WikiWorld

COCKROACH LOVE ^{DAMIEN BRODERICK AND PAUL DI FILIPPO}

When Kay got home, tired and unhappy from her gruelling flight halfway round the globe, she found her husband Elwood fucking a cockroach the size of a cocktail waitress.

She had longed only to kick off her sensible yet constricting Madame Ambassador high heels, and collapse on the couch for a foot massage from a considerate spouse. Unburden herself of all her diplomatic aggravations, with a cool drink in hand. Instead, that piece of furniture was now being creakingly abused.

Kay instinctively plucked off one pump, and heaved it at the insect.

In her blinding fury, she missed the bug by a good yard, and her husband as well.

The foul thing glanced at her and insouciantly kept right on peeling an orange with its mandibles as her spouse of five years thrust at its hindquarters. Kay couldn’t tell if the roach were male or female, not that it mattered especially.

“For the love of God, El!”

Elwood Grackle noticed her, finally. His face was flushed to a Clintonesque burgundy, and so was most of his bare chest. With a final shudder he jerked his useless fluids into the insect and fell forward, panting and dripping sweat onto the gleaming, jewel-toned carapace. The cockroach swallowed its final bright segment of fruit and chased it down with a tart bite of peel before throwing the curly remainder considerately into the faux fireplace.

Elwood detached with a squelch and a measure of insouciance. He pulled his ankled pants up awkwardly with one hand, reclaimed his shirt from the sofa back with the other. “How was the flight from Cairo, darling? You’re early.”

“I’m five hours late, you squamous fucker.”

“Well, yes, strictly speaking, but I was factoring in post-arrival press conferences, debriefings, and the like. Allow me to introduce Emma. Em, this is Kay.”

The roach’s voice resembled a bandsaw working its blade through a wet sandbag. “Your wedded bliss. Madame boss. Most honoured.”

“My wife, yes.” He toweled himself off with his shirt. “Em is our new Kaf.”

“Christ, so now you’re reduced to screwing a transgenic. The flight was gruesome, and so was Cairo. The noise of that place is indescribable.”

“Really? What’s it like?” He tucked himself away, donned the damp shirt, went to the bar to wash his hands lightly but firmly, and got out two tall frosty glasses from the fridge. He fished out a lime and slashed it. “A margarita, darling?”

“What do you mean, what’s it like? If I could describe it it wouldn’t be indescribable. Yes, I’ll have a drink, and why don’t you tell this filthy thing to clear off, I’m sick of the sight of it.”

“Your lovely bride is testy, Elwood. Felicitations, Madame, I was just leaving. I hope your mood is improved when next we meet.” Boldly flashing the progenitive trademark of the Abu Dhabi University biolabs branded onto its shell, the roach was out the door in a darting motion that eluded Kay’s swinging, still-shod foot with ease.

“I take it from your sour mood,” said Elwood, “that negotiations with the Egyptians were not successful.”

“My sour mood, as you so sympathetically phrase it, has more to do with your rutting.”

“Oh, don’t try to make me the villain. I sensed from your last phone call that you were already about as cheerful as a… as a drowning Micronesian. Your tiresome moodiness has been the status quo in our happy home for months.”

Kay was suddenly immensely weary. It was true. She’d been a fount of black despair lately. Not that she could help it. So much was going wrong for the nation. For the world!

She sagged down on the couch, hit the glutinous wet spot, recoiled and shot up again—awkwardly, given her half-shod condition—and spilled her drink. Considerately, Elwood jumped to support her, and guided her to the safe haven of a dry armchair. Her façade of professional and wifely fortitude crumbled. His familiar, solicitous touch! She began to weep.

El patted her shoulder. He went to mix her a replacement margarita, talking soothingly the while.

“There, dear, have a good cry. It’s not easy, helping steer the ship of state through these perilous times. Never forget, I’m always there for you, darling.”

“You’re never there,” she said, sobbing. “You’re always here.”

“Exactly, I’m always here for you. Look, you realize now that my little impulsive moment just now has no bearing on our marriage, or my love for you?”

