by D. Tolmach
He found himself falling in love with Martina and becoming a father figure to her older daughter, Liona.
“Come with me to Port City,” he pleaded with her the night before they landed as they lay together in the dark. He dreaded continuing his strange journey alone.
“Constantine, I can’t live in a Human city. You don’t know what it’s like down there. There’s no work for me and our relationship would be forbidden. I can’t raise a family in those conditions.”
“It’s got to be better than the mines.”
“The mines aren’t that bad, and it’s all I know.”
* * *
“All the trees are dead?”
“Most of them, yes. There are off-planet arboretums for the very rich, but planets are no longer capable of sustaining them.” When Aris met Kanard at the Port City Transport Station, she had fallen on her knees and kissed his feet before taking him to the cloning laboratory to meet Osco and Dilaura.
“Where does the oxygen come from?”
“Every inch of land outside of the cities had to be covered in a hardy algae slime called Mugger’s Moss, which converts enough carbon dioxide into oxygen. Meats are grown synthetically in laboratories, and vegetables are grown hydroponically in orbit.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Who?”
“Huh? Ah, nobody.”
“Mr. Kanard, your book was an inspiration to me.” Osco was giddy in the presence of his prophet. “It changed my life!”
“It did?” Kanard had found it full of senseless rules and banal platitudes, but there must be something to it. It had gotten him this far.
“Praise Goldath for bringing you to us! Now that you’re here, nothing can stop the Church of the One Undeniable and Completely Accurate Truth from spreading its enlightenment across the galaxy!”
Revolution
Jake was taking a long watery shit in an unfamiliar bathroom. He packed his bowl and hit it, hoping whoever was in the apartment was asleep and hadn’t heard his drawn-out fart and sickly splash. There were girly soaps and various pink personal hygiene products everywhere, which was a good sign. Emptying the ashes into the toilet between his legs, he wiped, hoping his stomach would settle and the ringing in his ears would stop.
The room was dark, the blinds down, but he could make out somebody lying on the couch. He made his way quietly to the door and put on his thermal suit. As soon as the door shut behind him, he heard it lock. She, whoever she was, had been waiting for him to leave. There was something strange about the hallway, and it took him a moment to realize that the lights worked and there was no need to turn on his flashlight. The walls were remarkably free of graffiti and the elevator unusually clean. When he left the building, putting his earbuds in and cranking the music, the outside world also seemed off kilter. It took him a few blocks to notice that the Dynastic flags that had always flown on every building had been replaced with black flags with a white star in the center. Weird. As he walked out of the residential courtyard onto the main street, he came across a crowd of people gathered around a large LED advertising screen. It showed a handsome woman with long braided hair, in a red dress, addressing the rapt onlookers. Jake silenced his player.
“The king is dead,” she said, smiling. “Long live Osco Silvos.” The camera panned out, revealing a stern young man—hey, it’s that guy from the handsome-felon meme—surrounded by armed guards and flanked by a baffled-looking bearded man in a black dress and a funny hat and a younger woman who looked incredibly like the first woman.
“Thank you, Aris. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Galactic Union of Autonomous Planets.”
The crowd erupted in applause.
“The Dynasty has fallen, but the war is not over.” As he spoke, the screen split and a slow-motion recap of a Revolutionary Guard firing squad executing the entire royal family played on repeat. “All that we have worked for is at risk. Saboteurs and wreckers are still out there, like Ion Armonde, who pointlessly sacrificed thousands of brave young men in the Battle of Messier 5 for his own selfish glory, and Henri Livshits and his band of traitors, who totally ripped off our idea for a new galactic order. But Goldath is on our side, and we will prevail. Freedom will finally reign in the Milky Way.”
Jake turned his music back up. Who the fuck is Goldath?
Vildana
Vildana Dianae was floating naked and bloated in space among dismembered body parts and twisted shards of metal. Her face was bluish and her vacant eyes leaked blood, but Osco found her just as beautiful as she had always been.
It was his hand that launched the missile that destroyed the ship full of refugees on its way to the Qbik after Armonde denounced him as a demented tyrant who betrayed the revolution. That same hand removed a pair of scissors from a pocket on his space suit and snipped off a large clump of her brown hair.
Vildana’s clone would have perfect vision, but Osco would leave her crooked teeth.
And her tits, he would make her tits bigger.
Andromeda Unshackled
Weirdos in a Weird Place
Pritchard P. Parsons’s body was doing its damnedest to get him to quit smoking. Every time the little nicotine worm in his brain whispered to him, “You’ve had a tough day, ol’ P. C’mon, you deserve to relax,” his throat would constrict dryly and a slight—but sharp—pain pierced his chest, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. It had been five days, but he knew once he took a sip of the vodka tonic on the bar in front of him, all bets were off. The worm would be fed.
Shhhpt. The ice that made up most of his cocktail rattled against the glass.
“Pack of Nova Lights, Danny-o,” he muttered to the bartender in his charmingly accented Andromedian.
