Margie the cook, tall, rangy, red-headed, square of face and shoulder, wearing her familiar flower-print apron, big wooden spoon in her right hand, standing in an open door, white kitchen appliances visible behind her, a thin cloud of steam wafting through the air, smelling of marjoram and bay leaves, black pepper and sweet basil, carrots, potatoes and nice, fatty beef...
And the three graces, standing all in a row.
Mira, short and dark and very Spanish-looking, dark-eyed, tawny-skinned, dressed in yellow shorts and a white halter-top, straight black hair combed just so, swept forward off her left shoulder.
Janice, tall, leggy blonde, eyes like blue ice, she of the slim, pale lips and heavy, rose-tipped breasts, dressed now in black and gold, showing a lot of leg, pelvis tilted at just the right angle by the force of high-heeled sandals. The first time I’d seen her naked, I’d been all but hypnotized by her curly yellow sunburst of a pubic thatch.
And Hani, of course, middle sized, face like a child, almost no breasts, almost no hips, dressed in a pale gray sarong, eyes so narrow and mysterious, one leg exposed by a long slit up the side of her dress. Barefoot.
How does it go? If I forget thee, Oh, Israel...
That did it. Spell broken. I laughed, laughed the way I hadn’t in many a long day, walked forward and took them all in my arms.
My room was already set up the way they knew I liked it, Fyodor helping me put my things away while Margie and the others set up for dinner, undressing me, gathering the bits of my uniform for cleaning. Chattering away, so obviously glad I was back.
Standing in the bathroom then, looking down into a black hole. Well, I didn’t expect water here...
Fyodor said, “Some kind of composting toilet, something the natives use. I don’t know why it doesn’t smell.”
Probably a good thing the local bacteria can eat our leavings then. I pissed, listened to it splatter down in the dark, stood still while Fyodor gave me a sponge bath, dried me with a fluffy, sweet-smelling towel, went back into the bedroom and let him dress me while my mind wandered.
And smelled that wonderful meal.
Fyodor chuckled when my gut made one of those little skirling sounds that let you know it’s been alerted, slapped me on the shoulder, and we went out to see what Margie’d wrought.
o0o
Down in the little valley, in the strip of dry woodland where the troopers and havildars had their huts, there was a public bath, built on top of an underground tank, full of recycling hardware. There were ramps for soaping, washing and rinsing, heated whirlpool baths, warm pools and cool, the air full of water vapor, a vast room full of laughing, talking men and women, Spahi soldiers all.
I stood and stretched, looking around me, naked and damp, feeling at home now, watching as Solange squatted and soaped herself, rinsed from a hose, flopped over backwards into the nearest whirlpool and bobbed up laughing, squeezing water from her eyes. She is so damned eerily slim, so non-European-looking, arms and legs stalky, as if without muscle. Too slim to be so strong, belly flat, gently rippled, abdomen sloping down to a hairless vulva that was no more than a tiny slit, almost not there.
“Get in, stupid!”
I smiled, walked down the stairs into a swirling luxury of warm, scented water, felt myself buoyed up, relaxed. Solange looking at me.
“Not much of a vacation, hm?”
Well. What to say? It had it’s moments. “I guess it was... everything I expected.”
Knowing nod. “I am never going home again. My relatives, all my old friends...” She shrugged. “Why ruin the memory?”
I shrugged back. “It was all right. But I’m glad to be back.”
Shadow falling on us.
I looked up and there was a short, squat, muscular white woman, head full of lank, not-quite-curly brown hair, snub-nose, heavy jaw, dark blue eyes looking down on us. Solange grinned and said, “Rissaldar Tatanya Vronsky. Jemadar-Major Athol Morrison.”
My boss, for the next couple of years. She was broad-hipped, fat stomach bulging above a threadbare carpet of light brown pubic hair, with thick, strong-looking arms and broad, blunt-fingered hands. She sat down on the edge of the tub and dangled her feet in the water, sighing softly. “God-damned desert bullshit. My fuckin’ feet are killin’ me.”
She looked to be about fifty years old, maybe just old enough to have been a raw recruit during the Invasion.
