My Elder Brother

	An Eldritch Tale, compatible with the "Toho Academy" series
					By Simon Barber

	(p.s. Distinctly R-rated, so don't say I didn't warn you....)

West of Sterrington, the hills begin to rise, in a wild sea of swollen 
stone that deceives the eye as to exact distances and angles. 
Travellers avoid these hills: it is too easy to get lost - and some of 
the lost ones never do return to the bright lights of the industrial 
estates and shopping malls below.
	It was that time of year, when Winter still gripped the land, 
snow hiding huddled from the corroding rain in whatever shelter 
ditches and tumbled walls could offer. Candlemas was its name of old - 
back in the time when folk had more dubious ways of passing darkened 
evenings in unfrequented places than watching the nice healthy 
Rollerball games on their pocket satellite receivers. 
	The sound of an old petrol-driven engine rolled through the heavy 
air, hydrocarbon fuels mingling with the wisps of fog. And then the 
engine note died; rubber tyres crunched on the gravel of the old road.
	"You SURE this is the way ?"

	At the unsigned, unhallowed, unfrequented crossroad where they 
had stopped, a lepine girl tried to look over the shoulder at the 
ancient text her ursine companion was holding. The book was bound in a 
strange glistening substance, and filled with indecipherable symbols 
which gave her cause to shudder at what she could decypher. All the 
ammunition cases and esoteric charms dangling from the bear's rotund 
frame were hardly helping clear reading.
	"Tell ya." The bear stabbed the damp paper, looking round at his 
slight companion. "This is the way. Unless..." he scratched his broad-
furred, brown, bristling skull. "Say... that furless native we asked 
awhile back. Did you notice something weird about him ? Like 
unnaturally bulging eyes, real bad posture, and skin looking sorta 
scaly ?" The bear's eyes suddenly sparkled. "Yeah ! That's it ! He 
must be one'o them Mew-tayted Cultists. Come on - let's go get him - 
AND his family, AND anyone else who might be involved...  - and don't 
forget, after you've burned the bodies, you gotta dissolve the ashes 
in acid. That's essential." He patted the bulge in his pocket where 
the thick tome "1001 things to do with Daemons" lay inside its 
liquescence-proof case.
	The lepine girl's ears twitched resignedly, as she tried to push 
her companion back towards the car, and cast a glance at the book. It 
was obviously computer typeset - she wondered how authentic the rest 
of its production had been, and if folk had solved the problem of 
printing in human blood without jamming the ink cartridges. "Actually, 
I think he was just sunburned. Furless species can get that even in 
Winter, up here nowadays, with the Ozone layer and all that..... Come 
on, Dwayne - I think it's left turn here."

	It had been more than Thirty years since the Millenium, when the 
world had almost ended - and a fair percentage of its population taken 
up alive in the Rupture, to discover, somewhat too late, that things 
were not quite as advertised. Now, with the reassuring deities of two 
millenia gone with their harvest, the survivors lived at the whim of 
the Elder Gods, appalling non-Euclidean monstrosities, summoned up 
from the outermost abyss, and inscrutably waiting for the time when 
the rest of Earth's population became their fodder . Oddly enough, it 
hadn't happened yet.
	At least, Persephone thought as she put the book down, her long 
ears a-twitch: - at least, that's what all the books SAY - and it does 
fit some of the facts..... they COULD be just investing in giving the 
world all this peace and happiness just to make things more 
exquisitely terrible for us when they decide it's Dinnertime......
	"Dwayne - I think we're almost there. " She pointed at the 
ancient map, annotated by the handwritten notes of the other 
Investigators. "Left at the brooding, aeon-shrouded woods, right at 
the black stones probably brought from night-haunted ruins of accursed 
primordial lands, straight along parallel to the.... " she looked out 
of the window at the low cliffs of white limestone that fenced in this 
narrow, deserted valley. "Parallel to the "leering walls of tumbling 
stone that have stood too long, maggot-riddled with daemon-gnawed 
shafts and immemorial charnel gulfs. Probably. ", it says here. " A 
thought occurred to her. "Just how reliable ARE these reports ?"
	The bear pulled over to the roadside, the rosary of garlic and 
wolfsbane getting tangled in the door handle as he cautiously emerged. 
He slowly nodded, surveying the unsettled hills of unnaturally regular 
outline that rose into the unpolluted air around. "Authentic ! These 
are SO authentic, the folk who made the real survey never even came 
back from the last trip. Now, THAT'S what I call PROOF. There's a den 
of co-llaborators there - just a-schemin' and a-plottin' to bring in 
even MORE things a-crawlin' up from the pits, a takin' our jobs and a-
marryin' our wimmenfolk."
