Hotel Andromeda

by Edited by Jack L. Chalker

  This specimen was female, not male as I had originally assumed. By making my body into a beautiful female as well, I had set myself up as a rival. Hotel Andromeda must be a lonely place for Borraks, and the last thing a single female would want to see is another more beautiful female on the make!

  I slipped out of sight into an unoccupied slaughter lounge where carnivores could select creatures and kill them there or cage them for later consumption in the hotel room. With no one looking, I transformed into my best approximation of a male Borrak this time, with a jagged crest on top of the head and a full blush of mating coloration.

  Becoming male doesn’t bother me. Hookermorphs are basically genderless, thought most of my clients are males looking for females. I can do whatever a species wishes—sometimes they are skeptical when I say “anything you want,” but believe me, with all the races and all the societies in the galaxy, I can’t think of many things that aren’t taboo in one culture or another. Some races express their passion through kissing, while others consider the pressing of one’s eating orifice against another eating orifice to be the most disgusting thing imaginable. No, being a male Borrak didn’t bother me at all.

  When I strutted into the bar, concentrating to keep a proper gait with all those segmented legs, I saw the female Borrak straighten from her perch on the barstool and turn both gleaming eyes toward me. Her feelers quivered. I could see her top forelegs fidgeting with nervous anticipation.

  I walked directly up to her, showed off my mating coloration. “Hi. Come here often?”

  She could barely contain herself and trilled. “Where have you been all my life?” She gestured to the empty barstool beside her. I struggled to clamber onto the stool, wondering how she had ever managed it herself. I was looking like a clumsy fool, but she didn’t seem to mind. The Borrak seemed very, very receptive.

  In my own excitement at breaking new ground with a little-known species, I did not notice when John-23 stepped into the bar, looking around with his cyborg eye. Beside him was a smartly dressed human woman; the jewels studding her clothes reflected the pearlescent light. He pointed to me.

  “Would you be interested in doing something about our obvious mutual attraction?” I asked the Borrak. The tips of her feelers touched mine.

  A hand touched my wing casing, a human hand. “There, I’ve found you, Ilkiy. Could we talk to you for a minute?”

  I turned to see John-23 and his lady companion next to me. Intimidated by the fearsome appearance of the Borrak, she still looked secretly pleased. “I’m busy at the moment. I’d be happy to arrange a more convenient time.”

  The woman wasn’t John-23’s wife, nor anyone else I had seen before. “I’ll pay you twice whatever this creature is paying you,” she said.

  The female Borrak reared up in an attack posture, clutching at me with one of her forelegs in a gesture of despair. I stopped the Borrak from doing anything that would have been embarrassing to all concerned, including the hotel management.

  “Relax,” I told the Borrak. “Enjoy yourself, have another drink.” I motioned for one of the robo-bartenders to bring a new slab of the gelatinous intoxicant the Borrak preferred. “John-23 is paying for it. I’ll be back, don’t worry.” I combed one of the Borrak’s feelers through my claws, and she cooed with pleasure. Then I followed John-23 and his lady companion into one of the lobby lounges, out of sight.

  “Sorry to interrupt you while you were working, Ilkiy. She asked me to find you right away,” John-23 said apologetically. “This is Mrs. Wenda Cochran. I’ll let her explain the rest.” He strode off down the corridor, leaving the two of us alone.

  The woman folded her fingers together. I noticed she was wearing a lot of rings. From what I knew of humans, she would have been considered quite beautiful, although she had a hard look to her, like an invisible exoskeleton of her own.

  I could have transformed into something more amenable to conversation, but I was annoyed at having my all-but-guaranteed score with the Borrak ruined, so I remained in threatening alien form.

  “I’ve heard about what your kind can do,” Wenda Cochran said. “I need your services, and I will pay well for them.”

  I found that rather odd, since she was an attractive member of her own species and should have had little trouble picking an available human male from the other hotel guests. However, she wore her human marriage-bonding ring a bit too prominently for active sexual hunting. But she had requested my services for something, and business is business. “I’m sure I can give you pleasure,” I said. “That is my job.”

