Prince nods. He squeezes my hand so hard it makes his knuckles white, and a wave of affection washes over me. Prince is ready to follow me without a protest. I am ignorant, but Prince seems to know I am ready to do the impossible to protect him. He doesn’t give me orders, and he doesn’t treat me with a distant and superior attitude, although he could and I wouldn’t flinch. His understanding toward me makes me feel light-headed, like in zero gravity. This amazes me. I always knew I had to respect him, but I wouldn’t ever have imagined he could reciprocate my feelings. I’m just a poor clone, but with him at my side, suddenly I am the King of the Universe.
I squeeze Prince’s hand back. As the alien keeps stomping noisily above us, we creep out on the suspension bridge and start to move side by side toward the stairs.
It works. We make our way just below the creature, silent and invisible. At least until the main walkway above us, at a point where it intersects other mobile platforms, turns into a metal grid.
I hadn’t expected this. I lift my face and see the spider-legged thing crossing the grid just over our heads. My heart jumps up in my throat. All the alien would have to do is look under its feet and it would see us. Damn.
At that moment, Prince stumbles on a metal fragment. The scrap tinkles on the bridge, then falls in the void.
The alien stops above our heads and its blue laser frames us.
Without thinking, I grab Prince in my arms and start to run.
THE ALIEN-ROBOT-THING moves unexpectedly fast, chasing me down. I run across the bridge, carrying my precious cargo. I’m almost at the stairs when the alien, with absurd agility, jumps toward us.
Incredible. The alien robot leans forward on the upper walkway and jumps into the void—just like that—landing on the bridge in front of me, making it wobble. The metal structure moans under its weight.
The alien crouches to absorb the recoil, its many legs clinging to the tubes and supports of the structure, then rises to its full height, the joints of its armor buzzing. It looms over me, cutting off any way out.
I failed to protect my Prince.
I step back, clutching Prince to my chest, waiting for a death ray to incinerate us. Prince lifts his head from my shoulder. The blue light coming from inside the liquid belly frames his face.
Prince was right. The real alien is inside. In the central part of the armor, drifting in the viscous blue liquid, a little, pale being with large, dark eyes scrutinizes us. The creature gurgles quietly as a series of lights and weird symbols appears on the translucent glass sphere enclosing its body. A blue laser emanating from the top of the globe scans us from every side, and a new wave of symbols pours onto the transparent surface. The creature blinks repeatedly—not using its eyelids, but thin membranes—and tilts his head in what might be wonder.
I blink too. I never thought I could see something of the sort. Inside the belly of the huge, threatening robot looming over us, the alien looks absurdly small and helpless.
“Incredible,” Prince says, trembling in my arms. “I’m seeing an alien. And he doesn’t seem to have bad intentions, Phae.”
As Prince speaks, the blue light moves, again framing his face. The alien stares at him, looking interested.
Yes. It doesn’t seem he wants to hurt us. Not immediately, at least. But suddenly a small slit in the alien’s face opens and begins to move and contract. I can hear a kind of gurgling, or buzzing, from inside the sphere. The symbols on the glass surface are blinking wildly.
At once, I seem to understand what the alien is doing. He keeps us here while communicating our location to his companions. And maybe they are coming.
I have to get Prince out of here. Now. I take a step back. Prince tells me something, but I don’t listen to him. I turn abruptly and run.
The alien follows me. His footsteps shake the platform beneath my feet, but I run faster, while Prince clings to my neck hard enough to choke me.
The creature is remarkably agile given its size and manages to keep up. The platform slips under a low arch, and this slows the alien down, because he has to retract all of his legs to squeeze himself into the narrow space. I start to believe I can do it. I’ve almost reached the opposite staircase, but the alien performs another incredible jump and falls in front of me, cutting off my way out.
The creature’s three-fingered clamps provide an excellent grip on the steel handrails, and he can perform extraordinary leaps. I have no hope. But the thin suspended structure moans and bends under the alien’s weight, and I have an idea.
