the luculla hive: queen

This is a chapter of the luculla hive, an erotic science-fiction novel. WARNING: Do not start with this episode! Go to the beginning.

03 August 2405

14.825337/106.495972/[2400]01:44:04.0/-15:56:15/3 Luculla
Voice log [Judith Hobson]

Narrative augmentation on

20:45:27

There are no animals on Luculla.

I had almost become resigned to the mystery of the Hive. My every day with Katie has been a heaven: of appreciation of her and of her folk; of casual (and unproductive) analysis of their speech and way of life; and of frequent and incredible lovemaking. But how it all arose, and how it perpetuates: these greater questions no longer stirred me to deeper or more rigorous investigations. I was here; I was in love; that was all that mattered.

Only sometimes at night, with Katie lying tucked against me in the deep darkness, I would remember snippets of Blackshore’s notes and fall to thinking how the Hive could possibly have been the product of her work.

And now that I know the answers, I wonder how I could have missed the clues. Possibly it was because I was only treating her as a scientist, not as a human being. Blackshore was known to be a genius and a visionary. That was why we were sent here. But she was also old, and lonely.

No longer. She is here, all around me, in her creation.

Without pollinators, reproduction on Luculla has taken a radically different path. The plants reproduce asexually, but they achieve the same diversity as sexual organisms with an ingenious lifecycle trick. This trick, I believe, is also the key to making humans better adaptable to alien environments.

When I woke this morning, Katie was not with me. Strangely, now that we are together, I no longer fly into jealousy at her disappearances--even though I know she could be with a drone. At first I was amazed: before long I was relieved. Even with the enthusiasm of a new experience, I can’t satisfy her almost continual needs.

I was washing when she stepped lightly back into my chamber. Immediately I noticed something was different. She normally returns in a state of languorous exhaustion; although for her this just means slightly less spring in her step, and even more inclination to spend time kissing and holding me. Rarely, she will even go to sleep in my arms. Needless to say, it is even more rare that I find any of these behaviours objectionable.

Today, she positively glowed with excitement. She pattered across to me like a ballerina, and bowed slightly while tucking her fingers into my hand. I laughed at her simple joy and tugged playfully so that she staggered slightly, giving me the opportunity to peck her cheek.

But instead of returning the kiss as she normally would, she grasped my forearm with the other hand and tugged in her turn.

‘I haven’t finished,’ I protested.

She tugged again, and said, ‘Come.’

Naturally I just gaped at her, utterly dumbfounded. In all my study of her, it had never occurred to me that Katie might be learning anything from me. I had simply assumed that she found my speech just as incomprehensible as hers was to me.

After a short but exquisitely judged pause, she repeated the plea. She blinked slowly as she said the word, putting me in mind of a very young child, and my heart leaped with a heady combination of love and pride. ‘You can talk,’ I observed redundantly, beaming.

‘No talk,’ she said impatiently. ‘Come.’ Her intonation was imperfect but the words were completely clear--and hearing the simple expression of emotion in them was like being reminded of the smell of a long-ago summer day.

‘Okay, okay,’ I said. I towelled off, my mind in full meltdown, and reached for my underwear--then caught sight of her, and hesitated. She had not moved, but was radiating frustration like a beacon. ‘Okay,’ I said again, slowly. She had made the effort to learn my ways; it was time to try another of hers.

I took a step towards her and she found my hand again; but she seemed to recognise and appreciate the step I had made and leaned forward to kiss me. There was no urgency in that kiss, only deep love, and I fell into it helplessly. There was no doubt that it was confusing to experience such a kiss without clothes, but not as a prelude to lovemaking. So perhaps it was not surprising that when our lips parted, and she shyly echoed, ‘Okay?’ I burst into tears.

Instead of precisely two gametes of the same species merging in the highly orchestrated but fragile fashion of Earthen plants, all Lucullan somatic cells are able to casually join with others of virtually any species, forming polygenetic cross-species hybrids.

It was two weeks since the warrior had brought me into the colony, and I had received the blessing of the singularly beautiful blonde Lady among her coven of lovers (whom I now thought of as the Queen of the Hive). It was towards her chamber that Katie brought me now, running and leaping through corridors that seemed to be abandoned. I was laughing as I followed the tugs of her hand, like a teenager skinny dipping with her friend for the first time; but as we arrived I slowed and gaped in surprise.

Most of the Hive seemed to be gathered in the chamber and the area around it. The press of naked bodies was an incredible sight, and deeply erotic; because the majority were engaged in sexual acts of varying degrees of intensity. There were no voices but those raised in gasps or cries of ecstasy; no movement that was not for the pleasure of the self or another. There were cat-girls entwined on the floor, tongues flicking at one another’s breasts or vulvas; ladies gathered on tip-toe into the bear-hugs of warriors, mouths breathlessly clamped; workers tangled in the caresses of one another’s many hands.