I said, “Good evening, M’am.” You don’t salute when you’re naked in the bathtub.
She said, “So this is your main man, eh, Solange?” Looked me square in the eye, fire and steel suddenly visible. “Jemadar Corday seems quite pleased to be under you, Morrison. Hope you can live up to her expectations.”
I glanced at Solange, said, “A dog-robber’s work is never done...”
Vronsky laughed, a sharp, coarse bellow. “Ain’t it the truth!” She scratched at that heavy crotch of hers, looked around the room full of naked soldiers. “Shit. I guess I’ll go home and let ole Sidney work this off for me...” She stood, stretched, and toddled away, wet feet making little slapping noises on the wet tile, buttocks shaking like sacks of tofu.
Solange giggled. “You should see her burdarage, Athy. That boy Sidney looks like he’s twelve years old!”
I could very well imagine. And could imagine him squatting between her massive thighs. She’d have him by the ears, pulling him right in close, almost smothered by flesh and hair. I said, “I took a look at her tag file on my way here. She damned well earned that job.”
Solange put her hand on the edge of the tub, staring out across the room. “I know. You’ll like her briefing sessions, Athy. To the point. Nothing extra. Nothing left out. She’s been out drilling with the newbies all this past week, marching them all the fuck over the place.” She looked at me, shook her head, smiling wryly. “I think some of the religious folk may be setting up an altar to her in the dorm...”
I could imagine that, too.
o0o
At night, Karsaavo’s hazy sky was as full of stars as any I’ve seen, as starry as Boromilith’s sky, as starry as Earth’s. Not the same stars, it was four thousand parsecs and more from either world, and quite a bit closer to the galactic core, but familiar looking, stars in swirls and clots and patterns of dots. Suggestive shapes here and there against the darkness, things for which the natives probably had names, a spiky patch of nebulosity looking like a pale, frozen explosion just now at zenith.
And, down by the horizon, two little ghost clouds, my old Magellanic friends. They say the Master Race is out there, prowling among the young, half-formed worlds of those wild little galaxies, but it’s seven years’ journey on the sort of ships they let us ride and no one I know has ever been there.
I tried to look for Andromeda, couldn’t figure out if it was anywhere to be seen. It would be a forty year voyage, and no one’s ever suggested the Master Race has done it. On the other hand, time is meaningless to them. Or should be. Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Maybe they just haven’t bothered to tell us.
Hard to imagine they aren’t just about everywhere. Hard to imagine there’s a whole vast universe out there, full of unknown species for whom the Master Race’s ambit is just one more flyspeck in the sky. A galaxy. A cluster of galaxies. Far away. Out of reach. Centuries by ship to the Virgo Cluster, millennia to the galaxies of Coma Berenices. Let’s go visit the site of a fine, bright quasar one day. It’s only a twenty-thousand-year daytrip away.
Solange and I walked from the bathhouse along a flat, dusty path, down to the native city, which she said was called Arat Arrao. It lay in a broad hollow between two bare hills, hills that reminded me of some of the big rocks we saw in Australia, remarkable at first, then forgotten, erased by the rigors of training. Low, rambling buildings of sandstone, adobe and stucco, always surrounded by strands of those talk, stalky dry trees, criss-crossed by dusty footpaths, intersected by rutted roads meant for the native’s wagons and carts, pulled by iridescent bronze-colored th
ings like horses genengineered somehow to look like Japanese beetles.
The were lanterns hanging from the buildings, from many of the trees, each glowing with a fine, steady, blue-yellow light, Solange telling me it was some native gizmo or another, like a kerosene lamp, burning something they milked from one of their domestic animals.
“Edible?”
She made a face. “Natives use it to oil their hides. Smells like old ghee.”
“They catch fire much?”
She laughed. “Not much.”
“Guess they don’t smoke.”
We came into an area that was alive with people, places and things, Solange calling it the Soaaren, a native word she said meant something like “shit-for-brains,” noisy, full of color and light. Most of the people hanging around here, thronging the footpaths, loafing in open doorways, were Karsvoë, oily skins gleaming in the lamplight, bodies banded here and there with colorful sashes and metal-studded belts, but this world had been occupied longer than Earth, had been occupied for centuries, in fact.
