No Other Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

overdue with
our hourly report to the computer. Tarik will be worrying about us.
And he should see the artifact you found as soon as possible.”
    “You did feel something,” he muttered,
watching her begin the climb up the dirt-covered steps. If she
heard him, she gave no sign. “And I am going to find out why you
repressed every normal response to me. No woman who can become as
angry as you were could possibly be as frigid as you pretend to
be.”

Chapter 4
     
     
    As anyone who knew him might have predicted,
Tarik was fascinated by Herne’s discovery of a recorder with a
serial number matching that of the recorder Merin was using.
    “There is simply no reasonable explanation,”
Tarik said, holding the partially cleaned instrument. “This model
has been manufactured only during the last five years, yet here we
have the same recorder in ruins six centuries old.”
    “Some quirk of time?” murmured Osiyar, his
telepathic training leading him to consider possibilities others
might find frightening or unnatural.
    “Here in the Empty Sector,” Herne began, for
once apparently ready to back one of Osiyar’s peculiar
theories.
    “This is nonsense,” Alla cut into their talk.
“I am certain there is some scientific reason for what Herne has
found. Given enough time and thought, we will discover it.”
    “My dear,” Osiyar told her, smiling, “after
our intimate association you should have learned that not
everything in the universe has a rational cause or effect.”
    “I must admit,” said Tarik, “that all the
theories occurring to me are unreasonable and so unscientific I’d
rather not consider any of them until we have more
information.”
    That seemed to close the discussion. The
recorder was packed away in the cargo hold to await further
cleaning and examination upon their return to headquarters at Home.
Merin continued to use her own, matching recorder every day.
    Feeling oddly disturbed by the duplicate
recorder and frightened by her emotional and physical reactions to
Herne, Merin tried to avoid him as much as possible. It was not
terribly hard to do. For a place built by only a few telepaths,
Tathan covered a large expanse of land. The telepaths had
surrounded their houses with spacious gardens and had maintained
many parks and open areas. All of this, as Tarik observed, would
have made it a green and pleasant place in which to live. The
visible ruin stretched over many acres, with still more buildings
buried under earth, trees, and bushes. Their aerial surveys had
shown evidence of outlying farms and villas, but those areas had
yet to be thoroughly mapped.
    In all this space it was easy for Merin to
stay away from Herne. By saying she wanted to record every detail
of Osiyar’s impressions of the city his ancestors had built, she
was able to convince Tarik to switch places with her, so that he
worked with Herne. Osiyar said nothing about the change, accepting
Tarik’s decision with his usual serenity, but Alla was another
matter.
    “So you can’t stand working with Herne any
longer,” Alla said. “Why don’t you just fight back when he’s being
difficult, instead of withdrawing into yourself as you always
do?”
    Refusing to say anything about what had
happened between Herne and herself, Merin kept her eyes and her
fingers on the recorder. Alla would not be discouraged.
    “He was in one of those black moods of his
after he saw that invisible woman. That was the day you worked with
him. Did he say or do something to offend you?” Alla asked, adding,
“I suspect Herne only became a doctor so he could have a legal
excuse to torture people. I will never understand why Tarik chose a
Sibirnan for our colony doctor.”
    “Tarik probably chose Herne for the same
reason he chose the rest of us,” Merin replied mildly. “Because we
are all misfits in one way or another.”
    She had been watching with interest while
Osiyar eased a piece of stone out of a mound of dirt and weeds.
When he looked up,