Archive-name: Fantasy/mindstar.02
Archive-author: Jeff Buser - (C) 1990
Archive-title: Those Of A Mindstar Born - 2


Wendy called the plant in the morning, telling them she would not be in.  She 
buzzed Sarah, but cut the connection when Sarah's autoanswer message came on.  
She used the hygiene closet and emerged slightly fragrant, feeling more awake 
and even more eager to tackle the mystery ahead.  She switched on the viewer 
and examined her body.  She saw a woman, rather attractive by her own 
standards, standing before her.  Curly red hair halfway down her back, wide, 
expressive green eyes, big breasts, narrow waist, wide hips, muscular legs, a 
nice package.  Her bodypaint depicted white and yellow flames dancing about 
her ankles and feet, rising to yellow and orange at her waist and fading to a 
red which matched the color of her hair where it played around and between 
her breasts.  Her back was done similarly, and the whole was executed in a 
new holocrystal paint which gave a realistic impresseion of actual fire 
consuming her body.  She had been really impressed with the effect when it 
was introduced, but now it was getting a little tedious to see it on everone 
she passed on the street.

Her facepaint was done in a similar motif, but was more subdued, a mere hint 
of flame around the corners of her mouth and eyes.  Fortunately, her red hair 
and natural radiant sexuality made her one of the few women who could carry 
the flame paint well, and therefore few others had it.  But she had seen 
enough 3D dancing lines and churning waters and rising smoke and sparkling 
stars and whirling galaxies to make her think it was time for a change.  And 
thinking about it, she began to look under the paint at the woman herself.

For the first time she began to notice the effects of 'jac juice deprivation. 
Around the corners of her mouth and eyes, tiny wrinkles were forming.  And 
some, no, quite a few of her fiery red hairs were now a lighter color, a kind 
of gray.  Scanning downward she began noticing other little imperfections 
which had happened so gradually that she had never seen them.  Her breasts 
which, though large, had once projected firmly outward, now hung down against 
her body;  her once flat stomach had expanded slightly, creating a sloping 
mound between her crotch and chest, and her legs, still muscular, nonetheless 
looked thicker, heavier.  She knew from the shows that on other worlds these 
traits were characteristic of aging;  women of her age were often portrayed 
in those shows as either grossly fat or painfully thin, wrinkled, 
sunken-faced, and gray, but here these symptoms only occurred in the truly 
ancient or mortally ill.

She remembered that years before the invasion she had met a free trader in 
person;  how old had she been then?  Thirty-five?  Thirty-six?  The trader 
captain had been only a few years her senior, but at the time Wendy had 
thought she was the victim of some strange malady.  The captain had been 
strong and quite sturdy looking, and yet her short cropped hair had been 
silver and her face lined and twisted;  the sight of the trader's twisted 
face when it contorted with laughter had sent shivers up Wendy's spine.  If 
it was the fate of everyone who lived without 'jac juice to live two-thirds 
of their lives like that, then something had to be done.

She fixed a quick breakfast and sat down at the console.  She queried the net 
about the ejaculoids and confirmed most of what she already knew.  All life 
on the planet seemed to consist of various large and small organisms which 
reproduced by emitting a discharge of countless single-celled proto-beings. 
Out of these vast, photosynthetic colonies of single-cell life, one or more 
cells would eventually develop into a replica of the originator.  How the 
colony chose one cell to develop while the rest supported it's infancy, or 
why the discharge of all life forms on the planet seemed genetically 
identical, or any of an endless number of questions remained unanswered.  The 
compound was adequately equipped for exobiological research but long ago it 
had been decided that use of live ejaculoids for experiments was immoral, and 
the creamy discharge had yet to reveal it's secrets to human science.  Many 
varieties of ejaculoid posessed very high intellegence;  though they had no 
way of duplicating human communication, many people believed them to be fully 
sentient beings.  Even the discharge radiated an essence of life;  the psi 
people said it had a rudimentary telepathic empathy which disappeared in the 
mature orgamism.  Wendy cleched the crystal tight in her palm.  The warmness 
she felt was not entirely the heat of the cream's biological function but 
also an impression of something vaguely like emotion.

Wendy punched up all information on the Prophylactans.  Not much was known 
about them.  They had landed forteen years ago, origin unknown.  They looked 
like large, semitransparent bags made of some highly resilient membrane in 
widely varied sizes.  They could fly or crawl with surprising agility.  They 
seemed to posess no technological artifacts other than their odd, shiny 
starship.  Some had speculated that they had not built the craft;  that they 
had hijacked it, or were merely escaped specimens.  Their only direct 
interference with human life was to bar entry to the alien ship, but the 
indirect consequences of their other actions were bad enough.  They had 
emerged from the ship by the thousands only hours after landing.  They had 
quickly enfolded every ejaculoid in sight, absorbing the discharge;  within 
two days they were multiplying by budding new copies of themselves from their 
outside surfaces.

