James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 03

by Bodicea

  Miller and Keeler exchanged glances that said, ‘Za, that was pretty effective’ and, ‘Za, it sure was.’ Led by the inseparable Honeywell and Buttercup, the party made their way inside, leaving a pair of Marines outside the hole to stand watch.

  The inside of the dome was familiar and beautiful. Keeler, Lear, and Alkema had seen the interior of an Aurelian world-ship before and were acquainted with the aesthetic sense. The Aurelians may have been hell-bent on the extermination and enslavement of humanity, but they also liked pretty things. The colored tiles on the ceiling, the sweetly scented breezes wafting through the flowers and trees, and even the music wafting through the air were all Aurelian masterpieces.

  “There doesn’t appear to be any interior structure,” Alkema whispered. “It’s all open space.

  All these domes cover a giant, climate-controlled garden.”

  “Why are you whispering, lieutenant,” Keeler said loudly enough to make the Marines almost drop their guns. His candor did nothing to reduce the tension in the air. The Marines were on extra-high alert.

  This was the essence of the Aurelians, Keeler thought, simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.

  “Someone’s coming,” Alkema said in a near-whisper, then corrected himself and said it louder. “Someone’s coming.”

  Honeywell backed him up. “Multiple targets closing on us.”

  The Marines brought their weapons to ready.

  “Swords?” Keeler asked.

  “Not Swords,” Alkema answered. “Humans…”

  First, the leaves began to rustle. Then, men and women began emerging from behind foliage and statuary, not one of whom could have been less than a hundred years old. They moved slowly, some with the aid of walkers and canes. Their skin was wrinkled and puckered, in most cases spotted with large and small brown lesions, which were especially obvious because they were all completely naked.

  The elderly naked people approached them without any fear or trepidation, full of curiosity about their visitors.

  One ancient woman, wrinkled like a piece of meat left in the desert sun, reduced to a few strands of spider-silk like hair across her head, her ancient mouth was puckered and toothless approached Marine Buttercup making small, choked, cooing noises in the back of her thoat.

  “Commander,” Honeywell leveled his hand cannon.

  “Hold,” Keeler ordered calmly. “Hold!”

  The Old Woman placed her hands on Buttercup’s enormous shoulders, traced his bulging biceps and magnificent pectorals with her cragged and withering hands. In a moment, she was tugging at the front of his pants.

  She was whispering something huskily, in something close enough to Aurelian for the Lingotron™ to make an immediate translation.

  Two words. “Do me!”

  Buttercup looked a little at a loss.

  She repeated her command, calling out loudly, “Come on, Big Man, do me! Give Old Annelie a little brown sugar, come on, love.”

  “Didn’t you bring any girls?” An old man, a wrinkled bag of skin and bones called out.

  “That one’s kinda pretty,” said another old man, fixing David Alkema with a leering stare from his good eye, the other hidden behind a rotting meringue of cataracts. Very slowly, another indicator of his unhealthy interest in the young lieutenant was rising.

  A very fat woman was bounding through a flower-bed, mounds of flesh undulating and flopping. Her fleshy arms were spread out as she reached towards a big blond Marine on the edge of the group.

  “Fresh men!” She called. “Fresh, hot, young men.”

  “No girls,” the first old man snarled, and spit into a bed of soft orange blossoms. “Why didn’t you bring any girls?” he demanded, directing a shout of stinking breath toward Honeywell.

  “I’m the leader, here,” Keeler told him.

  “Then bring us some girls,” the old man barked. “We ain’t had any new bodies here in …

  in… in I don’t know how long. Fine lookin’ young men, but no women.”

  “Commander,” said the Blond Marine. The fat old woman was trying to plant unwanted deep soul kisses on him. “Little help.”

  “Commander!” Honeywell barked. Almost all the Marines were surrounded, or being pawed by, naked, geriatric women behaving so lewdly as to guarantee lowering the fertility rate among the whole company for years to come.