  “Oh, you’ll give me pleasure, all right,” Wenda Cochran said, “but not in the way you think. I want you to sleep with my husband.”

  It was a good thing the chitinous face of the Borrak registered little emotion. “Why?” I asked.

  She sighed. Her body temperature went up, and I could see an emotional outburst simmering inside her. Tears appeared in her eyes. “My husband is a cheating bastard. He goes on business trips all over the galaxy and he jumps into bed with any humanoid with compatible sexual organs. I am sick and tired of it. He doesn’t know I’ve followed him here.”

  I still didn’t know where I supposedly fit in. “You are tired of him mating with females other than yourself,” I said, confused, “and so you wish to hire me to sleep with him?”

  “Oh that’s not all. I want you to take him to bed and then scare the bejesus out of him.” She snickered then, a harsh and mirthless laugh. “That’ll shrivel his little peeper once and for all. I want you to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget if he ever gets wandering hormones again.”

  “I think I understand,” I said.

  “I’ll pay you three times your usual rate,” Wenda Cochran said. “It’s his own money, and somehow I don’t think he’ll dispute the charge when it comes through on the credit report.”

  “Rex,” I said with a cooing tone in my voice. “I like that name.” I stroked his forearm with my enameled fingernails.

  Picking up Rex Cochran had been embarrassingly easy. I wore a body and face cobbled together from Lexicon entries of gorgeous human female models. I had only to walk slowly into the lounge and bat my eyes… and Rex was on me like a Lupine male sniffing estrus in the air.

  He had short blond hair, broad shoulders, a shirt that fit too tightly, letting curls of chest hair poke through the fabric. A necklace of gold and onyx dangled at his throat. I allowed Rex to buy me a drink, something perfumy and feminine. I laughed at his jokes, I flirted with him. I let him catch me noticing his body. It took him all of fifteen minutes to ask me up to his room.

  Since human mating practices are such a matter of public record, I won’t go into the details of how he rapidly “seduced” me, wheedling one item of my clothing off after another, trying to hide his wolfish glances. His actions so closely followed the general description in the Lexicon entry, I had an odd sensation of déjà vu.

  I thought of his wife Wenda, knowing what Rex did on so many of his “business trips,” how she had finally followed him here to the Hotel Andromeda to teach him a well-deserved lesson. As a hookermorph, I try not to be moralistic in such things—but in this case, Wenda Cochran was the actual customer… and the customer is always right.

  When Rex was on top of me and inside me, moving faster and faster after a puzzlingly brief foreplay session, I knew the time had, er, come. I waited a second longer, feeling Rex reach his peak.

  Then I let my imagination roam free as I transformed.

  Rex looked down to see the voluptuous naked woman he had lured into his bed turn into an octopoid Slimedurg with sulfuric acid hissing out of her pores. I wrapped five tentacles around him like whips and pulled him against me in what seemed a hilarious parody of what I had just been doing as a human female. I tried to draw his face close to my clacking beak for a little kiss. I let greenish saliva dribble out the corner of my mouth.

  Rex shrieked and tried to scramble away, sobbing and howling loud enough to rattle the windows in
his room.

  I rose up from the bed, raising all tentacles and reaching toward him. Then I shifted into a glaring Ice Medusa, with crystalline claws extending longer than my fingers. “What’s the matter, Rex? Don’t you want to play anymore?” I took a step toward him, laughing my best imitation of a maniacal beast.

  Rex stumbled against the far wall. He couldn’t seem to find the door, but he had managed to lose control of his sphincters in a terrible mess.

  Just at the moment he found the door and pounded on it screaming all the while and trying to activate the mechanism, I transformed my monstrous body into a perfect imitation of Wenda Cochran. “Watch yourself, Rex,” I said in her voice, “you keep fooling around on me and you never know what you might pick up.”

