- Wendy called the plant in the morning, telling them she would not be in.
She buzzed Sarah, but cut the connection when Sarah's autoanswer message
came on. She used the hygiene closet and emerged slightly fragrant, feeling
more awake and even more eager to tackle the mystery ahead. She switched on
the viewer and examined her body. She saw a woman, rather attractive by her
own standards, standing before her. Curly red hair halfway down her back,
wide, expressive green eyes, big breasts, narrow waist, wide hips, muscular
legs, a nice package. Her bodypaint depicted white and yellow flames dancing
about her ankles and feet, rising to yellow and orange at her waist and
fading to a red which matched the color of her hair where it played around
and between her breasts. Her back was done similarly, and the whole was
executed in a new holocrystal paint which gave a realistic impresseion of
actual fire consuming her body. She had been really impressed with the
effect when it was introduced, but now it was getting a little tedious to
see it on everone she passed on the street.
- Her facepaint was done in a similar motif, but was more subdued, a mere
hint of flame around the corners of her mouth and eyes. Fortunately, her red
hair and natural radiant sexuality made her one of the few women who could
carry the flame paint well, and therefore few others had it. But she had
seen enough 3D dancing lines and churning waters and rising smoke and
sparkling stars and whirling galaxies to make her think it was time for a
change. And thinking about it, she began to look under the paint at the
woman herself. For the first time she began to notice the effects of 'jac
juice deprivation. Around the corners of her mouth and eyes, tiny wrinkles
were forming. And some, no, quite a few of her fiery red hairs were now a
lighter color, a kind of gray. Scanning downward she began noticing other
little imperfections which had happened so gradually that she had never seen
them. Her breasts which, though large, had once projected firmly outward,
now hung down against her body; her once flat stomach had expanded slightly,
creating a sloping mound between her crotch and chest, and her legs, still
muscular, nonetheless looked thicker, heavier. She knew from the shows that
on other worlds these traits were characteristic of aging; women of her age
were often portrayed in those shows as either grossly fat or painfully thin,
wrinkled, sunken-faced, and gray, but here these symptoms only occurred in
the truly ancient or mortally ill.
- She remembered that years before the invasion she had met a free trader in
person; how old had she been then? Thirty-five? Thirty-six? The trader
captain had been only a few years her senior, but at the time Wendy had
thought she was the victim of some strange malady. The captain had been
strong and quite sturdy looking, and yet her short cropped hair had been
silver and her face lined and twisted; the sight of the trader's twisted
face when it contorted with laughter had sent shivers up Wendy's spine. If
it was the fate of everyone who lived without 'jac juice to live two-thirds
of their lives like that, then something had to be done.
- She fixed a quick breakfast and sat down at the console. She queried the
net about the ejaculoids and confirmed most of what she already knew. All
life on the planet seemed to consist of various large and small organisms
which reproduced by emitting a discharge of countless single-celled
proto-beings. Out of these vast, photosynthetic colonies of single-cell
life, one or more cells would eventually develop into a replica of the
originator. How the colony chose one cell to develop while the rest
supported it's infancy, or why the discharge of all life forms on the planet
seemed genetically identical, or any of an endless number of questions
remained unanswered. The compound was adequately equipped for exobiological
research but long ago it had been decided that use of live ejaculoids for
experiments was immoral, and the creamy discharge had yet to reveal it's
secrets to human science. Many varieties of ejaculoid posessed very high
intellegence; though they had no way of duplicating human communication,
many people believed them to be fully sentient beings. Even the discharge
radiated an essence of life; the psi people said it had a rudimentary
telepathic empathy which disappeared in the mature orgamism. Wendy cleched
the crystal tight in her palm. The warmness she felt was not entirely the
heat of the cream's biological function but also an impression of something
vaguely like emotion.
- Wendy punched up all information on the Prophylactans. Not much was known
about them. They had landed forteen years ago, origin unknown. They looked
like large, semitransparent bags made of some highly resilient membrane in
widely varied sizes. They could fly or crawl with surprising agility. They
seemed to posess no technological artifacts other than their odd, shiny
starship. Some had speculated that they had not built the craft; that they
had hijacked it, or were merely escaped specimens. Their only direct
interference with human life was to bar entry to the alien ship, but the
indirect consequences of their other actions were bad enough. They had
emerged from the ship by the thousands only hours after landing. They had
quickly enfolded every ejaculoid in sight, absorbing the discharge; within
two days they were multiplying by budding new copies of themselves from
their outside surfaces.
