"Land of Plenty"

Posted by Menagerie on July 23, 2004 at 17:18:17:

LAND OF PLENTY

“Aw, Daddy!” the auburn-haired teenager protested, hurling her books against the bed; they bounced, floated a bit, then gradually drifted down and nestled into the fluffy quilt.
“You can’t take them with us, honey,” said her father patiently. “They’re not allowed on Nesterok. The local ecology is very fragile.”
Amanda folded her arms over her tiny breasts, kicked her feet out from under herself and launched herself backwards in the direction of the bed…first horizontally, cutting through the light air like a hovercraft, then sinking slowly to the quilt. “It isn’t fair!” the sloe-eyed girl pouted as she settled on her back, her long legs splayed apart. “Why do we have to go to dumb old Nesterok, anyway?”
“Because they ordered me to,” her father muttered. Nesterok hadn’t been his choice, either; very strange place, three months from here even on Einstein-Rosen Distortion, close to the cool glow of the dying star Aldorr. The Federation had only made contact a decade ago, found a tiny world with sentient beings, few variations on flora and fauna…and a peculiar food chain. “It’s only for two years, and then we’ll be able to take an Earthside post. But the Service makes me go where I’m assigned. We’ll leave your pets with your uncle.
He glanced over at the terrarium; it filled a full wall in Amanda’s bedroom. The odd little lizards stared back at him, their tongues flicking. They’d come from all over the galaxy; his daughter’s collection. Some had two eyes, some four, some more; they were in a rainbow of brilliant hues and ranged from tiny to nearly a meter across. “Besides, the Nesteroki wouldn’t like you keeping those as pets,” the ambassador added; “They might think of it as slavery…”
A small planet, but so dense its gravitational pull approached that of Terra. Life teemed on Nesterok, but in so few forms—just a few types of flowers, a few insects, a few fish-type creatures and winged beasts. A few mammals, and then, the Nesteroki. Scaly, eyes set back, forked tongues, webbed feet. They greeted the ambassador and his entourage as the warp craft descended from curved space and descended to the rocky ground. The human visitors would need neither pressure suits nor air supply. “Quite breathable, Pollack,” the head of the Interplanetary Diplomatic Corps had assured the ambassador. “A little more oxygen than you’re used to, but that’s no problem, what?”
They had been going over local customs. “What do they eat?” Pollack asked.
The boss pursed his lips, grinned, and triggered the laser viewer. Pollack watched for a while, then, “They eat people?”
“Certainly look like people, don’t they?” his superior laughed. “Fancy, they all look like young women! But they’re not; just a freak of nature. They’re as dumb as cows, and reach physical maturity in less than two years. They reproduce through broken parthenogenesis, which results in genetic variation—a pale one could have offspring black as coal, and a two-meter monster could give birth to a beast half her size.”
“And all female?” asked the ambassador; he watched what appeared to be a hundred or more naked girls, full-bodied and voluptuous, contentedly eating out of feedbunks and ambling in disoriented fashion around a pen, a languorous Nesteroki keeping a cold, reptilian eye on them from a stool in the center of the yard.
“Well, there’s only one sex,” the director answered, “so if you prefer to think of them as female, then female they shall be. Now, you’ve been trained for this job, Pollack, and have sampled all manner of alien cuisine; don’t embarrass us the first time they offer you a steak, will you?”
Pollack thought about Greta and Amanda. “How safe will my wife and daughter be?” he wondered.
“Safe as you or I, old man,” the boss responded. “Don’t worry, Pollack; they can tell the difference. They rather seem to fancy belonging to the Federation; we’ve got something for them, and they for us…”
What Nesterok had was uranium, and a lot of it. Mining crews had already contracted with the Nesteroki to swap the valuable ore for finished goods from the Federation’s forty-score planets. The Nesteroki had no trees, and were crazy about wood; even the ship that had carried Pollack and his family and staff across the breathtaking expanse of universe was loaded with sealed crates, marked to show they contained furniture and other household goods. Work crews were unloading them as Pollack shook hands with the Nesteroki before him; its grip was powerful, its scaly skin slick. “Greetings, ambassador!” it exclaimed; perfect English. “Welcome to our world! I am Sorgg Gnath, what you would call Minister of External Affairs. Your quarters are ready; at your leisure, our monarch will receive you.”
