Notes From Tomorrow Bay

I have to write this down quickly in case I forget and none of it exists anymore and then no one will remember what happened. Cassie is gone. So are the bed and the contraption she constructed around it with such manic care over the last year or so. Jen is gone back up to the Prince of Saint Simon's castle in the foothills, leaving nothing behind but a half a dozen houseplants that are in various stages of dieing. She left weeks ago, right after Alia started pretty much hanging out full time. Alia is gone as well, although she never really lived here and it may not be important depending on what awaits me when I open the front door and test reality. The Man in the Moon's door is ajar and he isn't in his room and his bed appears unslept in and I know he was here last night because I threatened to kick his ass if he ever went out in the hills late at night and ate that gum again and so he might have just left but where else would he go, only Cassie would take him in- no one else is that tolerant of freaks, not even me. Still, he probably knew I was serious about kicking his skinny brittle-boned ass back to the moon. He saw what I did to that Floyd in the cove and so he might have decided to lay low for a couple of days.

I don't know. But I do know that if Cassie was right, if she succeeded, when I open the door the world will be different, there will be no Floyds ... there will have never been any Floyds and I just might be the only man on the planet who knows they ever conquered the Earth. So I need to leave this record so everyone will know about what happened even though it will have never really happened. Damn the living room looks empty without Cassie's king-sized bed and all the shit cable clamps monitors fans belts and whatnot she had wired to it; the insane jumble that she insisted was a time machine. I hope she was successful. She so wanted to have an orgasm.

I can only tell you the story I know, which is pretty much what they teach in school, with perhaps a bit more perspective given my close relations with several of the Floyds and it is probably half misconstrued and half myth, but it is the best I can do. They came from outer space, the Beyond, that infinite realm, the subject of dreamers, scientists, poets, prophets and long-ago human explorers. The Floyds from Sirius or Betelgeuse or some such exotic star, it hardly matters which one. A water dwelling race always on the look out for worlds with suitable environs in which to settle; they found and were fond of Earth. They are the Floidaria, or at least that is how it comes out in Standard English. They are also almost uniformly pink, moist looking, disturbingly translucent, although their skin is as tough as any seal's. For some reason obscured by the intervening two thousand years since their arrival, people called them the Pink Floyds, which most historians presume was a derogatory term for reasons no longer understood. Ultimately the Pink was dropped, and people- I mean humans- have been calling them Floyds ever since. Probably because the Floidaria find it insulting.

They came for the water and they took it. I guess there was some kind of battle royal when they first got here. Historians claim humans once numbered in the billions and dominated the land sea air with weapons and machines. That ain't allowed anymore. The Floyds claimed the oceans and left the land to the humans. Mankind defended our planet even though it had to have been painfully obvious that we didn't stand a chance against a species that had already conquered the stars. When the End of the World War was over and mankind was humbled the new order was initiated. It's all formalized somewhere in the original Pact, copies of which are kept in most major municipalities. We live by the Pact seeing as how the alternative is to die by it and the Pact says that man can't travel on in or over the oceans, nor pollute them or any streams or rivers that feed them. This stricture was savagely enforced for generations until humanity got it right.

The plague helped take the fight out of the last remnants of the human resistance. Debate still rages among self-professed academics over whether the plague was purposely unleashed against mankind as the final act of aggression by our conquerors or if it was unintentional. Two things that everyone agrees on are that the disease was alien, originating with the Floyds for whom it is non lethal, and that it was transmitted sexually which makes it the perfect scourge for humanity, a species the Floyds will be glad to tell you has never liberated itself from the animal need to procreate as often as possible. And yes, in order for the disease to have entered the human population someone had to have sex with a Floyd. Everyone also agrees that the sexual encounter would have necessarily been initiated by a human as an act of aggression against the invaders since no Floyd, at least back in the day, would have ever initiated sexual activity with a human or so they contend. They contend a lot of shit that I know isn't true. For instance an Incubator will have sex with damned near anyone at anytime; it's their whole reason for existence. I've seen more than a few young Combs visiting the brothels and whoracles of the Bay as well, although this is frowned upon officially and is considered a recent perversion the result of living too long in close contact with savage procreators like humans. It's really only the Spines, the third Floyd gender, that abstain from sexual relations with mankind, but they are wound so tight I'm surprised they ever deign to deposit their eggs in an Incubator at all.

