by D. Tolmach
“It’s not just the planets. You give ’em a couple of rocks and they start breeding, moving around to other solar systems, spreading their religion. Next thing you know we’re all speaking Human and worshiping Goldath, or whatever they call their god. People are afraid to lose what they got.”
“That’s right. Fear is the great motivator.”
“But that fear has made us what we are. There’s an evolutionary reason for fear of the other.”
“Sure, but at what price? I mean, Rikki, we got blood on our hands, literally, you and me. We reap the benefit of our government wiping out thousands of indigenous civilizations throughout the galaxy, and we pay them taxes for the pleasure. I mean, really, we’re just as guilty of genocide as our forefathers.”
“So what should I do about it, just drop out of society? Would that make me any less guilty? And you gotta remember, Gustav, those indigenous civilizations, they wiped out the civilizations before them, ad fucking nauseam.”
“Yeah, maybe, but that doesn’t make it right.”
“Maybe it does make it right. Maybe that’s just how it’s supposed to be.”
“And look at us. We arrest cats, ruin their fucking lives, for doing the same things we do. All so the owners of the prisons can get cheap labor and money from the government. I mean, how many hand jobs have you gotten from hookers in the last month?”
“I dunno, twenty?”
“That sounds about right. And how many poor bastards have you busted for getting hand jobs from hookers?”
“Yeah, but that’s my fucking job. If they wanted to get hand jobs from hookers and not go to jail, they shoulda become cops.”
“Jeez, Rikki.”
“Sounds like you boys are having quite the philosophical conversation. Mind if I join you?”
We looked up to see an old Human with a prickly green beard and long hair leaning on a gnarled old shillelagh. Something about his kind eyes made me feel a kind of kinship with him right away, like he was an old friend. “Sure, have a seat.”
“And please, explain to my friend here that being a cop comes with special privileges. It always has. We put our asses on the line to keep society from falling apart, and in return we get all the hand jobs from hookers we want or, alternatively, all the blow from evidence we want.”
“Shuddup, Rikki.”
“I’m sorry, did I hear correctly? You said blow?”
“Yeah, sure. You want some?”
“I would like that very much.”
I looked him up and down as he opened my cocaine travel case and quickly shaped two straight white lines, taking note of his elaborate outfit. “You a priest?”
He finished one right after another and grinned like a fucking bald eagle. “You could say that.”
“For that, uh, Church of Something–Something Truth?”
“Guilty as charged, officers. Oh dear, where are my manners? My name is Constantine.”
“I’m Gustav and this here’s Rikki.”
Our new friend pulled out a pack of cloves and held it out. “I like that, ‘Church of Something–Something Truth.’ It’s got a nice ring to it. I’ll have to talk to Goldath and see about changing the name.”
Rikki took a brown cigarette and lit it greedily. “These Human priests know how to party, huh Gus?”
I turned him down. “Haven’t smoked in three years. You a refugee, padre?”
“I guess you could call me a refugee, yes.”
“So what’s it like there in the Milky Way? Is the Galactic Union really as bad as everybody says?”
“Things are dire. I realize that we’re kind of putting you in an uncomfortable position, but I hope it won’t be for too long. You know, genetically, we are almost identical, the closest relatives of all sapient races. I have always admired the Andromedian propensity to consider all possible implications and outcomes of an action before taking it. We Humans can be so rash. Would you like some fish, or have you given up food as well?” Constantine pulled out a can of herring in oil and six slices of black bread. “Sometimes I’m troubled by visions of things getting even worse. There’s a power struggle going on right now in the Galactic Union after the death of Osco Silvos, and I’m afraid someone even more ruthless could take the helm, someone who, in an effort to take their people’s minds off their troubles and search for hospitable planets, may be motivated to start a war with Andromeda.”
“An intergalactic war? How would that even work?”
“The Universe has its secrets. They are guarded closely by societies of learned men and for now they remain safe from the Union, but if that changes . . .”
* * *
When we woke up, Constantine was gone. The air was already hot and I found my gaze drawn to the dead settler, who looked back at me sarcastically, and noticed he was holding a gnarled old shillelagh. Wait a minute. . . .
“Hey, Gus, check this out.” Rikki was standing next to a large cactus, only, unlike a normal cactus, it had a door in it with a little brass plate that said FLOOR № 400.
* * *
We entered his room quietly, turning on the lights and just looking around without touching anything. There were a lot of books in Human and beads and ritualistic-looking ornaments.
“I’d say our Mr. James Quarkson was a man of faith.”
Rikki took pictures and I flipped through dusty pages but found nothing of interest outside of crumpled-up tissues overfilling the wastebasket. I walked up to a computer sitting on a desk and turned it on. It was all in Human, but I clicked on a few icons until I came up with a file full of holorecordings. When I opened the last one, a man and a woman appeared in the middle of the room.
“Don’t be stupid, Senator. You know you don’t want to go down that road.”
Rikki and I looked at each other. “Isn’t that . . .”
“Yes, it is.”
