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On a clear night when Luna is not too bright, you’ll see her easily in old mother earth’s northern skies. She’s second magnitude, but bright enough if you look to the north west a little, about where your left hand would be if you raised your arm and pointed.

They call her Amaltheon, some of them, while others, me included, give that sun, and one of her planets in particular, a rather different name.

We were eleven months out on the downsun leg of our journey when I began this story. Eleven months into a four and a half year trip and already I and all my crew members had had more than our share of boredom. Boredom close to bickering, close to actual fighting tooth and claw. Bitching didn’t come into it; we almost murdered each other at times.

Sometimes I question the wisdom of having an all female crew, especially when it comes to the maintenance and repair of things. Like the tampon extruding machine for instance. No-one wants to do it ‘cos it is such a bastard thing to work on. Obviously designed by a man, down to a price rather than up to a standard. And eleven months into our trip it had broken down once again. That was when I decided to go off and explore one of Amaltheon’s little planets for myself. I can do that if and when I want to and no-one can gainsay me. No-one, ‘cos I’m the Captain of the ship and I’m in charge.

Looking back on it now I realise how lucky I’d been. I didn’t think that at the time however, the first time I landed, for the surface was perpetually snowbound, periodically hostile and home to some of the least endearing and sometimes downright bloody minded of all the peoples we, Homo Sapiens that is, have so far encountered in any known galaxy. Oh yes, they were very sexy too, in case you are wondering. The younger ones were anyway. And very well endowed apparently. So they tell me. Not that I am interested in that sort of thing.

…………….

But there was a time, somewhen between the three hundredth and the three hundred and thirty third footstep when I really wished I’d never set foot on the damned planet which at that very moment crunched crisply beneath my feet. Bowing my head against the sleet and shiveringly close to insanitary I blundered onwards. There was a time also, fleeting I grant you but nevertheless still a time, when the notion that I’d missed my way in the snow became uppermost in my thoughts. Everything suddenly looked the same. Bleak, yes, bloody cold, yes too, and worsening, oh certainly, but worryingly also because my landmarks were fast becoming mere humps of snow, all alike and lurking uselessly rather than the recognisable, individual stone statues of the Rhaanian gods and goddesses they’d been that morning.

Yes, you might say it was snowing heavily. You have to be a blind angler fish at the bottom of the ocean not to have noticed. And yes, you might say I was half a step away from being utterly lost in the whiteness of it all. Luckily, unbelievably almost, I had my little comforter with me, something which, if you like, I will tell you about.

……………..

Eggs beans chips and sausages! Those had been the lure initially. I’d seen the sign and sniffed the stink and suddenly I’d felt nostalgically hungry. But god’s knickers those chips were awful! No really, you cannot get a good chip outside Huddersfield Yorkshire England, UK, Northern Hemisphere, The World, Sol3…… etc etc etc, I don’t care what you say. Rhaanian superchips are simply extruded, deep fried exosludge so far as I am concerned.


Ok so the eggs beans and sausages had been ok. Passable then, alright, passable, the eggs of doubtful age and curious origin, that is to say distinctly reptilian I swear, the beans barely the size of a blob of the tomatoette sauce they reclined in and the sausages…….well the sausages, yes, the saus……no, the less said about them ages the better. Thankfully I’d not dared to ask for any black pudding to accompany my meal. Goodness knows whose blood they would have used to make it if I had! One thing about the meal though – whatever its composition, it had filled me up a treat.

To bursting point in fact. To the point where, when I went into the bar afterwards I’d had to unzip myself a little in order to get more comfortable. Of course the twins poked their noses out at the first opportunity, cheeky as always, but in the gloom no-one appeared to have noticed them.

Yes! Yes, the lighting in the place was bloody awful…….

So awful that the waiter couldn’t see me. Or perhaps didn’t want to.

Eventually I had to trip him up to get his attention.

“Oh good, you’ve realised, I’m a customer in your establishment have you?” I yelled at him while he lay sprawled decorously across the floor. “A customer! Oh yes, one of them! One who came here to enjoy a good meal. Ha! Meal, that’s a laugh! Indigestion and diarrhoea on a plate more like, and don’t ask me if I want my money back, its too late for that”

He peered at me curiously from his prone position, as if I’d recently crawled out from the inside of a cabbage.

“Daughter of springtime” he whimpered, scrambling to his feet and staring at the twins eagerly. Somehow he managed to carry out both feats without falling over again.

“How can you not find contentment in this establishment?” he whined.

He sounded like a moron, looked like a clown and sorry, he…it, wasn’t even remotely sexy.

Well I told him I’d only called in on the off chance because I was hungry and cold. I had neither asked for, nor wanted, any of the following: Sympathy, ridicule, understanding, councelling, councilling, cunninlingus, interrogation, examination, titillation, deprivation or any of at least a hundred and one other pointless practices I am unable to think of now let alone attempt to write down. I’d had something to eat, though whether I’d ever be able to digest it was another matter. Now what I wanted was a quiet drink. And no, I certainly would not attempt to perform a blowjob on ANYone with more than one head. Why, for the time being I didn’t want sex of any sort with anything!

“Daughter of Springtime” he persisted, blind to my gorgon gaze. “Don’t you know the most desirable males of all the humanoid species live here on this planet?”

