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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Science Fiction
- Subject: Time: PAST/Present/FUTURE
- Published: 07/29/2013
INTERSTELLAR AFFECTION
Born 1969, M, from Herten, NRW, GermanyINTERSTELLAR AFFECTION
By Charles E.J. Moulton
The view over Lake Aldrin had always amazed me. The way planet Earth set over the lake was an amazing sight even for a cynic like me. Of course, I was a lucky man. I had been hired as the star chef of Hyperspace Home Resort Newton for three years now and they had done everything to provide the best of an easy life for me.
I lived in a big house with seven rooms, a library, a pool, a music room and a Holo Vision Chamber™. When I sat in that custom made chair I had to think of how far we humans had come in the matters of technology. We were now travelling past light speed, communing with aliens, living on the moon and now this, too, was a reality: a chair whose armrests catapulted and transmitted a light that transformed your room into the film you were seeing. You not only saw the film, you were in it.
There were the normal machines available for the normal customer. Occasionally, the holographic film emanating from the chair’s armrests would get interference from the room’s furniture.
The room in my house had been specifically designed by Margin Electronics Corporations. This meant that I was actually moving around in the arena when Charlton Heston raced his rival. I could actually see the film from different angles and join in when the ancient pop icon Madonna dropped wax on Willem Dafoe. Watching movies like Star Wars was real fun, except for the guns. They stung a bit.
My friends always asked me why I looked at these ancient movies and not the newer ones that had more effects. I always answered that I found the older movies better. My favourite series was Star Trek and I always compared the series to my reality.
I could, of course, only watch movies in my free time.
I spent six days a week in the Home Resort, a 28th century hotel that accommodated its’ various lodgings to the living environments of the guests origins. My job was to design the replicated meals that rotated on a weekly basis. In addition to that, I was assigned to cook the fresh food for a number of species who, for religious or traditional reasons, refused to take part in a replicated banquet.
I had a team of a thousand individuals from forty different worlds working for me. We had guests from the entire galaxy here. The thousand light years distant warrior tribe, a clan named the Fhrmixyi, often chose the rustic environment with rocks and weapons hanging along the walls. The intellectual tribe Jwijkegy Nenheueh spent most of their time in meditation. The merchants Zuehszheoeb from close to Proxima Centauri were odd creatures that spent most of their time trying to fool somebody out of something worth something.
All in all, we had about three hundred species coming to our for each world custom made world. They were designed to fit the diverse needs of the places they entailed.
There were spider worlds and worlds that had bubble tissue as beds, there were eight legged shoe polishers and four-holed toiletries and miniature vans filled with crayfish that could be used as cosmetics.
With the money I earned I had bought my house in cash in five instalments for 200 000 federal units. My Space Wagon took me early every morning past the terra forming cubes onto Plaza Einstein where I worked. The building was huge and its’ two hundred stories housed twenty thousand rooms, each one equipped with a virtual butler and a hostess that could perform three thousand functions.
I lived alone in my house by Lake Aldrin and my love for erotic stimulation was renowned. I had my diverse array of holographic girls come each night after work. There were black haired goddesses with four breasts from Numia beyond Andromeda and there were human blondes with seductive genius, there were purple headed twins from the colonies of Titan and hybrids from the ocean with four clitoris.
It was a dangerous pastime, because it was all virtual and I looked for no mate.
I had all the mates I wanted in my machine. I thought.
It all changed the day we had guest from a planet around the Alpha Centauri system. A very elegant and tall species from a planet called Centaurinea came to hold a conference in our hotel. I knew that rich tourists took the ACTOR ship to the system to experience this very pretty world with its blue coloured people and oceans of deep thought. The men were well built and had bright, long faces and the women had shiny black hair mostly down to their knees arranged in spectacular ways to attract their men. Equality was the name of the game and this fascinated me.
ACTOR stood for Alpha Centauri Travelling and Organizational Rocket and this ship travelled a week long toward the system by way of the famous ocular fusion technique that made it possible to travel to before unknown speeds. On the tip of the rocket’s cockpit, where the pilots sat, there was a beam that functioned like an eye that foresaw a travelling distance of several light years and made the ship travel on this beam.
The individuals that came to our Home Resort were elegant people and wanted personal service from me. I quickly realized that they were keen on learning from us what kind of beings we were. Diplomats and politicians, they would talk until the interstellar morn about new breakthroughs in their squeak and click tongue.
One lady really fascinated me. She was a stunning girl named Wih–Meh–Wih, a chick with very lively eyes and we soon began flirting heavily with each other. It was usually my policy never to mix with the guests, but this time I was invited to be there. Because of tourism, this girl had learned to speak six or seven human languages and so I could speak to her in mine.
Soon enough, we were asking the council if she could join me in the house for a late drink and the sovereign said yes.
What began as a very sweet seductive chat by the lake, ended as a frenetic, sexual dance with this lady that had two vaginas and six C-Cup breasts. I was in awe and we had sex every night of that month. I soon discovered that she had seventy erogenous zones which made her sensitivity enormous. She sang very high tones during sex and her having two openings made the possibilities almost endless.
When she left, she pleaded for me to come to her world and I quickly agreed. I was the boss of my department and I was going to take leave as soon as the big boss of the resort said yes.
Her father, the sovereign, gave me a plaque at the end of their trip. It said: To Quigley Oacum, the best chef in the galaxy, with the best of thanks for brilliant service. Then they had written in their letters the same sentence again. It was a silver plaque gold studded with rubies in a white frame so it looked quite fantastic.
I cried when I received it, because they had grown quite attached to me and I really loved them. The sovereign was the king and the Wih-Meh-Wih was the princess and his daughter.
Both my alien girl and I were madly in love with each other and really wanted to see one another again. They flew home and soon enough I was planning a trip to Alpha Centauri.
I stopped using my holographic girls entirely and studied the language that I was about to speak on the planet. The country that I was about to travel to was the country of Huewhaohr on Centurinea and I really looked forward to practicing my Centurinean.
When my vacation finally came a good six months later I wondered if my girl would remember me. I’d told the manager that I would be gone six weeks, leaving me four weeks in Huewhaohr and two weeks on the luxury ship with four decks of pleasure.
I spent a week eating and drinking and watching holographic movies. There was a theatre with real actors on board and that was fascinating. I saw them perform a play from the 20th century. Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was being performed by a troop of actors that found themselves being hailed as the new Hollywood legends. The two main actors looked like the original film actors Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.
Were they holographic?
No, they actually seemed real.
Anyway, I arrived in the capital of Lhdzgelij in the country of Huewhaohr and soon began to ask for the Princess Wih-Meh-Wih. I was soon told where the castle was and realized that I could take the virtual train to the palace. It was an under and over ground system of something called a Ray Transfer, where you sat in small light bubbles and it took me past buildings that hovered in the air above large harbours and buildings that looked like multiple pyramids
The royal palace was huge and looked very different from anything I had seen before. Black and yellow towers revealed white and gold balls on their pinnacles with many red windows. Then there were fifty or more pyramids that all connected with each other. At the other end there was a huge crane-looking thing that housed some sort holographic belt of bubbles from which diverse lights were emanating. It was a spectacular sight against the canvas of this strange dusk of purple and orange lights from their suns. It was very strange to see, but apparently the sky produced some sort of Aurora Borealis with weird wavy belts of dancing luminosity.