While none of these behaviours was a surprise individually--the sexual sights and sounds of the Hive have been a constant background to all my days here--the sheer multitude was truly overwhelming. I could not dismiss it all as communication, and as Katie pulled me casually into the throng I felt the glow of response between my legs. I wondered again at how every woman there was truly beautiful: healthy and joyous, and desperately, desperately attractive.

Katie casually caressed or kissed several of her fellows as she passed, but still she led me deeper into the press. I reflexively smiled at each of her apparent friends, but they seemed to respect that I had so far limited my sexual attentions to her alone, and only greeted me with a lingering of their eyes.

Was this some kind of meeting? I had not yet worked out how they organised themselves: the Hive just seemed to operate by itself. The workers did most of the labour, working the simple fields, and preparing and preserving food; but it was a mystery who made the decisions. I had thought that there might even be no decisions to make: there was no want, and so no conflict.

As we entered the Queen’s chamber the press of bodies became more dense, and the sex proportionally more intense. My eyes lingered on faces in rapture: eyes shut tight, or unfocused while feelings soared within; or gazing with desire upon a lover. My naked feet pushed between and against bodies as I worked to keep up with Katie: of course, her graceful tip-toe progress seemed totally unimpeded. She watched the lovers too, without shame, and I decided to reflect her simple honesty and allow myself to be aroused.

This resolution was timely, because we had reached the centre of the chamber. The Queen was there, among and atop writhing bodies. Between her long, widely spread legs was the hairless head of a drone, the only time I had seen one outside of their secret cloisters. Its exaggerated physique flowed organically with the Ladies that surrounded it. In their turn they moved against it urgently, seemingly taking advantage of the Queen’s licence to enjoy its attentions there.

Katie had found a way to lean down to the Queen without kneeling on someone’s body, and kissed her gently on the lips. The Queen opened her eyes and looked deeply at her, raising her hand to push her fingers lovingly into her hair. I felt a tiny surge of jealousy, but it was wholly overridden by their desperate beauty. I noticed for the first time that they were about the same age: both of them among the oldest members of the Hive; and it lent them an air of seniority.

The Queen looked at me also, briefly but intensely, and then pushed gently against the drone’s forehead between her legs. It withdrew slowly, its long, long tongue emerging slickly from deep inside her, before furling back between ruby lips. I swallowed nervously, aware of my own burgeoning wetness.

Then the Queen seemed to rise, without effort, lifted by the Ladies below and around her. Coming onto her feet she took Katie’s hand, and the hand of an elegant ebony Lady at her other side. She kissed each in turn, briefly but with deep intent. The black-skinned Lady took the hand of another and they too, kissed. All around, Ladies, cat-girls, warriors and workers were coming to their feet, the sounds of sex dying down. Another Lady joined the line holding hands, greeted with a kiss.

Suddenly I realised that Katie had her hand held out to me, and both her and the Queen were looking at me. I felt myself blush brightly, but I could not boycott their ritual; so I stepped to Katie’s side, took her hand, and kissed her. The next step was more awkward; but when a raven-haired Lady took my other hand I succeeded in kissing her in turn without incident. In fact it was only the second woman I had ever kissed, and she was so gentle and empathic that I could not help but fall headlong into a fleeting but desperate crush on her.

The ritual rippled onward, collecting more and more of the women in the chamber into the chain of hands. After a few moments, with more still joining, the Queen stepped forward and began to walk towards the chamber entrance, untangling two lines of followers behind her. My heart was pattering with excitement. For the first time I felt a real part of the Hive, and it filled me with joy.

The cell hybrids can grow to form undifferentiated polyps, whose purpose is simply to provide a locus for genetic accidents giving rise to new phenotypes. These pseudo-sexual collaborations can live for minutes or years.

We walked deep into the Hive, deeper than I had ever been before; to where the light filtered only dimly through the tiers above. I was no longer turned on, but followed in reverent awe as Katie and the Queen strode silently on bare feet, unhurried and graceful.

Eventually there were no more side turnings. The passage looped once, and then opened into a deep, dark chamber. There were sounds here, from ahead: familiar sounds of bodies and breath in erotic motion. The Queen stopped, and her followers began to spread out on either side of her so that I could see ahead into the ethereal twilight.

There, roiling organically like a thundercloud, was a tangled mass of bodies, yards wide and as high as my head: so that I thought they must lie upon a rise in the floor or else those in the middle would be crushed; but they were so closely packed that it was impossible to see. I wondered why these women had not joined the throng at the Queen’s chamber; and again my cheeks grew warm at the deeply sexual acts I was seeing them perform. Faces and hands were pressed against skin, tongues and fingers trailing or caressing; hair trailing over fine curves and brushing softly against noses and nipples.

