FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

My name is Valcon Vaut. I'm a human. Like the rest of my species, I'm new to the galactic community. I freely admit that I'm not the best ambassador or representative of my kind. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've put a dark stain on humanity's record that will take an eon to erase. You can blame that on my chosen occupation.

Jobs have nearly gone extinct with robots doing all the menial work and providing all the necessities of life. Most humans and other alien races don't work to earn their share of universe's resources. I'm an exception. I'm a merchant. Well, really I'm more of a trader of hard to get and unfairly banned goods. Oh, Hell, there's no point in obfuscation. You need to know the truth to understand my story. I'm really a smuggler. It's a challenging and risky career because it puts me at odds with most governments, but it's not physically dangerous. I like danger, so when smuggling gets too dull, I turn to piracy.

You're probably thinking right now that I am a man without any morals or guiding principles. Well, you're mostly right. I'm a criminal, but I have my own ethical code of sorts. For instance, I draw the line at murder. I won't knowingly kill people. Note that by people, I mean any sentient species. There are a lot of aliens and humans who don't consider other intelligent races to be people like themselves. In my book, that's a worse crime than any I've ever committed. I'm proud not to be a bigoted xenophobe. I think every sentient species deserves equal treatment. I rob them all without prejudice. Mostly I steal from aliens, though, since there are so many more of them, and they have a lot of advanced tech humanity hasn't developed yet. There are always buyers willing to pay handsomely to catch up on the latest technological developments made by others.

My pirate technique involves sneaking up on robotic drone operated transports, disabling them without destroying the cargo, and then towing them to a remote place where I can load the booty safely onto my ship to sell on the black market. Even though I don't actually board ships swinging a sword and fighting against a live crew, battling robots is not as sissy as it sounds. They have weapons, they fight back like angry hornets, and unlike organic beings, machines don't surrender.

Action and danger abound in this line of work. I've had plenty of nasty hull breaches and near fatal encounters. That's why I do it really, for the excitement. I'm an adrenaline junky. While most sentients are content to live indolently, letting robots do everything for them, I need a little extra kick in my day to keep the melancholic despair and boredom away. Participating in a firefight where my opponent wants to blast me into cosmic dust yields a rush that nothing else short of sex does.

My quest for thrills and adventure is what drove me into space over five hundred years ago. Much to the dismay of the staid, old money patriarchs of the Vaut clan back in Sol system, I used my share of the family fortune to take off for points unknown in the best skin drive ship that money could buy. Since then, I've put thousands of light years between old Sol and me, and I never looked back. New and interesting is what rocks my boat. I've got no interest in visiting the same place twice.

To be truthful, I am not often welcomed back to the systems where I have plied my trade. Sentients the galaxy over don't like to have their rules bypassed, and they get even pissier when you steal their shit.

Theirs is a totally irrational response. It's not like the universe isn't overflowing with resources. Almost every star system has lifeless planets, moons, and asteroids just packed full of useful ores, minerals, and gasses. Programmed self-replicating automatons have no other function but to extract these materials and make whatever you want and however much you want from them.

At most, my misdemeanors cause a minor inconvenience to the rightful owners or intended recipients of the things I steal. My acts of piracy merely delay their gratification slightly. When I smuggle, I'm actually doing a public service. Just like on Earth, there's always someone somewhere wanting to force their rules and morality on everyone else. The prudes of the universe find certain merchandise and services distasteful and try their damnedest to deny these things to other sentients who want them. I think you can guess what is typically banned. I stay out of the service trade, but I excel at delivering the goods. When it comes to protecting the free market, I'm the hero. I'm a freedom fighter, Dude.

Time to get off my soapbox. Where was I? Oh, yeah. I don't often retrace my journeys. Sounds hard until you realize just how fucking big the Milky Way galaxy really is. Most people never think of the vastness of space because they can't wrap their planet bound, or space habitat bound minds around the distances. One hundred eighty thousand light years across! Just meaningless numbers to you no doubt because you can't possibly imagine how far a light year is, let alone nearly two hundred thousand of them.

Even with faster than light skin space drives, it would take me nearly three hundred fifty standard solar years to cross the Milky Way in a straight line. Forget for a moment please that there are no straight lines to travel along that path because space is warped and curved by the mass of the galaxy itself; but straight or curved, it's still a long way. With the latest rejuvenation technology, I'm likely to live to be over a thousand solar years, so I could make that boring trip, but there would be no time to visit any star systems along the way.

Why not? Do you know how many stars there are in our galaxy? No one is exactly sure, but it could be as many as one trillion. Did you catch that number? One trillion! Does it mean anything to you? It's a big number for even a jaded explorer like me, who has been through hundreds of star systems and bypassed many more. Let me put a trillion suns in perspective. If I could only spend one second visiting each of stars in the Milky Way, and if I had some miracle drive that allowed me to travel instantaneously between them, it would still take almost thirty-two thousand Earth years to see them all.

Yeah, we live in a big neighborhood with plenty of interesting new places just waiting to be discovered and lots of empty, lonely space in between where desperados like me can hide. The emptiness scares most people. The dark void between stars keeps most sentients from doing what I do; piloting my own ship that is, not the nefarious criminal aspects of my work.

I'm not really sure why most people seem bound to follow the rules. Maybe it's because they have a basic drive to cooperate with and care about others. I don't. They also like to be safe and protected. I don't. Why they want to live such sheltered, dull lives is beyond my reckoning. It must be some byproduct of evolution that didn't take hold in me.

The real reason, though, that few people travel much between stars is related to the method with which we cross the great distances required. Every sentient species eventually figures out how to cheat the universal speed limit of light. We have reduced the time it takes to travel between star systems to days or weeks instead of years, but it still takes a long time go very far from home. Time isn't the worst part of interstellar travel, though. It's the requisite short cut we take between stars that forces us to leave our own universe and enter the weird netherworld between the boundaries, or skins as they are called, that separate neighboring universes like ours from an infinite number of other realities.