It's creepy around here without Cassie; it's her house although how she came in to possession of it is anyone's guess. As I look out the window I see the fog rolling over Tomorrow Bay glomming onto the land and caressing the windows cloyingly. I'm sitting here on the old sofa that Buckley left behind when he moved back to the interior after Cassie dumped him and threw him out. I hate this sofa. It's uncomfortable and sour smelling and God knows what Cassie and her endless parade of paramours do on it when no one else is home. It has become my personal symbol of the world, how everything is fucked up, beaten sour, and used and no one gives a shit ... just me on the couch nursing a raspberry mead hangover and being depressed and today more than a little bit frightened because the bed and Alia and Cassie and her time machine and even the Man in the Moon have all disappeared and I am the only one who knows it. I feel weak and helpless and it pisses me off because that is what I am supposed to feel because that is what the Floyds have reduced us to, which is why I beat that big bastard from the Channel colony to a sticky pink pulp with an old two by four. That got their fucking attention, which caused trouble for the Prince of Saint Simon ,but did a hell of a lot for morale around these parts.

I tried to explain this to Cassie, but she sees herself as a woman above such mundanities. She nodded absently and worked on her time machine and asked me if I think Cyn fakes her orgasms- a hell of a thing to accuse a whoracle of. Cyn told her once that she sometimes has six or eight orgasms when she is having sex, one after another like the tide during a storm. Cassie hasn't had six orgasms in her entire life and she is obsessed with the idea that Cyn is faking hers. I told Cassie that I've ridden out some of those orgasms and they are earthshakers and if they are faked they are in a class with no other. Perhaps I flatter myself- I doubt Cyn's orgasms have anything to do with whose cock happens to be in her at the moment. She's just gifted.

It burns Cassie to no end and she abandoned her precious time machine long enough to curse me out when I told her I thought Cyn was for real. "Emotion." she mumbled as she returned to her contraption, "is the ultimate power source." She plans on powering her time machine with orgasms, if only she could have one. I'm not convinced that orgasms have anything to do with emotions. Cassie is an emotional mess, trying too hard to have an orgasm with every poor slob who happens by, and they all end up like Buckley ... frustrated, angry, ready to run back to wherever the hell they came from.

Animal sex might power the time machine, but I haven't noticed the rubbed raw emotions around this house juicing it up any. I sat on the bed and hooked myself up to the machine the night I killed that Floyd and I swore and I raved and I cried and the machine didn't do a damned thing.

I remember my old man standing outside the Temple of the Whoracle, holding his hat in his hand, running the brim around and around in his pudgy fingers and looking furtively about at the evening shadows brought to life by the twin bowls of fire that flanked the open doorway. He was dressed in his best suit, the one he wore to Sunday services at Our Lady of the Golden Gate, the Virgin Franchise up on Hate Street of all places. He was a deacon there, but that didn't keep him from bringing his son down to the North Shore to visit a whoracle on his sixteenth birthday to have his sperm screed by the priestess.

The place reeked of incense and sweat. It was dark and mysterious and moist like the womb it was meant to represent. This was not my first sexual experience, although my father probably thought as much, but it was unique. I recommend that everyone visit a whoracle at least once. The priestess I slept with was cute if a bit on the plump side and totally devoted to helping me achieve orgasm, which was no difficult feat at that time. When I began to ejaculate she stimulated herself to an almost spontaneous orgasm, screaming, bucking, rolling her eyes back. When she was finished I moved to withdraw from inside her, but she grabbed my ass firmly with her hands and wrapped her legs around me and held me in place. "Wait," she whispered, then closed her eyes and began to rock and hum. After some moments she opened her eyes again and looked into mine. Your future will take you away from here in the service of a small man of influence. You will not stay with him long before you leave for a humbler place of greater power. I see visions of futures that are pasts and are impossible to follow, yet you will follow one of these.