  His eyes bulged out of their sockets again, and Rex Cochran fled naked and shrieking into the corridor.

  Just before he turned around for the last time, I observed that Wenda had been right—the experience had certainly shriveled his little peeper.

  When I saw the female Borrak still waiting for me at the bar, I decided not to wait long enough for anything else to mess things up. Meeting new clients isn’t difficult, but finding a way to contribute to the Lexicon doesn’t happen every day, and I wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip away from me. Not many hookermorphs get to be xenosociologists.

  I came up behind her, wearing full mating coloration and exuding all the right pheromones. She whirled, looking like a blur of sharp-edged joints and legs. “I knew you’d come back! I’ve been waiting for so long.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said. She didn’t seem the least bit interested in what the whole business with John-23 and Wenda Cochran had been about. Maybe curiosity wasn’t part of the Borrak psyche; that would be in keeping with a lot of other insectile species.

  “Please tell me it isn’t some cruel joke,” she said to me. “Your mating coloration, your pheromones, your flirtatious small talk. I can’t bear to wait any longer. Are you really interested in mating with me, or should I just die unfulfilled?”

  I couldn’t figure out how a Borrak was supposed to smile, so I just made my voice sound warm and receptive. “I would be greatly honored to make love to you.”

  The Borrak seemed uncertain and afraid, but hookermorphs have to deal with that all the time. I coaxed her and boosted her confidence, then let her usher me up the motivator ramp, crossing a webbed catwalk to get to her room.

  She had selected one of the nest-like dwellings. Inside, she had stocked the place with colored gelatinous blocks of sugar-based foods. Every spare niche was stuffed with brilliant fresh flowers. Water dripped from a fountain off in the corner. Despite the cloying perfume of the sweet foodstuffs and the flowers, the place did have a romantic look about it.

  The Borrak hummed, then flickered her wing casings, palpitating a membrane in her abdomen with a sound very much like a love song. I was mentally noting all this to turn in a report to the compilers of the Lexicon.

  “I am so glad you like me,” she said. “I have been ready to spawn for so long. I don’t know how I could have waited another day. My entire body aches for you!”

  Dancing on my multiple legs, I sidled up next to her. “Well, then, let us get on with it. I’m also anxious to mate with you.”

  “I’m so glad you understand,” she said. Then she stung me in the soft part of my thorax.

  I found it amazing how rapidly the paralysis struck me down. My mind wasn’t clouded in the least, but I felt no pain as I tumbled to the floor in a clamor of chitin and disjointed legs. My face was not turned toward her, but the dome eyes had a wide enough field of view that I could see her movements. I could breathe, but I could not speak. What had I gotten myself into?

  Her abdomen seemed to be pulsing, and I could see her extruding something sharp from where I imagined the sex organs would be. It appeared to be a long tube, like a pipe with a pointed end. An ovipositor.

  Panic gushed through my glands. I wondered if that was a normal reaction for male Borraks, or if my own self-preservation instinct had merely kicked in. I couldn’t move. The paralysis from her sting had put me completely out of commission.

  Raising the ovipositor in the air like a spear, the female Borrak strode over to me. “I have been carrying these larvae around altogether too long. It’ll be a great relief to get rid of them. I really appreciate this, you know.” She leaned over to nuzzle the colorful crest on my head.

  Then she backed up and thrust her ovipositor through the chitinous shell of my wing casings, burying it deep within my body cavity. That time I felt the pain! She squirmed and dug the hollow point around and around until she finally managed to deposit one of her squirming larvae inside of me.

  She heaved a big sigh, withdrew her ovipositor, then shoved it in a different place, laying another voracious Borrak grub. She repeated the procedure six times, then finally retracted her ovipositor and sat down next to me, looking exhausted but fulfilled.

  She surprised me by igniting a tobac-stick, then sucking in a long breath before blowing a cloud of smoke dreamily into the cloying air. “Ah, that feels so much better,” she said. With a foreleg, she patted my exoskeleton near where she had deposited her larvae. “You’re a great lay.”

