I’ll just have to keep trying to keep him out of trouble, Dragon thought with a sigh. Hopefully the trip to their neighboring planet, Avria Pentaura, to get Ornith eggs would go well and take enough time that Zerlix couldn’t go gambling or whoring afterwards.
Dragon just wanted things to go smoothly for their Sire’s feast-day. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of his ascension to the leadership of the Crimson Blades as Komendant—it should be a special occasion, unmarred by any foolishness that Zerlix might thoughtlessly get into.
At least, Dragon fervently hoped so.
3
Bobbi sighed with satisfaction as she stood up and stretched, letting her back muscles flex after a long day of labor. The grain was all gathered into the storage area and the little tribe she was living with was assured of having plenty to eat for the coming rainy season.
The setting sun felt good on her skin—which was mostly exposed, due in part to the warm climate and in part to the fact that she was copying the dress of the Orniths in order to fit in.
Instead of a bra and blouse, she was wearing a kind of sling which looped under her breasts and held them up while exposing her nipples. It was tied at the back of her neck a little like a halter top. For a bottom, she was wearing a simple grass skirt with no underwear beneath it. The long, greenish-blue strands of dried grass fell to her mid-thighs and rustled softly when she moved.
At first it had felt strange to be so exposed, but the weather was warm and she was surrounded by female Orniths dressed exactly the same way—although they had three breasts, rather than two. By now, Bobbi had gotten used to it.
There was nothing sexual about the native uniform of the bird-like people—it was all purely for the sake of convenience and comfort. The Orniths laid eggs like birds but breast-fed their young like mammals—a detail that Bobbi found fascinating.
The halter, which supported but didn’t cover the breasts, allowed for easy breast feeding of the downy chicklings and the grass skirts allowed the Ornith women to lay eggs easily, without any need to remove undergarments to do so.
They were an unusual looking people—though Bobbi was used to them now. They had humanoid bodies no bigger than her own petite frame but their necks were long and snaky, like an ostrich or an emu’s neck, which meant that every one of the adults—and some of the children—were taller than her. When they talked to her, they ducked their small heads with their large, liquid black eyes, down to meet her face-to-face, which made conversation easier. The Orniths also had beaks instead of lips and tiny green and blue and purple feathers covered their bodies.
“Greetings be to you, Bobbi,” said a shy, fluting voice.
Bobbi turned to see Therena, a good friend of hers. Therena was around thirty-five but she was only now coming of age—the Orniths were a long-lived people and they took a long time to mature.
“Greetings be to you, Therena,” she responded. “How was your first mating?”
The Ornith females mated only once a year, leaving their simple village of wooden and straw huts and going off into the tall grass to meet the male Orniths who were nomads. The males wandered from settlement to settlement, hovering around the edges of the female-only villages and waiting for female Orniths who were having their fertile period to come out and mate with them.
Mating usually took a day and a night and was, as far as Bobbi had been able to observe, a period of intense copulation where the male and female Orniths were joined for nearly the entire mating time.
It didn’t look very comfortable to Bobbi—she couldn’t imagine wanting to have sex with anyone for that long. But maybe that was just the lingering bitterness from her break-up with her fiancé, Stephen. Sex with him had certainly never lasted a day and a night—it barely lasted five minutes if she was lucky—and it had been pretty boring too, if Bobbi was honest with herself.
At least we never got married—really dodged a bullet there, she told herself, her thoughts wandering for a moment to the life she’d left back on Earth. If they had gone through with the wedding, she’d be tied down and miserable now, instead of millions of light years away, living with the Orniths and having a fascinating time studying their culture.
It was a pregnancy scare that what had broken them up, Bobbi reflected. Missing her period had made her realize that she wasn’t ready to settle down yet. There was more she wanted to do and see and experience and Stephen wasn’t the man she wanted to experience it with—or the man she wanted to be the father of her children.
If that pregnancy test had been positive, she would probably be weighed down with a boring husband and a giant belly right now, Bobbi reflected. And she would have been stuck that way for nine months. Too bad humans couldn’t just have sex for a day and a night and then lay an egg like the Orniths did—it seemed a lot easier in the long run.
The females laid eggs weekly in the communal laying house, but it was only after mating that they laid a fertilized egg which might grow and mature and eventually hatch into a baby Ornith or “chickling” as their young were called.
Bobbi had gotten to see a hatching just the other day and she was somewhat surprised when the large egg—about twice the size of a football—hatched a chickling the size of a small toddler. The baby Ornith had come out able to speak right away, too. Apparently they learned and absorbed language through the shell of their egg during the two-year long maturation process.
Because it took the eggs so long to mature and the Orniths only mated once a year, fertilized eggs were rare and precious. They were carefully guarded by the elders of the tribe, who were too old to lay fertile eggs themselves anymore. They sat on the fertilized eggs and “brooded” over them while the younger Ornith females worked in the gardens that provided most of the tribe’s food. It was a simple system, but it worked to everyone’s benefit and they were a happy and contented people.
“My mating was successful,” Therena said, pulling Bobbi’s mind back to the present. She ducked her long, snaky neck shyly and cocked her head to one side, looking at Bobbi with only one large, liquid black eye.
It wasn’t easy to read an Ornith’s facial expressions since you couldn’t see their pupils and they had beaks instead of mouths, but Bobbi had learned to interpret this sideways look as an expression of suppressed excitement.
“Then the mating was fruitful?” she inquired, smiling.
Therena bobbed her head in acknowledgement.
“I…I have laid an egg. And oh, Bobbi—it is deep purple!” she said in an excited whisper.
“Oh, Therena! I’m so happy for you!” Bobbi ducked her own head rapidly up and down, which was a gesture of joy and excitement among the Orniths. She understood the significance of the egg’s color because the bird-like people laid color-coded eggs.
Unfertilized eggs were creamy white—much like a chicken egg on Earth, though many, many times bigger. A pale green egg held a male Ornith chickling—these were rare but not very prized, since males weren’t much use to the female Orniths and were only needed once a year for mating.
A pale violet egg held a female chickling. But a dark purple egg held a female with special significance. It was said among the Orniths that females hatched from dark purple eggs were extra long-lived and extremely wise. All of the elders of the tribe had been hatched from dark purple eggs.