Nepenthe Read online

  “It does ease the passage.” He’d sifted into her thoughts again. “You are clever for a race who only assumes one form.”

  There was room again for him to push, and he did. The sucking mouth released her clit, only for another to replace it. No, not one. Two. On either side. The rest of the suckers clinging to her palms, her arms and legs and soles, shifted positions in a relay and took up their many strange kisses again.

  She crumbled against him, weak this time from the knowledge of just how far she would have to go. The chest and face and arms he maintained in human form, a warm familiar comfort against her back. But all those other limbs, coiling, grotesque and exquisite, filling her holes, chasing her pleasure while they made terrifying promises for her body’s future. Hypatia let him, unable to care, unable to want anything else.

  “Again?” he said, and a new sweet-sour ribbon of flesh teased between her lips.

  She swallowed. Nodded. “Yes.”

  With a hum of approval, he slipped back into her mouth. Not a coil this time, but a long, stroking limb. Hypatia abandoned sanity and sucked at him like a lover.

  He groaned and squeezed her from everywhere. “Nnngh! You don’t understand what you do, I’ll—mmh! Unheard of!”

  The cocks rooted home, and a second egg blurted into her. Sensation burst around her clit, and Hypatia came again, mewling on the flesh in her mouth. The overload all but masked the squirming snap as the new little globe rushed to join its twin.

  Breath came ragged at her ear and the limb withdrew from between her teeth. “I think we’ll leave that, for now. Form of the Creator!” It sounded like an oath, and she was already exhausted from another climax when the organs between her legs took to their sticky business again. “I’d let you suck all day, it is … indescribable. But I fear it’s unhealthy for me to rush. We cannot afford the risk.” He pressed lips to her temple then, and Hypatia didn’t know if this was something his people did, or some human behavior he’d figured out how to mimic.

  “Can you reach your pleasure again?” he asked, and suckers shifted in several places. “Safely?”

  “I duh …” She gulped and rolled her face into the crook of his neck. He smelled … herbal. “I don’t know.”

  “Mm, well perhaps not with every egg, then.” A larger portion of the tiny mouths let her go, including the one over her swollen clit. “Lie back, treasure. We have a long way to go.”

  She sighed and let him cradle her body. He was still and warm now, supporting arms shifting gently to adjust his hold, while the cocks kept up their soft, busy work, far less aggressive now that she wasn’t suckling some sensitive part of him.

  After a time, he implanted another, and Hypatia felt it squeeze home.

  For the fourth, she rallied, and he made her come again, her cries trilling weak against his neck while he murmured low sounds of approval into her hair. The fifth and sixth came long after that, and her middle began to feel full. After seven, Hypatia lost count. The rest was a fever dream of alternately lolling weak and then squirming to bleat exhausted climaxes in the grip of his many arms. The windows went night dark and began to grow light again, and still he kept them joined. Her belly grew firm and round. Not so large and obvious as a human pregnancy, but the presence of the egg mass was enough.

  What … what have we …

  “Ptolarch.”

  A new voice filtered through the haze of their coupling, but they faced away from the room’s door, and Hypatia could not roll her head toward the sound.

  “Yes, Magistrand?”

  “We’ve fou—oh.”

  Awareness settled back in quiet layers, and it came to her that this one spoke with another male of his kind.

  “Yes,” said the one who had mated her. “Oh.” Limbs that had held her for hours shifted. Cocks retreated from her body.

  “You might have waited,” the second said. “The ship is far more sanitary than this … place.”

  “Oh no.” He helped unfold her knees. stroked her tacky skin. “This was the one. She would not have made it in time.”

  Another face came into view alongside the ruined bed. This one was in no way human, but completely purple, its upper body bearing only the vaguest resemblance to the shapeshifter who mimicked her own kind. An act of consideration, she saw now, or perhaps an attempt at seduction. She was too weak to care, but the other one made a face she couldn’t understand.

