- Emilia -

We're up right after dawn, and I feel totally refreshed and ready to face the day in a way that I never felt back at the cave where I hope the girls are still living.

I feel Ar'ox's large, warm presence beside me and smile. He sent me to sleep in the nicest way possible, and now I will wake him up in the same way.

His cock is rock hard and ready, the way most guys' will be in the mornings. I use just my mouth on it, taking it as far in as I can and again reminding myself that I seriously have to seduce him for real pretty damn soon.

He wakes up about halfway through, and then it doesn't take me long to bring him off. This time I leave his cock in there, letting him spray in my mouth. I kiss the tip of his outrageous dick and find the bathroom at the entrance to the cave, where there is also running water from those pipes that end up in the hollow salen trees.

When I return, he's still lying down, just looking at me with a sheepish smile on his face. “Emilia is wonderful. Are you really the Woman Messenger?”

Yeah, because let's not wait with the heavy topics until after breakfast. “It's ... difficult,” I say, wishing I knew the cavemanese word for 'complicated'. “There is food? Also, coffee?”

Well, a girl can try.

In the end, there is no coffee, but there is some decent fare in the shape of a stew and tepid water. I guess it's just as well. If he'd actually been able to come up with a pot of steaming latte, I would probably have converted to cavemanism here and now and cheerfully clung to him forever with tooth and nail.

Then we go to check out the Lifegivers. Sophia described them to me, and these look a lot like those.

They're basically plants, but they also have some animal in them, and probably some fungus stuff, too. They move and look weird, and they can provide a human fetus with everything it needs to grow to birth size.

Ar'ox peels away the layers of green and red leaves until I can see a translucent pod with what is clearly a human fetus inside, suspended in a cloudy liquid.

It's a fascinating sight, and I feel that I could stare at it all day. “Only boys come out?”

“Toh. Only boys. No girls, no women.”

“That's why you want women come back, so don't need use these things.”

“We want women back so that we will be happy again, and so that the Ancestors will smile on us.”

“You not happy, way things are?”

He shrugs. “How can we be happy without women? Something is lacking from life, something essential. I've always felt it. What is the point of this life if all we do is ... hunt and stay alive? I still can't express it right. Not everyone feels like me.”

“Does shaman want women back?”

He looks out onto the jungle. “I thought we all wanted that. Now I'm not so sure.”

The fetus in the pod moves his little arms. He can't be far from the day when the tribe will take him out of it to no great fanfare.

“Ar'ox, what will tribe do Emilia? What is myth about women?”

He looks at me with no expression. “I talked about that with Gur'ex last night. The myth says that the man who finds the Woman Messenger will be her Mate, and that he will give her a precious Gift. She then sees that our tribe is worthy of getting its women back, so she gives him a gift, too. Then she will go and tell our women that, so they will return to us. But of course you know that.”

“And you hesitant bring me back to my home because you think you fail, and women not come.”

“Yes. Did you change your mind?”

The fetus moves a little more inside its pod. I've heard that fetuses don't sleep all the time in the womb – they're awake at times too, and they can even hear things through the amniotic fluid. I idly wonder if this unborn boy will remember anything about this conversation.

How much should I tell Ar'ox? Is it safe to trust him about the cave and the girls? And the fact that I'm not this mythical messenger chick at all? Will he understand that he's already given me the gift of safety on a deadly planet?

I close the leaf and leave the fetus alone. He will have his own problems. No need to bother him with mine. “No. Still want go home. But also want see tribe Ar'ox.”

He juts his jaw out. He thinks I'm the Messenger, and some day I'll tell him that I'm not. Maybe I should know what will happen to me here before I do anything. I'm still not convinced that the 'gift' they keep talking about is anything I've ever wished for. And I don't think that Ar'ox knows what it is yet.

I look up at the houses in the hillside over us. They look good from a distance, absolutely. But close up, they're worn and not too well maintained. The water pipes are leaky and broken in places, the paths among the houses are washed out and look more like dry creeks than something that's intended to be walked on.

We start to walk back.

I point at some boys following us, and they smile and yell happily at the attention. “Is everything well in village? Boys look thin.”

Ar'ox glances at them. “Our hunts have been harder. We must travel further in the jungle to find prey. The good prey is not to be found at all.”

“Know why?”

He hesitates. “Some say the Ancestors are angry and they're making the hunts unsuccessful. Others think that we've just hunted the woods empty near the village and the Smalls avoid it now.”

“How about Bigs? One Big feed village many days.”