“So I hear!” I snapped “But I don’t care! Just bring me something to drink and don’t ask me what I think of the males of your species or I might just tell you!”

I zipped up the front of my suit again as I said that, effort though it was to do so. Then, more because he no longer had anything of interest to look at I suppose, he went away grumpily. As grumpily as the ones who’d cooked the meal for me earlier, steam rising from their angular Rhaanian foreheads as they hewed and chopped, thrashed and peeled, whooping gleefully while they sawed three lewd sausages off something only recently dead.

When he returned he neither looked nor sounded any better. He hadn’t learned his lines properly either.

“…..daffodils lurk beneath our snowdrifts” he started “buds as yet hidden in yesterday's scrap paper leaves, old news disguising….. the newly refreshed, old bones creaking, making way for the new....... and each day, each day the light grows longer.......”

He talked like a poet, part of the time but he sounded like a broken down Toyota on a dirt road in Africa all of the time. I can show you a picture of that Toyota if you like, I have one here.

He also smelled rather like a broken down Toyota, come to think of it.

On the other hand the drink he’d brought, whatever it was, was a startling revelation. The liquid, or perhaps fluid, making up the bulk of it was prettily coloured; it was in an interestingly shaped glass, well bucket if you want to be pedantic, and there looked to be quite a lot of it. A gallon at least I reckoned. It even had a little stick with an animals head on it standing out at one side and a green, squarish leaf thing floating on the surface. Best of all there appeared to be a naked girl swimming in it.

“Daughter of Springtime…….” The waiter began again.

If nothing else he was persistent. Persistent but not sexy. Not even desirable, not by a million miles. No doubt he wished I’d unzip my suit again so he could check that the twins were okay, but I didn’t. I was too busy looking at the naked girl in my drink.

There must have been something in the liquid, in my drink in fact, which acted like a magnifying glass. Hardly believing my eyes I gazed at her and saw every detail perfectly, as perfectly as I would have had she been the same size as me.

And there was the most disconcerting thing: as I gazed at her she gazed back at me. Then she winked, turned gracefully in the liquid and displayed herself delightfully.

My amazement must have been abundantly apparent because I’d made no more than two or three incoherent, disjointed sounds before the waiter addressed me again.

“Daughter of Springtime” he mewed “Do you remain dissatisfied? Would you perhaps prefer a glass of man?”

“M…mm……man?” I managed to stammer more or less coherently.

“Dau……”

“No!” I interrupted “I don’t want no bloody man!”

That was true enough! I didn’t want a man. Not at that precise moment anyway. What I did want though was something I could safely drink. And an explanation as to what it was he’d already brought me. I was the customer after all, the person who was, however indirectly, paying his wages. So I demanded, and got, an explanation. And this time he left out the Daughter of Springtime nonsense when he told me.

………..

Like I said, we were eleven months out on our downsun leg when I began this story. Now, after two days of writing I am having some trouble finishing it. It isn’t easy to write when it is next to impossible to sit still for more than a minute.

Whooooo! There she…..goes a….GA…..in!

Even now I find some of the beings that lived on that planet hard to believe. Some were plainly murderous, would pick you up and eat you as soon as pass the time of day. Some were mere colours and others so tenuous they couldn’t see you, but then you couldn’t see them either, which was probably fortunate for all concerned.

And then there were those little creatures that live in wet places and particularly enjoy swimming in large glasses of drink. It was a process of evolution apparently; the survival of the fittest and those creatures were fitter, more fitter than anything you’re ever likely to meet.

So you see, it all added up, when you did it on fingers and thumbs or on one of those clever Venusian abacuses that fold flat and go into you handbag. They may have perfected mermaids back on Old Mother Earth but you must admit there are certain drawbacks to such things. On this planet they went along on the same lines but rejected that part which physically resembles a fish. A mermaid with proper feet and legs instead of a tail can wear high heels, paint her toenails and, best of all, whilst swimming in your drink, can twist and turn and flash her crotch and still press her perfect, miniature breasts against you nose if you’ll let her.

After that you drink the drink carefully, carefully so as not to swallow her, then lift her out of the glass while she is still wet, and slip her quickly, oh so quickly, right i……n you know where!

……………….

She stayed for an hour the first time I tried her, an exquisite hour of agonising ecstasy, an hour in which the ache that began somewhere slightly north of my earlobes ended in a series of soaking wet upheavals somewhere beyond the soles of my feet but the ultimate experience came when, pinkly shiny and perfectly exquisite, she slithered out, slipped silkily through my hair then ran along the top of my left thigh as far as my knee. From there, cheeky as ever, she bowed and blew me a huge wet kiss.

…………….

That was five weeks ago, a few hours after I’d trudged lightheadedly through the snow and eventually found my ship. Like me, my crew were astounded by the little creature. They all wanted to try her, and did, which nearly wore her to a whisper. I had to rescue her, put her out of harm’s way for a rest. Then I sent down to that damned planet for six more. Of each. Six male and six female. They cost me a fortune but at least my crew stopped arguing and bickering. That wasn’t the end of it either. I also had to buy a dozen special glasses and a hundred gallons of the drink that goes in them.

My crew all love me now. They even speak to me again, now and then. When they’re not all wriggling and jerking uncontrollably that is, or staring at miniature people swimming in coloured liquids in glasses.

Last I heard they were planning to let the little creatures breed…….

© Aahlu. Mayday 2010.

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