Go back to my earlier discussion about how big the galaxy is, and you will realize that if you want to go somewhere far away, you will spend a lot of time in a region that is isolated, devoid of any spatial perspective and downright spooky. Most rational minds rebel at the concept of leaving our reality to be essentially nowhere for a significant time. I, however, like it. Why? Because I have the ultimate remedy for those weeks of isolation and ennui between the thrills of planning and committing my various capers.

I haven't introduced my mate to you yet, but she is the hottest little sex kitten in the whole universe - at least what I have seen of it so far. The universe is many orders of magnitude greater in size than the Milky Way, but don't get me going on how much more there is in addition to our average sized galaxy. That's beyond even my well-traveled mind to fathom.

Anyway, I wasn't using metaphor, figure of speech, analogy or whatever that particular literary device is named when I called my mate a sex kitten. You'll understand why in a bit. First, her real name...unfortunately, I can't pronounce it. Everything in her language sounds like a purring growl. My poor human mouth and diaphragm didn't evolve to make those sounds, so I call her Bard. Why? I'm getting there shortly, too.

She's an alien of the Klo'trilth species. Their system of origin is several hundred light years from Sol towards the galactic center. Klo'trilth look like the perfect, most erotic mixture of cat and human, incorporating all of the best features of both. Now you know that I wasn't being figurative when I dubbed her a sex kitten. She's got the cutest, fuzzy ears on the top of her head, a long, sensuous tail, green and gold fur over her whole lithe body, an ass that begs to be squeezed like a peach, and two - not the four to ten that Earth cats have - round and firm breasts. I'm not into the many breasts thing. Two is plenty, especially hers, which delight my senses.

She is absolutely the perfect physical manifestation of the ideal sexual form that I thought was just a perversion of my perpetually pubescent id. It's like she was made to order for just my particular kinky needs. Fate was kind to me when it intervened and led me to her. I'll discuss later how fate betrayed me and ended my career; that's really the point of this whole story anyway, but I digress yet again.

I stumbled on her planet while exploring alternate smuggling routes for one of the most potent and inhibition eliminating liquors ever distilled anywhere in the galaxy. Anoxtharian rum is surprisingly easy to make, and nearly all oxygen breathing, carbon-based sentient races go ape shit over it. It's also banned nearly everywhere apparently because it's the kind of social lubricant that can lead to interspecies sex. As if that was bad somehow. I just don't get it.

For the ridiculously low price of four thousand liters of my own home brewed version, I bought her. A more accurate statement might be that I made bail for her. She was, and still is, a troublemaker like me, and neither she nor her own kind wanted to see each other again. It was a classic win-win-win scenario.

It turns out that beyond being incredibly sexy, she's also a quick study and learned how to run my ship better than I do. The result: we get along as if we were expressly made for each other. True, I'm not a sentimental person, but I love her so much that I would crave her presence and affection even if she were a cephalopod that oozed slime and moved about like a slug. Fortunately, she is not, and I get the best fucking sex in the cosmos. I guess the galaxy is big enough that you can find just about anything you want if you search long enough for it. I mean, if you're into tentacle porn, I know another race...well, never mind. That really isn't relevant to this story; maybe some other time.

Sex kitten. I'm not kidding. She is turned on sexually twenty-four seven (that's an obscure old reference to Earth time for you non-humans out there). She has no inhibitions or boundaries when it comes to sexual exploration. I could fill your head with so much of the erotica we have experienced together that it would give you a four-day hard-on. Let me just leave it at this: unlike most people who freak out in skin space, I am a very satisfied man who welcomes the relaxing, uninterrupted time my mate and I spend there.

My mate has just one minor flaw that I really shouldn't gripe about, but I'm a selfish ass, so I will anyway. Her species goes absolutely crazy over literature, poetry, prose, and any sort of clever word play. It often becomes an out of control mania for them, as it has for my mate. Oddly enough, her obsession is centered on an old time Earth author named William Shakespeare.

Apparently, our radio broadcasts of his works in the early twentieth century radiated outward at the speed of light, reaching her world after becoming caught in the galactic information network (euphemistically known as GIN), and went viral for a while among many alien races. That ye olde tyme author really does have universal appeal. I am not sure how Bill's plays translate to her specie's native tongue, but my mate loves his work.

She adores it so much that she only speaks in quotes from Shakespeare. I kid you not. Never a word escapes her snout that wasn't written by the lyrical Englishman. In some weird way, she managed to memorize and catalogue everything the real Bard wrote and manages to produce a quote suitable for every situation. It's beautiful and maddening at the same time.

I've learned to live with it. It's a small price to pay for her companionship especially since conversation bores me, and I am a man of few words. Stop snickering.

"Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain," as Shakespeare and thus my mate would say. Besides, who talks during sex anyway? And if we do have bedroom talk, hell, it's a real turn on to have a furry lover who speaks in beautiful prose.

I know this has been a rambling personal account that is deeply self-centered. I admit that I'm a vain jerk. It's another reason I don't get along well with the rest of society. However, the story I plan to relate proves that even an ass like me can do some profound good, even if accidentally.

I blame destiny as a powerful force that draws us inexorably to certain unavoidable ends. In this case, fate brought about the end of my criminal career and the making of an unwillingly honest man. Perhaps I even learned something from it and grew in the process. I make no guarantees on that last part. I can't stand that psychobabble self-assessment crap. I am who I am. I'm ok with it, and so is my mate. Why the fuck should I change for anyone else?

