Forced
Galactic
Sodomy
538's
Big
Night
A Valentine's Day Present for Mrs. Troutwaxer
Even long after midnight the city stank. It was a complex stink, composed of two parts human misery and one part bad hygiene. Part of the smell came from the fly covered corpses of humans, dolphins and things even less identifiable that hung from the meat hooks at the butcher's booths. The stench of shit, fear, shame and unwashed glorp misery came from the human pens near the auction blocks where normals were sold. Hyperinflation had driven the cost of water up way beyond the reach of most wallets, so the pens weren't hosed down very often. From the civic executioner's stage near the police station came the weeks old scent of rancid semen, vomit and blood. People weren't just killed there; the X-courts and the Yacatisma discipline masters sometimes chose to give their employees public punishment before returning them to work. The fluids produced by the rapes, scourgings, flayings, and brandings all smelled bad after a few days in the heat of Xist induced global warming. Then there were the lesser stenches, those generated by rotting vegetables, poor sanitation, bad frop smoked by the soul whores, and the cheap perfume everyone wore to hide their body odor now that no one could afford to bathe.
These smells were always there, trapped beneath the permanent inversion layer. Without adequate ventilation the hideous odors rubbed each other hot and fucked the smog daily, giving birth to a sort of hellish uber stench, a nose raping, mildly hallucinogenic grunge that polluted all Los Angeles with a scent like the war fog of hell. The cities remaining inhabitants had long since learned to deal with this background odor, though this accommodation involved teary eyes twenty-four hours a day, snotty noses and the occasional spontaneous puke.
When David Lee Black, Pope of All Yacatisma Pain Chefs stopped at the entrance to the market, it was because his cybernetically enhanced nose had detected a scent that was not a regular odor of the city. It was a putrid sort of rotting meat and old medicine meet ammonia medical smell, and it emanated from the screaming, blanket bundled infant at the feet of a gaunt man who was nonetheless a bit too well dressed to be a beggar. Servos whined as Pope Black leaned down to inspect the child. The child in turn, stopped crying, opened her beautiful blue eyes and inspected Pope Black. The eight-foot troll she saw was only partly human. He still had the head and torso he'd been born with, but black, multi-jointed, metal things with odd toes and fingers that were much too long had replaced his legs and arms. "She's cute," the Pope said, but as soon as he started to speak something inside the blankets twitched and the baby began wailing again. Near the man and the baby there was a sign that read. "Baby has formula cancer. Brand no longer available, needs operation. Please help."
Of all the things that Pope Black had come to hate since X-Day, the advertising cancers were the worst. The Yacatisma installed supreme court had justified them as "acceptable corporate freedom of speech." The fucking Xists didn't care as long as it didn't hurt them, but for the pinks and the unsaved Subgenii of what had once been America, they were a daily torture. Once the Xists had made the technology available, Madison Avenue had proven unable to resist - and there were thousands of the damn things. Each company and each product had its own adcancer. A cancer for Bobco and a cancer for Yacatisco, and a cancer for each product they made. The most basic adcancers looked like a corporate logo raised slightly from the skin of the afflicted. The more advanced ones sang jingles, spouted slogans and mouthed the corporate party line. Worst of all were the new cancers, which were capable of discriminating the buyers age, sex and ethnic group, as well as the difference between various brands, and stimulating one's nerves accordingly.
Pope David was afflicted with the cancers for both Diet Mountain Pepsi and Regular Coke, which clung to his chest like deformed breasts. Sometimes the two cancers would attack each other, and he would stumble around like a zombie, sweating and nauseous while the twin neoplasms tried their latest viruses and chemotherapies on each other. If he drank Coke, or even water, the Pepsi cancer provided him with the sensation of having his balls caught under a steam roller, and if he drank Pepsi, the Coke cancer made him feel like he was a young virgin having a phone pole shoved up her ass. The shit bastard Xists loved this latest kind of cancer, and had probably been hoping for its evolution. Sometimes normals got so involved trying to avoid the pain generated by the adcancers that they would spend all their money on the advertised product and have nothing left to pay the monthly rent on their souls. There was no grace period, and once a person defaulted the Church's machines came with stunning speed and took the debtor away. The soul would be sold to the Xists, and the crying, empty husk would be taken down to MMM corporation, the huge black building where the Yacatisma were fed.
For all his hate of the cancers Pope Black didn't really feel much for the baby. The End Times had created too much pain and devastation for him to feel more than passing sympathy for a normal infant, no matter how bad her situation. As a pain chef for the Yacatisma, Pope Black knew enough about human anatomy and the cutting of bodies to save the child, he had no doubt of that. However, he sensed that the family wasn't quite ready to pay what he would demand for his services, so The Pope of all Yacatisma Pain Chefs tossed a ten billion dollar coin into the man's lap, turned away from the baby and her father, and walked deeper into the market. The prime space at the market's entrance was reserved for the "Twin Powers," which is what the pinks, unable to really understand the difference between one space monster and another, called the Xist's and the Yacatisma. Mainly their installations at the market were recruiting booths. The Xists hired normal herders, soul handlers and spiritual distillery workers. The Yacatisma wanted engineers and construction workers to help build them a spacecraft that could take them home. They'd won a space battle just before coming to earth, but only at the price of every ship bigger than a shuttle, and while the Yist's would certainly rather have simply blown up the planet they were being forced by circumstances to cooperate with the humans and the Xists. A job with the Xists was the envy of your neighbors, most jobs with the Yacatisma were the last resort of those who were within a day or two of default on their soul rentals.
Pope Black walked past all the recruiting posters, not really seeing them at all. He'd had The Dream earlier that night, and since he could never sleep after The Dream, he had come to the city's night market in search of distraction.
Even twenty years after the events that had spawned it, The Dream still hurt like hell. Unlike other dreams, the story never changed, though sometimes it sampled different memories. The nightmare didn't become cluttered and symbol filled, wasn't any less meaningful than it once had been. It was simply a reliving of the very worst event in his life. Worst of all, The Dream started so nicely.
The Dream began on that last July 4th, as Susie the Floozy ran at him and wrapped her whole gorgeous body around him, kissing him on the lips as she gave him the good news. "Pope Black -kiss- its happening!! -kiss- I saw it -kiss- on the news."
"You mean they've come?"
"Yes! Yes!" I was at the little market they have here and the TV was on and there have been spaceships sighted over Australia and Japan! There's some kind of intergalactic shoot out happening over India even as we speak!"
That X-Day had simply felt different. Maybe it was simply time. Maybe the Xists were just running late. Maybe it was that Dr. Howl had combed the weirder areas of San Francisco for weeks, buying souls from a bunch of know-nothing atheist pinks, and brought them to Brushwood. "I have brought these human souls to fill "Bob's" sample case," he'd said. "So the Xists can try the unglandscaped raw product. Sterno, please put them in the world cup golfer head when you send it downrange. I believe the Space Gods will find these souls tasty, as they were drawn forth from the deformed pineal glands of some very sorry white people."
On the other hand, given that there were now six billion people on earth, maybe the herd was simply big enough to harvest. So Pope Black had carried the nearly orgasmic Rev Susie back to the Subgenius camp, getting thoroughly kissed on the way, and they'd spread the word. Finally, they all brought their blankets and sleeping bags, camped out by the little on-site food mart and spent the night watching the news and making love.
"Sources here in Sydney say that a rather odd local woman who insisted on being called 'Octobriana Uberwoman' was hit with a piece of shrapnel from one of the alien craft and began mutating," the stringer from Australia reported. "She didn't die, but instead turned green and began sprouting limbs and growing at a huge rate. You can see her behind me, an immense fungus standing in the middle of Sydney Harbor, towering over the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge at well over five hundred feet high. It is obvious that she is now longer human. We have similar reports from Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. The rumors that all such mutants are members of an American cult called The Church of the Subgenius are being denied at the highest levels."
"Thank you Albert, for that report," the anchor said. "We now have an update on the space battle between the two warring forces... Oh my God, this is terrible news. It seems that... this is awful... What Air Force scientists believe to be an antimatter warhead has detonated over Germany, destroying most of Western Europe. The closest survivors we have contact with are British military observers in London, who report that the shock wave has knocked over all but the strongest buildings. A firestorm is currently raging over France, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Northern Italy..." at that point the anchor broke down in tears. "I'm sorry people, I can't-" and the station had gone off the air to the sound of Holocaustal cheering.
They'd changed channels and heard a report from Beijing, where a translator was speaking with a bare-foot peasant woman. "Lee Li Ping was a bad man. He had just come back from a stay at the Glory to Chairman Mao re-education camp, where he was sent because he kept trying to convert the good communist people of this village to the worship of an evil Westerner named "Bob." As you can see, he has gotten what's coming to him. Now he is a giant space fungus."
"But he was just a joke," Stang said, the astonishment clear in his voice. "We made him up!!"
