Bikini Planet

by David Garnet

  “No, you are wrong, you hideous sphincter. It is wearing garments.”

  “What are garments, you scraggy virus?”

  “Synthetic skin that protects a vulnerable body against extremes of temperature; even the most unattractive ecto-morph knows that.”

  “Remove your garments. Now.”

  The alien was talking to her, she realised. So was the other one, which said, “If you truly are an Algolan of royal birth, your dynamic worship, please remove your garments.”

  “I am not subject to your commands,” she said.

  “You are an alien. Probably, incorrectly, you see me as an alien. What do we have in common? We breathe,” said one of the creatures.

  “Without air, I cannot survive very long. How long can you survive, your asphyxiating dominance?” said the other creature.

  The two of them shuffled slowly away from her, the dark light shifted, the shadows altered, the perspective stretched.

  She inhaled. Deep. Deeper. Held her breath as long as possible. Let it out slow, slow, slow. When she breathed again, there was no more air.

  Feeling dizzy, she staggered, but managed to stay upright. She was very light-headed, her mind even more confused than it had been.

  They were suffocating her, she realised.

  She had to obey, to get undressed, and she explored her body with her heavy hands. Her clothes seemed to have no fasteners. Because she wasn’t wearing anything. How could she take off something that wasn’t there? She ran her fingers over herself. This was her body. This was herself. This was her.

  Whoever she was.

  She tore at her flesh, ripping it apart with her bare hands. As the darkness shaded into black, her limbs became even heavier, her fingers cold and numb.

  Then she fell, plunging into the midnight of a frozen winter, trapped in a world with nothing, not even air.

  Time passed, and finally it became dawn, the dim light slowly returning until she could see the discarded symsuit lying on the floor next to her. She could also see herself, and she didn’t like what she saw.

  “Must go on a diet,” she muttered.

  She’d spoken, she realised. Which tended to indicate she was alive.

  Her body had almost died, but because of the ordeal her mind had been resurrected.

  She knew who she was. She was Kiru. She was from Earth.

  Without her symsuit, she was horrified to notice how much weight she’d put on during the lifeboat trip. No wonder she felt so heavy and lethargic.

  “Totally abhorrent,” said one of the aliens, in apparent agreement. “Nothing but an ugly bag of bones.”

  “In a poised and elegant way, however, as one would expect from an enlightened dictator born to dictate enlightenedly over an empire.”

  Kiru stood up, or tried to, but it was very difficult because of her weight. No, she realised, that wasn’t the reason. Her weight hadn’t doubled, but the gravity was twice as much as she was used to.

  She hauled herself to her feet and looked at the aliens. It seemed the galaxy was not full of people from Earth—or even people who could recognise people from Earth.

  She was naked, but still had a slate, according to which this pair were Xyzians.

  “Are you a princess?” asked one.

  “Yes,” said Kiru. She had to lie. Lie or die. “I am Princess Janesmith, heir to the throne of the Algolan empire. You’ll both be very well rewarded for saving my royal hide.”

  “Reward me!”

  “Reward me!”

  Kiru watched the aliens as they swayed from side to side on their short grey legs. If a sphere could have corners, the Xyzians had her cornered. They were in what seemed to be a large chamber, but because the light depended on the aliens and their relative positions to one another, it was impossible to determine its exact size.

  “Was I alone on my ship?” she asked. “Were there any other survivors?”

  “Only the great despot which is your despotic greatness.”

  “I found no other living being.”

  What had happened to Eliot Ness? This was all his idea. He’d attempted to programme Kiru into believing she was an Algolan princess, and now he was gone. Kiru was alone again. As always.

  She shivered. Because she was cold.

  Under normal circumstances, being with two small, fat aliens would have seemed ridiculous. Nothing here was at all normal.

  She shivered again. Cold and scared.

  What did she have to be scared of? The worst they could do was kill her, which was what she was scared of.

  “I was the victim of a dreadful spacewreck,” she said. “It was such a tragic catastrophe. I was lucky to make it to the survival pod, but in the confusion I lost everything I own.”

  The best she could do was play for sympathy.

  “You lost everything?”

  “Everything you own?”

  It didn’t work.

  Because if she had nothing, they were more likely to dump her overboard.

  “I might seem naked,” she said, “to have nothing, but that’s only my physical appearance.”

  “Excuse me for this observation, your overwhelmingness, but your physical appearance is not blue.”

  “Algolans should be blue, it says here. Even royal Algolans.”

  “I’ve not been well,” said Kiru.

  “There is little similarity between the illustrations in the reference works and what I can see of your celebrated holiness.”

  “You do not even have a tail.”

  “No!” Kiru looked down over her shoulder. “Where’s it gone?”

  “Are you male, your ascendant princessness, or female?”

  The question was completely different from any of the others, and Kiru didn’t like its implications.

  Eliot Ness had told her that the universe was binary. Most alien races had two of most things. Two lower limbs, two upper limbs. Two heads were seldom better than one, however, and most species only had one. There would probably only be one mouth, too, because of a single digestive tract. But there would be two eyes and two ears and two nostrils.

