They grunted in spasms with each pounding thrust, sheets of rain pelting on them, until Bragg shuddered with an ejaculation and wheezed haltingly, totally spent. He pushed her down into the murky water. Even better! They both involuntarily gulped the vile bog water before she seized in air sharply, feeling suddenly very giddy. He coughed out water and rolled off her to lie carelessly in the disturbed mud, sobbing with laughter.
Feeling shudders surge through her, Genevieve struggled to pry open the two fruits, and handed him the unripe
fika
to complete his fantasy, the compelling offering to the sex god. He grinned victoriously and took it! But he hesitated and she forced herself to eat the insect-infested
fika
. Convinced, he bolted the fruit she’d handed him in several slurping bites, obviously relishing its sweet taste.
He looked drunk and ate happily, watching her eat, juice running down the sides of his mouth and dripping off his chin. But, to her dismay, he showed no ill-effects. She fought down the urge to throw up and took another bite. She was eating tiny
feek
larvae and mature insects! She saw them wriggling in the fruit as she swallowed down her bite with a shudder. God! Was anything going to happen? Had she done all this for nothing?
Bragg jerked in a violent convulsion and his face blanched. He suddenly looked terrified. A violent shudder of excruciating pain swept across his face like a turbulent wave as the
fika
poison gripped him. Orange
fika
juice burst out of his mouth in a splutter and he barked out an agonized wail then grew furious, somehow figuring that she was responsible. Bragg lunged for her with a roar but she slithered out of his grasp. He caught her leg, then lost his grip as he doubled over and more juice spurted out of his mouth. But she lost her footing and he threw himself on top of her, pushing her down into the muck. He bellowed and writhed and retched, but managed to pin her in the black water under his convulsing wet body. Furious, he beat her hard with his fists. She cried out and sucked in bog water with each blow, her mind screaming for it to stop, and felt herself slide into unconsciousness. Then he stopped and collapsed on her.
Genevieve pushed his heavy body off her with a grunt of effort then struggled out from under him, seizing air into her burning throat in spluttering coughing gasps. Her face pounded where he’d hit her. One eye had puffed shut and throbbed.
She rose on wobbly feet and panted out her breaths. Looking down at him, she felt no remorse. He’d hurt, possibly killed, innocent people. Wonderful, peaceful people—she gasped out a sob—the man she loved.
Then a severe convulsion toppled her with a splat beside Bragg’s body. For a moment, she panicked. Then she realized that no agonizing pain accompanied her shudders
—
they were the trembles of the
vishna
swamp water she’d taken in.
Waiting for her paroxysm to end, she crawled over to Bragg’s body and searched in the murky swamp water for his right arm. She found the GPS tracking meter strapped to his wrist, pulled it off, then fumbled it on hers with trembling hands. She then staggered to where Bragg had dropped his shorts and found the backpack. After hiking it over her shoulders she made her way with slow deliberate steps into the deeper swamp toward the
Atlantis II
. She still had to deal with Sanchez and Porter, after all. This wasn’t finished yet.
This swamp was brown and turbid with no floating vegetation, suggesting that it wasn’t stagnant like the swamp she and Azaes had traversed earlier. Genevieve stepped into it and shrieked as she plunged up to breast height. Shaking, she waded onward, taking great care with each slow and painstaking footstep, and forcing feverish thoughts of underwater creatures from her mind.
The hissing of the rain continued. It pelted the bog water around her, creating hundreds of tiny circular wakes, and smacked the large leaves above like a spanking hand. The rain plastered her hair over her face and sluiced down her face in runnels. She lost the bottom of the swamp a few times and had to swim. It was like a deluge.
She noticed a strong current pulling her legs from under her. Then she heard it over the drumming rain, resounding booms and pops, accompanied by a deep-throated roar. It was the sound of trees snapping and falling and—
Oh, dear God! A wall of water and debris higher than she could see surged toward her, smashing everything in its path. And in the instant before she met it, she realized that this was an
igapo
. And she was about to die.
The wave hit her like a brick wall.
