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mouth and little blue eyes. It was the worm.
At first, he thought Martia was dead. The thing was not coiled in her mouth. Its body disappeared into her throat. Then he saw her chest was rising easily and that she seemed to be in no difficulty. Forcing himself to come close to the worm, though his stomach muscles writhed and his neck muscles
quivered, he put his hand close to its lips. Warm air touched his fingers, and he heard a faint whistling. Martia was breathing through it! Hoarsely, he said, “God!” and he shook her shoulder. He did not want to touch the worm because he
was afraid that it might do something to injure her. In that moment of shock he had forgotten that he had an advantage over her, which he should use. Martia’s lids opened; her large gray-blue eyes stared blankly. “Take it easy,” he said soothingly. She shuddered. Her lids closed, her neck arched back, and her face contorted. He could not tell if the grimace was caused by pain or something else. “What is this—this monster?” he said. “Symbiote? Parasite?” He thought of vampires, of worms creeping into one’s sleeping body and there sucking blood. Suddenly, she sat up and held out her arms to him. He seized her hands, saying, “What is it?” Martia pulled him toward her, at the same time lifting her face to his.
Out of her open mouth shot the worm, its head pointed toward his face, its little lips formed into an O. It was reflex, the reflex of fear that made Lane drop her hands and spring back. He had not wanted to do that, but he could not help himself.
Abruptly, Martia came wide awake. The worm flopped its full length from her mouth and fell into a heap between her legs. There it thrashed for a moment before coiling itself like a snake, its head resting on Martia’s thigh, its eyes turned upward to Lane. There was no doubt about it. Martia looked disappointed, frustrated.
He sat behind her, for he did not want to be where the worm could touch him.
Martia made motions for him to go back to his bed and they would all sleep. Evidently, he thought, she found nothing alarming in the incident.
But he knew he could not rest until he had some kind of explanation. He handed her paper and pen from the bedside table and then gestured fiercely. Martia shrugged and began sketching while Lane watched over her shoulder. By the time she had used up five sheets of paper, she had communicated her message.
His eyes were wide, and he was even paler.
So—Martia was a female. Female at least in the sense that she carried eggs—and, at times, young—within her.
And there was the so-called worm. So called? What could he call it? It could not be designated under one category. It was many things in one. It was a larva. It was a phallus. It was also her offspring, of her flesh and blood.
But not of her genes. It was not descended from her.
She had given birth to it, yet she was not its mother. She was neither one of its mothers.
The dizziness and confusion he felt was not caused altogether by his sickness. Things were coming too fast. He was thinking furiously, trying to get this new information clear, but his thoughts kept going bacik and forth, getting nowhere.
“There’s no reason to get upset,” he told himself. “After all, the splitting of animals into two sexes is only one of the ways of reproduction tried on Earth. On Martia’s planet Nature—God— has fashioned another method for the higher animals. And only He knows how many other designs for reproduction He has fashioned on how many other worlds.”
Nevertheless, he was upset.
This worm, no, this larva, this embryo outside its egg and its secondary mother… well, call it, once and for all, larva, because it did metamorphose later.
This particular larva was doomed to stay in its present form until it died of old age.
Unless Martia found another adult of the Eeltau.
And unless she and this other adult felt affection for each other.
Then, according to the sketch she’d drawn, Martia and her friend, or lover, would lie down or sit together. They would, as lovers do on Earth, speak to each other in endearing, flattering, and exciting terms. They would caress and kiss much as Terrestrial man and woman do, though on Earth it was not considered complimentary to call one’s lover Big Mouth.
Then, unlike the Terran custom, a third would enter the union to form a highly desired and indeed indispensable and eternal triangle. The larva, blindly, brainlessly obeying its instincts, aroused by mutual fondling by the two, would descend tail first into the throat of one of the two Eeltau. Inside the body of the lover a fleshy valve would open to admit the slim body of the larva. Its open tip would touch the ovary of the host. The larva, like an electric eel, would release a tiny current. The hostess would go into an ecstasy, its nerves stimulate electrochemically. The ovary would release an egg no larger than a pencil dot. It would disappear into the open tip of the larva’s tail, there to begin a journey up a canal toward the center of its body, urged on by the contraction of muscle and whipping of cilia.
When the process was successful, the two eggs moved toward each other but did not quite meet.
Not yet.
There must be other eggs collected in the dark incubator of the larva, collected by pairs, though not necessarily from the same couple of donors.
These would number anywhere from twenty to forty pairs.
Then, one day, the mysterious chemistry of the cells would tell the larva’s body that it had gathered enough eggs.
A hormone was released, the metamorphosis begun. The larva swelled enormously, and the mother, seeing this, placed it tenderly in a warm place and fed it plenty of predigested food and sugar water.
Before the eyes of its mother, the larva then grew shorter and wider. Its tail contracted; its cartilaginous vertebrae, widely separated in its larval stage, shifted closer to each other and hardened, a skeleton formed, ribs, shoulders. Legs and arms budded and grew and took humanoid shape. Six months passed, and there lay in its crib something resembling a baby of Homo sapiens.
From then until its fourteenth year, the Eeltau grew and developed much as its Terran counterpart.
Adulthood, however, initiated more strange changes. Hor-‘tnone released hormone until the first pair of gametes, dormant these fourteen years, moved together.
The two fused, the chromatin of one uniting with the chro-matin of the other. Out of the two—a single creature, wormlike, four inches long, was released into the stomach of its hostess.
Then, nausea. Vomiting. And so, comparatively painlessly, the bringing forth of a genetically new being.
It was this worm that would be both fetus and phallus and would give ecstasy and draw into its own body the eggs of loving adults and would metamorphose and become infant, child, and adult.
And so on and so on.
He rose and shakily walked to his own bed. There he sat down, his head bowed, while he muttered to himself.
“Let’s see now. Martia gave birth to, brought forth, or up, this larva. But the larva actually doesn’t have any of Martia’s genes. Martia was just the hostess for it.
“However, if Martia has a lover, she will, by means of this worm, pass on her heritable qualities. This worm will become an adult and bring forth, or up, Martia’s child.”
“How do the Eeltau reckon ancestry? How keep track of their relatives? Or do they care? Wouldn’t it be easier to consider your foster mother, your hostess, your real mother? As, in the sense of having borne you, she is?
“And what kind of sexual code do these people have? It can’t, I would think, be much like ours. Nor is there any reason why it should be.