Their Human Vessel

by Lizzy Bequin

  Corrie was shouting a mile a minute, and she couldn’t tell if Vorne was even listening. More than anything, she just needed to vent, but the alien warrior’s nonchalance about the whole thing was beyond infuriating.

  Vorne stepped down from the chariot.

  “Do not be concerned, Corrie. You will be provided with clothing soon.”

  Corrie let her arms fall to her side, and she sighed with exasperation. Was that really Vorne’s big takeaway from her little rant?

  Still, clothing did sound nice.

  Speechless, she turned and looked out of the huge opening of the carved hanger. There were other structures outside—balconies, and windows on the other side of the canyon, as well as bridges of volcanic stone and green lava-falls.

  She had seen the city blurring past on their insane descent, but now she was really able to take in its magnificence.

  Corrie couldn’t deny, now that it had passed, that their entrance into the canyon and their landing had been exciting. There was something undeniably attractive about the way Vorne had held her so strongly and protectively as he masterfully guided the strange form of transportation.

  Corrie hopped down from the chariot, carefully sidestepped the little mess she had made on the ground, and went to the front where Vorne was leading the drashegar forward toward a thick bed of purple moss. The creature seemed to be feeding on these growths with a mouth hidden somewhere on its flat, smooth underbelly. Vorne was petting and patting the beast lovingly like a man would do with a favorite horse.

  “I mean, did you have to swoop in here so fast?” Corrie asked. “Couldn’t you have landed a little bit slower instead of going all Evel Knievel on me?”

  “Drashegars can’t go slow,” Vorne said matter-of-factly, as if everyone knew that.

  Corrie just sighed again and shook her head. She wanted to be angry with him, but she was too overcome now with the strange beauty of this place. The architecture was at once primitive and elaborate.

  With their own drashegar similarly feeding, Xalleus and Grekh approached.

  Xalleus gazed at Corrie with that icy, predatory stare that made her shiver and prickle with goosebumps. He had removed his bandages earlier, and Corrie was shocked to see that his shotgun wound was already completely healed. These aliens truly were tough and resilient.

  Grekh looked at where Corrie had puked, and he frowned.

  “Koh-ree throw up,” he said, struggling with the words.

  “Yes, thank you for pointing that out, Grekh,” Corrie said sarcastically.

  As soon as she had spoken the words, Corrie regretted her tone. Grekh was genuinely concerned about her. He seemed to be the only one of the trio of aliens who wasn’t a complete dick. There was something almost boyish about him, although Corrie had no doubt, under the right circumstances he could be every bit as violent and ferocious as she had seen both Xalleus and Vorne be.

  “Come,” Vorne said.

  He gripped Corrie forcefully by her arm and led her out of the hangar through a high arched door that led into a vaulted corridor. Xalleus and Grekh followed close behind.

  Corrie couldn’t tell whether she felt protected or like she was a prisoner of war.

  As they led her deeper into the city, she began to realize just how vast this network of passages and chambers really was. She wondered how old this city was. It seemed ancient, and yet nothing was in ruins, and everything looked as if it could have been carved yesterday.

  But the emptiness and quietude of the city was disconcerting.

  The place was empty. A ghost city carved into the living stone.

  At last, however, she recognized one sign of life. The sound of music—it sounded like a stringed instrument, but not quite like anything Corrie had ever heard before. The only thing she could compare it to was the dreamy, droning sound of an Indian sitar.

  It was a few minutes before they finally arrived at the source of the music.

  The room was circular, with a low, flat dome worked all over with fractal patterns and lit by dim lanterns positioned around the walls. The floor was polished smooth, but it was riven by natural cracks from which emerged thin, pale green vapors. In the middle of the room was a broad dais, and upon the dais sat a hunched and naked figure with its bony back to them.

  “Greetings Grandmother,” Vorne called out in English. “Grekh and I have returned from our reconnaissance.”

  The hunched figured emitted a cold chuckle, but did not turn around. The trance-inducing music continued.