	Persephone counted to ten under her breath. This trip, she 
reminded herself, is like the way they plan against natural disasters. 
You take the chance of it actually happening, and multiply that by the 
damage it'd cause if it did. So, a few folk drown in river floods 
every year - overall, it's still less dangerous than asteroid strikes 
that nobody's ever seen since they developed written records. Because 
even if those happen every few thousand years, they can really ruin a 
continent's Whole Day when they do....
	She pulled on her camouflaged Dutch Alpenkorps jacket, and set 
off after the bear as he started to work his way round the ancient 
stone walls, to where a step in the hillside hid their final 
destination. Above them, the gibbous moon and the sinister stars were 
coming out, ghastly pale in the unfathomed blue-black void wheeling 
mockingly above them. 

	"This," Dwayne's voice was a harsh whisper "is a classic defense 
against the kind o'thing that we've got to deal with. Solid silver 
shells - projected by a classic defender. Just blows away all them 
lesser bein's and their mortal cultists an' all their folks an' kids, 
neat as neat."
	The lepine girl looked at him. "Yea, verily," she intoned. "A 
weapon of righteous might, known unto the ancients as a Browning hi-
power. You could get locked up for carrying that over here, you know."  
The reality of hunting eldritch things in the modern world was rather 
different from the classic tales she had read as a kit: wholesale 
dynamiting of impious altars and exterminating legions of cultists (as 
in the final, soul-searing chapter of "The Snout At The Letterbox"), 
would have the "intrepid investigators" jailed for life, regardless of 
their holy motivations.
	"Ayup," the bear's protective talismans seemed at least to be 
rendering him wholly immune to sarcasm "I've used it a-plenty, back 
home. Now hush - it's just over the rise, seems like." He shivered at 
the unhallowed age of the place. All around were stones piled on 
stones by hands now dead. The walls and outbuildings spoke of elder 
aeons, of years passed before the compact disc player was even 
invented, let alone obsolete. "They'se all a-comin' back." He intoned. 
"they were locked aout ages ago, back afore there wuz folk there to 
see it. An' this time they want us - t'ain't jist the flesh and sauls 
they's wantin'. If they wuz jist eatin' us, it warn't so bad. They's a 
fixin' to go a minglin' an' a mixin' with us, like they's puttin roots 
down inta this world." He pointed at some of the arcane charms he 
carried. "Yew see these ? They's the only things as'll send them back 
to the Outside they comes from. They don't rightly belong here - but 
if'n they ever gits a-mixin' with those of us that dew - there'll be 
no shifting them. They'll be o' two worlds, an they'll be wuss'n both 
together."
	Persephone sighed, rolling her liquid brown eyes. All her 
lifetime, the world had supposedly been helpless on the plate of 
entities who were supposed to have devoured it at the first available 
opportunity, if the legends were literally true. Briefly she 
considered it: if the things from Outside really had "held unclean 
Dominion until Banished to the Darkness" only in recent geological 
time - how come it had been the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 
that had brought the planet closest to ruin without their rule, after 
supposed aeons with it ?
	 She felt the cold dew soaking through the grey fur on her hands 
and knees as she followed the huge backside over to the crest of the 
hill. And bumped into it - stifling a curse, she noticed that the bear 
had locked rigid.
	"Abominations o' Belial - heathenish crimes agin' all that's 
Natural.. betrayers o' the whole wide world..." she heard him hissing 
under his breath. And then her own slim form locked rigid in shock, as 
she looked round the side of the charm-laden figure at what was down 
below. The shock was not only at what she saw there - but that she was 
agreeing with her guide.
	In a hidden side valley, shielded from the gaze of all but the 
wraiths of mist and silent spectral stars, a small hunched hill rose 
scarcely ten metres above the grassy floor of the hollow. A great 
black stone crowned it, its fluid curve and oddly glistening shape 
totally unlike the bone-white blocky limestone of the natural rocks 
around - and neither was that stone unoccupied.
	"A horror... " Persephone heard the whisper again from the bear 
"called out 'o the dark. And if it ever teks root.." His illegally-
carried weapon at the ready, the bear began to move forward. 
"Persephone - there ain't nobody we can leave alive down there. Even 
the girl - she'll have bin drugged or hypnotised, but there's no way 
we can risk it .... if it's too late already.. the spawn...."