A blue and green holographic guard with four tusks, a brown uniform and a gigantic sword hanging from his belt appeared and soon asked me what I wanted. I told him in his language that I was a personal friend of the Princess Wih-Meh-Wih and wanted to see her. The guard told me that he did not know who I was and that he could not let me in unless he knew what my name was and from where I had come. I had come a long way to see the princess, I told him. He looked at me as if I had just stolen his sword.
The gate onto the garden before the palace was huge and the flowers seemed to be communicating with each other. They were waving their leaves and swaying to and fro. The flowers looked like a mixture between meat eating plants and roses. He watched me gaze at these flowers and slanted his four eyes and gave me a big smile looking through the pink rubber gate with an evil grin.
“Ijwoujw gesjsjhw, jejkeoisy ehehshsuzzh mmrer” he mused in his very husky bass baritone.
He had told me not to go to close to those flowers.
They ate strangers.
He nodded a few times and then said that he would ask the princess if she knew me. What was my name? I told him it was Quigley Oacum and that we had met on planet Earth’s moon six months ago and she had requested me to come. I had asked for a vacation in order to come and we had fallen madly in love.
He interrupted me rudely.
“Mwsojeoueksk, jej!”
His voice now sounded hoarser than ever and his two and half meters seemed a little too evil. He had told me to shut up and called me a dummy. He picked up a small machine that was the size of a toenail. Out of it he pulled a long antenna. He spoke into the top of the antenna and waited for an answer.
Soon enough, I heard something that very much resembled Wih-Meh-Wih’s voice and she laughed happily when hearing that I had come. After a few seconds she appeared in a holographic projection. She took one look at me and told the guard to ray me up.
He swung his head three times back and forth, which obviously was his version of bowing. The gates opened and Wih-Meh-Wih disappeared. Soon enough, a very strong and green light appeared out of the antenna surrounded me until I was in the light. I heard a very loud click and the light disappeared. Now I was in a throne room with a round black and yellow roof. There were squares in the roof here that had little pink balls as decorations. Each one was rotating. It was a dizzying sight. Additionally, the room was huge and had a chequered floor with red draperies around what probably were arches. This led to a very psychedelic effect on the viewer. Wih-Meh-Wih, who was at least a head taller than I, sat on an orange-purple throne with a black frame that rested on a shiny, black platform with steps leading up to it from the chequered floor.
After taking a short look at me, she ran up and embraced me with such vigour that I had to laugh at her enthusiasm.
She spoke English in her wonderfully odd Centurinean accent.
“I hhave mmisssed youu soh, my secret lllover,” she sang in high tones. “Whyy hhhave you waited so longgg?”
I told her that my boss would not give me such a long vacation first until now. She then said her father the king was very mad at her for considering leaving the planet. I was surprised. She paced the room while telling me that her father had fifty children with five concubines. Only one of them was allowed to leave the planet a year. Two of them had already left that year and both because of love. Wih-Meh-Wih wasn’t up for the throne or anything, she was just a princess, but the king was angry that she was considering going away so far. He had said that he liked me, because I was a nice human and cooked good food and that he even liked my name. Should I ever appear on their planet, which meant I loved her, I should have to withstand the thirty tests.
If I survived them, I could have Wih-Meh-Wih and take her where ever I wanted.
If not, it was off to the Khunga. That is, if I wasn’t dead already.
I started breaking out into fits of sweat. I began envisioning my vacation turning into a holiday from hell.
Thirty tests? Khunga? What was this? The Russian Revolution?
She smiled.
“Nnnnooohhh matter, dearrr,” she squeaked. “I think my fatherrrr will be nice enough to you to only put you through 25 tests. Think of how much great sex we could have on the moon if you manage to succeed going through the tests.”
I stopped her mid way through the doorway of one of the arches and asked her what kind of examinations these were.
What the heck was Khunga?
She giggled and told me that any stranger who wanted to marry and engage in a prolonged sexual activity with anyone in the planet’s royal family had to go through the 30 tests, which in essence comprised life on the planet.
There were easy tests like presenting the basic skills of the language, cooking a special meal of the region and learning how to operate a shtuunk.
“A what?”
She giggled again and told me in a giggly school girl fashion that it was the machine that I had seen the guard operate in order to contact the princess. I remembered the machine with the antenna and realized that this was a shtuunk.
There were tutors for everything and people to guide me through the process. The first ten tests were basic stuff like cooking, language and operations. The next five were religious and intellectual and the last ten were the hardest. These tests were the ones that most men failed. Battling the ten monsters of the planet was extremely difficult, in part because some of them couldn’t be seen. There were teachers here, too, but ultimately no one could prepare you for the extraordinary carnage.
Had anyone made it, I asked?
Yes, two out of fifty had made it.
My saunter through this very elegant palace was surreal. The rooms were very glitzy and it was obvious these people loved turning and rotating things in very brash fabrics. Long corridors with lit floors gave way to halls and rooms in very weird formations.
I was starting to doubt my choice of coming here. I had thought that my vacation would become an adventure of sexual bliss, now it was turning into a test of mad bravery and probably one that could lead into fatal attraction.
I stopped again and faced her.
We were standing facing holographic projections of what were obviously ancestors. They were all blue and huge with four eyes, but extraordinarily handsome. As we spoke they leaned over and shook their heads, nodded to one another and chatted.
“Look, dear,” I said. “I am afraid. I love you, but I am petrified of this. Is there no other way to get you to be mine?”
She shook her head and smiled, giving me an intense kiss that nearly blew my shoes off. Her two tongues grabbed my organ of the idioms and played with it. This gave my crotch a tingle that had me whimper.
That decided everything. No woman from home could make me feel that way. I did not know what waited for me in those tests, but I knew that I wanted to be with this woman forever. Her lifespan being longer than mine, she would also remain fit until my old age and bear me children who possibly also were fitter than me.
We passed long corridors with very high ceilings with these strange projections of rulers. She explained to me that these were the kings and queens a thousand years back. They had been visiting Earth for a long time now and looked at the primitive way we looked upon rulers. It was not until the end of the 21st century that they made a move to make real contact with us. That is when they saw a surge in morals, where more people had a belief in something divine. This was very important to a Centurinean.
I asked her if she thought sexual practice was a naughty thing.
She told me that it required a sense of responsibility and that many humans had a very eager sense of nervousness about life. Fertile love was as much a part of life as anything, but choosing a partner was something everyone should do with great respect.
If that was the case, I told her I was happy she had chosen me.
We entered the royal hall and this extent, it was more than a room, was the biggest I had ever seen. St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, that had been standing for a thousand years now or more, was about half the size of this thing. The walls were in constant motion depending on if we were moving or not.
The walls were blue, the floor was red and yellow and the ceiling was green. It was a dizzying sight. I felt like I was in an amusement park in one of those crazy houses.