The demise of my flamboyant, swashbuckling existence all started a little over two hundred years ago when most of my crew were captured or killed during an admittedly poorly planned raid of a surprisingly well-protected convoy carrying the usual goods I targeted: pharmaceuticals, intoxicants and sex toys. Yeah, those are still the most in demand commodities of any advanced civilization.

It's true. I actually had a crew back then. For some stupid reason, I thought that it would be fun being a pirate captain, but it turned out that I just became a manager responsible for a bunch of whiney idiots I couldn't stand with all the usual personnel headaches that accompany that crappy job. Therefore, it wasn't difficult for me to abandon them to take the heat for my botched robbery while I escaped with my mate and one other crewmember. I didn't save him out of kindness, loyalty or any other reason. He happened to be on my ship when I fled, and it was less trouble taking him along than flushing him out the airlock, though I soon whished that I had.

Dingus was his name. I'm not kidding. That was what everyone called him because he couldn't recall his real name or anything else about his origins. He was a soft hearted, easily forgettable moron who lived up to his moniker. I never saw any other of his species or met anyone who claimed to know of them. By some means, he couldn't remember - probably because he was an idiot - he became separated from his own kind. Speculation on his background included that he somehow crossed over the skin between universes and become trapped in our reality.

When I hired him, I didn't care, and to this day, I still don't. I wanted a wild and freaky pirate crew, so the weirder someone was, the more likely they were to be chosen to ship out with me. His background and appearance alone got him hired. He looked kind of like a floating squid or jellyfish whose digestive system produced hydrogen that was farted into floatation sacks to make him neutrally buoyant in most breathable atmospheres. The accompanying noises were annoying, extremely irritating and you didn't want him anywhere near an open flame.

Apparently, fate was having a good laugh at my expense when she tied my destiny to his, but I was too distracted at the time to divine what was coming next. My beautiful but badly damaged vessel was still space worthy but in desperate need of repair, and my fuel supply was nearly exhausted. We skipped in and out of skin space for months looking for a non-hostile system with Plythoniite crystals for the skin drive.

If you aren't familiar with the technology, Plyth crystals are the very best kind for focusing the antimatter beams that power the skin drive to locally warp space... Look, I'm not going to explain everything to you. If you're curious, search the GIN yourself. The point is, all of my crystals were cracked and failing, I was broke, Plyth is insanely expensive, and I needed more. That means I had to find or steal some before the drive died. Fortunately, I did - find it that is.

We found a Plyth-rich asteroid in a pathetic backwater system that turned out to have a planet with a sentient but pre-technological species of black and silver, one-meter tall, fuzzy, spider-like centauroids. Spiders really creep me out, so that may help you understand my unsympathetic attitude towards them. I would never have found their kind at all except that I am a cautious man (don't laugh) and thought it necessary to scan the system before I could feel safe to get down to mining.

The sentient bugs were mired in their own version of the Stone Age, so I fortunately had no reason to deal with them. Still, just seeing them briefly once made my skin crawl for two days, and I had trouble sleeping because of the nightmares they gave me. Dingus and my mate thought they were adorable, and in hindsight I have to admit they were kind of creepy cute. At the time, though, I just wanted to step on them.

Since the Spiders, as I dubbed them, hadn't developed space faring technology, let alone indoor plumbing, and no one else seemed to be present in this system, I claimed the asteroid for myself and mined the fuck out of it, taking as much Plyth as I could in the time I felt I had. It took a few weeks, because mining Plythoniite is hard. These crystals don't grow in concentrated veins and vugs like most decent minerals, but are dispersed widely in rock that forms near the cores of certain kinds of planets. In this case, a planet became torn apart into a ring of asteroids by unfortunate gravitational issues early in this system's development. Apparently, the universe is a cruel place not just to schmucks like me, but even to planets.

The result of my efforts was that I drilled and blasted a significant amount of mass off an asteroid the size of a small moon; enough mass that it changed its orbit resulting in consequences that everyone but me thought were important. It's what made Dingus become stupid. Well, he already was stupid, so this situation just gave his innate stupidness a chance to shine.

"What the fuck are doing, you jelly brained, little moron? That shuttle is mine, Dingus. Bring it back to the ship now!"

The imbecilic blob was flying towards the Spider's planet in one of my shuttlecraft without permission. I wasn't worried so much about the boat. It had been badly damaged during our narrow escape and probably wasn't worth fixing. It was only because the shuttle's control systems were so wrecked that Dingus was able to bypass the security I had in place to prevent this kind of unauthorized foray. What really pissed me off, though, was his insubordination. This was a perfect example of why I didn't want to manage or lead people. Everyone with whom I ever dealt, with the exception of Bard, always became a relentless pain in my ass.

"But, Captain, I need to warn the Spiders."

"Warn them about what? Damn it, you little freak. This is mutiny! Turn that boat around. That's an order!"

"I'll be right back, boss. I just have to tell them about the asteroid."

"Arggh. They don't even know the asteroid exists, idiot. They won't discover space travel for ten thousand years, if ever. The cultural scans indicate they're a non-cooperative species with near zero probability of ever building a real civilization. In the unlikely event they do, I left plenty of Plyth for whenever they are ready to travel in skin space if that's what prompted this insanity. What should be worrying that small cluster of nerves that you use to think with is that we are running out of time before the fuckers who shot the shit out of us track us here. We have the means to go, so we need to go now. Why, besides being a dumbshit, do you need to tell them about us mining the asteroid?"

It was my mate who answered in her habitual way using only Shakespeare.

"Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled eld, soft infancy, that nothing canst but cry, add to thy clamours! Let us pray betimes a moiety of that mass of moan to come."

Everything she said in her Elizabethan speech ultimately made some kind of sense, but sometimes it was hard to understand what she was getting at when she only had Shakespeare's words. Old Bill was a literary genius, but he lived in a more primitive time when the cosmos seemed much smaller. It was especially hard for me to grasp her meaning when I was upset or impatient.