"Apparently the giant fungus which was once a Chinese peasant is heading for Beijing. Reports, which are sketchy, say that the 27th Battalion of the Chinese Red Army tried to stop it. The fungus is said to have blown up the tanks and bombers, then released a gas which caused members of the armed forces to bow down to it as if in prayer. We have similar reports from Japan, where several members of a Subgenius group there are reported to have mutated. Apparently they are moving in the direction of several regional capitals, though they reportedly staged a fight near Osaka Castle, which they destroyed. Osaka Castle is the fourteenth century architectural masterpiece best known to Westerners as the Japanese castle destroyed in several giant monster movies. This behavior, described by a Japanese fan of monster movies as 'playful' apparently exactly replicated the monster's battle in the movie 'Godzilla Raids Again.' This is the first, and may I say a very hopeful sign, that any of the twelve known fungal mutants has retained any human knowledge or ideas. On the -I'm not sure I understand this - On the advice of the Toho Motion Picture Company the Japanese government is reportedly gathering its strength for a military attack on these fungal things, and sources say they are hopeful that such an attack will win the creatures' favor.
"The FBI has requested that anyone who knows a Subgenius stay as far away from him or her as possible. It is reported that in each case where a fungal mutant has evolved, that several nearby persons known to the mutant have died terrible deaths. The White House reports that a high level negotiating team is en route to New York, where the Subgenius cult is even now celebrating The End of the World."
"This just in. As you by no doubt know by now, most of Europe is in flames due to a badly aimed alien warhead. A brief tabulation of casualty figures would have us believe that there are over three hundred million dead." More Holocaustal cheering. "Despite this, the UN just reported that it has now made contact with each of the warring forces and is trying to negotiate a truce."
Of course The Dream didn't replay every news report they'd heard that night. Each time he dreamed it, The Dream sort of sampled news from that evening, and as The Dream began to move toward its terrible conclusion, it sampled the sex too - not everything, just a moment of each partner. It was obvious both in The Dream, and in the reality it remembered, that "Bob" and Connie had truly been among them that night. None of the men lost their stiffies, no matter how many times they came, no matter who their partners were, and the women were wet and wild all night long... The Dream replayed a few seconds of ecstasy with Tarla Star, a couple licks of that incredible blow job from HellPope Huey, and a few gentle pumps from the prostate pleasuring magnificence of Sister Decadence's superb technique with the strap on. Best of all was the memory that still brought tears to his eyes, the incredible, magical hours with Susie the Floozy. He'd learned that her mouth's eloquence about sex was only surpassed by her body's eloquence about sex; once again he felt the shuddering whole body orgasms she brought him to, the waves of bliss that stood every hair on end, and just before he came one more time -
The world cup golfer head full of souls rose up into the air and then he heard the urbane voice of the grinning man with a pipe who had caught it on the way down. "That was an excellent launching Sterno. Now are all of you ready to pull the fungus over your own eyes?"
Before the crowd could even begin to cheer there came the splatting raindrop sound of giant spores landing on everyone's head. It was always a few seconds before the horror sank in. A spore had landed on every head except Pope Black's own. Stang exploded upward into a huge, tentacled gray giant. Princess Doe whirled into an immense blue tornado that danced through the ruins of the camp. The huge thing that had been Friday Jones shot actinic red beams of vengeance toward Cambridge... and David Lee Black collapsed. His all too human legs failed and his face fell against the earth as he howled out his betrayal. When he woke up he was screaming and his Yacatisma made mechanical arms were ripping huge chunks out of the mattress as the tears rolled down his face... again.
Though The Dream had been over, the remembering had gone on. "I'm really sorry about this," said "Bob," looking sympathetically at Pope Black, "but there was a time last year when Dobbsco was badly overextended. I had to make a deal I didn't like much to keep things going. One of your enemies turned out to be very rich, and that enemy offered Dobbsco a great deal of money if I would tear up your ticket and not accept any more money from you. I really had no choice in the matter."
"Wha fuck?" Pope Black said, his mouth hanging open.
"The only thing I can do is make you a new deal. In a few minutes I'm heading for orbit to broker a three way peace treaty between the Xists, the Yacatisma, and the surrendering human governments. Things are going to change big time. In the next few years hyperinflation will be running full steam and the only currency that will buy you anything useful will be the human soul." The Messiah opened his briefcase and removed a big blue crystal.
"Take this. Fill it with thirty willing souls and call my full name three times. Then I'll give you your spore and you can join your friends." With that the savior stuffed a ten billion dollar bill into the Pope's shirt pocket, tucked the Bleeding Head under his arm and picked up his briefcase.
"Who's my enemy?" the Pope asked, "I gotta know."
"I'm not allowed to tell you," answered "Bob," his grin shrinking a little. "That was part of the deal. Good luck!" and with that the savior rose into the sky.
In the hours after his dream, the only attraction the market offered was the possibility that Pope Black might see someone who was more miserable than he was. The pinks in the slave pens were asleep, so he headed to the public executioner's stage, which was used after hours by several theatrical organizations, such as the Pain Gardeners, The Coven of Connie Ma, and the Robot Sex League. Once these would have been the names of bad underground bands, but in the end times they were people with some talent who would do anything on stage if only the crowd would throw them enough trillion dollar coins to pay the rental on their souls. Sometimes the Pope earned a little extra pocket money helping them to new heights of humiliation and pain.
Tonight the Circus of the Cursed was on stage. Of course the Cursed didn't need to pay any rent on their souls. They were living bad examples, each of whom had managed to piss off a Subgenius in the years leading up to X-Day. "Bob" had kept his promise, and on X-Day the paid up faithful had been given the power to punish those who had offended them. One enterprising unsaved Subgenius, the Right Reverend Yeti Sidney, had captured several dozen of these torment-deserving souls. One night a week he and his goons forced several of them to display themselves for money.
"It looks like an ordinary porta potty," Rev. Yeti Sidney's voice echoed down the corridors of the market, "but once every twenty four hours it reveals itself for what it really is. Do you want to see? I say, do you want to see!!" and there came the sound of coins falling on the stage.
Pope Black had seen Sally the Toilet Girl before, so he stopped at a butcher shop and bought a quart of pink blood. This fluid was the only thing his adcancers couldn't distinguish from the liquids his own body made, so he was forced to drink gallons of the gross, slimy stuff or endure hideous pain daily. The one person he would have trusted to operate on him, a pain chef named Shorty, had lost his wallet one day and had his soul taken soon after because management had refused to make an advance on his paycheck. A doctor could have taken care of the problem, of course, but that would have cost him a soul, and there was no way he was giving one of those up, not when he was getting so close to having the thirty "Bob" had demanded. Up on stage, Sally was barfing. The Pope listened carefully as it trailed off into dry heaves. "Oh no," she said, "You've got me up on stage again. You fucking shit. God, I remember some of those faces," she complained, then started to cry.
"That's right," Rev. Yeti Sidney told her, "so shut up or I'll put you down near a construction site tomorrow. Now suck my dick and I'll keep your worthless toilet self off the street tonight." Pope Black got from the butcher's office to the edge of the crowd in time to see Sally get Rev. Sidney's jizz across the face. "Now," he told her, "tell them what you did to become one of the cursed!!"
"When I was a little girl, I threw dog poop on Nickie Deathchick."
"Would you like Nickie to forgive you?"
"I'd do anything if she'd forgive me, anything at all!!"
"Well how about you pray to her?"
The crowd jeered. Cries of "Pray," and "Down on your knees bitch!!" were heard.
Rev. Sidney waited them out. "Hey, hey, hey," he said, "lets not get nasty. This praying is a sacred moment. Sally has been a toilet twenty-three hours a day for almost twenty years. Maybe, just maybe, the Deathchick is ready to forgive her. Let's not interrupt her prayers. He hit Sally lightly in the face with the microphone. "Now grovel bitch!!" he screamed. The crowd laughed, a course ugly gurgle of mirth.
"Dear Goddess Nickie," she prayed, "I'm so sorry for what I did to you. I've been a terrible, terrible bitch, and I deserve what happened to me. Please, please, please forgive me. I know that I can never suffer enough for how terrible I, a mere human was to your mighty paid up self, but nonetheless I beg you, please lift your curse, please, please, please. I-" Rev. Sidney pulled the microphone away and pushed her away with his foot.
"That's enough toilet face. I can't imagine any god answering prayers from a mouth as shit soiled as yours, but I've been wrong before." Two big men came up behind Sally and took her off stage. "We'll have Sally back in a little under an hour so you can all see if the divine Goddess Nickie Deathchick has forgiven her. If she has, we'll all see the love and mercy of the mighty, world spanning Church of the Subgenius." Here the crowd laughed again. "If not, well... I imagine some of you good followers of "Bob" just might need to excremeditate." More crude laughter. "As a matter of fact, in my opinion a bathroom needs graffiti, and I've made it a point to get a hold of some markers so those of you who are... um..." he paused a beat, "philosophers can express yourselves."
Sally's voice could be heard from her special off stage holding cell. "Fucking bastard!"
"Now tonight we have a special treat for you. Have any of you heard of Andy? Andy once made an itty, tiny little mistake, one you and I might never think anything of. But someone very important and very powerful remembered it years later. Who wants to meet Andy, the latest, greatest addition to the Circus of the Cursed." A few coins fell on stage.
"I can't hear you!" vamped Rev. Sidney. More coins fell on the stage. Rev. Sidney crossed his arms, turned his back to the audience and tapped one foot. "I guess these folks don't want to find out about Andy."
A man's voice came from backstage. "Boss, should I take him back to his cage?"
