The Final Planet Page 5

  So, they had sent the big brass out for me, gorgeous brass at that.

  “I’m happy to meet you officially,” he tried to respond in kind, “and to know that I have been in the care of a distinguished scientist.”

  She colored deeply, still abashed by him. Well, that can’t hurt now, can it?

  “I hope,” she said, frowning, “that you do accept my apologies. I greatly regret what was done to you. It was most inhospitable.”

  She was serious. The apology was not just a formality. Had there been disagreement about his treatment? Did she represent a scientific subcommunity that was in partial dissent from whoever controlled this place? Or was this merely deeply ingrained courtesy?

  So far two mistakes for Podraig and the Captain Abbess. The Zylongi had picked up traces of the Iona, and somewhere in their mythology lurked a red-haired giant. Nice going, fellas, he thought. If you’ve made any more, you can forget about O’Neill.

  Aloud, he said, “I accept your apologies, Doctor Samaritha. If one is to be examined as I have been, it is at least consoling to know that it has been done by a competent and gracious woman.”

  She now was so embarrassed that she seemed ready to run from the room. “You do have a poet’s skill with words, Poet O’Neill.”

  They’re great ones for titles around here, aren’t they?

  “If you’re a biologist, then you’ve at least discovered that I’m not a god—despite the red hair.”

  “You are interesting biologically … I mean you are much like a Zylongi and yet different in some ways. My colleagues find your data fascinating.” She had him at a disadvantage—after all, she had taken off his clothes and not the opposite (except, of course, in his imagination and that didn’t count). But she still wouldn’t look at him. Women had been avoiding his eyes lately.

  “In addition to being biologically interesting, what else did you learn about me?” O’Neill inquired. “I have the feeling you didn’t miss much.”

  The beautiful doctor flushed again. “I am sorry, Poet O’Neill, that the probe had to be so thorough. To violate someone’s modesty without permission is a terrible offense. I must ask again that you forgive me.”

  “As many times as you ask—” he turned on all his Taran charm “—I’ll forgive you, Doctor—and a few times extra for good measure.”

  She laughed, reassured, and actually sat down on the hard chair next to his couch. “Do you feel well? Sometimes the probe has uncomfortable aftereffects. Here, let me check your pulse.”

  She checked it by touching his throat rather than his wrist. Wow, O’Neill thought as she leaned over him, if someone has to take off my clothes and inspect my biology, she’ll do nicely.

  Still no hint of whether they had broken through with the probe. “So you found that I was ungodlike. I hope you found that I was not about to destroy your world.”

  She glanced at a disk on her jacket. “A bit slow by our standards.” Her fingers seemed to linger a tiny bit longer than necessary on his throat. “But apparently quite acceptable for your biology.… We find you to be utterly and completely harmless.” She consulted her record board again. “Poet Seamus O’Neill, an exile from Tara—for certain infractions that need not concern us—space minstrel, wanderer from world to world, entertaining as he goes. Low on his luck, lower on fuel, and lowest on food. We welcome you to Zylong. We are sorry that our first meeting with you was inhospitable. We will try to make your sojourn here pleasing.”

  She finally glanced at him and smiled. O’Neill felt his heart do some odd things. She looked back at her record board and blushed. “I wonder if I may ask you a question that is perhaps inappropriately personal. It … it is not strictly within the limits of my professional discipline. But I fear that our students of behavior would never dare ask you.”

  “Ah, there’s no harm in that.”

  “We noticed, we could hardly help notice that you kissed me in the jungle before I, ah, sedated you.”

  “Did I now?” Seamus O’Neill, you’re a damn fool. Violating one of their taboos the first thing you do on this heathen world.

  “Is that acceptable behavior in your culture?” She had turned a dusky purple. Sure she’s terrible pretty when deeply embarrassed.

  “Well, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with a little kiss. If it’s not done here, I’m apologetic altogether.”

  “Of course we kiss, but in the privacy of the chamber, and only with our mate or our promised.”

  “We do that too,” Seamus decided to temporize.

  “But we had not been formally introduced. We are not mated or promised. Was it therefore appropriate by your cultural norms?”

  “Well now…” You might as well tell the truth. “ “You seemed afraid of me and I wanted to let you know that I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “I see. That was very kind of you. I was frightened and you did, ah, reassure me—” She looked like Eve might have after she ate the apple: her averted face and her body, leaning inward in self-protection, hinted at a mixture of fascination, fear, and guilt. “—as well as astonish me. It was a disturbingly erotic experience.”

  Was it now? “Forbidden fruit?” he asked, thinking of Eve.

  “I have been asked by many—” she was studying her clipboard intently “—what the experience was like.”

  “And…?”

  “I laugh,” she laughed, and was radiantly beautiful, “and say that it was like being kissed in public by any red-bearded god.”

  What did Murtaugh MacMurtaugh say in their ethics class? Nothing is more pleasant than violating mores in the search for truth.

  “I’m sorry if I caused you any embarrassment,” he said, meaning about half of what he said.

  “In your culture, then, such signs of affection are permitted between doctor and patient?” She was making notes on her clipboard.