We watched in disbelief as Senator Finkworth fucked some redhead standing up from behind until she came, falling forward onto a table. I paused the recording. “Look, there’s somebody else in the room.” The definition was too low to tell who it was, but it seemed to be another couple copulating.
“It’s a hologram. They’re watching a holorecording while they’re going at it.”
I quickly clicked on the next-to-last recording. A woman appeared in a public bathroom. The door opened and a Human entered.
“Hey, is that our Human?”
“No, it’s not our Human. What are you, racist, Rikki? All Humans look the same to you?”
We watched for a while as the Human banged the Andromedian from behind. She was a tiny woman with kinda crazy eyes. That’s when it hit me. I bet my blue ass you’re just the girl I’m looking for. . . .
We went through some more videos, but there were literally terabytes of Andromedian politicians having sex with people who weren’t their spouses. After a while it became exhausting, but something brought me back to the first one we had watched, with the redhead. “Check this out, Rikki. See here? She looks at the camera. These are all hidden cameras. Nobody else knows they’re being taped, but she looks right at us. She’s the one recording all this.”
“But why? Who is she?”
I let my brain put the pieces together. “I’m thinking she works in government, right, and maybe it’s an insurance policy, or for blackmailing them, but somehow she records powerful people doing shit they don’t want anyone to see. Quarkson hacks into her computer and downloads all of it, resulting in a marathon jerk-off session”—I pointed to the Kleenex on the floor and in the garbage—“not that I blame him. If I so much as shift in my seat, I’m gonna blow a load in my pants right now. She finds out he did it and has him killed.”
“But if she had him killed, why did she leave his computer with all the evidence on it?”
“I don’t know, Rikki, but I got a feeling we’re onto something big here. We don’t tell nobody about this for now, not the chief, not nobody. I gotta think this over. A lot of people would pay a lot of money t
o make this disappear.”
“Yeah, that Human already paid with his life.”
A couple hours later and with the help of a translatebot, we were going through pages and pages of e-mails. We got her name—Loux—and found out she was an aide to Senator Finkworth.
“Look at this. She’s got a lot of correspondence with Andromeda Mayday. Looks like they’re close.”
“The singer? She got any sex videos with her?”
“Really? You want to see Andromeda Mayday naked, just turn on your holovision. Every music video she puts out is a sex video.” I mean, she sang an entire song while fucking some purple alien with a tail. It was artfully and tastefully done, and her titties were blurred out of course, but anyone who wanted to could find the uncensored version online. I clicked on the next e-mail. “Here’s a picture of them together, but . . . holy shit, Rikki . . .”
“What is it, Gus?”
“Loux is a Human.” We looked at each other. “You know what this means?”
“They’ve infiltrated our government?”
“It’s a fucking invasion.”
Spaceship Road Head
“Wait, so you guys are a thing now?”
It would have been sickening if it wasn’t just so darn cute the way Andromeda and Karlatte fussed over one another and finished each other’s sentences. Upon their engagement, they were dubbed “Andromalatte” by the media, and speculation immediately began about who they were going to wear at their wedding (which started a small-scale war between designers that claimed a death toll of nearly half a trillion) and whether or not Karlatte was already pregnant (having been conspicuously sober the last several times she was seen in public).
“Now I know why you never got over this one.” Andy ruffled Karlatte’s hair. “Did she ever give you spaceship road head while breaking the reality barrier? Uh, it makes me hard just remembering it. . . .”
“Stop torturing the man. And no, Pritchard, we will not have a ménage à trois with you.”
“Don’t be so mean, K. We could let him watch, at least once. . . .”
“Andy!”
“I kid! Don’t leave, P. We had just gone through so much I forgot you called. What was it that you wanted to ask Karlatte?”
“It’s nothing. I had a friend that was in trouble. I thought you might be able to help, but I guess she’s better now, because she seems to have forgotten about me.”
“Poor Pritchard. You’ll find true love one of these days.”
* * *
Vax was not better now and, contrary to appearances, was not asleep when the robot assassin cut a slice of fabric out of the sheet she was using as a tent on her bed and inserted its syringe, loaded with enough tranquilizer to kill a Sothic hummingbird, inching closer and closer to the vein on her right arm. Lou hadn’t wanted it to come to this, but ever since Vax had killed Quarkson, she had become more and more unhinged.
Having long understood that it was the persistent housefly that had been recording her every move and finding it impossible to kill, Vax started to let off steam by making funny faces and picking her nose in front of it, then moving on to flipping it off and choreographing elaborate and increasingly vulgar striptease dances, in the end finding that she got off masturbating while it watched and cramming larger and larger objects in her vagina, all for its amusement. She read it poetry and sang it Andromedian folk songs, and finally, with none of this inducing any reaction, she took a gun, the same one she had put to the back of the stranger’s head, and pointed it at her own temple. After standing there like that for an eternity under its ever-watchful emotionless eye, she whipped the barrel around toward her tormenter as fast as she could and blew a hole in the window it had been perched on a fraction of a second earlier.
Deprived of even the smallest of fucks to give anymore, she got back in her tent and gave up.