Suddenly, we stopped moving and so did the walls and that was when I saw the king sitting on a completely white throne at the end of the hall. The portion of the floor we were standing on lifted and started to move and at once it really did look like we were in a tunnel. Then we stopped and halted a few feet before the large throne.
Three big steps led up to the throne that looked not unlike the throne of Abraham Lincoln near Arlington cemetery on the west end of the National Mall of Washington. The king sat there in his brown uniform blinking with his four eyes, his height of eight feet looming over me like a tree would. He stood up and laughed, spoke with rolling r’s and exploding b’s.
“Quigley, my bhoy,” he chanted. “How arrrre you?”
So, this was my father-in-law?
He lifted me up and hugged me, told me how he’d been disturbed by the fact that his daughter had wanted to leave him to marry a human, but he realized that his daughter was now a young woman and if Quigley was strong enough to go through the tests there was no stopping us.
Furthermore, he could have the best meals in the galaxy whenever he came to visit us.
I had already booked a room at the Lkueuzgsos Oiisiisw, which was the Bubble Palace Hotel, the first class resort in town. It was a sort of resort for rich tourists. The king shook his head and said that of course I should stay here in the palace. I could stay with the princess, of course, but I did have to think of saving my strength for the tests.
He asked me how long I was willing to stay and I told him that I had planned to stay for four weeks and now that I was saving the money I wasn’t spending on the hotel resort I had some units to spare. He told me that I had to plan two weeks minimum for the tests.
The next week was a mixture of relief and agony. During the daytime I was being trained by twenty teachers ten hours a day in every way: physically, intellectually, spiritually, militarily, gastronomically, tactically, acrobatically, confrontationally and romantically. The tutors were so strict that I spent every lesson sweating and crying.
In the evening, my mistress cooked me the most delicious food. Zemiars Vegetable Spice Soup with Hsjwi cream, Steak of Piwueis with Hwztfajdfoid Sauce on Taqtuqtiqit foundation and as a dessert something as common as ice cream from the moon.
What the digestive was I need not tell you. I worked all day only to be with Wih-Meh-Wih in the evening.
She and I went into the holographic chamber to take trips all over the galaxy and went on real trips around the solar system in the mornings before sunrise. It was a crazy time.
Then on the eighth day it was announced that the tests could begin. The first tests took place in the royal hall that was bigger than St. Paul’s. I had to figure out riddles like these: if your rocket storage has 4 pink barrels, 8 white barrels, 6 green barrels, and 2 silver barrels, all standing in pairs, how many barrels would you have to beam out in the dark to be sure you had a matching pair? They were impossible to solve, some of them, because most of them did not have a logical answer. That hour gave me a head ache, but I passed it.
The food test was a piece of cake, pardon the pun.
That was what I did best.
The physical fitness worked well, although I did find myself rather tired after all of that running.
My lady came served me my lunch with her clothes off, which was quite a sight. Her six buxom blue bosoms were rather daintily decorated with ribbons. That was no way to calm down and I think that was the point.
The entire afternoon had me working in the holographic chamber trying to get out of a gigantic labyrinth. I spent six hours alone in there until I found myself out.
That night I did not want to speak to my girl.
I fell asleep after hopping into bed without even sparkling my incisors. I woke up next morning, because there was something bouncing and thumping next to me. Wih-Meh-Wih was jumping ferociously at the side of my bed. I suddenly felt a sensation of wanting to leave this planet and never come back. I had only four tests behind me and they had been easy.
She stopped jumping and smiled.
“I’ll mmmakke yyyouu brrrrreakffffast,” she chirped.
Completely baffled by this strange way of saying good morning, I sat up and got up into their version of a kitchen. I watched her standing on a platform with all these strange machines virtually coming to her instead of her coming to them.
I spoke to her softly about her maybe not being the right girl for me. We were so different. She said that she understood that I felt this way. She asked me to go through with the tests and then decide.
If the first day had been hard, the second day was even harder.
I felt like I was in an odd version of a Jim Carrey movie, with a bit of Sponge Bob thrown in. The next day I was to grasp Centurinean history, which was like trying to repeat how the hundred year’s war developed backwards while walking up and down a wall and eating cake while juggling potatoes and singing Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah sideways.
That was actually exactly what my next test was. I was to perform several tricks at once.
Then I was to learn one of their instruments.
By the end of the day I had a total of ten successful tests behind me and I actually didn’t want to see Wih-Meh-Wih ever again. She had expected that, but she kept on serving me now with greater care. She was never in the nude and she certainly didn’t come to close to me. It seemed to me that this entire hype of intense sex was exaggerated. What I needed now was calm and control.
I went to Wih-Meh-Wih and asked her if we could have some nice cuddling instead. To my great pleasure, she was happy and so we spent a very nice a quiet evening drinking a bottle of Centurinean wine made of a special grape like fruit called Thruibk. It was a taste that reminded me of blackberries with the syrupiness and bloom of a grape. We watched the stars shine over the Centurinean night and spoke of life and love and her conception of God, which was full of meaning. I also told her that the tests were not at all what I had expected. Weren’t the first ten tests supposed to be basic? She answered that I would find that, a lot of times, categorization was unnecessary. Everything was a part of everything. I felt I had redefined my relationship with Wih-Meh-Wih that evening.
The tenth day of my stay I felt ready to take on new tasks.
I said that I was ready to take on test eleven.
Wih-Meh-Wih told me that I passed the eleventh test yesterday evening by looking beyond the merely physical. Yes, sex was a fine thing, but there was much more than sex to a relationship. There was talking and cuddling and mutual understanding. The labyrinth had paved the way. I was honoured to be a part of getting to know myself. Obviously, she was smarter than I ever could imagine. Maybe smart was wrong: she was evolved.
I wandered the fields of the holographic landscapes and she showed me various worlds. She presented me the sunsets of Galinea beyond the suns of Proxima. The green fields of Ireland were followed by the rings of Saturn, the nebulas of Andromeda and Neptune’s thirteen moons then rose above the horizons. We took a walk on Jupiter, which was possible in a hologram. The storms were huge. We felt them whisk and bend around us, but didn’t get affected by them. Then we walked on Pluto and I have never seen such a lonely place.
At the end of the day, over a bottle of Thruibk and Hsjwi cream on the Taqtuqtiqit root, she asked me what I had learned. I said that creation was beautiful. I came to the conclusion that all things should be handled with care.
Nothing should be taken for granted.
I had passed the twelfth test.
The thirteenth test was a bit of challenge: acting. I had to read a play by a Centurinean author named Mij-Kleh Grrumsp IV. The story was about a young female from Centurinea that arrived on Earth and fell in love with a human man. He told her that she had to pass several hard trials before she could be his wife. She refused and left. After leaving, he reconsidered and went to Centurinea in order to agree to sacrifice something for her. Seeing how selfless he was, she then agreed to sacrifice something for him.
In the end, she told him she was a changeling and could teach him about the magic of the universe.
After reading the English translation of the play, their version of Shakespeare, I had to explain the moral of the story. The ordeal continued and Wih-Meh-Wih and I were to rehearse the parts with holographic actors as collaborators. The rehearsals went reasonably well, only the director was an unmerciful tyrant that kept on calling me the worst actor in the galaxy.
