IGMS Issue 50 (6 page)

Remy steered the stolen spacecraft through the airlocks covering Valles Marineris. Thirty million humans lived in the Valles, plus 15 million Thardexian refugees. He only needed one Thardexian if he wanted to live through this, and his best hope rested with his ex-girlfriend, Susanne. The ship touched down gently as a drifting rose petal in the fine red dust of her front yard.

His stomach had settled somewhat. The sparky, jittery rush of the caffeine was gone, leaving a mellow, steady hum.

Susanne opened the door before Remy knocked. Oh, right, the precognition. Tall and curvy, with skin as blue and creamy as Earth's sky, and long curly hair whiter than milk, Susanne wore a clingy green hugger that left nothing to the imagination.

Remy strolled into her living room as if it were routine, as if he hadn't run out on her two years ago after emptying all the money out of their joint accounts.

"Hey babe," he said, flashing a pained grin. "What's up?"

"Remy," she said. "Some guy called here five minutes ago asking about you."

"Crap," said Remy. All Thardexians were dangerously honest by Remy's standards. Trying to explain lying to them was like explaining a rainbow to a dog. He hoped Susanne's precognition hadn't kicked in.

"I wish I could have helped, but my precognition didn't kick in until I hung up. I told him I had no idea where you were. I said I hadn't seen you in two years, that you'd walked out on me after you freaked when I told you I wanted to have your baby."

As it turned out, the Thardexians had also been puzzled by the very limited scope of human reproduction. Thardexians boasted they could mate with anything with a genetic code. They claimed to do so frequently, and with gusto, although the actual interspecies mating process remained a mystery to human biologists. Ordinary intercourse never seemed to get anyone knocked up. If any humans had participated in a successful mating, no one was talking. But all these pregnant Thardexians had to come from somewhere.

"Baby, I've changed my mind," said Remy. "I've grown a lot these past two years. I think you and I should get into my rocket ship and high tail it back to your home planet where we can breed lots of happy sprogs."

"You wouldn't like my home planet," she said. "It has oceans of ammonia and three times Earth's gravity. And of course, there's the war."

"As long as I'm with you it will be like Heaven."

"You're in bad trouble, aren't you?" she said.

"You wouldn't believe," he said.

"Like, gorilla trouble?"

Remy nodded.

Susanne sighed. "I suppose, as a Thardexian, I bear some of the responsibility."

"I really don't hold you at fault for gorillas being jerks," he said. When the Thardexians had first arrived, they'd dispatched envoys to establish relations with the leaders of every government. Since they weren't initially certain of what, exactly, constituted a human being, they'd wound up sending an envoy to a troop of gorillas in the Congo. Exposure to the Thardexians'
universal translation software had a profound effect upon gorilla intelligence. The apes had used their newly enhanced intellect to launch a gorilla guerrilla war of vengeance against their human neighbors, reclaiming territory taken from them over the centuries. They'd funded their war by rapidly dominating the customary monetary streams relied on by human rebellions, trading in slaves, weapons, diamonds, oil, drugs, and, more recently, coffee.

Susanne clarified: "I mean that you wouldn't be involved in smuggling if my people hadn't made your governments outlaw coffee."

Remy shrugged. "I'd just be smuggling something else. I'm not cut out to make a so-called honest living by saying yes ma'am and yes sir a hundred times a day."

"True," said Susanne. "Which is one reason I was interested in mating with you."

"My bad boy charm, right?" he said, attempting a smile that turned into more of a grimace.

"Your inability to comply with authority," said Susanne. "With our planet in the midst of war, one hope for the Thardexians would be to introduce traits into our collective biological heritage that would reduce our aggression. Your counter-authoritative instincts could be useful if they're genetic in origin, rather than environmentally acquired. This is why I invested so much time in analyzing you."

"My mother thinks I was born bad."

"Perhaps. But you were also born shortly after your world made first contact with a technologically superior spacefaring race. You've grown up amid economic, political, and religious upheaval. It's not easy untangling all these environmental influences from your genetic proclivities. Plus, your gut flora was seriously mutated by your caffeine addiction."

"My gut flora? What does that have to do with anything?"

