OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO oOOOO OOOO. OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" .OOOOOO OOOOOo OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO OOOOOOO. OOOO oOOOO OOOO .OOOO OOOO OOOOOOOOo OOOO OOOO" OOOO oOOOO OOOO OOOO "OOOO. OOOO OOOOo .OOOO' OOOO .OOOO" OOOO OOOO OOOOoOOOO "OOOO. oOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO..OOOO OOOO "OOOOOOO OOOOoOOOO" OOOO .OOOO"""OOOOOOOO OOOO OOOOOO "OOOOOOO' OOOO oOOOO ""OOOO OOOO "OOOO OOOOOO |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | There Ain't No Justice | | | | #89 | | | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| - Cestoda - by The Collective His alarm had gone off at 7:00 a.m., but he'd ignored it, as usual. He'd slept in until two in the afternoon, when the glaring orange sunlight was sloping down across his pillow from the high window, and he couldn't ignore it any more. As soon as he roused himself and was sufficiently awake to make going back to sleep impractical, thick grey-green clouds gathered over the sun and the afternoon's downpour began. It was like that every day, as regular as clockwork. The mornings were unbearably hot, the jungle around the outpost steaming like a planetary sauna; the afternoons, evenings and most of the night were subject to torrential rains, which ended sometime around four a.m, as abruptly as they'd started. It was a horrible place; Jeff Chuan, the beacon technician assigned to the base, was compiling a list of things he intended to ask the smug, smirking government agent, next time the supply ship dropped by. Things like `Why Did The Beacon Need To Be At The Equator?'; the question of `Why Did The Beacon Need Five People To Monitor It?' was a particularly sore point with Chuan, including sub-categories like `Why Did The Two Women Assigned Here Have To Be Lesbians?' and `Why Did The Other Two Guys Have To Be Such Rabid Sexual Deviants/Stupid Fucks?' and, at the top of the list, underlined several times in red, `When The Fuck Can I Go Home?' He examined his legs for parasites, and after picking off four of the tiny, translucent three-legged ticks and tossing them into the toilet-bowl, he pulled on his coveralls and started searching for a pair of relatively clean socks. All of them had some kind of fungus growing on the toes; the planet's high humidity encouraged that sort of thing. He considered stuffing them all into the microwave, muttered `fuck it', and put on the cleanest of the lot. They itched strangely as they snuggled around his toes. In the corridor on the way to the kitchen, he saw Commander Marina Tietze almost turn around and go the other way when she saw him first. He considered giving her his customary greeting, but decided against it. Chuan wondered why the government, showing a complete ignorance of psychology, had put them all together on this base; they all hated each other to a degree. Unfortunately, the others had paired off into a four-man tag-team Jeff Chuan Hating machine. Commander Tietze and her lover, Medic Beth Sachs, enjoyed teasing him, knowing how horny he'd become in the eleven months he'd been on the base; Doctor Giro Frascastoro and his catamite, Second technician Manny Diaz made the most of their time by grossing him out. Frascastoro was the worst. Chuan had no idea where the slimy, pot-bellied toad had come by his medical qualifications (probably thrown out of Veterinarial School for fucking dead animals, he'd concluded), but the good doctor was in his element on this planet, whose rampant foliage provided a sizeable variation of `medicinal' plants, which he told the others he was in the process of catalogueing. Chuan caught the smell of the skunk-weed that Frascastoro smoked, drifting from the kitchen, and retched. At the door, he saw Frascastoro huddled over another form - probably Diaz - and wondered if he was that hungry. He wasn't. He went to the control room, gave a cursory glance at the status console, and located his coffee mug. There was a half-centimetre deep puddle of something brown in the bottom, and overnight it had become home to a host of tiny things; insects, worms, and some variety of plant-seed that no-one had been able to decide if it was vegetable or animal. It was considerably smarter than most of the life on this planet, humans included. After tossing out the inhabitants, Chuan was about to put some instant coffee crystals in the cup when he noticed a hair in the bottom. He picked it out and examined it; curly, stiff, blonde, and with a tiny chunk of skin at one end. It was a pubic hair, and there was only one person on this base with hair that colour; Sachs. The bitch. He suspected that she went around deliberately, putting pubic hairs in his coffee cup, his toothbrush (which he hadn't used for two months, since he'd heard that Diaz did something disgusting to Frascastoro with it), his food; he'd even woken up one morning with a couple of them in his mouth. He'd attributed that, however, to