Three days of rehearsals followed and, luckily, I had few lines.
On the sixth day we had a dress rehearsal before a crowd of belching, eating, holographic inhabitants. The performance was quite depressing and I asked myself how long this examination would last.
The premiere on the seventh day of the test was good and I must say that I passed the test. I had become a better actor than I thought. The audience was much nicer, so maybe that was the reason why I was a better actor on that day. Anyway, I was proud of myself after the show that night.
Test number fourteen was learning to fly a Centurinean rocket.
At this I was miserable. However, I kept on wondering how long I had been on this planet. Time seemed to pass differently here. Had I been here a month or year? I did not know.
We tried a new approach and the tutor explained in English what each lever did and how I should be really careful with each one and push them too hard. It was very dissimilar from human ships, which were quite sturdy. These ships were highly advanced, but very sensitive. After three days, I was ready and could pilot the thing in a race on one of the moons. It was the most famous races in the system and there were three hundred contestants.
Holographic competitors, of course.
I flew over canyons and mountains, lakes and cities. I was thrown off course by evil individuals and helped by good ones. In the end I came in last, but I made alive and that was main thing.
Wih-Meh-Wih hailed me as if I had been the winner.
The next six tests were a collection of trials that tested me physically, intellectually, spiritually, militarily, gastronomically, tactically, acrobatically, confrontationally and romantically. I had to perform several examinations at the same time that comprised a life on the planet. I had to know how to operate a Shtuunk and I was tested in an incredibly tough manner in order to be able to fight. I was taught to jump, sway, sword fight, kill, hurt, disable and save.
I was becoming a warrior.
Once test number twenty was finished, I was told that the final tests were coming up. I was about to enter hell and battle the most ferocious beasts of the galaxy.
I had to be extremely cunning and very brave.
The first beast was easy, considering the rest. It was a shark from Earth. I really didn’t know if this was real, because I was thrown into a room with a huge pool and given a diving suit that I had learned to use. It took ten weapons and three hours to kill the beast, but in the end I did manage it.
The second was harder. A tiger from a planet beyond Andromeda. He pushed me into a hole and chased me down a tunnel and up a hill before he jumped on me and tried to rip my legs off. I wrestled him to the ground, but he jumped on top of me and made me throw him against the wall of cave.
I was bloody and beaten by the time I was ready and my mistress had to bandage me up and leave me out of the testing for a longer time before my continuation of the process.
Test number twenty three continued on the first day of the third week of my visit on Centurinea. I realized that I probably had been here longer than two weeks, but that the entire concept of time was changed. I had been away for a week or two or a year or two. I did not know and it was all up for grabs.
I was now healthy enough to fight the most ferocious beast yet: a Hetsuwhra. The holographic programme had been created by the only one to survive a battle with the beast. This twelve feet tall and twenty feet wide monster had three heads and sixty eyes that were blinking constantly. Its’ ten arms were waving about all the time. He screamed in different pitches. It was like a weird concert with this strange monster screaming in three tones at once.
I had a very advanced assortment of weapons and armour. The walls of the cave had me bouncing. I finally killed the beast by luring it to eat itself. The right head mistook my presence on top of the middle head and tried to eat me. It then actually bit into its’ own head as I jumped off and watched it bleed to death.
I was completely drenched with the monster’s green blood as I dashed out of the holographic chamber. I jumped into a holographic sea naked after that at stayed there for the rest of the day.
The night in a haunted mansion was just a matter of endurance. I encountered every possible ghoul: werewolves, vampires, poltergeist, ghosts, mummies, ectoplasm, fairies, furies, witches, warlocks, elves, time travellers, apparitions. I was a nervous wreck when it was over.
Then I had to fight a very real monster, the largest monster in the galaxy: a Khunga. One that swallowed space ships was my foe. I had to find a way out of that thing and did it by exuding an antimatter substance and letting the monster vomit me out.
I was then chased by thousands of termites down a labyrinth and at one time I was so bitten by these things that my whole face was blue. I managed to escape in the last minute.
I was then sent to fight a sea beast.
At this point I was excluded from the testing process, because I had cheated and finished early. The king called me to his throne and beat me until I stood up and screamed at him that I loved his daughter and I had gone through twenty seven tests and was worth some bloody respect. He apparently was very proud of me and told me I had passed the next test by defending myself.
The three last tests were hard, but considering what I had gone through comparatively easy. I killed a dinosaur, a dragon and a giant.
After the last test was over I found myself being pulled away from the entire process. It was like travelling back into time and seeing myself perform all the tests at once. I had accomplished something. I should’ve been furious at these people for putting me through this whole thing. I should’ve left Centurinea at that moment and forgot the whole thing.
Instead, I was blissful. This was no ordinary woman. This was a female being from another world, one a head taller than me that loved me and who had such marvellous gifts as love. I was in awe.
The last remaining days of my vacation was the most amazing of my life. I was driven around in ships in order to see the entire quadrant of the galaxy, I was entertained by the most amazing entertainers I have ever seen, heard music I never dreamt possible, saw performances that brought me joy and ate delicious food.
The amazing thing was that my now official girlfriend and I did not once engage in a mingling of lust. Instead, we exchanged telepathic morphing. We danced in a spiritual light that had us waltzing toward paradise. It was remarkable.
We spent every evening dwelling in each other’s minds.
At the very last day of my stay at the palace, Wih-Meh-Wih told me that she was a changeling and could change form whenever she consciously wanted. She could even take the form of a human, but only the form that had been chosen for her. In her human form she was brown eyed and brown haired with a sweet complexion and normal human physicality.
I would see what that entailed upon my arrival on the moon.
Their ships were far more advanced than ours and my return trip with the ACTOR ship was cancelled. I took the trip with the king and my future wife to Earth and in a matter of days we were there.
We had chosen the lake by my house as a place for the wedding.
The ceremony was conducted by her father. Funnily enough, in a matter of a day’s notice my parents arrived to witness it and were happy and surprised to see their son get married.
My boss also arrived and put on his Sunday best to see his best cook take the oath.
The oath itself was astonishing.
I suddenly saw Wih-Meh-Wih turn into a beautiful, buxom, human beauty. We lifted off the ground and mingled in a spiral. I literally became one with her. Our bodies turned into blue light and we swayed and hovered above the lake in a spectacular dance of spirit.
I felt her and she felt me. There was no fear and no anguish.
The night was young as we consisted of blue smoke. Here, she told me I was her wife forever. I was one with the entire creation and she told me that I could become a changeling, too, with her help.
We gradually took our human form and landed on the ground.
The party continued and now I could hear what everyone felt and said and thought.
The language was emotion and the smiles were the reward.
I now had actually felt what my wife’s soul looked like and it was beautiful. Hearing and seeing her and guessing what she meant was different than actually feeling her.
My parents and her parents became really good friends and once they left in the same space ship to visit Earth and then go to Centurinea we realized we had created bliss.
We never have sex anymore.
We just turn into blue smoke.