I mumbled awkward thanks and tried once more to withdraw, but she held me tight. "I also see Them in your future. The Floyds."

With that she released me and lay back in her cushions. My future read in the sperm deposited in the sacred womb of the whoracle, I quitted the Temple, avoiding both my father's glances and questions.

Now every time I see a whoracle I can't help but think of my father and I wonder what ever became of him. Does he still officiate services at the little Virgin Franchise? I'll never know. Maybe he never existed. The only person I ever told about the experience was Cyn, one of the local whoracles here at Tomorrow Bay. We have a convenient understanding, Cyn and I- I read her cards for free (I read a lot of cards for whoracles, poor girls don't have any sperm to read) and she sleeps with me when I needed it, although for the record I never slept with her while Jen was living down at Cassie's even, though I probably needed it more then than at any other time. We have only one rule, she is not to scry my sperm. I don't care to know my future. She sat across from me at a rickety table on the veranda at the Laughing Saint and told me not to worry about the prophecy which had by that point proven frighteningly accurate in its preliminary predictions and we drank raspberry mead straight from the cellars of the Prince of Saint Simon.

Gods I love that raspberry mead. The Prince makes it primarily for the Floyds and discourages the local clientele from drinking it since it takes over a year to ferment and it's impossible for him to make as large a profit off of it as he does the wines and ales he also makes. Most of his patrons prefer the latter fare anyway, mead being a bit heady and something of an acquired taste. I acquired it because I'm the local middle man the Prince employs to sell it on the Floyd black-market, which is also why I'm allowed to partake of his stock gratis. Mead is like liquid nirvana to the Floyds, it blows the damned lids off of their minds and is strictly forbidden by their hierarchy.  The Prince makes a mint selling it from the Golden Gate to Tomorrow Bay and all points in-between.

I fell into the retinue of the Prince of Saint Simon about ten years ago, give or take. I was working at the Fat Peson at the time; my wages consisted of a meager bed in a drafty room that I shared with the rats roaches and other wharf vermin that came in and out through the same shoddy walls as the Bay breeze and fog. Still, it beat sleeping in the ruins of the City, which were my previous accommodations. In exchange for this largess on the part of Miguel, the proprietor for whom the inn and tavern derived its name, I read tarot cards and poetry for the alleged entertainment of his guests. The Prince happened to be passing through seeking to extend his mead and ale distribution northward when I was treating the patrons to a reading from my first collection, The Deck of Fortune, which consisted of seventy two poems. The Prince had the good fortune of being in attendance while I was reading the Quartet of Princes, which I never considered among the strongest poems of the collection, being partial myself to the more weighty subject matter of the Major Arcana or the whimsy of the Four Princesses. The Prince fancied he recognized bits of his Royal Self scattered throughout the poems. Not the corpulent corporal bestride his cold gold from the Prince of Coins, which a less kind observer may have applied to his person, but more the insightful regent smitten by Truth from the Prince of Wands or the thoughtful beneficence of the Prince of Grails. He hired me on the spot to be his court poet, which position he had hitherto neglected. When he returned down the coast to his castle I went with him. I lived on the castle grounds in much improved conditions for ten languid years until I grew weary of affectation and he grew weary of my puerile poetry and so I moved here to Cassie's place on Tomorrow Bay. I had long ago assumed a more useful position as mead trafficker due to my familiarity with the Floyd culture from having grownup in the Bay area.

