[In the previous installment, Niksin and Demetria Kyboc got a little…frisky, shall we say, with each other’s mysterious simulacrum.
Now, they learn the identity of the alien jailer who has imprisoned them in the caverns of the enigmatic Black Planetoid…]
III. The Lord of the Black Planetoid
Demetria heard a man’s voice—her husband’s voice.
“What are you?” it cried, in shocked bewilderment. But it wasn’t uttered by the Niksin-doppelgänger that stood before her—that terrifying, uncanny thing with whom she’d so nearly consummated her overwhelming passion.
She turned and beheld her husband—her real husband, this time, she was sure—his thickly muscled back and pale, bare ass facing her, as stark naked as she.
“Oh Niksin, darling!” she cried.
He turned, a look of confusion and cautious hope writ large upon his bloodless face.
“That you, doc? Is that really you, sweetheart?”
Sure, that was him—only the biggest goddamned verpa magna in the System dared call her “doc,” and that was the man she’d married. She ran into his embrace, tears streaming from her eyes. For a sweet, lingering moment, they remained in each other’s arms—simply, happily, unashamedly rejoicing in the physical contact with the one they each loved most in the world.
Then, recalling their plight, they disentangled themselves and sized each other up.
“Jee-zus, girl!” Kyboc swore. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
They each knew exactly what the other had been doing. Kyboc, for very obvious reasons—one look at him was enough to assure his wife that he hadn’t exactly been thinking pure and holy thoughts while she was gone; as for Demetria, she certainly wasn’t going to win the chastity award anytime soon, either—her late passion was betokened by her sweat-beaded skin and the warm flush of latent arousal that suffused it still. Also, she smelled a little like licorice…which she always did when she was in rut.
“Ain’t we a pair,” Kyboc muttered under his breath.
“B-but, it looked…it looked just like you, darling,” Demetria spluttered, flustered and embarrassed and unsure of what to say. “I don’t know what came over me…what was I thinking?”
“Save it, sister,” Kyboc soothed, holding her in his arms. “Same thing happened to your loyal and loving husband. Incidentally, girl, you’ve got one hell of a career ahead of you if you ever choose to set up shop in the Eotian fleshpots…”
He broke off as she kicked him in the shin.
“Oh, Niksin,” she implored, “tell me you didn’t…?” She left the question hanging.
He looked her hard in the eyes.
“Well, I…did you?”
She blushed furiously, stammered something inconclusive, and then looked swiftly away to hide from him any further physical manifestations of a guilty conscience.
“Of course I didn’t! How could you even ask such a question?”
“Well—same here, sister. I spotted the beast before things got serious. But I may have…well, you know…I may have gotten a little carried away while we were still getting to know each other…” and he grinned sheepishly.
“Oh, Niksin—you didn’t! Really, darling…we’re going to have to work on that; there are techniques, you know.”
Their friends—Incubus and Succubus—were gone; try as they might, Niksin and Demetria could find no trace of the strange beings that had so nearly led them both into sin.
“Darling, I can’t find my clothes,” Demetria whispered, “nor my N-ray pistol or clips.”
“Nor can I, doc—all that’s left us is our radium lanterns; I’ll see if I can…”
Whatever he intended to say was lost in the sound of the sudden, unearthly, booming voice that filled the black cavern:
“You’ll not need clothing here, children,” the terrifying words resounded.
“You will only appear before me as you are—not as you would have yourselves seem to be.”
They cowered before that awful voice; Demetria shrank into her husband’s strong embrace, and both shuddered in their helpless nakedness at the unseen power that buffeted them with those startling words—shuddered as Adam and Eve must have shuddered in Paradise before the ineffable pronouncements of God.
But this weird place was no Paradise—and whatever was the author of that terrible Voice, it sure as hell wasn’t the Ancient of Days.
“Who are you? What are you?” Niksin challenged the unknown thing.
“Show yourself!”
Suddenly the black, inky gloom of the weird cavern—or hollow, or chamber, or wherever it was—began to lighten…just by the merest, most incremental degrees. It was as if the curtain of eternal night were drawn back, just enough to disclose a little of the Great Mystery beyond. And they were astonished by what they saw—and they two white, naked, helpless little creatures huddled together for human comfort, in awe of That which was revealed to them.