Susanne gave him a gentle smile. "I find it charming that humans think of themselves as distinct beings rather than walking ecosystems. When I study you for biological worthiness, I can't just take your DNA into consideration. You're also host to legions of viruses, bacteria, and multicellular parasites both benign and malignant that influence your behavior in subtle ways. Now that you've been gone for two years, most of my previous research is obsolete. Your biome has evolved in the interim."

"All the more reason to take me back to Thardex One," said Remy. "You can study me there at your leisure. You said you still have connections there, right? That you could go back any time you wanted?"

Susanne crossed her arms as she fixed a hard stare at his mangled face. Then, her face softened. "You're so damn lucky."

"Why?"

"Since you've been gone, I've spent half my time hating you. The other half I've spent missing you. Life seems a little dull when I'm not getting swept up in your latest life-threatening scheme on a daily basis."

"I hope you're in the second mood."

"I just said you were lucky." Susanne wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her, ignoring the pain. Her lips were soft and sweet and slightly sticky, like she'd been eating honey. She smelled of lilacs.

For half a minute, Remy couldn't recall why he'd been dumb enough to leave her. Then it hit him, deep in the pit of his stomach, the tiny black vortex of horror that he'd felt every time he'd touched Susanne. While Thardexians didn't lie, they did deceive. They were shapeshifters. If their first encounter was with a human male, they took the form of sultry vixens. If they first met women, they appeared as tall, hard studs, muscles carved with the perfection of Greek statues. No one knew what they really looked like before they stepped out of their ships, aside from the fact that all Thardexians sported blue skin and white hair. Some tiny, distant voice in Remy's head screamed every time he put his mouth on her. The thought of going to Thardex One and discovering he'd been kissing some tentacled, gelatinous, blue-white blob was too awful to contemplate. Only the last remnants of the caffeine and the looming possibility of gorilla decapitation made her touch endurable.

Susanne broke off the kiss and went to the bedroom, returning seconds later carrying two suitcases. "Let's go," she said.

"Thardexian women certainly pack faster than human women," said Remy.

"Precognition, remember? I sensed I was going to be travelling long before I knew you'd be coming back into my life."

"Right."

A minute later, they were on the ship, punching up through the ephemeral Martian atmosphere, following the Thardexian spike map to Saturn, nine hours away. From there, they'd jump from spike to spike until they reached Thardex One. In twenty-four hours, Remy would be in a place so unpleasant that even Space Gorilla Max wouldn't bother to hunt him down.

This plan had seemed better back on Earth. His head throbbed with each heartbeat and tiny sparks floated before him. The caffeine was going, going, gone.

"I need coffee," he whispered.

"I knew you would," Susanne said, pulling a thermos out of her purse. She twisted the dispensing valve and the cabin filled with the nostril-stabbing aroma of Thardexian brew, thick and black as spent motor oil.

Once, her quirky and unreliable precognition had unnerved him. Now, as he lifted the thermos to his lips and sucked down a steaming gulp of bean juice, he recognized that her gifts had certain advantages. He emptied the thermos in under a minute and she produced a second one.

"I love you," he said.

"I've always known you would."

They spent the rest of the voyage in Space Gorilla Max's heart-shaped, satin-sheeted, banana-scented bed, taking full advantage of Thardexians' extraordinary flexibility. Remy felt like his life was turning out pretty well. Maybe it was Thardexian pheromone manipulation, maybe it was caffeine psychosis, or maybe it was love, after all.

In the afterglow, he confessed the biggest mystery of his relationship with Susanne. "I don't deserve you."

"I know," she said.

"Why do you put up with me?"

"Like I said. You have some potentially useful genetic traits."

"Yeah, but disobedience to authority? I mean, that can't be that rare, can it? There are a thousand punks like me on the streets of Houston."

"True," she said. "But there's also your hair."

"My what?"

"Your hair," she said. "You're still young, but I can smell in your genes that your hair is going to turn this gorgeous, thick silver. Mmmmm-rrrroww!"

"My hair?"

"Look, I don't ask you to justify your sexual selection preferences," she said, sounding a little defensive. "I mean, if I were to design a human female, I certainly wouldn't waste resources on these ridiculously globular breasts," she said, arching her back to better display her generous cleavage.

