“Let me formulate an opinion,” Wetzel said. Then he communed with LadyBug. “Can we?”
Picture this ablution.
He did, imagining taking a hot shower, then combing out his hair.
This resembles a rainstorm. We bugs can handle that. Your hair and skin will shield us from the heat and motion of the water. We will avoid the comb and brush.
“Showers are okay,” Wetzel announced.
“Next question,” Vanja said. “What about sex? We can no longer go elsewhere to have it, since the bugs will be with us.”
“Do you know about sex?” Wetzel asked LadyBug. “The villagers refrain from it so as not to drive you away.”
We do. They do. We appreciate that. But you may do it.
“We may? How can that be?
The other bugs have no objection. Only we scarabs. But now I know you, and you may do it.
“I don’t understand. If you can handle sex, why do you avoid the villagers when they practice it?”
Jealousy.
Wetzel thought he had misheard. “I still don’t understand.”
We are all females. We get the chance to breed only maybe once in a decade when there is a male, and only a few of us get to do it then. You humans do it so often and joyously that we can’t stand it and have to retreat.
Oh. “But won’t you be jealous if I do it with Vanja?”
Not if you let me share the experience.
“Again I have a confusion. How can you share it?”
Let me ride your mind and emotion. I will feel your feeling. I know already from your memories of prior occasions that I will revel in this vicarious experience. It will be much better than what I can anticipate on my own.
Wetzel nodded, physically and mentally. That did make sense.
“I believe I have the essence,” Wetzel said to the others. “We can indulge in our normal lives, including sex; the bugs can handle it. They know us better; the proscription remains for the village as a whole. I should be able to answer questions by the others, as I am in close touch with LadyBug and she will answer through me. We should be able to plan our mission now.”
“We need better background,” Wizard said. “Why are the scarab so rare? Is it entirely the fault of the poachers?”
Wetzel relayed the question to LadyBug as he heard it, so that it was as if Wizard were speaking directly to her. Then Wetzel answered for her. “Yes. The scarabs are inedible and harmless to others, so are not preyed upon by animals for food or self-defense. They were plentiful until their beauty and chemical properties were discovered by human beings. In twenty years predation was so bad they were reduced to perhaps a hundredth of their former number, and that continues. Only one in ten survive to adulthood in ten years. The Amoeba interceded by making itself a refuge, and that helped. But because there are no males here—males can’t survive within the Amoeba, for reasons we don’t understand—breeding must take place on the home planet, and that is where the poachers are. Without males the scarab will become extinct within a decade.”
“I gather the males are rarer than the females,” Wizard said. “Why is this so?”
“This relates to their life cycle,” Wetzel said, relaying it as he learned it. “One male can mate with one female every year or so; it takes him a while to recharge. He can do that for about thirty years before he dies. Each female that is bred fissions into about a hundred infant scarabs, who will in the course of a decade and four molts become adult and able to breed. She is then breedable for about thirty years, if she encounters a male. But there are no males here in the Amoeba; they must leave the Amoeba to have any hope of breeding.”
“This talk of breeding is getting to me,” Vanja said. “Let’s take a break.”
“We will resume this discussion in the morning,” Tod said.
They took their showers, and none of the bugs were bothered. They made temporary shelters from the hair of their hosts.
Then Pinkie came to invite them to the evening meal, and they went. The women openly admired the bugs; now the team was similar to the villagers in that respect. Even Vanja’s mosquitoes were well behaved, threatening no one. Younger women continued to flirt with the men, interested in trysts away from the village. The men continued to decline with evident regret.
Back at the house, in the evening, Tod remembered something. “We may be able to have sex, but the village stricture remains, and we should not violate it. They might misunderstand.”
Veee nodded. “The good ladies might want to know how we know that it’s all right.”
“For us and not for them,” Tod said, faintly smiling.
“And we shall have no viable answer,” Wizard said.
Vanja was ready. “Give me a unicorn ride, Wetz.”
Veee sighed. “We shall hold the home fortress.”
The two of them went out, and transformed, and raced to the official Village Love Nest. It was unoccupied, unsurprisingly. They transformed back to human form, and entered, neither having any need to strip off clothing.
Vanja stepped into him and kissed him. “It’s lust, not love, but I am getting to like you, Wetzel.”
“It’s my unicorn quality. It attracts all women except virgins.”
Virgins? LadyBug inquired.
Uh-oh. “I need to discuss virginity,” Wetzel told Vanja.
“I’m no good for that,” Vanja said, smiling. “I’m not sure I ever was one.”
“A virgin is a woman who has never indulged in sex,” Wetzel explained to LadyBug. “Once she has sex, she is no longer a virgin. I am desperately attracted to virgins, but they are not attracted to me. This can be awkward.”
I am a virgin.
“Yes, you are virginal. Do you prefer that Vanja and I not do this?”
Not at all. My kind has no non-virgins. We all crave fulfillment, though it destroys us.
“So you do not follow the rule of the unicorn. You are net repelled by my interest in sex.”
Neither repelled nor attracted. I am an insect. We are governed by different rules.
