Forty-three
Wallace explored their surroundings three days
journey along the cliff in either direction and directly away from it to
the grasslands for another day. With Sasha at his side and never less
than three cats accompanying them, Wallace saw enough of the surrounding
terrain to guess that the cliff was part of a vast shearing in the face of
the planet that extended to the horizons and probably beyond. The forest
and the rivers three thousand feet below would be an unexplored frontier
for the balance of their lives. Exploring a few more square miles of the
higher altitude forests and grasslands would be as much as he could ever
hope to accomplish.
Many days were gray and rainy.
On other days, the sun
shown overhead, but thunder and lightning tore through dense clouds below
the cliff.
During Wallace's explorations, Melanie continued to
keep to herself. "I'm not angry any more," she said in defense of her
behavior. "It just works better this way. You and Sasha make a go of
it. Get her pregnant, if that's what she wants. I've got more going for
myself than I can handle."
Wallace visited often enough to keep tabs of her own
focus of interests. She discovered that the rabbits were sharp-witted and
easily tamed. By the time she had several pets running about the hut, she
no longer had the heart to skin and eat them. The cats changed their
tactics without missing a beat, bringing in small deer from further away
and allowing the tamed rodents to breed and swarm about the hut
unmolested. Surprisingly, the rodents introduced Melanie to all the local
species of fruits and vegetables suitable for consumption, and during the
process, revealed an astonishing level of manual dexterity. "They must be
a form of primate!" she announced enthusiastically. "They've got hands
like monkeys! They can even climb trees!"
Wallace had never noticed. He failed to see the
importance of her discovery.
"The cats are smart, but they can't manipulate tools
with their paws," Melanie explained patiently. "The rabbits could handle
simple tools, if they were trained to do so."
"For what purpose?"
Melanie threw up her hands in exasperation. "I don't
know! That's up to the cats to decide! If only we could communicate with
them!"
The quiet weather patterns caught his attention. In
time, the seasons should have turned. He had been worried about the
possibility of coping with a harsh winter and had spent time watching the
position of the rising and setting sun. Constructing a crude sundial for
more accurate measurements, he made a stunning discovery. "There's no
axial tilt, or at least not much more that a few degrees," he told
Melanie. "It's supposed to be twenty-six degrees, isn't it?"
He had interrupted Melanie's evening dinner of a
typically warn and golden afternoon. Rabbits sat at her table, picking at
a vegetarian diet. Melanie was eating venison, a kind of mashed potato
and gravy, and drinking hot tea. Wallace lived a far cruder existence,
and Sasha had grown uncomfortably moody.
"No axial tilt?" she said.
"No seasons! The sun rises and sets in the same
place every day!"
Melanie was amused. "No winter?"
"What you see is what you get."
"I never noticed. That makes us even. You've never
noticed that there's no moon here."
The disclosure unsettled Wallace. The pitch black
nights clouded with stars had haunted him. He had never been able to put
his finger on the cause of his uneasiness. "I thought this world was a
lot like our own. I guess it's not."
"Must have been some major celestial catastrophe way
back when," Melanie guessed. "But I'm glad to see you still exercise your
brain, along with other parts of your anatomy."
"I guess that means you haven't changed your mind
about me lately."
"Well, I've changed my mind about wanting to move in
with the two of you, if that's what you mean. I can see that it wouldn't
work out."
"You going to turn into a hermit?" Wallace said.
"I've got lots of company," she reminded him,
gesturing to the animals sitting about her table and looking up at her
with quiet reverence. "If you think we should get together more often,
come to dinner next week. I'll throw together something special long
about dusk."
She picked up one of her rabbits. "Want to take a
warm-blooded pillow home with you? They like sleeping with anything
warm-blooded. Even Saurs are warm-blooded."
"Melanie..."
"I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I'm sorry
there's no rapport between us, Wallace, but she's changed since she's been
here, more than I would have expected. She's more than half Saur now.
She absolutely gives me the chills. I don't suppose you've noticed, as
close as you are to her."
Wallace had noticed the internal changes, the meshing
of two disparate personalities. Maybe the physical changes had crept up
on him. "What do you suppose it means?"
"I don't know what it means, but it bothers me. I
respect your loyalty, though. Don't let my paranoia bother you."
Wallace tucked the gift rabbit under one arm and
rose. "I think it would be safer if the three of us stuck closer
together. Sasha is still worried about the Carn showing up. She'd feel
better if you and your cats were about."
Melanie nodded to the rabbit. "Let it run loose to
feed. It's pregnant, so you'll have a hut filled with furballs in another
month or so. If you don't like them, I'll take them back. Don't let the
cats eat them. Scold them if they do. They make it a point not to
displease us."
