She was faster than any cat. She had doubled and redoubled a length of vine into a heavy cord. She slashed him across the eyes with it. He instinctively fell back and in that instant she was gone out of the firelight and into the forest. Her mocking laugh floated back to him.

«Goodbye, Blade master. One think I know — they breed fools in your strange world.»

He rubbed the welt over his eyes and cursed her briefly, then began to laugh at himself. She was right. He was a fool. She had conned him but good. It was what he got for underestimating her. The Jedd brain, it would appear, was as good as his own, if not so sophisticated.

At that moment there sounded, from far off in the depths of that immensity of forest, a high-pitched shriek, an animalistic gibber, that curdled Blade's blood and prickled the hairs on his body. The awful sound was like nothing he had ever heard before, not even on Lord Leighton's tapes. There was terror and triumph in it and blood and death and the surging vibrato of life. Blade crouched by his fires and stared in the direction whence the sound came. Miles away. No direct threat to him. He smiled then, a covert smile and sly, and prepared for sleep. They would see.

He pretended sleep, his weapons close to his hand. And listened. Half an hour passed. An hour. Then a faint sound in the undergrowth. He grinned.

«B-la-de master?» An echoing sigh on the breeze. Perhaps only a trick of the breeze and he was hearing what he expected, and wanted, to hear.

But it came again. «Blade master. I am sorry. Ooma is sorry. I wish to come back to the fires.»

Blade turned over and yawned loudly. «Come back? Why? I thought you liked it out there in the forest all alone.»

«I do not like it.»

He patted a yawn to conceal a smile. «But I thought you were afraid of me?»

Silence. Then—"I am. But I am more afraid out here by myself. Let me return. I–I will let you do anything you wish. To me.»

Blade pillowed his head on his arms and emitted a mock snore. «I do not wish to do anything to you, Ooma. Not now. I have found that we are not friends and I cannot trust you. Goodnight.»

Long silence. He could hear her moving in the thick bushes.

«I beg you, Blade master. I beg. I am cold and frightened. I want to come by the fires.»

«Then come,» he snapped, «but do not bother me. I wish to sleep.»

Feigning sleep, he watched her through slitted eyes. She came slowly out of the forest and crouched by the largest of the fires. As she warmed herself she watched him intently. Blade made no sign or sound. She began to search her sleek young body, carefully removing burrs and bits of twig and matted leaf. She smoothed and rubbed her body with her hands, cleaning it as thoroughly as possible. Blade felt his loins begin a renewed stirring. Could it be?

Ooma went to the pile of wood Blade had collected and began to search through it. He was about to warn her against using up too much wood, but kept his silence. She was not tending the fires. He watched with growing interest as she broke off a branch into a short length, stripped it of tendrils and began to use it as a comb. Squatting on her heels and casting an occasional glance in his direction, Ooma began to pull the makeshift comb again and again through her tangled dark hair with a coarse rasping sound. She grimaced and shook her head as the rude comb encountered an especially hopeless tangle.

By now Blade was in an acute state of readiness and had the control not to do anything about it. He thought he now understood what was going to happen. Let her come to him.

Ooma left off combing and began to squeeze and caress her plump little breasts. When her nipples were erect she wet a finger in her mouth and moistened them again and again until they glowed dark pink in the dim firelight. She then combed out her pubic hair with her fingers, very carefully, and toyed briefly with herself there. Then she came toward Blade. He still feigned sleep, but a sardonic part of his mind was putting himself in the place of Lord L, when that old man made his notes: Jedd females indulge in extensive foreplay to ready themselves for coitus. At times this foreplay is carried so far as nearly to constitute autoeroticism. Yes, his Lordship would put it all down in his tight, sparse handwriting, with no hint of lubricity. He was an old man. He was also a scientist.

Blade was neither.

Ooma nestled close to him from behind, slipping in until their bodies, his huge one and her small one, fitted like two spoons. He felt her breasts velvety and firm against his back, the nipples rigid and like warm little needles boring into his flesh. She breathed in his ear.

«Blade master? Do you sleep, Blade master?»

He grunted. «I do not sleep. As you well know. How could I sleep at a time like this? But I do not understand — you have changed your mind about many things, it would appear. Why is this, Ooma?»

She laughed softly and sank her fine small teeth gently into his ear. «I have been thinking. All the time I was frightened out there in the forest I was thinking. You were right and I was wrong. We will be friends and I will trust you.»

«And,» said Blade with some malice, «there was that cry. That sound in the forest. Or perhaps you did not hear it, Ooma?»

He felt a tremor run through the body pressed so close to his. «I heard it, Blade master. It was the cry of the Api. They hunt at night and it is rare for them to come this far from their own land, but when food is scarce they will. But I would not speak of the Api. They are far away and no danger to us tonight. Tonight, at this moment, it is something else that I want.»

Her hand came slyly around and found him and he heard her gasp. «Blade master! You are a giant there. There is none in Jedd, no Jedd male, who has anything like this.» Ooma gave this a tug and a rapid manipulation. Blade stifled a groan of pleasure. Already he was having difficulty with his breathing, his heart was trying to pound out of his chest, and he fought back the urge to consummate then and there. Go warily. He did not, in possessing her body, want to lose her allegiance and friendship. What was now transpiring, about to happen, was sheer, brute sex, animal lust on both their parts. It would die as the fires would die, leaving ashes, and there would still be tomorrow to face. He needed Ooma. For far more than sexual relief.

Ooma had none of Blade's reservations. The more she caressed him the more her ardor grew. Her voice went high-pitched and her breath sobbed and whistled in her throat. She licked his body with her moist tongue and murmured words he did not understand. She stroked his swollen testicles with her fingers, performed a brief, but avid, fellatio, and then dug her hands into his hair and pulled him down atop her. She guided him into the sleek, wet, tight and rough-walled grotto. Blade was huge and Ooma small and the fricative sum was an unbearable agony of pleasure. It seemed to Blade, trying to prolong the blissful pain, that Ooma spent incessantly without ever losing her grip on him. Her muscular control was beyond anything he had ever experienced; she squeezed him and milked him and, when he could struggle no longer, she took the final gush of his sperm with a high-ringing cry of pleasure that skewered the forest night.

Blade lay on top of her, sweating and panting, still twitching and mindless, fighting his way back from the little death. It had been sex such as few men were privileged to know — barbaric and primitive sex with a unity, a wholeness, a lack of inhibition that even Richard Blade did not often come by. He was grateful. He was also wrung out, depleted, wasted and weary. His massive body was a cocoon nurturing an ennui and death-longing beyond all measure or telling. The past was blotted out, the present did not exist, the future would never be. The great lie of living was over. He could rest now. Sleep now — rest now — die now—