He turned to see Ellen Kirkland lying on the slope a few yards away, looking at him with amusement. She was wearing full dress, which puzzled him. It wasn’t like her to risk getting her best uniform dirty, and if the two of them came back together and she had grass stains on her back, she was never going to hear the end of it.
Alex felt a moment of disorientation. Back where exactly? He struggled to remember where he was and what he was doing here. He wasn’t wearing dress uniform, but his orange flight suit, covered with the insignia from the Bellarmine. Although TCA fatigues have a lot of clever technology to conserve resources aboard ship, it was clear that the self-cleaning, deodorising and sterilising units were rapidly reaching the limits of their capacity.
“Did you have a good time with your new friends the Loroi?” Ellen asked. There was a teasing tone to her voice.
“Yes, it was… it was…uh…” Alex struggled to remember. There had been Beryl, with the white hair, and the cool analytical Tempo and Fireblade who wanted to kill him with her mind, or possibly simply beat him to death with the nearest blunt instrument. And a space battle on the Tempest and a ride in a shuttlecraft… and then…? “uh…fine,” he finished. It sounded lame, even to him.
“Fine! Hahahahaha!” He’d forgotten what a wonderful laugh Ellen had. “A world full of cute elven women, with a female to male ratio of 9:1. And the males are all under five feet tall. And all the women are good-looking, talented, brave and interested in you! Honestly ‘Captain’, whose male adolescent fantasies are we indulging here?”
“Well… uh… mine.”
“That was a rhetorical question, you doofus. But you see my point. Did it never occur to you that this is possibly a little too perfect?”
“Not what you’d call perfect. They kept me in a cell for a week. And the food was…”
“And then there’s a particularly cute one who likes you so much she ignores their taboo of not touching and even sits in your lap, and damn it, even laughs at your jokes. I expect you’re waiting for her to say, ‘show me more of this Earth thing called kissing?’ aren’t you?”
The thought had crossed Alex’s mind on more than one occasion, but he realised that this was another question he wasn’t expected to answer.
“Don’t get your hopes up. You know Loroi legends are full of girl-meets-boy stuff? Only in their case it isn’t called a romcom, it’s called a tragedy and it always ends with most of the protagonists dead and everything on fire. A female forming a permanent relationship with a male and keeping him for her exclusive use is not the done thing at all.”
“But I haven’t even…”
“But then of course, you’ve got plenty of back up, what with the professional woman who’s always completely in control, has perfect poise, always pays close attention to your every word and is apparently the only Loroi who ever visits the hairdresser. And of course, there’s the strong, tall, aloof and unapproachable warrior woman who is the one you really want, because she’s the only one who hasn’t shown any interest in you. Quick tip – whatever you do, don’t knock her beer over.”
“I don’t know if they actually have beer.”
“Figure of speech, idiot.”
“All right, all right. Is there a point to all this?”
“Yes. Don’t be taken in by all that cute girly stiff. That’s not what they look like, you know. Didn’t you listen to any of the briefings? They’re telepaths! They’re projecting images of themselves that you want to see into your brain. They look inside your head to give your fantasies form that they can then use to manipulate you.”
“No, wait a minute, that’s not right. All their telepathy and mind reading and stuff doesn’t work on humans!”
“And you know this how?”
“Because they told me… Oh!”
Ellen rolled her eyes. “Have they offered to sell you any shares in the Golden Gate Bridge yet?”
Alex thought about that for a while. “You mean Beryl isn’t actually…”
“No, she isn’t. Not at all. Not even remotely.”
Alex felt a wave of disappointment accompanied by deep embarrassment. This was in fact standard operating procedure for all his romantic encounters with members of the opposite sex, but that did not make it any easier. But beneath that, he still felt confused. He tried to piece together his memories of how he had arrived back home. What he was doing on this hill. When had he met Ellen again? Wasn’t she… wasn’t she… A memory leapt to the front of his mind. Ellen calling to him, screaming, pleading for his help, her voice echoing in his helmet as he was overwhelmed by a great shockwave… He stared up into the sky, trying to concentrate. Why wasn’t his mind working properly?
“And what was that crap you were spouting when the bloody Loroi cremated us all?” complained Ellen. “Bloody Micky Mouse?! What the hell was wrong with the Ode to Remembrance for God’s sake?”
“The what?”
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”
Alex gave her a puzzled look.
“What?”
“You’ve never heard that before?”
“Uh… no.”
Ellen wasn’t wearing her dress uniform anymore. She was in her scorched and torn EVA suit. Alex had a glimpse of her face through the gaping hole in the face panel. He was glad he couldn’t see more. One the first day of basic EVA training they showed the trainees images of what happened to you when you didn’t follow correct pressure suit protocol, to make sure they paid attention. It had certainly concentrated the mind of Cadet Jardin.
“You…uh… You’re not Ellen, are you?” he asked shakily.
“No, just the memory of me pulled from your mind.”
“Am I dreaming then?”
“Not dreaming, but let’s call it that. It’s as a close an analogy as you’re able to comprehend. There’s something you need to see, Alex. You’re still on the Highland-7 shuttle. When you wake up the Loroi’s mental influence will be blocked –you won’t be under their telepathic control. It takes a lot of energy, so it will only be for a moment.”