By law, every pack of cigarettes sold in Andromeda had to be in the shape of a diseased pair of lungs that would wheeze and cough every time you pulled one out. He blamed Karlatte for his habit, but he blamed her for pretty much everything. She smoked a pack of Mercury Reds a day without so much as clearing her throat and could drink him under the table to boot. When he was feeling particularly sadistic, he would torture himself with the truth she had always been out of his league. The reasonable part of his brain reminded him that every choice he had made had been his own, that Karlatte had never forced him to do anything. But the reasonable part of the Human brain is the easiest part to shut off, and Pritchard had become particularly adept at doing just that. The key to letting go of regrets, he found, was realizing that even if you had made different, apparently more prudent, decisions that would have spun your life into a completely different future, you likely would have fucked that up at least as much as you fucked up your current reality. For example, even if Karlatte hadn’t walked in on him in the bathhouse with that freaky-ass Cosmic Void nun, he likely would have pissed her off in some other way. . . .
And this reality wasn’t so bad, waiting tables on a vacation-resort planet, one of the largest non–gas giants in the Universe, with over half a gigameter of beachfront tiki bars, gaudy hotels, and bored, topless azure Andromedian trophy wives lubing themselves with cheap romance novels and sangrias on loudly colored beach towels. As the sun began to set and the tikis were lit, it was all they could do not to throw themselves at the mysterious and exotic Human bringing them drinks. The ones he really liked he would take down to a secluded cove and serenade with songs from the Gamma Dimension on his ukulele. On the whole, Pritchard lived a happy, if somewhat empty, existence, but every once in a while, catching his three-day stubble and piercing eyes in the mirror behind the bar, he felt like he should be famous, even if he was unsure as to what exactly he should be famous for. The real difference between him and Karlatte was drive. She knew exactly what she wanted, and every atom in her pushed her toward that goal.
He lit one up and waited for that moment of Zen you get with your first smoke after a few days, but an Andromedian boy of about five was staring at him, blowing his inner peace and making him feel self-conscious about smoking. Well, k
id, suck it. It’s a bar and your mom’s fault for bringing you here.
“Why is his skin brown?” the boy asked his mother, who shushed him and whispered something Pritchard could barely hear, something along the lines of “because he’s Human.”
“Can I touch him?”
“No you cannot. That’s very rude.”
“No, ma’am, it’s ok.” Pritchard held his forearm out, and the child ran his sea-blue hand over it and giggled.
“Now, go find your sister and play on the playground.”
With her son out of sight, she leaned over. “I’m sorry, could I get one of those?”
“Lemme guess, the hubby don’t let you smoke?”
She nodded as she inhaled, her body visibly relaxing, and she turned back to the bar and ordered a drink. A welcome breeze blew through the open café, fluttering her silvery hair, and both of them, without anything else to say to each other, turned their attention to the holovision.
“. . . we simply cannot afford to let any more refugees from the Milky Way in. I mean, have you seen what they’ve done to their own galaxy? There’s not an inhabitable planet left.” A middle-aged Andromedian man was being interviewed on the news.
“But Senator, these are people who have been victimized by their government—”
“Allowing a mass influx of aliens will permanently alter life in Andromeda, and not for the better. . . .”
“For God’s sake, change the channel, please,” the woman said agitatedly to the bartender.
On the next station, Pritchard’s heart dropped a good five inches when he saw Karlatte promoting her book Murder at Mugger’s Point Hotel, which, distressingly, was going to be turned into a movie. He was struck with the same desperate longing for her that he had when they first met, with a slight twinge of disappointment. She had taken to carrying around a pet teacup tardigrade in her purse like some billionaire hotel heiress, and, after all this time, that stuck-up, full-of-herself, arrogant, self-important female hadn’t learned Andromedian, still relying on a translatebot. “God, just turn it off and put on some music.”
“Friend of yours?”
“My ex.”
The woman put on her sunglasses so she could look around the tiki hut and not look like she was looking around, before turning back to the bar. Without glancing at Pritchard or moving her lips, she said, “I’m going to the bathroom. Wait two minutes and follow me.”
Illicit liaisons in beach resorts are so simple because nobody is wearing anything but cargo shorts or bikinis, which was how Pritchard and his new acquaintance were dressed. Just as he was mid-thrust from behind, watching himself in the mirror over the sink, somebody tried at the door handle.
“Vax, you in there?”
“Oh shit, that’s my bodyguard.”
Pritchard froze, before releasing involuntarily inside of her.
“My name’s Vax, by the way,” she whispered and reached around to shake his hand. Then she made a farting sound with her mouth before practically shouting, “I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Um, Pritchard.”
“Nice to meet you. So how do we get out of this?”
The outhouse next to the bar where Pritchard worked saw so much action that it had a hidden escape route for these kinds of situations. He crawled out the back and fell onto the sand, avoiding notice because everyone on the beach was enthralled by Murder at Mugger’s Point Hotel, which was the summer’s biggest best seller. From the other side of the small building he could hear the door open and Vax say “I’d let it air out before you go in there.”