	For down on that stone, something writhed. It was like looking at
 a badly tuned hologram - a viscid shape that seemed to boil and loop 
in and out of the dimensions. Like a recurving waterfall of thick 
crude oil - no, Persephone suddenly realised - like looking through a 
two-dimensional SLICE of a waterfall, its shape flowing through and 
past the limited line of vision. And as it turned, she saw it was not 
alone.
	It was a flash of yellow fabric, the precise shade of this year's 
swimsuit fashion, that first awoke the full enormity of the horror 
welling up in the lepine's heart. And then - like a drowned corpse 
rising to the top of some pit of foul slime, she saw a shape emerge, 
slowly coming into merciless vision. Suddenly, Persephone wished she 
was far, far away.
	A feline girl was down there, pinned and helpless in the 
gelatinous slime of those abyssal-spawned tentacles, their viscid 
ichor clotting and melding with what might once have been snow white 
fur. And as horror mounted on unwilling horror, one three-metre coil 
of semi-liquescent abomination took on definite segmented shape - and 
began to caress the girl. A blunt ebon head reared, glistening in the 
mocking light of the immemorial moon, waving uncertainly under the 
eldritch light. And then it began to hunt, like a voracious leech 
seeking a weak spot in mud-befouled clothing. The gelid tip slipped 
under the fabric covering a slim feline belly - even from where she 
stood, Persephone could see the snaking bulge crawl to and fro beneath 
the fashionable stretch fabric protecting her sight from the writhing 
horror that sought to force a roothold into the mortal world.
	The figure gave an almost ecstatic-seeming jerk, and Persephone 
was suddenly glad she could not see the feline's face. For now it was 
too late. The tentacle quivered, and pulsed like an earthworm boring 
into charnel clay - and Persephone did not need to see how and where 
the swimsuit bulged to know what was there taking place.
	Just at that moment Dwayne, who had been locked into trembling, 
muttering immobility, roused himself into action. With a roar, the 
huge bear sprang to his feet and charged, beginning to cover the fifty 
metres down to that place of unhallowed rite on the bespattered altar 
stone.
	"Begone !" The bear had a book in one hand and the clean gleam of 
silver-loaded metal in the other. "Avaunt thee, to that place from 
whence thou came ! Mesh'aggva, ghe-shasthahonin, st'agakkasta 
Gestharoth ! " His voice seemed to take on an unearthly timbre as he 
pronounced words that had been written for no mouth of Earthly 
evolution. And levelling his automatic, he emptied the silver-laden 
magazine in one long rippling burst into the towering wall of liquid 
night that rose up like a breaking wave before him.
	The effect was immediate. The whole landscape quivered, like a 
reflection in a disturbed pool - and the gelid mass seemed to twist 
away, spiralling like water seen vanishing down a plughole. In three 
seconds the bear and rabbit stood alone, the only trace of what had 
occurred being a swiftly-evaporating tarry residue on the couch-shaped 
stone.
	"There's .. there's nothing Left of her.." Persephone's throat 
was dry. Her perception of the universe had just cracked, and she had 
no time to sweep up the pieces. That such a thing was possible, 
changed everything. All of the darkly whispered horrors she had 
gradually taken a skeptic's detached interest in, were as real as the 
rest of her life from now on. It could happen - which meant it could 
happen, to her. She looked down at her slim, well groomed belly fur 
and then at the wickedly twinkling stars. There were nuclear and 
psychotronic-armed satellites up there - but the invasion of Earth 
would go unseen by them. Her internal muscles tensed unconsciously as 
she realised the route by which the conquest was arriving.
	Dwayne nodded. "Ah told ye so. We'd get that naaw and then, back 
in Americky, even a hunned years back. But there wuz allus some folks 
prepared to do what they had tew, to close the way for Those From 
Outside. I reckons what they called the Rupture wuz the biggest bust-
in o' the lot - they took all the preachers an' good folk off fust, an 
naow there's folk in Japan and places buildin' temples an' having 
reg'lar worship with things like ye saw. " He looked around the 
clearing.
	 There was a low farmhouse surrounded by a neat, innocent-looking 
garden, shrouded in winter-bare trees on the far side of the hollow. 
The bear resolutely clutched his collection of charms and high 
explosives. "But we didn't see whut brought it out o' the skies. They 
cain't live in a reg'lar way here - they has to be CALLED. And we've 
to settle whoever and whatever Called it here. Don't reckon they'll 
ever find a whisker of that poor gal. But mebbe it'd be worse if'n 
they did."
