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her, naked, Khorana groaned dully as the Jarp slammed
against her buttocks in the last throes of its ecstacy. It pressed
in hard, and the table actually slid a few sems along the floor.
Then it sighed, relaxed, and pulled out of her.
The relief hardly registered. She felt the flow from her
sodomized body and wondered if it were partly blood. The
pain told her it must be. She didn't care.
It wasn't as bad as the pain that had come before.
Jarps as a rule had smaller sexual organs than Galactics,
because their bodies encompassed both male and female sets
and there was only so much room. Hummer, however, was a
big Jarp in all ways.
Still it wasn't as bad as that other pain. When he had
thrust that thing into her. That ... tingler.
It was something else she'd heard of. A device for
recalcitrant slaves. Or slaves who were to provide the
entertainment of suffering for their masters. A tingler had ten
graduated settings. The tenth produced pain almost beyond
the capacity of the mind to register. To Khorana it felt as if a
thousand razor-blades were trying to cut their way out of her
body at once. White-hot razor blades. Twisting.
In a way it had been merciful. It had blanked her mind
when she had badly needed it blanked. Her mind was
functional again now, and she realized that she no longer
cared what happened to her. The tingler did no permanent
damage, but she knew such damage would come soon. She
hadn't cared since the moment Hummer had killed her baby....
She had talked before that, too. Told it what it wanted
to know. Told the Jarp who had been sheltered there, where
they had gone (to stay with the captain who had hired them
for the Race). Gave their names, their descrips, their plans.
Their captain's name. She had to. The Jarp had used that thing,
that tingler, on her child. She had talked, as fast as she could.
She and Modan
112 JOHN CLEVE
Modan. The Jarp had raped him, too. Not as a male rapes a
male. The Jarp sought satisfaction for both its sexes. It had
held Modan down, straddled him, forced him into itself.
Worked itself up and down, powerfully, brutally. Fondled him.
Held him. Squeezed him at last, with those huge six- fingered
hands. And squeezed and squeezed. . . .
Was Modan dead? Would it kill them all?
Of course it will. It had killed the baby, the baby, right in his
floater crib. They were witnesses. They could warn the
fugitives. It would kill them. She didn't care. Not with the child
gone. Now was only a dullness, almost a numbness.
It had killed the infant mercifully fast, for some reason. It
would not do so with his parents.
She grunted in reflex as those big hands unstrapped her and
turned her face upright on the table. Through unfocusable
eyes she saw orange fingers holding what looked like a knife,
moving past her face, down. .
A vibro-knife.
Khorana didn't care.
But oh, Booda the pain.. .
10
And say my glory was I had such friends.
 William Butler Yeats
The dagger thunked as its blade sank into the wood of the
ocher-leafed japyrain tree, then quivered subsonically. Its
blurred outline became swiftly clearer. The vibration ceased.
Whitey strode over and pulled it from the wood. Another chip
of bark fell to join the heap on the ground.
As he turned he saw Pransa watching him. She had evidently
just emerged from the Hotel Koba Central's rear door and was
walking across the empty lot toward him.
The day was hot. Arkimedes blazed bluely above. Whitey
wiped sweat from his head with his right sleeve. The dagger
flashed ice-blue in the light of the hot blue sun.
"Practicing again?" Pransa said as she neared him.
"Every day, Pransa," he said. "It's a skill I should keep up. I've
neglected it of late."
"Not the last few days you haven't. Really, how often does
knife-throwing come in handy?"
He shrugged. "Rarely. It's part of the training. I should be
practicing my fighting skills, actually. For that I need a
partner."
"Could I help? You'd have to teach me. Don't know how good
I'd be, but at least I could give you a workout.
113
114 JOHN CLEVE
"That would be good! Thank you, Pransa. We can
practice onboard during the Race."
She put her head on one side, her hair azure-
highlighted under this sun.
"Won't we be awfully busy?" she asked.
"At times. The Race is like any other space flit. Takes
weeks. Most of that is dead time, waiting time, in conversion.
Flitting through space, twiddling your thumbs." "Must be
especially hard on Jarps! So. We can pass the time at knife
practice. Doing what we always have."
"Grunt?"
"Slicing."
"Oh. Terrible," he said, grimacing.
"Making love, then." She smiled softly. "Slicing is what
other people do. Less fortunate people." She put her arms
around his neck. Leaning forward, she kissed him lightly. He
responded and it had begun to be something more than light
when ...
"Mm," she said, breaking away. "Speaking of terrible,
what's that racket?"
"Sounds like yelling. Neg; laughing. Loud. Coming from
that window--"
"That's our mod, I mean Kalahari's," Pransa said. "She
having a party?"
"Somebody's up there," Whitey said tightly. "Doesn't
seem advisable, with our two fugitives inside. Can you cherm
anything?"
Like any Aglayan woman's, Pransa's ability to cherm [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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