The cavern was immense—vaster by far than they had imagined; the thought struck both, equally, that it was not really a cavern at all, but that they had been treading the vasty, hollow interior of the Black Planetoid. It was like those old nineteenth-century, Symmesian theories of the Hollow Earth—the Black Planetoid was just a great, empty void, whereof the dark surface they had alighted upon was but the merest shell, a thin crust or film englobing this huge space.
And floating directly in the null-gravity center of the Black Planetoid, looming before them like the fiery-visaged Demiurge of the Gnostics, was the awful, eldritch Thing…the god of this place, for they could think of it as nothing else. Its shape, its form, even the nature of its substance, was indistinct and obscure—a sure, accurate description of it hovered just beyond the edge of reason and consciousness. A prodigious, moon-sized, fungoid worm compounded of black, glistening folds of the same tarry stuff whereof the Black Planetoid was formed? A nightmare intrusion from some unknown, nightward dimension that was foreign and totally sejunct from the wonted cosmology of human understanding? Or perhaps this was the Ancient of Days, the Yahweh of the Hebrews—and Niksin and Demetria, cowering in their pitiful, human nakedness before their ineffable Creator, really were Adam and Eve.
There was something red and glowing—a dull, pulsing spark of crimson light that beat like a heart in the “head” or “proboscis” or whatever the god’s wormlike extremity really was; it was like the soft scarlet sphere of a distant red dwarf star, like the ruddy discs of Barnard’s Star or Wolf 359 disclosed by the great liquid mercury telescopes of Cynthiopolis Siderea on Luna. It was—they each knew, instinctively—a sense organ, or sensory instrument of some kind; it was the Eye of the great, unknowable Thing that was now their Lord and Master.
Slowly, the waves of inky blackness resumed their unchallenged empery in the hollow center of the Black Planetoid; like something material, the darkness descended upon them again in almost physical billows, until the only light was the fitful glow of the two tiny radium lamps that suffused them with an eerie and entirely inadequate bluish radiance. And somewhere, beyond that puny ambit of light—somewhere out in the great Blackness, they could just descry that crimson sphere, still burning softly at the very edge of vision where it verged into the infrared and beyond their sight altogether.
The Voice was speaking, again—not a sound, in any real sense, but a mental energy that filled their minds and their imaginations and emptied their mortal skulls of anything else save the imperious thoughts of the Thing.
“I AM NEBROUGGAI,” It spake—or, rather, thought.
“I AM NEBROUGGAI THE ANCIENT, WHO WERE OLD ERE YOUR SUN WAS BORN; I AM NEBROUGGAI THE WISE, WHO HAVE ACCUMULATED THE KNOWING AND THE SEEKING OF A THOUSAND MILLION RACES AND A THOUSAND MILLION CIVILIZATIONS—ALL OF THEM OLD AND EXTINCT ERE THE FIRST PRIMITIVE SUGARS AND SIMPLE NUCLEIC BASES ASSEMBLED TO FORM THE FIRST, PRIMORDIAL LIFE-UNIT WHEREOF YOU ARE BUT AN IMPERFECT DECLENSION.”
For a moment, they cringed before that mental onslaught; but Niksin Kyboc, nothing daunted, grew tired of the game. He was sick of feeling ashamed and helpless in his nakedness; he was sick of trying to conceal his stubborn erection from the Vast Mind before him—as though It were an angry father, unexpectedly arrived, that had caught him in flagrante delicto with his daughter in his own bed. That was an old psychological trick—strip your victim of their clothing to intimidate them.
No dice.
And he was heartily sick to death of seeing his wife cringing and cowering against him, trying to hide her nakedness in his arms; she was a goddamned beautiful woman, a startlingly glorious thing of sculpted, feminine perfection—and there was no way in hell he was going to let her be ashamed of that.
He took his arms from around her, and stood up straight and tall; he stretched his long, muscled limbs to their full length, planted his feet firmly apart in a wide stance, and folded his great arms upon his chest in a defiant posture—and he proudly, unabashedly faced his tormentor, every glorious goddamned bit of him on display and unhidden.
“This fella’s got a big head, doc,” he said to his wife, “but the way I see it, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of before this cosmic Peeping Tom. If he won’t give us our clothes back…well, he’s just going to have to deal with seeing our magnificent naked bodies. Stand up straight, sweetheart—let him see us as we are. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, darling…take it from a guy who knows.”