“Are you insane? You were fucking a roach! What am I meant to think?”

El’s mouth twisted a little. “She’s a gift from the biolabs at Abu Dhabi University. For both of us. I was testing out all her advertised features.”

“A Kafka, for god’s sake. I’ve seen them in Cairo, you don’t need to explain them to me. Fifteen percent human genes.”

“Well, yes, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Sorry.” He raised his hands protectively in front of his face and tried not to grin. “But that’s what they are, dear. General factotum and bug of all trades.”

“What are you doing with one, that’s what I want to know? Surely for something that expensive we should have discussed—”

“No, I’m telling you. A gift! For you, really. It seems they sent one to every high-level bureaucrat in the current administration. Some potentate’s largesse, like the bestowal of the camel or virgin in days of yore.”

“Oh. Right.” Kay’s expression hardened. “In gratitude for President McMurtry’s new stance on Israel.”

“Probably. But hey, Big Mac didn’t exactly disavow American support, it was more a subtle shift in the—”

“Subtle! Subtle! About as subtle as getting home to find you screwing a bug. I’m going to bed. You can sleep on the couch. Oh, and wipe up the slime first.”

She hoped he could tell she didn’t mean it. He should be in the bed beside her. Because, really, there’s no place like home.

The Kafka, Emma, sucked in her stout belly and scrunched under the water heater. Her upstairs sleeping crate beckoned to her with its pheromone-laced organo-plastic shell, but she dared not approach it yet, given the hostility of the house’s queen female.

Trembling with the aftershock of insemination, Emma was also seething with anger. The bitch had called her a cockroach! Em gnawed at the drywall opening, shoveling the unpleasant residue aside into a white powdery pile, and dragged her carapace into the wall space. She was no more a roach than that fool Elwood was a… a… tarsier.

Beneath her forward feet, the rough-cut joists tasted of mouse droppings and something less appetizing. A cat had been in here. Not recently, though. Alert for danger, she forced herself to relax. Cockroach, indeed! Cretin! Em had eaten enough roaches to know the differences intimately—they were flat, their legs stuck out grossly, most were wingless. My belly, she told herself, settling onto it in the soothing grime, is rounded and womanly. My back is strong and mounded like the dome of a noble capitol building. My legs are sensitive and petite. I am a beetle, you stupid human cow. Hear me roar!

At the quivering tip of her abdomen, in the protruding ootheca, her rows of eggs glowed under the attentions of Elwood’s wrigglers. Babies! Soon! She yearned for motherhood.

Her irritation failed to subside. It wasn’t meant to be like this. They’d promised so much more, in the hatchery, along with their cynicism and, simultaneously, their rather pushy warrior faith. In the dim light, Em poked about and found the battered Avon paperback half-copy of Nabokov’s Pnin she’d been consuming. She managed three pages, gobbling them up as she committed the words to memory, before she fell asleep.

“I hope you’re planning on a shower before you come to bed, darling,” Kay told him, throwing off her underwear and moving in the dark. “I can’t bear the stink of the thing on you.”

Elwood’s voice came to her, from the open bathroom door, in the unlighted bedroom: “Sweetheart, you know I always—”

Kay slammed her toes into something and yelped in pain. In a moment, El was beside her, naked, smelling of rancid sex, wide-eyed. He flicked on the overhead light. “What? What’s the matter?”

“What the hell is it?” Kay cried, high-pitched. Her bare toe had struck a bulky off-white curved thing of some kind, as large as the kennel for a Bernese Mountain Dog and shiny as a polished egg, which it rather resembled. It had been squeezed in between her side of the bed and the sliding mirror fronting her closet.

“They brought it when they delivered the Kaf. It’s where she sleeps.”

“In my bedroom?”

“They abhor light, darling.”

Kay stopped rubbing her toe, which still felt as if maybe she’d broken one phalange, and looked for a handhold on the carrier. Nothing—it really was like an egg, seamless, closed.

“How does it get in?”

“You really mustn’t call her ‘it,’ sweetheart. There are provisions in the law now, I should have thought that you, of all people—”

Her questing fingers found a gap underneath. By main force she dragged the plastic shell to the end of the king-sized bed and tried to tip it over, gasping for air.