	Persephone noticed how the bear shuddered at the nightmarish age 
of the building, at least three generations old. It was a common 
feature, one unshocked part of her brain noted clinically - as soon as 
Dwayne saw anything built more than a century ago, he reached for his 
hardware. Despite the fact that her folk had lived here for millenia - 
the "sinister woods" and "immemorial carven stones" that he associated 
with such horrors, had been planted and hewn by her own ancestors, who 
had walked the daytime and nighttime lands unafraid all their days. 
Only in the past century had anything untoward occurred - what he 
really ought to be blaming, she thought fleetingly, are power cables 
and radio masts - They're the only new things IN this landscape.
	They reached the farmhouse. It was a single-storey structure, 
built of and backing onto a low cliff that formed the first flight of 
several which sealed the valley off from the rolling moors above. 
Where half an hour before she would have seen it as a charming 
hideaway, ecologically balanced and conveniently melded into the 
natural stone of the landscape, Persephone's new perception saw only a 
camouflaged hatchway to Charonic gulfs of illimitable monstrosities.
	"We'd best do this subtle," whispered Dwayne as he kicked the 
door in. "You watch my back - if ya see anything, scream." As they 
crossed the threshold, Persephone peering into that planetary pit of 
pulsatingly polypyous primal protoplasmic perversity, the rabbit was 
struck with the horrifying subtleties which made it look to her 
limited senses exactly like any other slightly tatty country 
farmhouse.
	Six rooms they checked through, the muzzle of the bear's silver-
laden cannon pointing in each one before he burst in - all were empty. 
Kitchen, parlour, store-room, bathroom, and two bedrooms bore evidence 
of a deceptively normal life - until they checked more closely.
	"Look - in here." Persephone was in the smaller, guest bedroom. 
Half unpacked on the plain flounced bed was an overnight travelling 
bag; she guiltily rifled through it. "Dwayne - it's Hers !" In the 
purse was a travel card, with the smiling picture of a white-furred 
feline girl in her mid-twenties. On the bedside table was a 
chequebook, with a half-written cheque made out to a "M.Braithwaite" - 
the name they had seen on letters in the hallway, evidently the 
house's owner.
	Looking down on the everyday bundle of clothing, just one neatly 
folded overnight change and a set of towels, the lepine's heart seemed 
to freeze within her. With what lies or threats, she wondered, had the 
feline been summoned here ? The cheque was a clue - blackmail perhaps, 
to lure a victim out to this place of unhallowed sacrifice ?
	"Lookey here," she heard Dwayne in the bathroom. And indeed, here 
was - evidence. On the floor of the shower cubicle was an oddly 
opalescent sheen, a slime that was spattered on the floor and on the 
still-warm shower head. "Yew can see - it's bin here, of all places."
	Persephone sniffed cautiously. Strange. There was the sharp 
sourness of fear and horror here - but only what she recognised as 
Dwayne's and her own. The hormonal musk pervading the room was a ripe, 
fruity scent of arousal, quite at odds with the foul acts that must 
have been committed here. And then she shivered anew - what had Dwayne 
said about hypnosis ? An image suddenly wriggled in to curdle her 
horror-laden imagination - herself on that slab, happily meeting a 
lover whose nature was unutterably different from what her deceived 
eyes were telling her.
	"There's nobody here," Dwayne grunted. "Musta gone outside. 
Here's - ah ! Here's the back way out !" At the end of a corridor was 
a plain white door, to which someone had playfully stuck an official 
Fire escape notice, with "Outside Exit" in bright fluorescent letters. 
The bear checked the safety catch of his automatic - took one look 
around to see Persephone standing at his back - and kicked the door 
in, charging through it to what lay beyond !
	Well it was that the rabbit had spent her kithood reading extreme 
science-fiction tales, and puzzling over mind-blasting revelations of 
quantum mechanics. Well indeed that she had hung psychedelic moebius 
strips all round her room, when Cyberhippy styles replaced Cyberpunk 
in the fashion magazines. Without that early acclimatisation, her 
brain would have surely shut down in permanent overload - Outside the 
door did indeed lead - to all eleven simultaneous dimensions of 
Outside.
	For what could have been a second or an hour she stood frozen 
there - eyes wide and unblinking in unspeakable rapture of a Space 
whose depths stretched in more directions than directions should 
exist. Far out in one of them, she later recalled seeing Dwayne 
spinning, tumbling like an astronaut lost in infinite night - and 
other, stranger things. None of them could Possibly be real, one basal 
fragment of consciousness kept trying to tell her - especially THAT. A 
denizen of those illimitable vistas seemed obscurely to be coming 
closer to her - and of a shape she had seen before, that night. Closer 
and closer it came, the shape she had seen on the altar under the 
mocking indigo of the skies - and with a shimmering transition, she 
was standing close enough to touch it, still transfixed and unable to 
run, or even to scream at what she saw !