Wallace had a chance to inspect the rabbit at closer
quarters during the walk back home. The animal still looked more like a
koala bear than a rabbit to his eyes, although it did have surprisingly
human-like hands as Melanie claimed. It huddled comfortably in his arms
as he walked, staring boldly into his eyes with the awareness of a
reasoning being.
Sasha ignored the animal. Wallace spent an evening
cross-legged in front of the campfire in the hut, watching her carve a
venison roast with a piece of volcanic glass. She had taken little
interest in Melanie's increasingly vegetarian diet.
He absently petted the rabbit while thinking of how
he had learned to enjoy Sasha's lean, musculature body. He wondered what
his old friends back home would have thought of having sex with a woman
with the lithe body of a snake. How could he ever hope to explain
to Melanie how addictive Sasha had become?
Her passion was more than human.
Sasha caught him staring. "What did Melanie have to
say about the sun not moving."
"She never noticed. I never noticed that there's no
moon here."
Sasha was appalled. "No moon?"
"We've been here long enough for a moon to change a
phase or two. There's no moon."
Sasha sat across from him on the ground. The fire
crackled softly between them. She stared at the rabbit with disinterest
for a time, then looked up at him.
"I'm pregnant."
Startled, Wallace set the rabbit aside. "How can you
tell?"
"I can feel it growing."
"You've been moody lately. Is that why?"
"I guess so. I'm frightened, Wallace. I don't know
whose baby it is, Sasha's or Qualin's, whether it will be human or Saur,
or something in between. I think you and Melanie should kill
me. Maligoth is going to use me to bring back the Carn."
Wallace took a deep breath to calm his sudden
jitters. "Remember that Melanie was going to jump off the cliff rather
than get mangled by a cat. And you were ready to die when we first
encountered them. Let the Stik handle Maligoth."
"That may not happen. We may all die."
"We will sooner or later anyhow."
Wallace wasn't sure his homespun advice helped any.
Sasha curled up in her bed of sand and stared off into space. Wallace
went outside and searched the star-clouded skies for evidence of further
astronomical anomalies. When he returned and lay beside her, Sasha made
no move to slip into his arms.
Sasha made no sexual advances at all during the week
that followed. At first, Wallace thought her problem a simple emotional
upset, but by the end of the week, he caught a first glimpse of her gently
rounded stomach. "I don't want to no more," was her only excuse for her
sudden frigidity. "It's time for the baby now."
It clouded over during an afternoon a week or so
later. Melanie sent a reminder of their dinner date in the form of a
rabbit riding the back of a cat. As Wallace caught sight of the strange
new partnership approaching the hut, the rabbit jumped to the ground and
handed him a note, a piece of bark scrawled with charcoal.
Don't you dare forget about me, the note
read. Remember that hell hath no fury like Melanie scorned.
Sasha sat before a hearty fire, soaking up the warmth
of the fire. Wallace handed the note to her. "I don't feel like going.
Go by yourself. Just don't be too late."
Wallace counted cat eyes on guard around the hut. "I
won't be long," he told her, and headed out in the rainy dusk on his own.
Melanie rushed out to greet him when he arrived.
"Wallace, we've changed the course of evolution on this planet! I just
found out that another family group of cats is bringing in game! Our cats
sold them the idea of taming the rabbits and teaching them to herd deer!
There's an entire civilization of cats up here in the highlands! They
rule everything!"
The news failed to dispel Wallace's gloom. "Sasha's
pregnant. She thinks Maligoth is taking advantage of her in some way.
She suggests that we kill her before the Carn gets around to making an
reappearance."
Wallace watched a play of confused emotion cross her
face.
"Do you think it'll be an egg like those horrid
little monsters hatched from?" he said. The notion had been haunting him.
Melanie gave a shuddering sigh. "Don't even think
it. If she's going to be moody, we'll just have to keep a closer eye on
her. The cats must know something about the Carn, whether it survived or
not. I'm sure they'll protect us against harm. They'll try, at least, or
give us some forewarning."
"It's probably nothing," Wallace said as he watched
her fear begin to feed on itself.
It started to rain outside. Melanie intensified the
campfire and they ate in silence. He watched her from across the
campfire, longing for the old camaraderie they had shared before Sasha's
return from the dead.
"You started this, Wallace," she said, accurately
interpreting his pained expression. "You have to see it through to the
end. You can't have me just because you knocked up Sasha. I have no more
protection against pregnancy than Sasha and we can't afford to have us
both incapacitated at the same time. I left my birth control pills behind
in Harthmore. They're in my bathroom medicine cabinet, upper left hand
corner, usually placed next to my roommate's diaphragm."
When Wallace returned to his own hut, Sasha was
crouched in the dark, shaking with fear. She cried out when she heard the
shuffling of his feet on the ground, then bolted into his arms when she
recognized the sound of his voice.
"I heard something!" she wailed. "The cats were
growling! It was the Carn! He knows! Maligoth knows!"