  Most races had two sexes. More than that, and the survival of the species became complicated. Two was the optimum number, and these were usually referred to as “male” and “female”—which did not necessarily bear any resemblance to what a human meant by those terms.

  Algolan society was dominated by females, Kiru knew, but as for the rest of the galaxy…

  From her experience of Earth, and after, she could guess.

  Kiru stood up as tall as she could and, in a deep voice, said, “I am male.”

  “I am male,” said one of the Xyzians.

  “I am female,” said the other one.

  “She is my husband.”

  “He is my wife.”

  “Oh,” said Kiru.

  “We do not see enough of each other, my treat.”

  “How can we? We have this entire ship to run.”

  “Work, work, work. We have to earn a crust, I know. But, my morsel, there should be time for play. Remember our games?”

  “We are too old for games.”

  “You are not too old, my pudding, and you are just as gross and beautiful as when we first mated. We can still rekindle the flames of our barbecue.”

  “Can we, my succulent one? Or has the oven in our kitchen lost all its heat?”

  “We need a different course on the menu, my sweet. An exotic new flavour neither of us has ever tasted.”

  As it spoke, the Xyzian looked up at Kiru.

  And she realised there was something worse than being killed, perhaps even worse than Grawl taking over her mind and body: They were planning to eat her!

  “You are a deviant,” said the other one. “Am I not all you desire?”

  “You are a banquet, my tasty one. Compared with you, this alien is less than a discarded crumb. But imagine it as an amusing appetiser.”

  Kiru was not amused. “No! I taste terrible. I’m an alien. If you eat
me, I’ll poison you!”

  “Eat you? The idea makes my throat burn.”

  “My stomachs turn at such an unsavoury thought.”

  “To believe we would want to eat the deformed creature, such arrogance!”

  “It must really be a princess, my laden dish, even if it is not an Algolan.”

  The aliens were bouncing up and down faster than ever, circling around and around, making Kiru dizzy.

  She had to get away, to open a door and escape. But she could only open a door if there was one. And the Xyzians didn’t seem to have invented doors.

  “I do not care about any reward or salvage. The only reward I want is you, my staff of life.”

  “And all I want is to salvage our love, my feast, to devour and digest you forever and ever and ever.”

  “Exquisite ecstasy.”

  “Ecstatic exquisiteness.”

  They became still, although their torsos wobbled from side to side, up and down, then they shuffled closer to each other. Their obese grey bellies touched.

  Kiru took a slow step sideways, hoping she could slip away while the aliens were so involved with one another. But it was an even slower step than she hoped, and in this gravity she stood no chance of running away.

  The aliens noticed her first tentative step, and they began to bounce up and down again. The heavier gravity had no effect on them. This was their ship, the gravity the same as on their native world.

  “I… I thought… that,” said Kiru, as slowly as she had moved, “that at… at such an intimate… intimate time… you don’t… don’t want me around.”

  “We want you.”

  “We need you.”

  “What,” she asked, “for?”

  “Our sex slave.”

  She felt sick.

  This was even worse than being eaten.

  She started to retch.

  Then she threw up.

  All over the Xyzians.

  Which was a serious mistake.

  Because how was she to know that vomiting was their idea of foreplay?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The lifeboat landed.

  There was a bump, that was all. The ship was down. Intact. Then silence. The voyage had seemed silent, but now the silence was absolute. No engine sound. No vibration. Nothing.

  “We made it!” said Wayne Norton, as he finally opened his eyes. “Isn’t that great?”

  Grawl was as silent as ever.

  “Aren’t you pleased? Nod. Just one little nod.”

  There was no hint of cranial movement.

  After so long together, Norton thought he knew how far he could push Grawl. And this was far enough.

  “How about breaking out the champagne?”

  Norton poured two cups of water. Grawl allowed him to do this occasionally, although he kept the meals as his responsibility. The water was recycled, which Norton always tried to forget. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if the lifeboat had had two recyling units. In fact, it had three—and he and Grawl were two of them, with whatever they produced then passing through the capsule’s filtration system.

  At least their food wasn’t recycled. When Norton had first considered the idea, just thinking of what he might already have eaten led to him skipping numerous meals. That was the trouble with thinking; it gave you too many thoughts.

  Fortunately, in spite of spending at least one or two minutes preparing each meal, Grawl never seemed to care whether Norton ate or not. In the end, he convinced himself the food wasn’t produced via waste reprocessing. If it was, there would have been so many added flavours that it couldn’t possibly taste as bad as it did.

  He handed one of the cups to Grawl, who accepted the water but didn’t drink.

  Although he’d attempted to keep counting the days, Norton had lost track of time. If the voyage had gone on much longer, he would also have lost his mind. Then one day (or maybe one night, it was all the same) he noticed one of the stars visible on the viewscreen was slowly getting brighter, which meant it was getting nearer. The lifeboat was heading toward it.

  That was when he realised the capsule was on autopilot. It would land on the nearest planet and they would be saved.

  But not all planets were safe. Some worlds were too big, with an atmospheric pressure strong enough to crumple the lifeboat like a tin can. Assuming there was an atmosphere. And even if there was, it could be a lethal mixture of toxic gases.