  “We found others,” he said. “From the larger islands.”

  “Mm, how many?” Her lover caressed her face, making no bother to look at the other who stood near.

  “Forty? Fifty perhaps. Male and female, mixed.”

  “This is good news. She will not have to carry alone.”

  Hypatia was able to look at his eyes now, direct without her neck straining to one side. They were lavender, like the undersides of his arms. The translucent, inner lids blinked at her again.

  “What …” She let the back of her hand fall against his smooth, pale chest. “Who … are you?”

  The creature smiled through a human face adopted just for her. “We are Nepenthe,” he said. “And we have found each other just in time. You may call me Io Rae.”

  “High One.” The other sounded brusque, and she knew affront when she heard it. “That is most disrespectful.”

  Io Rae hummed and traced her lower lip with a thumb. “You should see what ‘disrespectful’ things this one does,” he said. “And she is the first. No one has carried our young in a generation. She may call me whatever she wishes. And you will bow and call her ‘Ptolara.’ Because she is mine.”

  The second Nepenthe stiffened. “I understand her position, Ptolarch, but—”

  “Very good,” said Io Rae, pale purple eyes only on her. “Then let the others know. And we will be along shortly. Have them prepare the ship.”

  “High One.” The other cut his superior some brisk gesture involving several limbs and boiled from the room.

  “There are so few of us left.” Io Rae passed a gentle hand over her belly. “And only the males were able to flee our world with our minds intact. And now we’ve found you.” He raised her shoulders with the help of many arms and laid a reverent kiss on her lips. “What will I call you, little one?”

  She swam in his gaze, world upending.

  “Hypatia.”

  “Then you will save us, Hypatia. The Nepenthe will survive.” He cradled her close again. “And so will you.”

  The recovered humans huddled together in the center of the cargo hold: it was the only single space aboard the ship large enough to gather the entire Nepenthe crew and the last of the statiform race they’d rescued from the water planet.

  Dae Keth had located and gathered data on this world, and the Ptolarch had agreed they would route the ship here, all in high hopes of a location for a settlement. The salt content, however, of the painfully turquoise water covering most of the rocky planet, was far too high, they’d discovered. His people would have to exist in a compatible secondary form nearly all the time to tolerate it, and they’d learned already in the harshest way possible what could happen when their kind remained in altered bodies for too long.

  But the Nepenthe had not been the only race to find the waters and scattered islands of this planet less than habitable. From what they were already learning, these bipedal aliens—hopeful colonizers, themselves—had not integrated well with the native microzoa over time. Some virus had spread and decimated their population. The clustered group emitting fear in nauseating subsonic waves in the hold of the ship at that moment were the only survivors his crew had been able to find. The bodies of their dead were no longer in a solid enough state to count with any accuracy.

  The humans assumed various postures amid the ring of curious Nepenthe who kept to the outer walls of the hold. Some sat, some stood. Others were too weak to do more than lie on the floor. Ea Nir, one of their healers, made attempts to circulate containers of pure water among the survivors, but many were too nervous to accept
the offer from one of his race. And when Ea Nir tried to shift his appearance to mimic theirs, in hopes of providing the humans with familiarity, there were some who recoiled even further.

  For a race who could not shift form, their coloring and size varied to an impressive degree. Many of them were obscenely pale under their protective body coverings; the Ptolarch had chosen one such for his own. Dae Keth didn’t know if he would be able to tolerate such a thing, even if, as an incubator, the human would pass on none of its genetics to his offspring.

  “Then don’t choose a pale one, Magistrand.”

  His Ptolarch’s words came pushing into his awareness with a curling energy of private amusement to them. Dae Keth must have been letting his thoughts project, unveiled, for the High One to pick them up with such ease. He rearranged a number of his arms and shifted a glance away from the humans to his leader, seated on his left.