“I don’t think she’s in there,” El said. “Look, let’s just leave it there for the night, she’ll probably come in later, they’re very quiet and tidy, you know, we’re both exhausted and out of sorts, you and I, I mean, everything will look rosier after we’ve had a good night’s—”

Kay was not listening. Slamming the door between bedroom and hallway, she tugged at the old mahogany chest of drawers she’d inherited from Aunt Lil, dragging it, with a squawk of tortured Columbian structured parquet flooring, to jam the door shut, barring any direct or even furtive approach by the loathsome insect.

“Kay, it’s—She’s a person. This isn’t like you. I thought we had an arrangement?”

“Yes! But the main contract preceded the fooling-around clause. To love and honour till death us do part! You’re doing neither!”

El’s expression indicated he had a ready marital riposte. But some imp of caution dissuaded him from venting the pithy reply. Instead, he wisely hung his head, retreated to the bathroom, had a short but energetically hygienic shower, then crawled meekly into bed, carefully keeping a DMZ of six inches between himself and Kay, whose quivering silent fury scared him fully as much as the world had been terrified of Kim Jong-Il just before that dictator had been assassinated in the very act of launching assorted ICBMs. A crisis Kay had a not-insignificant part in defusing, with hard-nosed realpolitik efficiency.

Lying tensely on his back, vainly inviting sleep, Elwood Grackle remained unaware of the newly introduced and cleverly designed spirochaetes working their way up his urethra with their snicker-snack flagellae, heading with mysterious intentions much deeper into his system.

Professor Qutaybah Al Nahyan nervously fussed with his headdress in preparation for his interview with the Sheikh Khalifa. Although the professor maintained a certain formally congenial consanguinity with the ruler of Abu Dhabi—fifth cousins once removed on a great-uncle’s side—the hard facts of their relationship remained obdurate and inequal. One man was the living embodiment of their proud nation and its glorious destiny, Lion of the Prophet, while the other was a humble university instructor and researcher, educated at Oxford and Cal Tech, unmarried, living in a sparsely furnished bachelor’s condo in the Mussafah Residential neighbourhood. So today’s meeting was hardly between peers, let alone friends. It would be a master’s interrogation of his servant.

Drawing a small comb though his moustache and beard, Professor Al Nahyan sought to reassure himself that the Sheikh Khalifa would be pleased with what he had done, on his own initiative. True, he’d had to use some accounting sleight-of-hand to transfer funds from certain above-board projects to his own lab. And he had shamelessly passed off many of his classroom duties to his grad assistant, a stocky yet rather attractive American woman named Cayenne Sorbet, giving him time to work on tweaking the genome of his prized spirochaete. Also true, he had unleashed his creations on the world—via the Trojan Beetle of the Kafs—without so much as an environmental impact statement. Yet was it not all for the greater glory of Islam, a most gentle and accommodating way of spreading the faith? Surely, with such motives and goals, no discredit could redound to him.

At last the professor could dither no longer, but must make haste. Down to the condo’s basement garage, into the air-conditioned comfort of his Chinese sedan, and out to contend with the impossible traffic of the island city-state. Subsidized gasoline prices encouraged auto use here, unlike most of the rest of their world, suffering $200-a-barrel oil, despite the power beaming down now from orbit.

The meeting was scheduled to take place at MOPA, the Ministry of Presidential Affairs on the Corniche Road. As professor Al Nahyan pulled into the parking lot, the sharp sparkle of the ocean waters nearby pierced his eyes and gave him an instant headache. He began to suspect that this meeting would not go well.

