Maeve by Jo Clayton Page A

Aleytys and Tipylexne. They spoke briefly, then Aleytys moved past them, coming to stand over him, eyes irritated, amused, understanding. He resented her understanding even while he desired it. The ambivalence she generated whipped him to and fro.
    She spoke. “You can return to your people, Gwynnor, if you want to.” Her voice caressed his ears. Again … again … the tart sweet fragrance from her body nearly brought him to sexual readiness. In a total embarrassment, tears gathering in his eyes, he fought for some kind of equilibrium. Leave her … leave … go back to the simple, uncomplicated life on the plains. Or stay … and endure the continual vertigo from having his world turned upside down repeatedly … and suffer … continual uprootedness as his certainties were undermined. Go? He struggled with the idea until he knew that there was no way he could force himself to do what he knew he should do.
    Aleytys looked down into the flat green eyes, all surface with no depth to them. She sighed, annoyed by his persistent abhorrence for living beings other than his own cerdd. Even her empathetic outreach that brought his stomach churning, disgust vibrating into her nerves along with his alternating surges of desire and despair, didn’t help her understand what created this furor in the cerdd. She felt his head jerk as she touched him. Letting her fingers move down over his ears to his neck, she wondered if she should try to heal that sickness in him. Then she looked into his eyes again.
    He watched her with a kind of puzzlement in his face, the brief sexual response dying with the anger it provoked.
    She pulled her hand away, shaking her head with disgust at herself. What right did she have to rearrange his personality without his consent and understanding? She stepped back and rubbed her hands down the sides of her tunic. “Well, if you want, come with us.” She jerked her head at the waiting cludair. “There’s a problem with starmen from the city. I think I can help. So. We go to talk over the implications of interference.” She smiled at him. “You’ve done all you need for me, my friend. I know you don’t like being here.”
    â€œYou want me to go?” In spite of his obvious effort to speak calmly, his voice shook. She had to block out the blast of anguish flooding suddenly from him.
    â€œNo. Of course not,” she said quickly. She dropped to her knees so that her eyes were closer to a level with his. “Gwynnor, I have to admit I don’t understand why you want to stay since you don’t even like me and you find the cludair repulsive.” She stared into his unresponsive face and shook her head. “Gwynnor, they’re people. Like you and me. People. Not animals.”
    He wrenched his eyes away. “They smell bad,” he muttered.
    â€œDamn.” Aleytys dropped back onto her heels. “How do I deal with that?” His sense of smell was considerably keener than hers. She glanced over her shoulder at the cludair waiting patiently for her. Their noses, though broader and less defined than Gwynnor’s suggested that they, too, had a strong dependence on odor for information. She sighed, recognizing her inability to understand a world where the nose was as important as the eyes in making value judgments. “It’s up to you, Gwynnor. I’ll be sorry to see you leave, but if you can’t endure these people, it would be better for you to go.”
    Gwynnor hugged his knees tighter. He felt hunted. He couldn’t explain to her that he wanted desperately to go away, but knives turned inside him whenever he thought of leaving her. Biting his lower lip, he turned his head and met the eyes of one of the cludair males. He jumped up. “I contracted to take you to the sea, gwerei. A matter of honor.”
    The starwoman stood. “I see,” she said. “If you think you can manage.” She