Alia is actually the key to the whole tale although she would probably be surprised to hear it. The bastard Floyd from the Channel Colony knew, which was why I had to kill him- a convenient excuse I supposed, since I didn't like the sanctimonious bastard to begin with, but that is another part of the story best saved for later. Alia is an Incubator, the closest English language equivalent to her status that I know of. To understand what an Incubator is you need to know about the Floyd genders and I'll assume that Cassie was successful and that any readers of this manuscript are unfamiliar with the Floyds.

The Floyds have three sexes, as opposed to the two sex relationships that are the earthly norm. I hesitate to refer to the two dominant Floyd sexes as male and female since these words imply human characteristics unknown to the Floyds, so I'll use the common terms we employ to identify them, Combs and Spines. Combs produce sperm or some such Floyd equivalent and if it helps think of them as male. They are called Combs because of the fin-like combs that they sport down the middles of their skulls from the nape of the neck to the top of the forehead. Like all Floyds, they are hairless and this is the only feature on their skulls and it gives them an appropriate aquatic look. You must understand and perhaps I should have made this clear earlier ... Floyds don't really look all that alien or non-human. They are pink and somewhat translucent, but they are humanoid, with two legs and arms with only three fingers and toes and a thumb ... all webbed, not surprisingly. They're faces are somewhat flat, being devoid of noses, but equipped with two eyes and a lipless mouth with molar-like teeth. The Spines of course have no combs, but a spiny ridge along their backs and they produce eggs making them more or less equivalent to females. Where they differ from humans most, and this is important because it is the entire basis for their self presumed superiority to us, is that they don't have sex in the way that men and women do- human men and women that is. In order to reproduce, which is the fundamental goal of any species, they use Incubators. Incubators resemble the other Floyds in all particulars save two; they are smaller, giving them a teen aged look, and they have neither combs nor spines, but are more or less smooth. They are held in disdain by the Combs and Spines because they reproduce and in order to do so they have sex, with both genders, the Incubators being genderless themselves. A Comb uses an Incubator to deposit sperm and a Spine to deposit eggs. The Incubator does the rest and carries the offspring to term after which the newborn is raised communally and no Comb or Spine knows whose child is whose and the family is unknown.

Any Floyd will be glad to tell you that this is a far superior arrangement. Families only breed territorialism, protectivism and other social ills. The sexual relationship of mother and father that is at the core of human families is the cause of countless other tension frustration jealousies. The Floyds know no such emotions and so consider themselves superior. I might be inclined to agree with them except for one thing- Floyds are incapable of love.

Pel introduced me to Alia. Pel is a Comb and he is the middleman that handles the illicit trade in mead and is the closest thing to friend that I or any other human has in a Floyd. We rendezvous on a strip of beach just down from the eucalyptus forest on the southern curve of Tomorrow Bay. One night about three months ago I arrived there with my cart full of crates of mead and he was out in the sunset surf with Alia, riding her and the two of them riding the waves just where they broke. When they were finished they came ashore. I'm not prudish but I admit being embarrassed, another emotion alien to the Floyds. Pel introduced me matter-of-factly and Alia smiled and greeted me with a nod.

We conducted our business, Pel oblivious to Alia's presence and me unable to ignore her since she, I can't help but use the pronoun she when thinking of her, was the only Incubator I had ever met and my curiosity was aroused because I mean here was a creature whose sole purpose for existence was sex and I found myself immediately wondering what sex with her would be like

When our transaction was completed Pel broke open a case of mead as it was our habit to have a bottle or two on such occasions and it wasn't unusual for the dawn to find us quite drunk and waxing philosophical about human-Floyd relations. Alia joined us that night and when morning came Pel went back into the ocean and Alia came home with me. Nothing was said about this startling development and when we got back to Cassie's house we retired to my room and fucked as long as I was able and then fell asleep.