Chapter Twenty-Four
She saw her own purple face looking down at her in a haze of broken mauve light. Genevieve tried to cast off the febrile drowsiness that covered her like a thick blanket, but when she did, the image of herself faded beneath a dark wave of great pain and sparks of sharp agony pierced her chest and the rest of her broken body.
“Don’t fight it,” her image said and Genevieve let the hazy mantle cover her again and separate her from the sharp agony that threatened to cut her to pieces.
The image of herself grew solid again and Genevieve finally realized that they were on top of a
vishna
tree. She lay on a nest of branches on a tree-island. Just below them, about two meters down and for as far as she could see around her, was a sea of brown water, dotted with similar tree-tops. It was like a scene from Noah’s flood. As she surveyed the spectacular water world, she noticed that the rain had ceased and the sky was awash with water-colour shades of orange and pink. Good God! Was she dead?
“Where…am I?” she croaked in a voice thick with not having spoken in a long while.
“You are on the top of the world, thanks to the
igapo
flood,” the entity said, sounding just like her, “and with a little help from us.” She smiled sideways. “The
igapo
forest is now under forty-five meters of water. Only the tallest
vishnas
are not submerged.”
“You…helped?”
“We moved aside so you wouldn’t kill yourself smashing into us and helped guide your body here.”
Genevieve blinked in confusion. The woman didn’t make sense.
“I have also done your bidding, human,” the entity said.
“My bidding?” Genevieve sat up. Who…
what
was she?
“The images you imagined when you flew back to the jungle and sacrificed yourself in the crash.”
“What?” Her awful daydream! Genevieve stared at the woman standing before her.
“We can manipulate all physical things, including ourselves,” the woman who looked like her said, a faint smile of smug amusement alighting on her lips. “This includes repairing ourselves from deep knife wounds.”
Genevieve swallowed. Porter’s slashing knife. “Who are you?”
“I was your lover,” she said.
Her lover?
Genevieve blinked and felt her breaths escalate in nervous confusion. “What do you mean?” she said in a shaky voice. “You look just like…me…but I never met you before.”
“I was the
vishna
tree you climbed.”
Genevieve stared dumbstruck.
“You’ve heard of
soul-drifters
and
shape-shifters
,” her replica said, nodding to Genevieve’s expression of silent affirmation.
Azaes was, of course, a
soul-drifter
, which meant that he could enter other people’s dreams and manipulate them. Shiva, his betrothed, was a
shape-shifter
, capable of manipulating her own molecules to morph into various creatures.
“While Eosians like Azaes and Shiva are truly accomplished in these divine skills, they cannot yet achieve what I can,” the woman in her shape continued. “But that is because I am an Epoptes.”
“Oh, God!” Genevieve flung her hands to her trembling face.
The Epoptes smiled lopsidedly with wry amusement. “I suppose I’ve been called that too.” Her smile softened and she gazed at Genevieve with gentle eyes. “I joined with you, Genevieve. I made sweet love with you as the
vishna
tree. I
am
the
vishna
tree.”
The Epoptes
were
the
vishna
? And she’d joined with an Epoptes? Genevieve recalled the prophecy Diaprepes had shared with her, about the belief of joining with an Epoptes through intercourse and its signaling of a new age on Eos.
My, God! What have I done?
“You have done nothing that I have not sanctioned,” the Epoptes replied to her thought. “And enjoyed.”
Genevieve started at the alien’s response, then realized that mind-reading was a natural extension of
soul-drifting
. “What do you want of me?”
“Why should I want something of you?” the Epoptes replied, shaking her head and smiling through the side of her mouth like Genevieve always did. It rattled her. “You have already given me your gift and I have given you mine. We have joined. What you choose to do with this gift is your destiny.”
Genevieve swallowed, throat suddenly very dry. “I gave
you
a gift?” She recalled the
vishna
lovemaking and felt it had been mostly to her own benefit.
Her replica smiled. “You accepted me for what I am without understanding what that was. You had the courage to join directly with me without one of your kind to provide you with a seed-love to redirect and give you strength. You generated it spontaneously. It is a testimony to your naivety and acceptance. No Eosian, save for one, has ever done this.”