“Allow me to present my family, Mex Sorgg,” said Pollack, using the local honorific. “My wife, Greta; my daughter, Amanda…” The lizard man clasped the hand of petite, blonde Greta, who smiled; then of Amanda, who bravely resisted the urge to yank her hand away. Its face was impassive as it repeated, “Charmed,” to both women.
“And this,” the ambassador went on, “is my deputy, Mandi Hogan.” Tall and slender, the bespectacled Mandi extended a hand. “Yes,” buzzed Sorgg, “good.” It paused. “This evening, I’m sure you were notified, there will be a reception,” it continued. “All may attend. Yes?”
Pollack swallowed, glanced at his daughter. He’d been putting off the talk about the local cuisine. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Delighted.”
Well, the food really didn’t look like anything in particular. Chunks of meat skewered with a pale orange vegetable. “I do hope you’re not disappointed by the lack of variety, Ambassador,” Sorgg said suavely. “You must be accustomed to rather elaborate fare back home. Here, our diets are quite simple, but satisfying.”
They were in an ornate, rectangular hall, with a high ceiling, but tables and seats of various heights; many of the Nesteroki ran to two or even three meters high, but others were almost tiny. Pollack thought about what his boss had said about the “livestock”; the genetic code that had developed here, he decided, favored few species but many variations. He had met several of the small planet’s leaders when they entered the hall; they greeted him formally, and his wife, daughter and aide—lasciviously? If Pollack didn’t know better, he’d swear the beings were ogling them; hard to tell with those hard, impassive saurian features. Like a lizard’s, the Nestoroki Sorgg’s tongue flicked; it gobbled another bite of the meat.
Pollack hadn’t found it bad; kind of sweet, actually. His wife and daughter picked at their plates. “Come, come; eat hearty!” cried the Nesteroki Minister.
“What kind of meat is this?” asked Tiffannee, taking a bite; her pug nose wrinkled as she chewed.
“We call it the shrah,” said Sorgg. “It is the only beast with mammalian characteristics on Nesterok. Gives live birth, suckles its young.” It glanced at Pollack, its vacant eyes wide; the Ambassador met the questioning look and shook his head. Sorgg went on smoothly, “We can discuss the shrah at another time, perhaps.”
Greta nibbled on a bit of the pink, soft meat. “I rather like it,” she announced. “Perhaps we could bring some of it back with us…or the beasts, themselves. Has anyone thought of that?”
Pollack hesitated; his host jumped in. “Our creatures must stay here, for now,” Sorgg asserted. “This planet, relative to yours, is not very productive, and we need all of our breeding stock to survive.”
Amanda thought about her pets back home. “Can we visit a farm, Daddy?” she pleaded.
“Dr. Hogan and I will be going to a farm in a few local days,” Pollack answered; Hogan, sitting next to him and immersed in her notes, absent-mindedly nodded. “Then, we’ll see...”
The shuttle carried them across windswept wasteland, not a sign of plant or animal life. Boulders had been sandblasted smooth by eons of wind; the dust was a dull rose color. “There are but a few million of us,” Sorgg told its human guests, “so even our planet, a few hundred of your kilometers across, affords us the opportunity to separate Nesteroki from beast. Besides—” as they settled down into a landing area, surrounded by paddocks, “many of our people object to the smell. The shrah are not efficient users of nutrition; many of them in confinement produce a waste problem. Part of this land is diverted to crops—the kandar of last night’s meal, and a few others—and a grain, rich in carbohydrates, that finishes the shrah out to slaughter weight.”
As they clambered out, a few Nesteroki greeted them. One nearly 250 cm specimen, his scaly skin a bright scarlet, looked at Hogan and buzzed a few words to Sorgg; the Minister answered in bullet-shaped tones, and the worker laughed, a braying sound like that of a mechanical crow, from deep inside its gullet. Hogan turned coolly toward it…and spoke in Nesteroki; confused, the worker backed away, bowing.