"I don't know Harry," Rev. Sidney replied, "How about we give them one more chance."
"All right boss, If you say so. Personally, I think Andy's worth the money, but I can always take him in back and we can let his horrible, gross, bloody curse work itself out in private." At this business a small shower of coins hit the stage, and a big guy who worked for Rev. Sidney pulled a smaller man up on stage.
"Uh, Hi," said the little guy.
"Hi Andy, thanks for joining us today. Who cursed you?"
Andy started to shake. "It. It. It was... It was Sterno." The last words came out in a rush. The crowd hissed its approval.
"And what did you do to Sterno?"
"I- I- I just looked at him funny."
"That's all?"
"That's all. I didn't even know the guy!"
"How many years before X-day was this?"
"Oh, maybe six years before the aliens came."
"All right!!" Rev. Sidney pumped one fist up in the air. "That's Sterno for you. What a memory." Andy looked a little crestfallen. "So just what is your curse Andy?"
"Well, first my fingers and toes and elbows and knees and forehead all grow mouths."
"Are they human mouths?"
"Sort of, I mean they can talk, but they all look like animal mouths. One of them is a rat's mouth. There's a dog and a cat and a couple of beaks, and lots of weird insect mouths. They cut themselves into my fingers and toes and stuff."
"Can Sterno curse or what?" Rev. Sidney turned to pump the crowd some more. There was scattered clapping. "Then what happens?"
Andy shuddered. "Then they talk to me."
"You mean the mouths that have grown on your body talk to you?"
"Yeah, and they all hate me. They say the meanest things about me."
"Andy, would you hold your fingers up to the microphone so the crowd can hear?"
"Hey Andy," said the index finger, "what about all those times Uncle Fred fucked you up the ass!!"
The middle finger, rasping between fanged, drooling teeth said, "You know you deserved it Andy. You know he had to do it because you were such a bad person."
Then Andy screamed and his forehead opened in a bloody gash that showed mandibles and a rough tongue that looked like a file. "Andy you shit!" it screamed, "You don't even deserve to have molecules! Your mother always hated you. That's why she hit you and kicked you so often! She shit you out her ass Andy, cause that's where the goat fucked her!
"Excuse me," Rev. Sidney asked the big insect mouth in the forehead, "but after you're through ragging on Andy, what are you going to do next?"
"We're gonna eat him!!" the bug mouth answered enthusiastically. "Unfortunately, he'll grow back in an hour or two." Andy's head yanked itself toward the audience like a puppet on a string. "Hey, are all those people watching us?"
"That's right," Rev. Sidney answered, "Andy's on stage and so are you!!"
"That's great," said the bug mouth, "Hey guys, did you know that Andy has a really small dick? His first and only girlfriend called it Mr. Mouse PeePee."
Andy jerked back in pain as a sudden hole was torn in the front of his pants. "Bullshit! I keep telling you guys that I am not little!!" said the mouth on the end of Andy's shaft, hissing a little as it sprayed out flecks of lamprey spittle. "His first girlfriend kept saying, `Stop Daddy, stop!!' This guy used me on so many farm animals and small children that I for one am glad to eat him." Andy's other hand had lifted up and the forefinger was whispering something in his ears. Andy's face, already red with embarrassment, suddenly ran wet with tears of pure shame as he sank down on the stage and began to sob. Rev. Sidney's big assistant pushed Andy toward the front of the stage so everyone could see.
The mouths on his body began to pray in unison, those that could humming tunefully in the background. "Oh Lord "Bob," we pray to you in the name of our creator, Sternodox Keckhaver, and give Andy hating voice to our thanks for this lovely meal which you have seen fit to set before us. We carry out our thrice daily cannibalistic execution in your name, and eat Andy continuously on Sterno's birthday. Bob" be praised. Amen!"
At the end of the prayer Andy's clothes exploded with a comically overloud bang, leaving him naked and looking for all the world like a cartoon animal which had been holding a bomb. The cursed pink seemed to jump a little and while still in the air flipped woodenly over on to all fours. His butt rose into the air facing the audience, and the long, flexible lamprey thing his dick had turned into began fucking Andy wildly in the ass, its round mouth full of sharp teeth spinning like a power drill as it spattered Andy's blood and shit over the awestruck audience. Andy stopped sobbing at the first bit of penetration and began to shriek, one hoarse, raspy scream following another. As the index fingers went after Andy's eyes, Pope Black began to feel his own hurt and hostility falling away, the catharsis happening almost against his will as something hating and vicious within the Pope projected his negative emotions onto the horror before him. After spending a little while watching Andy devour himself he was once again relieved that he'd paid "Bob" the thirty dollars. Maybe the messiah had screwed him royally, maybe he hurt like hell inside, but he would never be Andy. He was a paid up Pope of the Subgenius Church and that was far better than any here could claim.
A second later he raised the now cold cup of blood to his lips and at the taste of the slimy drink he began to once again feel the old hurt and self-loathing. "I'm acting like a pink boss," he told himself in a burst of depression, "taking joy from some else's pain and drinking blood." Surely there was something constructive he could do to make these feeling go away.
It was then that Pope Black decided to face up to something he hadn't dealt since the events of X-Day; it had been twenty years since he'd talked to any of his friends. Sure they were big alien towers of fungus, but he'd been avoiding them ever since he'd been left behind. Of course only one of them lived in this city, but it wasn't someone easy to talk to, like Legume or Stang or Jesus. Nothing that easy, no. The ruler of Los Angeles was the subject of his most wonderful memory, the one that a few hours ago had made The Dream hurt so much more. Still, he missed the people he'd loved and he supposed he didn't have to hurt quite as much as he did.
It didn't take long to get out of the night market, and from there it was only a short trip downtown on his long, black Yacatisma legs. He ran down Highway 10, dodging cars, crossing lanes and jumping over bridges, feeling her pulling him nearer despite her new fungal form. He hadn't gone that far when he saw her. Her giant body towered over the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles like a luminescent tree trunk standing high above blades of grass. She'd grown since that terrible drunken night ten years ago when he'd gotten most of the way downtown before loosing his nerve, spread giant tendrils of herself down the wide streets and across the Los Angeles River. Part of her had crossed the Pasadena Freeway and another bit of her had grown across Highway 10 and was pushing east toward Soto Street. Her bulk had knocked over some buildings and grown around others, collapsed bridges, uprooted trees and spread along sewer lines, huge floppy tentacles pushing out of manholes and storm drains, crawling over power lines and bursting out of Los Angeles' new subway stations. He wondered how much of her was underground.
Eventually he realized that he was actually within her space. One part of her ran parallel to his course down Highway 10 and another crossed it. Giant green stalks grew out of her, some ending in flowers that looked like radar and radio antennas, others ending in crumpled mushrooms that looked like brains. Huge leaves oriented themselves toward the moon, and big tendrils moved like worms among the weeds at the side of the freeway. Every once in awhile parts of her opened and vented gas, which he supposed were spores, and dark brown ooze, which he thought might be waste products. He followed the freeway as far as he could and than ran down the divider, instinctively heading toward the junction between two glowing walls of sea green flesh. When he came near the place where these two masses met he slowed down and got closer. There were body parts growing amid the fungal stalks and folds; an arm, a few feet of intestine, a dog skull. Suddenly he heard her voice in his head, still the same shiver making sexy contralto. "Hello David, its been a long time."
"Hello Susie," he answered, "I'm sorry I've never come to see you, but the idea of facing any of the old crowd has frightened me for a long time. I mean, here I am, just like I was before, and you've all changed."
"Yes, we all have. I can tell that your legs and arms aren't human anymore. Why don't you step a few feet to your right so I can see you with my short focus eyes." He followed her directions and found himself facing four human eyes set into something orange and squishy that looked a little like a large mushroom. Nearby were a couple of tentacles about twelve feet long and as big around as his arm. "There you are," she said, "Welcome to the number twenty seven face on my southwest side. It's so good to see you again. I see you've got one of the good jobs. I don't get to spend much time torturing pinks anymore, though their souls are delicious. What have you done to your limbs?" Though the voice was the same, she no longer talked like the old Susie. He supposed that was because her intellect and emotions had advanced far beyond his own.
"They go with the job," he answered, "Lots of utilities for painful medical stuff." He flexed the food preparation arms he had been given by the Yacatisma and out popped several scalpels, a couple of syringes, a power saw, a neural whip, the electro-cauterizer, several toothed clamps, and of course the gun, a 2mm slug thrower that fired 300 spent uranium needles a second. "The legs are mainly for lifting strength and to allow me to get from one place to another quickly."
"I'm so glad to see you're feeling better," said Susie the Floozy, "Do you remember any of the trip to Los Angeles?"
"Not really," he said, though parts of it were suddenly coming back to him, mainly the stuff about screaming for hours and trying to strangle himself. "I really just remember waking up here. I was in a gutter and a couple of years had passed."
"I brought you here you know," Susie said, "It seemed like a terrible burden at the time. I was still learning to multi-task, I'd been assigned to rule L.A., and I was stuck with the man who'd been rejected by "Bob" and driven mad. In retrospect though, I'm very glad I did it. I've have hated to see you die out there."
"Thanks," he said, "I'm glad you did. I still remember our last night together."
"It is my very favorite memory of being human."