"What the fuck are you talking about, dear?"

"She means, boss, that you took so much mass off the asteroid that you permanently altered its orbit. It's going to hit the Spider's world in a little over two hundred years."

"So what?"

Does that seem heartless? I have been told that I am a callous bastard. I don't see it myself.

"Glad am I that your highness is so arm'd to bear the tidings of calamity. From thy cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells; thy deed, inhuman and unnatural, provokes this deluge most unnatural."

Apparently, my mate thought so.

"Enough, Bard. I get the point, but so what? Shit like this happens all the time. The universe is an unfair, fucked over place. Some bugs are going to get squished. So what?"

Dingus was not going to give up on the little black creepers.

"When it impacts, it'll wipe out their civilization and possibly trigger a mass extinction."

"Bah! Nonsense. The asteroid isn't that big. They'll survive. Besides, they don't have enough civilization to set back anyway, so drag your slimy body back here, and I won't have you keel hauled or flogged too severely."

"No can do, Boss. This is a moral imperative. You wouldn't understand. I'm going down."

"It's a one way ride, fool. I'm not waiting. We leaked a trail of antimatter all the way to this worthless system. If anyone decides to come after us, we are way too easy to track. I'm slipping into skin space pronto to go somewhere where I can get that leak fixed and then vanish without leaving a trail."

"You wouldn't dare."

"Try me, doofus."

"It's Dingus, and there are millions of helpless Spiders down there."

It was clear to me that the gelatinous mutineer was not going to listen to reason. My patience and charity could only be stretched so far. I readied the skin drive for immediate departure. I always liked to have the final word in an argument if I can, so I timed the spatial dislocation of our entrance to skin space to coincide with my final statement on the matter.

"As if I care."

I put all of the ironic inflection I could into that statement and engaged the drive before Dingus could respond. With my new supply of drive crystals, the maneuver executed perfectly, saving me from hearing any more of that idiot's mewling, altruistic rant. Of course, I can't escape my mate so easily, and she was harder to beat in the last word game.

"My mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all of our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear: he is a stone, a very pebble stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog."

That was hitting me low and hard, but the pending asteroid impact on the defenseless Spiders was pushing the limits of my prohibition about killing, so I was actually contrite for a change.

"Though it not be written down, yet forget not that I am an ass."

What else could I say? She was right, but she wasn't finished with me. There was still the last word to be had.

"The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted."

I had a hollow feeling inside that I might not be getting any sex for a while.

She did keep me celibate for longer than I could endure after leaving Dingus behind on his futile quest. It was fortunate for me that she wanted back in the sack as badly as I did, so we made up after a few days. Despite the often-critical things she said to me in Willie's words, she really did love me. I still remember the text she quoted as I begged on my knees desperate to end my forced abstinence and once again enter heaven as any penitent supplicant before a being so divine.

"Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical! Dove-feather'd raven! Wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of divinest show! Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st, a damned saint, an honourable villain! O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell, when thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend in moral paradise of such sweet flesh? Was ever book containing such vile matter so fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell in such a gorgeous palace!"

It's possible that she had mixed feelings about my character, but she clearly found me as physically attractive as I did her. I could live with that as long as she continued to put up with me and put out for me.

Her forgiveness of my personality flaws on this and many subsequent occasions allowed me to continue about my business for another couple hundred years: pirating, smuggling, and jumping on that ultra-fine, green and gold, furry ass my mate was always sticking in my face. I was in heaven. Then the wheel of fortune turned into a spinning black hole, and my luck disappeared over the event horizon. I guess my reputation became too nefarious and began travelling through the galaxy faster than I could.

Fuck! It was worse than that. The local equivalent of the police started chasing me and issuing bounties for my arrest. It was like the taming of the Wild West on Earth. My felonious way of life was under assault, and I got the distinct impression that I wasn't welcome anywhere in the Milky Way.

That sense was bolstered during my final raid, which turned out to be a trap set specifically to catch me. We were hit so hard and so fast, the shields on my ship failed within seconds of exiting skin space. It took all of my mate's piloting skill to escape destruction. With all the holes in my ship and the skin drive deteriorating, I was running scared, with the hounds on my heals, trying to escape as far out into the nether regions of the galaxy as I could.

I'm not sure what odd quirk of chance brought me back to the Spider's system again, but I blame that bitch called fate. The ship's automatic piloting and navigation functions were too fucked over to function. There was no conscious decision on my part or my mate's to go there. In fact, I wasn't even conscious when we arrived. I was dying. The ship's medidoc was blown to hell. My mate was also injured badly but doing her best to keep the ship going somewhere where we could get help without surrendering to the space cops. All of our orbit to surface shuttles were destroyed, and we were losing atmosphere, so Bard had to attempt a planetary landing in a ship that was never designed for such a maneuver. The last thing my mate noted before bringing us down was a reasonably advanced society on the system's one habitable planet. She broadcast a distress signal, set a course to land there and passed out.

I learned later that the auto piloting functions were serviceable enough to bring us safely to the surface - barely. The ship was a total loss, but we survived. I cried over my beautiful ship later. Did I ever describe her to you? No? I had her custom built to look like a three thousand meter long hammerhead shark. That's why I named her Sphyrna - from the Greek word for hammer and the name of the dominant species of hammerheads on Earth. She was designed to scare the shit out of our victims. Though drones don't really know fear, I still loved her shape anyway. Impractical, you say? Nonsense. In space it makes no damn difference how a ship is configured. It could be a sphere, a cube, or the fucking Statue of Liberty. Interstellar ships are never meant for atmosphere and terrestrial landings so the shape is irrelevant. That's why she didn't survive the crash.

