Star quest

don't mean to trample."
    She was shivering. He lifted her slight body and carried her to the bed with him.
    "The Seer," he said. "Hell, that's terrible. Terrible, not only for him, but for everyone who understands him."
    Her hands were caressing him. He forsook all conversation, pressed his lips to hers. Her small, pink tongue flicked inside his mouth. He squeezed her breast. And suddenly her claws came up, raked his side. He leaped off her. Blood was oozing thickly out of the long, fine scratches, staining his shirt.
    "What did you do that for!"
    "I'm still nothing more than an animal to you, Hero Tohm! You want to see what it would be like. You never say 'I love you'; you just start groping around. You want to see if there is anything good about me."
    "Bitch!" he snapped, massaging his tender side.
    "You want to know whether my tummy is furry."
    "Is it?" he wheezed, blood sticky on his fingers, his mind on fire.
    "You'll never know," she said, running for the door. "Never in a million years!" She slammed the door, leaving him alone in the darkness.
    For a long moment, he stood, clutching at the fire in his side, trying to diagnose the fire in his mind. But no answers would come. He treated the bodily fire by washing the shallow slashes. They were not deep, and the job required little time. He rinsed them with alcohol, salved them, and applied two hand-sized adhesive bandages.
    Washing the blood out of the sink, he felt even less real as the crimson patterns in the water grew fainter and fainter. Everything was beginning to seem like a dream—dozens of dreams and nightmares piled upon one another.
    He went to bed then, his eyes fixed to the ceiling, and tried to sleep. But sleep was a long time coming…

Chapter Eleven
    MAYNA WAS NOT around the next morning when Corgi, Babe, Fish and Hunk gathered to send him off. He looked for her constantly and hoped that she would come. But she did not
    "Now remember," Corgi said, his eyes a misty gamboge-flecked gray, "you only have twenty-four hours. Get back here with Tamilee, and you can come with us. Otherwise, I'm afraid you’ll be stuck here in this universe with the Romaghins and Setessins."
    "I'll try, Corgi," he said, shaking the preferred hands and tentacles.
    "Remember, you can go to the other hutches if you need either help or shelter," Hunk said.
    "Don't hesitate," Babe urged.
    T won't," he assured them. He stepped back into the tunnel from where he had first made his entrance seemingly years ago on the cushions of air. They closed the doors to the hutch. Taking the periscope scanner, he checked the alley above as they had taught him. He saw no one and, therefore, activated the blower that re-versed the air streams and lifted him gently but firmly up, up, up and through the grating which clanked back into place behind him and served as a landing zone when the winds abruptly ceased.
    He could hardly believe it. He was finally in the capital city, near the slave market, perhaps in time to buy back his Tarnilee. He tried to think of what she looked like. He couldn't get a clear picture.
    The day was going to be a beautiful one. The thin yellow clouds that would burn off before even the noonday sun appeared were the only things marring the otherwise perfect sky. The sun had just risen and had not yet heated the cool, pleasant air of night.
    He began walking, turned from the alley into the streets. The stores were open for business—ultra-modern, clerkless, giant chain stores, and the little, open front shops that always seem to flourish in a desert community no matter what its size and sophistication. At one place, homemade pretzels were for sale, salty and soft. He bought one with his miscellany money and munched on it as he walked. His insides were jumping with excitement and fear, but the most important thing was to seem calm externally, to appear as if he belonged there.
    He passed fruit shops where large baskets of berries of every chromatic dispersion lay in heaps. Some were similar to those he and Hunk had stolen from the hovercraft, but others were unlike any he had ever seen. He wished to taste them all, but he knew there were only twenty-four hours. He might need that time and more to find her. He walked on.
    In an open-air market where sides of animals lay in bloody pools, and cuts of steaks and roasts lay on chipped ice in unpainted bins, a Romaghin government inspector checked over the flesh, stamping it as the butcher slipped him (not so discreetly) a