the fantasy he'd jerked off to that night. It was hopeless. The closest he'd ever get to eating her would be if the food synthesisers broke down and he became a cannibal. The thought had passed his mind, although the idea of dismembering Frascastoro and trying to get the fat bastard into the microwave made him feel ill. He examined the cup under the microcircuitry scope; finding no other signs of sapphic sabotage, he stuck the cup under the rad lamp and let it sit for half an hour on full. While he was waiting for the cup to decontaminate, he went over the base systems. Apart from some intermittently faulty power lines in the laundry, everything was working, fortunately. He didn't want to have to go near Second Technician Diaz if he could help it; something about the guy made him want to back away. It was either the semen stains down the front of his pants, or the flecks of spittle that gathered at the corners of his mouth. He was about to try and get the net link up again, in the vain hopes of getting back into contact with a relatively normal cross- section of humanity, when there was a polite cough behind him. He knew that sound; it was Sachs. He prepared to confront her with the fact of her apparent pubic alopaecia and his coffee cup, but once again, confronted with the most beautiful woman on the planet (which wasn't much, considering that there were only two) he caved in. She had him hooked, and they both knew it. Besides, she was only wearing a pair of lacy black panties and a t-shirt. She pointed her nipples at him and said, `Jeff, the dryer in the laundry's out again. Could you look at it...' she smiled her infamous half-smile and licked her lips, `Please?' He wished that she'd learn some subtlety, at least. He frowned, muttered `yeah', and stormed off to the laundry, passing Tietze on his way. This time, he couldn't resist. `'Morning, Tits.' She snarled at him, `When are you going to fix the fucking dryer, Chuan?' `Right now, okay? Get off my case for a change.'Jesus! What was up her ass? `Oh, we're floating in the coastal waters You and me and the porter's daughters Oooh, what to do, not a sausage to do, And the shorter of the porter's daughters Dips her hands in the deadly waters Oooh, what to do, in a tiny canoe...' He was singing to himself while he traced the lines behind the dryer in the laundry, and entertaining the vague, recurrent fantasy that Sachs was going to leave the commander for him, and that was why Tietze was pissed off at him. He found a point where the power cable, running along the floor, had dipped into a puddle of water. Diaz had gotten into the habit of stuffing his used condoms into the air-vent above that point; something had gotten into the base, fed on whatever it had found inside the condoms and decided to stay and munch on the power cables. The insulation had been stripped away and the dryer was shorting out whenever the cable touched the water. He wrapped about two feet of bright orange insulating tape (he'd found, by experimentation, that the parasitic life on this world liked orange the least). After putting on thick rubber gloves, he wadded the half-a-dozen limp prophylactics into a ball (one of them making a crunching sound - apparently, still home to some variety of arthropod) with the intent of dropping it into Diaz' soup that afternoon. He replaced the wall panel, tried the drier. It worked. Sachs, who had been leaning in the doorway, smiled warmly; a rush of blood surged through him, and he tried to smile back at her, but decided against it when he saw Tietze coming. `Dryer's working again, Tits' he muttered, and walked past her as quickly as possible. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get the image of her with Sachs' head held snugly between her breasts. He headed for the infirmary, hoping he could steal some more amphetamine. He peeked in through the door; the doctor had Diaz trussed up like a ball of string, tied to one of the beds. a hose led from a cylinder to a short pipe that Frascastoro was forcing up the second technician's ass. I don't want to know, Chuan thought; he quietly bypassed the magnetic lock on the drugs cabinet and stole some speed and a syringe. Back in his quarters, the rain was beating down like there were five elephants out there, pissing on his window. He turned on the hot tap and waited for the stream of discoloured water to heat up. Sitting on his bed, he could feel thousands of tiny, living things scuttling around him; insects, three, four and five-legged, which would take tiny chunks out of him during the night; things like rats, except when he dissected them, they were solid vegetable matter all the way through. He pulled the cap off the medicine bottle, directed the stream of hot water into it and tipped in some of the grey powder, stirring it with the needle point until the chunks had dissolved. He drew three mils of cloudy grey fluid into the syringe and spent the next two minutes tapping it until all of the tiny air