Once again the back of his head was struck, very hard, and he could think no more.
Shadow:
Shadow learned day by day how to live with these new people, here on the slope of the crater wall.
One morning she brought a bundle of ginger leaves she had collected from the forest. She approached the group of women that was, as usual, centred on Silverneck. She sat next to Silverneck, offering the leaves.
A woman called Hairless — left almost totally bald in her upper body by over grooming — immediately grabbed all the leaves. She passed some to Silverneck and the others. When Shadow tried to get back some of her leaves, Hairless slapped her away.
So Shadow came up behind Hairless and began to groom her. Though Hairless flinched away at first, she submitted.
But now Hairless spotted the baby, clinging to Shadow’s neck. She reached out and plucked the baby off Shadow, as if picking a fruit off a branch. Shadow did not resist. Hairless poked her finger in the baby’s mouth and fingered his genitals. The baby squirmed, his huge head lolling.
While Hairless probed at her baby, Shadow stole back some leaves.
But Hairless developed a sudden disgust for the malformed infant. She thrust the child back at Shadow, jabbering.
Shadow retreated to the fringe of the group, chewing quietly on her prize.
Shadow was the lowest of the women here. She made her nests on the periphery of the group, and she kept as quiet as possible. Though she clung to Silverneck as much as she could, she was subject to abuse, violence, and theft of her food from men and women alike.
But this community was different from that of Termite and Big Boss. Here, sex was everything.
During some rough-and-tumble play between older infants, a chase and wrestle involved a boy taking the penis of another in his mouth. Soon the wrestling had dissolved into a bout of oral sex and other erotic games, after which the chasing began again.
One day two of the more powerful men came into conflict. One of them was Stripe, the dominant man, a tall, robust man with a stripe of grey hair down one side of his head. The other was One-eye, the shorter, more manic man who had taken it on himself to attack the pack of hyenas with a stick on the day Shadow had joined this new group. The fight, caused when One-eye didn’t respond submissively enough to an early-morning show of power by Stripe, escalated from yelling and hair-bristling to a show of shoving and punching. At last one firm kick from Stripe put One-eye on his back.
The smaller man got up, confronting Stripe again. Both men’s fur bristled, as if full of electricity — and both had erections. After another bout of shouting, they grew quieter, and One-eye, hesitantly, reached out and took Stripe’s erection, rubbing it gently. After a time Stripe’s bristling hair subsided, and he briskly cupped One-eye’s scrotum.
The contact was quickly over. Neither man reached an orgasm, but orgasms were usually not the point.
Sex was everything. Couplings between men and women, and the older children, were frequent, both belly-to-back and belly-to-belly. Infants became excited during couplings, jumping over the adults involved and sometimes pressing their own genitals against the adults’. But contact between members of the same sex was common too.
It was a lesson Shadow learned quickly. She learned how to avert a male fist by grasping a penis or scrotum, or taking it in her mouth, or allowing a brief copulation. She earned toleration by groups of women as they fed or groomed by rubbing breasts and genitals, or allowing herself to be touched in turn.
But still, things went badly for her, no matter how hard she worked. She was surrounded by hostility and disgust. The women would push her and her baby away, the men would hit her, and children would stare, wrinkle their noses at her and throw stones or sticks.
There was something wrong, with herself and her baby. The wrongness began to be embedded in her, so that she accepted it as part of her life.
That was why she submitted to the attentions of One-eye without resisting.
Many of the men, at one time or another, initiated sexual contact with Shadow. She was young, and, save for the lingering wrongness, healthy and attractive. But the contacts rarely led to ejaculation; the man, after being lost briefly in pleasure, would look at her, and his face would change, and he would push her away. After a time most of her contacts came from boys, eager to experiment with a mature woman, and men who for some reason were frustrated elsewhere; she learned to submit to their immature or angry fumblings, and the blows that came with them.
But One-eye was different. Of all the men. One-eye alone developed an obsession with Shadow.
At first his approaches to her were conventional. He would come to her with legs splayed and erection showing, sometimes shaking branches and leaves. She would submit, as she had learned to submit to any demand made of her, and he would take her into the shade of a tree.
But from the beginning his coupling was rough, leaving her breasts pinched and bitten, her thighs scratched and bruised.
After a time his demands became cruder. He would drop the formalities of the invitation and simply take her, wherever and whenever he felt like it — even if she was feeding, or suckling her child, or sleeping in her nest. He seemed to find her exciting and would quickly reach orgasm. But the speed of the couplings did not reduce their violence.
The other women rejected One-eye. If he approached them they would turn away, or run to the protection of the powerful women. His intent, manic strength repelled the women. And so he was forced to prey on the very old and young and weak, who were unable to defend themselves — them, and Shadow, for Shadow got no protection from the other women, not even Silverneck.
