The Future Is Short (24 page)
The dig was located 130 jaglumphs past the Melted Region and 20 jags to the right of the Double Ditch, inside one of the caverns that pockmarked the whitened landscape. A few normantodes skittered about, but other than those smelly pests the area was devoid of life. This particular cavern, the structure, the unique way the winds whistled past the cracked rocks, provided a nearly hermetically sealed environment against the eons.
“Must have hurt like a sonofablarg.”
DocSlug123 sloughed. “Repro is painful. Has always been. Nonetheless, we’ve seen evidence the ancients may have enjoyed the process.”
“Yer shelling me?”
Another one slithered out of the cavern, smaller but a lot fatter, glistening with mucus. “Youse gotta see this!”
“LarissaSlug5. Calm down. You’re drooling on my tail,” DocSlug123 scolded. “What do we gotta see?”
LarissaSlug5 shifted its eyespots in the direction of the cavern. The other two followed it inside, past smooth and perpendicular walls, into an inner room strewn with an assortment of mysterious apparatus in remarkably good condition. On a circular bearing surface stood a two-by-three maug rectangle. The rectangle had an opening at the base in which discs could be inserted.
“We know this because we’ve tried it,” said LarissaSlug5. It took a disc in its extensor and shoved it into the rectangle’s opening.
Momentarily, the rectangle lit up and displayed moving images of two ancients. They did not seem to be wearing clothes. The ancients were writhing and slipping around each other like twistersnakes on a cold evening. “That one there”—LarissaSlug5 pointed out the ancient with a long, hard, fleshy tube popping from its midsection—“we believe is the male. The other is the female. It has no tube appendage.”
“Yes,” agreed DocSlug123. “The female one, however, has two fleshy mounds under its head. The male one doesn’t have those.”
“Well, glom your eyespots on this,” LarissaSlug5 chortled.
The ancients continued writhing, a dance of skin and hair and sweat. Then the male ancient could be seen stuffing the flesh mounds of the female ancient into its own mouth hole. The female ancient did not protest.
“Is the male one eating the female?” asked BaxterSlug44 incredulously.
“We’re not sure,” LarissaSlug5 said. “It is possible. Feasting during a mating ritual is not unknown. That could be the purpose of the mounds.
If so, they grow back rapidly.”
“Not unlike our own dorsal puffs,” noted DocSlug123.
Dorsal puffs were survival adaptations, sources of food and water in extreme emergencies, usually self-ingested, but there were stories of sharing sustenance.
“Interesting,” BaxterSlug44 commented.
“Wait,” advised LarissaSlug5.
The male ancient, having had its fill of the female, declamped from the female’s mounds and rolled over, exposing its hard, fleshy tube perpendicular to its midsection.
The female ancient pushed its hair back with an extensor, slithered down the male’s body, and chomped on the male’s erect tube, taking the tube entirely into its mouth hole.
BaxterSlug44 and DocSlug123 went pale.
The male ancient jerked violently. Pain? Hard to say. Shortly thereafter, the male ancient relaxed. The female ancient smiled, opened its mouth. The long, hard, fleshy tube had disappeared. In its place, nothing but a wrinkled stump.
“Cannibals!” gasped DocSlug123. “The ancients were cannibals!”
Sam Bellotto Jr. is the editor of Perihelion Science Fiction, an online magazine of hard science fiction. His short stories have appeared in Every Day Fiction, Bewildering Stories, and the Twisted Tails anthologies. He is an affiliate member of SFWA and the Association of Software Professionals.
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6.
Contact of the Unfortunate Kind
Mike Boggia
“Dwark, are you sure this is a good idea?”
“You question your exalted leader’s intelligence?”
“No, not at all. It’s just that we’ve traveled many solar systems and made no contact with advanced life forms. Teach me how, in your infinite wisdom, you deem this planet worthy of our visit?”
“Eckwoos, at last you show some wisdom. Life forms have existed on this planet for millions of years—the biped humanoid forms for 200,000 years. Any species which survives such a length of time must have higher intelligence than the quadrupeds existing with them.”
“Ah, I understand. If they evolved over this period of time, should we not expect a more advanced civilization, O Exalted One?”
“Some evolve more slowly than others. Now our craft is hidden in the greenery, we must find transportation into their city.”
“Why not use the skimmer? We’d be there in seconds.”