We first ran into the Man in the Moon at the Laughing Saint during a thunderstorm shortly after Alia became a regular fixture at the house. I say we because I was there with Cyn and Cassie and Billy the Guide who had just gotten back from the Reno run. Billy was a friend of Buckley's and this was just after Buckley split, his departure and Alia's arrival almost coinciding, and I guess Billy thought Cassie was on the rebound or something and he was looking to score and he just got paid by the caravan driver and was acting the big shot and buying us all drinks so we were glad to share his table even if Cassie had no intention of sharing his bed. It was Cassie who noticed the Man in the Moon sitting in a corner, wet from the storm, staring out the window at the nasty ass weather like he had never seen rain before much less lightning.  He had that look in his eyes like someone who just witnessed proof that there was a god. I half expected him to fall to his knees and start confessing like some rube at a Virgin Franchise.

Everyone in the Saint eventually took notice of him since he stuck out like a turd in a punchbowl, being half a foot over six feet and thin as a sapling and about as fragile looking and all alabaster albino death-shroud white like his skin had never seen the sun and jumping every time it thundered.

"Poor baby." Cyn said, after we all laughed at his miserable countenance.  She got up and invited him to our table, which probably saved his ass since some of the thicker types who frequent the Saint were starting to lose their sense of humor and replacing it with a xenophobia that lends itself to violence. It took all of Cyn's considerable powers of persuasion to pry the Man in the Moon from his corner and get him to join us, but she wouldn't take no for an answer and so he finally bowed to the inevitable and sheepishly accepted the chair Billy the Guide pulled over for him.

He introduced himself as Larry, saying the name like he had never heard it before and smiling in embarrassment. "Where you from?" asked Billy, pouring our guest a tankard of the amber.

"Sacramento," he said, and we all laughed, but accepted the awkward lie, Sacramento being a wasted place from the old histories now referred to as Dead Cap by everyone or simply The Cap by anyone unfortunate to actually live there. I'm supposed to meet someone here he said and Cyn smiled patted his hand leaned close with whoracle eyes and said Honey you have met someone.

After a couple of ales I asked him where he was really from.

He considered lying again, but gave up the idea. "The Moon," he said softly so no one beyond our circle could hear. No one laughed this time.

Damn Cassie whispered and nothing more was said about it. The story came out in bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks and a lot of it was lies, but I guess that was to be expected since he was a secret agent of sorts and had been trained since childhood to tell half truths to the locals when they sent him down to Earth on his mission. He came home with us that night and moved into Buckley's old room. Billy the Guide spent the night on Buckley's couch all alone and no doubt laying there in the moonlit night wondering where that stain by his head came from.

What can I tell you about Cassie's insane contraption which she insisted was a time machine? It worked off an old generator bartered from the Prince of Saint Simon and fueled by the precious gasoline pumped out of the ground down south in Orange Country and it was her greatest obsession after the elusive orgasm. The generator energized wires and sensors and receptors and a dozen less identifiable things scavenged from PreFloyd ruins or manufactured up at the Prince's laboratories. Most of it was put together by Buckley under Cassie's watchful eye and it was only after it was completed to her satisfaction and she had determined that Buckley would never giver her the orgasm she needed to power it that she sent him packing.

The questions she could never adequately answer; how it worked and what she planned to do if it did. It was her dream to go back in time and warn a world distracted by petty internecine warfare and reveling in the accomplishment of the Lunar Colony that invasion by a watering dwelling race of alien Pink Floyds was eminent. Why would they believe you? I asked her and she was firm in her conviction that she and the sexual partner who finally gave her her orgasm would be all the evidence she needed.

It never occurred to me, and she couldn't possibly have foreseen, that her deliverer and fellow time traveler would be a Floyd Incubator.

The problem was that there was never anything deeper to my relationship with Alia than sex, which is odd because it never occurred to me that I ever wanted or got anything more out of my relationships, but like a hole the in sheets there it was exposing the straw beneath. Forget for a minute that Alia was an alien, albeit humanoid, and imagine a girl for whom sex was a way of life, not like Cyn ... being a whoracle and telling the future in men's sperm, but actually her entire biological reason for existence- not a job or a calling.