The Sheikh, however, seemed in a fine, expansive mood when Al Nahyan was finally ushered into the presence. Four or five men in tasteless western garb and an equal number of proud yet fawning cousins in their mid-twenties and early thirties attended the potentate as he sat at ease behind a desk as large as an aircraft carrier’s launch deck. Holograms projected above the black glass desk displayed a magnificent assortment of prancing, head-tossing racing camels, presumably candidates for the Sheikh’s fabled stables. Rumours suggested that the best of these coursers were genetically modified, enhanced against all the laws of God and man. If it were so, the result, the professor had to confess, proved the infraction worth the risk. His eyes moistened to see them, even at one-tenth scale, and his heart beat faster at the thought of mounting one and wheeling away into the desert, as his ancestors had ridden for centuries in the service of the Sheikh’s own lineage. He came to his senses as the dealers in dromedarian flesh departed, puffing on large cigars, and his master faced him with a keen glance.

“Fine steeds, eh?”

“Yes indeed, sir.”

“And what of your own little breeding experiments, eh? Eh?” The Sheikh laughed a booming, deep-chested laugh that rattled the professor’s equanimity if not the bomb-proof three-ply windows. “Are we on target for the, uh, transformation of the infidels?”

Al Nahyan nervously found a chair, but dared not sit, though his knees knocked.

“Second stage insertion has begun, sir. A container of larvae has been ferried up the San Francisco de Quito skyhook, packaged for orbital transport by Virgin as solar cell panels. I anticipate shuttle deployment above Ecuador within the hour. We’ll take down those Google power-sats in a matter of days.”

The Sheikh’s face set hard, considering who knew what complexities of realpolitik. He tilted his bearded head, then, and reached for the humidor.

“The Kafirs, the infidels, will not know what hit them. A cigar, doctor?”

Melatonin-plus carried Kay through a night racked, in the deepest crevices of her jetlag-shocked body, by exhaustion and disgust. When the alarm beeped at ten in the morning she was still asleep—miracle of pharmaceutical science!—and when she flung her legs over the side of the bed she was hardly any closer to full consciousness. Her toes banged into the roach kennel as she stumbled to the bathroom.

“Damn you, El!” she shrieked, but the chest of drawers had been pulled ajar and he was long gone, into Beltway wonk territory, no doubt greasing his way along the corridors of D.C. power, such as it was any more. The pain in her toe seemed out of all proportion to the impact; maybe she had broken a bone. Shit! Now she’d have to fit an X-ray appointment in with all the rest of her impossibly burdened schedule. “Planner on,” she shouted furiously to the system, and through the scrubbing and gurgling of her morning ablutions dictated her modified timetable. The odour of freshly-brewed automated coffee floated to her under the door from the kitchenette, and something more. Could it be a toasted muffin with orange marmalade? Heavenly! It made her laugh and brightened her mood. She’d surely put the fear of reprisal into the brute. For Elwood to stay home and make her breakf—

“Good morning, madame,” the Kafka said, peering out from behind the refrigerator. “Would we care for an egg?”

Speechless, half-blinded by a rush of blood to her brain, Kay stopped on one foot (the uninjured one) and stared through squinted eyes at the gleaming kitchenette. One of her failings, she was prepared to admit, and certainly one of Elwood’s, was to let the conapt pile up ever grungier with unwashed plates and cups and glasses, half-empty containers from the classiest takeoutlets in Maryland, a dead imported wine bottle or two from the Rhone Valley in Germany or the Illawarra in Australia abandoned on its side under the couch. The help were meant to deal with it, one day a week, but since Big Mac’s punitive expulsions of the wetbacks it was impossible to get any help at all, let alone the good kind. Yet now everything in sight was redeemed, renewed, polished. Had the roach been bending its many elbows to the task?

“No egg,” she said weakly. “Just bring me a cup of coffee and that muffin. I’ll be in my study.”

The creature turned away obediently, no hint of the saucy impudence of last night, but as Kay left the room she caught a glimpse of something horrible and disturbing. A kind of pulsing puce-hued bag protruded from the Kaf’s hindquarters. An egg case? Dear Christ, was the thing enceinte? Was it about to give birth in the kitchen? She couldn’t handle it. Her mind shifted sideways to the problem Sheikh Khalifa posed to the Free World from his seat of power in the United Arab Emirates. If only she had been able to make the Egyptians see that the Emirates were as much a threat to them as to the West—

In the hallway, her bare toes came down on something hard and sharp, something that scattered and rattled. White, stripped bones, with a quite largish crunched skull, as big as a—

Kay screamed at the top of her lungs, and ran for her iPhone, punched Elwood’s direct link. “Get back here this minute,” she shrieked. “Your fucking sex toy has eaten the cat.”

