The Uplift Trilogy - 03 - The Uplift War by David Brin

Author:David Brin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780553279719
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1987-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

54

Fiben

“Hold still now,” Fiben told Gailet as he combed his fingers through her fur.

He needn’t have said anything. For although Gailet was turned away, presenting her back to him, he knew her face bore a momentary expression of beatific joy as he groomed her. When she looked like that—calm, relaxed, happy with the delight of a simple, tactile pleasure—her normally stern countenance took on a glow, one that utterly transformed her somewhat ordinary features.

It was only for a minute, unfortunately. A tiny, scurrying movement caught Fiben’s eye, and he pounced after it on instinct before it could vanish into her fine hair.

“Ow!” she cried when his fingernails bit a corner of skin, as well as a small squirming louse. Her chains rattled as she slapped his foot. “What are you doing!”

“Eating,” he muttered as he cracked the wriggling thing between his teeth. Even then, it didn’t quite stop struggling.

“You’re lying,” she said, in an unconvincing tone of voice.

“Shall I show it to you?”

She shuddered. “Never mind. Just go on with what you were doing.”

He spat out the dead louse, though for all their captors had been feeding them, he probably could use the protein. In all the thousands of times he had engaged in mutual grooming with other chims—friends, classmates, the Throop Family back on Cilmar Island—he had never before been so clearly reminded of one of the ritual’s original purposes, inherited from the jungle of long ago—that of ridding another chim of parasites. He hoped Gailet wouldn’t be too squeamish about doing the same for him. After sleeping on straw ticks for more than two weeks, he was starting to itch something awful.

His arms hurt. He had to stretch to reach Gailet, since they were chained to different parts of the stone room and could barely get close enough to do this.

“Well,” he said. “I’m almost finished, at least with those places you’re willing to uncover. I can’t believe the chimmie who said pink to me, a couple of months ago, is such a prude about nudity.”

Gailet only sniffed, not even deigning to answer. She had seemed glad enough to see him yesterday, when the renegade chims had brought him here from his former place of confinement. So many days of separate carceral isolation had made them as happy to see each other as long-lost siblings.

Now, though, it seemed she was back to finding fault with everything Fiben did. “Just a little more,” she urged. “Over to the left.”

“Gripe, gripe, gripe,” Fiben muttered under his breath. But he complied. Chims needed to touch and be touched, perhaps quite a bit more than their human patrons, who sometimes held hands in public but seldom more. Fiben found it nice to have someone to groom after all this time. Almost as pleasurable as having it done to you was doing it for somebody else.

Back in college he had read that humans once restricted most of their person-to-person touching to their sexual partners. Some dark-age parents had even refrained from hugging their

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