Amazon
RealTime Publishing
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: RealTime Publishing
ISBN-10: 1849610605
Type: Fiction
Pages: 218
ISBN-13: 9781849610605
The Supreme Civilisation has a passive rebellion on its hands. Talkers, hybrid human/Nautili, are going missing. Promiscuous poet Farley Judd investigates....
Each of the 5 novels of the series Towards the unMaking of Heaven takes place within an intergalactic civilisation known variously as the Supreme Civilisation, or, more often, simply as Space. And the third novel, You Human, is in 3 parts, Prologue, Leander Chronicle, and Epilogue. Prologue and Epilogue are told by the randy poet Farley Judd. He is also Director of Communication on his Station. Free of any sexual hypocrisies himself, he tells of other station inhabitants sexual obsessions with his Talker. Talkers are telepaths in instant communication with all throughout Space. The result of interbreeding with the Nautili, Talkers male and female have long sinuous bodies and very short legs. Misused and abused, the Talkers start to disappear, leading to disruption throughout Space. Farley Judd goes in search of them, eventually discovers the Leander Chronicle, which tells of Talkers' resentments and fears of humankind, and of their determination to live a life independent of both humans and Nautili. The Epilogue tells of what Farley Judd did with the Chronicle, the whole being a consideration of love, sex and hatred.
Excerpt
Prologue
My first reaction was,
“Not my Talker.”
News, of course, had already come through that a few Talkers had gone missing. That that news hadn't come via my Talker should have given me pause for thought. It hadn’t. I was confident that I’d treated her fairly; and, superciliously, I had blamed the disappearances of those other Talkers on their D-of-C’s neglect.
My Talker had not suffered such neglect. I had assiduously kept all the ruffians and viragos away from her, had even secured for her an apartment near the office so that she only had to walk two corridors; and I had arranged for someone to be there always to walk her back and forth from work. On occasion I had even accompanied her home myself.
Before we proceed any further let me here make one thing lucidly clear — I, Farley Judd, am not a good man. I am not a bad man either. Just so you understand that I am not seeking plaudits.
And before any sneering cynic suggests that I was keeping that Talker to myself, for my own sexual gratification, let me here also tell you the reason for my being late to the office that morning.
Usually it was a gross miscalculation if I was early at the office. What D-of-C, I ask you, needed then to be in their office for more than an hour a day? So long as the Talker was functioning, so long as the machines were working, the D of C’s presence was most certainly superfluous.
Both Talker and machine were capable of using their initiative; at least to the extent that they could hold any questionables until the D-of-C or a Sub arrived. And arrive I always, sooner or later, did.
To spend all day in the office was to become caught up in the invention of work and the perfidy of Service politics. I had found that if I was not in the office I was less likely to be stabbed in the back than if I was there all day reminding them of my existence. On top of which the less that I did the less fault could be found with it.
Idleness aside, I had better things to do with my days than lounge about the office. That day, for instance, had been taken up with a sophisticated sixty six year old. Hardly alibi enough to be late for work, you might say, nor sufficient to refrain from indulging the odd body of a Talker. I should, however, point out here that I am over fifty years old myself and that this particular sixty six year old was in supple trim and.…
I have to confess that I but bedded her out of curiosity — to see where she’d put the wrinkles. And that I'd got rather drunk to do it. With the consequence that I never did discover where she kept her wrinkles... Which is all very glib and unfair of me...
Truth be told she was a classy lady, her every word a witticism, her every movement a refined gesture; and, at the time, I had felt honoured to be allowed into her bed.
And, truth be told, I was simply not attracted to Talkers. Those short chunky legs and large fat feet repelled me. While their immobile faces I found utterly daunting.
Talkers, male and female, I found easy enough to work with — they fulfilled their function: I fulfilled mine. Any speculations I had, though, about bedding the female variety were distinctly without desire, with the absence even of base lechery. But let the stupidest of ordinary women walk past, one wiggle of her overweight hips and, mesmerised, I follow. How, though, could one become allured by hips that were twitching only thirty centimetres above floor level?
On that station there were over 100,000 people. Of those 100,000 at least 25,000 had to be women between the ages of 20 and 70 and, therefore, sexually active. If, optimistically supposing, a quarter of those 25,000 women were both desirable and available on any given day, then even the most priapic and promiscuous of males would have his work cut out satisfying them all. And I was neither that horny, nor that indiscriminate, nor that energetic — at the age of my prostate every other day was my optimum, twice a week if I was lucky. So what did I need with a Talker?
That’s not to say that I didn't understand the sexual fascination that Talkers inspired. The fascination of the new, the different, the exotic; an adolescent-like obsession that should with gratification, though, have instantly lost all its power. And Talkers were obliging enough. One only had to ask; and, with their featureless voices, even a refusal was without embarrassment.
Possibly it was their very featurelessness which so repelled me — have one and you’d had them all. Because, should a Talker have accorded you the satisfaction of your perverse whim, then, once you'd sampled the passive delights that a two meter torso and thirty centimetre legs had to offer, once you’d sated your particular fancy, and once you'd laid to rest all the rumour and mythology concerning their sexuality, then you were left with some very boring, with some very one-sided sex.
So we are left with the Talker fetishists.
And they were fetishists first and foremost, Talkers just happened to have become the object of their inveterate serial obsession. Those fetishists were the freaks I protected my Talker from; and, I suspect, those fetishists were more taken with the Talkers’ impassive faces than with their peculiar anatomy. That selfsame impassive physiognomy being exactly why I found Talkers so unappealing, so very unexciting. But I could see how some fetishists could become unbalanced by their attempting to elicit a spontaneous response from a Talker, and why Talkers were so often found physically and fatally abused, the passive victim of bizarre bondage or excessive flagellation...
And my Talker had inexplicably disappeared....
So when I had finished mentally cursing her for her ingratitude, my second thought was that some fetishist had kidnapped her and was holding her against her wishes.
My Sub had looked through her apartment. Her plants were still there. So I notified the police, gave names or descriptions of those fetishists I'd had to warn off from her door, and of those others whom I had seen near her once too often for it to be a coincidence.
For the moment that was all that I could do, except stay in the office and explain to irate users why they couldn't have Talker time, tell them that we still had machines. About which they made disparaging remarks.
Wherever I was posted as D-of-C, including one station where they had four Talkers, I insisted that all machines be functioning at maximum efficiency. You will, therefore, suppose correctly that I never wholly trusted Talkers. Talkers were, after all, semi-human, were open to some and more of the same disorders as the rest of us. Trouble was, despite standing orders to all stations, machine competence was not universal. Machine-transmitted messages, therefore, owned a regrettable tendency to disappear into space.
Notwithstanding that tendency I still insisted, during my brief visits to the office during my brief tenure of office, on all important communications being duplicated by machine — to keep the machine system functioning if nothing more. Granted machines weren't instant like a Talker, but what message needed to be sent that quickly, could not wait six or seven days for a reply? The rubbish, the office tittle-tattle, that I had to refuse even as a Sub...
“For the moment,” I told all enquirers, "you will have to scale down the speed of your operations.” The Traders of course kicked up the biggest public stink, privately offered the largest bribes. My intention was to hold off until I definitely had my Talker back; then I’d be the one who decided the price.
But my Talker didn't come back.
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