  For days, and nights, he had gazed out at the blackness, watching for an orbiting planet to come into view. Without success. It was the star which was pulling them closer, its gravity dragging them toward an inevitable fiery doom. But long before they were incinerated in the heart of the alien sun, the escape pod would become a stove and they’d be boiled alive.

  Then at last he’d seen the planet, and it grew and grew as the capsule came nearer and nearer. It had to be habitable, or else the ship wouldn’t be heading there. But was it inhabited? If not, Norton would be stranded on an alien world with only Grawl for company. Which was a vast improvement on being trapped inside a lifeboat with him. At least he could have half the globe to himself.

  “Let’s see where we are,” said Norton.

  He went to check the screen. It was blank. For a moment he wondered if it was damaged. But it was still operational, and there was nothing on it because there was nothing to see. The screen was dark, darker than it had ever been, because there were not even any stars.

  “Must be night outside,” he said.

  Grawl shook his head.

  Norton stared at him in amazement. This was almost the first positive response—okay, negative response, any response!—Grawl had made for weeks. Maybe even months.

  “Shall we open the door?”

  Grawl shook his head again.

  “Is it too cold? Would we freeze out there?”

  Again.

  “Is it too hot? Would we fry out there?”

  And again.

  “Is the air poisonous?”

  Again again.

  “So why can’t we leave?”

  Grawl opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, closed it again.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Grawl’s mouth opened and closed in the same slow rhythm, but his lips didn’t move.

  He looked like a fish. Was Grawl playing charades? Why now? They could have done this weeks and weeks ago, to pass the time.

  “A fish?” said Norton.

  Grawl nodded his head. He was holding the cup in his right hand, and he started making circular movements with his left arm, rotating it over his head.

  “Swimming?” said Norton. “A fish swimming?”

  But what else did fish do except swim?

  Grawl nodded again.

  Norton kept looking at him, wondering what all this was supposed to mean. He shrugged his bewilderment.

  Which was when Grawl threw the contents of his cup at him.

  “Water?”

  Again, Grawl nodded.

  “Oh, yeah, water!”

  Again again.

  “We’re in the water? No. On the water? No. You mean… under the water?”

  The lifeboat hadn’t landed. Not exactly. Because it wasn’t on the land. It was in the sea. Beneath the sea.

  Norton remembered shutting his eyes before the capsule came down. Grawl must have kept his open, which was how he knew they had fallen into the ocean.

  “Can you swim?”

  Grawl shook his head.

  “Neither can I. How far down are we?”

  Grawl shrugged.

  “Ohhhhh,” said Norton, “nohhhhh…”

  But if they couldn’t swim, it didn’t matter how deep they were. They might as well still be out in space, a hundred parsecs from the planet. Norton had no idea how far a “parsec” was, it was just another unfathomable measurement. Unfathomable! How many fathoms beneath the surface was the lifeboat? He had no idea how far a fathom was, either.

  “When I was a kid, my favo
urite movie was 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Did you ever see that? I don’t suppose you did. Long before your time. Two-dimensional, non-interactive. Very primitive. A league can’t be much. How deep is it to the bottom of the sea? Earth’s deepest sea. Two or three miles? More? I don’t know. Say it’s as deep as Everest is high. Five and a half miles. Call it five. That’s… what?… four thousand leagues to a mile. So a league can’t be much more than a foot? About sixteen inches. Hardly anything. How many leagues deep are we? However many, it’s too many. I wish I’d been born in California. On the coast. Southern California. I’d have grown up surfing. I’d have been able to swim. Could have swum out of here. Nevada? Middle of a desert. No chance. Did anyone learn to swim in the Hoover Dam? But I guess if I’d never been in Las Vegas my whole life would have been totally different and I wouldn’t be here now and I wouldn’t need to swim, would I?”

  Grawl raised an index finger and put it to his lips.

  Norton shut up.

  Grawl started to move his finger away from his face, then paused, gazing at it. Then he touched his finger with his other hand. It was his right finger, it was his left hand, and both were gloved in the same strange fabric which covered the rest of his body, except for his face.

  Norton was clad in exactly the same way, except that he didn’t have a right index finger. His outfit fitted him better than any glove. A seamless overall, it was as comfortable as a second skin.

  Having been in space before, Grawl knew the proper lifeboat drill, and it was he who had found the clothes. The things looked like paper bags at first, but Norton was glad of anything to cover his nudity.

  The garment never needed washing, and neither did he. The water Grawl had thrown at him had already been absorbed into the colourless cloth. The material seemed to assimilate every drop of sweat, to neutralise every odour. The gloves prevented his fingernails from growing, and the hood kept his hair nice and short.

  Because the lifeboat had no shaving facilities, Norton’s stubble had started to grow. One morning there was a finger-shaped shaven patch on his cheek, and he guessed his finger had been pressed against his face while he slept. As an experiment, he held his palm against his chin for a long while. When he took it away, his skin was smooth. The glove had absorbed all the hair. After that, he was able to keep his face stubble-free.