  Io Rae occupied the interior of a hemispherical seat and appeared to be paying scant attention to the anxious crowd in the hold. Limbs that would normally drape over the seat’s edge, or gesture in the fluid way their Ptolarch preferred, busied themselves now with supporting and soothing the female human with whom Dae Keth had found him coupled down on the planet’s surface. An image the Magistrand would never be able to cleanse from his mind, to be certain.

  “Eager to try it yourself, are you?”

  Dae Keth shifted in irritation at the High One’s lightheartedness. Io Rae found humor everywhere, but the fate of their race was nothing about which the Magistrand preferred to make jokes.

  Even now, the Ptolarch retained the face and upper body of a male human and spoke quiet words to the female he cradled. The female who was already carrying the first egg mass any of them had implanted since leaving Nepenth. It was the High One’s right to choose the first host, and this one had looked like she’d been in no condition to refuse, but how many others among the survivors would agree to aid his people in this way? Unwilling beings made poor hosts. ‘When one sows in poisoned soil …’ as the saying went.

  Ea Nir approached Dae Keth and the Ptolarch, the healer still assuming the form of the bipedal race, still refining the bodily structures as he came. His fellow delighted in the art of shifting forms in a way the Magistrand did not.

  “High One,” Ea Nir said. “Magistrand. I have done what I can for the moment. The ones who will take sustenance have taken it. Perhaps after you speak, the others can be convinced. Some will not last a day if they do not take in nutrients.”

  “Then it is well we do not delay further,” said Dae Keth. “High One?”

  “Indeed,” said Io Rae, his eyes never leaving his chosen. “Have we corrected the language barrier?”

  The healer made a gesture with human-looking hands that didn’t translate. “We have, High One. The Magistrand ordered it at first contact, during our search.”

  “Perfect.” The Ptolarch traced the tip of one of his natural arms over the swollen belly of his female, and it appeared to cost him significant effort to pull his attention from the human.

  She hadn’t spoken above a murmur since their leader had carried her onto the ship, but her emotions roiled loud and clear, ebbing and flowing between general confusion and exhaustion. When her eyes moved to her own kind, she churned with fear; not for herself, but for them.

  And shame, of all things. Her thoughts were not as clear as those of his people, but Dae Keth gathered shame was tied in with the mating act for this race. And it was somehow made worse by her brethren observing her and understanding the Ptolarch had laid claim.

  Springing up amid that oppressive cloud of shame, however, were flares of some other impulse the female couldn’t control. Every time she met eyes with Io Rae, and he would mimic the upward curving lines of her mouth, hot gouts of lust would burst away from the human. The raw emotion would make Dae Keth’s flesh twitch with each eruption, and he could feel her work to suppress it every time. If he was this unnerved standing a respectable distance to one side, the Magistrand could only imagine what it felt like for his leader, with his new host nested there among his arms.

  “And soon your own host. In your own arms. Trust me, this is what we’ve been waiting for.”

  The Ptolarch began to rise from his seat, extracting his arms from around his female even as he added to Dae Keth’s thoughts again. On many limbs he stood, their natural deep purple a contrast to the pale human upper body he retained. All whispering in the cargo hold ceased as eyes turned to the High One. His host curled her limbs around herself in the depths of the seat, but watched, rapt.

  “Human friends,” Io Rae began, and his voice carried. “We are Nepenthe.”

  The group of aliens with their dry flesh and their tufts and manes of variously-colored hair looked from one another to the Ptolarch, and then to the Nepenthe standing along the walls. Some of them shook their heads or whispered, and Dae Keth could feel their confusion at being able to comprehend the foreign speech.

  “This world has not been kind to you,” the High One went on. “We understand you sought a colony here and found only devastation. The survivors who surround you here were the only left living my crew has been able to find. Our equipment has run scans of all landmasses.”

  There were breathy noises from the humans at this, and many exchanged looks with widened eyes.

  The Ptolarch said, “We, too, came to this planet in hopes of a habitable place to settle, but the biosphere here will not suit our needs, either. As you are all that remains of your race on this world, we before you are the same. We cannot live here, and neither can you. To enable our joint survival, we would like to propose an alliance.”

