Under a Starless Sky novel Chapter 65

The hairless one kissed her companion’s forehead and departed. The door opened for her and shut, double French hidden doors that slid open and shut. They opened just enough to allow her egress, but when fully opened, the opening was a circle. Shen saw it for what it was- a portal, hidden in the wall. The hairy one tapped the wall with a glass.

“Attentive little fellow, aren’t you,” the hairy one said. With tweezers she opened an exchange lock, picked up a specimen cup, placed this inside the lock, closed the lock. A push of a button caused the inner door of the exchange lock to spring open. “Take your clothes off. Put it in the bin here.”

Shen looked at her, as directly as one could a giant without getting hung up on her lips that had more than a hint of a mustache. Hair or not, they were solid, puffy, stretched hearts shape, deep red, hyper feminine lips- the cliché pouty, sex doll lips.

“No,” Shen said.

From the other side of the container Arne and Jerica were telling her to let Shen alone. She tapped the glass and their voices were muted. She rested her head and arms on the table, maintaining eye contact.

“There are lots of ways for me to get what I want,” she said. “Negative and positive punishment. I could just sleep you, then man handle you. You wouldn’t learn respect that way, so I prefer not to sleep you. I could torture or kill your friends. Might still do that, but first I must have a better understanding of your relationship with them. I would hate to kill your masters only to find out I did you a favor. I am bigger, stronger, smarter. In the end, I will win. Accept that. Give me what I want.”

“You have everything; you don’t need me,” Shen said.

She seemed to consider that. “Speculation. Assumption. Fairly reasonable assessment. Minimum effective population size to maximize human diversity is approximately 10,000 people, with caveats. My present sample size is five hundred thousand. That is sufficient to wipe out all life on the surface and start over from scratch, and still arrive at a future population of about twenty billion, including 7 basic human racial types, 20 tangential races, and unlimited hybridization potential. You are sufficiently compatible with the human niches on the surface that you can breed and introduce a new line, but sufficiently divergence that I can identify you as not from here. It could take me a life time to sort out your particular adaptive advantage. Ideally, I would like to have a female one of you to keep the line relatively pure. I have potential mates that should be neutral enough to carry the predominance of your genes forwards without too much loss of information. Now. Take off your clothes.”

“No,” Shen said.

“Interesting,” she said. “I am being very straight forward with you. That doesn’t alleviate your concerns?”

“Part of the problem is the theoretical delusion that science is curative- that enough knowledge, enough information, the right kind of facts will bring about the resolutions of life’s doubts, the resolution of all distress,” Shen quoted. “You have given me nothing.”

She smiled. “Intelligence. Nice.”

“Pseudo intelligence. I read a book. I quoted Carl Whitaker,” Shen said.

“Academic,” she said. “Impressive. Take your clothes off.”

“No,” Shen said.

“Very well,” she said. “We’ll do it the hard way.”

The giantess stood up. She went to the door. It opened for her, but she shut it with a wave of her hand. She touched a pad beside the door, and the circular arch illuminated, and when the door opened for her, the space was illuminated with a moon-glow on water sheen. She walked in and disappeared. Arne and crew, who were now in the lower level saw her arrive by portal in the room below Shen, which was locked to them. Shen did not see her arrive in the room below him, but he inferred as much when she came up the stairs. She was still a giantess, only, instead of 36 feet tall, she was 12 feet tall. She was also naked, blue from head to toe, her hair fiery red, her eyes aglow with a fierce orange light, as if stoked by burning coals on the other side; she had four arms. One of her hands hovering over the pad unlocked the door and she entered the compartment with Shen.

“Take off your clothes,” she said. Her voice was different, same- but filtered, modulated, like many voices starting separate but ending as one.

“No,” Shen said.