Cassie was fascinated by Alia from the day I brought her home and the fascination persisted even when the new oddity of the Man in the Moon became a fixture. Cassie made off-hand ribald comments about the voracity and frequency of our lovemaking, but I knew that it was curiosity and not disapproval. Cassie was attracted to Alia. Here she thought is the creature that will break the ice of my frigidity and give me an orgasm.

"I'm not a lesbian," Cassie told me after I discovered she was having sex with Alia. She isn't really a female.

"She isn't even human," I said, as if that were taboo coming from me who'd been sleeping with the coquettish Floyd Incubator for a month.

And Alia was in heaven living in our little three bedroom bungalow in the hills of Tomorrow Bay, her foray into human life consisting almost entirely of an endless stream of showers and sex and meals of marine delicacies I began bartering Pel for and evening bouts of mead drinking which inevitably led to more sex. It was our cycle of life, all of us, even the Man in the Moon, who was raised in the Lunar culture of absolute abstention, a child of that cold harsh society in which babies were made in Petri dishes and not bedrooms.

He was appalled at the beginning, until first Cassie and then Ali and even sweet helpful Cyn broke him down and taught him that that piece of muscles, veins, and hot flesh between his legs had purposes other than voiding used mead. They took it as a challenge to break down centuries of asexuality ruthlessly bred into the offshoot of humanity living in the Lunar Colony intent on acculturating away the animal heritage of their Terran forbearers. They gave him his manhood back and he became almost human.

The crazy thing is that Cassie wasn't the only one plotting to overthrow the Floyds. After two thousand years of occupation and degradation and domination the human race must have finally had enough- it had been humbled, humiliated, decimated, denigrated, but not broken ... at least not the odd menagerie that populated Cassie's place up on the hill.

I never really trusted the Man in the Moon and who would after the way his ancestors betrayed their race, not that he was responsible, but still it's a sort of gut racial instinct or at least it was for me. Everyone knows about the Lunar Colony, although popular theory postulated it had long since died out as it was almost two thousand years since they contacted their Earth bound brethren. The Floyds sometimes made allusions to them in a matter of fact way and no doubt continued relations with them; Pel once told me they traded water with the Lunies. Face it, the Floyds had no interest in the moon since there is no water there and that is what spared the Lunies to begin with during the initial invasion when the Floyds ignored them at best and perhaps conspired with them. Legend has it that in the beginning the people on Earth had waited and prayed and begged for help from the colony, fantasizing that the Lunies would intervene and tip the balance humanity's favor, but no such rearguard action materialized.  As the fabled technologies of Earth fell into disrepair, contact with Moon was lost. Until the Man in the Moon showed up that night at The Laughing Saint and joined us in a drink and moved into Buckley's room. I kept an eye on him. He never said what brought him to Earth and we never asked and life went on and he became a part of it.

Then I found the package. It fell out of the sky on a slender parachute late at night and I followed the Man in the Moon as he went out to look for it and I saw him open it and eat the gum and sit entranced mumbling to himself. Then he burned the parachute and the package and went into town and had a cup of coffee before returning to Cassie's place. When the next package fell to Earth I beat him to it. I chewed the gum.

And I went on the gum trip.

I don't know his name, although I'm sure Pel must have introduced us before I put the two by four to the side of his head; me all surprised at how easy it was to swing the pine and how the bastard's skull crushed all easy like a Chinese lantern. He told me I was dangerous and I guess he was right even if I had never killed anyone or thing before or since. I was dangerous to him and to his demands and his accusations which were too close to home and required a more emotional than rational response. He laughed at me and said that I was in love with Alia and he said it like it was an off color joke that he was embarrassed to repeat even though it was uproariously funny and everyone who heard laughed their own embarrassed laugh.