  Now Seamus’s big Irish tongue got him into trouble, big trouble. Most of the problems that would later arise resulted from the tiny, wee fib he told.

  “Nothing would be thought wrong with it at all, at all. Sure doesn’t the research literature show it facilitates the healing process, if you take my meaning.”

  A harmless exaggeration. He didn’t expect to be taken seriously.

  “Really?” she looked up from her notes. “I could see that it might.…”

  “No more than two or three times a day, however.”

  After all, it was a very chaste kiss.

  “Really!” She made another note. “How very interesting.”

  “Some of the scholar folk have done research which indicates that it helps the recovery process, speeds it up something terrible.…”

  Well, if they haven’t done it, they ought to have.

  “How extremely interesting!” Another note, now with eyes anywhere but on him.

  “How many days have I been here in your hospital?”

  “We call it a Body Center.” She finally looked at him. “Two days. This is the morning of the third.”

  “That means—” he was only joking, really only joking “—that you owe me four, maybe five kisses. I’ll have to be catching up.”

  “How astonishing.” She made more notes, scribbling rapidly. “That’s fascinating. I must share this with my anthropological colleagues as soon as possible.”

  The devil made Seamus Finnbar O’Neill do what he did next.

  He reached out from his couch, grabbed the woman’s arm, drew her toward him, put his other arm around her waist, and brushed his lips against hers—briefly, but twice.

  “Now you only owe me two.” She wore some sort of thin but firm corset garment underneath her wrap. He permitted half of his hand to slip down toward her rear end; and delightfully solid it was too.

  She did not resist or pull away.

  “That is not our custom,” she said blandly, her lips trembling, and delightfully solid lips they were too. “It is not, however, unpleasant.” She drew several strong lines under some of her notes. “Ought I to
thank you?”

  “That depends on whether you liked it.”

  “Of course I liked it, Poet O’Neill. I am not immune to human reactions, even if I am a Research Director.”

  “Well, I’m glad of that anyway.”

  Careful, Seamus me boy. Your big mouth might be getting you into trouble. This woman loves sinning something terrible.

  Time would prove that an understatement.

  She scribbled frantically.

  “And what would you folks be planning to do with me next, lock me up in a cage, where the common folks of Zylong can come and stare at the red-bearded nongod?”

  “Of course not.” Her dark eyes flashed dangerously. “We are not savages. You will be our guest until your machine can be repaired. We have no such machines here, so it may require some time.” She tucked her note pad under her arm and edged toward the door. “Where you will be housed has yet to be determined. In a short time Technician Londrau will escort you through our Health Center. Is that acceptable?”

  “Anything you say, ma’am.” He sighed loudly and patiently.

  She paused at the door.

  “We will ask many questions, you should not think this hostile.”

  “I guess I am a questionable phenomenon.” He smiled his most charming smile.

  “Quite.”

  Swiftly and gracefully she glided back to the couch, bent over him, and touched his lips with hers, permitting Seamus an extensive, if very brief, view of her breasts. Twice.

  “I believe we’re even now, Poet O’Neill.”

  “For the last two days,” he stammered.

  “We shall see about the future.” She vanished through the doorway.

  I think I’m in deep trouble. I’m nothing more than a horny adolescent male. God won’t hold it against her. But no good can come of violating your most powerful mores. Murtaugh again. Still, she wanted to do it.

  Well, Podraig said the culture hereabouts was falling apart. Maybe I’ll have to kiss every lovely woman on the planet as part of my spying mission. Sure she practically forced me into it. He pondered with satisfaction the possibility of Zylong being a vast harem for himself and decided that it was a fantasy he ought not to encourage.

  The Lady Abbess would not be amused. No, decidedly not.

  Technician Londrau was an enthusiastic young man with a voice as flat as the Iona’s computer, if not a comparably foul mouth. However, the exhausting tour that he conducted of the Health Center took Seamus’s mind off his lovely boss—more or less.

  It was an enormous complex of buildings, housing various hospitals and research facilities with massive banks of equipment and a huge staff of workers, much larger, it seemed to Seamus, than the work required.

  For the first time, he began to feel not only like a foreigner, but an uncultivated one at that. There were at least twice as many workers in the medical complex as the slightly more than five hundred monks, Wild Geese, and pilgrims on the Iona. While, as far as Seamus could see, the Zylongi had no greater medical capabilities than did the tiny medical staff of the monastery, they put a lot more of their resources into health care.

  Of course, he told himself, they have more money and more people.

  The trouble with you, Seamus O’Neill, is that you’re a peasant who has spent all his life with eccentrics, characters, oddballs, and other related peculiar types. Sure they’ve shown you the films and the pictures and made you read the books, but your world has been alloy hull and half a thousand people for the quarter century you’ve been around. Now you’re in a great city of a mature and sophisticated civilization. You’ll gawk every time you turn around if you’re not careful. Once they become accustomed to your height and your great, terrible red beard, they’ll see you for the bumpkin you really are. Especially if you keep kissing their mature Research Director types.

  Ah, sure they weren’t really that powerful kisses. Just little pecks, if you take my meaning.

