“There are so many things you have yet to see in this place,” Marina says. She swims up behind Pietor, then past him, and slides fingertips along his arm to his hand. For a fleeting moment he sees that she too is naked, and he tries to get a better look. It is his dream, after all, isn’t it? She moves a bit closer, but instead of revealing herself she uses his body to push off.
“Not yet,” she says.
“I’m in the forest,” Pietor says. “In real life, I mean.”
“I know. Maybe you should not have brought your family, though.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not like you, Pietor. They wouldn’t understand the things you understand, the things you see. Some things are meant for you alone.”
Then she flips around and goes under the water head first, arching her back. In the glittering light from the shores Pietor watches the skin of her back, her buttocks, then her legs glide away and under the surface.
Again he is alone in the lake, and he feels the sea snakes or eels which were once just little fish swirling around the lake in an ever-tightening spiral toward him. And he remembers that even the little fish were capable of biting; who knew what the sea snakes would do.
One of the snakes leaps from the water, and in mid-air changes to a small kitten, which plummets back into the water, then dives out of sight.
He wonders if he should trust the planet, trust the forest of his dreams, trust anyone or anything to take care of him. He thinks of the dozens of babies back at the colony, also born of Mohave, and he wonders if they are here, too, dreaming as he is. They may be the fish, the sea snakes, the kittens.
He trusts this world, his dreams, even the tall cats, more than he has ever trusted people and real life.
He floats, lets the water surround him more and more until everything but his nose is under water.
Then he sleeps.
*
“Pietor,” said Leticia. Pietor blinked a few times to clear the sleep from his eyes and glanced up at his mother. He stood and took notice that the buggy was stopped, no longer bouncing through the underbrush. They had to have arrived.
“Are we there yet?” he asked.
“You know we’re inside the forest,” Leticia said. “You going to sleep through your father’s big discovery?” She turned back to the front of the buggy.
Outside the windscreen, the bright floodlights lit a clearing. Trees thrust up and out of the illumination all around, and Pietor recognized the shapes of the swaying giants, and above in the distance the canopy of branches at the top of the trees. This time Pietor looked from a viewpoint with which he was more familiar, and he knew they were definitely in the right place.
“The forest has been here a long time,” Pietor said. “No one discovered it.”
“Come on,” said his father, and he opened the door of the buggy into the night of the forest.
*
“You should have come alone,” Marina says.
The clearing is different in the luminance of Marina’s hair, her phosphorescent glow lighting the trees like white fire. She moves toward Pietor, loosing her hair from its tie behind her head.
“I know,” Pietor says. “They wouldn’t stop.”
“The tall cats will come for them now, Pietor. The tall cats who walk beyond the edge of your vision, then stalk around through the trees over your head.”
Marina reaches Pietor and lays her hands flat on his chest, then presses, pushing him backward, down onto the ground. Before he can react she is straddling him, her face above his, her eyes reflecting brilliant green light.
“The tall cats drop down from the trees, silent, and sink teeth deep into your skull. They tear off the back of your head while you’re still alive.”
She sneaks her fingers around the back of Pietor’s head, runs them through his hair, nails tickling his scalp. She moves her face closer to his.
“You hear the crunch of bone, the sucking sound as the skull pulls away. You feel the air touch your brain, licking its folds with a chill wind.”
She brings her hands back around to the front of Pietor’s face, slides her fingers over his forehead, down his temples, then to his eyelids.
“Then everything goes black.”
She closes his eyes with her fingers.
“But they’re not coming for you, Pietor. They wouldn’t have bothered you. You should have come alone. It was you I wanted. It was always you.”
Pietor sees nothing, but feels her lips as she kisses him, softly, on the lips.
“And I’ll have you,” she says. “Only this once.”
*
Pietor opened his eyes to conflagration. The Allen family buggy lay in pieces, the largest chunk of it the frame, which sat broken and twisted a dozen feet in front of Pietor. Flaming piles of disc coal pushed up black smoke into the night sky and the tendrils snaked among the trees. Where the smoke hit the canopy of branches the trees had withdrawn, and Pietor looked with astonishment at the opening that led up to the sky. People would now be able to get in.
The broken, shredded bodies of his mother and father lay on the ground, skin stripped and blood pooling around their eviscerated remains. Whole chunks of meat were missing, bones snapped, skulls shattered as if their brains had been sucked through the bone and out.
Pietor knew he should be upset, should care, but here in the real world he never felt those sorts of things. It was too bad his parents had died, and he had a pang of regret, but he had only a vague understanding of what was going on around him. Here was life and death in its grim reality, and Pietor felt almost nothing.
Still, it was interesting to him because it was something new.
*
Marina moves her arms behind her back, unbuttons her dress and lets it fall to the ground. Pietor watches as each inch of skin is exposed, slowly, the skein of cloth drifting downward in the low gravity. As she stretches her arms up in the air, her fingers reach for the tops of the trees, and her muscles flex, her body arching, lithe, beautiful, feline. Pietor’s gaze goes to her nearly flat chest, her breasts just beginning to develop, her nipples, then down between her legs and to her feet. Her toes curl into the ground.
“This is your discovery,” she says.
He wants to ask her to touch him, to kiss him again, but something keeps him from doing it. He doesn’t understand it, the feeling of wanting her nor the feeling of not wanting her. And then white hair begins to sprout along the sides of her neck, then around her nipples, between her legs, along the tops of her feet. Her toes curl into claws and her nose elongates. She pokes her tongue out between her teeth as her upper canines plunge lower, pointy and brilliant white.
When the transformation is complete, the lithe white cat settles down onto all fours and extends her nose toward Pietor, tongue still out, sensing, tasting the air.
“You’re beautiful,” Pietor says. There is no fear, no sense of danger. He feels only adoration, awe, maybe even love.
Marina lowers her body to the ground and puts her head on her front paws. Her body erupts into a purr, a soft shaking that grows until it massages Pietor’s body with its relaxing rumble.
“Thank you,” she says. The feline form doesn’t alter her ability to speak, nor to send shivers through Pietor’s body with a glance.
“Not as tall as the others,”