Demetria laughed, in spite of herself; for a moment, when he’d withdrawn his arms from her, she’d flushed in embarrassment and humiliation. But she realized that her husband was right—a rare enough occurrence to cause her to pay attention. Nebrouggai the Ancient had them in Its trap; their nakedness was a part of it. They were supposed to cringe away and cower in shame and helplessness. But what of clothes? They were a crutch. Let them face the enemy of mankind as they were—mankind in the rough, unadorned and unconcealed, versus the inhuman Thing from Outside.
Dr. Demetria Kyboc, taking a cue from her husband, unfolded her long, slender limbs, and stood up proudly to her full height; she placed her hands on her hips, in a defiant gesture mirroring her husband’s, exposing naked breasts and pudenda alike to their captor—and all her shame and embarrassment had melted away.
She was a human being again, proud and confident, the beautiful and graceful product of fifty million years of primate evolution; she felt incredibly alive standing naked beside her husband, and—more importantly—she felt like a scientist again, curious as all hell and eager to learn the mystery of the Thing called Nebrouggai.
“ANSWER ME, HUMANS,” that great Voice exploded again in their minds, “WHY ARE YOU SIMILAR, BUT YET UNLIKE; WHY ARE YOU DIFFERENTLY SHAPED, THOUGH YOUR BIOCHEMISTRY BE SO ALIKE?”
They looked at each other in confusion.
“We do not understand the question, Nebrouggai,” Demetria spoke up.
“He’s talking about our downstairs plumbing, doc,” Kyboc whispered, flicking a finger in the direction of his most noticeable anatomical departure from his wife.
“Oh,” she whispered back, “oh, we understand you, Nebrouggai”—speaking more loudly, to the red Eye—“you refer to our gender.”
“WHY ARE YOU SIMILAR, BUT UNLIKE?” the Voice repeated, a note of impatience creeping into the mental onslaught.
“That is how we reproduce our form of life, Nebrouggai,” Demetria answered, with assumed pedantry; she took Niksin’s hand in her own, rejoicing in the assurance and comfort of contact with his flesh.
“My husband…er, the male of the species, uses that appendage to plant his gametes, his seed, inside of me—that is, I mean to say, in the female of the species. When the male’s seed is deposited in the female’s body, it combines with her gametes to form a new human being—a compound of both of their genomic architectures.”
There was profoundest silence for a long while.
“Not bad, doc,” Kyboc whispered to his wife, smiling foolishly and squeezing her hand. “A little too clinical for my tastes…but not half bad.”
She laughed—a thrilling sound—and nudged him with her elbow.
“But don’t you see, darling? What extraordinary powers over matter this creature must possess! That’s what that business with our simulacra was all about, you know—this Nebrouggai wanted to experience firsthand our method of reproduction, so he created physical instruments to study it. Really a very thorough and scientific sort of fellow, and I mentally salute him for it…”
“Oh, I get it, doc,” Niksin muttered through gritted teeth, “old Nebrouggai here is a first-rate sleaze bag…and believe me, sister, I’ve met some real doozies in my time. Just let him try to ‘experience’ my wife’s method of reproduction again, and we’ll see what happens…”
Demetria ignored her husband’s flippant asides, and turned to face their captor.
“Now you may tell us something, Nebrouggai the Wise,” she called out to the redly pulsing Eye.
“How came you to be? How ancient are you really, Nebrouggai the Ancient? Are you the Inhabitant of this place, or—as I have come to suspect—are you the Black Planetoid given life?”
Niksin Kyboc grinned madly at his wife.
“That’s telling him, dear!” he whooped.
“MY AGE IS TO BE COMPUTED IN AEONS, FEMALE HUMAN,” thundered the Voice in their heads. “I AM AMONG THE FIRST IN THIS SIDEREAL UNIVERSE TO BE ENDOWED WITH LIFE AND INTELLIGENCE; I AM AS OLD AS THE FIRST STARS. IN THE BEGINNING, I WAS BUT A SMALL, LIFELESS PLANETOID FULL OF INERT ORGANIC COMPOUNDS; FOR INCALCULABLE AGES, I ORBITED A TINY WHITE DWARF STAR IN THE OUTERMOST FRINGES OF A PRIMORDIAL GALAXY—FAR DISTANT FROM THIS YOU CALL THE MILKY WAY.