I change direction and start to run again.
“Phae! It’s useless!” Prince shouts in my ear, but I don’t stop.
The alien springs up and falls in front of me on the suspension bridge, so I change direction and dart back toward the stairs.
“Phae!” Prince screams.
The alien leaps and falls on the staircase once again. He swoops down on the already deformed structure with all his weight. And he breaks it.
With a snap, the spiral staircase detaches from the suspension bridge. Three of the metal cables on the right explode with a dull sound, and the surface tilts, but I was expecting it and grab the railing with one hand.
Clinging to the staircase, the alien begins to fall.
For a moment, one of his grippers clenches to the last rod, and then the metal bar comes off and the creature drops down.
I lean to look. The robot crashes on the surface of the Main Bridge, six levels below. The central sphere explodes and a splash of viscous liquid smears the floor. The little alien creature slips out and rolls in the muck.
A groan escapes Prince’s lips. He sneaks away from my arms, and, clinging to the handrail, starts running on the tilted bridge toward the opposite staircase.
“Prince, stop!” I shout.
He doesn’t listen. He runs fast, but I’m faster. I reach him at the top of the stairs. I grab my Prince around his waist and lift him. He shouts and hits my chest with his fists. “Let me go, I have to help him!”
I yell, “I can’t let you go, it’s dangerous!”
Prince stops hitting me. He takes my face in his hands, looking into my eyes. “Please, Phae. I don’t care if he’s an alien, I have to help him.”
“Maybe he’s here to kill us, Prince.”
“Maybe. But I can’t let him die like that. Once I’d have let him go belly up without flinching. Indeed, probably I would have trampled on him to finish him, but now I can’t. The sarcophagus has changed me; now I know the suffering and I can’t bear to hurt someone.”
Sure. I don’t know many things about purebred humans. I don’t know what kind of life they live on Earth or what they feel. I don’t know what Prince went through many years before I was born, before getting here, on this Ship, and I cannot even imagine it. I’m just a stupid clone. But I can understand suffering, and what Prince is saying makes perfect sense to me.
“Okay, I’ll let you go. But hold my hand and stay close.”
Prince nods. I put him down on his feet, and he holds my hand tightly. Together we run down the stairs.
The little alien lies in a pool of viscous liquid at the center of the floor, panting.
Prince looks at me, asking silent permission to let go of my hand. I let him go. My Prince enters the puddle of slime with his bare feet. He kneels beside the creature.
I approach too. The alien is a helpless, small aquatic creature. From his tiny body, two little legs and two pairs of thin and delicate arms protrude, his webbed fingers almost transparent, the internal structure of his skeleton shining through. His skin is pale blue. His head is round, almost as big as the whole body, hairless, and his wide eyes are huge and oval, deep black, in which I see reflected our amazed faces. The alien blinks and pants in an attempt to breathe, the little, round mouth gaping.
“Shit, he’s dying,” Prince says. He reaches out and picks up the little alien, holding the round head carefully in one palm, the whole body in his other palm. The alien looks at Prince, blinking
and gasping for the liquid he breathes as air.
My heroic Prince looks around. When it fell, the mechanical exoskeleton rolled on one side, inclined on the eight shrunken legs. On the broken glass of the central core, the lights are flashing wildly. Half a palm of liquid has remained on the bottom of the crushed sphere.
Prince gets up, gently holding the alien, and runs to the exoskeleton. The robot is too tall for Prince to reach the globe. “Phae!” he yells.
I run to him. I grab him around his hips and lift him up. Prince deposits the alien inside the sphere, facedown in the little liquid remaining. I can hear the creature suck the fluid convulsively.
Prince caresses the alien’s back. “Come on, you can do it. Come on.”
I hear steps approaching. Still holding Prince’s hips against my shoulder, I slowly look around.
Aliens, at least ten or twelve, flow from the central arcade and rush around us, patting on the floor with the spider legs of their mechanical exoskeletons. In a flash, we are surrounded.
“Prince?” I say slowly. “You can let go of him now.”