Until she heard the quiet mechanical whine of a tiny circular saw cutting through the sheet, followed by a long needle sliding through the hole. Without thinking, she pulled the broom handle she had been using as a tent pole and knocked the robot to the ground, beating it until it could no longer move, and she found herself standing in her nightgown, covered in black plastic shards and holding a broken broomstick. She looked at the fly, which looked back at her, and then she ran toward it, threw herself through the second-story window, and landed on a large man with a cocaine-frosted mustache who had been sneaking around her yard.
“Where do you think you’re going, miss?”
“Please help! I’m being chased by a housefly.”
He looked up at the window and nodded. “Rikki, hit it.”
His partner fired an electromagnetic pulse in the general direction of the bug, knocking out the power for the whole block in that direction, and he grabbed Vax by the arm and forced her into the back of a gray van parked on the street. He handcuffed her to a seat while Rikki got behind the wheel and sped off.
“You wanna tell me what that’s all about?”
Vax, her hands bound behind her, couldn’t hide her tears and found she was unable to stop the words from flowing as well. With a panicked relief, she recounted all the events of the last week, starting with the fateful day she met Pritchard P. Parsons.
* * *
All the biggest stars in the galaxy were schmoozing backstage at the Pre–Presidential Debate Show among enormous pyramids of overflowing champagne glasses and vats of black caviar, but Icy Lou’s eyes were glued to the screen of her communicator, which she was constantly refreshing to see if there was any breaking news of the arrest of Senator Jargis’s wife. Shit was out of her control, and it had been for a while, but now that Vax had escaped her assassination attempt and disappeared, the hopelessness of the situation was finally overwhelming her.
“Put that away, Loux. Enjoy yourself. I’ve got a good feeling about tonight.” Senator Finkworth had already read the debate script and knew he’d come out on top, making him the front-runner for the presidential elections, which were only five years away.
“I’m sorry, Senator. I just have a lot on my mind.”
“Hello, Loux!” The senator’s wife swooped in and kissed Lou on both cheeks. “You look stunning.”
“Thanks. You look amazing yourself.”
“Yes, yes, you both look fabulous. Now where can I find something stronger than champagne around here?”
“Darling, are you sure you want to drink before the big debate?”
“Don’t worry, honey. I’ve got this in the bag.”
Then everyone stopped when the door opened. The paparazzi that had been standing outside, cordoned off from the red carpet, could be heard yelling “Andy, Andy, look over here . . . Karlatte, show us your ring . . .,” and there she was, silhouetted in the flash of the cameras with her entourage, holding Karlatte’s hand. As the doors closed behind them, she entered the interior light dressed in a strategically ripped tuxedo T-shirt and kilt and with a cartoon villain’s mustache drawn on her upper lip.
Seeing her was like a dam breaking in Lou’s soul as a wave crest of emotions and memories pushed out—for the time being—the paranoia that had become such an integral part of her. Their eyes met and Andy winked. Suddenly she got a text.
Hey Lou, why so blue? ;)
Har-har. Congrats on getting hitched.
Thanks, babe.
* * *
Pritchard was doing a pretty good job of drowning the awkwardness of it all in champagne and caviar. When Andy offered to get him backstage, he couldn’t very well turn her down. It was the party of the year, plus he wasn’t about to risk blowing the minuscule chance that she hadn’t been kidding about letting him watch at least once, and even if she was, what was it they said? Every joke has an element of truth to it? Besides, being around her was invigorating and addictive. She had an electric aura that drew you to it like a moth to a bug zapper. And he was glad to have an excuse to break out his best leather pants and leather jacket and aviator glasses, although he found himself wishing Vax
was there with him. Her absence and Karlatte and Andy’s giddiness left him empty inside, and, try as he might, he didn’t feel nearly half as cool as he looked.
He was shoveling caviar into his mouth on a cracker when a ginger Andromedian woman approached him and shook his hand.
“I don’t think we’ve met. My name is Loux.”
Pritchard could be forgiven for thinking he was being hit on. “Pritchard P. Parsons at your service.”
“So, you’re friends with Andromeda Mayday?”
“Yup. Karlatte is my ex-girlfriend.”
“That must be hard for you.”
“Eh, I’m over her. I’m just happy she’s happy.”
“I bet a guy like you can get any Andromedian girl you want.”
Pritchard looked at her with a mixture of drunken suspicion and confusion, just now realizing that they had been speaking Human the whole time, and shrugged.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“You know, kinda. I got this thing going on, but it’s not exclusive or anything.”
“And you didn’t bring her to the party?”
“She was, um, busy.”
“She must be doing something really important to miss out on all this.”
“You know, people have their own lives.”
She handed him another champagne glass, which he downed in one gulp. “You want to have a smoke?”
* * *
Outside in the courtyard, it was a who’s who of Andromedian politics and show business. Lou gave Pritchard another glass and let him light her cigarette. “So how did you meet a girl that’s so busy?”
“What’s it to you? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me.”
She played with the top button of her blouse until it unfastened as if by accident and tried to make her eyes as big as possible. “Please, I wouldn’t have to get you drunk to take advantage of you. You just seemed so sad and lonely, like a lost puppy in there.”