With the surname Stoner, a man was doomed from birth to a certain fate. Nominative determinism was a potent cosmic force, creating a Filipino Roman Catholic Cardinal named Sin, not to mention that top Harley Street neurologist, Lord Brain, Fellow of the Royal Society. So no-one among Jayant Vishnu Stoner’s co-workers aboard Google PowerSat #9 was surprised at Jay’s penchant for ingesting, smoking, injecting, popping, perfusing, snorting, or transcranially/magnetically inducing any illicit stimulant that fell to his questing hand. They regarded as just another workplace perk his amusing propensity for chatting with amiable hallucinations, a luser’s gag, they assumed, meant to entertain them during their endless orbital days.

With his long funky dreads and his migratory subdermal flock of CGI tattoos, his fascination with jam-band music (his iQuant held 10,000 Phish tracks alone) and his slacker work habits, Jay surfed leisurely through his duties as solar-panel installer like a toasted postmodern peon of the space age. Only Jay’s bosses were ignorant of his potentially dangerous non-compliance with management-approved modalities of employment. They were too busy surveying their stock options and charting the exact moment when they could prematurely retire.

Google’s network of PowerSats was nearing the edge of critical mass, the ability to produce a quantity of non-petroleum energy able to rival—and eventually displace—old dirty sources like gas and soft coal, the bountiful curse that had contributed so much pollution to China. These megawatts of clean power beamed by microwave to lacy terrestrial rectenna farms had already brought down the price of a barrel of oil from $250 to $200! Of course, as pointy-headed economists had warned, that cost reduction immediately led to an outburst of SUV purchases burning this cheaper fuel—but every solution has its drawbacks. Soon, the new paradigm of carbon-free power would be a reality, and the global economy would surge forward on a solid footing, no longer indebted to tyrants and dictators or greedy CEOs.

Not that Jay subscribed to any such high-minded idealism. It wasn’t as if he had yearned or studied for this position. He had lucked into this job as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement. Google had failed to defend its search hog adequately against all the latest viruses, and the rogue program SnapDragon had snared the name and stats of Jayant Vishnu Stoner, and the randomly selected names and stats of several hundred other innocents. Their photos and full details immediately popped out whenever the search-term “FBI most wanted” was entered. In return for this gross defamation (and several false arrests, plus one fatal shooting), the victims were offered a choice: a job with Google, or a cash settlement. In a moment of sober practicality, Jay had taken the employment and training option.

So here he was, geared up in a nifty, sleek Dava Newman BioSuit against the unforgiving cargo bay vacuum of Google PowerSat #9, helping to unload the Virgin Galactic Ship Victoria Beckham, out of Quito Skyhook and now a good part of the way around the planet. In the satellite’s microgravity, the bulky waffle-patterned organo-plastic crates were easy to shift and slot, allowing Jay to focus on the Widespread Panic tune pumping through his earbuds, and the low-level buzz created by his consumption of a morning fetal-cell-and-absinthe cocktail. Floating in a lazy haze, Jay was only a little surprised when Mr. Mxyzptlk showed up. The derby-wearing imp from the fifth dimension was a welcome confidante. Jay paused his iQuant and greeted him happily.

“Mxy, my man! What’s down?”

Speaking around his cigar, Mr. Mxyzptlk told him, “Feast your peepers on the crate with the pliss scabbed on.”

Jay focused blearily through the distortions of his merry high. Sure enough, one crate packaged as solar cell panels also featured an attached Portable Life-Support System. Weirdness! Why would dead power mechanisms engineered for the nullity of high-orbit require livestock temperature and atmosphere regulation? This shit had to be contraband! The PowerSat crew enjoyed frequent illicit shipments of porn, pets, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and transfats, and this had to be one such—although the usually reliable grapevine had not alerted Jay in advance.