“BUT THEN LIFE CAME TO ME”—they each could have sworn that emotion, of some kind, had filtered into the cadence and timber of the Voice—“SLUGGISHLY, FITFULLY, THE CARBON COMPOUNDS LINKED TOGETHER IN THE TARRY MATRIX OF MY PLANETOID, AND A SIMPLE, PRIMITIVE LIFE WAS BORN. THAT LIFE WAS—IS—IMMORTAL, AGELESS, DEATHLESS; AFTER COUNTLESS AEONS OF TIME ELAPSED, THAT LIFE EVOLVED INTELLIGENCE. AND THAT IS HOW NEBROUGGAI CAME TO BE—THE COMPOUND MIND OF THE LIVING PLANETOID. I HOLLOWED OUT THE PLANETOID, AND SECRETED MY MENTAL MATRICES WITHIN IT; AFTER INTERMINABLE DULL AGES CIRCLING MY PARENT SUN, I ELECTED TO ESCAPE—TO ROAM THE UNIVERSE, EXPLORING, SEEKING NEW FORMS OF LIFE AKIN TO MY OWN.
“AND SO IT HAS BEEN FOR TWENTY-THOUSAND MILLION YEARS. SIX HUNDRED MILLION YEARS AGO, I ENTERED YOUR GALAXY FROM THAT SIDEREAL NEBULA YOU CALL THE GREATER CLOUD OF MAGELLAN; CHASED THENCE BY A MALEFIC INTELLIGENCE THAT LEARNED MY SECRET AND SOUGHT TO GLEAN THE AGES-OLD SECRETS OF MY MIND. FOR KNOW, HUMANS, THAT THERE ARE THINGS IN THE OUTWARD NIGHT WHEREOF YOU CAN SCARCELY COMPREHEND—EVILS FOR WHICH YOU HAVE NOT THE REQUISITE INTELLECTUAL VOCABULARY.
“WHEREFORE, I ENTERED YOU SOLAR SYSTEM, FOUR MILLION YEARS AGO—JUST IN TIME TO WITNESS THE BIRTH OF YOUR CURIOUS SPECIES ON THE FOURTH PLANET OF YOUR SYSTEM. AS A GREEN COMET I APPEARED IN THE SKIES OF YOUR WORLD, BUT YOU WERE NOT THEN A SPACEFARING RACE; AND SO I HAVE SWUNG AROUND YOUR GREAT SUN, TO APPEAR AGAIN FROM TIME TO TIME AMONGST YOUR WORLDS AND OBSERVE THE PROGRESS THAT YOU HAVE MADE, AFTER THE ELAPSE OF—AS YOU WOULD COMPUTE IT—SO GREAT A PERIOD OF TIME.
“THAT IS WHY I HAVE BROUGHT YOU TWO HERE. I WOULD LEARN MORE OF YOUR SPECIES—YOU ARE A FASCINATING RACE THAT REMINDS ME OF A GREAT CIVILIZATION I MET ONCE, LONG AGO, IN A GALAXY SHATTERED IN A COSMIC COLLISION A THOUSAND MILLION YEARS ERE YOUR SUN WAS BORN. YOUR RACE HAS SHIRKED THE FETTERS OF GRAVITY; YOU ARE RESTLESS, AND ENERGETIC, AND THEREFORE INTRIGUING. AND THERE ARE SO MANY OF YOU, WHEREAS NEBROUGGAI IS BUT ONE, THOUGH ANCIENT; AND I WOULD LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS WAY THAT YOU MULTIPLY YOURSELVES—SO UNLIKE ANY OTHER SPECIES I HAVE FOUND.”
The pulses of thought from the great Voice receded from their minds, like the slowly ebbing waters of an outgoing tide; only the great, pulsing Eye remained, beating steadily in the blackness like the heart of some ancient sun.
“He sure can be a talkative fellow, when he wants to be,” Kyboc observed.
“Not sure if I buy all that rot though, doc. This Nebrouggai kinda sounds like a pervert; reminds me of this weirdo I used to know in the TPDF—Hervé, I think his name was, or Frank—who used to be real big into skin flicks and voyeurism…”
Suddenly, his words trailed off into silence.
Demetria was gone.
“Doc!” he called. “Where the hell have you gotten to now?”
[What nefarious designs does Nebrouggai, Lord of the Black Planetoid, have in store for our intrepid hero and heroine? Join us in the next installment for the thrilling conclusion to “Nebrouggai, the Ancient”…]