There, on the windswept steppes, the King Penis at long last showed Himself to the world. Pete, suffused with joy at the honour of serving as mouthpiece to his God, made this announcement:
‘The King Penis is risen. It is time. After so long in exile on this world, it is time for Us to go home. So many centuries it has taken, so long a struggle to mould terrestrial creatures to Our needs. But now it is done. The culmination of Our science awaits Us. At last Our slaves have built a starship, a starship which will take Us home.
‘We are One, one mind, one soul. Come, children of the King Penis, oh faithful servants. The road home awaits Us all.’
~ * ~
SEVENTEEN
In these days when high technology was cheaper than water, and more ubiquitous than clean air, hardly a village on the planet was without at least one television. Everyone heard the message. Hundreds of millions of women saw the image of the King Penis, the alien mastermind of their oppression. Women who had slaved all their lives on the edge of survival to keep their families fed; women who had grown up watching their brothers educated instead of them, served at table instead of them, inheriting wealth and power instead of them; women who had survived through wars and drought; and other women who had left family and friends to follow their husbands, serve their husbands, keep their husbands; women who had loved men, women who had hated men, women for whom men had been the limits and the substance of their lives; hundreds of millions of women saw the image of the King Penis, and began to understand.
~ * ~
‘Why doesn’t somebody blow him out of the sky?’ Val raged. ‘He’s the centre of it. Kill him, and all the others will die. It’s a hive mind, for Christ’s sake!’
George wailed, and couldn’t be consoled. ‘Oh, God!’ he screamed. ‘I was more than that. I’m human. I’m human too!’
But he was dying, and he knew it. And he wept and wept. ‘God forgive us for harbouring such a monster. I want to be human too!’
~ * ~
When she heard, Trish went crazy for a while. ‘All of it, all of it for thousands of years just because some slug got shipwrecked. All the pain, the suffering, all the oppression, just for this! The culmination of science. The rape of a planet, just for that fucking slug!’
She raged around their flat, pummelled the sofa with her fists, and screamed. Then suddenly she stopped, and sagged to the floor. She sat and stared blankly at the wall.
Carole came and sat beside her, put her arms around her, and kissed her lightly on the temple. ‘We did what we could,’ she said softly.
Trish began to shake. ‘Aliens,’ she whispered. ‘Aliens.’ Then she started to laugh. ‘NASA spent billions trying to contact aliens, and they were hanging between their legs all the time. Oh, God.’ She buried her head in Carole’s shoulder. ‘Oh, God, it’s so horrible.’
~ * ~
Old Naandi danced in the moonlight. ‘The Mother is awakening!’ she cried. ‘Can’t you feel Her power?’
Amira stood very still in the cool night air, and let the vastness of the land seep into her bones. She nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I can feel it.’
~ * ~
EIGHTEEN
It was raining rivers. Water thundered against the hull of the starship and sluiced across the launch-pad, driven by a hard, bitter wind. Jason had never known it to rain so hard for so long. He stood in the airlock, peering into a wall of water as the King Penis was brought to the base of the starship.
He raised His head into the rain to look up, and His foreskin split into a huge grin. Even He was dwarfed by this huge artificial phallus, and He found it good.
‘Now,’ the instruction spoke from deep inside Jason, ‘remove the human cargo. We will replace them.’
Like a puppet, Jason marched into the ship to obey. Other technicians joined him, and together they opened the first cryogenic unit and lifted out its occupant. Stiff and brittle, the frosted stellanaut radiated cold. Even through his gloves, Jason could feel the chill as he and another man carried their burden out of the ship.
The rain drenched them at once, and the wind tried to snatch their load from their hands. Struggling to breathe in the deluge, they lifted the stellanaut on to the railings around the elevator platform and threw him towards the ground far below. The stellanaut hit the concrete and smashed like glass; teeth, fingers, a kneecap and half an arm scattering across the launching site.
Distantly, Jason remembered a dream. Pat’s voice and his own, laughing.
‘I wish I was taking you to the stars.’
‘I felt as though I was the stars. I am the universe.’
‘And I am the ship.’
Tears filled his eyes as he toppled the next stellanaut to her death. But then his thoughts blurred, the remembered laughter faded, and a moment later he had forgotten who Pat was.
One by one, they cast out the chosen few. The cream of humanity lay scattered across the launch-pad and began to melt in the rain until the concrete was slick with blood.
~ * ~
NINETEEN
Val’s new history book was taking form in her mind. It was called A Terrestrial History of the World, and she planned it to tell the truth about the alien crash-landing and subsequent domination of the planet, tracing the threads of coercion that had shaped events for the past five thousand years. But for now, she had more urgent things to do.
George was dying, and for the last time she laid aside her work to care for a sick man.
‘I want to live,’ he muttered weakly. ‘But I don’t deserve to live. Alien. Monster. No. No, I was more than that. I was human. I was.’