Plenty of humans here. A few Spahis, of course, most of them, like us, in standard fatigue uniforms, others identifiable by their size and physique, by a certain controlled springiness of step. There were service burdars out together for an evening as well, scattered through the crowds as well, dressed in whatever passed for finery among them, a group of dark brown men walking down one bright lane, dressed in white tunics and yellow turbans, gabbling away in what I supposed might be Marathi or some such.
A pair of armed Saanaae, handguns in holsters strapped across their bellies, straw hats tipped back on their heads, badges at their throats. Keeping an eye on things, probably pissed off at being assigned to the night shift.
Something shaggy the general size and shape of a bison, with rather human-like arms growing out of its cheeks, holding a small, colorfully beaded purse in one hand, big blue eyes looking around nervously. There was a tag stapled to its left ear, bearing the cartouche and sigil of its Master.
A tall, thin, rather well-dressed oriental, striding purposefully along the road, looking neither left nor right, little blue poppit clinging to the top of his head.
The western-style swinging doors of a building made up to look like a cowboy saloon opened and closed, disgorging a couple. I could feel Solange watching me watch them. A pale, intense, dark-haired man, holding hands with a smaller, slimmer Karsvoë, the two of them looking mostly at each other, walking off down the path, going somewhere. The native, dry skinned, was dressed up in a pale, yellow silk sarong that left one shoulder and arm bare.
“Jesus. Well.”
She said, “This is funny as hell. Let’s go in. You’ll love it.”
Inside was a sawdust-floored bar that reminded me a little bit of Davys, with a scattering of blue lamps, paddle fans on the ceiling, driven by rope chains that ran along pulleys and out through holes in the wall. A bar, serviced by two spindly native bartenders, a bandstand at the back of the room, native musicians lolling around, piddling with things that looked like cylindrical guitars, cymbals of brass and steel. A dance floor, crowded with natives, human couples mingled among them. Tables. A stage at one end of the room.
We worked our way over, found a place to sit, got a wandering native waiter to bring us some kind of sour, beery-tasting stuff, and sat waiting. Solange said, “I was amazed, the first time I saw this. Laughed like hell. These little sons of bitches...”
After a while, the lights dimmed and people stopped dancing, a hush falling over the room, people crowding up behind the tables, looking toward the stage. The native musicians started twanging their instruments softly, smacking their cymbals together in some kind of irregular tempo. Hell, doing their own version of a bump-and-grind maybe... Crash! There was a sizzle and some kind of flickery spot started up from the back from the room, making a smell like bubbling quicklime. Steadied, brightened. Focused on the stage.
There was a naked man standing up there, posed like a statue, muscled like some old-time body builder, Caucasian skin shaved clean, shining with oil, staring out into the space over our heads. The cymbals banged again, and he started to dance. Sort of. Whirling around, prancing in time to the music. I heard Solange start to snicker.
Well. All right.
Crash! A second spotlight sizzling to life, focusing on the a back corner of the stage. There was a small, very thin native there, naked as the man, so heavily oiled I expected her to make squishy sounds as she walked around the stage. She, I supposed, for this was one had a puckered little cloaca between her legs, and when she started to dance, her fat tail began whirling around, lifting high. Behind us, I could here people murmuring. Well, not exactly people. Natives murmuring in their own raspy tongue.
I said, “Jesus, Solange. How long has this been going on?”
“I don’t know. As long as humans have been here, I guess.”
Which can’t have been long. Four or five years.
She said, “Watch.”
They moved together, dancing around each other, whirling... suddenly the man dashed inside the arc of her spinning tail, grappled with her, arms around her, holding her close, mashing their faces together. The native’s mouth opened and she stuck out a thin, forked tongue, very much like a snake’s tongue, thrust it into his mouth. A very long tongue...
It kept on coming and I realized she must be putting it dozens of centimeters down his throat. “Holy shit...”
Solange guffawed, and said, “How’d you like to try that, Athy?”
