Manta 3 - Ox by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: English Fiction, Fantasy, General, Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780380004614
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1976-07-31T05:00:00+00:00

She yielded, knowing he was right. "Then love me now, right now," she said, moving into his arms.

"What we defer today may never come tomorrow..."

Even the natives knew it was ending. Veg cut and hauled huge amounts of fog to make a new wall Ox by Piers Anthony

for their cattle, and Tamme took the children for walks through the forest, protecting them from the wild predators that lurked there. It was perhaps the only taste of woman's work she would ever experience.

On the day that Tamme decided, using cynical agent judgment, that she had regained ninety-five per cent of capacity, the hosts invited the neighbors for a party. They ate fog delicacies and sang nasal foghorn songs and played with the hexaflexagons Veg made, and in its simple fashion it was a lot of fun.

In the evening she and Veg walked out, holding hands like young lovers. "One thing nags me," he said. "Tamme Two could have killed you, couldn't she? After you fell down, and she put the knife in you, she just turned away. I wasn't sure which of you had won. But she could tell us apart—I guess it was by our reactions, and I still had the burn marks of the rope on me—and she looked at me, for all the world just like you, but sharper somehow—even before the fight, you had gentled some—and she said I was the enemy. I guess she was going to kill me, and she sure as hell had little conscience about it, but my double wouldn't let her." He paused, smiling reminiscently. "I sort of like that guy, you know! He has guts and conscience. He told me during the fight that he had to stay with his own, but he wished Tamme Two was more like you and hoped she'd get that way. So it wasn't just the knife in your head that changed you; you were getting there on your own.

"So they projected out, and I went down to find you. I thought sure you were dead. But you'd hung up on a crossbar with that knife in your hand. I guess you'd yanked it out somehow. You were hardly even bleeding."

"Agents are tough," she said. "I shut off the blood and went into what we call repair-shock. I don't remember it; the process is automatic. Actually, the damage was too extensive; I would not have survived without help."

"Yeah. I carried you up and projected us here, and the folks understood. They were great! But why didn't Tamme Two come down and finish you off for sure?"

"She should have. I think, at the end, it must have bothered her to kill herself—even her alternate self. I know I had little stomach for it. So she pulled her shot, just a little, and left it to nature. Perhaps she is further along the way to becoming normal—like me—than we supposed. The odds were still against my survival."

"I guess they were! If the fog people hadn't taken us in

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