“Right…”
“It may hurt a little. In fact, it may hurt quite a lot. Try not to scream or anything.”
“Right.”
When he looked back at Ellen, she was wearing her uniform and her face was whole again.
“Oh, and Alex, before you go. When I died on the Bell. It wasn’t your fault. There wasn’t anything you could have done. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“Thanks.”
“Only, next time someone asks you to say a few words in my memory, find a better poet than Disney, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Ready?”
“Not r… agh!!”
--------------------------*
Alex woke up. Pain lanced through his head. He was lying under a pile of bodies. A limb, covered in coarse black hair, a cross between a tentacle and spiders leg, brushed over his face. With a cry, he recoiled in horror and struggled to get free. A mass of jointed tentacles appeared in front of his face, like some nightmarish cephalopod, but as well as suckers they bore inhuman eyes with multi-lobed pupils that melted and changed and grew, and slobbering mouths full of many layers of sharp teeth. His perspective changed, and the mass of tentacles arranged themselves into a travesty of a face, but as the tentacles moved and pulsated so the features of the face slewed and distorted. The tentacles emerged from the top of an single piece garment that gave the creature a basic humanoid form, but as it moved the suit bulged and flexed and bent in all the wrong places, as though the monstrous contorted form within had a different body plan to any being from a rational universe. The black hairy appendages that formed insane approximations to arms and legs spoke directly to humanity’s primal fear of spiders and snakes and things that crawled. A strange sound, a voice he could almost understand, came from one of the mouths.
In panic, Alex looked to left and right. There were at least half-a-dozen of the creatures, all pressing around him, hemming him in. He pushed with all his might and freed himself from the throng. He fled for two steps and then the pain surged inside his head, making him stagger against the far wall of the room. He turned to meet the monsters. One of them advanced towards him, its insane face of writhing tentacles changing and twisting. A ghastly spiky talon reached out towards him. The room was spinning. His back was against the wall. There was nowhere to run. He slumped down to the floor, whimpering in terror, making a futile attempt to protect his face with his arms.
The pain stopped suddenly, like someone turning off a light.
“Alex, what’s wrong?” asked a concerned female voice. Beryl was standing over him, a worried look on her face. For a moment, Alex was unable to speak because he was gasping for air. He could hear his racing heartbeat pounding in his head. Behind Beryl the rest of the crew of the Highland-7 were looking at him in alarm, detached amusement or disdain, depending on the individual. Slowly, his terror subsided.
“Sorry… ah… sorry…” he managed at last. “Uh… bad dream…yes… bad dream. I… uh… thought I was… I was back out in space… yes, that’s it, suffocating in my suit.” He was still staring at Beryl, wondering what he could believe, what was real and what was illusion. Then Beryl gave that little tilt of her head and that little indulgent half smile. His heart rate increased, and his breathing tightened again, but this time it had nothing to do with a panic attack.
“It must have been all of us lying on top of you like that, making it difficult for you to breathe. We’ll need to be more careful next time.”
“You did not object when we suggested it to keep warm,” said Tempo, looking at him with her inevitable perfect poise and that look of slightly unsettling calculating scrutiny that said she always knew exactly what he was thinking, almost as though she could read his mind.
“But he had so lovely warm,” said Spiral. “Can we keep him?”
“You must take him to walks and clean up after him,” replied Talon. Cloud and Reed giggled. Fireblade, aloof and silent, hadn’t moved from her position at the back of the compartment. She glared at him as though wondering if anyone would object if she threw him out of the airlock.
Tempo looked at them all with the exasperated air of an indulgent but long-suffering mother.
“Enough! I think it’s time we saw what was going on outside. If we are ever going to move, we’ll need to do it soon.” She stood up and walked towards the shuttle’s cockpit, with her perfect grace and co-ordination, despite the slight Coriolis force caused by the shuttle’s spin. Alex thought he heard a faint chittering, like the noise a gigantic insect would make, as she came past, and he shrank against the bulkhead. He hoped she didn’t notice, but he knew she noticed everything. He was suddenly aware that the data pad in his pocket, the one with the Historian’s app, was so hot that it was almost painful.
Beryl was still watching him with concern, anxious for his well-being. He looked at her again, trying to will himself to break the illusion, to see what she actually was, but no matter how hard he tried, all he could see was his ideal woman.
“Are you sure you are all right?” she asked. “Would you like some more of your beefstroganoff? I wonder if perhaps Noillir is not good for humans after all.”
“I’m okay, give me a moment,” he said and his heart leap again at the smile of relief she gave him. But what was reality? Were the Loroi tentacle-headed monsters, projecting a benign desirable image into his mind, or were they really what they appeared? Who could he trust? He tried to remember the warning from his dream. Something Ellen had said pulled at his mind. Some inconsistency that didn’t make sense. But what?
For now, there was nothing he could do either way. He smiled at Beryl and followed her back into the cockpit of the Highland-7, wondering if showing her this Earth thing called kissing would be such a good idea after all.