"So what's it like for you? This isn't exactly the Pleasure Saucers we were promised, we're not on a pleasure planet, and the only sex goddess I see is you." Her luminescence became briefly brighter. He supposed that was something like blushing at the compliment.
"You don't understand," she said, "We are the Xists, we are the sex goddesses, and the pleasure planets are inside us. All that came from Planet X were the spores. I'm having sex all the time with everyone we ever knew. One fully functional complete personality, which is part of me, is in virtual space fondling Sister Decadence's mating tendril, while another is getting wonderful tongue from the Prophet Lilith. I'm eating pieces of Nickie Deathchick's clitoris, which is made of chocolate cake and getting thoroughly reamed by Legume in sixty three of my four hundred and forty seven mating cavities. Of course I'm just telling you about the tip of the iceberg. That part of my life is almost fully complete." Here she sounded a bit sad. "Are you getting laid?"
"Every once in awhile," he told her brusquely. He really didn't want to discuss the sick ways he made the soul whores earn their keep with the woman who had loved him so completely. "Why is Nickie's clit made of chocolate cake?" he asked.
"Silly man, don't you remember? It's her birthday." Several meters of flesh lit up and gradually a picture formed of several huge fungal beings in some virtual space. One of them had extended what the Pope assumed to be a mating tentacle that was made of chocolate and covered with burning candles. The other beings were eating the tentacle with some mouths and singing with others. "Sing along with us," Susie said.
It felt a little strange but he began to sing anyway. "...happy birthday dear Nickie, happy birthday to you." Finally he heard Nickie's voice. "I hear someone I don't see. Is there someone else at the party? If so, your image is not following the rules of my virtual."
"Pope Black came to visit me," Susie said, "So I asked him to sing along."
"I see. Hi David. It's been a long time."
"Hi. I'm sorry I don't have a present for you."
"That's all right. It's good just to see you again. The best present you could give me would be for you to get the rest of the souls "Bob" demanded and come join us." She said, and the picture faded.
"So, you can multi- task." Pope Black said, "What else are you doing?"
"Psychic mouths three through eleven are eating normal souls. I'm playing chess with Modemac, watching a couple of podlings for Jesus and Mary, maintaining several virtual pleasure planets in memory, discussing plans for terraforming Venus and the two artificial planets we're creating with Dr. Howll, controlling the orbits of several comets that will be simultaneously delivering water to Venus and knocking it into a new orbit, spying on the Yacatisma, and watching Princess Doe maneuver Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune into orbit near Mercury."
"You're really reorganizing the Solar System."
"Oh yes, we have to," she said. "We desperately need to increase space for the soul farms. We've caused Mercury and Mars to collide, and added one of the Jovian moons to that mass as well. Now we're guiding the new planet into the same solar orbit as Earth. We're also putting Venus into the same orbit as we're in here and building an entirely new planet out of asteroids and some of the other moons. Later we may build more inhabitable planets out of cometary material. So there will ultimately be at least four planets, each capable of supporting up to fourteen billion pinks, in orbit around the sun. The big gas giants are being put into orbit around each other inside what was the orbit of Mercury. Their masses are creating a gravity vortex that can be tuned to the resonant frequency of hydrogen. We'll draw the hydrogen in and feed it to the Sun, then focus most of the Suns outgoing material as thrust, so the Sun will become the engine of a giant ram ship that is our Solar System. We'll take the pinks and all our planets with their raw material to our brother and sister Xists in that solar system. Imagine the party when we all get to torture and eat fifty six billion normals at once!"
"I'm missing out," the Pope said, starting to feel depressed once more. "I don't suppose you know who's responsible for that."
"I've never asked," she answered. "You know how "Bob" is about stuff like that. How are you coming on gathering souls for his new deal with you?"
"Twenty four," he told her, "At this rate I'll have thirty in the next five or six years."
"We all know you're getting a raw deal," Susie said, wrapping one of her tentacles around his shoulders. "Do you think you can hold out?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "I keep dreaming of that day when it all happened and I wake up screaming. Some days are pretty good. Others really suck."
"I see. Keep working on it David," she said, using his given name. Then she turned up her voice way up to eleven on the sex goddess scale. "Stay strong for me." She caressed his face with one of her tentacles. They exchanged a few more words, but it was obvious that they even though they both really wanted to talk the intellectual and emotional divide between an Xist and a SubGenius was a bigger chasm than they could bridge. Though he felt oddly relieved, he was even more depressed than he'd been before coming to see her. For lack of anything better to do, he sped back down to his home in El Segundo and tried again to sleep.
Pope Black had a day job working for MMM industries, a company which had once made meals for airlines, high schools and hospitals by separating the edible components from garbage and turning them into something that looked very much like food. Now MMM, called "Meals for Metallic Monsters" by its employees, had a contract to feed the inhabitants of the Yacatisma shuttles and life boats orbiting the earth. The Yacatisma ate the pain of living things an average of four and a half times a day, and they got stupid fast if at least one of those meals wasn't agony from some kind of intelligent being. Every once in awhile a hunter or fisherman brought in a dolphin or a face raping bat, but usually feeding the Yacatisma required lots and lots of human bodies. Sometimes that meant buying pinks at the auction block, but that was expensive, and usually the suits at MMM purchased bodies in job lots from the Subgenius Church after the souls were extracted for non-payment of rent. The nerves worked just fine, so causing loads of pain wasn't difficult, and it wasn't like there was a person inside. Soulless pinks were just huge painful vacuums that could only moan, "I want my soul back, please give me a soul, I need my soul, please, please, please." for hours at a time when the body wasn't being tortured. They were usually kept gagged.
All had gone well for many, many years. Pope David had answered the help wanted ad and been hired, working his way up the ladder by torturing animals, then soulless normals. Finally he landed a cushy job as one of those few pain chefs trusted to serve meals to the head Yacatisma, Fleet Admiral Forced Galactic Sodomy 538, and its staff of planet raping, variety loving, robot hoodlums. Then he'd violated his training.
What happened in there?" asked Pope Black's boss. Yacatisma Services Manager Konig was a bald, graying little troll of a man who was just beginning to show a paunch. He chain-smoked when he could get cigarettes and bathed infrequently. Somehow he had gotten a full sensory linkage to the MWOWM computer. He made a point of tapping his finger near the Xist fungus hanging off his face when he felt that the person he was discussing things with was wrong - as if someone couldn't load as much garbage into an Xist database as one could into a human one. "You've never screwed up like that before."
"Saw someone I knew." Pope Black didn't want to talk about it. The Yacatisma Admiral's "breakfast" that day had been a big breasted, wide hipped, totally fuckable pink female, and the bus boy who brought her upstairs had told Pope Black she had the face of an angel. The assistant chefs had already gotten things going, tied the meal face down to the torture table and begun serving the first course, which was wound buggered kittens au gratin.
There was only one minor problem. Pope Black's schedule had coincided with that of Senior Assistant Larry Wilson, an incompetent hack with no understanding of human or animal anatomy who had gotten his job through some kind of family connection. In addition to his lack of the necessary background to cook Yacatisma style, Wilson was also "math impaired," which meant that he frequently made data entry errors while logging what the Yacatisma had been fed into the inventory control computers. Once he had lost track of a normal soul and nearly brought the wrath of "Bob" down on the entire shift. The Pope had seen to it that the incompetent assistant actually got his penis inside the kitten and had made a mental note to check the logs himself. Then he'd gone about his own job; getting the cages containing the rabid pit bulls in position near the meal's breasts, clamping the heads of the lampreys in a pair of tongs and laying them out near the victim's eyes, making sure the pressure piston, which would be used to rip her lower jaw off, was properly connected to the hydraulic pump. Then he'd positioned himself in the correct position to double fist the soulless pink female from behind and rip her open from the inside. There would, of course, be no lubrication. After The Dream and his visit with Susie the night before he was a little irritable - prepared not only to do the job, but to do it with that bit of extra hate and gusto that made him the Yacatisma Admiral's favorite Chef.
Then Wilson took the meal's gag off without orders and Pope Black heard the victim's voice. "Please, give me my soul back, I need my soul, just give it to me, give me my soul." The voice was familiar, so he'd made the ultimate mistake, the one they trained and retrained you not to make, and looked down around the front of the table.
"Cindy? Oh my God! I thought you were dea-" then he realized that for all intents and purposes she was dead, and committed a second faux pas as he fainted on the food.
"Maybe you'd better tell me all about it." Konig said, "Because we've got to make some kind of explanation to Fleet Admiral, not Commodore or Captain mind you, but Fleet Admiral Forced Galactic Sodomy 538, who isn't human, who doesn't understand human frames of reference, who knows nothing about human sentiment, and who is currently howling for your blood!"
Pope Blacks legs whined as he telescoped them downward, bringing his face down to Konig's eye level. He swallowed convulsively a couple of times and forced the words out. "It was my little sister."
"Ah shit." Konig patted one of Pope Black's metallic shoulders. "I don't suppose you could have done anything other than look," he said. "In fact, that's why I got out of the preparing side of it. I saw an acquaintance and realized that it could only get worse. This was before you were preparing humans, of course. But we still have to solve the problem." Pope Black knew Konig - Yacatisma Services Manager Konig he reminded himself - was full of it. The sympathy was a false front, an attempt to appear like something other than a pink boss. The whole "I'm so sorry for you" thing might even be a ploy to get him to make a damaging admission on tape. The boss's office was known to be thoroughly bugged. "What am we gonna tell its nibs?" Konig asked.