When I awoke afterward, I immediately wished that I hadn't. I was in a hospital surrounded by a half dozen of the multi-eyed and multi-limbed black Spider centauroids. I must have been there for days hooked up to nothing but an IV because my guts were empty and I was hungrier than I had ever been. It was an unpleasant way to come back from the dead. How can I adequately explain the shock that opening my eyes and finding myself naked and exposed to oversized spiders gave me? If there had been any shit left in me, I would have voided it in the bed right then. This was my worst nightmare scenario, so please be sympathetic even though I probably wouldn't return the favor for you.

They had me hooked up to a lot of monitors and must have realized my heartbeat and other vital signs were going nuts from shock and fright because they jabbered among themselves in the scariest hissing language that no master of horror holos could hope to improve upon, then left the room. My mate entered shortly afterward, which caused my vital signs to settle down except for a sudden rush of blood to a certain important organ. Upon noticing my growing condition, Bard spoke.

"Even such a passion doth embrace my bosom: my heart beats thicker than a feverous pulse."

Then she jumped in bed with me, and we spent some quality time in a reunion that left no doubt to any insectoid voyeurs how the reproductive practices of our two species worked. I imagine the Spiders watched our frantic fornication, but I never knew for sure. If they did, they had the good taste never to mention it, and they stayed away for the entire hour we took to work out the pent up emotions of being separated for so long. It was only four days, but for us, that was like being locked up in a monastery (for me) or a nunnery (for her) for a year; note that neither of us was into same sex relations, so that really was torture).

When we were finished with our conjugal visit, I began to assess my escape plans. The Spiders triggered enough primal fears in my brain to bring back with startling clarity the memories of this system from over two hundred years previously. A giant rock was coming to decimate this planet at any moment, and I was the cause. The stench of karmic revenge was palpable, and I despised being the victim of my own transgressions. It really sucks, mostly because I had nothing or no one to blame for my situation but myself.

The asteroid was a big worry, but its impact could still be years or decades away. I planned to check into that later. My more immediate concern was the bounty hunters who could be only days or hours away. I was as good as caught if we stayed here much longer. That was also my fault. The universe was hating on me big time.

"Bard honey, how is the ship?"

"...And destroy'd the sweet'st companion that e'er man bred his hopes out of."

"Shit! My beautiful ship is wrecked? Can it be repaired?"

"Nothing will come of nothing."

"Aw fuck! A total loss. What about Dingus? Maybe he can help us. Where is the little Jell-O treat?"

"Dead, sure; and this his grave."

"Running out of options, honey love. Do these aliens have space faring technology?"

"I'll not believe but they ascend the sky. Another would fly swift, but wanteth wings. Alack that Leonine was so slack, so slow!"

"They can put things in orbit but not go faster than light?"

"The truth appears so naked on my side that any purblind eye may find it out."

That was the worst possible news. We were trapped in this hillbilly system with no way out. I was left wondering which would get us first, the asteroid or the bounty hunters.

I didn't have long to think about it. The Spiders must have surmised that we were done with our conjugal visit because three of them entered without even knocking. There was something different about this trio compared to the medical staff that had been present when I awoke. Don't ask me how I knew the difference, but there is a universal plain and sterile look to doctors and nurses that transcends cultures and species. These three lacked it.

They served some other Spider society function, and that had me worried. Don't ask why I thought that their intent towards me was malicious. I always suspect the worst of people. It's probably because I'm a deceitful double crosser who just assumes everyone else is too. I was convinced they were the local authority come to read me the riot act for fucking up their world and setting it on a course for destruction. Alternatively, the bounty hunters were here already and the Spiders had cut a deal with them for a share of the reward. These three could be an escort to deliver me to my pursuers. A thousand similar negative scenarios flashed through my head, and I began estimating my chances of fighting my way out of there to hide myself in the hills. I would wait there until the Spiders discovered how to travel faster than light and began building their own ships so I could steal one and escape. They had certainly made enough progress in the last two hundred years to give me hope that they were only years away from traveling to the stars.

Unfortunately, they didn't carry any weapons for me to snatch and use against them. I was too weak to fight them with just my hands, so I decided to play things cool for a while. That left bullshitting as my only recourse. I had to con them somehow. Angles to bribe and bedazzle them began forming in my head. I smiled and put on my most friendly and least sincere face.

"Gentlemen...uh...Ladies?..." I could not tell if they had any sex at all. "...whatever or whichever, I wish to thank you for saving my life and my mate's."

This tactic seemed to fool them. They didn't assault or arrest me immediately. In fact, they were oddly polite.

"It was our greatest pleasure to do so," said the one in the middle, though it might have been either one of the other two.

I later learned that they spoke through a series of openings in their necks without using their mouths, so it was really hard to tell which one was talking unless you paid close attention to their neck holes through their glossy black fur. I was trying my best to avoid looking at the little creepers at all, so let's just assume it was the same one speaking the whole time.

Their response seemed strange to me, but maybe they were a bunch of sappy humanitarians who got their jollies from helping other people, or maybe they hadn't figured out yet who I was. I could work with either situation.

"It sounds like we have a mutually beneficial relationship going on here. I am sure that we can negotiate arrangements between us that are more valuable than with anyone else."

This was my diplomatic way of offering them more money than the bounty hunters would pay and hoping greed would overwhelm their desire for revenge.

"Only beneficial joy and elation for our planet can come from your return. We have awaited you for centuries to pay you back for what you did to us."

So much for not recognizing me. They were going to push hard for revenge, eh? The pleasantries were over. It was time for me to push back.

"Let's not be hasty guys...gals? There are things that I can teach you that are of incalculable worth and can help forestall future disaster."

