No Other Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

kind of violent
emotional reaction to another person. She struggled to control
herself.
    Merin’s rage was not the result only of
Herne’s words, nor of her growing frustration at her inability to
fit into Tarik’s colony. She was frightened by the way she had felt
when Herne touched her while treating her cut face. She was so
careful never to touch anyone. She had been warned since childhood
of the danger. But his hands had been so gentle on her face. She
could still feel his fingers on her chin and her cheek. She wanted
to put her own hands on the spots. She resisted the impulse, but
she could not stop the urge to strike out at him, to say the same
kind of cruel things to him that he had said to her, for though he
did not know it, his curiosity was cruelty.
    “Shall I be equally rude and challenge you
about the customs of Sibirna?” she asked, her voice as cold as the
winter wind on his home world. “Where you were born and raised the
vile natures of children are quelled with harshness, with constant
painful punishment, until those children grow up into
sour-tempered, irritable men and women, quick to take offense,
eager to quarrel. Say what you will about the Oressians, my people
have never started an interplanetary war.”
    “Who knows whether they have or not, when
they are so secretive that they will allow no outsiders on their
planet?” he retorted. Then, suddenly, he gave her a lopsided smile.
“I don’t even know enough about your people to insult them
properly, unless it’s by accident. That’s a fine situation for a
violent Sibirnan, isn’t it, when you are saying those terrible
things about my folk?”
    “Every word I spoke is true. I have studied
your world’s history, and I have observed many Racial types while
at Capital. But, Herne,” her anger dispelled by her brief verbal
attack, she took a step toward him, looking directly at him as
earlier he had told her to do, “there is in you a streak of
kindness and gentleness that is at variance with your own
traditions and upbringing.”
    “On my world,” he said, “the sick and injured
are left to themselves, to die or recover as the local gods
ordain.”
    “Did it hurt you to see that?” Something in
his voice told her it had hurt him deeply.
    “Once, when my mother’s sister was ill, I
took bread and drink to her. She died anyway, and I was beaten for
trying to help her.” He was still sitting on the ledge, staring
down at his hands. “It was then that I knew I could not live all my
life on Sibirna.”
    “So you left and became a doctor?” she asked,
fascinated by these revelations. How different Herne was from the
harsh man she had first imagined him to be, and how hard he tried
to hide the gentle part of himself. Yet the attempt was not
completely successful. She had seen through it. “Was the practice
of medicine your way of channeling your kindly impulses into useful
work?”
    “Something like that,” he admitted. “But I’m
still a product of my upbringing. Is that why you left Oressia?
Because you didn’t fit in, either?”
    “Oh, no,” she said. “I fit in perfectly.
There and nowhere else.”
    “Then why leave?”
    “You would not understand.” Because he was
looking at her with a sweet half smile that tugged at her heart,
she added, “It was done because my age group was too large.”
    “You mean excess population is sent away?
That’s been done often enough on many worlds. Younger sons or
daughters with no economic opportunity where they grew up,
political or religious dissenters, all have migrated and colonized
elsewhere since history began. You know that. It’s the same old
story. You go somewhere else and build a new life.”
    “As you did?”
    “I haven’t done too badly, considering my
past,” he said, thinking that this was the first time he had ever
spoken so freely about his early life. Odd that it should be Merin
who had generated his openness. Emboldened by the apparent
friendliness of their