  Inside me, I could feel the grubs beginning to stir.

  The Borrak hauled herself to her numerous feet and preened in front of a mirror. “As you can see, I’ve provided everything they’ll need. Plenty of food and fresh vegetation, just the right environmental conditions. I’ve got the room reserved for three weeks, and by that time they should be ready to fend for themselves. I’ll let them know at the desk that the children’s return tickets to Borrakus should come out of your account. That is the father’s duty, you know.” She raised her antennae in question, but of course I could not respond. The only functional nerves in my body seemed to be the ones transmitting jabs of pain as the grubs began to devour me from within.

  “Well, at least that’s over with for another year,” she sighed to herself, then left. I heard her seal the door behind herself, illuminating the Do Not Disturb sign.

  From within my body, I could feel seven distinct paths of agony where the grubs continued to munch. They seemed to be very hungry…

  John-23 thought it greatly amusing that a hookermorph would take time off for maternity leave. But hey, everyone else is entitled, so why shouldn’t I be?

  “Stay away from that edge!” I called to the seven babymorphs lurking too close to the zero-g swimming pool. “Wait until you learn how to change into a water-breather before you mess around in a pool.”

  All of the little ones sulked into their protoplasmic state for a moment; then with the short memory of children, they bounded off in different directions, a kaleidoscope of changing shapes, imitating parts of whatever they found interesting around them. Very precocious kids—I’m proud of them.

  I had never even thought of reproducing myself before. While I understood the mating habits of countless other sentient creatures, I had somehow remained ignorant about “the birds and the bees” for my own species. Hookermorphs don’t spend a lot of time learning how to become parents; that’s not what hookermorphs consider a desirable skill. It’s a good thing something in our inbred instinct triggered a reaction in me, though, and I did exactly the right thing while the little Borrak grubs were having me for lunch.

  You see, the way we morphs reproduce is to surround another living organism, and then transform back to the basic state, dragging the enclosed organism along for the ride. You’ve never read that in the Lexicon, now have you? With seven Borrak grubs gnawing away inside of me as the paralysis gradually began to wear off, the best I could manage was to transform back to my basic state, formless, like a bag of old soup. And that did the trick. Inside me were no longer any voracious larvae, but seven squirming babymorphs.

  The babymorphs came out of it delighted, ready for the galaxy and eager to learn. John-23 thinks they’re cute, at least in some of their incarnation
s, and the rest of the hotel staff seems tolerant at least.

  Over by the pool, one of the guests was walking a spiny-backed dragon dog, who sprayed acid on some of the corner shrubs. It lunged on its leash, snarling at the cluster of babymorphs. Feeling a surge of maternal protective instinct, I jumped to my feet, but the little ones reacted all at once, changing into an array of hideous monstrosities. One of the babymorphs became a fanged Putter-clam, opening wide its jagged shell and snapping at the dragon dog, which fled back behind its owner’s legs.

  I smiled. They already know how to defend themselves. Now I just need to teach them how to flirt.

  With a sigh, I settled back into the chaise lounge and let the sunlight photosynthesize my green skin. I’ve earned a rest, haven’t I? I need to write a letter to the Lexicon people, since I have two new listings for them. One for Borraks and one for morphs. And while I’m at it, maybe I’ll try my hand at writing my memoirs. That should surely scandalize the galaxy. Just the type of thing people will pick up to read on an outbound starflight. It’ll sell millions.

  Besides, I’d better make my fortune soon. As precocious as the babymorphs seem to be, I’m bound to have competition before long. I’ll really need to stay in shape.

  Volatile Mix

  Jerry Olfion

  David Wikondu was walking down the corridor toward the best of the hotel’s three restaurants, anticipating a lavish dinner on his expense account, when he heard the scream from around the corner. It was a long, warbling howl, and sounded as if it had come from an alien throat, which didn’t surprise him. There were maybe half a dozen other humans in this whole wing of the hotel, tops.