Our five children are changelings, too.
And, boy, can they cook.
INTERSTELLAR AFFECTION(Charles E.J. Moulton)
INTERSTELLAR AFFECTION
By Charles E.J. Moulton
The view over Lake Aldrin had always amazed me. The way planet Earth set over the lake was an amazing sight even for a cynic like me. Of course, I was a lucky man. I had been hired as the star chef of Hyperspace Home Resort Newton for three years now and they had done everything to provide the best of an easy life for me.
I lived in a big house with seven rooms, a library, a pool, a music room and a Holo Vision Chamber™. When I sat in that custom made chair I had to think of how far we humans had come in the matters of technology. We were now travelling past light speed, communing with aliens, living on the moon and now this, too, was a reality: a chair whose armrests catapulted and transmitted a light that transformed your room into the film you were seeing. You not only saw the film, you were in it.
There were the normal machines available for the normal customer. Occasionally, the holographic film emanating from the chair’s armrests would get interference from the room’s furniture.
The room in my house had been specifically designed by Margin Electronics Corporations. This meant that I was actually moving around in the arena when Charlton Heston raced his rival. I could actually see the film from different angles and join in when the ancient pop icon Madonna dropped wax on Willem Dafoe. Watching movies like Star Wars was real fun, except for the guns. They stung a bit.
My friends always asked me why I looked at these ancient movies and not the newer ones that had more effects. I always answered that I found the older movies better. My favourite series was Star Trek and I always compared the series to my reality.
I could, of course, only watch movies in my free time.
I spent six days a week in the Home Resort, a 28th century hotel that accommodated its’ various lodgings to the living environments of the guests origins. My job was to design the replicated meals that rotated on a weekly basis. In addition to that, I was assigned to cook the fresh food for a number of species who, for religious or traditional reasons, refused to take part in a replicated banquet.
I had a team of a thousand individuals from forty different worlds working for me. We had guests from the entire galaxy here. The thousand light years distant warrior tribe, a clan named the Fhrmixyi, often chose the rustic environment with rocks and weapons hanging along the walls. The intellectual tribe Jwijkegy Nenheueh spent most of their time in meditation. The merchants Zuehszheoeb from close to Proxima Centauri were odd creatures that spent most of their time trying to fool somebody out of something worth something.
All in all, we had about three hundred species coming to our for each world custom made world. They were designed to fit the diverse needs of the places they entailed.
There were spider worlds and worlds that had bubble tissue as beds, there were eight legged shoe polishers and four-holed toiletries and miniature vans filled with crayfish that could be used as cosmetics.
With the money I earned I had bought my house in cash in five instalments for 200 000 federal units. My Space Wagon took me early every morning past the terra forming cubes onto Plaza Einstein where I worked. The building was huge and its’ two hundred stories housed twenty thousand rooms, each one equipped with a virtual butler and a hostess that could perform three thousand functions.
I lived alone in my house by Lake Aldrin and my love for erotic stimulation was renowned. I had my diverse array of holographic girls come each night after work. There were black haired goddesses with four breasts from Numia beyond Andromeda and there were human blondes with seductive genius, there were purple headed twins from the colonies of Titan and hybrids from the ocean with four clitoris.
It was a dangerous pastime, because it was all virtual and I looked for no mate.
I had all the mates I wanted in my machine. I thought.
It all changed the day we had guest from a planet around the Alpha Centauri system. A very elegant and tall species from a planet called Centaurinea came to hold a conference in our hotel. I knew that rich tourists took the ACTOR ship to the system to experience this very pretty world with its blue coloured people and oceans of deep thought. The men were well built and had bright, long faces and the women had shiny black hair mostly down to their knees arranged in spectacular ways to attract their men. Equality was the name of the game and this fascinated me.
ACTOR stood for Alpha Centauri Travelling and Organizational Rocket and this ship travelled a week long toward the system by way of the famous ocular fusion technique that made it possible to travel to before unknown speeds. On the tip of the rocket’s cockpit, where the pilots sat, there was a beam that functioned like an eye that foresaw a travelling distance of several light years and made the ship travel on this beam.
The individuals that came to our Home Resort were elegant people and wanted personal service from me. I quickly realized that they were keen on learning from us what kind of beings we were. Diplomats and politicians, they would talk until the interstellar morn about new breakthroughs in their squeak and click tongue.
One lady really fascinated me. She was a stunning girl named Wih–Meh–Wih, a chick with very lively eyes and we soon began flirting heavily with each other. It was usually my policy never to mix with the guests, but this time I was invited to be there. Because of tourism, this girl had learned to speak six or seven human languages and so I could speak to her in mine.
Soon enough, we were asking the council if she could join me in the house for a late drink and the sovereign said yes.
What began as a very sweet seductive chat by the lake, ended as a frenetic, sexual dance with this lady that had two vaginas and six C-Cup breasts. I was in awe and we had sex every night of that month. I soon discovered that she had seventy erogenous zones which made her sensitivity enormous. She sang very high tones during sex and her having two openings made the possibilities almost endless.
When she left, she pleaded for me to come to her world and I quickly agreed. I was the boss of my department and I was going to take leave as soon as the big boss of the resort said yes.
Her father, the sovereign, gave me a plaque at the end of their trip. It said: To Quigley Oacum, the best chef in the galaxy, with the best of thanks for brilliant service. Then they had written in their letters the same sentence again. It was a silver plaque gold studded with rubies in a white frame so it looked quite fantastic.
I cried when I received it, because they had grown quite attached to me and I really loved them. The sovereign was the king and the Wih-Meh-Wih was the princess and his daughter.
Both my alien girl and I were madly in love with each other and really wanted to see one another again. They flew home and soon enough I was planning a trip to Alpha Centauri.
I stopped using my holographic girls entirely and studied the language that I was about to speak on the planet. The country that I was about to travel to was the country of Huewhaohr on Centurinea and I really looked forward to practicing my Centurinean.
When my vacation finally came a good six months later I wondered if my girl would remember me. I’d told the manager that I would be gone six weeks, leaving me four weeks in Huewhaohr and two weeks on the luxury ship with four decks of pleasure.
I spent a week eating and drinking and watching holographic movies. There was a theatre with real actors on board and that was fascinating. I saw them perform a play from the 20th century. Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was being performed by a troop of actors that found themselves being hailed as the new Hollywood legends. The two main actors looked like the original film actors Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.
Were they holographic?
No, they actually seemed real.
Anyway, I arrived in the capital of Lhdzgelij in the country of Huewhaohr and soon began to ask for the Princess Wih-Meh-Wih. I was soon told where the castle was and realized that I could take the virtual train to the palace. It was an under and over ground system of something called a Ray Transfer, where you sat in small light bubbles and it took me past buildings that hovered in the air above large harbours and buildings that looked like multiple pyramids
The royal palace was huge and looked very different from anything I had seen before. Black and yellow towers revealed white and gold balls on their pinnacles with many red windows. Then there were fifty or more pyramids that all connected with each other. At the other end there was a huge crane-looking thing that housed some sort holographic belt of bubbles from which diverse lights were emanating. It was a spectacular sight against the canvas of this strange dusk of purple and orange lights from their suns. It was very strange to see, but apparently the sky produced some sort of Aurora Borealis with weird wavy belts of dancing luminosity.
