“I apologise,” I said, “for your pain.”
Her raw skin twitched, which I took to be a sneer. “It was my decision; it is my pain; do not presume to pity me,” Albinia told me coldly.
“Yes Star-Seeker,” I said, and my dawning love for her received a brutal jolt.
And thus the months passed, and then the years. I remember that period fondly now, as a kind of golden age. Though at the time it seemed to be mostly drudgery and terror, alternating with moments of love-sick anxiety.
So many missions. So many evil aliens! So many unscrupulously bargained contracts of trade!
That was my life, the all of my life, before it changed. Before the events that But no. I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Are you sure there’s life down there?” I said sceptically, looking at the panoramic wall-screen image of the slime-covered festering oozing planetary surface that was beneath us.
“Explorer says yes,” said Albinia.
“All right then,” I said. “Phylas, suit up; and let’s get going.”
Our shadow-selves materialised in a field of green grass. The sun beat down upon us.
“Nice weather,” said Phylas, cheerily, and I shot him a filthy look. Phylas, I had learned during our many missions together, was possessed of the boundless optimism of the utterly stupid; his naivety was almost as vexing to me as was Morval’s bleak melancholy.
“ There are storms,” Albinia/Explorer informed us.
A six-legged faun sauntered up to us, and nuzzled me with its snout. I patted it; and it was soft and warm to the touch.
And my mood mellowed. Phylas was grinning still, yet it no longer irked me. Indeed, I ventured a grin of my own, which he easily outmatched.
“I like this place,” I told Phylas.
Phylas laughed out loud. “Indeed so! It reminds me,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Of when I was a boy. My father used to take me hunting. We’d shoot our native grazing animals with a home-made bow and arrow. It was a rite of passage; I was born on the planet of Darox, you know. We had our own-”
I realised that Phylas was now holding a wooden bow, and a quiver full of feathered arrows; a highly unexpected shadow-self conjuration on his part, or so I mused.
“This is meant to be,” I pointed out, “a serious mission.”
“Live a little!” said Phylas. I envied him his youth and his foolishness. And I wondered, where had each of mine of those gone?
“ You need to move out of that swamp, ” said Albinia. “ There’s a strong probability that the sentients are located in the hills above you.”
Swamp?
Phylas drew back the arrow, as the faun skittered away. His aim was true; the arrow took the beast through the neck and it fell.
I stumbled backwards, towards the river. A narrowboat drifted past me, with my beloved Shonia on board, in a beauteous white robe. I blinked.
“Dream of me!” my first true love cried.
I tried to speak, in order to summon Albinia’s help; but my vocal cords were frozen. I blinked again.
“It’s exquisite,” said Phylas, as we walked through the palace, admiring the gem-studded walls and the rich hangings and the seductive beauty of the incense fumes in the air.
“It reminds me,” I said, searching for the memory.
“Ah glory,” said Phylas, for a harem of radiantly intelligent Olaran females were now approaching us. They were clad in robes as rich as-as I took out my knife and I severed Phylas’s throat. Then I thrust the blade through my own forehead, so it impaled my brain and severed my [I awoke on the couch, with a blinding headache. Explorer began recalibrating my connection with my shadow self but-]
I bit my finger and screamed with pain, and lunged off the couch. I ripped the contacts off my skull and body. And I stood there panting.
Then I looked to Phylas. He had sunk back into his shadow-self; so I brutally ripped the contacts off him and he screamed and looked at me.
“Bliss!” he roared.
“Illusion,” I pointed out.
We staggered up to the Command Hub.
Albinia had already surmised that this was a planet inhabited by telepathic slime; Explorer’s instruments informed us that this continent-wide intelligence was able to manipulate the thoughts, emotions and sensations of all who walked through its muddy oozing bogs.
“Why didn’t you rescue us?” I accused.
“You looked as if you were having,” said Albinia, “fun.”
I wrote up the experience in my log, and concluded: No potential for trade: Danger Rating 3: System Quarantined; review in 100 years.
Commander Galamea was curt, and clearly angry with me, I did not know why.
“Set course,” she said, and Albinia sank into a trance-like state.
Phylas and Morval attended to their phantom control displays.
I realised that the Commander’s skin was pinking; and it dawned on me that she was in heat.
“Commander,” I said softly.
She glared at me.
“If you need any-” I hinted.
“What?”
“Help?”
She glared even more.
“Help with what?”
“If your mood is… I realise that when a female is…”
Her glaring intensified.
“You want to fuck me?” she asked, savagely.
“If you need me to,” I said helpfully,
“I will never,” Galamea said, “need a male ever again!”
Her body was trembling with repressed passion; I was awed at the strength of will she was displaying in refusing my offer.
And baffled, too; for all she had to do was indicate her sexual state, and all of us males would do our duty. Grudgingly, perhaps; but even so!
So what, I wondered, made her so bizarrely reluctant to ask?
We shadow-suited up, Galamea and I.
I had a bad feeling about this. But it was the Commander’s idea; she wanted to experience a mission with me.
I lay down on the shadow couch. I closed my eyes.
And then I opened my eyes and found myself standing on a planet full of dark gloom. I could hardly see my way to walk.
Galamea switched on her helmet-torch and we made our way through a dense mass of pointed stakes. This was, I realised, a field of sorts.
“ The nest is to your left, six thousand baraks, ” said Albinia/Explorer.
“Why the darkness? I thought it was daytime,” Galamea asked.
“ I have no data on that.”
“Are there thick clouds?”
“ I have no data on that.”
My shadow feet left no tread; but my motion must have triggered a trap. A stake impaled my body, from my arse to my scalp. I tried to wriggle free.
“Split yourself,” said Galamea bluntly.
“I can’t.”
“Split yourself!”
I split my body in half and Galamea picked up the pieces and stuck them back together. My shadow self reformed.
“ Here, ” said Albinia/Explorer, and I switched on my own helmet-torch and the field was illumined. We saw around us leafless trees haunted by shadows. The shadows were the nocturnals who were the primary sentient species on this planet. The secondary sentients were trees and our chances of trading with them were approximately low to zero.
“Do you have any concept,” Galamea said to me, in quiet tones, as we were waiting for the shadows to approach.
“Of what, Commander?”
“Of how it feels. To have no power over your body.”
“I do not follow.”
“Last week. When I was in heat. You so courteously offered to… fornicate with me. When I was, as you were aware, in heat.”
“I would have been privileged to assist you, Commander,” I said, cautiously. I had never been spoken to so candidly by a female before about this delicate matter. Even my lovers had never referred to the monthly imperative of their biology, except in terms of their needing it, and needing it now.
“I did not want you to do so,” Galamea said bluntly. “I mean-what I’m trying to say here Master-of-the-Ship Jak-is that I didn’t want you to fuck me, at such a time, and in such a way.”