If they wanted to play hardball diplomacy, then so would I. It was possible that there was still time for me to help them avoid the impending bolide impact. If they wanted to save themselves, they needed me. I always had an ace up my sleeve somewhere if I searched long enough. To soften the bluntness of my implied threat to let them all die if they didn't negotiate with me, some flattery seemed in order.

"I see that you have progressed very rapidly since my last visit. It's very impressive actually..."

It is true that my praise was sincere. I was remembering how primitive and hopeless they had seemed when I first encountered them. They really had advanced quickly in very little time.

Perhaps they were proud of their accomplishments because my statement got them very excited. They danced and moved about rapidly, making bizarre sounds that I later learned were expressions of reverent joy.

"Yes, Valcon. The message we received from the blessed Dingus was the inspiration that we needed to give us hope and the urge to better ourselves by working collaboratively."

"Dingus? Blessed? What the fu..."

"That, methinks, is strange."

"Come with us, Valcon, and we will show you how we have kept the memory."

The leftmost Spider reached out with several of its arms for me. I retreated behind my mate. I was starting to get used to their appearance, at least to the degree that I wasn't constantly fighting off a terminal case of the heebie jeebies, but there was no way that I was ready for them to touch me.

Bard, on the other hand, was quite at ease with the creepers and even seemed to enjoy their presence. She grasped the proffered appendages in one paw and tossed my clothes to me with the other. I was forced to dress myself on the march as she let the alien arachnids lead us to wherever they wanted us to go. I felt silly and a little embarrassed hopping down the hallway in my underwear trying to get my legs in my pants. It was not a very dignified beginning to what would turn out to be the strangest day of my life.

To my surprise, no guards joined us as we left the hospital and took a short stroll through their city. To call their architecture bizarre was an extreme understatement. Their designers eschewed right angles and planar surfaces. Many spaces were not even enclosed by buildings as much as covered with flexible surfaces hung by slender but strong cables. It was the queerest combination of intelligent engineering combined with the fractal geometry of nature.

Our destination was the most alien building of them all that stood alone in a huge central plaza surrounded by paved walkways and park like grounds. It looked more like a vast web than a building. Funnel shaped spires seemingly woven of cable and glass with no definite shape whatsoever lent it an odd symmetry and sense of purpose that was difficult to describe. It was too close to a real spider's nest for my comfort, but I let myself be led inside anyway by my mate and the three guides. What choice did I have?

I don't know what I expected to find inside, but encountering a three story tall statue of that soft bodied, idiot Dingus was like a cosmic punch in the gut. It appeared that this was a temple, and the little squid had been elevated to a god.

I whispered to my mate, "He must have had time before he died to give them his message. He probably also gave them the knowledge to advance so quickly."

"And even there, methinks, an angel spoke."

The Spiders had better hearing than I thought because they responded to my hushed message.

"Yes. The message that combined both despair and hope was delivered, and we took solace in it. It changed our society forever and freed us to become what we never thought we could be. Poor Dingus did not live long after his shuttle crashed. Our medicine was much more primitive then. He was only able to tell us of the danger and give us the inspirational message that transformed us forever."

I think a different Spider may have said that. The voice seemed to change pitch a bit, but I couldn't be sure. The one I assumed was doing all the talking may have been just choked up and become all emotional over his or her jellyfish god.

"We were stagnant in our ways and without purpose. Philosophers of the day taught fatalism and individualism over progress and the greater good, resulting in stagnation and strife that kept us primitive. With no overarching purpose, we remained savages for many millennia."

Despite my jealousy over Dingus' deification, curiosity drove me to ask what message squid brain had delivered. It was hard to imagine how a creature so insipidly stupid could have inspired and galvanized a race into advancing so rapidly.

All three Spiders lowered themselves in a gesture of supplication and spoke in their manner of reverent awe.

"The message. The message. The message."

I'm not a religious guy at all. Fate and karma seem real to me, but I have found no evidence to make me believe in any kind of deity. As I already made clear, I have traveled far and seen a lot. If there is some sort of creator or guiding force or deeper meaning in the universe, it has successfully eluded my detection. There are aliens with no religious belief, aliens who fervently believe in things that are demonstrably untrue, and plenty like humanity that believe in something, but aren't really sure or can't agree on what. How can you possibly tell who is right? I think they are all dupes and thus typically treat all religions with equal disdain. I made a special exception here, though, because I was particularly galled by how foolishly these aliens had fallen into worship of a creature so many orders of magnitude below anything remotely approaching god-like.

As stupid as worshiping a semi-intelligent jellyfish was, I was totally unprepared for what they showed me next. The reality and core icon of their bizarre cult was beyond my wildest narcotic or alcohol induced hallucinations. My mate and I were led into the true heart of the temple. I had erroneously thought the statue of Dingus was its focus. Boy, was I ever wrong.

The central chamber was huge, roughly circular, and the oddly funnel vaulted, translucent ceiling rose over a hundred meters high. The space inside could accommodate thousands of spiders, and it did. The building was packed with them. I would have jumped out of my own skin to escape the horror if the throng had not been perfectly still and had they not left an open space for us to enter the room without my having to touch any of them.

"O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!"

My mate was not intimidated by their presence. That gave me some courage. It helped that I was also distracted by the enormous floating apparition for which this space had been erected. Above us, a giant holographic image of me, complete with audio, was playing.

My jaw fell open and nearly hit my chest. It was incredible. There was my face and the small fragment of the last message that I sent Dingus playing in an endless loop. A burst of static preceded the only remaining portion of my sarcastic reply.

"(static)...I care. (static)...I care. (static)...I care..."

The aces I thought I held in my hand turned into deuces. If the Spiders had been staring at that for two hundred years and letting it fuel their anger, there wasn't much hope I could talk them down from the lynching I fully expected to receive.

"Bard, it's me. They got my last message. I am seriously fucked. Why did I ever say that?"

"Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

"Hey, no name calling even if true."

"What's in a name..."

"Enough! Even I know that quote. The lady protests too much, methinks."

Normally, she loves it when I quote Shakespeare back to her even if it is an overused expression, but she was clearly angry with me for getting us in such a fucked up position.

"Double, double toil and trouble."

My mate frowned and went silent having made her point. I had done and said something cruel over two hundred years ago, and now it had come back to haunt me. I was ready to come clean and beg forgiveness from the Spiders, when the weirdest thing happened. All of the bugs began chanting at once, and it wasn't about having me skinned alive.

"All hail the return of the savior, Valcon Vaul. His message inspired us to be our best. Valcon cared when no one else did. All hail..."

They shouted their mantra repeatedly as my paranoid, selfish, criminal brain struggled to make sense of the situation. Being liked and admired by anyone but Bard was beyond my ability to understand. My brain refused to own the concept and tried to find a sinister reason for their unexpected behavior. So absorbed was I in my own corrupt mental machinations that I didn't notice the sneaky way that our guides moved closer to me and slipped their equivalent of hands into mine and then eased into a mood of rapturous joy having made contact with the most reverential creature they could ever hope to know.

"Well I'll be damned!" I exclaimed aloud when I finally understood.

To my mate, I whispered, "They only got the last part of the message. The first part is lost in the static."

"For though my soul disputes well with my sense, that this may be some error, but no madness, yet doth this accident and flood of fortune so far exceed all instance, all discourse, that I am ready to distrust mine eyes and wrangle with my reason that persuades me to any other trust but not that I am mad."

As Bard implied, the reality was more insane than any fantasy my mind could have imagined. All the while, my visage suspended in the air continued its eternal recitation of its sacred message.

"I care," intoned my voice in a manner that had been intended as sarcastic, but in isolation seemed sincere.

"I care," I said mimicking myself, and the congregation's chant changed to "Valcon cares. Valcon cares. Valcon cares..."

My mate knew the truth of it all and voiced her scorn quietly so that only I could hear it under the joyous roar of my devoted disciples.

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

Like some cheap holovid drama where the old miser or cantankerous grouch miraculously transforms himself into a compassionate altruist at the end of the story having learned the errors of his evil ways, I freely admit that I was touched by their affection and devotion. Don't believe for a second, though, that I really became a better man and a liberal philanthropist. The vain part of me, however, was pleased to be loved, and something akin to the affection I have for my mate was kindled inside of me for these little black critters. I didn't even flinch when I finally realized what I was holding in my hands. I did let go, though, and if they had tried to hug me at that moment, I would have tried to stomp them.

Despite having no reason to fear the Spider's vengeful wrath, I was still concerned about the asteroid. It hadn't hit their planet yet, and I didn't want it to now that I was stuck here with them.

"This is great. Really great, but can you stop chanting for a moment?"

The temple went so silent, I was momentarily deafened by the normally unnoticed sound of blood rushing through the vessels in my ears.

"There's an asteroid that is going to hit your world. We have to work together to stop it."

"You need not worry about that, kind and benevolent Valcon," replied one of the three guides with absolute sincerity, though I had never heard those adjectives used in conjunction with my name before. "Because of the strength and hope that you gave us by sacrificing one of your own..."

"All praise the blessed Dingus!" Interrupted the throng at the mention of the death of one so holy.

"...Because of the willingness of a total stranger, you, to sacrifice of one of your own to deliver your sacred message of hope, we were inspired to save ourselves, and we did. Our scientists developed and deployed a gravitational web within this system that allows us to move mass about as we please. The asteroid that Dingus predicted would hit our world was placed into a harmless orbit octets ago."

I later learned that they count in groups of eight instead of ten like us. Maybe it's because that's how many appendages they had.

"It is you we have to thank for this miracle. It is why we built this shrine, to honor your simple phrase that turned our thoughts from melancholy despair to hope."

"Alas, thou hast misconstrued every thing!"

"Now, now, dear. Let's not question the canon. It certainly works well for us. I am their greatest idol after all."

"Why, 'some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them."

My mood had greatly improved. I was a hero and safe from destruction. There was no way out of this system at present, but with time, I could help them discover skin drive technology, and I would be free again. It would mean being stuck there a few decades perhaps, but that was certainly better than being dead.

I am sure you are asking how I could have forgotten about my pursuers, but consider how totally overwhelmed by external stimuli I was. I had briefly forgotten about the bounty hunters, and they chose this moment to manifest themselves by usurping the Spider's communication system to broadcast my arrest warrant. The glorious image of me reciting my misconstrued message of indifference was replaced by the logo of the galactic police and a voice reiterating my various crimes.

It was a long list, I am proud to say. It never repeated.

"One woe doth tread upon another's heel," wailed Bard.

"Crap!" said I with less elegance. "There is no way for us to hide on this planet now that I've become a center of worship. Even my deification is doomed now that the Spiders know of my galactic misdeeds. It seems that we are deeply and thoroughly screwed after all, dear."

"Our wills and fates do so contrary run."

It was my expectation that the Spiders would realize that I was a criminal and not worthy of their devotion. However, that is because I'm a rational being devoid of deeply held and unshakeable faith. I completely underestimated the power of an entrenched belief system.

Shouts of "Blasphemy," "Sacrilege!" and "Protect Valcon!" arose from the crowd drowning out the never-ending recitation of my crimes. It continued for tens of minutes during which time I wondered what my primitive benefactors could hope to accomplish against a galactic authority that was eons more technologically advanced than they were.

It turned out that the Spiders were not as helpless as I thought. The warrant ceased its recitation and my beatific image reappeared. The crowd calmed down allowing my guides to speak again.

"The unholy aggressor has been neutralized."