“I didn’t know you had learned that,” said Pollack out of the side of his mouth, glancing at his assistant as they shook the claws of the other workers. “What did it say?”
She kept shaking claws without looking at him. “What do you think it said? It asked the Minister if I was their lunch break.”
“And I told it to mind its manners,” Sorgg jumped in. “We’ll have no affronts to our guests.”
“I’m not offended, Mex Sorgg,” she answered brightly; long, lanky, redheaded, in an issue Federation jumpsuit, she looked every bit the professional. “I asked for this assignment. Fascinating!” She looked around at the silos, the grain bins, fields of irrigated crops under gigantic domes…and out to the west, in the glare of the red star, the feedlot.
Pollack didn’t know Dr. Hogan; they’d spoken little during the journey. He was a career diplomat, she, a social scientist. She seemed to have political connections; the IDC chief had informed him certain aspects of her work were sensitive, not to be interfered with. Mostly, she pored over notes, ledgers and statistics…They walked the short way; the pungent odor drifted toward them, full force by the time they reached the fence. “Watch your step,” said their host, pointing a claw in the direction of piles of feces.
It was disconcerting, Pollack realized, to be surrounded by what appeared to be dozens of nude teen-age girls and young women…some of them walking up to him, staring dully into his face and then turning away, or brushing their naked flanks against him to get his attention. These were mostly of a dark flesh-tone and uniform size, 140 cm or so. “We have selectively bred the shrah throughout our history, Ambassador,” said Sorgg over the deafening cacophony, the breathy whines and cries of the beasts. “But due to their method of reproduction, they spontaneously mutate into an array of sizes, colors and shapes. The beasts you see here were selected from different herds; our people find the flesh from this variety particularly palatable.” A wide-eyed blonde shrah, huge breasts heaving as she chewed a mouthful of the grain, sidled up to Pollack, looked directly into his eyes. “Hello, there!” he smiled, then realized he was talking to stupid livestock; the yellow-haired beast continued looking at him, then wandered off, her plump buttocks wiggling.
Pollack watched the backside of the shrah as she jounced toward the feedbunk and joined a couple of dozen others; despite the unpleasant aroma of the feedyard, he felt a tightness in the nether region of his jumpsuit. Any one of them could physically pass for human; all had exaggeratedly curvy legs, arms and torsos, and enormous bosoms. Pollack had brought a supply of Libido Suppressors, but had put off taking them; Greta would just have to understand, he decided. If he spent much time around the shrah without something to dull his sexual drive, he’d be awfully uncomfortable during his stint here.
“The shrah are nurtured on their parents’ milk for…about half of one of your solar years,” Sorgg was continuing as they walked toward a bare metal building, the creatures continuing to bounce around them. “Why do they keep coming up to us?” asked the Ambassador. “Is it because we look like them?”
“No,” Hogan answered quickly. “It’s because they want food. They’re docile beasts, not especially curious.”
“Correct, Dr. Hogan,” said the Minister; it opened a gate, and they stepped through. A few shrah leaned up over the fence, their breasts pinned against the piping, then turned and waddled back toward their feedbunk. “Then,” Sorgg went on, “they consume kandar as they grow to full size—another half-year—and finish out on grain. Kill weights are not uniform, since they are of many sizes; this group will stay on feed 120 of your days, and will be slaughtered at about 65 kilograms.” It opened the door. “Slaughter is done here, on site; carcasses are shipped to our city for further processing.”
As the shrah were herded into the building, Nesterok workers prepared them for slaughter. Body hair was removed through some sort of sonic device; the shrah watched placidly, some chewing their last meals, as tufts of their hair fell to the floor.
Then, a worker pointed a small device at one of them; it lit up green. “Genetic analysis,” Sorgg informed them. “The shrah mutate so rapidly, some are not edible by Nesteroki. Those are separated out and destroyed.” As if in demonstration, the next—brunette, short and stocky—produced a red light; she was led away, placidly. “Incineration, in the next room,” said the Minister.