In captivity, they disintegrated into a pool of simple organic slime.  No 
effective weapon other than brute force had proved effective against them, 
and their close proximity to the ejaculoids and their overwhelming numbers 
made extermination impossible.  Once a team had used heat wands to burn their 
way through the gaurds into the ship without damaging it, but nothing useful 
had been found.  The Prophylactans had merely swarmed into the ship, burying 
the explorers, and had their power packs been exhausted before burning 
through the layers of living entombment the brave souls would likely have 
been lost.

So, the humans had turned back to their daily work, and found new  
entertainment in the systems which the original colonists and their 
descendants had long had little use for.  How could everyone pretend that 
nothing was wrong, that life inside the compounds was enough? 

Wendy remembered when she had been nearing the end of primary training.  She 
had been relieved that performance evaluations were over, and decided to go 
out into the natural sectors for a while.  She was nearly an adult, and her 
mother had been eager to let her experience the natural beauty of the world 
away from human engineering and technology.  She and two friends had taken a 
minimal amount of survival gear and had walked straight away from the 
compound in a randomly chosen direction.

She was alone.  Nyri and Gwen had gone off to look for flyjacs and she had 
stayed to ready the gear for the next day's walking.  She had gotten done 
before they had returned, now having a highly practiced and efficient routine 
for making and breaking camp.  She had walked in the opposite direction, down 
into a small hollow where two hills joined.  She came into a clearing and saw 
a 'jac like she had never seen before.  It was round and wide with a broad, 
concave back perhaps four or five meters across.  It's skin was light ivory 
with a purple-red tint.  All around it's circumference were the beautiful 
heads which were the trademark of most of the larger, mobile 'jacs.  The 
heads (she thought there were eight) rose up on long, slender necks and bent 
inward over the back;  from them poured a constant stream of discharge.   

She slid down a steep embankment and walked toward the creature.  She 
extended a hand and rubbed along the outside of the creature's body.  It's 
flesh was warm and, like most, was very smooth and firm.  There were no 
individual muscles that Wendy could see;  instead, any part of the body 
seemed able to become rigid or springy at will.  She stripped out our her 
briargaurds and pressed her own body against one of the necks towering above 
her.  She stretched her hands up over her head as high as they would go, 
caressing the thick, slowly swaying neck.  The head still bent over the 
creature's back, pouring cream onto itself in a heavy, pulsing stream.  Wendy 
reached down to where some of the 'jac juice was dripping over the edge onto 
the ground.  She dabbed her fingers in it and brought them to her mouth, 
trailing sticky tendrils of juice from the creature which then snapped and 
hung dripping from her hand.  She tasted the juice;  somehow it was even 
sweeter and more satisfying that that of the more domesticated 'jacs at home.  
Not much cream dripped over the creature's sides, however;  it must have been 
recycling the juice it sprayed.  Suddenly Wendy clambered up onto the back of 
the creature.  She slipped on it's damp side and fell headfirst into the 
center cavity, cream washing over her in thick, stringy waves.  Her chest 
made contact with a long slit in the creature's body, and the suction of 
rushing cream into that opening tugged at her breasts.  An abrupt awareness 
of sexuality burst into her mind, and then several of the 'jac's heads 
plunged beneath the surface to pull her up. Amidst the tangle of twisting 
necks, Wendy's head broke surface.  She shook her head, huge gobs of sticky 
cream flying from her long hair.  She wiped her face with her hands, licking 
residue from her lips and fingers.  All of the heads were now bent down, 
nuzzling her from all angles.  Her ass was wedged into the creature's back 
opening but the flow of cream had stopped.  

One of the heads was lying in her lap, about the size of a human head, 
rounded and with a single oblong opening nearly a foot long and several 
inches wide from which cream had just been pouring.  Wendy embraced the neck 
with her arms where it met the head, and pulled the head up to her face.  She 
began kissing it, dipping her tounge and lower lip into the opening to drink 
the residual juice there.

"It's OK.  I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to scare you or hurt you.  I just wanted 
to play."

As if in response Wendy felt the suction of the back opening start up, 
pulling jism through her legs and over her crotch in a constant flow.  The 
heads around her began sliding against her and the one in her arms erupted 
into a glorious fountain of juice, coating her face in a strong stream of 
white fluid.  Wendy opened her mouth, drinking deeply of the sweet, thick 
discharge, but there was far too much to consume and most of it splashed out, 
flowing down over her chin and chest in torrents of hanging drops.  She 
twisted her head, showering in the downpour as she felt a strange tingling in 
her crotch begin to build.  It seemed as if there was a buzzer in her chest, 
deep beneath her breasts, connected to another buzzer in her cunt by glowing 
electrical wires.  The wires began extending to her arms and legs as the 
heads of the 'jac performed their synchronized dance around her, sending 
waves of living jism up and down her body.  She began opening and closing her 
legs to vary the flow over her crotch, and periodically a head would splash 
beneath the surface to double the pressure on her awakening organs with it's 
output.

