14.
 “You mean—“
“Yes, before I got up the courage to talk to you on that rock where you were painting.”
“Did you know?”
“Not at first. I just thought you were the most beautiful creature on earth. I saw that huge guy, but I never saw the two of you together, and I finally figured out why. Your body changes, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. “When it’s his time to be awake, yes. We talk sometimes while one sleeps and the other wakes, or during the transition.” She added for explanation: “Our cells are mostly water. Water can take on any shape that the container wants to be. Cells take orders, and it just takes a tweak of the RNA on the DNA. In fact, we are like water that sloshes back and forth between two containers of different shapes, except it’s the same container, and it just changes shape.”
“Why?”
“It’s how we evolved. What can I tell you?”
“So...” He lay beside her with a numb stare and his eyes rolled in circles as he tried to calculate how it all worked. One body, two persons—one male, the other female. Eight hours as a woman, eight hours as a man, and then the poor host body slept like a log through the night from all that exertion. Sparto smoking and drinking, Korinta drinking water and worrying about their health, and it all balanced out somehow. They were even in love and could have conversations, could hug each other, though a neutral observer might have just seen a man or woman swooning along with his or her arms around himself or herself. Rodney’s eyes rolled more and more as he came to understand it all.
Korinta ignored him as she looked through her binoculars. “They think they have killed us in our bed while we slept. They will be negotiating for quite a while yet. They have a large tract of space to debate about. It’s like your American southwest...big, empty, and full of stars. Full of territory to milk for all it’s worth. The worst part is, as we fail here, as the Government and NBI are driven back, planets like yours become slave estates. This entire planet becomes a plantation.”
Rodney whispered: “But we have jets, bombs, nukes, microwaves, advertising, talk shows...”
“You’re nice enough people except when you are driving cars or worshiping,” she said, “but you’re little more than a small ant heap. One boot print, and you’re history. But they won’t kill you. They will enslave you. Without backup, there is nothing I can do to help you.” She suddenly had a picture of herself, in a car, going over 100 miles per hour and slamming into that room killing everyone inside. “Your car!” She grabbed him by the lapels and shook him. “Your car! Where is it?”
“Stuck up the road with an overflowing radiator and busted hose,” he wailed.
“Darn!” She released him and looked at her car. “If we could have gotten it, we could have driven it into that room at top speed and killed everyone in it.”
“What about your car over there?”
“Do the arithmetic, Einstein. They rigged it to blow sky-high if I got in it and turned the key.”
He looked at it. “What if you don’t turn the key?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if we roll it toward the building and then turn the key?”
“We’ll die just the same.”
“But we’ll kill them and save the Earth.” He stared at her. “Say, you two don’t care. You get to go home if you can just slip by Al Capone and his pals in there.”
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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