Pollack and Hogan watched—he grimly, she studiously taking notes—as, one by one, dozens of shrah met their doom. Workers stunned each of the creatures, shackled their ankles and hung them up by their heels; throats were cut, torsos eviscerated, heads removed. Pollack blinked at the sight: he was surrounded by what appeared to be headless, naked young women, gutted and hanging upside-down from a pulley channel that extended the length of a room the size of a football pitch. He swallowed. “They are not people,” Hogan said, a shade softer than her usual severe, lecturing tones. “They’re animals.” The Minister was looking at him; no emotion on that scaly face, but the voice was sympathetic. “Shall we go, Ambassador?” it said. “I think we’ve seen all there is to see…”
That evening, it was Pollack’s turn to pick at his food, while Greta and Amanda dug in. “What a day!” his wife said as she cut into a slice of shrah loin and popped it into her mouth. “It’s amazing what they’ve done here, with so little to work with. We saw stores, factories, schools, churches…did you know the Nesteroki live to over 300 years old?”
“But they hardly have any babies,” Amanda chimed in. “Their population has been going down for centuries. They say it’s because they don’t have enough food—may I have seconds, please?” she asked their servant, handing the little, meter-high Nesteroki her plate; it took the platter and turned back to the kitchen, without a sound.
“This food is so good!” laughed Greta. “Shrah is so rich; I’m going to have to go on a diet.” The good-looking, fortyish blonde looked anxiously at her husband. “Do you think I’m getting fat?” He took in her compact, well-constructed frame; she was solid, no fat. “No, dear,” he muttered, “you look wonderful.”
“Is everything all right, Daddy?” asked Amanda; the servant laid another serving of loin in front of her. “Did you see the farm?”
“Yes,” he said, cautiously nibbling on a bit of meat. “Very impressive…”
The first of the dreams came that night. Pollack was back in the big building, the endless pulley overhead, the workers droning in their strange tongue. Shrah after shrah was hung up to be slaughtered…but these were not shrah; there was intelligence, pleading in their eyes. These were women; they looked at him. “Please,” they seemed to be saying. “Please.” He was unable to move; each life was snuffed, each body split open, each head severed. Then came the next; naked like the others, but taller, more slender. The workers fastened the chain around her ankles, then backed away; she looked at him from the bloodstained floor, a hook above her head, tears in her eyes. “Daddy!” she screamed. “Daddy!”
He woke up.
A month later, Pollack was haggard. “I’m sorry, old boy,” the distorted image of the IDC boss said over the video, the signal jerking and bending over the portable unit. “If it’s any consolation, your predecessor had the same problem. Buck up; they’re treating you right, aren’t they?”
They were, but Pollack’s paranoia grew. The blank features of each Nesteroki consultant, merchant, government official and servant seemed to be a leer; whenever one looked at his wife or daughter, he could picture it hunched over the nude, roasted body of Greta or Amanda, sawing into her flesh, devouring her…He was losing weight; kandar didn’t provide much nourishment, and he shunned the shrah.
On the other hand, Greta and Amanda couldn’t get enough of it. Greta had always stayed in shape, working out, watching her weight; now, her tummy had a little roll, her hips were a little wider. Even Amanda, the teenager who could seemingly eat nonstop without gaining a pound…she had shrah morning, noon and night (just a fourteen Terran-hour day, a lot of eating) and was getting leggier, hippier, bustier. She showed up one day in a swimsuit, on her way to use the pool in their quarters. There was so much more of her now. “How do I look?” she cried proudly, her hair whirling slowly in the 0.8 gravity as she gyrated to show off her full bottom, soft belly, rounded thighs…Pollack smiled weakly, “Wonderful, honey,” and thought again of the building on the farm…
The nightmares continued. Amanda and Greta together now, screaming, naked, hanging by their heels. Greta swings as she fights, her breasts swaying; Amanda bucks, tries to lift herself, falls back, sobbing. A Nesteroki stands before them. It points a machine at them.