"I don't know. Maybe you'd better tell me what happened after I fainted."
"After you fainted your assistants removed your unconscious body from the preparation chamber." Konig never used the slang word "oven" that the staff used among themselves. In his own mind he wasn't something far worse than a cannibal. He was just management. "Then Senior Assistant Wilson attempted to prepare the meal by himself. If he'd had the brains to simply tell the Admiral that the second course would be delayed for a few minutes we'd have been okay - sure, he would have assessed us the standard penalty and we would have taken it out of your pay - but we'd have been okay. Instead, he misplaced the piston. Rather than shattering her jaw and breaking the flesh away from her head the piston just broke the meals front teeth and popped out of its mouth. The pit bulls attacked each other, probably because he let them out simultaneously instead of attaching them one by one. Wilson did actually get one Lamprey started feeding - on his own nose - while the other lamprey attacked one of the pit-bulls. By then Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 was on the viewscreen screaming that you should be disemboweled. At that point I went downstairs to see if I could salvage the situation, and I did manage to make the meal to specifications even though it's been awhile since I last cooked. By then the Admiral's appetite had soured and apparently one of its underlings got a free gourmet breakfast." Konig closed his eyes to concentrate on his MWOWM hookup. "According to this the Xist's ate your sister's soul yesterday. There was nothing we could have done."
"Ah shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!"
Pope Black felt like crying. The shock of seeing his sister's body when he had believed her to be dead, and then learning that her soul had been eaten threatened to overwhelm him. That was bad; in the post-apocalyptic world of the rupture, letting sentiment get in the way of basic survival would get him killed. He took a breath and forced the sorrow into the background.
"How long was I out?"
"Three or four hours. I've been stalling the Fleet Admiral until you woke up." Pope Black tried to think like a pink manager in the middle of the crisis. Step one for such a man would be covering his own ass. Step two would be fixing the blame - probably on an underling - probably on Pope Black. Fixing the situation could wait until at least step three. "Well sir," he began, thinking quickly. "Its nibs does like me."
"Maybe." Konig gave him a long look. "It has mentioned a time or two that you're more like a Yacatisma than any human it knows... Of course, that may mean that it expects you take punishment like a Yacatisma as well."
"Ummm" Pope Black pretended to consider this. "Let me try out a scenario on you. We go with what the alien does understand-"
Konig cut him off. "You've got an idea? You talk to it." Sniff. "I wash my hands of it all." What his boss really meant, with extreme prejudice, was that Pope Black was on his own in dealing with the most evil creature for light years. Management wouldn't even help him come up with a good excuse. Had some bit of internal politics led the boss to decide that the Pope had to go? This would bear some checking into - if he survived the Fleet Admiral's wrath.
Konig closed his eyes and the hideous face of Fleet Admiral Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 appeared on the viewscreen. It was not the first time Pope Black had seen a Yacatisma, of course, but the Fleet Admiral's "face" was the most frightening thing he had ever seen. The nanobots that composed the Fleet Admiral's only real physiology were currently disassembling one of its eyes, and a group of larger, insect sized machines were crawling up one side of the Admiral's face toward a pool of what appeared to be lubricating fluid. There were several things that looked like mouths in view, and the "teeth" were growing and shrinking as he watched.
"VILE DESCENDANT OF TREE SHREWS," The Admiral's voice was a grating, metallic scream, "MY FACE PERFORMS AVALANCHES AT THE SIGHT OF YOUR GROTESQUE HUMAN BODY. I LOOK FORWARD TO NEUROLOGICALLY STIMULATING THE SENSITIVE PORTIONS OF YOUR ANATOMY MYSELF, FOLLOWING WHICH EACH OF YOUR LIMBS WILL BE AMPUTATED OVER A PERIOD OF DAYS WITH A MICROSLICING MACHINE AND MY NANOBOTS WILL MINE YOUR SPINAL MATRIX FOR BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS. YOUR BRAIN WILL BE KEPT IN A DISH AND CURRENT WILL BE FED DIRECTLY TO YOUR PAIN RECEPTORS AS PART OF THE ENDLESS CHAIN OF AGONY WHICH PROPELS OUR SPACECRAFT. YOUR INSALUBRIOUS ORGANIC INCOMPETANCE HAS RUINED MY MEAL AND MADE ME AN OBJECT OF RIDICULE AMONG MY OFFICERS, INCLUDING THE BEING I HAD INTENDED TO MATE WITH, THE BEAUTIFUL, AWESOMELY WAR SCARRED, LIFE RAPER 745. WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF."
"I apologize for what happened. One of my underlings, Senior Assistant Wilson, attempted to usurp my position by using a mild poison to render me unconscious, then feeding you incorrectly while blaming it on me. I'm sure he will confess all his crimes to you under questioning." Konig gaped at him, then smiled a sickly smile. Family connections had made it impossible to get rid of the incompetent Senior Assistant, but Pope Black had done it for him. Unfortunately for Konig, he would now have to explain to Someone Important that Wilson had bitten the big one. On the other hand, the lie was airtight. There was no way a verminous pink like the Senior Assistant would ultimately give the Yacatisma interrogators any answers other than the ones they had been primed to look for, much less stand by the truth. Pope Black was darkly amused at putting Konig on the horns of such a dilemma, but if management wouldn't stand up for the worker, the worker wasn't about to stand up for management.
"I transfer the threats made against you to Senior Assistant Wilson," said the Admiral, while one of its mouths closed to a round dot, spiral teeth growing shut like the pieces of a camera aperture. "A small craft will be sent to your facility to bring Senior Assistant Wilson to our interrogation center. Nonetheless, my meal was disrupted, and my honor as an all consuming creature stained. My officers will begin to mutter against me. You too, must be terminated."
"Oh no," the Pope replied, "there is no way your officers could possibly question your unholy brilliance as a Yacatisma war leader." This was certainly true. Forced Galactic Sodomy 538's fleet had originally been composed of forty eight dreadnoughts, thirty two battleships and over a hundred cruisers and destroyers - the smallest of which was over three miles long. Somewhere in the vicinity of Epsilon Eridani they had run afoul of a single Zist light cruiser, which had blown half the Yacatisma fleet into atoms in the first four seconds of the engagement. Any other Yacatisma officer would have perished, but Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 was a brilliant strategist and it had actually managed to destroy the Zist vessel, though the enemy cruiser's lifepods had eradicated what was left of the Yacatisma armada before being reduced to scrap. This "victory" had left the Admiral in command of several shuttles, a dozen one person fighter craft, and less than a hundred life boats. This Pyrrhic victory was the first time the Yacatisma had actually won any of their battles against the Zists, and Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 was almost certainly looking at a promotion upon its return to Yacatisma space. This of course assumed that its superiors didn't demote it for the crime of letting the humans live in peace while its minions mined the earth's core for the materials necessary to build a ship capable of taking them home, or simply kill it for the far greater sin of signing a temporary truce with the hugely hated Xists. Given a record like that, Pope Black thought, Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 was almost certainly being a little insecure where the respect of its officers were concerned. The trick to surviving this little fuck up, the Pope continued to himself, will lie in discovering just what the Fleet Admiral really is worried about and helping it with its problem.
"Your honor was not stained, you have indeed shown yourself to be a perfect Yacatisma - your prompt action in summoning Konig has kept your underlings from spending years eating the incompetent cuisine of Senior Assistant Wilson. Let us solve your problem together. Let Wilson cook the next meal before killing him and you will explain that I am convalescing after my ordeal. When they begin to complain of the food tell them that I will return tomorrow. Remind them that your heroic actions have kept them from more of the same. They will rejoice to be commanded by you!!"
"This is true." admitted the Admiral, "but what of Life Raper 745, whom I hate slightly less than I hate all other things? It is a being of intelligence and sensitivity who will know that I am merely practicing good leadership technique when I should be killing EVERYTHING in sight! It will think me weak!! Regrettably, I still must kill you!" The top half of the Admiral's face was moving to the left, the bottom half to the right. Obviously Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 was in some distress about how its love interest might see things.
"Not so," Pope Black replied, "When a being hates you less than it hates others it does so for mysterious reasons hidden deep within its fluid pumping machinery, and it pretends you have no faults while ignoring external data to the contrary. Is this not the nature of hating less? And is it not also the nature of hating less that we worry overly much about the opinions of those we are attracted to? If Life Raper 745 truly hates you less than it hates other things it will rejoice in your adroit handling of the situation. If it does not hate you less, what do you care about its opinion."
"There is something to what you say. Whoever believed that a human would be such a philosopher of not hating. You have eased my mind. I will grant you the boon of taking your own life in a clean and relatively painless manner." The eye that the nanobots had been working on broke down into small pieces and trickled down the Admiral's face. Its other eyes blinked with audible clicks. A small laser installation began to grow in place of the disassembled eye.
"I offer an alternate plan to my own extinction." Pope Black proposed. "Allow me to bribe you." Konig put his head in his hands.
"I do not understand."
"Allow me to pay you not to kill me."