  “Permission for my men to defend themselves,” Honeywell requested.

  “Non-Lethal means,” Keeler ordered.

  Honeywell had two words for this. “Buzz-Knucks.”

  Gratefully, the Marines deployed the stun pads on their gloves. With quick chops to the shoulders, several old ladies crumpled to the ground. The woman who had first assaulted Buttercup looked up dreamily as the shocks hit. “How did you ever know I was into that?” she giggled, then collapsed.

  “They’ll be all right,” Keeler reassured the others.

  “Who cares,” said one of the old man, bald but with a fringe of gray and white around the ears. He was larger than the others and seemed more solid. He was openly fondling his own half-erect penis, unconsciously, the way a man might scratch the back of his head. “What are you doing here? Who are you? Did you bring any women or just those… nice big boys with the vibrator hands?”

  “We are searching for the homeworld of the Aurelians. We thought this was it.”

  “You thought… you thought … oh, ho ho ho ho … you thought this was Aurelia?” The whole assembling began tittering, then guffawing. Flabs and flaps of old skin quivered and rolled.

  “So, you are not Aurelians?”

  The old man laughed again, struggling hard with the concept, but seeming to at last be convinced.

  “We traced one of the Aurelian ships to this location. It was built here… perhaps two hundred or so years ago?” Alkema asked. “Eighty or so years, by your planet’s orbital period.”

  “Yes, yes, oh, the Aurelians came here. A long time ago, they came here,” said one old woman. She hadn’t been on any of the Marines, and thus had retained her right to consciousness.

  “They were so big and strong,” one withered man gushed, clapping his stringy arms together. “… and so marvelously sensual. Oh, the things they did with oils.”

  A pudgy woman, topped with billowing white hair cooed, “They took care of us, they did.

  Gave us everything we could have dreamed of.”

  “Where are the Aurelians now?” Keeler asked.

  “They built a world-ship, and they took the best among us when they left. We were left to live out our lives here… in the garden dome they built for us.”

  “Real nice of them,” said a skinny old woman. “They didn’t have to you know.”

  “They treated us so well,” another old woman sighed.

  “You are all that are left of your people?” Keeler asked. The denizens looked at him a little confusedly, and he realized that any forthcoming explanations were likely to be very sketchy.

  A little while later, they were all sitting beside enormous, multi-tiered fountains, whose waters splashed and fell. The fountains were arranged, set back at different distances and heights, creating a nearly musical arrangement of sounds.

  Getting information out of the old people was exceedingly difficult. The only thing that maintained their attention for any length of time was thoughts of sexual practices they could try on Alkema and the Marines. It was eventually learned that a long time ago, this had been a human colony. They knew little of its history, having been born in the third generation after the Aurelians had arrived.

  “Before the Aurelians, this world was called Hearth.” Keeler looked up toward the red, red sky. Hearth was a quite appropriate name, he thought.

  “The Aurelians, such wonderful people,” said one old and nearly hairless woman, her wrinkled eyes widening in adolescent wonder.

  “The Aurelians were very good to us.”

  “They liberated us.”

  “From whom?” Keeler asked.

  “Fr
om the repression of the former existing order,” an old man all but shrieked. Of all of them, he was the wildest looking, crazy twists of hair and beard sprouting all around his face and body.

  “What was the planet like before the Aurelians got here,” Keeler rephrased. “How did you govern yourselves?”

  “We were ruled by the Tetrarchy of the Four Hemispheres.” The sturdy man from earlier spoke. He was the calmest of the lot, and seemed to prefer his food to the sex.

  On cue, others among the elderly mob voiced their own opinions, with enthusiasm that was almost zealous. Several enthusiastic denunciations of the previous order followed.

  “The Tetrarchy oppressed people from expressing their sexuality fully, but the Aurelians freed us to enjoy all the sensual pleasures our bodies could offer.”

  “And they brought the Øpra.”