  “You address me in the human tongue, Vorne? Perhaps you have been scouting around the human facility for too long.”

  Unlike Vorne’s voice, the Listener’s held no trace of an accent. It was a strong yet decidedly feminine contralto, rich, clear, and betraying no sign of age. It could have been a movie star’s voice. It echoed around the chamber for several seconds after she had finished speaking.

  “Our excursion has been fruitful, Grandmother,” Vorne said, still using English. “We have brought back an escapee from the human seed farm.” His fist squeezed a little tighter around Corrie’s arm. “And...something else.”

  The dark figure on the dais froze, and the music stopped abruptly. The withered back and nobby spine went rigid. The ghost of the final chord reverberated gradually into nothingness. A long, impossibly skinny arm reached out and set the long stringed instrument aside.

  “Something else, you say?”

  The Listener raised her head, and Corrie heard the sounds of snuffling as the being tested the air. Corrie knew it was her scent the Listener was seeking.

  “Ah, yes,” that deep yet feminine voice said. “Something else indeed.”

  The Listener turned, and when Corrie saw her face, a startled scream escaped her trembling lips.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Be quiet,” Vorne hissed. “Show some respect.”

  But Corrie had already stopped screaming. In fact, it wasn’t even really a scream so much as a yelp of surprise that echoed around the domed chamber.

  Corrie didn’t know what she had been expecting when it came to Vorne and Grekh’s grandmother, the Listener, but it certainly wasn’t the being that stood before her now. The alien’s appearance had startled her at first, but now Corrie’s fright was transitioning into a timid curiosity.

  And for her part, the Listener did not seem offended by Corrie’s little outburst. Her alien face was serene as she approached the group through the shrouds of vapor rising from the cracks in the floor.

  Although she was more or less humanoid, the old Terramaran female was far more alien than her grandsons in appearance. She was every inch as tall as the males, and had her spine not been hunched with age, she would have been even taller than them. Her arms were inhumanly long and lanky. Her naked body had neither breasts nor visible genitals to mark her out as a female, and yet there was something distinctly feminine in the lines of her face. Her skin was the same dark, slate-blue hue as the alien males, and her eyes burned with the same eerie green fire, but her facial features were much different. She had a head that was at once ovoid and angular, and a pair of horns, smaller than the males, jutted from her brow.

  Such was the strange creature that slinked toward Corrie, emerald eyes fixed with intense curiosity on the human female that her progeny had brought into its sanctum.

  Corrie shuddered under the Listener’s gaze. Had Vorne not been holding her tightly, she would have backed away.

  The Terramaran female’s nose, little more than two slits on its flat face, continuously snuffled Corrie’s scent. The being circled her, paused briefly to regard Xalleus and his broken horn, then turned her attention back to the human—the true object of her curiosity.

  “Very good,” the Listener said, still speaking perfect English, obviously for Corrie’s benefit. “She smells ripe, this one. Ripe for breeding.”

  Corrie cringed as the Listener’s knobby fingers grazed her arm. Next those fingers touched her breasts, and the creature’s eyes seemed to glo
w a little brighter with amusement at those two pieces of female anatomy that her species did not share.

  Then, before Corrie even had a chance to react, the Listener’s hand dipped, a lightning quick motion, and one finger was inserted into Corrie’s vagina, searching around her walls.

  “Hey, what the fuck!” Corrie tried to struggle away, but Vorne held her fast.

  There was nothing sexual about the Listener’s touch. It was cold, clinical, and curious in a purely exploratory sense. The bony fingertip worked deep until it prodded Corrie’s cervix.

  “Ow!” Corrie cried out.

  The Listener regarded her reaction impassively. After a moment, she withdrew her long finger from Corrie’s hole, sniffed it.

  “Yes, yes. Very ripe. Very ripe, indeed.”

  Those green eyes, glowing even brighter than Vorne’s, Grekh’s, or Xalleus’s, raised to stare deeply into Corrie’s face.

