by D. Tolmach
“Andromeda.”
The men nodded approvingly. The stranger inspected each of their faces for any indication of disgust or pity at his pockmarked and scarred face and body but found not the slightest sideways glance or smirk. And the unfriendly-looking friendly muttonchop beard he had cultivated to make himself look extra menacing paled in comparison to the facial hair of these gentlemen. It was quite obvious that, degenerates though they may be, they were far more experienced in the ways of the Universe than he, and he reverted to his usual state of insecure self-loathing, at least until somebody passed him a joint.
“Beacon of Freedom and Prosperity.”
“What?” The stranger had zoned out.
“Andromeda. That’s their motto. ‘Beacon of Freedom and Prosperity.’ The oldest democracy in the cluster.”
“And where are you jumping to?” He realized that the proper thing to do in such situations was to try to make conversation, and it seemed like an innocuous enough question, but for some reason the others laughed and the man with the braided beard grinned slyly as he poured finely ground bud mixed with tobacco into rolling papers.
“Not where, my friend, but when. The Cosmic Gate that the monks have built can not only send you to just about any galaxy you want to go by folding the fabric of space”—he illustrated this by rolling the joint—“but it can also bend ti—”
“Hello, brothers!” A tall and stout dreadlocked man wearing hemp twine necklaces and bracelets entered and shook everyone’s hands at the table. “I hope you’re enjoying your time at our modest monastery.” He had an enormous veiny cock that drew the stranger’s gazes like a magnet. It took every ounce of the little willpower the stranger had not to stare.
“Of course, Father.” The man with the braided beard had finished his joint. He lit it and stood, shotgunning the priest.
“Oh, that’s good stuff, my son, very good stuff. Now enough dillydallying, you potheads. Get your arses in the steam room.”
* * *
“So, brother, your application for asylum was accepted by the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization of Andromeda?”
The stranger nodded, sweat pouring over his entire body. The monastery had been built on a burned-out rogue star in between Andromeda and the Milky Way, considerably closer to the latter. The monks and nuns, the youngest of which were hundreds of thousands of years old, had achieved immortality through meditation and regularly beating each other with bath brooms in the fumes of the still-cooling star.
For two thousand credits, they would let you use the Gate to travel instantaneously from one galaxy to another, and for as little as twenty, you could get a prepaid intergalactic calling card.
“You’re very lucky. You made it in just in time. They may just halt all migration from the Milky Way. With the election coming up, the candidates seem to be trying to outdo each other in their hatred for Humans. The only one of ’em with any sense or empathy is a fellow named Finkworth. I don’t envy the poor saps that’ll get stuck in the Galactic Union.”
Finkworth. The stranger made a mental note of that name.
* * *
Icy Lou found that she liked having blue skin. It complimented her red hair, although the Andromedian hormones gave her terrible mood swings. She had lied her way into a job as the assistant to Senior Senator Finkworth, a distinguished man of great political conviction and champion of the underdog, and was highly influential in getting him to focus his attention on the growing refugee crisis in the Milky Way.
Unfortunately, he was getting his ass fed to him in a debate with Senator Jorg Jargis on live holovision.
“Their religion, what is it called, the Church of Undisputable Absolute Facts or some such nonsense, is a death cult and we have no way to vet any of them. How do we know which ones are terrorists, or even spies for the Galactic Union?”
“That’s just crazy, bigoted talk, Senator. With all due respect, they’re running from the Galactic Un—”
“And why should we commit to accepting any refugees when Triangulum refuses to help out? Why should we bear all the responsibility?”
“I can’t answer for Triangulum except to say that we should be better than tha—”
“I mean, it feels like they’ve already taken over. The most popular book in the galaxy was written by a Human. Now they’re making it into a movie. Turn on the holovision and there’s Andromeda Mayday, rest her soul. I’m sure she was a perfectly nice lady, but don’t you think we should be promoting our own culture?”
This went on for a while.
When he got off set, he was covered in sweat. She rode with him in his limousine in silence until they got back to his office.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Senator. The man is a nativist. It’s easy to appeal to the base, selfish instincts in people. Our side is more nuanced, and nuance doesn’t come across well in sound bites on holovision.” She closed the door behind her and took out a portable holoprojector. “Luckily I have a Plan B.”
A high-definition life-sized hologram of Vax and Pritchard appeared, complete with surround sound.
“My God, is that Jorg Jargis’s wife? With a Human? In a public toilet? Where did you get this?”
“Do you really want to know the answer to that?”
“Is it shopped?”
“Of course it’s not shopped. If we want to persuade the people to take in twenty billion refugees, we need to discredit the xenophobes fighting us tooth and nail. We start with Jorg.”
“You want to blackmail the wife of an Andromedian senator?”
She raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Andromedian politics was dirty, but this was outside the realm of everyday corruption.
“You’ve already done it, haven’t you?”
“People’s lives are at risk, Senator.”
He grabbed her wrist. “Damn it, Loux”—Loux was what she called herself now that she was passing as Andromedian—“you shouldn’t have done this behind my back. If you weren’t such a hot political genius, I’d fire you.”
