Those Who Watch

Still, she remained aloof. She continued to sleep in the other room. When she bathed him or dressed his broken leg, the sight of his nude body clearly disturbed her. Vorneen expertly diagnosed her sexual dilemma, though his insight was purely intuitive, and not related to any pattern he had ever known among Dirnans. She desired him, and yet she was afraid of him — afraid of her own desire for him. So she kept away.

The first time, when he had suggested she get into bed with him, he had been in real pain, still battered and bruised from his landing, still shocked and dazed over the almost certain death of Glair and the possible death of Mirtin. He had wanted warmth. He had wanted closeness. Well, she had refused that; but she had held his hand, and that was good enough.

After that, though, he had wished for something more than that. He wanted her close enough so that he could work his wiles of seduction on her. But that, naturally, she would not countenance.

He wished he knew more about local sexual beliefs. He had studied Earthman tribal taboos during his indoctrination sessions, of course; and during his ten years of observing these people from the sky, he had come to know a bit about their thinking on the subject. But there were gaps, and just now they were turning out to be distressingly large gaps.

Her mate was dead. Her husband; they had only one mate at a time, always of the opposite sex, in a socially accepted sexual group here. She was a “widow’. Were widows required by custom to remain chaste for a certain mourning period? If so, how long? Her husband had died a year ago.

There was a child in the house. Was sexual intercourse prohibited within a certain distance of a child? Was it necessary to send the child away, or to go themselves to some permissible place to perform the act?

What about religious rites? Did they invariably precede any physical consummation?

Vorneen did not know the answers. Privately, he suspected that Kathryn was free to give herself to him any time she pleased, and that she could not bring herself to do it.

Certainly she was modest. Her attitude toward his own nakedness was complex, for he had learned that she once had belonged to a social caste — nurses — in which young women were allowed to view and handle ailing males without inhibition. So her half-veiled reactions to his body sprang from some conflict of desires within her, not from any violation of tribal taboo.

She kept her own body concealed from him. In the many days he had lived here, Vorneen had seen Kathryn’s nakedness once, and that only by accident. It had happened after di

Vorneen did not object to that. The criteria by which Glair had designed her body did not happen to be his criteria for feminine beauty; Earthfolk were so alien in form to him that he had no such criteria at all. To him Kathryn was just as beautiful as Glair. More so, perhaps, since Kathryn was authentic, Glair only a sleek replica.

He wished Kathryn would be less prudish about her body.

He wished she would step into his room one night, in-candescently nude, and give herself to him.

It happened, of course. But it happened without pla

His broken leg was knitting rapidly, and he felt the time had come to test its strength. He had lolled in bed long enough. Since his suit’s communicator had been shattered in his landing impact, he had to get up and around if he hoped ever to be picked up by a rescue team, and it seemed to him that his leg might already be able to support his weight. One night after Kathryn had gone to sleep he pushed the coverlets back and swung both legs over the side of the bed.

An instant of vertigo swept through him. This was the first time that he had tried to come to a true sitting position in bed. He gasped and clung to the edge of the mattress for a moment while bis body adjusted itself.

Then, delicately, he placed the soles of his feet against the floor.

Vorneen sat quite still. He pictured the broken leg buckling and snapping the moment he exerted pressure on it. His entire outer body might be artificial, but it was linked neurally to his i

No.

He moved his center of gravity forward, clung to the table beside the bed, and pulled himself to his feet. Gently, gently, gently---How was the leg? Supporting him? Yes!

A moment later a wave of dizziness convulsed him like the power of a winter storm.

His body seemed to be falling apart, each limb dropping away from the core. Vorneen cried out and took a wild plunging step with his good leg, then a half-hearted sliding step with the injured one, and finished the maneuver standing in the middle of the room, quivering violently and grasping the back of a handy chair for support. He thought the floor would open wide and engulf him. He could not see for dizziness. He shifted all his weight to the good leg, so that it fired angry protests to his neural center at being imposed upon in this fashion after such long inactivity. His broken leg was whole again, but he had not allowed for the weakness of his muscles, the chaos in his nervous system, that had come upon him from so many days in bed. Momentarily bewildered, he could not even summon the presence of mind to begin shutting down ganglia.

“What are you doing?”

Kathryn stood in the doorway. She wore a flimsy thigh-length nightgown that concealed nothing of her body, and her face was a study in outrage. Vorneen fought to focus his consciousness.

“My leg— testing it—”

She rushed to him. He was frozen where he stood, seven feet from the bed, unable to go back, unable to go forward, and rapidly losing the strength even to remain standing. Her arms were about him, steadying him. Relief flooded his system. She clutched him fiercely, and in the same instant he lost his grip on the chair and began to fall. Somehow Kathryn absorbed the full thrust of his and held him up just long enough for them to stumble three steps together and topple onto the bed.

Together.

He was nude, and she wore only a millimeter’s thickness of fabric. They landed in a confused heap, laughing and panting, Kathryn on top of him, and more by accident than anything else their lips touched, and suddenly, as if he had opened some immediate sensory conduit between their bodies, he felt the fire blazing within her and knew that she was his.

How did one make love to an Earthwoman? Where were the places of excitement?

Vorneen frantically summoned what he could recall of his theory.

It was no use; veteran of a thousand affairs though he was, he was baffled and flustered by this unexpected encounter. His hands surged across her. But where? Elbows, breasts, shoulders, knees, buttocks? He discovered it did not matter. Kathryn was aroused. She ripped her gown away. Her flesh was like flame against him. His body was responding, which solved one question that had perturbed him.