  “You have already bred her.” Though looking at Corrie, the old alien was clearly speaking to Vorne. “She has already been seasoned. Dangerous. Most dangerous.”

  Seasoned? This woman—for that was how Corrie thought of her, despite her inhuman appearance—was talking about Corrie like she was a piece of meat.

  After that unwanted exploration, Corrie felt her blood rising, and against her better judgement, she started to talk back in an angry tone.

  “Look, I don’t know who you think you are, but you can’t—“

  The Listener raised one gnarled hand, and as if by magic, Corrie found herself growing quiet. Though the Listener’s expression remained mask-like, a low, throaty chuckle rumbled up from inside her.

  The dissonance of the Listener’s blank expression combined with the mirthful sound of her laughter was disturbing.

  “You ask who I think that I am? I think that I am Gulnara, the Listener of Ashlar. And what about you, human? What is your name?”

  “My name is Corrie. Corrie Pedersen.”

  “Corrie Pedersen,” Gulnara repeated, pronouncing the name with ease, unlike the male aliens. “And why have you come here, Corrie Pedersen?”

  “Why do you think?” Corrie was defiant, but her voice trembled on the edge of tears. “Vorne captured me and brought me here. Grekh too, and Xalleus.”

  “No.” Gulnara’s tone went cold. “I mean, why are you on this planet? Why have you come to Terramara?”

  Corrie sighed.

  She had already been through all of this with Vorne once before. Now she had to explain it all over again. How she had come to this planet secretly, using an elaborate disguise and faked documents. How she was not really working for Galen Group and how her whole goal was to expose the atrocities involved in the production of Juvanis. Her break-in to the seed farming facility. Her shocking discovery of how Juvanis was collected, what it really was. If she ever got out of this mess and got around to writing a book about this whole experience, she would already have a lot of practice telling the story.

  Gulnara listened silently, listened to every word. Her flat, dark, alien face was placid through it all. As Corrie spoke, the alien’s eyes gradually narrowed until they were little more than green slits, and Corrie wondered if the creature hadn’t dozed off.

  When her story was through, however, those eyes snapped open with a startling wakefulness. Gulnara waited, letting the silence ripen. The only movement in the domed chamber came from the plumes of vapor rising from the cracks in the floor.

  At last, Gulnara spoke.

  “No, human, that is not why you are here.”

  “It’s not?”

  Why the hell was the alien woman contradicting her? Corrie hadn’t lied about anything, and she hadn’t omitted any important details. Just like a good journalist, she had told the whole story, and she had told it as objectively as humanly possible.

  But a strange emotion swept over Corrie, because she felt on some intuitive level that the ancient alien was right. All along she had felt there was something more to her mission here. Something more than just getting a big scoop for her news outlet back home on Earth.

  “I’ll tell you why you are here, child,” Gulnara went on. “You are here because I have called you here.”

  “Called me?”

  Gulnara gestured to Vorne, and the alien warrior let go of Corrie’s arm, which was now prickling with pins and needles from the tightness of his grip. Corrie had hardly even noticed that because she had been so focused on Vorne’s grandmother instead. Now, Corrie rubbed the life back into her arm and gave Vorne an indignant glance.

  Gulnara trudged to a nearby crack in the floor, and inhaled deeply the fumes wafting from below. She let out a big sigh.

  “These vapors originate deep in the bowels of this planet. They are filled with spoors from a particular species of fungi that thrive in deep underground spring wells that are far too hot for any other living thing to survive. These spoors, when inhaled, have certain mind expanding properties, and they grant me prescience.”

  “You mean you can see into the future.”

  “I can hear into the future. The stars speak to me, child, just as they have spoken to all of the women of our species.” Gulnara lifted her head, studying the carved dome. “For that is what the stars are, human. They are the spirits of our female ancestors.”

  Corrie followed Gulnara’s gaze, and she realized for the first time that the domed ceiling was actually a planetarium, inset with glittering facets of volcanic glass to represent the stars and constellations.

