Space Bound: A Dragon Soul Press Anthology

by J. E. Feldman

  “Xeno-biology is a complex and variegated subject,” the professor continued. “Labyrinthine, one might say. In no way is it compatible with tardiness. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Clearer than the crystal lakes of Tardon Five, sir,” I said.

  Cynthia pulled in her voluptuous lips to stifle a laugh.

  “As I was saying before our latecomers brought a halt to proceedings, my name is Professor Alden Jones, but on my home planet, I do not have a name. In fact, my species does not communicate through sound at all. If you hope to succeed in xeno-biology, you must let go of any and all assumptions that what is common to your species will be common to others…”

  Neither I nor Cynthia turned out to be a xeno-biology whiz. I fell in love with a visual arts elective and flunked out. Cynthia had more than adequate intellect to find her way through Professor Jones’ “labyrinthine” course, but she, too, got side-tracked – which we’ll get to shortly.

  We soon discovered we had much more in common than xeno-biology. We were both orphans, for one thing.

  My parents were aboard a pleasure cruiser when it blundered into freak meteor storm. A rescue effort recovered a few hundred survivors from the mangled wreckage, but Mum and Dad were among the ten thousand dead. Two years on, I had resumed my life, although I still suffered occasional self-destructive urges. To put a finer point on it, when I was eighteen going on nineteen, I decided I could fuck my way to happiness.

  Cynthia had never known her parents and no one else knew who they were, either. Her earliest memories entailed a refugee station that orbited Janus Prime. She and a human boy there became like brother and sister, before she joined an Earth family on a colony just outside the solar system. They still kept in touch and the two families sometimes got together on birthdays and holidays. Although Cynthia’s was not a conventional childhood, it was not an unhappy one. More demons dwelled in my heart than hers.

  We looked different – she was short, about five-three, and I was taller with a long-boned appearance and straight hair – but something about the two of us together seemed to attract men across the spectrum. That was what I thought at the time, anyway. It was almost an equation: Cynthia + Aurealia = Sexual Allure. Earth schools were the main feeder for MWC University, so potential human males were plentiful.

  The university alone had three clubs catering to every whim and taste and it was only a quick shuttle ride into the city, where a girl looking to score would find a dozen more.

  We were friends for about three months before we went clubbing the first time. We didn’t even go out ‘on the pull’ that night, as I recall. A group of girls at our lunch table simply invited us to join them at Ayr’s Rockhouse that night, our eyes met, and we agreed.

  Loud music thrummed the wall as we joined the line to get into the Rockhouse. One time in its life, the club had played rock music, but now it was all about bass beats. We were a group of five girls and the guy at the door waved us to the front, much to the irritation of the men ahead of us. A set of dimly lit stairs led up to a long central bar. We congregated around an unoccupied table and two girls visited the bar, returning with drinks for us all. Conversation had not warmed beyond small talk before the first guys came circling.

  Two that night, both tall, both well-built, smiles that glowed in the club’s black lighting. They didn’t even look at the other girls. I assumed it was the ‘me and Cynthia’ alchemy; an appealing yin and yang.

  One pointed to Cynthia’s glass and said, “Too late to buy you a drink?”

  She smiled – hers made his look like a guttering candle – and said, “I’ve got two hands.”

  Not another word passed between us and the other girls in our group. David and his friend (whose name I’ve forgotten) plied us with drinks as we danced for a while. Then we consumed more drinks and, in a giggling haze, made our way back to the dormitory. There were no shared rooms at Em Dub (our shorthand for the university’s name), but Cynthia and I weren’t far apart – mine was beside the stairwell on level three, hers beside the stairwell on level four. If I shouted up the stairway, Cynthia could hear me from her room. We parted at the level-three landing and I took whatever-his-name-was to my bed while Cynthia and David made their way to hers. Before they left my sight, David collapsed against the bannister and Cynthia almost pounced on him, her lips consuming his and her petite hand cupping his crotch.