He shrugs. “The village was placed here because Bigs don't come to walk all over it and destroy. When I hunt Bigs far away, I can't bring all the meat back.”

That makes sense. “Fruits, vegetables?”

“You've seen the jungle. Not much of edible plants. Meat gives more energy for hunters and boys.”

“You guys seriously need to invent farming,” I say in English. And as soon as I say it, I know that's the solution. On Earth, in the stone age, only travelling tribes could make a living hunting bison and mammoths and reindeer. They had to follow their prey's migrations and couldn't build cities. That could only happen after they invented farming. I know that because I've read Clan of the Cave Bear and it spurred me on to do a little more reading online.

And right now I'll guess that the only ones on this whole planet who've ever thought along those lines is me and the other girls. It's easy to take the idea for granted, but there's a good chance these guys just haven't thought about planting seeds and harvesting whatever comes up from the dirt.

Well, it's not like I'm a farming expert. I couldn't tell the difference between a grain of barley and a fidget spinner. But it seems to me that it might be possible to find a plant or two and then see if they have seeds and then plant them. And to try to find animals that can be kept and milked and so on. If it works, it might make me useful for the village. And for the girls, too, when I see them again.

But I'd like to know how bad the problem is. “Can see food stores?”

He shrugs and takes me to a house in the middle of the village. Inside there is a very large cave containing many wooden bins and crates and nets hanging from the ceiling. Most of them are completely empty, and the handful of primitive containers that have anything in them are not even half full. If this tribe functions anything like our little cave community, then everything the tribe has is kept here, and nobody keeps much in their own caves.

“Not much here,” I say, trying to keep my voice neutral. I am actually really alarmed.

“Not much,” Ar'ox agrees. “Hunters are expected later in the day, and will bring enough for the tribe.”

“But if not, and if for other reason not bring food every day, then have no more. No ...” I try to think of a suitable word.

“Reserves?” Ar'ox suggests. “True.”

“Was always like this?”

He looks around the cave, and I get the feeling he hasn't seen this for the disaster that it is before now.

“Deh. When I was a boy, the food stores had more in them. And even then, much was thrown away when it was no longer completely fresh. Today, everything is eaten.”

“How long can keep tribe alive? When hunt not going well?”

He scratches his chin. “Not long.”

We walk out into the alien sunshine. Most of the boys have had their curiosity satisfied, and only a handful of them are still trailing us a respectful distance away. Their clothes are torn and dirty.

Would it kill this village to plant some nice flowers outside their houses and in the communal areas? Even back at the cave, we have a couple of nice flower beds by the entrance.

We've walked around the whole village now, and I'm starting to see decay and problems everywhere. The wall is broken in some places, and other places the wood is rotting. I can tell from hundreds of old tree stumps that the jungle used to be much further away, but now the cavemen have let it encroach on them until there are trees that lean over the wall and into the town.

After a while I see the reason. Far too many of the men here seem to be idle. I suppose that the duty to go out and hunt may circulate among them, so that not every man is out every day. But in a well-ordered tribe, I would expect every man to do something on their days off. Ar'ox did say that they all have some other task, like making fabric and weapons. But as it is, most of them are sitting around outside their houses in little groups, just chatting the day away. They're not old, either.

“What they do?” I ask and point to one of the groups.

“They talk and relax,” Ar'ox says. “Hunters must relax sometimes.”

“How many men hunt every day?”

He thinks. “All must hunt, except the very old and sick and the shaman. Many men hunt each day.”

“How many?” I persist. “As many this?” I hold up ten fingers.

“Toh. Maybe some days this many.” He holds up eight fingers.

Huh. Ten guys a day is about one percent of the population, because I think they're about a thousand men here. If each man hunts once every ten days, which seems like a pretty leisurely schedule, that's still only ten percent of them hunting at all. Back at the cave, I was worried because I felt like a freeloader. But this tribe is pretty much all freeloaders.

It's not that I can blame them. That jungle is scary. But say what you will about my mooching on the other girls, I wasn't sitting around just chilling. I made sure to do something that at least could be useful. Here, they don't. And it's killing their society.

“How often Ar'ox hunt? Every day?”

He frowns and looks around at all the little groups. I've given him something to think about, that's obvious. Then he juts his jaw out, and I think I see anger in his eyes. They're even more fiery than usual. “Toh.”

I take his hand and look up at him. He's too honest and active to have seen it before now, too busy doing his part and then some. But this he really should understand, because to me it's too obvious and too serious to ignore.

“Not many men hunt,” I state quietly. “Most relax only. Every day.”