"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 01 - Of Alien Bondage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

slide off the branch and swung delightedly in with a flapping of wraithy wings
to pick up speed. The fringebird swept in among thickly clustered trees with
leaves of chartreuse and turquoise, puce and yellow. Dangling nonchalantly by
his three-fingered tail, a vaguely anthropomorphous swinger watched the
passage, in beauty, of the fringebird. Then he twisted his yellow-furred head
to chuckle at the other swinger, a couple of branches below. Nestled among
extravagant scarlet blossoms nearly as big as she was, she simpered and
twisted. She bent to show him the heart shape of her vulva. It was a brilliant
white badge amid bright yellow fur. The swinger ceased chuckling. He raised
the ridges above his eyes and grunted. Then he swung swiftly down to the
female. A few trees away, an orange-maned feline lay. Its four-inch claws were
retracted and its fangs showed only because it snored. It lay snoozing noisily
beside its mate of the moment. It too was weary after the violence of then
lovemaking. There would be more. At the edge of the rain forest a heavy-laden
phrillia bush bowed. It snapped aside, losing one enormous blue blossom that
would have shamed a giant orchid. A pearly gray antelope sprang from the bush
to bound in ten-foot leaps across the veldt. Its bluish tail was 13 high;
beneath it showed a patch of scarlet. Just behind her, curveting amid the
thick blades of the grass, followed a slightly larger member of the species.
It was superbly antlered. The two animals fled across the savannah in a series
of slow-motion bounces-until the female spotted the two-legs. She veered
sharply. So did her pursuing swain, as though attached to her by some
invisible pheromonal thread. Both were lost from sight in the flicker of a
coquettish eyelash. Afar, thunder rumbled. The only clouds in evidence were
big, straggly puffs of white afloat on a sky almost coppery. One of the humans
laughed. She did not even glance toward the sound of thunder. "The fringebird
. . . the swingers . . . the leapfoots! We are all alike today," she said. Her
eyes were pale and gray and her mouth was smiling in delight with the animals,
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with herself, with the early summer. Almost spring had been skipped over, this
year. The Rites must have been potent indeed! Praise the Tribe-mother and her
Mother, the sun! The young man pretended to sulk. Perhaps it was not all
pretense, at that. "Fringebird and leapfoot and sillyswingers do not have to
go and confer with mother and Tribemother," he complained. He was a
magnificent young Apollo, almost heavily muscled and almost unclothed in a
very short tunic that bared one side of his chest and that arm. His long hair
was a pale yellow against his faint tan. Their planet's sun was not all that
bright, and too there was the shimmery cloud layer. Else they'd have been more
richly pigmented. A heavy atmosphere with a unique permanent inversion almost
at the tropospheric level served to trap warmth and water vapor. It enabled-or
forced-them to live in a tropical climate without fear of sunburn, without
racial traits to turn sun and release heat. Their genetic heredity instead
equipped them to cope with high and constant humidity, and with Aglaya's
strong gravitational tug. Short, 14 both of them. Hardly sylphlike. Calf
muscles like fists under the skin. Thighs visibly hard under taut skin, with
overdeveloped muscle down the front; the pusher-lifter worked hard, on
Aglaya. "Formalities, Tarkij," she said. Formal names were seldom used and