"The commons, like an angry hive of bees that want their leader, scatter up and down and care not who they sting in his revenge."

"You didn't kill them did you?"

I was honestly concerned. When I said earlier that I didn't like killing, I was serious. I'm a free market capitalist who happens to take a very extreme view of the concept of free. The ultimate free market would have no rules at all, and I am pretty close to that. Anything short of killing or causing physical harm to other sentient beings is ok by me, including theft. When I steal, I'm just redistributing wealth, and isn't that what capitalism is all about?

"No, Valcon. We did not kill them. Our gravitation web is moving them to a place in our system where they cannot harm us and where we can study their drives to learn the secrets of faster than light travel. This skin space technology intrigues us. We want it for ourselves.

"We also adapted our radio communications to filter any broadcasts from outside our system. We will not listen to or abide such blasphemy."

"They did so to the amazement of mine eyes...cunning in music and the mathematics."

Bard saw the truth of it. The Spiders were clever indeed, and mastered whatever they put their minds to. Apparently, all they had needed to excel was a reason, a reason that I inadvertently gave them. Their gravitational tech was far beyond anything I had seen in my travels. Perhaps it was a result of their bizarre arachnid psychology, but the odd web-like way they manipulated gravity like elastic strands far exceeded the control of this basic force that any other race had yet developed. It was worth a fortune, which gave me an idea.

I was a prisoner on this planet because I lacked a skin drive capable ship and because I was wanted everywhere else. True, I was wanted by the Spiders, just not in the legal sense of that term that everyone else used. To continue my campaign to plunder the galaxy of its riches, I was left with no choice but to turn to a life of legitimacy; that is, if you consider predatory capitalism founded on exploiting a monopoly to be legitimate. I did, and I set out to divert the Galaxy's wealth towards myself with a small percentage to my benefactors, of course.

As expected, the Spider's macro-scale web grav tech was a huge hit. It made me (and them) vastly wealthy galactic citizens. I was pardoned by many authorities who desperately craved to get their hands, paws, tentacles, pseudopods, or whatever they used to grasp things with, on it. I was living the dream, unfortunately, it wasn't my dream.

You probably think that the wealth, the adoration of the Spiders, and the grudging forgiveness of some of the galaxy made me a happy man, but you are wrong. My career as a smuggler and pirate had never been about the money, and Bard is the only one I really need to love me. I did it for the adventure, thrills, danger and risk that were like oxygen to me. Without those things, I was dead. I was trapped in a web of responsibility more powerful than the Spider's popular invention. I was a folk hero, fabulously wealthy, safe, secure, still wanted over half the known galaxy and everyone knew who I was. My residence was the galaxy's most opulent cage. Life sucked.

Despite the lavish surroundings of my executive office, which was completed with the most expensive marbles, rare woods, precious metals and the finest art created by the most genius masters of the galaxy, I became melancholy and drank more than usual. Jerk that I was, I blamed everyone but myself for my predicament. I cursed the galaxy that still wanted me in prison. I cursed my incredible wealth that was a lodestone around my neck keeping me tied to one place. I cursed my popularity. I was drunk and cursing up a storm when my mate finally got sick of my self-pitying ravings about my lost, glorious past.

"For it so falls out that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost, why, then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not show us whiles it was ours."

I was only half listening to her and misinterpreted her statement for sympathy.

"So true. Oh, Bard, how I miss our independence. My freedom was everything to me, but I never knew how sweet it was until I became rich and responsible for an entire race. What miserable luck it was that led and imprisoned me here. Why must I_'suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'_?"

Her answer to my abuse of Shakespeare was to throw some more Shakespeare in my face. Her words actually went in my ear, of course, but it felt like a slap.

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"

I was brain numb drunk, so it took me a few minutes to process what she was telling me and accept that I, one of the most far-reaching, uncatchable and notorious outlaws ever, had jailed myself. It was an epiphany at once terrible and liberating: terrible because I had put on the chains and manacles myself by acceding to fate and surrendering my will to resist and shape my own destiny; liberating because this was the wakeup call that I needed.

"Damn it, Bard! You are right as always. Where would I be without you, love?"

"As one dead in the bottom of a tomb."

"Just so. The grandest and most daring adventure is out there waiting for me, and I have imprisoned myself. Well, that ends today. As jailer in charge, I hereby set myself free."

I tossed the rest of the bottle from which I had been binging into the tropical fish tank. Many rare sea creatures collected from distant exotic locales subsequently died, but I didn't care.

"It's the twentieth anniversary of my triumphant return to this world. The Spiders have rebuilt my beloved ship in all of her glory in honor of that date. Upgrades using secret gravitational web tech that no one else possesses make her the most advanced ship in the galaxy. Bard, let's take all the cash we have, get on that ship and 'take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them'."

I grabbed her in a lustful embrace, which she returned with an exuberance that set my loins afire. She jumped up to wrap her legs about my waist and pressed herself against me in a way that left no ambiguity as to her desire and intent. Suddenly, my escape seemed less urgent.

"We depart in the morning. One more night in prison won't matter. I need to sober up and celebrate first, and I can't think of a better way to do it than making love to you."

Bard was pleased that I had finally broken my funk and that I was ready to go out and live life bravely once again. I think she was also glad to have the old me back. I make a better lover when I'm happy, and this was the happiest I had been in twenty years.

Without flowery speech, she had me on my back on my one-of-a-kind pure Plyth crystal desk (don't ask what that's worth - it's beyond anything you can imagine), ripped my clothes off with her paws, and pressed her mouth tightly against mine. As she straddled me and began to undulate her pelvis in the most delightful manner, she did pause to take breath for a moment to have her customary last words.

"Well; keep good quarter and good care to-night: The day shall not be up so soon as I, to try the fair adventure of to-morrow."

[THE END]