“Eckwoos, your brain is a dark cloud, with little hope of light. The skimmer would frighten them with our supreme presence. We must blend. Bipeds with lower mental capacity often act with stupidity when confronted with the unknown.”
Eckwoos sighed and sucked in twelve of his sixteen tentacles, leaving two to morph into legs and two into arms as he assumed human form.
Dwark nodded with approval, his transformation already complete. He pointed through the foliage to a four-wheeled machine. “There’s our transportation.”
“Where are the owners?”
“In that long dwelling.
It is called a mall.”
They stumbled toward the vehicle. Dwark muttered curses about bipedal locomotion and gravity of the planet. Eckwoos, shorter in stature, managed to balance himself and reached the object first.
It is labeled, Jeep, on the front. Such primitive transport.”
“By the rings of Uranus, don’t just stand there. Open it and let’s leave before we are discovered.”
Dwark stubbed his foot against the vehicle, setting off a shrieking alarm. Eckwoos jumped back, tripped, and rolled across the ground. His body reverted to its natural, spherical form. Tentacles waving, he cried in fear and pain. “It attacks.”
Dwark cursed at the top of his lungs, high piercing whistles that sent birds and animals fleeing.
Before either could recover, a large group of people surrounded them. Several wore hastily created aluminum foil hats with wires protruding from the sides. Others held bats, knives, and rifles. A shouting match broke out between those wanting to kill the invaders outright, and those wanting to take them prisoner.
An elderly biologist pleaded to capture them for a zoological project. His colleague wanted immediate dissection.
“Look out, bet they have ray guns.”
“Atomic blasters, fool.”
“Lasers.”
Dwark lunged across the blacktop, snatched two of Eckwoos’ flailing tentacles, and transformed himself into a stegosaurus; an extinct beast he remembered lived on the planet.
The crowd beat a hasty retreat. Screams and yelps faded in the distance.
Dwark dragged his second-in-command back to their ship. “Of all the degenerate spawn of galactic procreation, this is the worst,” he growled as the wedge-shaped craft screamed over the trees and across the city, narrowly missing a statue with a raised torch in the harbor.
“A manned mission to their moon, unmanned crafts to their nearest plant, advanced telescopes flying to the far reaches of their solar system. I expected more.”
“Oooh, I hurt,” Eckwoos sniveled.
Dwark slapped him with a neon red tentacle. “Shut up. You’re the one who suggested we stop here.”
“Did not.”
“That’s how it will read in the report.”
“Yes, Exalted One.” You twark-thumping son of antimatter, he thought, picking gravel out of his skin. I hate contacts.
Mike Boggia’s passion since childhood has been writing. He had a gothic novel, The Dungeon, written under the pen name Mary Lee Falcon, published in 1967, sold a short story to Mike Shane Mystery Magazine in 1973, and in 2013 had a short story in Mystic Tales from the Misty Swamp.
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57.
Amos Parker
“A contradiction, Amos.”
“No
, Muse. It isn’t.”
“It is, and will fail. Expecting easy art will make it hard.”
“You're wrong. You’re MY Muse. I’m not YOUR Amos. I can be alone and in control!”
“You aspire to own me now?”
“Yes!”
“Another attempt that will fail.
You martyr spirit, over and over. But once, could you tie your physical self to a stake, to burn? Yet humans are creatures of infinite spiritual flame.”
“It’s not even a matter of aspiring or attempting. I own you already. I couldn’t ‘attempt’ to own my hands, could I?”
“I gather from your words, Amos, that you believe you do own them. Yet I gather from your tone that you . . . fear you do not.”
“Fear is the mind killer. I don’t fear anything.”
“Yet your life suggests otherwise.”
“Just shut up and obey.”
“You speak to me as you would to a slave.”
“I just said I own you! That's why the attempt! I have the right to take you off the burner like a teapot when you wail.”
“Even that teapot there by the stove is on loan, borrowed from Infinity, unavoidable for Eternity.”
“I won’t be thirsty when I’m dead.”
“Do you still believe you own your hands, Amos?”
“Look at them.
Who else?”
“Infinity, I say.”
“I won’t need to strangle you when I’m dead either.”
“Is that why, alive, you aspire to embody me?”
“Embody. I suppose Infinity even owns the vessel for this attempt then? It won’t be easy like the booklet says? But hard as your obedience?”
“Please.
Attempt. Free Will is real will. But the attempt will crash. And then, staked, it will burn.”
“For what?”
“Heresy.”
“Which heresy?
No, I don’t believe you!”