I’m too stunned to understand his words. And suddenly a third guard enters the cocoon, making it look really crowded.
“Wait,” the third clone says. “He gave me this.”
The guard squeezes his enormous frame between the other two to slip something in my coffin. It’s a bundle of soft, white fabric. I recognize the robe Prince was wearing.
A cry of wonder and contentment escapes my mouth. I take the garment and press it against my face, but something rolls out of the crumpled robe and falls between my legs.
The alien ball.
“Your human lover said this thing would make the hibernation process less traumatic for your body,” the guard says. “He says to hold on. He says he’ll make sure to fix things. And he says he will find a way to keep the promise he made to you.”
“But… but… I cannot leave him alone at the mercy of the senator!”
“Your human needs some time to understand how to deal with the senator, and you cannot help him in this. The senator has control of the reactors that change the atmosphere, so it’s necessary to think carefully about how to act in order to avoid war and destruction and the extinction of the human race.”
The huge clone raises his visor to look in my eyes. He smiles. “Let me tell you, your human is quite wise, despite his young age. And he’s not alone. Now he knows the password, too.”
“But he’s not a clone,” I state. “I thought the password would work only for clones.”
The gigantic guard tilts his head. “I think the password applies, if it’s a clone’s lover using it.”
I’m stunned. “What is your secret name?” I ask the clone.
He startles a little. He hesitates, but eventually reveals it. “My name is Souldancer.”
“Will you take care of him, Souldancer?”
He nods. “I’ll do it.”
“All right, then,” I say hoarsely. I take the robe in one hand, the alien orb in the other hand, and I lie down in the sarcophagus. I stare at the three guards directly in their bug eyes. Their insensible look genetically designed to maintain the distance between the two races, makes me sad. “Please. Watch over him.”
“We’ll do our best,” Souldancer repeats. Then, in religious awe, he adds, “He says he loves you.”
So our love became somehow a symbol of their freedom, of a possible union between humans and clones. And I’m okay with this.
I close my eyes when the lid drops on me.
I’m not going to be recycled after all. Maybe one day I’ll awake.
And Prince will be there.
Chapter 11
FIRST THING in my mind: I was so good at imagining the path inside Book I made it real.
Oh, Corp, trees and grass. Their deep green color fills my eyes. I’m in a dazzling room with a low ceiling and glass walls wide open on what seems like the luxuriant path of my dreams. There’s a bright, vast Outside. It looms over me without domes, and a surge of dizziness makes me clench my hands on the metal edge, sure I’ll be sucked away. A strange, fragrant sigh shakes some light piece of fabric hung in front of the open glasses. Behind, grass and vegetable life forms of a breathtaking green rustle gently at the huge whisper of this bright Outside. There’s water flowing briskly between the plant forms, forming a quiet, deep pool. I never saw so much water in my life. I never saw anything like that. It’s not like Book; it’s better.
In a stupor, I lower my gaze to my hands, to my skimpy body. I am here. My body is real. I’m not dreaming. I sit in the padded foam of the sarcophagus. I’m cold. I tremble, but I feel good. I feel full of energy.
Someone puts a warm, soft garment over my shoulders. “Quietly, we have time. Take all the time you need.”
His voice is a little changed, a little shaken, but I recognize his scent.
My heart skips a beat.
He turns around the sarcophagus and sits at my side.
My Prince.
I’m blinded. His beauty, his colors. Petals on his lips and gold in his hair. I can’t talk. My eyes fill and tears run down my cheeks.
“I’m dead?” I can ask, incredulous. My voice is so hoarse. “I’m recycled?”
“No, honey.” He takes my cold hand and squeezes it, narrowing his eyes to study me. “Can you remember me, Phae?”
“How could I forget you? You are my Prince.”
“And you remember this?”
He takes an object from the padding of the sarcophagus. He slides it in my hands. It’s irregularly round, pulsing. “The alien ball,” I say.
Prince tilts his head to gaze at me. “It was in my sarcophagus when you put me back inside. Do you remember?”
