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Fuck Me Gently With A Chainsaw
Place, time, circumstances, yada yada yada. Yeah, I know. The place was (drum roll, fanfare) the planet Tserephai. I think some Russian guy had been through that part of space before us; the names of most of the planets around there started with "ts". Let me tell you about Tserephai. It's about 4/7ths ocean, the rest completely covered with dense forests. Really dense forests. You can't squeeze between the trees, they tend towards the gargantuan and they have a horrifying grow-back rate. The ExPort they'd set up had a crew on permanent flamethrower duty. They even tried sterilising the soil, and the trees grew over it, pushing fresh soil as they went. They actually pushed the ExPort base off the ground. I was sort of, uh, with the Maracites at the time. I wasn't one of them; I was just a hanger-on. primarily because they were in favour at the time, they had their own starships, the police never bothered them, et cetera. The downside of this was that they'd ask me to do stuff for them. Usually, I didn't mind. The thing was, they were often completely senseless things like, "take this mostly-empty bottle of fizzy brown liquid to such-and-such deserted, lifeless planet, throw it out of the airlock and then come back here". I got the idea they were having a series of elaborate jokes at my expense. Their latest request was to spend two weeks with some women who were starting a refuge on Tserephai. The women weren't too taken with me being there - they were seperatists - but I lived at the ExPort and tried to not bother them. At least they weren't so stuck-up that they didn't let me visit occasionally. I learned that they weren't running away from males in general; they just had some ideas they wanted to try out. I got to help in their ill-fated attempt in clearing off some land, when they had some ideas about growing earth crops. We cleared a space of about forty paces along a side, and two days later the trees had all grown back. Another day later and their shacks were being crushed by the regrowth. After that, they just moved up into the trees. It wasn't so bad once we'd gotten used to moving along the branches, learned which things we could eat and so forth. Anyway. I was there for two weeks. On the day the Maracites came to pick me up (I felt honoured; they'd come out in the Kahluri, the starship they called the Royal Barge) I was heading back to the ExPort when I spotted two of the women through the blue-green thicket haze. They were cutting branches with some device which, from where I stood, appeared to be mainly transparent sound-baffle shields, about the size and shape of a guitar. They held the neck against the trunks of the branches and powdered tree flew up from where the neck touched. I couldn't hear anything but judging from the way that they held it, it was shaking a lot. I got a little closer and saw that one of the women was doing most of the holding; the other was simply hanging onto the end of the device, pressing the base into her crotch and riding it as the neck moved through the branches. As I watched, she writhed, almost letting go of the device; threw her head back and gasped. I would have stuck around longer, but the Kahluri was hovering overhead in a way that said "we aren't going to wait here forever, and if we leave without you, you'll have to make your own way home". That was another thing I admired about the Maracites; they way that they got so much meaning into their gestures. |
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