bubbles had merged into one, whereupon he squeezed it out of the needle and started looking for a suitable blood-vessel. He couldn't find anything on his arms; with the afternoon rain, his veins seemed to have retreated into his flesh and no amount of cajoling would bring them out. `Come on, you little fuckers, got somethin' good for ya!' he muttered, slapping the crook of his elbow. Nothing. `Shit.' He fell back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling. He heard a faint thumping sound from the quarters next to his; Tietze's. Hot damn. He turned his terminal towards him and keyed the bank of infra-red sensors he'd stashed in the ceiling. The picture was blurry, but after some complicated image processing (which took up most of the base's computer processing ability - to hell with the beacon's alignment) he got a grainy, black-and white image of Tietze and Sachs, grappling on the commander's bed. He'd seen enough of this sort of thing to realise that watching two lesbians fucking wasn't as interesting as it was made out to be; still, it helped him get it up to the point where he could force the needle into one of the veins which ran along the side of his penis. He could never work out which way the blood was flowing, and he didn't have the patience to experiment, so he just stuck the needle in facing towards his body and slowly forced the fluid into the vein. He couldn't tell if it was going inproperly; most of it seemed to, but the last few millimetres formed an ugly, thumb-sized lump on the side of his erection. What the fuck, he thought. It's not as if anyone's going to get to see it in the near future except me. Around this time, he always started wondering why, of all the drugs available on the base, he had to use speed. It didn't help relieve his boredom, or his horniness. He wondered why he was here, and what ever happened to all the good things in life, and if there really was a purpose to living beyond endless multiplication of humanity throughout space, and why no-one was interested in religion anymore, and whatever happened to the Discordians? They used to be fun, or at any rate, they were the least boring of a pretty boring bunch, and - At this point, he was no longer pacing back and forth in his room; he was practically bouncing from one wall to the other, his penis still turgid and discoloured, pointing towards the ceiling, and that lump hadn't gone down yet, but there was no way in hell he'd let Frascastoro touch it. Maybe Sachs could help. When he thought about that, he started imagining her cool, slim fingers touching his erection, stroking it gently, and it was only when he realised he was actually banging his head against the porous plastic wall that he thought maybe he should get out for a while. He got dressed. It was still raining outside; he picked up a backup microwave emitter which he'd converted into a kind of weapon and headed towards the main lock. It hadn't been opened in a while; he had to bash the door with his fist a couple of times before it slid up, insects and small growths raining down as they were scraped off. The smell never failed to make him retch; the rotting jungle swamp stench. He didn't bother to scan the area for dangerous life-forms; there weren't any on this planet. He marched down the ramp, his bare feet sinking up to his shins in the mud, which was thick with decomposing pieces of various steps in the food-chain. He could feel still-living things writhing through the shit, briefly touching his body long enough to realise that he was something alien, inedible, then scurrying away to find something else to eat. He slogged through the rain, marching determinedly away from the base, off through the stumpy grey bushes into what passed for a forest on this godforsaken planet. He found one of those raised mounds that indicated the home of something that looked like fat, six-legged gophers. Like everything else on the planet, they were some kind of cross between plants and animals, slow, stupid and a damn easy target. He stood a few metres away and focused the emitter on the opening of the mound, and switched it on. It hummed and crackled in the rain, and he felt it grow warm. Within seconds, steam was pouring out of the burrow, and he could hear chittering, squeaking sounds from within. A pale tan snout poked out of the hole, turning this way and that, looking for what was attacking. Chuan giggled maniacally and lowered the focus of the emitter. The gopher writhed, making pathetic mewling sounds; it had swelled to the point of being stuck in the entrance of its hole; he had to restrain himself from rushing over and wringing the damn thing's neck. He gritted his teeth and jacked up the power on the emitter, grunting `Eh? Eh?'