She leaned against his desk and patted his cheek, just a little harder than your standard love pat, before taking his hand and caressing his wedding ring. “Don’t be stupid, Senator. You know you don’t want to go down that road.”
His gaze moved to Pritchard and Vax, still going at it on loop a few meters away, and he turned her around and pulled up her skirt. As he entered her, she pulled his hand around and pressed it to her clit, smiling into the camera lens of the hovering housefly-sized eyebot observing them emotionlessly from across the room.
* * *
Vax was having a complete nervous breakdown. She had always been impulsive and sexually risky, but up until now, she had been lucky enough to avoid any serious consequences. If this video gets out . . .
She was fucked sideways.
Her entire family would be a laughingstock, Jorg would divorce her, she’d lose her kids . . .
It didn’t make any sense. Who records the inside of an outhouse? Was it the Human—she couldn’t remember his name, P something—seducing women and then blackmailing them? But she seduced him. Was it one of Jorg’s seventeen previous wives? They were already the seventeen richest women in the quadrant, thanks to their alimonies. Unless they were just being spiteful, which was completely within the realm of reasonability. Whoever it was, Vax rightly assumed that everything she did was being recorded, which was driving her quite literally insane.
For his part, Pritchard was getting paranoid. His experience with Vax had rattled him—the fact that she had bodyguards meant her husband was probably someone whose wife you wouldn’t want to get caught schtupping—and when you turned on the news, this or that politician or populist blowhard was going on about how Human immigration was ruining the galaxy. He was starting to expect the torches-and-pitchforks treatment any minute now.
All of this was compounded by the fact that, one morning while getting ready for work (a process which consisted of getting out of bed and putting on his c
argo shorts), he, as always, compulsively checked his left thigh pocket for his passport, visa to the Delta Dimension, and Andromedian temporary residency permit, only to find them all inexplicably missing.
Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit he prayed to no god in particular. After tearing apart his small bungalow without anything to show for it, he realized that they must have fallen out of his pocket somewhere up on the cliffs.
The night before, five minutes after promising himself he would never so much as look at another married woman, a bachelorette party came into the bar and commandeered the karaoke machine. They made Pritchard do shots with them, and the next thing he knew he was in the sand and brush at the peak of the rocky hill overlooking the beach with the bride-to-be straddling him, groaning loudly, silhouetted in the moonlight.
Somehow, through the magic of alcohol he had been transported back to his bed just as his alarm was going off.
So he called someone to cover his shift for an hour while he retraced his steps from the beach all the way up to the highest point of the escarpment, following a trail of various pieces of discarded feminine clothes and empty champagne bottles, where he bumped into Vax and almost knocked her over the edge. Despite having planned to jump to her death, she cried out and instinctively grabbed Pritchard before she realized who it was.
“You,” they said to each other at the same time, and she pulled herself away from him but almost lost her balance again and gripped his shoulders painfully. For a moment he thought she was going to drag him down with her.
“What are you doing here? Are you following me? What do you want from me?”
“Lady, I’m just looking for my passport. What are you doing here dressed like that?”
She was wearing an elegant white dress, like what the ghost of a woman who threw herself into the ocean would wear.
“I’m . . . I’m being blackmailed.”
“Blackmailed? For what? By who?”
“I don’t know, but they have a holovideo of . . .” She didn’t finish, as if she wanted him to read her mind.
“Of what?”
She pointed down at the beach. “You know, us . . .”
“Us? You mean you and me us? In the loo?”
She nodded, her face in her hands. Pritchard felt a chill.
“What do they want?”
“They didn’t say.” She wiped tears from her eyes with her hand. “But it probably has something to do with my husband. He was that asshole on the holovision saying all those terrible things about Humans.” Pritchard didn’t know what to do, so he put an arm around her and took out a pack of cigarettes and handed her one (wheez–cough), and they sat together on the precipice, smoking.
“So, wait, were you going to jump?”
She nodded again and they smoked in silence, thinking about what to do next. Eventually Pritchard spoke.
“I think I know someone who can help us. You need to be careful, though. We don’t know who is watching you or if they’re watching us right now.” They both looked around for anyone suspicious, but they seemed to be all alone, save for a fat housefly buzzing in the distance. “Go home to your kids and pretend like nothing has happened. What? What’s wrong?” Vax was looking past Pritchard. She leaned over him and pulled out a thigh-high fishnet stocking that had been snarled in tree roots sticking out of the ridge with a dark blue booklet caught in it.
She untangled the stocking and handed it to Pritchard. “Is this what you were looking for?” She made as though she was going to throw the passport off into the sea. He snatched it from her and checked that the other documents were still in place, then cried out in ecstasy and hugged her before they almost fell off the cliff together again.
* * *
The stranger was no stranger to feeling out of place, but, being thrust into an alien city with waves of blue faces rushing this way and that, all dressed the same and apparently conducting very important business, he had never felt so small. The buildings were tall and transparent and the sun shone warmly on his face, a completely new sensation, as was the crystalline air filling his lungs and the gold and red and orange leaves on the trees in the park.