“Yet you have a problem when other human couples indulge in sex.”
True. Now that I am sharing your mind, being vastly enhanced by it, I suspect I am sharing also your propensities. I never shared a human mind before.
“In that case, Vanja and I will proceed. But let me know if this becomes objectionable to you.”
Get on with it.
Wetzel smiled. “We’re fit to proceed,” he told Vanja.
“So I heard, from your half of the dialogue. I wonder—could I talk with Ladybug, if we had reason to talk?”
“I don’t think so. She could read your mind if she sat on your head, but her ability to project is limited to things like Go Away. That’s how the surviving scarabs have managed to avoid capture.”
“I understand that. But if you enhanced her ability to project, so she could project to me?”
“I had not thought of that. I don’t know.”
I might.
“She might. We can try it, if you wish.”
“Try it.”
“LadyBug, see if you can draw on my telepathic power to project your thoughts to Vanja. Such an ability might be important.”
Hello, Vanja.
Vanja was startled. “I got that!”
“You can focus your thought to her by speaking it, Vanja, as I do. Or you can simply think hard, and she will read it via my telepathy.”
Hello LadyBug. Vanja thought. Wetzel got it because it was his telepathy being used to read it.
You are a bat!
“Yes. You saw me transform. But I don’t eat my friends.” Vanja found it easier to vocalize.
What is a friend?
“That is when two people—by people I mean anyone of any kind, human, unicorn, bat or bug—come to know each other, and to like each other. Wetzel and I are friends. We understand each other. We are both were-creatures.”
Can I be a friend? This concept is unknown in my species.
“When y
ou borrow Wetzel’s mind, you can understand friendship,” Vanja said. “Then it becomes possible for you.”
I want to be a friend.
“We’ll be your friends,” Wetzel said. “That means in part that if you should get in trouble, we would try to help you.”
“If you broke a wing and could not fly,” Vanja said, “I could transform to bat form and carry you to safety. I would not eat you because you are my friend, and you would trust me for the same reason.”
I don’t know how I could help you if you were in trouble, but I would try.
“You can help us by enabling us to save your species,” Wetzel said. “That is our mission.”
Now will you have sex?
Wetzel and Vanja laughed.
“We had better do it slowly, and explain the steps, so she can understand it throughout,” Vanja said.
Wetzel approached her where she stood. He saw the mosquitoes perched on her hair, and hesitated.
“They won’t bite you,” Vanja said. “They don’t suck the blood of friends.”
He laughed. “Of course not. But do they get jealous?”
“They don’t care about what else I do. They don’t have the intellect or power of the scarabs. They are lesser creatures, content with their lot.”
“Then I will kiss you. This is a precursor to sex.” He held her close and kissed her.
I feel a surge of emotion.
“The kiss does arouse interest and expectation,” Wetzel said. “If she were not interested, she would avoid the kiss, or break away following it. It is a kind of courtship.”
Courtship?
“The man woos the woman,” Vanja explained. “He flatters her, so that she will give him sex. She knows that’s all he really wants, but she likes his attention anyway.”
Even if she is a virgin?
“Even then, normally. Why virgins don’t want sex with were-unicorns is a mystery.”
Because they know they will lose their virginity and his interest. So they make him work for it, giving them more attention than they would have otherwise.
“Mystery solved!” Vanja said appreciatively.
An insect had quickly solved a riddle Wetzel had not fathomed with all his thought? Maybe it came with the territory of being virginal or dead.
May I borrow your body?
Vanja smiled. “That depends on what you want to do with it.”
Not to do; to feel. I want to feel your feeling while you do the sex.
“Welcome.”
Thank you. I will reach for you with Wetzel’s telepathy, which is far stronger than mine.
Then something subtly changed. Vanja remained the same, physically, but her mood shifted. “Well, now,” she murmured. “That is strange and wonderful.”
Wetzel, still holding her, suddenly realized what it was. “You’re a virgin!” he exclaimed.
I am, LadyBug thought. Her body is not, but I am.
“It is the emotion that counts,” Wetzel said, his interest intensifying. “I pick it up telepathically.” He was embracing a virgin in spirit!
“Take it, LadyBug,” Vanja said, intrigued.
I do not know what to do. I thought only to watch and learn.
Vanja, reveling in the feeling, neither acted nor spoke. She was being a passive virgin, a prohibitively rare experience for her. She was largely lost in the wonder of it.
“I do know,” Wetzel said. “You can experience the sex for yourself.” He slid his hands down to Vanja’s sculptured bottom, squeezing the buttocks. “The feel of her flesh excites me,” he said, though LadyBug was surely reading that directly. “It makes my copulatory member swell.”
She was reading it. That excites this body too.
Then he drew back and put his mouth to her breasts, kissing the nipples. “This turns me on further.”
I do not know what that flesh is, or what it does, but your caress generates a hunger I have never before felt.
Then, unable to delay longer, he guided Vanja to the bed, laid her on her back, mounted her, and carefully entered her. “I am causing that member to penetrate her body. I am inserting it to its full length.” He kissed her as he drove into her core and spurted. “I am ejaculating!” he gasped. “The reproductive fluid is passing from me to her.”