  One of the humans who was already standing pressed forward through the small crowd to confront the Ptolarch. Several Nepenthe shifted closer to their leader in the beginnings of defensive postures, but the female ignored them.

  “What do you mean by ‘alliance?’ ” she said. Her stance was wide, arms bent and fists on hips, as though by making herself larger she would protect the others behind her. “No one proposed anything when they dragged us onto this ship. Your crew just herded us along like cattle.”

  Dae Keth didn’t know what ‘cattle’ were, but he could respect the aggressive display this human made. The increased volume. The flash of black eyes amid deep brown skin, and the long, fine ropes of hair swinging from the crown of her head with her movements as she spoke.

  The Ptolarch tilted his altered face to his second-in-command: it was the Magistrand’s place, like this human, to be the aggressive one. The one who cut and spliced, who planned and executed while their leader built goodwill.

  “We removed you from a planet that was killing you.” The female turned her eyes on Dae Keth when he spoke. “Would you have preferred to stay and die?”

  She looked him up and down. He, like the rest of the Nepenthe in the hold—aside from Ea Nir, and the Ptolarch in his strange chimera form—stood in his own natural shape. On his own ten, suckered limbs that never quite held still. The upper half of his body was broader than the humans’, though not entirely dissimilar in architecture. His two specialized arms were more dexterous than the bipeds’, as they didn’t have the ability to shift their phalanges into any other shape, and, as all of his kind, his head grew no hair or fur. The only follicles hiding below his glossy, dark purple flesh, were vestigial at best. The Nepenthe had not evolved in that way.

  The facial structure of their two races was alike enough to find familiar ground: symmetrical eyes, mouth opening with food-crushing bony ridges inside. Additional small openings for scent and sound. The humans had more fleshy adaptations surrounding their sensory organs; more developed lips and external ear parts. When this one looked at him, so different from anything she knew, would enough of him be the same? Enough to accept what the Ptolarch wanted him to propose?

  “So give us the choice, then,” the female said after nearly staring a hole through his body. “What do you want from us? Let us hear and decide.”

/>   There was a collective bobbing of heads from the others around her, which Dae Keth understood as agreement. He could also feel the thrum of the group swarming to the idea of this vocal female as their leader, and some part of him approved, though he didn’t have time just then to inspect his reasons.

  “The alliance we seek is simple,” said Dae Keth. “We help each other survive.”

  The human eyed the Ptolarch’s chosen host, the only one of their number apart from the group, where she remained curled in the seat behind her new mate. “And how will we do that?” she said.

  “The crew you see around you now?” The Magistrand gestured to the perimeter of the hold. “Like yourselves, we are the last. We are all who escaped our home world. We have no females among us—it is complex. We can explain in detail later, but for now what our Ptolarch proposes is this: that those among your survivors who are capable agree to host our young”—there were more noises of shock at this from the humans, but Dae Keth continued—“until a new generation of Nepenthe matures, and in return, we will provide for your people as our own until we are able to locate another acceptable colony planet for your settlement.”

  Wild conversation broke out among the humans the moment he finished speaking, but their new leader made her voice go out over the top of the din, more than enough to hush the layers of noise.

  “What do you mean, ‘host your young?’ ”

  Dozens of alien eyes fixed their attention on Dae Keth.

  “Those of you who possess compatible organs,” he said, “your females, unless our understanding is inaccurate—will allow us to implant our eggs and will agree to incubate them until maturity.”

  More exclamations from the survivors who were strong enough to be vocal. The female who confronted Dae Keth made a hand gesture for silence. “We can appreciate a chance to make it off this planet alive, but I don’t think any of us wants to give birth to hybrid alien children.”

  There were some grunts of amusement from the Nepenthe crew, but the Magistrand allowed the female’s concern as fair. How was she to be familiar their biology after only the shortest span of contact?