	When the extremely irate white-furred feline girl swung a mean 
right hook and knocked her unconscious with a single punch, quite a 
lot of Persephone's brain was grateful for the respite.

	Consciousness returned, as the lepine's head swam and buzzed 
unmercifully. She was lying sprawled flat out - her eyes refused to 
open for a minute, for fear of what they might show her. 
	A tentatively exploring hand felt smooth sheets and the firmness 
of a mattress beneath her touch. But then she explored further - and 
with a sick thrill, her fine grey-furred hand came away from her belly 
covered in a tacky, gelatinous fluid. As it recoiled back, the fantasy 
of herself on the slab hammering forcefully back into her horrified 
mind, her elbow struck something shudderingly like a scaled sack of 
jelly.
	Persephone's eyes flicked open, on reflex action alone. She was 
in the spare bedroom of that shunned house, lying on the flounced bed 
- and she was not alone in the room.
	Between the bed and the wall, she had seen a clear space of 
perhaps two by three metres. But it was clear no longer. A vast and 
viscid bulk, green-black and resembling .... the nearest things she 
could fit it to was a sea-slug, sea anemone or an animated gherkin, 
heaved and pulsed on the floor, its mass towering over her. Facing her 
was an obscenely fleshy ring, fivefold symmetry ringed by long, black 
tentacles and centred round a gaping five-bladed mouth !
	The rabbit had done very little screaming in her life. She was 
just about to change that, as the glistening mass quivered into 
movement, when the door swung open. And there was a sight that was as 
incongruous as any she had seen that night.
	"Cup of tea, dear ?" Asked a short, cheerful brown-furred goat 
woman, putting the tray down on the bed. Her incurious gaze fell on 
the entity that squatted slug-like at its side. "And how about you, 
Tekkil-Li ?"

	That was not a good evening for Persephone's view of the 
universe. As she sat curled protectively in a corner chair of the 
comfy parlour, the clock on the wall striking eleven in the long 
February night, she got the distinct impression that she had been 
living with her eyes shut.
	"Of course, I'm sorry Amanda hit you," Maria, the leader of the 
"evil Cult" pointed out, the goat's long ears twitching as she handed 
Persephone a slice of carrot-cake. "But you DID rather spoil her 
evening for her - and poor Tekkil-Li took ages finding this place 
again. He got back just after I did - Amanda was about to kick your 
teeth in, but we managed to dissuade her. She'll have to wait till 
Autumn now, I'm afraid." They had heard a car pulling away, not two 
minutes after Persephone had awakened: to judge by the screaming tyres 
and over-revving of the turbine, its driver had not been in a good 
mood.
	"Amanda? Was that.. the feline girl I saw being..... " Rabbit 
ears drooped as she accepted the cake.
	Maria nodded. "Just before that redneck turned up. I'm afraid you 
seriously ruined her plans: the poor girl was in tears when she left. 
I'm sure her husband will be devastated - and he's such a nice 
minotaur, they came up here to arrange things together, and to meet 
Tekkil-li first. We have to book ages in advance - he's very popular, 
you know."
	"Ulp." Persephone almost choked as she swallowed, dry-mouthed. 
"You mean ... she wasn't drugged or kidnapped, or...."
	Goat fingers tapped tetchily on the arm of the old leather chair, 
as Maria looked sternly at her unexpected visitor, her ears lowered to 
her skull. "Go ahead, dear, say it."
	"Folk who come here, never get back alive !" Persephone felt the 
hard-won map still in her outer pocket. "They come here, and get raped 
and eaten by THINGS that shouldn't even exist in a sane universe !"
	"Oh my, you've been reading books by mad Arabs and things, 
haven't you ." Came the bored reply. "Just like your friend with the 
pistol. Maybe by the time he resurfaces in our space, he might have 
learned better - unless he insists on attacking everything he finds 
out there, in which case he WON'T be coming back. Or any of the others 
who decided to break in here, annoying my family."
	"F...Family ?" This was too much for her to take. She looked 
round, and stifled a scream as the gherkin-like entity rippled into 
the room, shunting its bulk on starfish-like tube feet.