  “These are the hordi on which Director Samaritha is doing her most important research,” Londrau droned on. “See how clean their quarters are and how well they are treated. The Director is teaching them to read and communicate. They are not the domestic strain who act as our servants, but the wild species from the desert and the jungle. Yet note how quiet and happy they are.”

  The hordi were diminutive creatures, a little more than four feet tall, and indeed looked much like the protohominids in the textbooks in Seamus’s biology courses. About a dozen were eating and sleeping and playing with and nursing their young, huddling together in a large area that had been arranged to look like a jungle habitat. Indeed, they seemed placid and gentle, unperturbed by the four white-clad technicians who were monitoring them.

  “We do not even need cages,” Londrau boasted. “They are all very fond of Director Samaritha.”

  “That shows good taste on their part,” O’Neill agreed. “Obviously they are an earlier stage of the evolutionary process. Prehominids.” Probably the natives of the planet. They had managed to survive along with the colonists from Earth, the ancestors of the Zylongi. Of course, on Earth, the various pre- and protohominids had survived for aeons, side by side, if in different ecological niches. Till Cro-Magnon man occupied all the niches.

  “Certainly not.” The Technician fought to control his temper. “They are obviously unrelated to us.”

  “I see,” said Seamus, who did not in fact see at all. There were enough traits of these docile, attractive little creatures in the Zylongi to leave little doubt that there had been cohabitation sometime in the past. Samaritha’s faintly pointed teeth, for example. Nothing wrong with that, but why deny it?

  The more fascinating question was why the prehominids on Zylong were so similar to those who had apparently once existed on Tara. Parallel and unrelated processes? Or had some prehistoric visitors brought species from Tara to this world, where they had survived long after their species had become extinct on Earth?

  If the Zylongi had such hangups about their prehominid neighbors that they denied the mixing of the two species, they could hardly be expected to know the answer to that question—not that it was particularly important for Seamus’s purposes to learn the answer.

  “You perhaps have noticed that they are not naked?” Londrau’s singsong voice interrupted O’Neill’s reflections.

  “Ah, aren’t they now. Sure ‘tis a good thing you called my attention to it. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

  This guy is beyond belief.

  “It is very interesting. Once they have learned to communicate with us, they wish to clothe themselves. We permit it, of course. They seem to learn shame with the power of communication.”

  “Or maybe just imitation.”

  That stopped Technician Londrau cold. “What a very interesting speculation.” He scribbled a note on his pad. “Fascinating.”

  Seamus considered whether he would want to engage in sex with the slender little female hordi, nervous darting creatures with pert breasts and slim hips. They were appealing enough, he supposed, if you didn’t have your own women around or if you found excitement in brutalizing the frightened and the powerless. Since Seamus didn’t enjoy the latter much, even in fantasies, he decided that the little critters were not much threat to his virtue.

  Well, didn’t you enjoy the doctor’s fright?

  Yeah, but she’s not powerless. I am.

  More or less.

  As the tour continued, Seamus noted several more interesting phenomena. First of all, only a few members of the staff seemed to be working very hard. The energetic types like Samaritha and Londrau were far outnumbered by those who didn’t seem to be doing much at all, save for filling out forms and sitting at desks watching what seemed to be video monitors. They moved slowly and did not seem particularly interested in their work. They were, however, quite interested in him. An ever-changing band of gawkers followed him through the spotlessly clean, indirectly lighted pink and beige corridors and rooms of the medical complex, chatterin
g away about him, just quietly enough so he could not hear them.

  “Begone, you curious rabble,” he had shouted at them once, more or less for the hell of it, waving his arms in a mighty theatrical gesture.

  That band of gawkers fled in terror, to be replaced a few moments later by another crowd.

  “That was very amusing,” Londrau commented in a tone of voice appropriate for an obituary, making an inevitable note. “You frightened them.”

  “Just gave them something to talk about,” Seamus sighed.

  “Of course,” said his guide, scrawling away. “Fascinating.”

  Secondly, there were only a few elderly people in the Body Center. Either they were treated elsewhere, or Zylong had another way of dealing with the old. Seamus did not like the implications of that at all but decided not to ask about it, not yet.

  Finally, while the Body Center was clean, neat, airy, and well illuminated, it didn’t seem to work very well. Many of the lifts were not functioning. Banks of terminals were not lighted, the workers staring idly at the empty screens. Several large machines—for the making of blood and nourishment he was told obscurely—were also inactive. Each time it was explained to Seamus that these mechanisms were “temporarily waiting repair.”

  Now on the Iona, most everything was messy, as the Lady Abbess constantly complained. The Tarans didn’t mind mess at all—not so long as they could take their three showers a day. In fact, the more mess the better: it was a sign work was being done. Sometimes when you were a little lazy, you’d make a mess just so your fellow pilgrims would think you were working, a technique at which Seamus O’Neill was, to tell the honest truth, extremely skillful. Yet all the machinery functioned, even if it wasn’t needed. A Taran took any nonworking machine—even if it was a tertiary backup mechanism that had never been used in the whole pilgrimage—as a personal insult, a challenge to his or her integrity and honor.