Nothing to do but grimace and dig her in the side with my elbow.
The rest of the show went on from there, native nibbling on his penis until it was erect and oily, bending over backward so he could shove it in her cloaca, putting on an act that was all squirming and moaning... nothing at all unusual except the species of the participants. And the beer seemed really disgusting, the more I drank of it.
Outside, the night had actually grown cool, the street crowds thinning out, as Solange and I walked back up the hill, away from the lamplight of Arat Arrao.
She said, “I guess some people are just attracted by the exotic. I don’t know. There’s four or five Spahis stationed here have taken up with native lovers. One woman. The rest men.”
“MacKaye have an opinion about this?”
She shrugged. “No one’s tried moving one in as a burdar. Besides, we’re just one little base. He’s got a half-million people to look after, scattered across eleven worlds in this sector.”
“Vronsky?”
“Always hard to tell with her. Five people out of sixteen-thousand-plus in her division. Maybe it’s not enough to matter.”
“I saw a lot more than five people dancing with natives tonight.”
“Yeah. Well. Service burdars always have a hard time. Rissaldar might not care what they do. There’s some contractor personnel on-planet now too, brought in by the Saanaae, I think.”
As we walked up onto the hillside and got above the line of the trees, even with a narrow ridge to the west of town, a stiff breeze started blowing, a cold breeze almost. Solange wrapped her arms around herself and said, “Brr. You’d be surprised how fucking cold the nights can get.”
No clouds, heat radiating away into space. I remembered the day here was about forty hours, rather long for a habitable planet. I said, “You ever think of trying it?” More polite than asking her if she ever had.
“What? Fuck a native?” She laughed.
“Sure.”
“No, that’s stupid. I’ve got all the burdarage I’ll ever need. Besides, that fucking oil they wear...” She looked at me, head cocked to one side. “Think you might be interested?”
I thought about it. “No. Probably not.”
She said, “Right. Hey, my house is up this way,” gesturing at a trough-like path coming off the main road, headed to a cluster of lights. “I’ll see you in the morning. Briefing at 0800.”
“Morning?”
A grin, teeth emerging white from the imp
enetrable shadows of her face. “It’s 2300 right now. Native day is split into two periods of 30 terek, which change over roughly at local dawn and dusk.” She pulled up her sleeve and showed me a military chronometer. “Somebody wrote up a little program for these things. Um...” Looked at the watch. “It’s just past the sixth dark-time tero, just now. Sunrise around twenty-four terek away, maybe 1500 hours, our time tomorrow.”
“Jesus. That ought to get confusing...”
“No, shit. But you can get used to anything.” She turned and walked away in the dark, whistling some song that seemed vaguely familiar.
o0o
When I got home, my crib was quiet, almost dark, but Fyodor, knowing my habits, had left a few soft lights switched on. Now I stood at the foot of my bed, Hani in her sarong, facing away from me, hands at her sides, waiting. I put my hand on her long, straight black hair, ran my fingers downward onto her back, feeling the hair’s smooth, slightly coarse texture, feeling the delicate musculature beneath her skin. She arched gently, pressing against my hand.
It had taken four weeks for the starship to get me here from Earth, through two transfer points. I’d spent those nights alone, thinking about... Hell. Thinking about just about everything. Thinking about Alix. Replaying Marsh’s death scene over and over again in my head.
But every night when I went to sleep, it was just Alix I saw. More often than not I’d wake up in the darkness, just in time to feel semen splashing onto my belly, or injecting itself into a wad of crumpled-up bedding.
No more.
Hani pulled her hair forward, exposing the back of a slim, delicate neck, and I slipped her sarong off her shoulder, let it fall to the floor around her feet. Here was everything I needed. Everything I ever wanted.
I gave her a slight push, watched as she toppled onto the bed, pushing with her toes as she fell so she’d land well up on the mattress. Lay still. Waiting. Legs spread just so. Face down, slightly pigeon-toed, head turned to one side.
I climbed on top of her, lay full length on her back. Slid my hand under her body and down to her crotch. Helped myself get past the introitus, slid full length inside. Lay still.
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