The wires were now burning bright along every nerve of her body.  Her toes 
and fingers first stretched to their limits and then clenched into balls with 
the stimulation.  As the glow seeped into the base of her skull and spread 
out into her brain she believed she was one with the alien.  It was no longer 
a creature to her; she knew without doubt that it was a soul, like her, alone 
in a prison of flesh which they could now, only briefly, transcend.

And then the light exploded from her, illuminating the living stuff which 
penetrated her every opening.  She cried out, a long, high cry of sheer 
exhiliration which rose above the hills into space and time.  The light 
slowly, slowly, slowly faded to black.

When she had awoken, the heads of the 'jac had been back to their original positions, pouring a steady flow of juice over her body.  She lay in the cavity, her head hanging over the edge and her hair still dripping remnants of jism from earlier.  It was dark and the stars were out, clearer than she had ever seen them from the compound.  She mustered her strength and dropped from her lover's back.  She carried her briarguards back to camp and wiped off there, taking care not to wake her friends who had returned and were already soundly sleeping.  They might have just thought she had been bathing, but somehow they always knew what each other had been up to.  She wouldn't have been too embarrassed, except that her experience with the 'jac had been the
first orgasm of her life.  Some girls bragged about their exploits with 
'jacs, and while most people publicly expressed with mild humor that it was 
sick, Wendy knew that everybody fantasized about making love to them.  Just 
how many really did it she didn't know, but normal human relationships were 
much more fashionable and much less prone to humiliation upon exposure.  But 
after her experience in the hollow, Wendy wondered how making love with 
another woman would ever be able to compare with the feeling she had shared 
with the 'jac.

Wendy snapped off the console and rested her head on her arms.  This was 
getting her nowhere.  As a control systems tech, she better than anyone 
should be able to get useful results out of a machine, but her heart and mind 
just weren't in it.  What had some Mother said?  'The more things change, the 
more they stay the same'?  Wasn't everyone's blind acceptance of recent 
events just like the attitude they had displayed since the colony's birth?  
When the seedship had landed, and the suspended chromosomes had been nursed 
by the autodocs into adolescent colonists over the years, how had that new 
breed reacted to the discovery that all the children were sterile?  They had 
lived out their lives almost to extinction before Mother Krystal had proposed 
perpetuation through cloning.  The autodocs had all the necessary equipment, 
and soon a new generation of female children was alive.  The decision not to 
clone the males was based on many factors;  the one recorded for posterity 
was that to make a male clone, male and female chromosomes are both needed 
but female clones only require female cells.  The fact that the males had 
already shown more major signs of genetic damage and the possibility of worse 
defects was also mentioned.

The most basic reason, however, was that in the fifty odd years after the 
seedship had landed and hope for the future was lost, men had fucked up the 
planet almost irreparably.  Clique warfare, destructive hedonism and complete 
disregard for the native ecology had reduced the colony to a state of near 
barbarism.  But in the four hundred and fifty nine years since a dying 
woman's brilliant vision, there had been no warfare, no ecological abuse, no 
cultural excess of the sort which had destroyed countless empires before.  
There had been times of stress, of course, times at which the future had 
seemed bleak; there had also been women of action and women of insight, but 
the overwhelming majority of the planet's human history had been a tale of 
survival by indifference.

When the MetaC drive had been invented, allowing journeys that had taken tens 
or hundreds of years to be made in weeks, merchant ships had begun arriving 
every few days.  What had the government done?  They had imposed trade limits 
to keep the planet's economy the same as it had been during the time that a 
single ship's arrival made the history crystals.  When the Free Planets had 
rebelled against the oppressive Earth Empire, the government had actually 
seemed a little reluctant to let the Imperial offices close as the end of 
rebellion finally arrived.

And now their indifference was not only costing the planet's inhabitants 
their happiness, but might also be harming the planet's ecology.  Nobody knew 
how much damage the Prophylactans were causing because nobody really fully 
understood the workings of the native ecosystem.  The 'jacs were mostly 
dormant now, enveloped by the parasites.  They seemed to have almost no 
discharge, and at least this had reduced the reproductive rate of the 
Prophylactans to a near halt.  The accepted theory was that the discharge was 
not just the reproductive matter of the ejaculoids, but was also their food. 
Since the jism was no longer free to enter the environment and 
photosynthesize before being reabsorbed, the 'jacs were probably being slowly 
starved to death.  The humans would still be fine after the planet's own life 
came to a grinding halt, within the enclosed ecosphere of the compounds, but 
it was a tragic, stupid, fatal thing to simply let happen.  Wendy, her head 
still heavy on her arms, began to cry.

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