The light is green
Meanwhile, Mandi Hogan was filling the void left by the Ambassador’s discomfiture. She was forever asking questions of their hosts, in Nesteroki; Pollack had barely picked up a few words of the raspy native language. She spent a great deal of time at the spacedocks, as load after load of wooden items came in, and uranium ore went out. She issued progress reports in his name; he reviewed them in a perfunctory way at first, then ignored them altogether. She had taken over; Pollack didn’t care. He wanted out.
But he couldn’t ignore everything. Discrepancies were showing up at the docks; warehouses should have been full of furniture, full of lumber. Complaints were forwarded his way from Terra; he brought it to the Minister’s attention. Sorgg was impassive as always; Pollack said, “I’m worried, Mex. Could unscrupulous business practices jeopardize future uranium shipments?”
So they checked it out. They went to the spacedocks, examined the books. The Minister flashed his badge; crates were opened. All were full of wooden goods. “Perhaps they are disappearing into the black market,” said the Minister. Pollack looked around at the Nesteroki, whispered, “I have a suggestion…” It took some persuasion, but Sorgg finally agreed.
They waited in an armed hovercraft twenty kilometers from the spaceport, the Minister, Pollack and a pilot, watching the remote scanner. The screen revealed a cargo ship rising vertically from the dock. Sorgg spoke to the pilot. “We’ll follow at a distance.” It headed west, toward the farm. Sorgg gave a command; the pilot spoke into his communicator. “It’s ordering them to land,” said the Minister.
Instead, the craft sped up, shot past the farm. Sorgg continued to croak orders in Nesteroki; the hovercraft easily caught the lumbering cargo vessel. The pilot repeated the orders, then suddenly turned and shouted something at the Minister.
“Down!” cried Sorgg, and they hit the deck as a blinding flash filled the cabin; the hovercraft rocked and tumbled, then stabilized. They stared out; the cargo ship was gone. Disintegrated. Wreckage was tumbling Nesterokward.
Said the Minister, “I’m ordering a full investigation.” Pollack returned to his quarters.
The next day, his daughter disappeared.
“Our search crews are everywhere, Ambassador,” Sorgg told the Pollacks; it was late in the Nesteroki night at the Minister’s headquarters. “We have infrared sweepers, genetic identifiers. We will find her.”
Pollack was distraught while his tearful wife tried to soothe him. “You know perfectly well what’s happened, Mex,” he said hoarsely. “My daughter is in some Nesteroki’s larder somewhere.”
“That is not so, sir,” it responded. “Please calm yourself; we are doing all we can. Your superiors have been notified and will send assistance, but it will be a long time in arrival. I have arranged a security force for you; they are at your disposal.”
“At my disposal?” he snapped back.
“Certainly, Ambassador. They will take you anywhere, to assuage your concerns. The Monarch’s facilities, if you so desire.”
Pollack stood. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “I know where I want to go.”
A lone Nesteroki piloted their small cruiser to the farm. “She always wanted to come here,” said Pollack.
“Why wouldn’t you let her?” asked Greta, puzzled.
“I’ll explain later.” He directed the guard to open the gate. “Stay here.”
The shrah were asleep, curled on their sides in the coral-colored dust. Pollack pointed to the big metal building; the guard headed toward it, unlocked the door. Pollack steeled himself, went inside, and reached into a pocket. He held a genetic analysis device.
Inside were neat, silent rows of shrah, that day’s kill. Decapitated, dressed out. He pointed at the first. Green. The second. Green. Green. Green. Green…A second row…
Red.
The carcass was long and slender, evidence of recent weight gain—full thighs, bulging buttocks. Still, they all looked that way—they were fattened for slaughter. There was one other way to know.
Amanda didn’t know her father knew about the tattoo. It was tiny, in a very private place. He parted the carcass’ legs, looked at the inner right thigh.
Not there.
Now he was confused. The Nesteroki were meticulous about their food supply; any unsatisfactory shrah would have been culled out. He pointed at a second carcass. Red. He looked. No tattoo.