‘Yes, George,’ she said. ‘You were human. You are human. You’re a kind and gentle man, and I love you very much.’
But as she spoke she bit her lip and wondered - wondered what a truly human history would have been like. If the whole mad rush towards the control and domination of nature had been imposed from the outside, if the whole Western scientific world-view had served no purpose but to help an alien escape his exile, then no wonder it seemed so inhuman. What did the King Penis care if his actions destroyed a planet? It wasn’t his world. All he cared about was the development of a science that could build a starship; nothing else mattered to him.
She squeezed George’s hand and bent to kiss his forehead. ‘Despite everything,’ she said, ‘some of you retained your humanity.’
George moaned at the sound of her voice, but he could no longer understand her. His eyes were unfocused, staring inwards, no longer sentient.
She smoothed his hair, and stroked his poor, deformed torso, devoid of human breasts. ‘Oh, George,’ she whispered, ‘the alien warped your body, but in spirit you were human, as human as any woman.’
He snuffled and twitched, and let out a long, sighing breath, impossibly long. She waited for the inhalation, but it didn’t come.
Softly, she began to cry.
~ * ~
TWENTY
The last cryogenic unit was filled with tightly packed rows of penises. Jason closed the drawer and watched the colour fade from their skins as frost began to form.
Outside, the King Penis was being winched aboard, the sling holding Him swaying dangerously in the mounting gale. The curious design of the globular observation deck at the ship’s nose now became clear as it opened to receive Him. Jason felt His chuckles deep within himself as the Living God slithered into His cockpit, curling tightly in on Himself until He fitted snugly.
‘Now,’ the deep voice rumbled along Jason’s guts. ‘Now it is done. Recommence countdown. T-minus thirty minutes.’
With the other technicians, Jason hurried towards the exit. He didn’t want to leave, he wanted nothing more than to stay close to God, but he no longer had any will of his own. Together, the six men climbed into the elevator, and were carried down the scaffolding, down the long shaft of the starship, to the launch-pad where only a few hours before the one hundred and forty-four stellanauts had met their deaths.
~ * ~
George’s body was gone, and Val was alone again in her apartment. She wandered aimlessly from room to room, still crying a little. It was past midnight, almost time for the launch. She went to her study, and jacked into the Net.
The ether felt busy tonight, very active. A lot of people were out to see the action. She tasted for satellite and guided her persona into the hall of satellite pillars, looking for a free camera. She wanted real-time control on this one, a ringside seat.
But all the cameras were taken. A lot of personas were drifting about, half-incorporeal blobs of colour, searching as she was for a free camera. Val wasn’t about to waste her time. She wanted to know what was happening, and a piggyback would do.
She chose a big geo-synch weather satellite and jumped in. ‘Excuse me,’ she said as she arrived, but there was no one there. The cameras were being controlled for sure, but from somewhere outside. Still, they were looking at what she wanted to see, and megabytes of data were flowing in. She immersed herself.
Night had fallen, and the ship was floodlit once more, standing proudly against the heavy, massed clouds. It had stopped raining, but the wind was blowing stronger [63.7 kph], and all around the horizon electric storms were building up [24 storms: range varied: 11.4 kilometres to 22.3 kilometres. All closing]. Val watched, fascinated. She could almost feel the power of the storms. The sea was running higher now, waves crashing against the shore only a couple of kilometres from the ship. It’s one hell of a night for a takeoff, she thought with satisfaction.
~ * ~
Lightning flared, and all the lights went out. Roused from her despair, Pat ran to the window and looked out over a complex suddenly in chaos. Away to her right, a hotol hangar was in flames. Heavily armed men ran around everywhere, shouting orders to each other. The emergency lighting came on, dim but sufficient.
Pat sniffed the air. It smelled of ozone and felt charged with power. She glanced at the wall-clock. T-minus fifteen minutes, and counting.
There was a dull explosion from the burning hangar, followed almost immediately by another flash of lightning. The room shook, and glass showered in around her as she ducked. Was that an earthquake? The shouting from outside came louder. Somewhere, a man was screaming.
The lab in which she was being held was on the first floor, but a drop of four metres suddenly seemed less daunting than it had. She climbed carefully through the broken glass, let herself over the sill, and dropped.
Two more explosions sounded, much nearer, as the fire spread to one of the fuel depots. She wondered what had happened to Jason; remembered watching in horror on the lab monitor as he threw the stellanauts to their deaths. Then she remembered their lovemaking, his alien dick snuggled intimately inside her, and suddenly she stopped and threw up against a wall, her insides heaving.
‘Alien, alien, alien! ‘ she cried, and beat her fists against the wall. ‘Alie-en!’