“An Eosian did what I did?” An Eosian broke their most sacred law?
“Yes.”
“What happened to him…or her?” She swallowed.
“Nothing. He lives still. He is the same one to whom you have given your heart.” She burst into an open laugh at Genevieve’s expression. “Yes, your precious Azaes. It happened when he was quite young, only five thousand years old…young and obsessed with the
vishna
’s power, like most youth. He was feeling discouraged, not having met any potential lover to share eternity with. He began to think he would never meet this special person. That, perhaps for him, she did not exist. Alas, she did not, at least not on this world. So, he gave himself to me.” She smiled rather smugly.
Why that little rat! Genevieve thought. He
had
joined, and he’d kept it a secret from everyone for all these years. He’d committed the ultimate transgression in their pledge with the Epoptes. Was that why he’d been so hard on her and on himself? But it did clear up the puzzle of his ability to provide her dream with a realistic and vivid
vishna
joining experience.
Genevieve struggled over another question the Epoptes revelation had raised: “Diaprepes told me of a prophecy many of their people believed, that once they joined with an Epoptes through…eh…intercourse,” she blushed furiously for a moment, “they would enter a new age of enlightenment and divine life. If you’ve been the
vishna
all along, then the Eosians are already there!” Especially Azaes.
The Epoptes burst into a laugh. “Brave and clever mortal! You are not so different from the immortals who share your ancestry. You both fear the inevitable. You fear death as they fear life. The Eosians are blind to the fact that we live among them as the
vishna
, and that they are already joined with us. They cannot believe that they deserve a place among us. Their own propaganda and legend have kept them humble but have also undermined their ability to see their own nobility.”
“Why have you kept yourselves hidden from them?”
“For that very reason, mortal…” the goddess drifted closer and Genevieve breathed in the seductive scent of
vishna
. She swallowed convulsively, suddenly feeling the spike of both dread and yearning.
“The same reason I never revealed myself to you, even though I was with you in your ship since you entered what you call the Pleiades system…”
Genevieve felt suddenly enlightened. “You tampered with my ship, appearing as me.” Just like Epoptes before her had interfered with previous ships once they’d entered the system.
The Epoptes nodded. “Yes, I tricked your ship. I’m sorry. It had to be done. To bring you down.”
“And did you create my dreams? Or did Azaes?”
“He did most of it, although he doesn’t even realize this himself. I certainly helped. But so did
you
, Genevieve. You and Azaes collaborated on most of it. I am only a mirror.”
According to Azaes, the Epoptes also killed Dan. But somehow, Genevieve couldn’t feel any hatred for this alien being who looked and acted and smelled like herself. Genevieve felt only fascination and awe…and—oh, God! incredible desire! She’d never made love, much less contemplated making love, to a woman before. Yet, now, here, with this woman who was the image of her, yet a goddess of the universe, it felt right.
The Epoptes knew and drew forward. In one swift motion, they embraced and kissed. Oh, how different! She tasted sweet nectar as their tongues played together. The Epoptes gently coaxed Genevieve to recline back on the
vishna
bed and lay on top of her, silky legs entwining between hers, moving up her thighs like a clever snake, then pounding Genevieve’s throbbing sex with her thigh, pounding out grunts of delirious want that swelled into a burning yearning. Then the Epoptes was sucking her nipples like the
vishna
flowers, wet and enticingly fragrant. Determined to love her back this time, Genevieve let her hand seek her creamy slit and stroked as she would her own. Her counterpart moaned with pleasure. Delighted, Genevieve tongued the Epoptes’s breasts as she plunged her finger deep inside the alien’s slimy wetness, pulling out a sharp cry from her. She slid her fingers around the deepness and rocked her palm over her mound. The Epoptes mirrored Genevieve’s action, first fondling her nether lips, then rapidly slipping her fingers in and out, pounding and sliding. They writhed together like one body, purple sweat bursting out of them and binding them in wetness. Genevieve felt a deep fire burst up and drown her in flame, mouth snapping wide, hurling out a scream. They screamed together with boundless pleasure, then everything faded like a dream in a mist.