It's strange to think there was a time when Humanity was all alone, its knowledge of the wider universe limited to what it could glimpse through telescopes from Earth. Scientists peering into the night sky, searching for evidence of life, or even just its possibility. Their excitement over glimpsing the tell-tale traces of planets about other stars, especially when their orbits allowed for liquid water. There are, of course, many such planets. Life has evolved on some, and on some there is sentient life capable of reaching the stars. Earth is a newcomer, and in time there will be more.
But also there are many planets out there that are, so to speak, unoccupied. Some even have atmospheres that are breathable by humans, and temperatures that can be endured all year round.
Algoran is one such, and by an irony of fate, we discovered it even before the first humans set foot on Mars. Named for the famous interstellar explorers Al Hughes and Goran Ivanovic, who were the first humans to set foot there (it was Al Hughes who took the photo of the mountains that I cherished for years), Algoran orbits the red dwarf star known as Kepler-1229 in Earth's astronomical database. While its year is a mere quarter of an Earth year, its day is a long three Earth days and the nights get bitterly cold, but otherwise it's perfectly inhabitable.
And the two moons are beautiful. Proper round moons that linger in the sky and bathe you in their silver light... I think that's the one thing I used to miss most about Earth.
It's the perfect place for a human colony - and it's only seven hundred and seventy lightyears from Earth.
In theory, you can do it in a single jump through whitespace. This would, of course, not only require an engine roughly the size of Pluto, but also a detailed cosmological map covering about a thousand cubic lightyears. And even then, the accumulated uncertainty is such you could end up in a neighbouring star system.
Far better to do it step-by-step, short jumps, recalibrating, recalculating, pausing to let the space-time ripples fade into the cosmic background before leaping like a frog to the next lily pad in the chain.
It's Space. No one's going anywhere in a hurry.
*
Perhaps the most startling and unexpected thing about being on my own amongst alien species was just how little my cultivated feminine persona meant. High heels were reduced to an unwise eccentricity. Short skirts were a functional advantage. Huge breasts were at most a grabbable feature. Gender and sexuality matter not when the only question is whether you're willing to fuck - and, perhaps more importantly, whether it's possible to fuck safely.
Having spent much of my life at odds with the femininity of my body, it was tempting at first to abandon my heels, swap skirts for trousers and minimise my breasts. To eradicate the lie of my femininity, in other words. But as the weight of expectation eased - as I acknowledged that I no longer needed to worry about being judged to be a woman when I was not - I chose instead to embrace the fiction I had lived for so long.
I was Sam Jones, Ship's Whore, non-binary, semi-human and hot as fuck. Even if I was the only one who could see it.
I certainly wasn't the only one who had embraced machinery to endure Space. I nearly screamed the first time I saw Dzajji, who looked like nothing more than a giant, metallic, ten-legged spider. She was like something out of an ancient horror story, when in fact ten legs are just fantastically useful when you're busy operating stuff in zero gravity. What her original body looked like I have no idea - it's not the sort of thing you ask a lady.
"I heard you might be interested in hiring a ship's whore," I said, once I could speak at all. I really wasn't sure whether it would be possible to fuck at all, let alone safely.
"Sit!" she said. "Let me buy you a drink."
We were in a zero-g bar in a space station orbiting a cloudy white gas giant, visible through the transparent floor. Thankfully my magnetic soles were able to grip the material, whatever it was. "I think I'll stand," I said, looking down nervously, "but I'll take that drink."
As deadly as her legs looked, her body was an almost featureless metallic sphere with a number of black eyes looking in different directions, and what looked like a straw - through which she proceeded to sip the alco-water from the pouch. "I've not seen one of you before," she said. "What are you?"
"Sam Jones," I said, declining to elaborate.
We studied each other silently for a minute. "You are very primitive," she stated. "Are you designed to receive pleasure, or only to give?"
"I am most certainly designed to receive pleasure, but I would be disappointed not to give it too."
"Hmm. Will you consent to be bound for the duration?"