- In captivity, they disintegrated into a pool of simple organic slime. No
effective weapon other than brute force had proved effective against them,
and their close proximity to the ejaculoids and their overwhelming numbers
made extermination impossible. Once a team had used heat wands to burn their
way through the gaurds into the ship without damaging it, but nothing useful
had been found. The Prophylactans had merely swarmed into the ship, burying
the explorers, and had their power packs been exhausted before burning
through the layers of living entombment the brave souls would likely have
been lost.
- So, the humans had turned back to their daily work, and found new
entertainment in the systems which the original colonists and their
descendants had long had little use for. How could everyone pretend that
nothing was wrong, that life inside the compounds was enough?
- Wendy remembered when she had been nearing the end of primary training.
She had been relieved that performance evaluations were over, and decided to
go out into the natural sectors for a while. She was nearly an adult, and
her mother had been eager to let her experience the natural beauty of the
world away from human engineering and technology. She and two friends had
taken a minimal amount of survival gear and had walked straight away from
the compound in a randomly chosen direction.
- She was alone. Nyri and Gwen had gone off to look for flyjacs and she had
stayed to ready the gear for the next day's walking. She had gotten done
before they had returned, now having a highly practiced and efficient
routine for making and breaking camp. She had walked in the opposite
direction, down into a small hollow where two hills joined. She came into a
clearing and saw a 'jac like she had never seen before. It was round and
wide with a broad, concave back perhaps four or five meters across. It's
skin was light ivory with a purple-red tint. All around it's circumference
were the beautiful heads which were the trademark of most of the larger,
mobile 'jacs. The heads (she thought there were eight) rose up on long,
slender necks and bent inward over the back; from them poured a constant
stream of discharge. She slid down a steep embankment and walked toward the
creature. She extended a hand and rubbed along the outside of the creature's
body. It's flesh was warm and, like most, was very smooth and firm. There
were no individual muscles that Wendy could see; instead, any part of the
body seemed able to become rigid or springy at will. She stripped out our
her briargaurds and pressed her own body against one of the necks towering
above her. She stretched her hands up over her head as high as they would
go, caressing the thick, slowly swaying neck. The head still bent over the
creature's back, pouring cream onto itself in a heavy, pulsing stream. Wendy
reached down to where some of the 'jac juice was dripping over the edge onto
the ground. She dabbed her fingers in it and brought them to her mouth,
trailing sticky tendrils of juice from the creature which then snapped and
hung dripping from her hand. She tasted the juice; somehow it was even
sweeter and more satisfying that that of the more domesticated 'jacs at
home. Not much cream dripped over the creature's sides, however; it must
have been recycling the juice it sprayed. Suddenly Wendy clambered up onto
the back of the creature. She slipped on it's damp side and fell headfirst
into the center cavity, cream washing over her in thick, stringy waves. Her
chest made contact with a long slit in the creature's body, and the suction
of rushing cream into that opening tugged at her breasts. An abrupt
awareness of sexuality burst into her mind, and then several of the 'jac's
heads plunged beneath the surface to pull her up. Amidst the tangle of
twisting necks, Wendy's head broke surface. She shook her head, huge gobs of
sticky cream flying from her long hair. She wiped her face with her hands,
licking residue from her lips and fingers. All of the heads were now bent
down, nuzzling her from all angles. Her ass was wedged into the creature's
back opening but the flow of cream had stopped.
- One of the heads was lying in her lap, about the size of a human head,
rounded and with a single oblong opening nearly a foot long and several
inches wide from which cream had just been pouring. Wendy embraced the neck
with her arms where it met the head, and pulled the head up to her face. She
began kissing it, dipping her tounge and lower lip into the opening to drink
the residual juice there.
- "It's OK. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you or hurt you. I just
wanted to play."
- As if in response Wendy felt the suction of the back opening start up,
pulling jism through her legs and over her crotch in a constant flow. The
heads around her began sliding against her and the one in her arms erupted
into a glorious fountain of juice, coating her face in a strong stream of
white fluid. Wendy opened her mouth, drinking deeply of the sweet, thick
discharge, but there was far too much to consume and most of it splashed
out, flowing down over her chin and chest in torrents of hanging drops. She
twisted her head, showering in the downpour as she felt a strange tingling
in her crotch begin to build. It seemed as if there was a buzzer in her
chest, deep beneath her breasts, connected to another buzzer in her cunt by
glowing electrical wires. The wires began extending to her arms and legs as
the heads of the 'jac performed their synchronized dance around her, sending
waves of living jism up and down her body. She began opening and closing her
legs to vary the flow over her crotch, and periodically a head would splash
beneath the surface to double the pressure on her awakening organs with it's
output.
