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discernible, but it seemed to be a dark area of some kind protruding from the
desert floor. Rocks? It didn t seem likely.
Trees! An oasis!
The sun was definitely climbing, and the day was heating up fast. Now was the
time to make for any possible haven, and second-guessing was a luxury that she
could not afford.
She started off toward the black dot and began to improve on her walking and
balancing abilities with almost every step. She did not walk with those feet;
she sort of trotted or even galloped, kicking up sand but making very good
speed. She also learned rather quickly and a bit pain-fully that when moving
fast, she had to lean a bit forward and keep the hips wide, otherwise that
thing down there flapping away would get crunched between the upper calves.
It was getting progressively hotter, and she could actually see the heat both
as it came down upon her
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and as it was first trapped and then radiated back by her body. She won-dered
just how hot to the touch she was right now.
She began to have trouble seeing. The heat radiation was coloring everything
and distorting her sight. It suddenly oc-curred to her that there was more
than one use for those in-ner lids, and she closed them.
Virtually all colors snapped out and the world became a mass of infinite
grays, yet the black dots that hadn t seemed to grow any closer no matter what
speed she was making now began to resolve them-selves a bit more clearly and
did in fact seem to be getting ever so slightly larger.
It was an oasis! That might not mean people, but those were clearly trees of
some kind, and trees needed water.
Or at least she hoped that trees here needed water.
She would have expected to become winded after a while and have to rest,
particularly in the growing heat, but she found that running across the sands
like this gave her a real rush; her chest apparently contained mostly lung,
and it went in and out with each giant breath she took. But the rhythm of the
breathing and the running was very easy to slip into, and even though it
seemed like she d been run-ning for hours across many, many kilometers, she
didn t feel the least bit tired or winded.
She was definitely hungry and thirsty, though, which only gave her more
impetus to reach her goal as quickly as physically possible.
Soon the oasis loomed before her, filling much of her vi-sion, and it was
enough of a dark mass that she lifted the inner lids to get the full detail.
The trees weren t like any she d ever seen before, but they had a tropical
look, with thin and supple trunks rising to layers of oversized palm- or
fernlike leaves.
She ran right through the first row and found the area larger than she had
expected and the ground inside harder with much exposed white-veined gray rock
that produced a  clopping sound when her feet hit it.
She slowed but found that she needed to go up to a tree and put a hand out to
fully stop herself without falling over.
It was almost a letdown to stop running, but her chest continued to heave and
she continued to gulp in air at the same rhythm until her breathing slowed to
a more normal rate.
She looked around, and her ears automatically rotated about a hundred degrees
on either side, checking for sounds. There wasn t much except the rustling of
some leaves in the highest part of the trees, apparently in reaction to a
slight breeze that didn t reach the ground.
Her nose, though, brought an overpowering aroma that she recognized
immediately, even though she d never smelled it before
water!
Finding it was as simple as following her nose.
She didn t hesitate a moment worrying that it might not be good water. It
wasn t any new inner sense that told her anything about it but rather an
all-consuming thirst that made it clear that the question was moot. She simply
had to have water.
The water was in fact from a spring that bubbled out of the rocks and created
an attractive, shaded pool
about a dozen meters across. She headed for it, got on all fours, then dropped
down and just stuck her face in it and began to suck and lap it in. Her
natural nose plugs closed the in-stant her face hit the water, and she hardly
noticed.
It was an eerie sensation, though, because she just drank and drank. She had
never drunk this much of anything in her whole life, and long after a human
her size would have been satisfied she continued to take it in. She could feel
it, cooling down her whole body in stages, coiling around in-side her like a
living thing, and finally concentrating in her back. There was no telling how
much she drank before, un-able to take another gulp, she came up out of the
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water and settled back, lying there on her side. For several minutes she felt
bloated but cool, and then, slowly, her body temper-ature seemed to come back
to normal and that bloated feel-ing subsided.
She wondered where all the water had gone. She didn t feel like she d grown
some sort of camel s hump, nor did rolling on her back for a moment reveal
one, but clearly this body had areas to store a lot of excess liquid. After a
while she forced herself to get up, even though she actually felt sleepy. For
one thing, the pool was not totally calm but it did reflect decently and she
wanted to get a more com-plete image of herself. And then it would be prudent
to look around. Although Lori the American college teacher wouldn t have
resisted, Bimi of the People knew that it wouldn t do to just zonk out without
checking the lay of the land.
The image of herself in the gently rippling water was both strange and
familiar. She d always had something of a long neck, and she still did; the
face, although the same beige or light tan color, contained enough of the old
Lori Sutton to be recognizable, although it had a harder, larger, rougher
cast. It was, she realized, what her face would have looked like had she been
born a man. She d always had that boyish look to her face, and now it seemed
to have firmed up and looked not nearly as bad to her as it had all those
times in the mirror.
The lips were thicker by quite a bit and were a dark brown, the nose was a bit
larger, the eyes were dark black blobs against a medium brown field, the ears
were very equine and larger than she d thought, and the eyebrows were thick
and snow white and rose on either side of the eyes at a slight angle, giving
her a slightly exotic look. The big shock of white hair was actually kind of
cute. The horn, the same color brown as the skin fur, looked, well, different [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]