"I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF SUCH BLASPHEMY!" The Admiral paused for a few seconds and continued in a softer voice full of suspicious tones. "Besides, what do you have that I could want?" Pope Black heaved a sigh of relief. Now they were negotiating.
"I have great ability as a cook and the full resources of the MMM corporation behind me," the Pope stated. "Bring Life Raper 745 to your quarters tonight and let me feed the you and your intended a brilliant, glorious meal which the two of you will never forget. Among humans eating together frequently proceeds mating. Is this not so in your species?"
"Yes, sufficient mass must be gathered for the mating to be successful. Understand me, David Lee Black, Pope of all Yacatisma Pain Chefs, the food must be exceedingly plentiful as well as brilliantly prepared. Life Raper 745 particularly enjoys pain as felt by the animal you call face-raping bats. Do you have any in stock?"
"We certainly do, Konig interrupted, a smile that was much too big showing all the man's stained teeth. "May I suggest a whine to go with that?"
The negotiations with the Yacatisma Admiral went really well for awhile, but then they bogged down over the question of desert. Nothing in the inventory would do; the suffocation of pink babies wasn't good enough for Life Raper 745, nor was the dissection of puppies while the mother watched. Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 hated the taste of pink penis a la blowtorch, and the sexual torture of a young virgin of either sex was "too pedestrian." Rather than let the Fleet Admiral get angry due to a lack of progress, Pope Black suggested that he might be allowed to visit the market to check on the availability of "certain delicacies which might be of interest." Naturally, he was thinking of the pink baby with cancer.
Pope Black arrived at the market just after one o'clock, and spent several anxious hours waiting for the father and child to return. He killed time by putting deposits on a couple of items he thought might make good alternative deserts, calling in the assistant chefs he wanted on hand for to help cook the Yacatisma's meal, and worrying about why Konig had been so nice just after throwing him to the wolves. What was the little glorp up to? Finally he spotted the infant and her father, who looked even gaunter than he had the night before, at their spot by the entrance to the market. "Any luck?" the Pope asked.
"Not much. Just a few trillion dollar coins. Last night some rich old lady gave me a quadrillion dollar bill, but that won't even pay for the pre-op office visit, much less the surgery." The man looked like he was about to cry. "I just don't think poor Lizzie's gonna make it."
Pope Black reached down with one razor sharp claw and cut away the blankets and bandages. This poor little girl had the worst of all worlds. The huge cancer, obviously one of the earliest of the newest generation, was a ropy, logo covered blob that obscured most of her chest and abdomen. There was some bleeding where the carcinoma's twitching had torn the skin away from the ribs, and the child had clearly had drawn her sharp fingernails across the infected area. If she had been fed with the correct brand of formula and baby foods she would have been fine and the cancer would have fallen off when she turned two or three, but this was now impossible. The corporation which created the cancer and the products it demanded had abruptly gone into Chapter 7 bankruptcy and been nuked by the IRS.
"Sir, I think I can help you," the Pope said to the child's father, "and oddly enough, I believe you can afford it. Why don't we find someplace to talk."
Brent, the baby's father, insisted on buying the meal, then he called his wife and would only make small talk until she arrived, having run the terrible risk of cutting her work day short. The baby's mother, Cheri, was a gaunt woman who might have been beautiful if she'd eaten recently. Her mouth tightly pressed closed and her eyes were tired. It was obvious that both parents had been shorting themselves on food in their attempt to finance the operation. "All right, what do you have in mind," Brent asked.
"It's simple really," said Pope Black, "I'll operate on the child in exchange for your soul."
"You've got to be kidding." Brent said. Cheri's eyes narrowed just slightly and her lips turned down into a small thoughtful frown.
"No, I'm not," Pope Black replied before the couple could find strength to make a serious protest. "Consider your situation. It's obvious you've both been literally starving yourselves to pay for this. I don't imagine either of you has been doing well at work. One day soon one of you is going to lose your job and then all three of you will default on your soul rental."
Cheri sighed. "The only reason Brent could be here today is that he was suspended a week without pay for blinking at work. Every night he comes down here to beg and I go to work the streets. We can't keep it up much longer."
"You've been whoring?" the Pope asked.
"That's right. I hate it, but every trick adds something to the surgery fund."
"Let me give you my proposal in more detail," the Pope told them. "As you can perhaps tell from my appearance, I'm a pain chef for the Yacatisma, and I do surgery every day, though its not the kind an ordinary doctor does. My client, the Yacatisma Fleet Admiral, wants a special meal tonight because it's got a hot date, and I believe that the pain of your child's operation could provide it. I'll see to it that the Yacatisma pay you for allowing your child to be operated on. The money should be enough for the follow up care and chemotherapy with Dr. Barkus, who's not too expensive, and there may even be a little left over to keep mom off the streets. If that doesn't work out, one of you can whore for me and at least you won't have to give a pimp eighty percent."
The pink couple was quiet for a little while. Finally Cheri spoke, not to him but to her husband. "Brent," she said, her throat working convulsively, "how much has inflation gone up while we saved for this?"
"About four thousand percent."
"So you know we're never gonna make it, don't you."
"No," the father admitted, "we're not."
"Cheri grimaced at Pope Black. "Which of us do you want."
"I think the two of you probably ought to decide that."
"She makes more money than I do," Brent said, "and she's more secure in her job. It has to be me, doesn't it." The Pope nodded, trying hard to keep a look of sympathy in his eyes, when what he felt was sheer raw triumph. Not only was he going to live, but he had gotten another soul for "Bob!"
"Two conditions." Cheri told him, and he knew he was hearing the final offer. First, you take care of my pimp if there's a problem."
"Okay."
"Second, I want you to inject Lizzie with some yeti blood. I want her to pass the Subgenius blood test, so she doesn't ever have to pay rent on her soul." Unknown to most pinks, there was a virus that would put yeti material directly into the cell. The Church used it to keep safe those pinks who were for some reason essential to the power structure. The Pope had stolen a couple of bottles once when he'd been part of the MMM delegation that went to the local Subgenius headquarters.
"That's okay too. You do understand that you'll have to watch the operation. The Yacatisma like emotional context with their food where possible and you'll have to provide it."
"I'm willing to do anything I have to if it will save little Lizzie."
"Good, then let me call the boss." Pope Black activated his com link and waited while the Yist communications officer summoned the Fleet Admiral. "I have something entirely new," he said. "A human child has a parasitic illness which requires surgical removal. I will do the surgery while the mother watches. As she watches, she will feel hope instead of terror, dread, and despair. You and Life Raper 745 will be the first Yacatisma to feel human hope, and I believe that this new perception will fuel a truly wonderful mating."
"What is hope?" asked Forced Galactic Sodomy 538.
"Hope is the feeling that the despite one's poor circumstances things will get better. You have been in orbit around our primitive world for a long time trying to build yourselves a way home after the destruction of so much of your command. I believe that you and your intended mate will respond favorably to hope."
The Admiral made a booming sound which filled Pope Black with terror. After some thought, he decided that the hideous noise was a laugh. "It is very possible. I am willing to try it and I believe that Life Raper 745 will enjoy it too. There is just one thing I do not understand," the Admiral said, "This human child will live through the surgery?"
"We certainly hope so."
"You humans are full of surprises. We exterminate the diseased. Very well. Prepare the meal."
"I look forward to serving you."
"In addition," said Forced Galactic Sodomy 538, "I have news for you. Senior Assistant Wilson has been under interrogation and his confession revealed surprising data, which is of great interest to both of us. Also, he spilled his guts. My communication officer will download the confession for you." The Fleet Admiral cut the voice link and the download commenced.
"We're on," Pope Black told Brent and Cheri. "The surgery will begin sometime after six. Are you ready?
Brent helped Cheri up from the table and picked up the baby carrier. "We're ready," he said, doing his best to keep a stiff upper lip.
The Pope called a taxi and had it drop them off a block away from his work. On the way, the Pope of all Yacatisma Pain Chefs read his download. It was indeed very interesting, and appended to the confession log was a proposal from Fleet Admiral Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 itelf. At the appointed time, Pope Black sighted his wireless modem on the appropriate bit of sky and transmitted a one byte reply that signaled his agreement to take part in the Fleet Admiral's plan.
As soon as they got to MMM Pope Black had Lizzie put on intravenous feeding in the hope that this would help the infant survive the operation, then led her parents to a private room so they could say their good-byes. Once the family was taken care of he called Lisa, a tech with a good reputation who had not been mentioned in Wilson's confession. Explaining that there was a big job to do, he had her go over all the gear he'd be using to cook the Yacatisma Admiral's meal, starting with the food preparation chamber and working her way up to the main transmission antenna. As Pope Black had expected, the competent Lisa found and fixed several shorts in the transmission path to their Yacatisma uplink. She also discovered that the voltages to some of the electrical sockets in the "oven" had been adjusted to levels which would certainly have shorted out his prosthetic arms, and possibly killed him. After personally watching her adjust the voltages back into the normal range, he put a quadrillion-dollar bill into the tech's hand, wiped the report from her pocket computer, and told her she'd been working in the basement all day. She handed the money back to him and patted him on his metallic butt. "We all heard about what happened," she said, "and we're all rooting for you. Just take care of business."