  I don’t know about David, but my guy did the walk of shame a short while after midnight. It hadn’t been bad sex; it had just been…sex. When it was done, we were just two tired and sobering strangers.

  I said as much to Cynthia the next morning over a late lunch at the Em Dub cafeteria. I blamed No Name, dismissing him as an unimaginative lover, but down the line, I came to understand my ugly frame of mind was the real culprit. Take it from me and every porn star that ever lived: you can’t fuck your way to happiness if you don’t love the person you’re fucking.

  Cynthia, on the other hand, seemed to sparkle, as though she were a cut jewel and the night’s exertions had polished her to a high sheen. “He was enormous,” she said, leaning across the table, almost gloating.

  “Length or girth?”

  “Both.”

  I sipped my coffee. “Do you think you’ll see him again?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  A few days later, Cynthia said she planned to meet up with him during a three-hour break between classes. We didn’t cross paths again until Friday morning and I waited in vain for her to bring up the subject. I thought about prodding her a little after xen-bio, but before I could, she said, “Are we going out tonight?”

  “Sure, if you want to. I kinda thought…”

  “I want to check out the Constellation Club in the city,” she said, ignoring my verbal ellipsis. “Meant to be nice, tons of single guys.”

  I smiled. “Sounds like a plan. Meet you at the stairs at eight?”

  The shuttle’s motors made a low hum as they whisked us towards the city. I had spent most of my life on Earth and I still marveled at my new planet’s craggy landscape that appeared almost iridescent green under the blaze of artificial lights. In dark areas, the sky swirled with alien constellations. During the day, however, a nearby red dwarf star dispelled this ersatz magic, revealing a weather-beaten land whose only real richness came in the form of copper. The city had been built on a natural wasteland to minimize its ecological impact and, although the atmosphere could support human life, nothing dwelled there save for a few subterranean lifeforms. On the planet’s northern pole, a mining concern operated under the auspices of an Earth-based company, which donated a considerable annual benevolence to the university.

  Like us, most other passengers were young and heading out for a good time. Cynthia and I talked a little during the shuttle ride, but she only seemed half there. Sometimes, her eyes darted around. They reminded me of a crow’s eyes as it stalked worms and bugs. I would see that gaze again and again in the weeks to come, but that night I thought nothing of it.

  We arrived at our stop, only a short walk from the Constellation. Cynthia set off along the pavement as though her feet were on fire and she could see a bucket of water. Even with my longer strides, I had to sort of power-walk to keep up.

  “You thirsty, girl?” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  The Constellation Club was a lot more laidback than the Rockhouse and the man on the door just gave us a short nod as Cynthia skipped up the stairs. It was the preferred haunt for men on ‘shore leave’ from the mine and the place crawled with large arms, stubbled faces, hungry eyes. But no pair of eyes looked hungrier than Cynthia’s. She might have been a lioness studying a herd of wildebeest. I placed a hand on her shoulder. She seemed to be burning up.

  “Are you okay, Cyn?”

  She turned abruptly, stared at me, nodded once. Twice. Her whole form subsided beneath my hand, as though an air compressor had been switched off. “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Vodka and lime
?”

  “Make it two. No sense lining up again.”

  By the time I returned, she had worked her magnetism. I placed the drinks on our table, then stood back to sip one and watch Cynthia go. The two miners, friends I assumed, were basking – I’d even say bathing – in her presence. No magician had ever kept children in greater thrall. They grinned and laughed and did not seem the least perturbed that Cynthia’s eyes kept twitching downward.

  Her drinks stood on the table untouched and weeping condensation. She led both miners to the far side of the club and began to dance with them. Actually, dance was a euphemism; she skipped all niceties and began to grind her hips into theirs, first one, then the other. Whenever the strobing lights illuminated the miners’ faces, I caught snapshots of sappy grins and erupting lust. Cynthia pulled one in close, fondled his crotch, then swiveled and did the same to the other. Apparently, she preferred what she felt beneath the jeans of Miner Two, because she caught his wrist and hot-footed it towards the toilets, tugging him along behind her. Miner One stood alone on the dance floor, looking crestfallen and nonplussed, then began to shuffle off.