The Andromedian Senate was a formidable building, and every step he took toward it he expected someone to accost him, arrest him, or call him out for the fraud that he was, but all he got were curious stares from people unaccustomed to seeing Humans. The security guard didn’t even look up from his copy of Murder at Mugger’s Point Hotel, simply pointing to the visitor’s log and informing him that Senator Finkworth’s office was on the 334th floor, which he had to repeat three times because the stranger was having a hard time learning Andromedian numbers.
* * *
“Hello, Mr. Quarkson, my name is Loux. Please, have a seat.”
“You speak Human?” the stranger, whose name was not Mr. Quarkson, asked the woman, whose name was not Loux, with surprise and relief in his voice.
“I do. I assure you Senator Finkorth is fully committed to ensuring that all refugees are treated fairly by the government of Andromeda. Now, tell me your story.” His appearance was striking. The scars that covered half of his face made her shiver unpleasantly, and something about his manner set off alarm bells in her intuition.
“I was aboard the Qbik when it was attacked by the Galactic Union.”
“You were?” Now it was her turn to be surprised. “I was under the impression that there were no survivors.”
“There were. The lucky ones were those killed in the initial blast. I was not on the observation deck.”
Her brow furrowed in a mix of confusion and sympathy. “Is that where you were so terribly hurt?”
He smiled sadly and fiddled with his watch. “No. Unfortunately, when the Galactic Navy stormed the station, they found me hiding in my apartment. I was taken to a starstation concentration camp, where I was tortured. They held me there for months before Lathe rebels attacked it and freed all the prisoners. Then I made my way to the Andromedian embassy and applied for asylum.”
She studied the man’s eyes for what seemed to both of them like a rather long time. “I see. And how are you being treated here?”
“Very well, thank you. I have a dorm room and a food card, and I hope to find a job soon. Every day I go to Andromedian language and civics lessons. Soon I will be a productive member of your society.”
“Well. I’m glad things are working out for you, and I’m sorry for the horrible things you have had to go through. If you need anything, please call me.”
* * *
It was a warm autumn day in the capital of Andromeda, and the stranger whistled self-satisfactorily as he strolled past the tourists and government workers taking pictures and having lunch in the park in front of the Galactic Senate. His mind wandered back to Loux, who was as perplexing as she was beautiful. Maybe it was just because she spoke the language with no accent, but she seemed somehow more Human than Andromedian. Whoever she was, she hadn’t believed his story for a second. In any case, it didn’t matter now. The nanobots he had released in her office would be infiltrating her electronic devices and sending him complete access to all information stored on them by the time he got back to his dormitory.
He casually jammed the signal on the eyebot she had sent to track him and bought himself a gyro at a nearby food truck.
* * *
“I’m sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected or is out of the calling area. Please hang up and try again later.”
Pritchard had put off calling Karlatte for hours, debating with himself how to explain his situation. There was no conceivable way their conversation could go that she wouldn’t hang up immediately (hey, I really need your help, see, this girl I had sex with is kinda getting blackmailed . . . well, she’s, uh, her husband is a Galactic Senator). Would it be in bad taste to bring up the fact that if it weren’t for him, she’d be rotting in prison in the middle of an asteroid belt? In the end it was with both distress and relief that he was anticlimactically
shut down by an intercept-messenger droid. He waited an hour and called again.
“I’m sorry, the number you have dialed . . .”
He thought for a minute before dialing a different number.
* * *
Lou had been played. She didn’t know exactly how, by whom, or to what end, but Mr. Quarkson was not who he had claimed to be. And now he had jammed her eyebot, so she couldn’t even track him and find out who it was she was dealing with. She quickly scanned her office for bugs and found nothing, which didn’t make her feel any less uneasy. He had to be from the Galactic Union; it was the only thing that made sense. Somehow they found the Cosmic Void Gate and were trying to stop refugees from leaving the Milky Way. She pulled back her curtain and observed him eating on a park bench.
She was still unsure how she was going to use Vax. She had thought about having her drug her husband before the Presidential Debate Show—a politician on truth serum during a debate: that would be entertaining—but as she snapped pictures of the stranger from afar, a plan was beginning to form in her mind.
Back from the Dead (and Better Than Ever!)
Andromeda was chained naked to a rock and awaiting certain death at the gaping maw of a hungry plesiosaur when she got the call from Pritchard.
“Hi, Andy. Can you talk?”
“Hi, P. Um, not for long,” she gasped, being sprayed in the face by a wave of salty water. “What is it?” She knew exactly what it was. He called her out of the blue, usually drunk, every two months or so asking about Karlatte.
“You don’t happen to know where K is, do you? Her communicator is disconnected, and I, um, needed to ask a favor.”
Andy looked over at Karlatte, chained spread-eagle to another rock sticking out of the violent seawater across from her. “She’s . . . a bit tied up at the moment.”
“Can you have her call me when she gets a chance? It’s really important.”