. The gopher swelled visibly, its squeaks almost doubling in volume; it looked like a rubber glove connected to a water pipe briefly before it exploded, leaving two crooked limbs attached to a steaming, grey-brown stump. Chuan laughed hysterically, falling to his knees and thumping the mud over and over. He only stopped when he saw the rear two-thirds of the thing emerge from the hole and stumble about slowly, only slightly hampered by the lack of its head. Damn guineapigs. In half an hour's time, the light had dropped to the level where he couldn't see the things to heat them up. He threw the microwave emitter at the last one, causing a small bang as the unit shorted out. By the time he got back to the base, he was feeling very drowsy and had fallen flat on his face in the mud a number of times. He slumped up against the hatch, sopping wet, trying to figure out just where he was. He edged his way around the base, falling over again; suddenly, he came up against a window. His revulsion gone, he peered in, fascinated by the sight of Diaz with his fist up Frascastoro's ass up to the elbow. He shook his head slowly, not comprehending why people behaved that way. He staggered around outside the base, looking for Tietze's window; it was covered from inside. Cursing, he crawled back to the lock, staggered inside, found his way to his bed and fell asleep, fully clothed. He didn't sleep well that night; he dreamed that he was being slowly lifted off the floor by thousands of tiny hooks lanced through his skin. He awoke several times in darkness, and fell asleep again moments later. The next afternoon, he awoke with a feeling of numbness throughout his body, and the feeling of stiff muscles; probably from yesterday's unusual exertion. He rolled off his bed, intending to land on his hands and knees; he couldn't bring his arms up in time, and he fell flat on his face. He managed to sit up next to his bed, and to his horror saw thousands of hair-thin, grey-green tendrils poking through the gaps in the weave of his clothing. He ripped his shirt off and tore at the plants that had grown into his skin last night. Each one came loose with a sucking sound, leaving a tiny wound. Soon, he was peppered with holes, oozing a translucent yellow pus. His skin had toughened, like the cover of a magazine that'd been left out in the rain. His alarm mounting slowly, he undid the button on his pants and yanked them off. The bright red wet stain didn't help calm him down. Moaning, he wrapped a towel around his waist and ran to the infirmary. Thankfully, Frascastoro wasn't there; Sachs was going through the drug cabinet, probably looking for the bottle he'd taken yesterday. She dropped her clipboard when she saw him, and she tried starting three or four sentences without success. `I got stuck outside in the rain last night.' he gestured mutely at his shoulder, which had moving lumps about the size of his little finger in several spots. She hesitated before touching him, and settled for grabbing the edge of the towel and leading over to an examination table. He sat up and stared in shock as she removed several dozen more filii with a pair of clamps, each one making a wet sound as it came free. `Yeah... I heard you coming in last night. You were screaming something about fucking a dead gopher.' he shuddered as she removed a strip of skin coated in something like an insect's casing that had grown into his forearm. `Well, I was pretty much out of it... AAAAHH!' He screamed as she lanced one of the lumps on his shoulder. The skin parted testily, revealing something with the consistency of a giant spermatazoa, slowly moving back and forth, trying to work its way back under his skin. Ashen-faced, she tried to tug it loose with the clamps; eventually, she settled for slicing it up in situ and removing the pieces. She repeated the process for several other lumps on his upper body, then, with obvious reservations, she unwound the towel from around his waist and cut free his underpants. All of his pubic hair had gone, eaten away. Pale pink lines, each about half a centimetre in diameter, wound their way from his belly, down his groin and between his legs, slowly pulsing, thick with fluid. The lump on the side of his penis hadn't gone down at all; it had turned black and was now home to something that looked like a segment of knotted rope. He could feel it; it was strange, but seeing something living inside the skin of his penis turned him on. Sachs was poking at the side with a scalpel, looking for a good point to open the skin and try to remove whatever it was; she stopped when she saw his arousal. `Are you okay?' she asked, in a `don't-fuck-with-me-or-i'll-just- walk-out-NOW' tone of voice. He waved her on. `Yeah, just get rid of it, hey?' Her face wry with resignation, she jabbed at the lump near the pouting end of his foreskin with the scalpel. The skin split open and the thing uncurled, revealing itself to be three or four pale grey worms, looking like animated tripe. They didn't wait to be removed, but started sliding down the shaft like snails. The feeling was indescribable; Chuan found he was getting more turned on by the minute. She applied some C-salve to the cut, which would seal it in a