“What’s that?” he muttered, incredulous. “Some kind of babelfish?”
“Yes, sir, it’s a translation device. It may look old-fashioned and clumsy, but it converts my language into yours, and yours into mine, adequately enough. Mr. From-the-Sky, I have business that cannot wait. When you can walk, I’ll take you to a better-equipped refuge, where you may rest and recover in safety.”
Forrest decided that he wasn’t dreaming. He was on Ancient Venus, and his rescuer was a sophisticated Venusian, an unexpected bonus! She had some rationale to account for his odd anatomy and strange arrivaclass="underline" fine, he would let her be. He had no urgent need to explain himself. He couldn’t gauge how long he’d been in this cave, not even by the growth of his beard, which she had kept close-trimmed. But he could assume the retrieval had failed; probably he was too far from the drop zone. He wasn’t overly concerned. PoTolo would certainly keep trying. All Forrest had to do was get himself back to the zone, before the orbits of the two planets veered too wildly apart.
She walked him up and down. She showed him the “wellspring,” a water supply tapped from the root system of the trees, and explained how to operate a firebowl (the flames were natural gas, from the same source), how to use the gourdlike ration packs. Her tone was always frosty, if translated emotional nuance could be trusted, her conversation minimal. Forrest surmised, amused, that whoever he was supposed to be, in local terms, was a bad guy in her reckoning—temporarily protected by her Venusian Hippocratic Oath.
They left the cave via a twisting, crawl-space passage—waking nightmare memories for Forrest—and emerged from a hole in a huge dead root. Her “refuge” was the hollow under a giant tree stump. She led the way, Forrest stumped behind, favoring his lame leg. He’d tried to convince her to take him back where she’d found him, to no avail, and he was angry. But not such a fool as to strike out on his own, against her will. If Lizard Woman had dragged him below herself, she was extremely strong. Or had confederates he hadn’t met; or both, of course. She was alone, living on gourds of mush but implanted with impressive tech. What was the story? Who was Forrest supposed to be? So many unknowns, and he’d have relished them except that he was so annoyed.
But her pace started to tell. She had the pack, he carried nothing, which he found galling. If there were trails, she didn’t use them; if she had transport, she preferred to hike. What was she? Some kind of Venusian Backwoods Survivalist, humiliating a hated city slicker? He refused to be outdone. When she handed him one of those sappy-gruel gourds, he emptied it without breaking stride. But it got to be desperate work. She wore a floating grey robe; under it a shirt, and pants that accommodated the tail by having no back side. When the robe lifted, as she crossed some obstacle, he saw the big gleaming root of her tail, and it was sexy in a weird way.
Before long, her tail was the only thing that kept him moving.
Dizzy with exhaustion, he picked at his itching fingertips, trying to extricate a tiny, wriggling, brown worm or caterpillar from under one of his fingernails. He didn’t know he’d stopped until Lizard Woman was in front of him, taking hold of his wrist.
She pulled out her headset and donned it. “Your head swims,” she suggested, a cool, contemptuous light in her huge eyes. “Disoriented, can’t think straight? Your skin creeps?”
“All of that,” mumbled Forrest. “Well done, Doctor. You said you would help me.”
“I don’t believe I did say that, and yet I will.”
She was lying, things only got worse. Now they really went off the piste. Forrest was dragged through virgin thickets, thrown into ditches, forced over madsastrugi of upheaved root mass … until they reached a small clearing where a new kind of tree, reddish and gnarled, grew with no near neighbors. Stumbling and confused, he was ordered to strip, and hustled onto a natural platform among its roots. The lower part of the bole was scarred. She stuck something in his hand, forced him to grip, and shouted at him.
“Stab the tree! Stab it! Over your head. Cover your eyes. Okay?”
He was holding a knife. He reached up, and stabbed the tree. A huge gush of stinging hot liquid burst out, and pounded on him.
A hot shower! My God!
The itching that had been driving him mad, a vile, active sensation over his whole body, leapt to a crescendo. He looked down and saw a nest of little dark worms on his chest. More of them, over his belly, his arms. They were wriggling out of his pores, his anus, they were everywhere, there were hundreds of them. The hot, scouring liquid diminished. Frantically he stabbed the tree again, and again, oh blessed relief—
The first time he left the platform, she sent him back. The second time, she was satisfied, and slapped a new kind of soft-walled gourd into his hands.
“Hold that. Whatever they gave you, Mr. From-the-Sky, it doesn’t last. You’ll have to do as we do, in here. Depilate and use barrier methods, or the sippers will overwhelm you in hours. I’m going to fix you up, before you collapse.”
She made him sit on the ground, massaged a grainy goop into his hair, his beard, his arms and legs, his chest, his pubes: sent him to rinse off, then helped to apply a cream that left his skin shining like her own. There was also breathable gel, she said, as she sleeked his every crevice, for nostrils, mouth, and eyes: but it wasn’t necessary in the short term. The “sippers” wouldn’t block airways, or endanger sight, until their host was actually dying. The erection she provoked along the way didn’t bother her, she ignored it and so did he. But there was something between them, when he was hairless, purged, and dressed again, that had not been there before.
“Since we’re talking, sir. What about a name?”
“Forrest. My name is John Forrest, and you?”
“Sek
“Sek. That means the woods, doesn’t it?”
“You know my humble language?”
He shook his head. “In the cave, I sometimes heard you talking to someone. Or communing with your gods? I listened. I figured out that sek meant woods, frequency of occurrence.” He gestured around them. “Since here we are.”
“I have no gods,” she said, and added, “Ool means song. The
The distinction was obviously important: but he wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Woodsong, okay. Er, John means gift of God.”
She laughed, at least the sound she made felt like laughter. His eyes burned, he’d forgotten to cover them, but the world was in focus. He was awake, alive, firing on all cylinders again, maybe for the first time since he’d touched down. He looked at the gouged tree bole, and the shower platform: a natural formation, smoothed by long use.
“There are people living around here?”
“There are the indigenes, primitive surface-dwellers: you won’t see them. A few others: you’ll see them even less. Let’s go. It’s not much farther.”
Soon they crossed a really large clearing, and he was able to gauge the height of the frondy canopy at last: impressive but not extraordinary, sixty or seventy meters. Only mosses grew on the open ground, but the springy, uncertain feeling stayed the same.
Sek