- The wires were now burning bright along every nerve of her body. Her toes
and fingers first stretched to their limits and then clenched into balls
with the stimulation. As the glow seeped into the base of her skull and
spread out into her brain she believed she was one with the alien. It was no
longer a creature to her; she knew without doubt that it was a soul, like
her, alone in a prison of flesh which they could now, only briefly,
transcend. And then the light exploded from her, illuminating the living
stuff which penetrated her every opening. She cried out, a long, high cry of
sheer exhiliration which rose above the hills into space and time. The light
slowly, slowly, slowly faded to black.
- When she had awoken, the heads of the 'jac had been back to their original
positions, pouring a steady flow of juice over her body. She lay in the
cavity, her head hanging over the edge and her hair still dripping remnants
of jism from earlier. It was dark and the stars were out, clearer than she
had ever seen them from the compound. She mustered her strength and dropped
from her lover's back. She carried her briarguards back to camp and wiped
off there, taking care not to wake her friends who had returned and were
already soundly sleeping. They might have just thought she had been bathing,
but somehow they always knew what each other had been up to. She wouldn't
have been too embarrassed, except that her experience with the 'jac had been
the first orgasm of her life. Some girls bragged about their exploits with
'jacs, and while most people publicly expressed with mild humor that it was
sick, Wendy knew that everybody fantasized about making love to them. Just
how many really did it she didn't know, but normal human relationships were
much more fashionable and much less prone to humiliation upon exposure. But
after her experience in the hollow, Wendy wondered how making love with
another woman would ever be able to compare with the feeling she had shared
with the 'jac.
- Wendy snapped off the console and rested her head on her arms. This was
getting her nowhere. As a control systems tech, she better than anyone
should be able to get useful results out of a machine, but her heart and
mind just weren't in it. What had some Mother said? 'The more things change,
the more they stay the same'? Wasn't everyone's blind acceptance of recent
events just like the attitude they had displayed since the colony's birth?
When the seedship had landed, and the suspended chromosomes had been nursed
by the autodocs into adolescent colonists over the years, how had that new
breed reacted to the discovery that all the children were sterile? They had
lived out their lives almost to extinction before Mother Krystal had
proposed perpetuation through cloning. The autodocs had all the necessary
equipment, and soon a new generation of female children was alive. The
decision not to clone the males was based on many factors; the one recorded
for posterity was that to make a male clone, male and female chromosomes are
both needed but female clones only require female cells. The fact that the
males had already shown more major signs of genetic damage and the
possibility of worse defects was also mentioned.
- The most basic reason, however, was that in the fifty odd years after the
seedship had landed and hope for the future was lost, men had fucked up the
planet almost irreparably. Clique warfare, destructive hedonism and complete
disregard for the native ecology had reduced the colony to a state of near
barbarism. But in the four hundred and fifty nine years since a dying
woman's brilliant vision, there had been no warfare, no ecological abuse, no
cultural excess of the sort which had destroyed countless empires before.
There had been times of stress, of course, times at which the future had
seemed bleak; there had also been women of action and women of insight, but
the overwhelming majority of the planet's human history had been a tale of
survival by indifference.
- When the MetaC drive had been invented, allowing journeys that had taken
tens or hundreds of years to be made in weeks, merchant ships had begun
arriving every few days. What had the government done? They had imposed
trade limits to keep the planet's economy the same as it had been during the
time that a single ship's arrival made the history crystals. When the Free
Planets had rebelled against the oppressive Earth Empire, the government had
actually seemed a little reluctant to let the Imperial offices close as the
end of rebellion finally arrived.
- And now their indifference was not only costing the planet's inhabitants
their happiness, but might also be harming the planet's ecology. Nobody knew
how much damage the Prophylactans were causing because nobody really fully
understood the workings of the native ecosystem. The 'jacs were mostly
dormant now, enveloped by the parasites. They seemed to have almost no
discharge, and at least this had reduced the reproductive rate of the
Prophylactans to a near halt. The accepted theory was that the discharge was
not just the reproductive matter of the ejaculoids, but was also their food.
Since the jism was no longer free to enter the environment and
photosynthesize before being reabsorbed, the 'jacs were probably being
slowly starved to death. The humans would still be fine after the planet's
own life came to a grinding halt, within the enclosed ecosphere of the
compounds, but it was a tragic, stupid, fatal thing to simply let happen.
Wendy, her head still heavy on her arms, began to cry.
|