  “The Tetrarchy held all the power and wealth of the planet and the hands of a few greedy families, but the Aurelians shared all the worlds wealth among all the people.”

  “And they brought the Øpra.”

  “The Tetrarchy forced people to embrace ridiculous superstitions. The Aurelians outlawed that, and freed us from religious oppression.”

  “And life was so hard. It was a struggle for most people to have enough food. We lived in holes in the ground to protect against the solar flares, hiding away food supplies in tunnels for years when the sunstorms raged. It was a horrible, horrible way of life.”

  “Thank the Aurelians for freeing us from having to live like that.”

  “Indeed,” Keeler said. Underground cities? Well, if you lived this close to the sun, you would want to be shielded. He wondered what the cities looked like, how they were socially structured. Miller wondered how the planet maintained an atmosphere if such flares were regular and strong enough. Alkema wondered when they had stopped wearing clothes.

  “The Aurelians were wonderful.”

  “They left you here to die,” said Alkema.

  “Oh, we have lived two, three times the natural span of our years. We have lived lives of comfort, and fulfillment, and happiness.”

  “And Øpra!”

  “Okay,” Keeler had to ask, finally. “What is this Øpra?”

  “Try some, Leelaynah, bring him some Øpra.”

  An old woman came forth with a basket of what looked like pink flower petals on the table. “Would you like some Øpra.”

  “Øpra?” Keeler repeated. He reached to the bowl and scooped out a small handful. The petals were heavier than he would have expected.

  The old man and the old woman began laughing. “Ooooh, look at that. If I took that much Øpra, I could fly around the world.”

  Keeler rolled the Øpra in his hand. “This isn’t a snack item, is it?”

  The old people laughed as he replaced the stuff on the table, except for a single wedge he placed in a pocket of his jacket for later examination. He really wanted to find out what this stuff did. From his present company, he guessed it had something to do with keeping the mind in a state of delusional adolescence while the body aged, and aged, and dried up like an autumn leaf.

  “I am grateful for every day I have left that I was able to live under the enlightenment of the Aurelian Union, said one sour-looking old man.

  One woman gripped her breasts and raised them from where they naturally hung, about the level of her navel, up and away from her body, as though offering them to the gods. “The Aurelians taught us to celebrate the sensuality our bodies afford us,” she said dreamily.

  An ancient, pale woman shivered, shaking her naked withered breasts like the dried vines blowing in a wind. “Oh, we had such wonderful orgies.” The words were a little hard to discern, as she had lost most of her teeth.

  Alkema looked unimpressed. “But when you die, there are no more of you. The history of this world…”

  “Will be as it should have been,” said one old man. “These worlds were not for humans to exploit. Our ancestors destroyed thousands upon thousands of ecosystems, altered the true histories of so many planets.”

  “The Aurelians have the right way. They build their world-ships, and leave the natural planets alone.”

  “The Aurelians are the future of the human species. They’re stronger. They’re smarter.

  They’re better than we are.”

  “Our only duty is to make way for them.”

  Every chin was raised with pride. They spoke with gratification of their forthcoming extinction. Keeler had heard of this, humans who hated themselves for being human. On Sapphire and Republic alike, it was a rare form of mental illness, although very few cases had been recorded since the colonial era. He shook his head, sadly.

  “You can’t mean that,” Alkema was arguing. “You’re facing extinction.”

  “Dave,” Keeler said slowly. “They’ve been raised to believe that extinction is an appropriate destiny, for themselves and us as well.”

  Alkema was not finished. “Don’t you at least resent being left behind?”

  “We have lived lives of comfort and fulfillment. If they had taken us, we would died anyway.” The old man shrugged. “No, we do not resent them. We are grateful for the paradise they left us.”

  They left orbit the day after meeting with the Hearthian survivors.

  “It is indeed a shame we can’t stay longer,” Keeler said sadly as the planet diminished to a disk, and then a dot, and then a point behind them lost in the corona of its angry red star. He was gathered in an observation deck with his officers.