"Love," he said in that condescending Floyd way that sets my teeth on edge, "is the great weakness of your inferior race. Rationality ends where love begins. Love is an evolutionary cul de sac from which there is no escape and which is the reason your race is doomed to eternal failure unable to make the next step to greatness the intellectual leap that would set you on the path to one day approaching the accomplishments of our race. But it cannot be bred out of you, just look at those pathetic creatures on the moon who have tried for two thousand years and succeeded in nothing more than an emotional amputation. Even after your race is conquered and you are wholly subservient to superior species you react by falling in love with an incubator, a creature held in disdain in its own culture and which exists merely to pleasure procreate and progenate. This is the ultimate degradation and would deserve nothing but pity and disdain if it did not reflect poorly open our standing and set a bad precedent. Just as the Council was forced to take action against the Bay Colony in the past when it became too familiar with humans I have been sent to set this right. You will go to your home and return with this derelict Incubator at once or I will be forced to take sterner measures."

What those measure were, I'm sure I don't know, since it was at that point that I swung my two by four and collapsed his skull and watched him crumble to the sand in a pool of gelatinous pink ichor. Pel cursed in English and in his own language and warned me that things would go poorly and retreated to the ocean. I panted and cursed and wept and beat the shit out of that Floyd corpse and then went back to Cassie's and told her what I had done and by the time the sun came out dozens of the residents of Tomorrow Bay had made the pilgrimage to the seashore to view the shattered Floyd corpse with a reverence usually reserved for the iconography at a Virgin Franchise. I stayed back at Cassie's place and fucked Alia as long and as hard as I could afraid that at any minute an army of aliens would come and rip her out of my arms.

The gum tasted acrid like chewing chemicals or metal, but the sensation soon passed and the journey to the moon began almost immediately. There was the darkness of a void that descended as my eyes closed and my mind lost its own voice, replaced first by a thrumming in the black that oscillated from the back to the front of my brain and was gradually associated with a wave of soft violet rolling in my mind's light sparks stars pin holes in reality appeared and disappeared in patterns that defied definition gaining in rapidity until the light dominated and the dark became the stars and the violet melted into a pool at the bottom of my brain reflecting the white face of the moon that swallowed me as the thrumming rippled away across reality one last time. The pause lasted for one minute of eternity before the voices began.

"Jonas!" the voices cried over and over and over, swinging on a pendulum of sound that ranged from soothing to angry, the individual voices all at different stations of the arc so that the emotional resonance enveloped me.

"Jonas, why don't you act?" asked one voice alone in the whiteness of the moon. The others rolled behind it like breakers over me in deep monotones. "Centuries of planning. Your whole life training. Everything depends on Jonas. Jonas why do you hesitate? The time is right. This may be the only chance we have. Two thousand years and you hold the key to revengerevengerevenge. Jonas. Infect her. Poetic justice. Think of what her species did. A plague for a plague. Two thousand years. Jonas. Send her back beneath the waves. We have taken steps. You must not hesitate. You must not fail. Jonas. Infect her. Revenge." The last word hung in the whiteness and the white was pregnant with it so that it gained form and color and the thrumming rippled back in and the white became the face of the moon and I was sitting on the beach slack jawed staring at the moon and gum had dissolved in my mouth.

"You don't know what you're fucking with," the Prince of Saint Simon told me over a pint of raspberry mead, which was damned nice of him considering his thugs Brave and Cody basically abducted me from Cassie's place and hustled me up to the castle in the hills and I was more or less in his power, but then he is so used to having people in his power that he could afford the luxury of being magnanimous. There weren't many luxuries the Prince couldn't afford.

"What am I fucking with?" I asked him when he didn't continue.

"The liberation of the Earth," he roared, theatrically striking a pose, so I felt the urge yell Bravo! and applaud even though I had no idea what the hell he was talking about and told him as much.