I close my hands around the sphere. A rush of energy hits me, and my body drinks it like water. My palms warm up and start to tingle. The heat spreads throughout my body.
I smile. “Sure I remember, Prince.”
He caresses my cheek. His hand is warm and soft. I close my eyes for the pleasure of his touch. “Look at me, Phae. Open your eyes.”
I do it.
“Do you notice anything different in me?”
I blink. Prince is a little changed, but his beauty dazzles me. His hair is longer than I remember and falls on his shoulders. His eyes of deep green are different. Wiser.
“I’m thirty-seven years old now,” Prince says.
I gasp in surprise.
He grins. “I got rid of the senator. It took me a bit of time. But the wonderful thing is that now we are exactly the same age.”
I study him, bewildered. Only a few marks around his eyes, his voice a little deeper, his gaze wiser, and a single, long strip of silver in the gold of his hair give a hint he’s no longer in his twenties. But if possible, the touch of mystery and wisdom makes him even more beautiful. He smiles at me. “How do you feel, Phae?”
“I… confused, but extraordinarily good.”
“It’s the alien sphere.” Prince puts his hands on mine, around the ball. “We were right: it’s a medicine. I felt like a rag the first time I woke up from suspended animation. You brought me around the entire ship and hours had passed before I could stop shaking and manage to talk.”
I blink. “Indeed….”
Prince raises his hand and touches my chin, waking me up from the hypnosis of the pulsing light.
“It helped us and will help us again.” Prince’s face lights up in a hint of his cheeky smile. “I believe it’ll ensure us a healthy, long, and sexually satisfying life.”
I take his hand and kiss his palm. I look at him, I fill my eyes with him, and my cock fills as well. Through the sphere, a shiver of well-being crosses my spine.
I’m alive. I want to live.
I place three small kisses into Prince’s palm, and then one on the inside of his wrist. He’s real. He’s not a dream. His flesh is warm beneath my lips, the thin blue veins that show through his skin pulsing with life.
Prince is real.
I let go of his hand, which remains on my face, and take a lock of his long hair. I twist it around my fingers. Silk.
I search for his new, wiser gaze. His eyes are filled with tears, but he waits patiently. He sits and waits for me to grasp the concept.
He’s alive. I’m alive. We are together.
This is all I need to know.
I forget the ball upon my thighs and drag him to me. I smell his neck. I rub my lips on his skin. His eyes well up and tears run down his cheeks, and I kiss them away. I cover his face with kisses while his fingers wander on my skull, and he laughs, crying.
It’s him. He’s my Prince.
I search for his mouth in the exact moment he looks for mine, too.
Oh yeah, I remember this. A humid, secret oblivion.
Our mouths glued, our breath blended, Prince slips his palm under my clothes, on the tingling skin of my chest. His hand sneaks down and closes around my cock.
Oh, Corp.
Too little. Prince lets go of my shaft and slips away from my grasp, leaving me astounded, dazed. He st
ands up, his bare feet on the smooth floor of this strange, dazzling room. He grabs the sphere from my thighs, then takes my hand. “Come on. Can you walk?”
I could follow him anywhere.
I stand up and the garment Prince put on my shoulders remains on the sarcophagus, forgotten. I follow him, my cock hard and swollen as it hasn’t been for whole broad cycles. Prince drags me toward a soft piece of furniture, large, covered in white fabric, flanked by four columns, a small roof, and other thin floating curtains around. When Prince lies on the mattress, I understand it’s a cot, but the largest and most elaborate cot I’ve ever seen. But I pay only brief attention to the bed. Prince absorbs me.
“Come on,” he says, placing the shimmering sphere on a pillow before dragging me down. “All the explanations will come later. But first I need you so bad.”
Yeah. I would like to treasure him, take time to discover him again, but we have been separated for so long and my body is thirsty and hungry for him. I tear off his clothes and cover his skin with kisses. His soft, white, scented skin. “Phae,” he moans. “I missed you so much.” He drags me up abruptly to devour my mouth. We roll on the soft padding of this large cot.