Prince withdraws his hands from the shell, leaving the alien inside, and I deposit him on the floor and hold him in my arms, stepping back a few paces.
The aliens take care of their companion. Two of them secrete a kind of glue that solidifies on the broken sphere, regenerating it, while a third fills the growing globe with liquid through a thin conduit that disappears somewhere in a hidden reservoir. As soon as the fluid covers him, the sick creature perks up a little, blinking. A fourth alien drops something in the new sphere just before it solidifies completely. It looks like a ball of bright white-blue light, beautiful, pulsing.
In a few minutes, the creature floats in an irregularly mended sphere and breathes in great gulps, watching the two of us with his big, black, intense eyes. His robot comes to life and gets up with a weird buzzing sound. At least two of its spider legs don’t respond. But the creature is safe.
I don’t know if the same thing is true for Prince and me. We are surrounded. I take another step back, while Prince clings to my side, but this time I can’t run away.
The aliens scrutinize us with their blue rays. They don’t move and don’t harm us. I hear them humming and gurgling into their shells, and they do it for a long time, while Prince trembles slightly in my arms. We wait.
I have no way of knowing; however, I am under the impression they speak about us and discuss what to do with us, while the alien Prince has saved pleads our cause. They don’t look like an army. Maybe they are only explorers, or something like that, because they don’t use weapons on us. They do nothing to us. They simply argue.
And in the end, they choose to leave.
One by one, they retreat and disappear along the main arcade. The last to leave is the creature Prince has saved.
The little alien brings his limping exoskeleton toward the exit, but then turns around to observe us, blinking quickly. Prince leaves me and takes a couple of steps toward him. I think the danger is gone, so I let him go.
The alien inside the liquid tilts his head to look at Prince. Incredibly, his little mouth is curved in what looks without a doubt like a smile.
My Prince smiles back, then raises his palm. “I wish you to be okay.”
The alien raises a mechanical paw toward his mended sphere. With amazement, I realize the clamp can pass through the glass, which is not hard, but gelatinous. The alien grabs the medicine ball and removes it from his transparent shell. Then he rests the glowing orb on the floor and rolls it toward Prince. A gift.
The alien turns and disappears.
We remain alone.
THE BALL of light the alien has left shines into the dark and abandoned hall of the Main Bridge. The object emits a sort of phosphorescence, pulsing as though it is breathing. Prince takes a couple of steps toward it.
“Wait,” I say. “I’ll get it for you.”
Prince waits.
I go closer and collect the ball. I can hold it in the palm of my hand. It’s strangely warm, irregular, with a supple coating around a soft, gelatinous center. It doesn’t seem to be any kind of danger. Indeed, while I hold it in my hand, a feeling of well-being and contentment spreads in my body.
I give the ball to Prince.
“How beautiful. What do you think it is, Phae?” he says, holding the luminous orb in the cupped palms of his hands, watching it with wonder. The blue glow lights up his pretty face. I realize the sphere pulses with the rhythm of his breathing. Or maybe it’s Prince who begins to breathe following the slow pace of the thing’s pulsing. In fact, looking at that light is very relaxing.
“Maybe it’s a kind of medicine.”
Prince doesn’t answer. But all at once, something obscures the starlight above the transparent roof, and Prince looks up. Alien Ship rises above us.
“Look, Phae!” Prince cries in wonder. He joins me, and together we watch some tiny dots detaching from Ship and drifting toward Alien Ship, driven by small, bright engines. At that distance, they look just like spiders, but we know they are the aliens. They are sailing in the void inside their exoskeletons. A gelatinous screen opens in one side of Alien Ship and swallows them. Some silent engines explode with a blinding blue light, and Alien Ship veers toward the unknown depths of Outside.
Chapter 7
WHILE WE’RE both stuck in the small space of the sanitizer, Prince begins to cover my face with hungry kisses. I lift him and bring him to my cot, our naked bodies still smoking with steam.