matter of minutes, wrapped some gauze around the base, and for a moment, they shared the same thought that this could turn into something more personal. He could imagine that she was about to lean over and kiss him when Frascastoro barged in and ruined the whole thing. His eyes lit up when he saw Chuan's erection; Sachs hurriedly wound the rest of the gauze around him and placed the towel over his lap. Some hours later, after the majority of the things growing into him had been removed, Chuan threw himself down on his bunk wearily. They'd scraped every centimetre of his skin, pumped vile chemicals down his throat and removed most of his hair. He felt like an old rag that someone had used to clean an entire fleet of starships, and yet he didn't feel any cleaner than before Frascastoro had started his work. He couldn't prove it, but he felt that a thin coating of slime had been spread over his entire body by the depraved old fart. He needed a shower. He stripped off his coveralls and examined the gauze wrapped around his dick. It was stained yellow on the side where he'd been injured, but it felt completely healed. He picked the bandage off until he reached the section where the pus had dried, stuck in a hardened mass. He went into the shower cubicle and, after using the water to wash some stray insects down the plug, he stepped under the spray and gingerly removed the rest of the bandage. His penis looked better, but it had come out of the ordeal with a decidedly left-hand bend. He soaped himself vigorously, washing away the slime, the soap stinging the hundreds of holes in his skin. Suddenly, he realised that Sachs was standing in his doorway, watching him. He stared back at her, the shower-water running down one side of his face, plastering wet hair over one eye. Finally, she spoke. `I... I just wanted to see if you were alright...' There was another awkward pause. He replied, `I'm fine, really.' She didn't reply, but instead entered the tiny bathroom and kneeled on the floor in the shower stall, the water soaking her coveralls. He watched with a mounting sense of unreality as she ran her hands up his now-hairless thighs, rubbing soap along the lines of his hips. She reached out with her tongue and touched his foreskin; despite all he'd been through in the past twelve hours, he responded, his erection rising unevenly. She grasped it eagerly and began slowly pumping it back and forth in her fist. Suddenly, he felt something stirring inside; not the familiar pre-orgasmic pulsing, but almost like the feeling he got just before voiding his bladder. Sensing this, she grasped his scrotum and tugged downwards insistently, sending shock-waves through his groin; she jerked faster and he fell back against the shower cubicle wall, his knees suddenly weak. She pushed back the loose skin of his dick, making the head stand out, and he felt something sliding down his urethra. It felt like he was pissing a string of rosary beads; then, they both saw the first three segments of some kind of caterpillar emerging from the end of his penis. They both stared as it waved about, then she leaned down, took the end segment between her teeth and slowly drew the whole thing out, segment by segment. The feeling of its legs as it tried to scrabble back up the channel was like pissing steel wool. She tossed her head back and, opening her jaw, threw the caterpillar across the room. He looked down and (afer a lingering glance on the thin coverall material that strained to cover her breasts) met her defiant grin as she ran her tongue around the head of his penis, catching the stringy mucus that the caterpillar's removal had produced. He smiled back. They were going to get on just fine. ú ùþ ú ú þù ú ÛÛÛÛÛÜÜÜÜþÜÜÜÜ ú ù ú ú ù ú ÜÜÜÜþÜÜÜÜÛÛÛÛÛ ±±±±ÛÛÛßÛ²ÝÛÝÛÛÝþ Üú úÜ þÝÛÛÝÛݲÛßÛÛÛ±±±± ±±±±²²²²²ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜþúÝ ù ù ÝúþÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ²²²²²±±±± ±±²²²²ÛÛßßÛßÝÛÛÛÛÛÝÜúþ þúÜÝÛÛÛÛÛÝßÛßßÛÛ²²²²±± ²²²²²Ûß þúßÞþßþþÜùþ þùÜþþßþÞßúþ ßÛ²²²²² ²²²²Ûß ú ù ù ú ßÛ²²²² ²²²ÛÝ ÝÛ²²² ²²²ÛÜ Phoenix Modernz Systems: 908/830-TANJ ÜÛ²²² ±²²²ÛÝ The Syndicate: 908/506-6892 ÝÛ²²²± ±±²²²ÛÜÜÜ VapourWare BBS: 61/3-429-8510 ÜÜÜÛ²²²±± ±±±²²²²²²ÛÜ Yellow Submarine: 404/552-5336 ÜÛ²²²²²²±±± ÛÛ±±±±±±²²²Û Urban Discipline / VaS World HQ : 313/464-1470 Û²²²±±±±±±ÛÛ ÛÛ±±±±±±²²²Û RipCo ][: 312/528-5020 Û²²²±±±±±±ÛÛ ±±±²²²²²²ÛÜ ÜÛ²²²²²²±±± ±±²²²ÛÜÜÜ ÜÜÜÛ²²²±± ±²²²ÛÝ ÝÛ²²²± ²²²ÛÜ ÜÛ²²² ²²²ÛÝ ÕÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ͸ ÝÛ²²² ²²²²Ûß ú ù ³ TANJ Mailing Address ³ ù ú ßÛ²²²² ²²²²²Ûß þúßÞþßþþÜùþ ³ PO Box 174 ³ þùÜþþßþÞßúþ ßÛ²²²²² ±±²²²²ÛÛßßÛßÝÛÛÛÛÛÝÜúþ ³ Seaside Hts, NJ ³ þúÜÝÛÛÛÛÛÝßÛßßÛÛ²²²²±± ±±±±²²²²²ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜþúÝ ù ³ 08751 ³ ù ÝúþÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ²²²²²±±±± ±±±±ÛÛÛßÛ²ÝÛÝÛÛÝþ Üú ÔÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ; úÜ þÝÛÛÝÛݲÛßÛÛÛ±±±± ÛÛÛÛÛÜÜÜÜþÜÜÜÜ ú ù ú tanj@pms.metronj.org ú ù ú ÜÜÜÜþÜÜÜÜÛÛÛÛÛ