  “Yes, they speak.” For the first time, something resembling an emotion came over Gulnara’s face, something that Corrie recognized as sadness. “These days their voices are very quiet, but I still hear them just the same.”

  Those green eyes turned toward Corrie and blazed again.

  “And they told me you were coming.”

  “But I thought you said you called me.”

  Corrie sensed Vorne tense slightly beside her. Perhaps he didn’t like her questioning his grandmother. Corrie was also aware of Grekh and Xalleus standing behind her, somewhere nearby.

  Gulnara chuckled.

  “Yes, it’s true. Though I didn’t know it was you I was calling. But for a long time I have sat in this chamber, breathing these vapors, projecting my thoughts outward to the void. Like a message in a bottle, as you humans say. So many messages I’ve sent. So many bottles. And finally one of them found its way to you.”

  Corrie shook her head. This old alien woman was mad. She had spent a long time breathing these vapors all right, and it had obviously fried her brain.

  Something resembling a smile curled Gulnara’s lipless mouth.

  “In dreams, child. In dreams.”

  Corrie’s heart skipped. Her stomach fluttered and her mind reeled. In the weeks leading up to her arrival on Terramara, she had been plagued with dreams, dark dreams of the most obscene and carnal variety.

  Could it really be?

  As Corrie thought back on those dreams, she realized that they had indeed begun shortly before she had hatched her plan to come to this planet and investigate Galen and Juvanis.

  A few days ago, Corrie would never been willing to accept that she could have been called here through her dreams. But after everything she had been through these past days, it didn’t seem so crazy after all.

  “Okay,” Corrie said, “assuming you did call me here, why did you do it?”

  “Terramara needs your womb,” Gulnara answered. “There are no females left on our planet. None but me, and my own fertility is long gone. All the other females were wiped out by your people decades ago.”

  “My people?” Corrie gasped.

  Gulnara turned and looked at Vorne.

  “You didn’t tell her?”

  Vorne answered in his deep, rumbling voice, “I explained to her that all of the Terramaran females were extinct, but I didn’t tell her exactly how.” Then, somewhat guiltily, he added. “There was not much time for talking, Grandmother. We were very busy.”

  Gulnara
snorted.

  “Busy indeed.” She turned back to Corrie. “It was a disease created by the Galen Group, a biological weapon designed specifically to exterminate all of the females on Terramara. It worked exceedingly well. I am the only one who survived.”

  Corrie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The fact that Galen Group was imprisoning the Terramaran males to exploit them for their seed, that was awful enough. But the fact that they had wiped out the females of this species on purpose? That was even worse. That was genocide.

  “But why?” Corrie’s voice was shaky with emotion. “Why did they do it? Why did Galen kill the females? I thought it was just the males’ seed that they wanted.”

  “Precisely, child. Precisely.”

  Gulnara took Corrie by the arm. At first, Corrie flinched away, but the alien’s touch was gentle. She led Corrie slowly around the room, speaking as they went. The three males followed closely behind.

  “At first, the humans bartered with us for our Terramaran seed. We were happy to give up some small quantity of the stuff in exchange for human technology. After all, there was more than enough seed left over. Our males produce their fluid in such copious amounts, as you well know.”

  Heat rushed into Corrie’s cheeks, and she looked away. She most certainly did know.

  Gulnara continued.

  “It did not take long, however, before the humans became greedy. They wanted more seed than we Terramarans were willing to supply. And they wanted it for free. They tried to enslave our people, but the Terramarans are proud and fierce warriors. Or at least we once were. But for Terramaran males, nothing is more important than their family—their mates and their offspring. The humans saw a weakness that could be exploited. Once the females had been eradicated through disease, the males lost their way. They saw no future for our species. The great societies of Terramara disintegrated into wandering bands of savages who were much more easily captured and enslaved by the human overlords. Divide and conquer. Now they keep them in farms, replenishing their stock through cloning.”