  “They didn’t use the pathogen,” Miller had been turning this point round in his head.

  “They didn’t need to,” Keeler countered, once again. “The people of Hearth gladly accepted their extinction. The Aurelians only had to convince them it was their destiny.”

  “With a little help from this,” Lear held a sample of the Øpra. The Medical Core had examined it carefully. It was a hallucinogen that produced mild euphoria and an intense aphrodisiac. It also had life extending properties and made the mind very pliant and suggestible.

  “They used the Pathogen on Medea because the Medeans put up a resistance” Miller said.

  “The Hearthians went down easily.”

  “Well, we still can’t rule out the Medeans using it on themselves.” Seeing the looks from Miller and Keeler, she quickly appended the remark. “Although it is unlikely in the extreme.”

  “So, what will they do about Bodicéa?” Miller asked.

  “We’ll know in a few weeks,” Keeler said. “We’re going back.” They looked at him as though he had sampled the Øpra himself, but Keeler had made up his mind. The decision to go back to Bodicéa had been an easy one. There had been a feeling throughout the ship, a consensus, that to go on without checking back one last time would be like quitting a novel before reading the last chapter. Less prosaically, they had seen the start of an Aurelian conquest, and they had seen its ultimate result on two worlds. What they had not seen was what happened in between. This was probably important.

  They stood on the Primary Command Deck, preparing for departure. “The final report is ready for transmission to the Home Systems,” Lear said. “Do you wish to add anything.”

  “Za, Record Now.”

  Keeler was not usually one to stand on ceremony, but this was perhaps the most important transmission he would ever make. He used the formal Sapphirean heading.

  “Hi, everybody. I’m Commander William Keeler of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus. You may remember me from such previous TPT reports as ‘EdenWorld: Screwed Up Bizarro Planet,’

  and ‘Bodicéa: Bombed By Bodacious Bad-Asses.’ The report contained in this transmission is the third we have sent on the study of the race known as the Aurelians. We haven’t learned much about their origins beyond what we have included previously. Apparently, they believe themselves to be a more advanced, more evolved species of human that we are. They are larger, stronger, arguably smarter than we are. They regard humans like us as an inferior life form.
They take us into their ships by the hundreds of millions, as slaves of some kind, we imagine.

  “This record contains our observations on the world formerly known as Hearth. In addition to an unfortunately limited discussion of native life forms and what we have pieced together of Hearth’s colonial history, it also contains additional tactical data on the Aurelians, and what ultimately becomes of the worlds they conquer.

  “These reports contain all the tactical data we have. We must have faith that they are not undefeatable. We are en route back to 10 255 Vulpeculus, from where we shall transmit further analysis. Study this data carefully. Fear No Evil. God is Near. End.”

  When he had finished, he looked back toward the viewport. There was no sign of Hearth, and its sun had diminished to a very bright red star.

  “At least Hearth solved one of our problems,” Miller said quietly.

  “Za-a-a-a-a,” Keeler nodded, and it was hard to suppress a very slight smile. “I wonder how our friends are doing.”

  She was an ancient specimen. Her hair was sparse, the texture of a scrubbing brush, her breasts had shriveled and withered and suggested that any milk that might be squeezed would emerge yellow and sour. Part of her face had fallen in, clearly showing the hollows where teeth had once been.

  She sucked a wedge of Øpra and lay her down on the lap that had once belonged to Cree Bladerunner, extended a brown tongue that looked like a teabag, with half the wedge of opra still on it, waggling it seductively. These gestures were accompanied by a kind of throaty cooing that devolved quickly into a wheeze and finally into a coughing fit.

  He who wore Cree Bladerunner’s skin reached for another wedge of Øpra, and grabbed a handful.

  Across from him, the person wearing the body that had once been Ahmed Zoetrope looked at the naked old woman staring back at him.

  “Come on, Honey, give Sweet Annelie a little love sugar.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Journal Entry