"Um, I think big breasts help me choose a mate who will be able to feed my offspring," said Remy.

"Other mammals choose mates perfectly well without prominent breasts," said Susanne. "But don't worry about it. It's fine. You like boobs. I have boobs. Just accept that I like your hair. I mean, really, really like it. You're going to be amazing in another two decades." Her voice dropped an octave as she ran her fingers through his locks. Her eyes grew dewy as she brought her face close to his. Rather than kissing him, she licked the dried blood on the left side of his face. Her saliva numbed his pain. Her faint purring as she analyzed the genetic information she'd just gathered unsettled him, but her breasts mashing against his chest overrode any uneasiness.

Remy was just recovering to the point he was ready to give her another sample of his DNA when the computer chirped their arrival at the Saturnian gravity knot. He went to the leather seat, took the joystick and started steering toward the next spike. Susanne came into the cockpit and massaged his shoulders. His fingers flew across the instrument panel and the ship turned, bringing the rings of Saturn into view.

This was why he'd been born. This was the payoff, the single moment of his life where everything was correct, sitting at the controls of a cherry red rocket ship, a blue-skinned babe wrapped around his neck, the rings of Saturn glowing before him. Maybe Thardex One would be a lousy place to live, but what did that matter? He loved Susanne, Susanne loved him. All was right with the universe.

This bliss lasted upwards of thirty seconds.

The rings of Saturn vanished, hidden behind a steel shark the size of a small moon that swooped down from above. The shark opened its iron maw and swallowed their vessel. The door of the rocket ship exploded from its hinges and a dozen goons stormed the cockpit. They grabbed Remy and Susanne, dragging them screaming and kicking from the ship.

In the center of the vast, chilly hanger, Space Gorilla Max waited. The bloodied, beaten heads of Tyro and Wilson hung from his belt.

Space Gorilla Max wasn't happy. He was a big silverback, easily half a ton. His eyes were red as tomato sauce. When he spoke, his long canine teeth flashed ivory.

"Remy!" he shouted, his rank spittle fouling the air. "You sack of excrement! You dare touch my ship? Do you know what I'm going to do to you?"

Remy kept quiet, fearing his worst guesses might be taken as suggestions.

"The average human intestine is twenty-three foot long," said Space Gorilla Max. "Boys, bring me my tape measure."

"Look," Remy said. "Do what you want to me. But leave Susanne out of this. She had no clue this was your ship. She's innocent. Just ask her. You know she can't lie."

"I can't imagine why her innocence is important. I wonder what the average length of Thardexian intestine is?"

"Why not find out?" Susanne asked.

Susanne lurched, her body swelling from sleek supermodel to sumo in a span of seconds. Her legs thickened to tree trunk size, her torso leaned forward as a long tail sprouted to balance growing weight. Her head expanded to the size of a small car, taking on the form of a t-rex, only toothier. She opened her long, knife-filled jaw and gulped down Space Gorilla Max in a single bite. For several long seconds, his agonized, muffled shrieks could be heard from her belly.

All the gorilla's men fled the room, sobbing like children.

Susanne belched. Her outline slinked and undulated as she slipped from dinosaur back to dream woman. Only, now she was a very pregnant dream woman, her belly bulging like a beach ball. She wiped her glistening lips with a slender, dainty hand as Remy stared.

"I'm so sorry," she said, rubbing her belly. "I really think I would have decided to mate with you, given time. But it seemed more urgent to mate with Space Gorilla Max. I don't know if he has any other useful traits, but oh my god his fur! That silver mane---oh, oh, oh. It makes my toes curl. Our babies will be fabulous!"

Remy nodded. "I'm, um, happy for you."

"Do you still want to go to Thardex One?"

"With Max gone, I guess it's safe to go home. Cops will be looking for me in Texas, but I've got family in California. Maybe it's time for a fresh start."

"You aren't as upset as I thought you'd be," she said.

Remy shrugged. He truly wasn't upset. Perhaps ideas passionately embraced in the moment could be discarded just as swiftly. Perhaps watching his girlfriend digest a gorilla had mutated his gut flora even further. Whatever the cause, he felt as if he was a little wiser, as if he saw the world a little plainer now.