* * *
Andromeda Mayday had gotten the band back together. Or at least a reasonable holographic facsimile thereof. The Laniakea Music Review featuring her was the magazine’s best-selling issue in a millennium, mostly because she was topless on the cover, nipples hidden behind her forearm, and in the two-page spread, in which she was in bed with all five members of the Unmenschenables, nipples covered by Tombstone Wolfram’s forearm. Despite the lack of female nipples, which sapient societies throughout the supercluster had decided must be concealed (preferably behind clothing, but at least behind forearms), this caused quite an uproar from parents concerned about this new extragalactic threat to their children, particularly fathers, who confiscated every copy they found and hid them in the bathroom.
She was also attacked as problematic for not featuring any Andromedians in her latest music video.
All the dates on her galaxy-wide tour were sold out, her second single was number one on the charts, and her tearful interview on Marc Maron’s podcast brought to light the terrible plight of refugees from the Milky Way, all with her legions of adoring fans ignorant of the fact that she was in fact a volleyball-sized hovering holoprojector that held the consciousness of the very dead Andromeda Mayday. Indeed, her entire band was made up of laser replicas of the original members, which was why the most important point in her rider was that nobody under any circumstances is to touch any member of Andromeda Mayday and the Unmenschenables.
That was all before she disappeared.
The theories floated about her abrupt vanishment spoke more to the creative perversity of the professional gossip class than it did of any particular personality trait or vice of Mayday. And no, for the record, she didn’t autoerotically asphyxiate herself in a hotel room after a concert as was reported in the Latest Outrage or overdose speedballing in the bathtub during an orgy at a masquerade ball in the mansion of an eccentric publishing magnate like the Daily Pearl Clutcher wrote, and she certainly wasn’t abducted and sold as a sex slave to Lupine space pirates as one particularly inventive holovision host speculated, implying that it was the singer’s own fault for corrupting the youth of the galaxy while he himself had a life-sized android replica of her in full bondage gear in his dungeon that he sodomized on a daily basis dressed as a furry.
She just disappeared.
* * *
Vax’s first instinct was to kill herself. She had fantasized about it often: she would go to the highest cliff on the shore and throw herself into the raging waters. It would be as romantic as it was painful, because if she made a slight miscalculation or there was a strong wind, she would end up as hamburger meat on the jagged rocks below. On the plus side, teenagers would scare each other for generations around campfires with stories of her ghost haunting the beach, and that would be pretty cool. The more logical move would be to sneak into her husband’s extensive gun collection, find a plasma pistol, and just blow her brains out. The only thing that had kept her from doing so thus far had been her children, which she had never really wanted, but now that she had them she wasn’t about to let some bimbo next wife raise them.
The news she had received that morning pushed her closer to suicide than she had ever been.
She was lying in bed reading Murder at Mugger’s Point Hotel when she got a message on her tablet from an unknown address. Not thinking, she opened it only to be assaulted by a hologram of herself getting rammed by a Human in the bathroom of a cheap beach bar. It had surprisingly good production value and included close-ups of both of their faces, panning, and zooming, and if there was ever any doubt as to who was being recorded, it was all cleared up when she was heard to say “My name’s Vax, by the way.”
She closed the hologram before she could hear herself fake a fart and fell back on her pillow, feeling sicker than she had ever felt in her life.
And then there was another ping.
She sat back up and hesitated a moment before opening it. A head appeared wearing a balaclava, and with a digitally disguised—yet clearly feminine—voice, it spoke.
“You are now mine.”
* * *
“Do you need a hug?”
The last thing the stranger wanted was a hug, but before he could object, the Cosmic Void Abbess had put down his birth certificate and refugee travel document, both of which were forgeries, and walked around the desk and embraced him while he stood there awkwardly. Like all Cosmic Void clergy
after their monastery was introduced to ecstasy, she was wearing nothing but hemp jewelry with colorful beads and smelled strongly, but not unpleasantly, of patchouli.
“You poor thing.” She smiled absently with her head on his chest, grinding her teeth as she melted into him.
“Um, yes, do you think I could be getting to my room? I have a big day tomorrow.”
“Of course, but you must wash yourself in the soul-cleansing steam of the Void Bathhouse before your jump.” She still hadn’t budged and her blonde dreadlocks were starting to tickle his nostrils. Slowly she took his arm like an old lover and led him down the hall to the spa, where she handed him a white towel and a pair of paper slippers that she pulled from a shelf next to the entrance. “So, you know, if you want I can, uh, go in with you and we can fuck.”
“That won’t be necessary, thanks.”
She shrugged without losing her sleepy grin, said, “Have a nice bath,” and went back to her post, still grinding her teeth.
* * *
The men were sitting naked around a long table with various bottles of liquids, fruit, chocolates, and tea, laughing and regaling each other loudly with their travels and sexual conquests. The tiled room smelled of humidity and marijuana, and chillstep played in the background; the stranger disrobed and wrapped the towel around his waist.
“Hello, fellow traveler.” One man stood, filling any empty glass he found with port wine. He had long frizzy hair and a beard braided with beads. “Please, have a seat.” His voice was gravely, gracious, and wise sounding. They all scooted to make room for the stranger. “What’s the destination of your jump?”