“Soon,” he whispers, panting. “We’ll keep cuddling and foreplay for later. We have all the time. But now I want you inside.”
Oh, shit, this is so fine with me. I crawl between his legs and kiss his shoulder as he turns to search for something in a piece of furniture next to the bed. This bed is as large as my entire old cubicle.
Prince lies down again with something in his hand. It seems to be a little ration package. When he squeezes it, a clear, scented gel escapes from the top.
Prince uses the liquid to smear my cock. I close my eyes and bite my lip at the pleasure of his fingers running along my shaft. Kissing my closed eyelids, he hooks my narrow hips with his legs and pulls me in the right position between his thighs.
“Push, but slowly,” he stammers, the need making him a little incoherent. “I haven’t done it for at least ten years.”
I push, and my hips know what to do. My body knows him. He’s my Prince, the only one in my life, and he opens for me. I slip all the way inside and I sigh, and he sighs too, almost in unison.
Yes. Simply perfect.
Something incoherent and wild and needy comes over me. I pin his wrists to the mattress and fuck him. He shouts at me to do it. I say something, I stammer—oh shit, I’m already coming.
Prince opens his eyes wide and time seems to stop for some seconds when our gazes lock.
“Come inside of me, Phae. Now,” Prince orders.
I obey.
I come screaming his name. I yell to this strange, colorful, dazzling, bright Outside that he’s my Prince, and he’s mine. He squirms under me and pulses around me, and the moment he follows me in the oblivion, I think I’m going to die.
I LIE in a daze.
My spent cock is still inside of him. Prince’s legs are intertwined with mine; his arms are around me, as mine are around him, my face in the soft hollow of his neck. The alien ball pulses quietly on the pillow, close to us. My eyes are shut, but I can feel its glow throbbing in my head with the slow rhythm of our heartbeats, perfectly in sync. It’s as if the sphere can capture you, connect to your body, and deeply regenerate you. I feel the energy within me. A tingling through my skin like electricity.
Is the sphere a thing the aliens have produced or something that occurs naturally on their water planet? Probably we’ll never know.
Not that it matters.
“I’m dreaming all of this,” I mumble against Prince’s neck. “Maybe I’ve been recycled.”
“You haven’t been,” Prince says, in his voice an unusual hardness unfamiliar to me. “You won’t be. You are safe.” He takes my chin and lifts my head to look me in the eyes. “You remember what happened before ending up in that sarcophagus, right?”
I nod. “Yes. I thought they were taking me in a recycling capsule. I thought it was the end.”
Prince studies my eyes and I see in his determined look the man he has become after our separation. A surprisingly strong, charismatic man I watch with awe and wonder, no matter that I’m still inside him. “That day, I could have started a war against the senator,” Prince says. “The clones were on my side. But I couldn’t jeopardize the fragile balance between the terraforming reactors and the survival of the last members of the human race. Now the terraforming is still going on, but the domes are no longer necessary, and within ten years, the atmosphere will be completely converted. But when we arrived the situation was quite different. The senator could destroy the entire colony just by pressing a button. So I decided to go along with him and marry him.”
“You what?”
He laughs, but then turns serious at once. “Listen to me, Phae, because I don’t want to lie to you. The senator had my body, it’s true, but in my heart I have been faithful only to you. And then,” he adds with a wry smile, “I knew how to make things less interesting. He was aroused if I was rebellious and wild, but I was docile and boring and soon he grew tired of me.” He narrows his eyes. “Reinhold was tough, I admit it, but I was tougher. And patient.”
He’s talking about the senator in the past, and I like that. But I haven’t the courage to ask what happened to the man. “How long has it been?” I wonder instead. Prince said he’s my age, but I can’t process the information properly.
He smiles, his eyes suddenly wet. “I took care of you for fifteen years, Phae.”
Oh, shit. “F-fifteen….”
