the golden statue of a bird, its beak open and its wings outstretched.
“That’s a Chon,” Herne said, pausing to look at it. Though larger than any Chon he had ever seen, the statue was perfectly lifelike, the detail on every feather exactly modeled. The long-ago sculptor had successfully conveyed all the grace and nobility of the great, intelligent creatures who, though much reduced in numbers, still inhabited Dulan’s Planet. It occurred to Herne that he ought to be surprised to understand that what he was seeing was part of Tathan during the days six hundred years before his own time, when the telepaths who built the city still lived there, but everything that was happening seemed completely natural to him. “Why did the telepaths make a statue of a Chon and put it in a place of honor?”
The woman did not answer him. She barely slowed her steps when he stopped to look at the statue. He hurried to catch up with her. She led him out of the hall and down a few steps, then across a garden that lay green and silver and quiet beneath twin crescent moons.
“Where are we now?” Herne asked.
Come…
The woman did not speak. The bidding was inside Herne’s mind, and it was irresistible. He went with her to where more steps led downward. Soon they were underground. They needed no lights; a white luminescence surrounded them, moving with them. Herne looked back once and saw how dark it was behind them.
On their right as they descended was a stream flowing downward into an underground lake that extended so far that Herne could not see the end of it. The water was dark blue, as if it lay beneath the purple-blue sky of Dulan’s Planet and reflected its color. The water as also lit from within. It shone like a priceless jewel held before a brilliant light.
The steps ended when they reached a white stone grotto, and there the woman stopped. On the right rippled the purple-blue lake; on the left was a room with its long side toward the lake and its inner walls hung with shimmering white fabric. The woman pulled aside a sheer curtain and entered, then stood waiting for Herne.
She offered him food, tiny cakes on a silvery-white tray, and a drink poured into a crystal cup. The liquid was pale blue and clear, the cup cool when Herne took it in both hands. He lifted it to his lips but did not drink, for he recalled something Tarik had once said in one of his many speeches about old history and the need to remember it. Tarik had spoken of an ancient legend about a man who ventured into a world beneath the world, who had been warned not to eat one crumb or drink one drop in that underworld, or he could never again return aboveground. Herne set the crystal cup down upon an intricately carved white stone table and faced his mysterious hostess.
“Who are you,” he asked. “What do you want of me?”
“You know my name.” Her low-pitched, quiet voice reminded Herne of someone, but he could not think who.
“How do you know that? And, come to think of it, how do you know my name? You have called me Herne from the beginning.”
“From the beginning,” she repeated. “Herne the hunter, Herne of the forest; you know what I want. What you want.” She moved toward a wide couch half-hidden by netlike draperies that billowed and swayed with the movement of air.
“Ananka.” He used the name Osiyar had called her and she stood still, smiling at him. Again he felt that odd tug of recognition.
“Ananka,” she said, putting out one hand to him. “I am your Fate, for this night at least. Come, accept it, for there is no breaking the threads spun before time began.”
He saw that the golden cloak she had worn when first she appeared to him was gone. She shrugged her shoulders and her gown fell open down the front, revealing porcelain skin. He noted the rich curves of her breasts and the curling luster of her golden-brown hair. And then he realized that he wore no clothing at all. It did not surprise him. In this place, nothing could surprise him.
Ananka took his hand, drawing him with her to the couch. When she lay down upon it, he stood above her, enjoying the elegant display of gleaming limbs, the tempting possibilities revealed, concealed, then opened to him again as she shifted position, making room for him.
“Come, join me,” she murmured. “You do not remember, but I do. As I once promised you, this night is our time.” Her beautiful lips parted and her eyes smiled into his. He still could not tell what color those eyes were, whether brown or purple, or some other shade.
Herne was a healthy male in the prime of life, and he had not pain with a woman for half of a Jurisdiction year. Suddenly, he did not care about the color of her eyes, or if she was real or a mirage of some kind, or whether she would poison him with food or drink, or the touch of her luscious body. He wondered briefly if he would ever see the sky or his fellow colonists again, before Ananka drove everything else out of his thoughts. He lowered himself to the couch and she put her hands on him.
She was vibrant with experience, ripe with lush womanliness. She was alluring beyond any man’s dreams. Again and again she roused Herne to wild desire, then granted him intense, prolonged pleasure. But she took from him, too, took and took until he felt drained of his very life force. At last, when her eager mouth and searching fingers could stimulate him no longer, he drifted toward exhausted sleep with Ananka propped above him on one elbow, watching the failure of her most recent efforts.
“Poor, weak man,” she said with a ripple of mocking laughter. “Not like my kind at all. But, still, an interesting experiment, to know human sensations….”
* * * * *
“Herne. Herne, wake up.” Tarik shook him hard. When the effort failed, Tarik pushed the button that converted the bed back into a chair and swung it into navigator’s position.
Jolted into sitting upright by the movements of the chair, Herne opened his mouth to utter an oath most improper to use with one’s commanding officer. He stopped when a small hand entered his line of vision. In the hand was a mug. The fragrant steam curling up from the mug began to clear his groggy brain.
“Here,” Merin said. “Qahf will help.”
Something about her quiet voice touched a memory in him. He made his bleary eyes focus on her face, but it was the same Merin he had seen nearly every day since he’d joined Tarik’s colonists. Beneath the stiff
white coif her face was thin and rather sharp-featured. Her skin was pale, her lips a milky coral shade. As always, she kept her eyes demurely lowered. Just the same old Merin; cool, distant from everyone, never showing a trace of emotion. But she could be kind. The qahf was just what he needed. Herne gulped it.
“If we are all awake at last,” Tarik said, “we ought to get started.”
“I will work with Osiyar,” Alla informed him.
“We’ll make two groups,” Tarik ordered. “I want a historian with each, so Merin, you will work with Herne, and I’ll join Alla and Osiyar.”
“We won’t need you,” Alla began.
“Oh, yes you will,” said Tarik in a voice intended to remind Alla just who was heading this expedition. He touched a few buttons at the shuttlecraft controls. “The computer will monitor our movements. Each of us is to check in every hour, on the hour. If anyone doesn’t call in, the computer is programmed to send an alarm signal to all the others.”
Osiyar and Alla left the shuttlecraft. Tarik prepared to follow them.
“Tarik, wait.” Herne got to his feet. “I need to speak with you in private.”
“I’ll be outside.” Merin slipped through the hatch and closed it behind her.
“Well?” Tarik looked impatient.
“That woman I saw last night came back,” Herne began. “She took me with her to an underground room.”
“Before you awakened,” Tarik said, “I checked the scanning instruments. Nothing living approached the shuttlecraft during the night. No one left it, either.”
“I tell you, she was here! And I did leave!” Angry now, and feeling more than a little guilty over what he had done with the woman, Herne recounted his adventure of the previous night, ending with, “I have no idea how I got back to the shuttlecraft, nor any recollection of dressing myself. I don’t even know where my treksuit was after we reached the grotto. Except – except, just a moment ago, when I stood up I thought I saw myself standing beside my sleeping self, and the standing Herne was naked until I merged with the body wearing the treksuit.