Prince’s mouth is glued to mine. In a daze, I crawl on top of him and try to enter him, but his opening is too tight.
“Just missing lubrication,” Prince says inside my mouth.
Okay. I kiss him deeply one more time, then leave his mouth with regret and slide down for his other entrance, raising his legs upon my back. Prince moans as I start to lick voraciously at his opening.
I like licking at his ass much more than all the things I’ve ever done in my life. I can’t have enough of it. I cover his hole with my saliva and stretch it with my fingers until it’s tender again and ready to be filled.
“Stop it, Phae, now you can fuck me,” Prince says, but I can’t remove my mouth from his ass. So he pulls away from me and turns on his hands and knees, his legs as open as the width of my cot allows him, leaving me out of breath at the sight of what he’s offering to me. “Fuck me. Now,” he says in a you-are-my-servant tone.
I am his servant. I rush to please him.
I crawl on top of him and my cock slips in the right position. I enter him, and now his silky channel fits me. I close my eyes in awe, and I do what he ordered. It’s not easy on this cot, but I think I’d succeed on the top of a pillar. I grab his hips, thrusting in him, covering his spine with kisses, as he screams, “Yes, Phae, yes, I like it!” The way he joins my thrusts drives me crazy.
I would never, ever stop. I choke back the peak, because I want this forever. I would like to slip inside of him and disappear in him, until nothing matters. Our lives, our distance, our suffering, all will be cleared, annulled, and the two of us, together, could form our own personal, intimate universe.
WE’RE STUCK somewhere in deep space, inside an abandoned spaceship. This is the situation. But I allow myself to forget this, at least for a little while. I simply lie on this cot, sexually satisfied, like a kind of lazy animal.
“Prince,” Phae whispers in my ear. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I say, my eyes closed. “Almost.”
I realize I have a hell of a thirst. I’m also hungry. The ninety-four years’ fast contracts my stomach in a vise. But for now, the thirst is greater. All my internal organs scream for a bit of water, and my saliva is turning into something gluey, sticky. “Oh, I’m so longing for a drink.”
“I can get you some water.” Phae stands up. I open my eyes and peer at his sculpted buttocks as he requests a ration from the automatic system. His back is straight and his shoulders broad, but his ribs protrude
cruelly and his thinness knots my stomach. What kind of life can you live alone on a wreck abandoned in deep space?
Hatred for my father blinds me for a moment. But I know I can’t blame him totally. He had no reason to think I would wake up from cryosleep before arriving at my destination. And I suppose he believes the clones are living beings without feelings, the same thing everyone believes on Earth.
So, whom can I blame for being in this situation? The whole human race? Myself?
This clone, who is in love with me, returns bringing a ration. He sits on the edge of the cot and opens a can of water for me. I’m dying of thirst, literally. I take the can and pour the water in my mouth, but a retch almost suffocates me.
The taste is mossy, old, rotten.
Phae looks scared. He helps me to sit up and removes my hair from my face.
“I don’t think it’s drinkable. As if a rat is dead inside,” I explain, giving him back the can.
He sniffs inside the opening of the can. An expression of extreme discomfort draws on his face. “Okay, I’ll request another one.”
He demands another can of water by pressing a special button on a control panel near the chute. A second aluminum cylinder slides out of the opening, and he examines it carefully to ensure the container is intact before opening the flap and handing me the can. I sniff from the hole and wince. The liquid inside smells rotten, just like the previous one.
Phae is looking at me, concerned. I hold his gaze. “Tell me the truth, Phae. All the water you drink tastes like that, right?”
He shrugs. “I can ask for one hundred rations, but the taste is always the same.”
“And you drink it anyway?”
He looks confused. “I have nothing else to drink.”
Sure. I guess I'm too spoiled. If he manages to drink this shit, I can do it too.
I put my mouth on the opening of the can and let the water slip into my mouth, but my body just refuses to accept something that tastes so heavily of rot and decomposition, all with a slight aftertaste of disinfectant. My stomach flips again in a couple of empty retches.
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