  In my direction.

  “Strike out, big fella?”

  He gave me a weak smile. “I guess so.”

  “Come to try for the consolation prize?”

  He shrugged. “I was just…I didn’t know where else to go.”

  He looked like a forlorn puppy – a forlorn puppy with huge biceps – so I took pity on him and we got talking. His name was Damon and he did indeed earn a living in the mines. His twinkly eyes belied the snail brain behind them, but he seemed nice and by the time Cynthia and her new friend returned from the restrooms, I had finished my drinks – and hers – and begun on another that Damon had bought for me. The strobe lights started to leave colored trails across my retinas.

  Cynthia approached the table, her arm around her miner’s waist and his across her shoulders. She looked satiated. After studying her a while through tipsy eyes, I decided the right adjective was relieved. “Urgent call of nature?” I asked.

  “Something like that.” She arched an eyebrow. “Thirsty, were you?”

  Cynthia’s facetious rejoinder pissed me off more than it should have. Because, even though she and her miner were all over each other, Damon’s eyes had begun to wander, you see. I gulped down the rest of my drink and guided him towards the exit. If I’m honest, it was more drag than guide.

  When we were out in the cooling night air, I said, “Where are you staying?”

  He named an apartment tower I had never heard of.

  “Take me there.”

  We got down to it on the apartment’s wide-bodied lounge, but I was only fucking to fuck and I have no doubt Cynthia still troubled his mind. Neither of us even bothered to fake an orgasm; Damon just noted the growing tedium on my face and withdrew. He sat on the lounge staring into space while I dressed.

  “I guess I’ll see you around,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  I left the apartment and rode home alone on the shuttle, my head already thudding with an impending hangover.

  Some women can hold grudges till the end of time, even when they’re wrong, but I’m not one of them. I slept through most of Sunday and then early Monday morning, I went upstairs to Cynthia’s room and knocked on the door. When she opened it, I said, “Can this bitch buy you some breakfast?”

  She smiled and said, “I should be buying. I’m sorry I went off and left you like that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.”

  We went Dutch on some buttered toast and coffee. Outside, the red dwarf waxed across the sky, sending down the closest thing to an Earth summer I had seen since moving to the Em Dub planet. Later, when we made the short walk to the xen-bio lecture theatre, the warmth I felt for my friend and a natural post-hangover high put me in fine spirits.

  Even listening to Professor Jones drone on about the complexity of applying traditional Earth classifications to alien zoology had a certain intellectual wholesomeness. After about twenty minutes, however, I began to notice Cynthia fidgeting in her seat. First, she merely shifted around, as if trying to get comfortable, but after Professor Jones’ monologue had burned past the half hour, she began to squirm.

  “Are you okay, Cyn?” I whispered.

  She replied with a single curt nod, eyes staring.

  I began to sweat just sitting next to her. During the lecture’s final minutes, it seemed her very atoms had become agitated. When at last the professor dismissed us, she sprang from her seat. I pursued her into the corridor.

  “Cynthia, what’s the matter with you?”

  She glanced at me sidelong, never slowing her pace, and said, “I need to fuck. Now.”

  Her words brought me to a halt. Bemused and worried, but unsure what to do, I let her streak away down the corridor.

  Late that afternoon, I was in my room pulling together research materials for an assignment. I had left it until the last minute – an effective motivator, but not so good for my stress levels. Just as I was taking a crack at an opening paragraph, there came a knock at the door. I got up to answer it, praying it wasn’t some student council prat eager to avail me of his political cause.

  It was Cynthia. She had lost that ants-in-her-pants jitteriness but she still looked wired, strung out. Light charcoal crescents underlined her eyes. “We need to go out,” she said.