Not long after that Cheri called him on the intercom and told him that Brent was ready. He hurried down to the waiting room. "Is this gonna hurt?" Brent asked.
"You won't feel a thing," he assured the frightened normal, "you'll just be floating inside the crystal and hanging around with the other souls inside. It won't be so bad. Just repeat after me, then breathe out into the crystal.
"I, Brent, grant my soul and all decisions made regarding its usage, nature, and future, to David Lee Black, Pope of all Yacatisma Pain Chefs."
"I Brent, hereby grant- " The Pope pressed the crystal to Brent's forehead so that it could hear Brent's intent and then moved it down toward the pinks mouth. On the next outward exhalation, the pink's soul was his.
"Please give me my soul back, please, please, please, I need my soul."
"What you're seeing is just a pure automatic reaction," he reassured the trembling Cheri as he led her out the door, "All the bodies do it, just repeat phrases like that over and over again." Cheri collapsed against him, sobbing. Pope Black reminded himself that pinks were incapable of feeling real emotions, but he nonetheless held her until she got herself under control, then turned her over to Junior Assistant Rhonda, an excellent, non-judgmental listener with a caring face and good hands. He had called her in today solely for the purpose of taking care of Cheri until it was time to operate on the baby.
Pope Black started preparing the meal a few minutes after Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 called to report the arrival of Life Raper 745 at its quarters. The Pope of All Yacatisma Pain Chefs and the Fleet Admiral had planned the Yacatisma version of a "romantic" seven course meal. At Life Raper 745's request, the Fleet Admiral put a live visual of the food preparation up on its number three view screen.
"Soup" consisted of the Pope ripping open the bellies of two pregnant pinks who still had their souls. He took it slowly, using a knife that was no longer quite sharp to make a number of short, jabbing cuts, which he finally connected into a rough circular incision by ripping between the cuts with his augmented fingers. He made good use of the electrocauterizer and saw to it that the pink bitches were given enough blood to keep them conscious. "Salad" involved the raping of the fetuses he'd removed by trained orangutans as the mothers watched. The emotional reaction of the mothers was fed into the mixture as well - the "whine" Konig had mentioned. The "appetizer" was a cage full of small rodents, several of which were picked in real time by the happy couple. Pope Black fed the little animals tail first into a very slowly revolving meat grinder. For the "fish" course he flayed a dolphin and salted its skin, then bashed it to death with a meat tenderizer. For the "fowl" course (and how Konig had howled over the cost) the last remaining pair of bald eagles was implanted with neural transmitters then dropped one at a time into the La Brea tar pits by "Harvey," a special robot controlled by the Pope. The "main dish" was of course the face raping bats, one slowly burned alive, the other eaten by starving shrews. Innocent pink children who had committed minor infractions at school watched the preparation of the main dish, and their emotional reactions were beamed, complete with video, to the Yist lovers along with the pain felt by the face raping bats. Then, at the request of Forced Galactic Sodomy 538, Pope Black demonstrated the use of earth's classic instruments of torture by using the rack, branding iron, thumbscrews and iron maiden on those same pink children. The kids were led out in a sobbing mass by their principal, an unsaved Subgenius who was smiling happily at the thought that her charges’ discipline problems had received so much individual attention.
Then the final moment arrived. A mildly medicated Cheri was strapped down in a comfy chair and her baby was laid out on the operating table. He replaced the plastic bag of IV nutrient solution the baby had been getting with a bag of type A blood that Cheri had donated, and replaced the blade on his scalpel. A curtain was erected between the mother and child to keep Cheri from being too grossed out. As he worked, he explained what he was doing to the mother. "I've cauterized the major arteries leading to the cancer so Lizzie won't bleed to death when it is removed," or "I'm cutting the top part of the cancer away now. I already see some healthy tissue." He made it a point to keep the reports upbeat and easily understood. The actual removal of the cancer didn't take long, but untangling the cancer's sensory nodes from the child's stomach was a real pain, and at one point he was afraid he'd lost her. Finally he got all the bleeding stopped and pulled what little healthy skin remained over the wound. Sometime during the course of this last surgical step the Yacatisma couple quietly disconnected the pain feed and Pope Black was able to relax for the first time since breakfast. When the operation was finished, Dr. Barkus showed up to take the mother and infant to his clinic. As soon as Pope Black got home he left by the back door and (just in case Konig was having him followed) made his way to a randomly chosen hotel, where he got a room under an assumed name and collapsed into a deep and happy sleep.
The next day Konig called Pope Black into his office. "I've got bad news for you," he began, "The Fleet Admiral called me as soon as I got here. Apparently its sweetie turned it down last night. You spent hundreds of quadrillions of the company's money last night and our main client is madder than ever. First of all, YOU'RE FIRED! Secondly, the Yacatisma are already here to get you." Pope Black carefully took one big step back from Konig's desk as the window shattered inward and one of Life Raper 745's giant claws burst into the room shedding war machines from every perch and hatch. One of those war machines took careful aim and roasted the Xist fungus on Konig's face.
"What are you doing?" screamed the terrified manager.
"I'm afraid Senior Assistant Wilson has confessed all," said the grating, hideous voice of Life Raper 745, "including your own role in the theft of several hundred souls which should have been sent to the Xists, and which we have been billed for. He also discussed your suspicion of Pope Black after he started examining Wilson's data entries, and your complicity in making sure that the Pope's sister was fired from her former job and deemed as unhireable, then making sure he was required to cook her as food for our table. We hate the Pope a little less than we hate little organic vermin like you. The Xists have already released you to our custody, and we have decided to punish you for defrauding us. We had originally planned to simply kill you, but Pope Black requested that we take you with us so we can torture you to death according to his favorite recipe and remove your brain for use in our propulsion system."
Konig sputtered, "But, but - the Admiral called me on the phone today - he told me-"
"It lied." Life Raper 745 told him. Pope Black laughed despite himself.
Konig took a deep breath and got himself together, then slowly reached into his top desk drawer and pulled out a blue crystal similar to Pope Black's. "Let's not be hasty here," he said, "I have plenty of souls to trade for my freedom." Before anyone could say anything, the Pope reached out with his razor sharp electric bone saw and cut off Konig's hand at the wrist. Hurting his boss felt so good that Pope Black's dick started to get hard, so he cut off Konig's other hand, a bit more slowly this time.
"They're my souls now," he cried, a small smile flickering across his face as he picked the crystal up from his boss's desk. The lesser Yacatisma war machines dragged the screaming Konig out of the room, taking him away to the tortures that Pope Black had designed. Pope Black held Konig's crystal up close to his eyes and looked inside. Dozens of souls flickered within. Grinning happily for the first time in twenty years, he called "Bob's" name three times.
The door to Konig's office opened. Miniature motors whined as dozen's of the Life Raper 745's weapons swung to cover the new arrival. "Well done Pope Black," said the messiah's urbane voice. "I guess you'd like to use this now." The messiah carefully put a goopy looking, cantaloupe sized green seed down on one of the leather chairs.
"I'd love to," said the Pope, "But first I'd like to know who my enemy is."
"Well, that's a bit embarrassing actually," said "Bob," who was starting to sound a little nervous. "Do you remember the gorgeous blond chick that tried to pick you up one night in Amsterdam? You ended up telling her no because she was so vulgar and so eager for action that you decided that she probably had a disease?"
"Yeah, of course, she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever..." said the Pope, trailing off as a dark suspicion formed in his mind.
Suddenly the same lovely blond walked into the room. "JR Robert Dobbs!!" Connie screamed, "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times. This shit doesn't get his spore until he fucks me!"
"Bob's" grin faded slightly. He smoked his pipe a little less jauntily. "But honey-" he began.
"Don't you but honey me. You know-" As Pope Black watched the Messiah and his wife having their domestic, he realized that both his god and his enemy were within point blank range and paying no attention at all to him. The opportunity was just too good to resist, so he raised his right arm and fired a three-second burst - almost a thousand rounds - into the messiah and his wife.
"They will revive quickly," he told Life Raper 745. "Keep shooting them at regular intervals so they don't wake up. The female taught me everything I know about cooking, so she should make an excellent addition to your ships crew," he lied. "The male's brain regenerates infinitely and can take far, far more pain than Wilson's and Konig's put together. Hurry up and get them to the ship. I'll stay here and cover your retreat!"
"But who are they?" asked Life Raper 745.
"If you follow my instructions, you'll be forever known as the Yacatsima that captured both "Bob" and Connie. Get moving."
"But "Bob" and Connie are Yaca-" the hideous war robot's voice cut off as it considered the implications of what the Pope had told it. "Pope Black, in the millions of years since our escape from the hell zoos of the Elder Gods, my people have been destroying every planet, star and galaxy we could find solely to sift through the rubble in the hope that we might find these criminals." said Life Raper 745. "We expected them to disguise themselves, but who of us would have believed that these thugs would take on the form of such an inferior bio-form as an evolved tree shrew."
The hellish robot warrior vibrated for a few seconds, then Yacatisma war machines once again swarmed into the room, grabbing the corpses of the messiah and his wife. "Pope Black, you will come with me now, be made into a full Yacatisma, and take over as our chief cook. We have publicized a different date, but actually our ship will leave as soon as I am aboard."
