him. Here was life and death in its grim reality, and Pietor felt almost nothing.
Still, it was interesting to him because it was something new.
*
Marina moves her arms behind her back, unbuttons her dress and lets it fall to the ground. Pietor watches as each inch of skin is exposed, slowly, the skein of cloth drifting downward in the low gravity. As she stretches her arms up in the air, her fingers reach for the tops of the trees, and her muscles flex, her body arching, lithe, beautiful, feline. Pietor’s gaze goes to her nearly flat chest, her breasts just beginning to develop, her nipples, then down between her legs and to her feet. Her toes curl into the ground.
“This is your discovery,” she says.
He wants to ask her to touch him, to kiss him again, but something keeps him from doing it. He doesn’t understand it, the feeling of wanting her nor the feeling of not wanting her. And then white hair begins to sprout along the sides of her neck, then around her nipples, between her legs, along the tops of her feet. Her toes curl into claws and her nose elongates. She pokes her tongue out between her teeth as her upper canines plunge lower, pointy and brilliant white.
When the transformation is complete, the lithe white cat settles down onto all fours and extends her nose toward Pietor, tongue still out, sensing, tasting the air.
“You’re beautiful,” Pietor says. There is no fear, no sense of danger. He feels only adoration, awe, maybe even love.
Marina lowers her body to the ground and puts her head on her front paws. Her body erupts into a purr, a soft shaking that grows until it massages Pietor’s body with its relaxing rumble.
“Thank you,” she says. The feline form doesn’t alter her ability to speak, nor to send shivers through Pietor’s body with a glance.
“Not as tall as the others,” Pietor says.
“I’m not yet full grown.”
“And when you are?”
“I’ll be a great hunter,” she says.
“And when I’m full grown?”
“You’re the first of your kind.”
“What?”
“You’re not like the others, Pietor,” she says. “I’ve told you that. You’re born of Mohave, and you are an integral part of it. Everything born here is.”
“And what of the other people?” he says.
“We do want you here. All of you. You’ll tell the others at the colony about the lake and they will send to Earth for creatures to stock it. There will be fish in this water, and people will eat the fish. And we will eat the fish, too. And maybe the people as your civilization grows. You’ll help me, won’t you Pietor?”
“You want to eat us?” Pietor says.
“Not you, silly,” Marina says. She stands, so quickly Pietor could not have moved away if he had wanted to, then brushes a claw lightly across his temple. “You are my brother. I’d never hurt you.”
“Your brother?”
“Of course. We were born together, at the same time, of the same world. You breathe the same dreams in your mind that I breathe. That makes us siblings, as in tune with each other as twins born of the same mother.”
Pietor knows this is true, knows that his own feelings of longing for Marina are deeper than just a simple attraction of the flesh. There is mystery certainly, but more than that there is familiarity.
“I’ve known you my whole life,” Pietor says.
“You know everything about this place,” she says. “As it knows everything about you. Help me.”
Pietor knows, as he knows everything in his dreams, that there is no way he could ever refuse Marina. And he doesn’t want to refuse her because she is everything he thinks of as good in the world. She is more than just his sister. She is the other half of Pietor himself, the half who belongs only to the planet Mohave, not at all to the planet Earth. He fits with her.
“I will,” Pietor says. “But not everyone will know you as I do. Others will come to kill you.”
“Let them come,” Marina says. “The hunt is so much more enjoyable if there is a fight.”
“You’ll eat everyone?”
“No. Other children will be born to your people. And with them, others will be born to ours. Someday we’ll all be a family. Everyone else will be selected out. You call it evolution, but we select for the survival of the planet. Not all creatures are good for the planet.”
She stands on all fours, then arches her back, a shiver moving from tail to nose. Then she moves toward Pietor, rubs her body slowly along his arm, then goes around his back and around again. She moves in close toward the back of his head, and Pietor wonders once more if she will rip open the back of his skull and suck out his brains. He feels her breath, hot and strong on his neck, then his ear.
“As it is in dreams, so it shall be in life,” she says. Her tongue darts out to lick Pietor’s ear briefly, then she is gone into the trees.
Pietor scratches at the fine brown hairs pushing out of the skin of his groin, then lays down to bask in the warm rays of the sun.
*
The colony’s canary-yellow lander drops through the hole in the canopy and circles the smoldering wreckage of the Allen family buggy a few times, then sets down at the edge of the burned forest. Pietor sits cross-legged on a patch of burned underbrush, his eyes tracking the noisy craft as it crunches charred branches and plants beneath its weight.
The doors to the lander open and several armed men step out, cautiously walking toward Pietor. They reach the bodies of his mother and father and stand, looking toward him. Pietor knows the kinds of questions they will ask, and he knows how he has to answer if he doesn’t want the forest burnt to the ground. There will be time afterward to show them the lake, ripe for fish. Then, someday, the forest will grow its own biosphere, and it will expand to change the world. And people will be just one part of that grand system.
Pietor buttons his shirt up to cover the brown hair which has sprouted on his chest overnight. He walks toward the armed men. They relax a little when they see he appears unhurt.
“I have some things to show you,” Pietor says.
Now he wakes.
Stairway to the Stars
By Larry Shaw
Yes, Earth may be a sort of fenced-off area, so far as other intelligent races of the galaxy are concerned. But not for the grandiose reasons that some have imagined....
It was a stairway leading down, but it also led out into space—indirectly. And the situation had the aspects of a burlesque on Grand Hotel, but....
John Andrew Farmer scowled at the octopus
