“Welcome to my humble spacecraft, your majesty,” the first fat alien said to her. “Your wondrous presence lights up the whole ship.”
“Your divine being illuminates the entire galaxy,” the second fat alien said to her.
“Shut your toxic aperture!” said the first fat alien to the second fat alien. “I am captain, and I am talking to the transcendent princess. Please forgive this obscene intrusion, your terrific excellency.”
“You fetid excrement!” said the second fat alien to the first fat alien. “I am the one who is on duty. Not that it is a duty to greet your imperial magnificence, but rather the greatest privilege of my entire life.”
The two aliens were both identical, both almost spherical. Round scaly heads balanced on top of round scaly bodies. Grey on grey, with huge grey eyes. Small and squat, reptilian and repulsive.
Who were they? What were they doing here?
Also, where was here!
And what was she doing here?
She said nothing, did nothing, and tried to remember.
One of the round aliens said, “My whole existence has been a prelude to this moment. Having reached this pinnacle of achievement, from hereafter my career is on the decline.”
The other round alien said, “You must ignore my insubstantial crew, your great greatness. I will have it expelled into space like the putrid garbage it is. Say the word, and I shall also step out into the void so the entire ship can be yours and you are not contaminated by my wretched self.”
“Please, your acclaimed wonderfulness, ignore this anorexic peasant. If such is your wish, of course. Whatever your glorious self commands or desires, it is yours. While you are on board, this ship is your ship and I am your captain,” said the other spherical alien.
“No,” continued the previous one, “I am your esteemed luminescence’s captain. It was I who came to the rescue of your unique superlativeness. I seek no compensation for all my exertions and expenses, although if your prestigious self were to offer a reward for your salvation I would not be so rude and ignorant as to refuse any such tokens of gratitude.”
She was on board their spaceship. They had rescued her.
But what had they rescued her from?
She felt exhausted, unable to stand, hardly even able to move. Although there were only two of the grotesque aliens, she was surrounded. The creatures kept rolling from side to side, wobbling all around her, and she couldn’t tell which was which. As they were exactly the same, it made no real difference.
She had found herself in a huge spherical room which was so bright she had to narrow her eyes, and yet it was a negative light which seemed to defy the laws of physics. The vast room was so bright that it was almost dark. The aliens were grey, and so was she, but they all cast brilliant shadows against the curved floor, the distant walls, the high ceiling.
The shape of the room seemed very familiar, reminding her of somewhere else, somewhere much smaller.
She tried to remember where it was.
And who she was.
“Does your majestic majesty understand me?” said one of the round creatures.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Paradise!” said the alien which had last spoken. “Did you hear that, you emaciated dirtbrain? Our honoured guest addressed me. Me! Not you.”
“Can you hear me?” said the other grey alien, as it bobbed up and down and around. “Can you hear me? Can you? Can you?”
“Yes,” she repeated, “I can hear you.”
“Heaven, absolute heaven!” said the same alien. “This revered high personage can also hear me, you malnourished bacteria.”
Their heads were gnarled and wrinkled with creases and cracks which could have been eyes and ears and noses, but there was nothing which moved like a mouth while they spoke. The sounds the aliens made seemed to come from deep within them, echoing and gurgling upward through layers of bubbling fat.
They were only half her height, although probably four times her weight, and she wondered if she should have been scared of them. She was too confused even to be nervous.
“Have you found the correct reference yet, you virulent wart?” said the other alien, or perhaps the one who had just spoken.
“Here it is, you starving excuse for a life.”
For the first time, the two round creatures became still, gazing up at an array of multicoloured lights which hovered in the air a few metres above their round heads.
“This odd being does not look like an Algolan,” said one of them.
“Maybe it is a bad picture, germ-features,” said the other. “Try a different reference work.”
The lights blinked out, to be replaced a moment later by another rainbow of luminescence. The aliens remained motionless, staring at the glow.
While they looked up, she looked for an escape route. She wasn’t in danger, not yet, but that might not last. Even if she could recognise a way out, that might be even more risky.
Her body was slumped, her shoulders stooped, and her knees bent. She tried shifting her legs to become more comfortable. They would hardly move. It was as if her feet were stuck to the floor, which made the idea of escape even more theoretical. She peered up at the phosphorescent swirl, but she could see no pattern.
It seemed the aliens, however, could.
“Almost the same illustration, you disgusting skeleton.”
“This being is not an Algolan, you insignificant amoeba. I have been fooled.”
“That is not difficult, you moronic excrescence.”
“You were also deceived, you gullible cyst.”
“Not at all. I have always had doubts, you supporting scab. If it was a princess, why did it have no jewels or treasures or offing works of offing art?”
“None that you recognised, you cultural savage. Algolan or not, this is an alien. Everything on board the lifesaver was alien. I do not yet know what is worthless and what is priceless. That is why I loaded the complete craft on board.”
“That was my initiative, you mendacious particle.”
She was wearing a slate. That was how she understood what was being said; but that was all she did understand.
The aliens appeared to know far more about her than she did, but she was aware it wouldn’t be the best policy to ask who she was.
“Your distress signal claimed you were an Algolan princess,” said one of the aliens.
“I am Princess Janesmith of Algol,” she said, and she wondered why she’d only now remembered the name.
“Janesmith,” she said, trying it again, “Princess of Algol.”
The name sounded right, but was it her name?
“Algolan Princess,” she said, “Janesmith.”
The first of the aliens said, “I heard you the first time, you elite product of generations of selective breeding.”
The second of the aliens said, “But, your fabulous highness, I heard you first. It was I who responded to your graceful request for assistance, and I had the satisfaction of saving your perfect noble life.”
“Shall we cut the coprolite, your patrician apexness? Are you really an upper-caste Algolan?”
“How dare you doubt me!” she said.
The two aliens scuttled away a few metres.
As they moved off, the dimensions of the huge chamber seemed to change, the spherical shape becoming distorted. Her own glowing shadow stretched and slid aside, as if trying to detach itself from her body.
The two aliens affected the light, she realised, the position of their bodies making everything brighter or darker. As the angles and intensity of the negative light altered, every perspective became optically warped.
They never changed, always remaining grey, but everything around them appeared to be changed by them. And in a universe where vision was all, appearance was everything.
“It has a voice of authority,” one of them said, moving closer again. “A positive sign.”
“That is the translation device talking, mucus mouth,” the other said, also returning. “Your renowned potency must take no offence at my insistence, but your immaculate reflection does not match that of an Algolan.”
She looked up. Although she could still make out nothing, the aliens must have been able to see an image in the random design of coloured lights which hung in the air.
“I am Princess Janesmith of Algol,” she said. Again.
She realised she was trying to convince herself as well as the aliens. All she could remember was that she’d been somewhere else. Now she was here. On board an alien spaceship. They claimed to have rescued her. Now she needed to escape from them.
“You do not look like an Algolan,” said one of the bloated aliens.
She stared up, but she still couldn’t see anything pictured in the shimmering gleam.
“It is wearing a disguise, you trail of muck,” said the other alien.
“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?