~ * ~
Data was flowing in faster now. Val’s satellite seemed to be patching into others. Visuals gave a mosaic of images, from a distant shot of the entire Florida coast to close-ups of the ship’s control deck. Data on the storms flickered across the images: range from ship, charge on the clouds, height of clouds, voltages, air pressure ... it went on and on, streaming past her. Someone must be recording this; no one could take in so much at once. Val patched out of numerics, concentrated on visuals.
~ * ~
The fire was spreading rapidly. Searching for an escape through the dense smoke, Pat found her path blocked by flames. Three bodies lay huddled where the explosion had flung them. As she watched, a bulge stirred and began to wriggle down the pants-leg of one of the corpses. As its snout emerged by his heel, she snatched up his gun and hit out at it with the butt, yelling furiously. The penis squealed and tried to escape, but she hit it square on and then smashed it into a pulp, howling abuse.
Running footsteps sounded behind her. She swung round and opened fire. The bullets ripped into the man’s body, hurling him against a burning jeep. As he fell, she aimed lower, and fired once more.
Then there was another huge explosion, and the sky fell in on top of her.
~ * ~
T-minus five minutes, and lightning struck the main computer complex. Val saw it from a dozen different angles as all the main cameras triangulated on the one spot an instant before the strike. As though the lightning had struck her, Val’s persona reeled backwards, out of the dataflow, as she suddenly realized who was controlling the cameras.
‘Gaia!’ cried her real-world self, and burst into delighted laughter.
Her persona stretched, and shook itself. ‘Gaia!’ For thirty years, the Net had been growing, new data stations coming on-stream all the time. And amongst its many functions was the detailed monitoring of planetary processes.
Val patched back into the cameras, shaking in her excitement. ‘The Net has woken Her up, and She knows exactly what She’s doing!’
Down at the launching site men, still under the control of the King Penis, were trying frantically to douse the flames of the computer complex. What was left of the master computer tried to stop the count, but the overrides had been cut.
T-minus one minute. Val could see from the data that the storms were losing their power. ‘One more strike,’ she prayed. ‘You’ve got to hit the ship. You can’t let it get away.’
T-minus thirty seconds, and the ship’s main engines roared into life. ‘Don’t let it get away. Please, don’t let it get away.’
T-minus twenty seconds, and the King Penis turned in on Himself, composing Himself for His second long sleep. All around, men stopped what they were doing and looked towards the ship, dazed, confused.
T-minus ten seconds, and a shiver passed through the Earth’s crust. Throughout the length of Florida, buildings shook and bridges creaked. Five.
The Earth shook harder, and the starship swayed against its gantry.
Four.
Data overloaded into Val’s persona. The rose-coloured blob turned incandescent, atomized, and vanished.
Three.
The King Penis, the One True Sky God, was dreaming of home. So near now.
Two.
And the Earth lifted and split as a huge quake reached the surface, tearing apart rocks that had withstood the passage of millennia.
One.
The starship listed to one side as the Earth opened up beneath it. Very slowly, it began to fall.
Zero.
The main engines burst into full life as the ship teetered on the edge of nothing. Slowly it began to move, its engines struggling to lift it, and then it keeled over into the chasm. The King Penis jerked back to awareness as He felt the last phallus collapsing. Then the ship disappeared, swallowed up by the crack in the Earth’s mantle. There was one last, huge explosion as the engines caught fire, and all around the world, the remaining penises shivered, gasped, and died.
The lightning ceased and the gales subsided. A stillness fell over all the Earth, expectant, waiting.
At her desk, Val stirred, and woke up. Her terminal had fused. No entry. She rubbed her forehead and wondered how she would ever continue to write her books without the Net. But perhaps, now, there would be other ways of knowing. She listened, and heard the silence.
<
~ * ~
The Fleshpots of Luna
Matthew Dickens
One more bar of chocolate? Oh, what the hell... He had to have some pleasure out of life.
It was evening. The All-Nite store was going through a quiet period. A few people loitered among the shelves of overpriced convenience foods, a couple of kids perused the VR slasher flicks. Quentin edged to the counter and began to feed his choices into the waiting maw of the autocheckout.
A queue began to form behind him. Where had all these people suddenly come from? Quentin felt the chill fingers of paranoia clutch at him, knew with fatalistic certainty that everyone was eyeing his purchases with unconcealed contempt.
Outside the mart a group of five or six kids lounged in the mall, sprawled limbs like scaffolding pipes. One of them sauntered towards him, nodding at the flimsy plastic bag.
‘So, fatso? Got yourself something else to eat, huh?’
Quentin ignored him, walked on.
‘Why don’t you share it, man? Don’t it look like we need it more than you do?’
They were following him. Quentin hesitated. Beyond the mall lay the parking lot, and the safety of his car. But out there he would be easy meat. Here at least there were other passers-by. Not that they would be likely to intervene in a fight.
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