By now Blade was in an acute state of readiness and had the control not to do anything about it. He thought he now understood what was going to happen. Let her come to him.
Ooma left off combing and began to squeeze and caress her plump little breasts. When her nipples were erect she wet a finger in her mouth and moistened them again and again until they glowed dark pink in the dim firelight. She then combed out her pubic hair with her fingers, very carefully, and toyed briefly with herself there. Then she came toward Blade. He still feigned sleep, but a sardonic part of his mind was putting himself in the place of Lord L, when that old man made his notes: Jedd females indulge in extensive foreplay to ready themselves for coitus. At times this foreplay is carried so far as nearly to constitute autoeroticism. Yes, his Lordship would put it all down in his tight, sparse handwriting, with no hint of lubricity. He was an old man. He was also a scientist.
Blade was neither.
Ooma nestled close to him from behind, slipping in until their bodies, his huge one and her small one, fitted like two spoons. He felt her breasts velvety and firm against his back, the nipples rigid and like warm little needles boring into his flesh. She breathed in his ear.
«Blade master? Do you sleep, Blade master?»
He grunted. «I do not sleep. As you well know. How could I sleep at a time like this? But I do not understand — you have changed your mind about many things, it would appear. Why is this, Ooma?»
She laughed softly and sank her fine small teeth gently into his ear. «I have been thinking. All the time I was frightened out there in the forest I was thinking. You were right and I was wrong. We will be friends and I will trust you.»
«And,» said Blade with some malice, «there was that cry. That sound in the forest. Or perhaps you did not hear it, Ooma?»
He felt a tremor run through the body pressed so close to his. «I heard it, Blade master. It was the cry of the Api. They hunt at night and it is rare for them to come this far from their own land, but when food is scarce they will. But I would not speak of the Api. They are far away and no danger to us tonight. Tonight, at this moment, it is something else that I want.»
Her hand came slyly around and found him and he heard her gasp. «Blade master! You are a giant there. There is none in Jedd, no Jedd male, who has anything like this.» Ooma gave this a tug and a rapid manipulation. Blade stifled a groan of pleasure. Already he was having difficulty with his breathing, his heart was trying to pound out of his chest, and he fought back the urge to consummate then and there. Go warily. He did not, in possessing her body, want to lose her allegiance and friendship. What was now transpiring, about to happen, was sheer, brute sex, animal lust on both their parts. It would die as the fires would die, leaving ashes, and there would still be tomorrow to face. He needed Ooma. For far more than sexual relief.
Ooma had none of Blade's reservations. The more she caressed him the more her ardor grew. Her voice went high-pitched and her breath sobbed and whistled in her throat. She licked his body with her moist tongue and murmured words he did not understand. She stroked his swollen testicles with her fingers, performed a brief, but avid, fellatio, and then dug her hands into his hair and pulled him down atop her. She guided him into the sleek, wet, tight and rough-walled grotto. Blade was huge and Ooma small and the fricative sum was an unbearable agony of pleasure. It seemed to Blade, trying to prolong the blissful pain, that Ooma spent incessantly without ever losing her grip on him. Her muscular control was beyond anything he had ever experienced; she squeezed him and milked him and, when he could struggle no longer, she took the final gush of his sperm with a high-ringing cry of pleasure that skewered the forest night.
Blade lay on top of her, sweating and panting, still twitching and mindless, fighting his way back from the little death. It had been sex such as few men were privileged to know — barbaric and primitive sex with a unity, a wholeness, a lack of inhibition that even Richard Blade did not often come by. He was grateful. He was also wrung out, depleted, wasted and weary. His massive body was a cocoon nurturing an ennui and death-longing beyond all measure or telling. The past was blotted out, the present did not exist, the future would never be. The great lie of living was over. He could rest now. Sleep now — rest now — die now—
He knew his danger and fought back. He rolled off Ooma, who was already sleeping. So simple, so easy to do it like that. Sex, satisfaction and sleep. The three sses.
He jabbed himself with the stone knife to keep awake and bring him back to reality. He made a tour of the camp, halting long in shadow to listen and peer, and saw no danger. Finally, sleep overpowering him, he bedded down in the shadows away from the fading fires. Thus an intruder would be apt to attack Ooma first, so giving Blade a chance at him from behind.
Chapter Ten
Ooma turned out to be a chatterbox. When she was not using her tongue for his, and her, sexual gratification — every night after dinner and before sleep — she talked incessantly. Blade fell into the habit of listening in silence. Now and again he would grunt in assent, or snarl in dissent, and on the latter occasions she would fall silent for a time. Never for long. Blade learned a great deal in those four days, but there were times when he almost wished the beastmen overseers had caught her.
He spent much of his time in deep thought, pondering, trying to fully grasp a concept slowly building in his mind. It came slowly, with much painful groping, for Blade was no scholar, no intellectual and certainly not a scientist. He was a highly intelligent man of action, gifted with a fine brain and a superb body, but he was uneasy with the novel precept slowly burgeoning within him. Lord Leighton would have welcomed the challenge; Blade was baffled and unsure.
He had, of course, read Lamarck and Darwin at Oxford. After the computer experiments began he, at Lord L's behest, did some refresher reading. It was this that enabled him to spot the salient difference in the present X-Dimension, the thing that set it apart from those he had visited before, and also made it so akin to Home Dimension and yet so vastly different.
Blade was witnessing the evolutionary process in microcosm.
First he had been struck by the symbolism — the way the terrain kept rising. He had come out of the swamps, scaled the cliffs and had been climbing ever since. Flora and fauna were changing. The lake people were a cut above the cave people and the girl, Ooma, of the mountain-dwelling Jedds, far superior to both.
Blade had walked through vast stages of time, as reckoned by H-Dimension standards, in a few days. Less than a week. Evolution was encapsulated. It was like wandering through a cross-section of an evolutionary model. In this dimension cultures and civilizations, true men and submen, reptiles and mammals, were developed not along parallel lines, far separated in time and space, but in contiguity. Jam-packed together. Impinging on each other, yet not merging, each with a sharply etched phylogeny of its own.
But if the slant of the terrain was always upward, the ontological line was not. Ooma was proof of that. Her remote ancestors — about whom she was somewhat vague — had built the mammoth idol in which Blade spent the night and from which he had spied on the lake people and seen Ooma escape.