“Think I’ll just skim a little off the top, Mxy! Thanks for the heads-up!”

“No grind,” Mxy said. With a shouted “Kltpzyxm!” the imp vanished.

Exhibiting a druggie’s exaggerated slyness, Jay guided the selected crate out of sight of his busy co-workers, through an airlock, and into the adjacent shirtsleeves environment of the large room where Manned Manoeuvering Units were repaired. The workspace, festooned with spare parts, was luckily unoccupied, sparing him any need to blurt out an absurd excuse for his presence. Still in his suit, Jay cracked the seals of the crate with fumbling eagerness, anticipating familiar goodies.

For a full ninety seconds, his fogged brain failed to register what he was seeing, actually seeing in external reality. As far as he could tell. “They’re immature bugs!” the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants whispered in his ear. “Giant fucking larvae, dude!”

He tore at his eyes, but sure enough, the crate was filled with squirming featureless maggots the size of microwave ovens. Several had begun to pupate, enclosing themselves in the shells that would crack to discharge the adults of whatever the hell gruesome species they were.

One of his rare bad trips kicked in. The wriggling flesh hassocks creeped him out. A powerful vision seized him: roaches expanding, multiplying, filling the station from wall to wall. “Yaargh! Gotta get rid of the suckers!”

Jay hastily re-sealed the crate, and removed its PLSS unit. All he had to do now was cycle it back out to the airless cargo bay, and the unprotected bugs would die.

He pushed the crate toward the airlock. At the last moment, SpongeBob offered counsel.

“Man, somebody went to a lot of trouble to get these up here. These things must be valuable! Why not save at least one… ?”

“Good idea!”

Jay soon had a single grub hidden inside an empty suit, tethered by netting to the wall of the workspace. With luck, it would survive and not be found until he could get it back to his quarters. His humour was mellowing again. Hey, who knew what might hatch out of it? Something pretty cool, maybe.

“Great job!” said SpongeBob. “Let’s hit the dining hall for a Crabby Patty now!”

“Yeah!”

“You son of a whoring bitch!” Kay shrieked, gazing at the pink-tipped strip of paper in her trembling hand with its pink-mauve + sign. A drop of urine dripped off of it, splashed her bare foot. If the kit did not lie, her uterus was flooded with chorionic gonadotropin. Was invaded. She rooted frantically through her packs of pills. A rushed count showed none missing. What the hell? Had the bastard purchased some exhausted stock from a crooked Bolivian recycling pharmacy, via Web2Bay? Substituted the past-use-by dud product for her own contraceptives? The print was too small to tell. “I informed you it was too soon for this! I have my diplomatic career to consider, you ridiculous sentimentalist.”

In the living room, Elwood had his forehead pressed to the new patterned mat he’d extended over the parquet. Outside, the usual unearthly wailing rose from a plasticized carbon-bonded minaret erected with grudging city approval just across from the Farmer’s Market. The Adhan rose and fell, calling the faithful to early morning salat prayer. “Ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasūlullāh,” El murmured ecstatically. “Hayya ‘alā Khair al-’amal.”

“Make haste toward the best thing yourself, you pig of a pig.” Wasn’t it enough that she had to put up with this ululating in Cairo, where she’d spent six weeks in a crash Arabic course using the powerful mnemonic principles of the Pole, Piotr Wozniak. “What’s the idea? And get up off the floor, you fool, you’re an Episcopalian and a third-degree Mason, not a Muslim.”

El lifted his spirochaete-laden head dazedly. “We are all part of the body of the Umma,” he explained. “So mote it be.”

“Well, something else is part of my body now, you sorry excuse. I’m pregnant!”

After a pause for pious thought, El told her, “I forgive you.”

“Will you be taking breakfast, madame?” asked the roach, putting its head in from the kitchenette. “And congratulations on the baby—I’m in the family way myself.”

Kay seized a bright green apple from a decorative bowl of wax fruit in the centre of the table, flung it at the creature; the fake apple caught in the plates of its back. “And I know who the hell the father is! Elwood, you disgust me. How could you fuck a thing like that, and then bring your soiled seed to our marriage bed?” It’s affected his mind, she thought. Infected his mind. And probably his body as well. She shuddered, feeling befouled.