	The goat exposed sharp grazing teeth as she grinned. "It's a 
family tradition, don't you know ? Back as far as the sixteenth 
century, my ancestor Isiah Braithwaite was hauled to the religious 
court at York to stand trial for committing "Unspeakably Unnatural 
Rituals". Luckily, they were SO "Unspeakable", nobody dared to repeat 
anything they'd seen, so the case had to be dropped. Sometimes, you 
simply can't have too much of a good thing."
	"Let's get this straight." Persephone struggled to regain 
control. "People actually Decide to come here ? They LIKE the idea of 
being half torn apart by something that looks like a slowed-down film 
of an explosion in a tar refinery ?"
	"Some people shouldn't knock what they haven't tried," Maria 
snapped. "I bet your ursine refugee friend told you they were 
hypnotised or some rubbish like that. He just can't cope with the idea 
that there's women who wouldn't look at Him twice, and want to find 
out what a lover learns in several thousand years of experience. He'd 
be a whole lot happier with them being drugged and raped, I don't 
doubt. I've seen enough of his kind before - Gods, what they've done 
to us over the centuries ! If we didn't get burned at the stake, we 
were spied upon by the Inquisitors - and even centuries later, given 
the chance they murder our children at birth and display them in bell 
jars, calling them "Blasphemous freaks of Nature" just because they 
look a little different. But even if we do get the child safe to the 
ocean in time for its next stage..." She sighed. 
	Persephone swallowed hard again. "You can actually - Breed with 
these ? And you Want to ? I'm sorry - I just Don't believe it," she 
said flatly. "The idea of making love to something that looks like a 
three-tonne sea slug just doesn't appeal. Even if it was physically 
possible - I'd hate to think what the lowest common ancestor is we 
have. Maybe I don't know as much biology as I should, but I do know a 
LITTLE about genetics. What the child'd look like, if it was even 
viable...."
	The goat's eyebrows raised. "Oh, yes ?" Her eyes bored into 
Persephone's own, and her nostrils flared. The scent of musk was in 
the room now, much as it had been in the shower. Slowly, she started 
to undress. Beneath the dress and the simple black slip, her fur shone 
with a healthy, wholesome glow in the dim lamps which also illuminated 
the three-dimensional aspect of something unutterably alien. "So, 
you've read those hateful books, written by crabby old men back in the 
days when you could be impaled for having a single free thought in 
your head. Can you see any "Vile degeneracy" here ? Any "Damning 
taints spawned of abominable midnight miscegenations"?" She slowly 
turned around, displaying her charms. 
	Persephone's ears rose in unconscious appreciation. Maria's fur 
was a rich chestnut brown on her head and the sides of her lean body, 
with a pale honeyed frontal patch extending from her collarbone to the 
inside of her strong thighs. Two sets of small but perfect breasts 
rose in normal goat fashion through the silken fur, drawing the eyes 
down to a trim belly in which there was no horror, only the promise of 
simple, healthy mortal pleasures.
	"Ahhh ... I can't see anything at all wrong there." Persephone 
had only briefly experimented with lovers of her own sex, and 
maintained little more than a theoretical attraction. Or indeed, one 
part of her fractured mind pointed out, it might just be that I never 
met one I liked so much as the males..
	Maria stood with her hands on her hips, glaring down defiantly. 
Then her expression softened. Suddenly, she laughed. "Here we are, 
with what's according to you, the most appalling secret in the 
Universe coming out. And here's me, too shy to tell you I want your 
cute little cottontail all to myself tonight. I always get heated-up, 
when there's a girl taking Tekkil-Li out on the Bridal Stone."

	Half an hour later, they lay embraced, Persephone's single pair 
of breasts intermeshed between the double delights of the goat like 
well-fitting gear teeth. No, she decided, fingers reaching down to 
stroke a helplessly quivering tail - of all the things she might be, 
she's not abnormal. Maria's touch was gentle, and the goat's sweet 
love had blended with her own in a delirious meeting of petals. It 
can't be THAT bad for you, she thought, to have a family history like 
hers.
	Suddenly a thought struck her. "Maria," she ventured "If it's so 
great, why don't YOU try it ? We searched everywhere - it's just you 
and the thing out there - I don't see you with any half-monstrous 
children."
	The goat gave a gentle laugh. "I'm not in any great hurry. I've 
got centuries and millenia ahead of me for that. In any case, they 
wouldn't be "half" anything - it'd be one or the other. " She felt the 
lepine's body go rigid in shock, and stroked her reassuringly.