Bruised and bloodied, she submitted to his attentions, over and again, and the sex became harsher.
One day Shadow caught a glimpse of one reason why she continued to be shunned.
One-eye had used her particularly hard that day, and some old wounds had been opened by his roughness; she wanted to clear the dirt and blood from the injuries before they began to stink. Deep in the forest, high on the wall of the crater, she found a small, still pool. She leaned over the pool, reaching for the water.
A reflection peered back out at her.
She leapt back, jabbering in alarm. Her infant, feebly crawling in the leaves, fell on her belly and mewled.
Cautiously Shadow crept back to the pond. A face peered out at her, a face made grotesque with a bulbous nose and lumpy protrusions on its cheekbones and brow. The face was alarming and threatening — but of course it was her own face.
Screeching, she dug her fingernails into her face, the swellings there, and tried to rip it off, longing to throw it far away from her. But she succeeded only in making her face bleed, and great crimson drops splashed into the little pool that had betrayed her.
By now, Shadow had no memory of the infected stream from which she had drunk when she crossed the plain, and had no understanding of the fungus infection she had contracted.
She lay down in the leaves, thumb jammed in her mouth. Her child began to sneeze, loudly and liquidly.
Shadow uncurled. She rolled over and picked up her infant. She inspected the child’s dribbling nose, then she plucked some leaves and wiped away the snot and dirt. Then she took the softly weeping child to her breast.
Far away she heard a hooting. It was the cry of One-eye, seeking to use her body once more. She curled tighter around her child.
The infant’s cold grew steadily worse, developing into a fever that kept him awake during the night.
Shadow quickly grew exhausted, without energy enough even to feed herself, or keep herself properly clean. The swellings on her face now itched constantly. They hurt badly when struck. And they continued to grow, to the point where she could see the fleshy masses framing her eye sockets and cheekbones.
Even in the midst of all this, she was not spared One-eye’s voracious demands.
She never resisted him. But out of his sight she would place her sickly infant down carefully on a bed of leaves or a nest of branches. If the coupling permitted it, she would look across that way, and even reach out to touch or stroke the child.
Eventually One-eye noticed this.
It enraged him. He was already lying on top of her. He pinched her chin in his right hand, making her face him, and he punched her hard on the lumps in her brow, making her scream. Then he grabbed her ankles and pushed them back towards her head, and entered her savagely.
When he was done he pushed her away and began to beat her, aiming precise blows at her belly and kidneys. When she curled in on herself he grabbed her arms and pulled her open, making her lie unprotected on her back, and rammed his fist over and over into her solar plexus.
The world dissolved into fragments, red as blood, white as bone.
When she came to she could barely move. Her belly and back were a mass of pain, and one eye was covered with a film of drying blood.
Silverneck had taken her baby. The older woman cradled him on her lap, and was even allowing him to suck on her cracked, dry nipples.
With a groan, Shadow let the world fall away again.
After a time, she was aware of a looming shape before her. Her child was sleeping uneasily at her breast. She cringed, trying to curl tighter.
But a gentle hand touched her shoulder, and pushed her gently back. It was Silverneck. She was carrying a pepper. Its stem had been pulled out, and it was full of water. Shadow drank greedily. But her lips were cracked and swollen, and she felt the water dribble down her chin.
It was dark before she found the strength to clamber a little way up into a tree, and construct a rough nest.
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant was bent double. His arms were pinned behind his back. Something was jolting him, over and over. His head felt like it would explode. It was like the feeling you got after a few days on orbit, when your body fluid balance hadn’t yet adjusted to microgravity, and blood pooled in your head.
But when he forced his eyes open — the light stabbed bright, making him squint he saw, in glimpsed shards, a ground of rust-red dust, powerful bare legs pumping.
Not on orbit, it appears, Malenfant. He was being carried over somebody’s shoulder, in a fireman’s lift. But his head was upside down, and with every step his cheek crashed into the back of his carrier.
He threw up. It was a spasm of gut and throat; suddenly hot yellow-green fluid was spilling down the naked back before his eyes.
There was a loud hoot of protest. With a shrug he was thrown off the shoulder, as if he were as light as a feather, with a good two yards to fall to the ground.
The fall seemed long, slow-motion. He couldn’t raise his bound arms to protect himself. He landed head-first.
When he came to again his head ached even worse than before. He was lying on his side. All he could see was red dust, and a pair of grimy buckskin boots. His legs were free. But his arms, still pinned behind his back, felt like they were half-wrenched out of their sockets.
A buckskin boot dug into his stomach to tip him over, none too gently. He finished up on his back, as helpless as a landed fish. It felt as if his neck was in his own warm vomit.
Faces loomed over him. One pushed closer. It was a bearded man, aged perhaps forty; his face was round, greasy, suspicious.
Malenfant tried to speak. “Let me up,” he gasped.