A blue and green holographic guard with four tusks, a brown uniform and a gigantic sword hanging from his belt appeared and soon asked me what I wanted. I told him in his language that I was a personal friend of the Princess Wih-Meh-Wih and wanted to see her. The guard told me that he did not know who I was and that he could not let me in unless he knew what my name was and from where I had come. I had come a long way to see the princess, I told him. He looked at me as if I had just stolen his sword.
The gate onto the garden before the palace was huge and the flowers seemed to be communicating with each other. They were waving their leaves and swaying to and fro. The flowers looked like a mixture between meat eating plants and roses. He watched me gaze at these flowers and slanted his four eyes and gave me a big smile looking through the pink rubber gate with an evil grin.
“Ijwoujw gesjsjhw, jejkeoisy ehehshsuzzh mmrer” he mused in his very husky bass baritone.
He had told me not to go to close to those flowers.
They ate strangers.
He nodded a few times and then said that he would ask the princess if she knew me. What was my name? I told him it was Quigley Oacum and that we had met on planet Earth’s moon six months ago and she had requested me to come. I had asked for a vacation in order to come and we had fallen madly in love.
He interrupted me rudely.
“Mwsojeoueksk, jej!”
His voice now sounded hoarser than ever and his two and half meters seemed a little too evil. He had told me to shut up and called me a dummy. He picked up a small machine that was the size of a toenail. Out of it he pulled a long antenna. He spoke into the top of the antenna and waited for an answer.
Soon enough, I heard something that very much resembled Wih-Meh-Wih’s voice and she laughed happily when hearing that I had come. After a few seconds she appeared in a holographic projection. She took one look at me and told the guard to ray me up.
He swung his head three times back and forth, which obviously was his version of bowing. The gates opened and Wih-Meh-Wih disappeared. Soon enough, a very strong and green light appeared out of the antenna surrounded me until I was in the light. I heard a very loud click and the light disappeared. Now I was in a throne room with a round black and yellow roof. There were squares in the roof here that had little pink balls as decorations. Each one was rotating. It was a dizzying sight. Additionally, the room was huge and had a chequered floor with red draperies around what probably were arches. This led to a very psychedelic effect on the viewer. Wih-Meh-Wih, who was at least a head taller than I, sat on an orange-purple throne with a black frame that rested on a shiny, black platform with steps leading up to it from the chequered floor.
After taking a short look at me, she ran up and embraced me with such vigour that I had to laugh at her enthusiasm.
She spoke English in her wonderfully odd Centurinean accent.
“I hhave mmisssed youu soh, my secret lllover,” she sang in high tones. “Whyy hhhave you waited so longgg?”
I told her that my boss would not give me such a long vacation first until now. She then said her father the king was very mad at her for considering leaving the planet. I was surprised. She paced the room while telling me that her father had fifty children with five concubines. Only one of them was allowed to leave the planet a year. Two of them had already left that year and both because of love. Wih-Meh-Wih wasn’t up for the throne or anything, she was just a princess, but the king was angry that she was considering going away so far. He had said that he liked me, because I was a nice human and cooked good food and that he even liked my name. Should I ever appear on their planet, which meant I loved her, I should have to withstand the thirty tests.
If I survived them, I could have Wih-Meh-Wih and take her where ever I wanted.
If not, it was off to the Khunga. That is, if I wasn’t dead already.
I started breaking out into fits of sweat. I began envisioning my vacation turning into a holiday from hell.
Thirty tests? Khunga? What was this? The Russian Revolution?
She smiled.
“Nnnnooohhh matter, dearrr,” she squeaked. “I think my fatherrrr will be nice enough to you to only put you through 25 tests. Think of how much great sex we could have on the moon if you manage to succeed going through the tests.”
I stopped her mid way through the doorway of one of the arches and asked her what kind of examinations these were.
What the heck was Khunga?
She giggled and told me that any stranger who wanted to marry and engage in a prolonged sexual activity with anyone in the planet’s royal family had to go through the 30 tests, which in essence comprised life on the planet.
There were easy tests like presenting the basic skills of the language, cooking a special meal of the region and learning how to operate a shtuunk.
“A what?”
She giggled again and told me in a giggly school girl fashion that it was the machine that I had seen the guard operate in order to contact the princess. I remembered the machine with the antenna and realized that this was a shtuunk.
There were tutors for everything and people to guide me through the process. The first ten tests were basic stuff like cooking, language and operations. The next five were religious and intellectual and the last ten were the hardest. These tests were the ones that most men failed. Battling the ten monsters of the planet was extremely difficult, in part because some of them couldn’t be seen. There were teachers here, too, but ultimately no one could prepare you for the extraordinary carnage.
Had anyone made it, I asked?
Yes, two out of fifty had made it.
My saunter through this very elegant palace was surreal. The rooms were very glitzy and it was obvious these people loved turning and rotating things in very brash fabrics. Long corridors with lit floors gave way to halls and rooms in very weird formations.
I was starting to doubt my choice of coming here. I had thought that my vacation would become an adventure of sexual bliss, now it was turning into a test of mad bravery and probably one that could lead into fatal attraction.
I stopped again and faced her.
We were standing facing holographic projections of what were obviously ancestors. They were all blue and huge with four eyes, but extraordinarily handsome. As we spoke they leaned over and shook their heads, nodded to one another and chatted.
“Look, dear,” I said. “I am afraid. I love you, but I am petrified of this. Is there no other way to get you to be mine?”
She shook her head and smiled, giving me an intense kiss that nearly blew my shoes off. Her two tongues grabbed my organ of the idioms and played with it. This gave my crotch a tingle that had me whimper.
That decided everything. No woman from home could make me feel that way. I did not know what waited for me in those tests, but I knew that I wanted to be with this woman forever. Her lifespan being longer than mine, she would also remain fit until my old age and bear me children who possibly also were fitter than me.
We passed long corridors with very high ceilings with these strange projections of rulers. She explained to me that these were the kings and queens a thousand years back. They had been visiting Earth for a long time now and looked at the primitive way we looked upon rulers. It was not until the end of the 21st century that they made a move to make real contact with us. That is when they saw a surge in morals, where more people had a belief in something divine. This was very important to a Centurinean.
I asked her if she thought sexual practice was a naughty thing.
She told me that it required a sense of responsibility and that many humans had a very eager sense of nervousness about life. Fertile love was as much a part of life as anything, but choosing a partner was something everyone should do with great respect.
If that was the case, I told her I was happy she had chosen me.
We entered the royal hall and this extent, it was more than a room, was the biggest I had ever seen. St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, that had been standing for a thousand years now or more, was about half the size of this thing. The walls were in constant motion depending on if we were moving or not.
The walls were blue, the floor was red and yellow and the ceiling was green. It was a dizzying sight. I felt like I was in an amusement park in one of those crazy houses.