	"You say you know a little about biology ?" Propping herself up 
on one elbow, she faced the intruder who had come to extirpate her and 
her kind from the face of the planet. "Well, I'll bet you don't know 
about THIS. Genes aren't the half of it - every living thing has a 
bioenergetic field, as integral to Life as chemistry is. It's what you 
see on Kirlian photographs. Now, usually, the fields merge in new life 
at conception - each cell has their own little field. But think of it 
like magnetic currents around wires - if the current was somehow 
floating free - or if it was Somewhere Else - as long as it touched, 
the effect would be the same."
	Maria stroked the trembling grey fur in the bedroom darkness. 
"Oh, you've no need to worry, I'll wash your clothing before you go. I 
asked Tekkil-li to carry you to onto the bed when we first brought you 
in here. He couldn't help making rather a mess on them - I bet you 
thought he'd "taken advantage" or some rubbish like that. "
	Persephone sighed with relief. Sure enough, when she had 
undressed to Maria's warm approval, she had neither felt nor found any 
evidence of unwanted attentions.
	The skilled goat fingers playfully caressed her flat, trim belly. 
"He's very flexible, you know. But with the right biogenic field - you 
don't NEED chemical genes inserted anywhere. And don't be fooled by 
their physical shape - they only use that ancient underwater form 
because it's easiest. That's the last physical form they had before 
their evolution took them into N-Dimensional space; they keep it like 
a sort of vestigial organ they don't normally need over there."
	The rabbit relaxed. "Then he didn't... ?"
	"Honestly ! You think we're some sort of monsters ?" There came a 
goatish snort. "But it's not as easy as all that, anyway. They're 
limited in space and time, over here. You saw him turn unstable out 
there while he had to concentrate on pleasuring Amanda the way she 
asked: he does a pretty good 3-D Rudolf Valentino impression when he's 
got the time to work on it."
	Persephone's whiskers twitched. "Dwayne said they could be 
"banished" back to where they belonged."
	A moist set of goat nostrils flared in annoyance. "He did, did he 
? Just before the bastard wrecked Amanda's chances for two whole 
seasons. It's true enough, it's hard for them to stay here without 
losing their shape - a bit like trans-dimensional bungee-jumping, if 
you had to grab hold of the ground at the bottom of the dive. Someone 
distracts you, and whoosh - back you go." Her arm enfolded the lepine 
once more, and a brown-furred hand caressed long and sensitive ears. 
"It gets easier at some stages of the planetary cycles - "When The 
Stars Are Right", to quote those ludicrous old tomes. So even if they 
can get here, they have to mesh fully with our spacetime if folk want 
to join with them, which they can't always manage - you might say, 
it's not just Christmas that comes but once a year...."
	A narrow caprine muzzle explored deep into lepine delights. With 
an impassioned squeal, Persephone abandoned her fears for the sake of 
very immediate pleasures. Whatever her ancestry might be, she 
fleetingly thought as the agile tongue went to work - she's Definitely 
got what it takes...
	"But." It was a long and lazy hour later, when at last they lay 
at ease. "I still can't see how you managed to get away with it ! It's 
not just cranks like Dwayne who'd be after you if they knew."
	Again came the grin in the half-light. "You want to know a REAL 
secret ? Like, why folk come here at all ? Imagine it - maybe you're 
in a mixed marriage. Some hunk of stallion is giving you everything 
you want, say - except you'll still need to look for another mate if 
you want a kid. So, think about it. Are you going to pick a mate who's 
carrying some inherited disease that'll mean your kid's never going to 
live to grow up ?" 
	More than half the married couples on the planet were of mixed 
species, unless strictly forbidden by the older religious laws. Mates 
for the sake of children would be chosen separately, generally for 
physical rather than emotional attraction. In much of the poorer 
world, it made essential sense, with no risk of unexpected hungry 
mouths to feed - plus, the very real advantage that diseases of one 
partner rarely affected the other.
	Persephone snorted. "Do me a favour ! You think I'm stupid ?"
	A low chuckle came from the darkness, as Maria laid back upon the 
musk-scented sheets. "Of course not. You wouldn't pick a mate whose 
child's going to be dead in thirty years, either - so why not go all 
the way, and choose one WHO'LL STILL BE ALIVE IN THREE THOUSAND YEARS 
TIME ?"
	There was a silence. And lying there, Persephone gradually 
realised what all this meant.
	"But .. what's the point, if you'll never get to see it anyway ? 
If you give birth on the beach like you said, to a stream of first-
stage polypous larvae who won't even be coming back to land in your 
lifetime ? That's hardly something to look forwards to."