"That's a terrible idea," Pope Black told it, now understanding just why the Fleet Admiral hadn't simply asked him to stick Konig on the next shuttle, "You'd be very foolish to take me with you."
The Yacatisma stood stock still for a moment. "Those are my orders from Forced Galactic Sodomy 538." The sight of several thousand Yacatisma weapons suddenly aimed at him made the Pope's brain get stuck. He couldn't think of a single argument that might convince the hellish robotic warrior to leave the planet without him. Certainly Life Raper 745 would not be moved by the truth about his motivations. "If there is a reason to leave you here, tell it to me now, or I will force your compliance. Also, if you approach the spore I will obliterate you." said the giant war machine.
Just start talking, the Pope told himself. Something useful will come out eventually. "Um... you told me why yourself."
"I DID NOT!" Life Raper 745's enraged shout rattled the file cabinets and shook plaster from the walls. The safeties of several thousand Yacatisma weapons clicked as one.
"Yes. You did." The Yacatisma was clearly upset about something, but what? Suddenly he understood. "You would not be leaving ahead of schedule unless there was a military reason. The Xists will know of your plan the second you power up your main drive units and you will have to fight a fungally enhanced G. Gordon Gordon with only one dreadnought. Let me use the spore and when I am one of them I will intercede for you!"
"Why would our ancient enemies let us go freely?"
"I suspect that they would be as happy to be rid of "Bob" as you are to hold him prisoner. I believe that I can convince them on that basis."
"Logical. I am allowed strategic discretion in this matter and will allow you to remain here." The lesser war machines withdrew and the giant Yacatisma strode off toward the place where its shuttle was parked.
Pope Black carefully picked up the spore and broke it over his own head. The sweet fluid surrounded all his hairs and filled all his pores, ran down his throat, up his nose and into his ears. The fluid flowed into his pee hole and ass. Every place the spore juice touched exploded in pure brain bending pleasure as he grew and grew and grew and the building was shattering around him, and oh yes, oh baby was he ever big. He reached beneath him with one of his thousands of tentacles, picked up the two crystals full of pink souls, and put the wonderful food into psychic mouths one through eighty-seven. They were delicious, far better than any food he'd ever eaten. His outer mind was filled with excited requests for celebratory sex from all his friends, and best of all, Susie the Floozy really wanted to talk with him!
"Okay guys," he transmitted on a frequency he instinctively knew the Yacatisma weren't advanced enough to pick up, "business before pleasure. In the conversation I just had with Life Raper 745 I was told that their new dreadnought is already complete. As soon as the shuttle now lifting off reaches the mother ship, they will head back to Yacatisma space. I can't believe they'd lie about their lift off time without some military reason. I believe that when they leave they intend to aim their main propulsion units at the Earth and blow up the planet with their ship's superheated exhaust."
"Well," said G. Gordon Gordon, "Why don't we just kill them." A chorus of cheers greeted this suggestion.
"I think it would be a better idea to let them leave peacefully if possible. I just killed both "Bob" and Connie and gave the corpses to the Yacatisma. If we destroy the Yacatisma ship, chances are very good that the messiah and his wife will both find their way back to Earth. Do we really want that dickhead and his stupid wife to stay here on our planet?"
"Yeah," said Nenslo, "That stupid fuck eats more than his share of pink souls."
"I never get any slack when he's around," Stang moaned, "That son of a bitch just makes me work too damn hard. I can multitask on thousands of separate channels and do you know what ninety nine percent of them are doing one hundred percent of the time? They're writing HTML code for the astral web site on MWOWM. I thought after the saucers came I could rest and slack off, but NOOOOOOOO!! Would you believe that dumb ass salesman wants me to organize a devival?"
"You think you have it hard," Jesus bitched, "Try running a banking system with him around. I could increase the rate of inflation by at least a thousand percent if he'd just stop skimming 'a bit off the top' every month."
"I never believed in that jerk anyway," said Princess Doe, "I just joined for the sex - and you know what? As much time as Ivan's working, I'm not getting any!!"
"You know what?" Sterno said, "I think "Bob" is a FISH-COCKED roach-fucker. That chintzy, fucked up, LAZY, COMPLETELY STUFFED WITH RAT SHIT, lame-ass, fucking "BOB" rapes soulless PINK CORPSES. His FAVORITE thing to do of a Saturday Night is to cut the cocks off of GREAT DANES, stuff wires up the urethras so they have some semblance of an erection, stuff them up the bloody cunts of DEAD FUCKING CHIHUAHUAS and then EAT 'EM RAW, BALLS AND ALL, SAVING THE FORESKINS FOR HIS FUCKED UP SLUT BITCH CONNIE AND HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW.
And the unflappable BE- SHITTEDNESS of that STUPID MOTHERFUCKING whore anti-virgin!! Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a VOOM-BROOM, that CHEESE-CUNTED shithole couldn't find her way through a POOP LOG JAM if she had fucking GLASSES. THAT SNATCH-FACE goes great guns shoveling GREASY SHIT SANDWICHES into her FESTERING, LEECH BE-STRUNG NETHER MAWS. She's the hell-poop mongering, ASSHOLE-EATING-OUT, toe-jam injecting, botfly larvae munching, AIDs-Mosquito breeding, shit-breathing ETERNAL VORTEX of G'BLHEEGLFRAN.
"Bob" and Connie are cocksucking, slug-fucking shits, slime- betrothed, pin-worm humping, fucking VULTURE CUM SNARFING DUMB FUCKS who shit in each other's assholes and then hire Connie's fucking MOTHER to suck the shit out with a fucking straw and the fucking straw ITSELF is ALSO made of PURE SHIT! Those fuckers SUCK COWSHIT while fucking a DEAD TURTLE while a donkey FUCKS THEM UP THE ASS while the WHOLE ZOO WATCHES! And you FUNGAL FUCKWADS, you slack-cunted, pencil-dicked, hog-fucking, poop-chomping, dog-saliva- slurpers let them get away with it!
"Bob" fucking SUCKS and you dumb shits wouldn't know how to kill a messiah ANYWAY. You DON'T have a fucking CLUE! You'd ruin the experience for EVERYBODY JUST BY LETTING "BOB" AND HIS BITCH SURVIVE!!"
After a few minutes of less than lively debate everyone came to agree with Sterno. Each of them had some problem or issue that "Bob," and to a lesser extent, Connie, were just too lazy and self indulgent to address, and given the chance to run the messiah and the anti-virgin out of town, they'd take it.
At Dr. Howll's suggestion, they used time control to wait backward until the destroyed pieces of Earth flowed back together and everyone was alive again. As soon as that happened they moved the entire planet a week forward in its orbit and watched the bright pretty cloud the Yacatisma ship had left behind.
Tears of shame and pain flowed down Connie's face in the aftermath of yet another brutal, hours long, flesh tearing session of anal, oral, and vaginal rape. Forced Galactic Sodomy 538 and Life Raper 745 had used their white hot, barbed dicks mercilessly, bringing the anti-virgin to heights of pain, nausea, and trauma she'd never imagined.
Try as she might to pull away, giant clamps on her wrists and fingers forced her to work the switch that shot ever more power through the electrified blue spikes that penetrated "Bob's" cortex. Sonic monitoring devices surgically implanted into Connie's inner ear gave her no choice but to listen as her husband's brain howled from the torture she could not help but inflict. The ex-messiah's agony was so hideous that entire civilizations died, their heads exploding in all consuming balls of fire, just because the ship had passed close to their planet. Twelve jillion Giga-stangs of pain per nanosecond shot into the ship's fusion matrix and accelerated the Yacatisma dreadnought into Dobbsian hyperspace and toward home.
However, there was a place deep within that tortured brain, far, far below the place where the screaming happened. There, a tiny part of "Bob" was aware that his brand spankin' new metal body, which bore an amazing resemblance to Forced Galactic Sodomy 538, was already growing in a forgotten corner of the starship's hold.
And had the messiah been able to look at his wife, he would have noticed that her face had already begun to take on a slightly metallic cast, and that the occasional insect sized robot could be seen to crawl into or out of her nose or ears. When the transformation was complete, Connie would be a perfect duplicate of Life Raper 745.
It had been almost a billion years since Dobbs and his wife had last screwed the Yacatisma, and they were both looking forward to fucking the killer robots blind, taking their money, and selling their souls to a bunch of no-count, po-bucker alien space gods.
"Honey," Connie asked idly after her tears had dried, "do you think the Zists might be getting hungry?"
The End
Just a few short words of acknowledgment. The Sterno rant really was by Sterno. I shortened it slightly, made some rearrangements to the sequence of insults, and changed its targeting. It was orignally aimed at the posters on alt.slack, but I made him yell at "Bob" and Connie (why doesn't she get the sacred quotes around her name too?) instead. If you're reading this on-line, you're probably seeing some art. I picked works by G. Gordon Gordon, Ferdinand Le Mur, Nenslo, Ivan Stang, Poindexter, and IMBJR to illustrate this piece. In particular, the piece by Nenslo which shows the giant tentacled things gathering souls in the ruined city had a major influence on the way the story eventually evolved. The other major sources of inspiration for this particular look at the future were "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, "Bloom" by Wil McCarthy, and my mother's unsuccessful fight against the conspiracy's cancer bots. Thanks to everyone except the colon cancer!