“I can help you find what you seek,” said the voice behind him. He whirled. Mandi Hogan.
Holding a laser pistol. She smiled.
“It surely is dreadful, what has happened to your daughter, Ambassador,” she purred. “Killed and eaten by those evil Nesteroki. You can rest assured, the guilty will be punished.” And she giggled.
“What have you done with her?” he cried.
Hogan pointed to the far end of the room, rows and rows of gutted—shrah?. “One of those, over there,” she responded airily. “Oh, you should have seen it, Ambassador; she kicked and cried, said her Daddy would get us.”
“Us?” he repeated.
Hogan came a step closer. Sweat shone on her forehead in the harsh artificial light; her red hair was wildly askew. Through her glasses, her eyes glittered.
“What did you think I was doing out there on the spacedocks, ‘Boss’?” she asked. “What you see before you are female humans, mixed in with today’s shrah slaughter. The native livestock simply do not reproduce rapidly enough, even for the few millions on Nesterok. I’m paid quite well for each shipment.”
He rose slowly to one knee, his eyes locked on her; she circled around him, the pistol trained on him. “I’ve been studying this culture since contact. When I learned of the shrah, I made some inquiries; made a few deals.” A noise behind her; a scream. Hogan smiled. “My business partners here are adding your wife to the daily kill as we speak. Oh, that green light-red light thing. The Nesteroki are paranoid about their food supply, much as some people back home are. No, Greta’s flesh will not be noticed, it will not sicken the Nesteroki; just more meat for the stockpile.” She raised the gun. “And you, Ambassador, are destined for the incinerator. I have the qualifications, I know the language, and nobody else wants to come here; I’ll get your job. And when my tour of duty ends, I’ll be rich. Thank you,” she hissed, “for your assistance.”
Pollack lunged for her, found empty air. He grabbed again; claws pinned him down. He closed his eyes, waiting for the searing pain through his skull…
“My dear Ambassador!” exclaimed Sorgg Gnath. “I am so terribly sorry!”
Pollack opened his eyes. Mandi Hogan was sprawled, senseless, on the floor. The Minister held a stunner; a cadre of Nesteroki was behind him.
The story was gradually pieced together for the grief-stricken Ambassador by Sorgg. One of Hogan’s Nesteroki cohorts, he was told, worked in Sorgg’s office; it alerted the docks to the raid. They had gotten the drop on Pollack’s guard at the farm, had easily subdued Greta. Then how had they known to come to the farm? “I learned of your discomfort,” said the Minister, “from your superiors.”
Greta and Amanda were retrieved from the slaughterhouse, shipped back home. Other bodies awaited identification from Terra. Hogan faced Nesteroki justice. “It will be swift,” said Sorgg, “and certain.”
Still dazed and sedated, Pollack prepared to board the return ship to Terra. At port, the Minister gravely placed a claw on his shoulder. “Our sympathies on your loss, Ambassador,” the Minister said. “I hope this terrible misfortune does not affect relations. Nesterok believes it has much to offer the Federation.”
Pollack nodded, turned and left Nesterok for good. Sorgg watched the starcraft blink out of sight, then headed for the detention center. To Cell 48.
“You fool,” it told Mandi Hogan, in Nesteroki. “The entire operation could have been lost.”
Disheveled, defeated, her hands bound before her, Hogan’s eyes were cast downward. “Why did you betray me? There was no reason…”
“For the same reason I ordered the loaded cargo ship destroyed,” it said. “This has become very sloppy. Your superiors knew of the discrepancies; they were in Pollack’s log. Better to blame it all on you and say the case has been solved. I have other operatives; they will take your place. The shipments of human women will continue.” Its blank eyes looked directly at her; she bit her lip. “In fact, I now have one more I wasn’t counting on. Guard!”
A hulking Nesteroki appeared. Sorgg said, “Take her to the farm for processing.” It paused. “And deliver the meat to my private stock.” Hogan glared at it; as always, the face showed no emotion. “Dr. Hogan,” it said as the guard seized her and prepared to lead her away, “ours is a poor land. One can never have enough shrah.”