Suddenly, we stopped moving and so did the walls and that was when I saw the king sitting on a completely white throne at the end of the hall. The portion of the floor we were standing on lifted and started to move and at once it really did look like we were in a tunnel. Then we stopped and halted a few feet before the large throne.
Three big steps led up to the throne that looked not unlike the throne of Abraham Lincoln near Arlington cemetery on the west end of the National Mall of Washington. The king sat there in his brown uniform blinking with his four eyes, his height of eight feet looming over me like a tree would. He stood up and laughed, spoke with rolling r’s and exploding b’s.
“Quigley, my bhoy,” he chanted. “How arrrre you?”
So, this was my father-in-law?
He lifted me up and hugged me, told me how he’d been disturbed by the fact that his daughter had wanted to leave him to marry a human, but he realized that his daughter was now a young woman and if Quigley was strong enough to go through the tests there was no stopping us.
Furthermore, he could have the best meals in the galaxy whenever he came to visit us.
I had already booked a room at the Lkueuzgsos Oiisiisw, which was the Bubble Palace Hotel, the first class resort in town. It was a sort of resort for rich tourists. The king shook his head and said that of course I should stay here in the palace. I could stay with the princess, of course, but I did have to think of saving my strength for the tests.
He asked me how long I was willing to stay and I told him that I had planned to stay for four weeks and now that I was saving the money I wasn’t spending on the hotel resort I had some units to spare. He told me that I had to plan two weeks minimum for the tests.
The next week was a mixture of relief and agony. During the daytime I was being trained by twenty teachers ten hours a day in every way: physically, intellectually, spiritually, militarily, gastronomically, tactically, acrobatically, confrontationally and romantically. The tutors were so strict that I spent every lesson sweating and crying.
In the evening, my mistress cooked me the most delicious food. Zemiars Vegetable Spice Soup with Hsjwi cream, Steak of Piwueis with Hwztfajdfoid Sauce on Taqtuqtiqit foundation and as a dessert something as common as ice cream from the moon.
What the digestive was I need not tell you. I worked all day only to be with Wih-Meh-Wih in the evening.
She and I went into the holographic chamber to take trips all over the galaxy and went on real trips around the solar system in the mornings before sunrise. It was a crazy time.
Then on the eighth day it was announced that the tests could begin. The first tests took place in the royal hall that was bigger than St. Paul’s. I had to figure out riddles like these: if your rocket storage has 4 pink barrels, 8 white barrels, 6 green barrels, and 2 silver barrels, all standing in pairs, how many barrels would you have to beam out in the dark to be sure you had a matching pair? They were impossible to solve, some of them, because most of them did not have a logical answer. That hour gave me a head ache, but I passed it.
The food test was a piece of cake, pardon the pun.
That was what I did best.
The physical fitness worked well, although I did find myself rather tired after all of that running.
My lady came served me my lunch with her clothes off, which was quite a sight. Her six buxom blue bosoms were rather daintily decorated with ribbons. That was no way to calm down and I think that was the point.
The entire afternoon had me working in the holographic chamber trying to get out of a gigantic labyrinth. I spent six hours alone in there until I found myself out.
That night I did not want to speak to my girl.
I fell asleep after hopping into bed without even sparkling my incisors. I woke up next morning, because there was something bouncing and thumping next to me. Wih-Meh-Wih was jumping ferociously at the side of my bed. I suddenly felt a sensation of wanting to leave this planet and never come back. I had only four tests behind me and they had been easy.
She stopped jumping and smiled.
“I’ll mmmakke yyyouu brrrrreakffffast,” she chirped.
Completely baffled by this strange way of saying good morning, I sat up and got up into their version of a kitchen. I watched her standing on a platform with all these strange machines virtually coming to her instead of her coming to them.
I spoke to her softly about her maybe not being the right girl for me. We were so different. She said that she understood that I felt this way. She asked me to go through with the tests and then decide.
If the first day had been hard, the second day was even harder.
I felt like I was in an odd version of a Jim Carrey movie, with a bit of Sponge Bob thrown in. The next day I was to grasp Centurinean history, which was like trying to repeat how the hundred year’s war developed backwards while walking up and down a wall and eating cake while juggling potatoes and singing Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah sideways.
That was actually exactly what my next test was. I was to perform several tricks at once.
Then I was to learn one of their instruments.
By the end of the day I had a total of ten successful tests behind me and I actually didn’t want to see Wih-Meh-Wih ever again. She had expected that, but she kept on serving me now with greater care. She was never in the nude and she certainly didn’t come to close to me. It seemed to me that this entire hype of intense sex was exaggerated. What I needed now was calm and control.
I went to Wih-Meh-Wih and asked her if we could have some nice cuddling instead. To my great pleasure, she was happy and so we spent a very nice a quiet evening drinking a bottle of Centurinean wine made of a special grape like fruit called Thruibk. It was a taste that reminded me of blackberries with the syrupiness and bloom of a grape. We watched the stars shine over the Centurinean night and spoke of life and love and her conception of God, which was full of meaning. I also told her that the tests were not at all what I had expected. Weren’t the first ten tests supposed to be basic? She answered that I would find that, a lot of times, categorization was unnecessary. Everything was a part of everything. I felt I had redefined my relationship with Wih-Meh-Wih that evening.
The tenth day of my stay I felt ready to take on new tasks.
I said that I was ready to take on test eleven.
Wih-Meh-Wih told me that I passed the eleventh test yesterday evening by looking beyond the merely physical. Yes, sex was a fine thing, but there was much more than sex to a relationship. There was talking and cuddling and mutual understanding. The labyrinth had paved the way. I was honoured to be a part of getting to know myself. Obviously, she was smarter than I ever could imagine. Maybe smart was wrong: she was evolved.
I wandered the fields of the holographic landscapes and she showed me various worlds. She presented me the sunsets of Galinea beyond the suns of Proxima. The green fields of Ireland were followed by the rings of Saturn, the nebulas of Andromeda and Neptune’s thirteen moons then rose above the horizons. We took a walk on Jupiter, which was possible in a hologram. The storms were huge. We felt them whisk and bend around us, but didn’t get affected by them. Then we walked on Pluto and I have never seen such a lonely place.
At the end of the day, over a bottle of Thruibk and Hsjwi cream on the Taqtuqtiqit root, she asked me what I had learned. I said that creation was beautiful. I came to the conclusion that all things should be handled with care.
Nothing should be taken for granted.
I had passed the twelfth test.
The thirteenth test was a bit of challenge: acting. I had to read a play by a Centurinean author named Mij-Kleh Grrumsp IV. The story was about a young female from Centurinea that arrived on Earth and fell in love with a human man. He told her that she had to pass several hard trials before she could be his wife. She refused and left. After leaving, he reconsidered and went to Centurinea in order to agree to sacrifice something for her. Seeing how selfless he was, she then agreed to sacrifice something for him.
In the end, she told him she was a changeling and could teach him about the magic of the universe.
After reading the English translation of the play, their version of Shakespeare, I had to explain the moral of the story. The ordeal continued and Wih-Meh-Wih and I were to rehearse the parts with holographic actors as collaborators. The rehearsals went reasonably well, only the director was an unmerciful tyrant that kept on calling me the worst actor in the galaxy.