"The Lunar Colony," he said, sitting conspiratorially close and sipping his own mug. "They've been working ages developing a virus that is fatal to the Floyds and the ironic part is that it is transmitted sexually through the medium of the Incubators who succumb to it slower than the others so that no one will guess the truth until it is too late and the Lunies have been waiting for the right time to introduce it since Incubators don't have much traffic with humans, not like the Combs who are damned near social or even the Spines who at least get their feet dry now and again, so when you hooked up with that little Incubator down at Tomorrow I contacted the colony straight off."

"You contacted the Lunar Colony?" I asked, actually impressed or dumbfounded or something for the first time in a long time.

"I've been in contact for years," the Prince confided, "and so are a lot of other influential humans who are waiting for the opportunity to strike back and that opportunity is down at Cassie's place right now screwing someone no doubt and waiting unwittingly to be the instrument of our just retribution. The Lunar Colony sent a specially trained agent down to infect the Incubator, but it seems that he was intercepted in my own tavern before I had the opportunity to bring him in and now he's living down at Tomorrow Bay and instead of infecting her he's been screwing her relentlessly, a fact more disturbing to his superiors than his failure to complete his mission, so we need you to carry on in his place."

"Me?"

"I told my lunar contacts you were just the man for the job. Think of it, instead of bashing in their brains one at a time you can take a stab at wiping out the majority of their race on Earth once and for all."

My face must have betrayed me because the Prince became agitated, which made his honor guard edgy and gave me on hell of a thirst all of the sudden, so that I drank deep and long to buy time to recover my composure.

The Prince of Saint Simon wanted me to kill Alia, a sacrifice in the war between species, the first, no second, casualty in nearly two thousand years of enforced peace.

"The sex can't be that good," the Prince said, "and there are more important things than sex" ... which might be true, I thought, for Princes but I couldn't think of anything more important when it came to common people like me or Cassie on her quest for an orgasm or apparently for the Man in the Moon. We were just genetic cogs in an evolutionary perpetual motion machine with LOVE dangling on a string in front of us, keeping us humping along forever.

So I lied to my dear friend the Prince of Saint Simon and told him I would do it.

I held Cassie and she cried. I have never seen her cry before, she's the toughest person I know, hell-bent, head strong and without regret, yet last night we sat together on this very couch and I held her for the first time and it was not sexual like you might be thinking and it never has been sexual between us which probably why we remained friends and I held her in the way a friend holds a friend while I comforted her as she cried wet wet tears on the shoulder of my denim shirt. I stroked her short cropped hair, whispering that it was alright even though I wasn't sure why she was crying or if she really was alright.

"I love her," Cassie said, at last and I knew then that she would have her orgasm and that Alia who was at that time fucking the Man in the Moon with wild abandon, which was so common an occurrence in our house of late that no one paid it any attention or even bothered to close a door. I thought of the vial of virus in my jacket pocket and wondered why I hadn't tossed it off a cliff on the way back into Tomorrow Bay as I intended. The Man in the Moon roared and swore and carried on in a way the gum council would never have approved of and I remembered the bastard Floyd from the Channel Colony and I knew he was right and I pitied Cassie and held her tight because we both loved a being for whom love was not possible and I wished I could beat the bastard's brains in again for being so smug and so right and I held Cassie and I lied to her softly over and over that it would be alright.

The Time Machine watched us wondering if Cassie could go through with her plan now that she was confident of an orgasm but fell in love with a loveless creature, knowing that Cassie must still love the Floyd in order to have her orgasm and power the machine that would erase their coexistence at the least.

This reminds me that I am still alone without so much as the Time Machine to keep me company. I wonder if Jen is still in the neighborhood. I could use a little old fashioned monogamous human foreplay hold-me-when-it's-over relations. That is all the story I have to tell. I'm hungry and thirsty and I almost hope Cassie has failed because I feel like going up to the Laughing Saint for some chowder and a pint of raspberry mead.