“Verily,” El expounded, “prayer prevents the worshipper from indulging in anything that is undignified or indecent. That’s Surah Al-Ankabut, chapter 29, verse 46.” He got to his feet, a look of crazed passion in his eye. “They can all grow up together. They can attend Naval Prep School, in historic Newport, Rhode Island, as I did, and my father before me. Imagine them in the rigging! Six legs good!” Foam was starting to seep from the edges of his mouth.

A hideous peeping came from the kitchenette, as of a nestful of baby chicks calling their mother. Kay’s face drained of blood. No, not chicks. They probably hunted down chicks and ate them raw. And what the hell was growing inside her?

“I’m going to kill you,” she told her deluded spouse. She picked up an ornamental brass poker from the set of Ralph Lauren accessories resting beside the ornamental fake fireplace, and hoisted it lustily above her head. “I’m going to fucking murder and skin you, and then I’m driving straight to the Prince George’s clinic.”

Elwood Grackle grabbed a defensive dining room chair by its cushioned back, but left it dangling. “Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you,” he warned, “but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors. Kill them whenever you confront them and drive them from where they drove you. Surah 2, verses 190–191.”

“We’re fresh out of eggs,” Emma called in her abrasive voice. “Anyone for a sliced sausage?”

Aboard Google PowerSat #9, Jay Stoner was entertaining a visitor in his private room, a room admittedly smaller than the average terrestrial capsule-hotel accommodations. Luckily, the visitor could be cradled and compassed completely within the circle of Jay’s arms.

The gently squirming peristaltic mass of the lone surviving smuggled larva, retrieved from its hiding place, radiated a kind of numinous pet-like comfort into Jay’s quiveringly drug-sensitized brain, traversing all interspecies communication gaps and barriers. Waves of wordless approbation laved him. Damn! This thing was just like a Tribble! Shame he had killed all the others, he could’ve sold them to his fellow crew members. Life aboard the solar-power station could be harsh and boring, despite both management-approved and illicit recreations, and any additional source of comfort was always eagerly sought. But all the other bugs were irrevocably gone now, and Jay wasn’t one for crying over spilled bongwater.

Suddenly a floating copyright mark akin to Jay’s own anime tats drifted up to display itself beneath the larva’s epidermis, much like an answer appearing in the window of a Magic Eight Ball.

“N-5397-batch5,” read Jay aloud. “Aw, is dat your widdle name-ums? Uncle Jay is gonna call you Enny. Enny-wenny-wenny-henny-penny!”

Jay began to tickle the bug, and gushes of telepathic gratitude swamped his senses. “What does Enny-wenny want now? Sugar water? A widdle sweater to stay warm?”

The flood of love pouring out of the larva almost instantly transmuted to hate. Jay was stunned and saddened. But then he realized that the hate was not directed against him. Oh, no! Enny’s anger and pain represented a lashing-out against the bug’s creators, the men who had placed Enny and cousins on a one-way trip to space, away from all familiar earthly pleasures, to carry out their greedy schemes like disposable grunts on the front lines of corporate wars.

“Tell me, tell me, Enny! Who did it to you! Who must suffer your sweet, sweet ichorous revenge!”

Images marched through Jay’s brain. Arabs in their robes, state offices, a seaside city, signage—

“Yes, yes, Enny, I know who they are! Bastards! We’ll make them pay! Soon, soon, just when the shift’s about to change—”

Jay smooshed his face into the warm pulpy haggis of the larva and smothered it with kisses.

Enny seemed content to wait.

“Nothing has gone wrong, qua wrong,” Professor Al Nahyan assured Sheikh Khalifa. His glowering master did not look especially assured. “The package was intercepted somehow. We had no way of perceiving in advance—”

“Quiet.” The Lion’s fingers, scented and beautifully manicured, drummed on an acre of black glass. The great office, blue lit, was refrigerator cold, its master wrapped in a fur-lined dishdasha. Qutaybah shivered. “One larva is still minimally responsive, you say?”