Three days of rehearsals followed and, luckily, I had few lines.
On the sixth day we had a dress rehearsal before a crowd of belching, eating, holographic inhabitants. The performance was quite depressing and I asked myself how long this examination would last.
The premiere on the seventh day of the test was good and I must say that I passed the test. I had become a better actor than I thought. The audience was much nicer, so maybe that was the reason why I was a better actor on that day. Anyway, I was proud of myself after the show that night.
Test number fourteen was learning to fly a Centurinean rocket.
At this I was miserable. However, I kept on wondering how long I had been on this planet. Time seemed to pass differently here. Had I been here a month or year? I did not know.
We tried a new approach and the tutor explained in English what each lever did and how I should be really careful with each one and push them too hard. It was very dissimilar from human ships, which were quite sturdy. These ships were highly advanced, but very sensitive. After three days, I was ready and could pilot the thing in a race on one of the moons. It was the most famous races in the system and there were three hundred contestants.
Holographic competitors, of course.
I flew over canyons and mountains, lakes and cities. I was thrown off course by evil individuals and helped by good ones. In the end I came in last, but I made alive and that was main thing.
Wih-Meh-Wih hailed me as if I had been the winner.
The next six tests were a collection of trials that tested me physically, intellectually, spiritually, militarily, gastronomically, tactically, acrobatically, confrontationally and romantically. I had to perform several examinations at the same time that comprised a life on the planet. I had to know how to operate a Shtuunk and I was tested in an incredibly tough manner in order to be able to fight. I was taught to jump, sway, sword fight, kill, hurt, disable and save.
I was becoming a warrior.
Once test number twenty was finished, I was told that the final tests were coming up. I was about to enter hell and battle the most ferocious beasts of the galaxy.
I had to be extremely cunning and very brave.
The first beast was easy, considering the rest. It was a shark from Earth. I really didn’t know if this was real, because I was thrown into a room with a huge pool and given a diving suit that I had learned to use. It took ten weapons and three hours to kill the beast, but in the end I did manage it.
The second was harder. A tiger from a planet beyond Andromeda. He pushed me into a hole and chased me down a tunnel and up a hill before he jumped on me and tried to rip my legs off. I wrestled him to the ground, but he jumped on top of me and made me throw him against the wall of cave.
I was bloody and beaten by the time I was ready and my mistress had to bandage me up and leave me out of the testing for a longer time before my continuation of the process.
Test number twenty three continued on the first day of the third week of my visit on Centurinea. I realized that I probably had been here longer than two weeks, but that the entire concept of time was changed. I had been away for a week or two or a year or two. I did not know and it was all up for grabs.
I was now healthy enough to fight the most ferocious beast yet: a Hetsuwhra. The holographic programme had been created by the only one to survive a battle with the beast. This twelve feet tall and twenty feet wide monster had three heads and sixty eyes that were blinking constantly. Its’ ten arms were waving about all the time. He screamed in different pitches. It was like a weird concert with this strange monster screaming in three tones at once.
I had a very advanced assortment of weapons and armour. The walls of the cave had me bouncing. I finally killed the beast by luring it to eat itself. The right head mistook my presence on top of the middle head and tried to eat me. It then actually bit into its’ own head as I jumped off and watched it bleed to death.
I was completely drenched with the monster’s green blood as I dashed out of the holographic chamber. I jumped into a holographic sea naked after that at stayed there for the rest of the day.
The night in a haunted mansion was just a matter of endurance. I encountered every possible ghoul: werewolves, vampires, poltergeist, ghosts, mummies, ectoplasm, fairies, furies, witches, warlocks, elves, time travellers, apparitions. I was a nervous wreck when it was over.
Then I had to fight a very real monster, the largest monster in the galaxy: a Khunga. One that swallowed space ships was my foe. I had to find a way out of that thing and did it by exuding an antimatter substance and letting the monster vomit me out.
I was then chased by thousands of termites down a labyrinth and at one time I was so bitten by these things that my whole face was blue. I managed to escape in the last minute.
I was then sent to fight a sea beast.
At this point I was excluded from the testing process, because I had cheated and finished early. The king called me to his throne and beat me until I stood up and screamed at him that I loved his daughter and I had gone through twenty seven tests and was worth some bloody respect. He apparently was very proud of me and told me I had passed the next test by defending myself.
The three last tests were hard, but considering what I had gone through comparatively easy. I killed a dinosaur, a dragon and a giant.
After the last test was over I found myself being pulled away from the entire process. It was like travelling back into time and seeing myself perform all the tests at once. I had accomplished something. I should’ve been furious at these people for putting me through this whole thing. I should’ve left Centurinea at that moment and forgot the whole thing.
Instead, I was blissful. This was no ordinary woman. This was a female being from another world, one a head taller than me that loved me and who had such marvellous gifts as love. I was in awe.
The last remaining days of my vacation was the most amazing of my life. I was driven around in ships in order to see the entire quadrant of the galaxy, I was entertained by the most amazing entertainers I have ever seen, heard music I never dreamt possible, saw performances that brought me joy and ate delicious food.
The amazing thing was that my now official girlfriend and I did not once engage in a mingling of lust. Instead, we exchanged telepathic morphing. We danced in a spiritual light that had us waltzing toward paradise. It was remarkable.
We spent every evening dwelling in each other’s minds.
At the very last day of my stay at the palace, Wih-Meh-Wih told me that she was a changeling and could change form whenever she consciously wanted. She could even take the form of a human, but only the form that had been chosen for her. In her human form she was brown eyed and brown haired with a sweet complexion and normal human physicality.
I would see what that entailed upon my arrival on the moon.
Their ships were far more advanced than ours and my return trip with the ACTOR ship was cancelled. I took the trip with the king and my future wife to Earth and in a matter of days we were there.
We had chosen the lake by my house as a place for the wedding.
The ceremony was conducted by her father. Funnily enough, in a matter of a day’s notice my parents arrived to witness it and were happy and surprised to see their son get married.
My boss also arrived and put on his Sunday best to see his best cook take the oath.
The oath itself was astonishing.
I suddenly saw Wih-Meh-Wih turn into a beautiful, buxom, human beauty. We lifted off the ground and mingled in a spiral. I literally became one with her. Our bodies turned into blue light and we swayed and hovered above the lake in a spectacular dance of spirit.
I felt her and she felt me. There was no fear and no anguish.
The night was young as we consisted of blue smoke. Here, she told me I was her wife forever. I was one with the entire creation and she told me that I could become a changeling, too, with her help.
We gradually took our human form and landed on the ground.
The party continued and now I could hear what everyone felt and said and thought.
The language was emotion and the smiles were the reward.
I now had actually felt what my wife’s soul looked like and it was beautiful. Hearing and seeing her and guessing what she meant was different than actually feeling her.
My parents and her parents became really good friends and once they left in the same space ship to visit Earth and then go to Centurinea we realized we had created bliss.
We never have sex anymore.
We just turn into blue smoke.
Our five children are changelings, too.
And, boy, can they cook.
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