I blinked. Was this giant spider really wanting to catch me in her web for a journey of uncertain length? "Will you promise not to eat me?"
Dzajji laughed. "I will promise only that you will reach your destination undamaged and in good time."
Which was all I could really ask for. "When do we leave?"
*
Algoran was my ultimate destination, but I set my aim instead for the Gnafr home world. Fragmentary memories of the place haunted my dreams, and a lingering grief over the loss of friends, and the anguished family who would never know. Friends I had never met, and family that was not my own. But I could at least tell them that one of their own still lived, a semi-permanent guest in a madly rotating tube in orbit around Neptune.
There are three ways a lone traveller like myself can move around. Hitchhiking is the slowest and inevitably the most uncomfortable. First you have to find a ship going in the right direction, and then you have to put up with whatever quarters they have to spare. Nine times out of ten the atmosphere will not be breathable and the freedom to move will be extremely limited. Being stuck in a cabin without a view for two weeks, using corset and collar to breathe, is almost enough to make you swear off Space for good. (Goran Ivanovic's famous journal of interstellar travel glosses over such practicalities.)
Far better to pay for a berth, to have the freedom of the ship and its entertainments, and to sleep in a conducive atmosphere. Or to work for a berth, which is much the same. Fortunately, Mendar's Minister Tidtikka, was right. Pleasure is my business and I do not lack for clients.
Like a frog, I hopped from lily pad to lily pad, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes paying, mostly working. Each hop took me a little nearer my goal: a planet of ocean, volcanic islands and reefs in elliptical orbit about a painfully bright yellow-white dwarf star. Once there I met with a series of officials. They were initially hostile and nearly had me in tears, making me wish I hadn't wasted a whole year of my life on an unnecessary detour, but after a few days of this their suspicion faded and I was invited down to the planet.
On a rocky beach beneath a starry sky, I surrendered once more to a Gnafr's intimate embrace, its vampiric cloak wrapping around me, and shared the joy of discovering one's long lost mate is alive against all the odds.
*
It wasn't the first time a client had tied me up, but there's a huge difference to being tied up while in your cabin on a space station with a human population, and being tied up by a giant metal spider in a star ship a hundred lightyears from the nearest other human. For all I knew.
Dzajji was the captain and pilot and (usually) sole crew member of a freighter carrying rare elements from star to star. I was just a pleasant diversion, a way to pass the time as the ship spiralled out to safe distance before jumping through whitespace. I had no cabin, nor berth, nor even clothes.
She kept me on the bridge with her, my wrists and ankles snared and stretched wide by chains. The propulsion of the vessel induced a gentle gravity that tugged me constantly towards my spidery captor as she worked the controls expertly with her multiple legs. A thick tube through my mouth fed nutrients directly into my belly, forcing me to breathe through my collar; a thin tube inserted in my urethra drained my bladder.
It wasn't the first time a client had tied me up, but never before had I felt quite so helpless, nor quite so dehumanised.
*
In the days following my visit to the Gnafr home world, that ghostly alien presence within me evolved in new ways. No longer a passive translator, it stepped inside my thoughts, making translation more immediate - and not merely words, but a deeper understanding of meaning. Concepts of physics that I had no prior knowledge of seemed suddenly self-evident. And beneath all that, a deeper intelligence, part-Gnafr, part-human.
"Are you real?" I asked.
"You think, therefore I am," it replied. "But are you?"
*
Her instrumentation scanned every inch of my body with tools that hummed and vibrated, that turned hot and cold, that caressed and pinched. That my feet were ticklish amused her greatly and she tormented me for hours, ignoring my subvocalised pleas for mercy. That a simple pinch of my nipples drove my arousal levels sky high delighted her, and she took to doing it at irregular intervals. That stimulation of my clit caused such excitement fascinated her likewise, and like a mad scientist she refined her experiments until she was able to hold me at the precipice, desperate for release but unable to find it.
My struggles to be free of the chains left me coated in sweat. Saliva dripped from my mouth, tears ran from my eyes and fell from my cheeks, and I could feel the cool wetness between my wide-spread thighs.