“Yes, yes—within certain unpredictable limits. But there are very many more on the ground, naturally. Ready to give birth, if the induced mutations hold steady. Some have already been through parturition.” He checked his babbling tendency to persiflage under stress. “They are very… compulsive animals. The second generation individuals are even more potent. With 65 percent human genes, thanks to the maternal and paternal contributions, they are more anthropomorphic, and completely irresistible to either human sex. The Westerners will go extinct, wasting all their lusts on the bugs instead of breeding strong sons and modest daughters.”

The professor neglected to add that the hybrids would be fully Islamic in their outlook, due to the onboard spirochaetes of his devising—Plan B, as it were. He was still unsure of the legitimacy of conferring Koranic knowledge on another species.

“So I understand.” The Sheikh failed to fly into a rage, which was at once a blessed relief and a phenomenon beyond all understanding. Al Nahyan wrung his sweating hands, fearing for them. But the Sheikh merely lifted one of his own and flicked his fingers. Begone, said the fingers. The endocrino-entomologist scrambled gratefully from the room, reeling with the vertigo of terror. Clearly, geopolitical and theological factors were in play here well beyond his narrow, specialized knowledge. Beyond his need to know. He crept past crisp guards in military uniform and languid courtiers arrayed like peacocks by languid couturiers. The sun, when finally he escaped into the open, beat on his naked head like a cruel blessing. Like the justice and mercy of Allah.

In the distance, a voice called from the muezzin, called the Faithful to prayer.

But contrary to all his past devotional humility, all that professor Al Nahyan could think of was the image of his plump and attractive grad assistant, Miss Cayenne Sorbet, locked in carnal embrace with a second generation Kaf.

What a waste. I’ve completely thrown my life away….

Jay oozed stealth as he air-swam down the corridors of the satellite, mingling with the dispirited workers swapping posts. Enny rested hidden in a courier’s bag strapped to Jay’s back.

“Soon, Enny, soon,” Jay muttered, drawing no suspicions from his co-workers, who were certain he was merely addressing the ghost of Phil Silvers or John Lennon or Yogi Bear, as was his wont.

At the beam-control room, Jay encountered Bob Hazzard, itching to leave, and knew he had beaten Bob’s replacement to the door. Unquestioningly eager to leave, Bob allowed Jay inside.

Jay locked the door.

Fully automated, the cybernetic mechanisms that kept the output beam of PowerSat #9 focused on the rectenna farms in the deserts of the American west needed only to be monitored for freakish drift. But of course, manual overrides existed to allow a complete shift in target.

Unpacking Enny and allowing the larva to float beside his shoulder, Jay set to work.

Plugging in the GPS coordinates of Abu Dhabi took only seconds.

Fingers poised to stroke the touchscreen and send gigawatts of searing microwave radiation down upon the unsuspecting, unprotected emirate, Jay paused and turned to Enny.

“Is this really what you want, Enny?”

The savage surety of the bug’s response was unmistakeable.

Jay stroked.

In a D.C. townhouse, a man and a woman lay insensible on the floor, while dozens of second-generation infant Kafs swarmed over them, spreading mutagenic slime trails across their skin.

Emma watched with pride and pleasure. Like the heroine in one of The Master’s best books, Lolita, she knew that innocence was much deadlier than cunning any day.

The Sheikh Khalifah relaxed in his chair. He touched hidden contacts on his great desk; the doors locked with chunky authority. The smoky, polarized windows transitioned to complete opacity. He stroked a last button, and a brocaded, gilded basket rose from beneath the floor. Within the basket, a gleaming, jewel-crusted mutant bug turned her sleepy gaze upon him, preened her antennae.

“My lord,” she said.

“Come to me, you lovely bitch,” said the Lion of the Prophet, parting his blue-silver trimmed dishdasha.

The Sheikh was suddenly forced to shield his eyes. What unexpected nova could leak through the window films?

Only a city instantly aflame.

The contents of the office burst into flame, and for a final mortal second, the Sheik Khalifah learned that roasting Kaf smelled like lobster.