Glorious!
“Glorious,” Vanja echoed, experiencing his orgasm via the telepathic connection. “So urgent! So robust! I never felt what a male feels.”
What does a female feel?
“We’ll show you,” Wetzel said. He withdrew, then moved down to put his face on Vanja’s cleft. He tongued it.
She was already well worked up. In moments she went into her own orgasm, her thighs clamping on his head. It was less intense than his, but lasted longer, and was fully as satisfying.
I am ready to die.
Both Wetzel and Vanja reacted with alarm. “Mating makes you fission!” Wetzel said.
I did not breed. I experienced your mating. I have no maleseed. I can’t fission.
They relaxed. “And we must find a scarab male for you to breed with,” Wetzel said. “And a safe haven for that breeding to occur. That is our mission.”
They lay for a while, the three of them savoring the experience. Then Wetzel thought of something. “You’re not a virgin any more, LadyBug,” he said regretfully.
But I am. My body has not been bred.
“But you just experienced two orgasms.”
They were yours, not mine. When I get mine, I will happily fission and die. At least now I know what it will be like.
Wetzel checked her mind. She was now that anomaly, an experienced virgin. “Amazing.”
“Wetzel, you have your permanent virgin!” Vanja said.
That made him pause. Could it be? But he realized that it wasn’t. “It is a mock-up, fashioned from a vampire and a beetle. Not someone I can marry and sire children with.”
“I could bear you babies.”
“But after LadyBug passes from the scene, either by breeding or old age, then the virginity would be gone, and I would have little interest in remaining with you, or you with me. We’re not for each other Vanja, in that manner.”
She sighed. “We’re not.”
We’re not, LadyBug agreed with similar regret.
“Meanwhile we still have serious problems to work out,” Wetzel said. “Such as how to find a male scarab, and how to locate a poacher-free world that is suitable for scarab reproduction.”
“Which do we do first?” Vanja asked. “Neither one is much good without the other.”
“Maybe the others can figure that out,” Wetzel said. “We’d better go rejoin them.”
He and Vanja transformed, and he galloped back along the path. It had been an interesting diversion, but now they did have work to do.
“What business do you have with the villagers?” Wetzel asked LadyBug, mentally vocalizing, as he could not speak in this form. It seemed to work well enough; it was the thought that counted, not the sound. “They avoid sex in the village so you won’t be repelled, but why should you go there anyway?”
When we die of old age or injury we go there. Ordinarily we would linger and be uncomfortable. They kill us quickly and painlessly. In return they get to squeeze us and use our shells.
“They get your juice?” he asked, surprised.
Yes. It is valuable to them.
“It is. They get a lot of money for it.”
Money?
“Wealth. They can buy many things they want.”
Buy?
Wetzel tried again. “The way you want to breed and fulfill your destiny, they want to get money. That is their fulfillment.”
Strange.
“We are not like scarabs,” he reminded her. “The poachers want money too. That’s why they chase you.”
We thought they just hated us.
“No, it’s for money. Money drives human cultures.”
Maybe in time, with your mind, I will comprehend that.
; Wetzel changed the subject. “Why are there so few scarab males?”
It is our way. One male breeds many females, so we need few males. We do not know who they are until the fourth molt. Maybe it is not decided until then. By that time only one in ten of us survives, and often there is no male left in that brood. There was none in mine. Of course I would not breed with a male of my own brood, but with a male of another brood. But they all bred elsewhere and none was left for me.
“So it may be hard for us to find a male.”
Very hard, she agreed.
“Those molts,” he asked. “What is their nature?”
They define the four stages of our existence. When we first appear, the result of the fissioning of our parent, we are very small. We float in air, drifting with the winds, eating what we encounter, slowly increasing our mass. It is our amoeba stage. When we become too large to float, we land on the ground and molt, assuming our second form. We are in our slug stage, crawling on slime to reach the flowers. We must find pollen to feed on so we can survive and grow. When we are large enough, after two or three years, we molt and form into our third form, caterpillars, with many legs, and can travel much faster and feed better. We grow again, and in another two to three years we molt and assume our adult form, with wings and shell. By ten years most of us are full scarabs. This is when we become male and female. We can breed at that point, immediately or any time before we die of old age. I am thirty; I have ten more years to breed if I am going to.
This is remarkable, Vanja thought. Wetzel had included her in the dialogue, but in bat form she could not speak in human language. LadyBug is a middle aged female. Then, to LadyBug: What are your males like? How do they breed you?
Wetzel kept mentally silent. Naturally the vampire was interested in sex, however it occurred. But he was curious too.
The male scarab is like the female, but larger. That makes him more obvious, and the poachers catch males more readily. To breed a female he pokes his snout into her nether crevice and pumps her so full of semen that she explodes.
“That must be a lot of semen!”
It almost matches her mass. That’s why it takes him a year to build up another load. She inflates, her every portion swelling, and holds together until the internal pressure is too great, then lets go and gloriously fissions.