Prince strokes my cheek with his knuckles, his eyes sweet with affection. “They were difficult years, and I’ve thought many times to awaken you—I missed you so much—but then I tried to be as strong as you and wait for better times. You were without code and if I had awakened you, you risked recycling.” He laughs. “Physically, your sarcophagus was under my bed. We can say I was your guardian angel, in this period.”
I really don’t know what to say. I’m too stunned.
Prince sighs. “For fifteen years I have been patient. I waited for the time to ripen, for the awareness of clones and also of humans to increase. During the day, I was the silly husband of the senator of Otherworld, but at night I wrote subversive programs and I sent messages in the clandestine network. I have formed a resistance movement. I worked to isolate the senator from his supporters. And yes, Reinhold Coburn is the only victim on my conscience, because in the end I ordered the attack that killed him.”
“You did all of this?” I ask in surprise.
Prince chuckles. “Yes, and as far as freedom and emancipation are important values, the funny thing is that I did it just for the two of us.”
Prince laughs at my stupor. He makes sure I rest my head back on his shoulder. He moves slightly, snuggling deep down in my embrace, and kisses my temple. “The senator was killed two months ago during a commemorating parade,” Prince continues. “When he died, I dealt with my opponents and, with the support of the clones, I claimed the throne.”
I startle. “You mean you are the King?”
“Senator is the right title,” Prince says with a chuckle. “But yes. Actually I am the king of the Otherworld colony.”
I blink, confused. I have no words. I didn’t imagine my Prince would become King, but I think… I think I like the idea. It swells my heart with—I have to struggle for the right word—with pride.
“I would like to begin a new era of peace and prosperity,” Prince continues, “avoid all the mistakes of the Old World, proclaim peace and equality, and establish a democratic government of the people. My staff and I—Alina Rais, Souldancer, Solartrance, who helped me to gain control of the orbiting base, and many other humans and clones—look to the Old Earth as a model for all that has been wrong with the human race, and this is a good start, I think.”
I untangle myself from his embrace just enough to lift on one elbow and search for his eyes. “My Prince is a King…. I can’t believe it.”
; Prince narrows his eyes and follows the line of my chin with a finger. “Perhaps you might like to know that I have eliminated forever the abomination of cloning. First thing I did as a senator, I proclaimed the total abolition of clone slavery. I have outlawed the production of new clones, and I emancipated the remaining clones. Now clones and humans can live together. And I did this avoiding bloody wars. What do you think?”
I grope in search of words, but I can’t find a single one.
He twists his mouth in a cheeky smile. “Now I think I’ll delegate to my staff the task of forming a democratic government, because I, Senator of Otherworld, want to take a little time off to be with you.”
Finally—barely—the awareness makes its way into me, and an uncertain, stupid grin widens in my face.
Prince did it. He kept his promise and has found a way for us to be together. We have a life to live. No more loneliness, no more spaceships, no more sarcophagi or crappy rations, and no more cycles, but a whole new life in this world so similar to the one in my dreams. With my Prince.
Oh, Corp.
I want to scream.
I swallow the lump in my throat and move the single strand of gray in the gold of his hair. “You have been incredible. You have done more than find a way to be with me. You gave me a new life and a new world, saving the whole human race in the process!” I state, hoarsely.
Prince smiles, resting his forehead against mine. “Can you say that special thing for me, Phae?”
“I love you more than my life, Prince,” I say without thinking about it for a moment.
His eyes sparkle. He sinks his nails into my shoulders, dragging me toward his mouth. “Now I am finally free to say it. I love you too, Phae.”
So, in this nice new world, in this room surrounded by vegetable life forms and softened by the fragrant sigh of that bright Outside, we start to make love.
Again.
About the Author
TALIA R. BLACKWOOD loves being able to lose herself into the worlds she creates. When she isn’t writing, she is a distracted—but talented—graphic designer. She spent part of her life in Scotland, but now her place is in Italy where she lives with two cats and two daughters. She can be contacted at [email protected].
Bright Star Page 13