But gradually my awareness grew: of jarring inconsistencies in the visible bodies. Of hands with no owner, of abdomens for which there was no obvious thorax, of breasts with no partner. My heart began to hammer, my breath to fail. What was this? Like a vision from a nightmare it boiled outward to fill my awareness, until I felt myself falling into horror.

I tried to think scientifically, tried to apply reason to my observations. But this was a biological phenomenon with no analogue I had ever known. The creatures in the thing (I could no longer think of them as women) showed no sign of trauma or stress, but merged and flowed against each other in a continuum of ecstasy. The sounds and the acts were of sex: but dissociated from individuals, enacted instead by the many limbs, torsos, heads, breasts and genitalia of a giant self-pleasuring organism.

I became aware that Katie had let go of my hand, and I glanced to her in a surge of alarm. She and the Queen had taken a final step forward. The Queen turned around, to gaze at her followers. Then, slowly, deliberately, she toppled backwards.

I gasped. I took a reflexive step towards her, quickly aborted by my own terror. Her fall was cushioned by an upsurge of flesh from below; hands appeared, to catch her, grasp her, and then caress her.

I don’t know when I started screaming: it might have been at once, or it might have been as the Queen’s body began to take on impossible dimensions, parts of her moving and flowing away in different directions, some to disappear in the mass, others to become fully engaged with other mouths, with other hands.

But the black-haired Lady who still held my other hand was not deaf to my cry. She rounded in front of me, pulled my face into the crook of her neck, hugged me gently. This simple act of human tenderness was wondrously healing: and my panic began to subside.

The contributing plants are propagated by seeds which simply bud off, each adopting a species-specific strategy for dispersal. This happens apparently at random, although there does appear to be a simple regulation mechanism that keeps the polyp from becoming too large by promoting more budding as it grows.

Even as their Queen was assimilated away, there remained an air of expectancy among the women gathered in that deep alien place under the Hive. Over the neck of the Lady holding me I could see that Katie still stood nearby, waiting, watching. The soft light made her pale skin seem angelic, her cascading auburn hair like a veil over her shoulders, fading into the beautiful curves of her back, bottom and legs. She seemed so whole, so perfectly unique, that I whimpered at how close she stood to peril.

At once, there was a shuffle of bodies moving to my left. Katie immediately looked over, then strode purposefully in that direction. I craned my neck to see; the Lady relaxed her embrace, still watching me.

Somebody was crying out, the dismay and fright plucking at the already stretched strings of my nerves. I saw two workers kneeling, holding between them a blonde girl, sexually fully mature but young and achingly pretty. She was sitting on the floor facing the writhing thing in the room, one of her legs embedded in it, her arms reaching out to it, straining against the many hands of the workers. As I watched, her leg was pushed towards her by forces unseen, dissociating her from the mass; and she cried out again in alarm. Her face streamed with tears, and my heart flew out to her.

Katie was there. Expertly, efficiently, she straddled the girl, pulling her body close and cradling the back of her neck, and kissed her emphatically. The girl returned the kiss hungrily, her reaching hands relaxing and coming down onto Katie’s back. As I watched, the passion of their embrace quickly escalated, as though they were new lovers in the throes of their first physical encounter.

Emotions stampeded through me. Watching Katie, my lover, deeply engrossed in the lust of a perfect young nymph was like the keenest double-edged blade; here I stood myself, naked, propped in the arms of another beautiful Lady; and nearby, that most alien expression of pure erotic extremity. What bitter jealousy, what fear, what raw excitement!

Perhaps these feelings do not adequately explain my next actions. Perhaps they cannot ever be explained in terms that may be understood anywhere but in this place; where creatures that were once mammals have adopted a wholly new mechanism of reproduction.

I am now convinced that it all originated in the genius of one woman, who was seeking answers not only to scientific questions, but also to deeply personal ones. But such speculations did not fully form in my mind until later. At that moment, as I watched Katie and the girl move against each other, fingers and tongues flowing to express their desire, I became aware of the soft push of a breast against mine, of the tickle of pubic hair against my hip. The Lady had not moved: she, too, was gazing at Katie; but when I looked at her, and my eyes dwelt on the handsome line of her pale cheek, her eyes turned to me and also lingered.

Katie is with me as I recount this. I’m not sure how much she understands but her speech is developing fast, and we are having the beginnings of conversations; although she will sometimes quite unselfconsciously kiss me in the middle of a sentence as though filling in a gap in her vocabulary. But we also have a new responsibility, which occupies much of our time: to keep the pretty newcomer satiated.

It is perhaps some measure of the progress I have made that Katie occasionally leaves me to discharge this duty alone. And there are times too, when I cannot help but leave my room to seek out a certain raven-haired Lady, with whom I once made love in a deep, dark place that haunts my dreams.