	Again came the chuckle. "Quite. Now, I don't know much about 
sorcery, though it's the "in" thing since the Millenium unlocked the 
power - but there's cybermancers with computers, and they've worked 
out some pretty handy spells. It's not all "Forbidden knowledge handed 
down from forgotten realms of mystic night", you know. Like, there's 
one to bind the biogenic field to the mother at the instant of 
conception. Instead of having to go through the whole aeons-long life 
cycle, the child takes it's mother's three-dimensional shape - that's 
it's "Natural" form, stable over here, and nobody's any the wiser. I 
should know - my own Mother used it, for which I'm grateful." She 
self-consciously ran a hand over her short, neat horns, rearranging 
her ears on the pillow.
	"So that thing, Tekkil-Li", Persephone's ears were surely tired 
of going rigid in shock tonight "That's, your Father ?"
	For a long while there was silence. And then she noticed the bed 
was shaking - putting out an exploring paw, the lepine discovered 
Maria's whole body wracked with laughter.
	"What's so funny ?"
	The goat-girl gave a snort of suppressed glee. "My Father ? 
Hardly. You asked why I didn't have any children of my own yet. Well, 
it certainly wouldn't be by him - and he's the only one in the area, 
more's the pity. There's some sort of Exclusion Principle against more 
than one of them being in the same part of Spacetime - and Tellik-Li 
is my Brother - just that he looks more like our Father than I do ! "
	
	Dawn approached in the grey February skies: it looked like being 
a clear day. While an exhausted lepine dozed in a musk-soaked bed 
indoors, Maria stood by the Bridal Stone on the hilltop. Acting though 
it did as a focus for the planet's original owners, still the 
advancing sunlight would soon disrupt the tenuous hold that Tekkil-Li 
kept on this part of space-time.
	** I do hope you didn't frighten the poor girl ** Radiated the 
thought-waves of her brother as he prepared to return "home" for the 
day. ** And I hope you told her what your own biogenic field would do 
to her, if she's anywhere near her fertile time. It's not as if You 
had to be male, or even shaped that way at the time. **
	Maria laughed. Briefly concentrating, she unlocked the abilities 
that were the inverse of her sibling's own - every molecule moved 
through N-Space and rearranged to form a tall and muscular he-goat, 
even the exciting, nose-catching scent of musk perfect to the last 
pheromone. Persephone had been quite right about having to hide from 
the scrutiny of the outside world - though as a disguise, this had put 
many an investigator off the track. Or rather, she reflected, it had 
led them straight to the middle of the very things they had been 
looking for.
	"I could have left her with a little Candlemas present, even in 
female shape, if that's what you mean - and in fact, I think I might 
well have done. Now it's up to her. But I've taught her how to avoid 
that, if she wants to - from any of us." From a sealed drawer, she had 
removed with insulated tongs a rounded grey stone triangle some two 
centimetres across, its almost smooth surface graven with an arcane 
design that hurt her eyes to look at. The rune-graven stones from 
ancient Mnar acted as the strongest possible disruption on what held 
her kind to the Earth. "I've shown her the only sort of Precautions 
that'll work with our sort after she's willingly made love to one on 
Candlemas Eve - she only has to get it installed by her doctor like an 
old-fashioned shield in the next few days, and all's well." Maria's 
ears twitched at the prospect of the slender rabbit currently warming 
the bed for her return.
	Tekkil-li gave one of the whistling noises that had given his 
kind its name. Viscid tentacles twitched and slopped noisily on the 
black stone he was increasingly concentrating on holding focussed.
	** Do you think she'll be back ? I think she's cute, for a flat-
spacer **
	Maria looked around the hollow in the growing light. "Well, you 
never know. I doubt she'll be coming back with any more of those 
damned "Investigators", anyway. After all, we ARE the good guys."
	** Quite. But if you'd Told her first what you might do for her 
family tree even in female shape, I'll bet she wouldn't have bedded 
you in the first place. Then she wouldn't NEED to take any 
Precautions. **
	The tentacles waved farewell, as Tekkil-Li felt the local 
spacetime slipping out of focus. Maria was left there, watching the 
viscid slime evaporate through the dimensions, no longer held here by 
its originator's willpower.
	She transformed back to the female shape she felt most 
comfortable with, and started to walk back through the dewy grass of 
morning towards the farmhouse, tail and nostrils twitching at the 
prospect of a delightful awakening for Persephone. Suddenly she 
stopped - and a mischievous smile wreathed her narrow muzzle.
	"I may be good - but I'm not THAT good !"





			###### End of Tale ###########