  “Go out? It’s Monday, Cyn. I have an assignment to finish. To start, actually. You know I’m always up for a good time, but—”

  “I’ll go out on my own, if I have to.” It sounded like an ultimatum or emotional blackmail and I found myself bristling. “But I’d rather have you with me.”

  I ran a hand through my hair. “There’s nothing open on a Monday, anyway.”

  “I know a place.”

  “What place?”

  “The Five Moons Bar.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s on the far side of town. We won’t stay long, I promise. Come on, please.”

  I sighed. “Oh, all right. Come in while I get changed.”

  She sat on the foot of my bed and stared into the large mirror opposite. She didn’t appear to like the reflection.

  “So, what’s the great emergency?” I asked, peeling off my old T-shirt. “I thought you dashed off for a quickie after xen-bio this morning?”

  “I did,” she said dismally.

  “Didn’t match up to nasty toilet sex?”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  “What then?”

  “He wasn’t…big enough.”

  I paused in running a brush through my hair. “Not big enough? You didn’t look too disappointed last night.”

  “I wasn’t, that was the thing. He was big. And last night it felt like it. But this morning…”

  She looked at me with those ash-bag eyes, as though imploring me to help, to make sense of it. But I was the last person to ask for advice on satisfying sex.

  “It was like he had shrunk overnight,” she said at last.

  “Don’t they say it’s mostly in your head? If you think you’re going to have a good time, you will?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s all it is.”

  She didn’t sound like she believed that, though, and when we arrived at the Five Moons Bar, I knew she didn’t. Light-skinned faces of any variety were almost non-existent and I stood there feeling a little ill (drinking a vodka, lime, and soda to be polite) as the guys came to her like flies to a day-old carcass. I learned, after chatting to one who could bear to draw his eyes away from Cyn for a few minutes, that they were mostly African nationals who worked for an excavation contractor with a big stake in the mines. It had set up the Five Moons to help its staff feel at home while they were light-years from Earth. It was more a social club than a bar, and most nights the men and women simply socialized to keep in touch with their culture and traditions. But the moment Cynthia set foot in the place, every man forgot that.

  S
he landed herself the one she wanted. I refrained that night. Another ten minutes of miserable lovemaking offered no appeal. As we left, I asked Cynthia to let me know when she got back to her dorm safely.

  Which she did around midnight, in person. I was pleased for the distraction from scrapping away at my essay. “How was it?”

  “Amazing,” she said. “He was enormous. I thought something was going to tear.”

  That seemed a strange thing to be happy about, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

  The whole saga reached its climax the following Friday evening. Cynthia had been as restive as a rabbit in a field full of foxes. She could barely hold a conversation, let alone concentrate in class. ‘Constant distraction’ was the phrase that occurred to me. Another student told me she had bailed out of her mid-week astronomy class; just jumped up and left, ignoring repeated queries from her rather put-out lecturer. I never asked her about that, but in retrospect, I believe she returned to the Five Moons to see what she could wangle into her bed. She must not have found much satisfaction because by Friday morning, she was almost out of her mind.

  I went up to see her before classes because I was worried about the astronomy incident. When she opened the door, my heart jolted. Her hair stood out in a frizzy black halo and the ashen smudges beneath her eyes had spread all the way to her cheekbones. She appeared drawn, almost wasted, as though a parasite had sapped her vitality. When she saw me, she forced a smile. It scratched deep crow’s feet into her face.

  “Jesus, Cyn,” I said. “What are you doing to yourself? Are you getting any sleep?”

  “Not much,” she admitted.

  I glanced past her into the room and on her dresser, like some obscene black tower in a field of snow, stood a dildo. She noted my line of sight and winced.

  “That didn’t help?”

  “It’s just not the same.”

  Seeing her that way helped me see things as they were. She had fallen into a tailspin and I had been her neurotic co-pilot, standing by while she pushed the throttle forward even harder.