Chosen by the Alien Above Part 4: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance Serial (3 page)

He loved the drama of unneeded complexity.

“Ready?” asked Noah.

“As I'll ever be.”

Maybe it was the pizza, or maybe it was a quick acclimation, but my belly felt ten times more settled this time around.

He held the laden spoon between two fingers and pushed it at me. His fingers let go and my eyes shot down. A lifetime of experience telling me the spoon was headed for the floor. I looked back up to track it as it glided toward me.

It was unreal. I caught it just before it smacked into my chest. I didn’t want white splotches on my perfectly purple suit.

Not those white splotches at least.

The ice cream had little flecks of tan in it. The beans. This guy knew good ice cream.

“Here's where it gets tricky,” he said. He cracked the top on a plastic bottle. A fine mist burst outward and disappeared as it dissipated into the air.

“Ready?”

I nodded, despite being anything of the sort.

He spun the lid off and pumped the bottle in my direction. A long tendril of liquid snaked out of the opening. He capped the top with his thumb and cut the stream. The shifting rope drifted toward me. The surface wobbled, broke apart, and rejoined as it closed the distance. It headed for my chest. Too low.

I tapped the ceiling and drifted down.
 

There. Closer. Inches away.

I lined up and hoped for the best. I opened my mouth as the leading edge hit my lips. Tiny dark bubbles splashed off and drifted away. The writhing snake hit the back of my throat with a chill. I kept my mouth open, scooping up the remaining liquid.

I wavered or the liquid did because half of it splashed my face. A little bit up my nose.

After sucking in as much as I could, I finished with the spoonful of ice cream.

The sweet, frozen richness was a welcome reminder of familiar things. Of life back home and the simple pleasures that were so easily forgotten.

I sent the spoon drifting back to Noah and finished gulping down my first taste of an entirely literal root beer float.

It took another ten bites for us to perfect the system. For most of it to end up in my mouth instead of around it. I wanted to continue improving, to verify the mechanics and especially to get a few more delicious mouthfuls. But I didn't want to be greedy.

Pleasures great and small were meant to be shared.

He took a number of turns and didn't miss a drop. The few errant globs that tried to sneak away were quickly tracked down and swallowed. It struck me again how he moved. He swam like a dolphin in the water. He flew like a hawk in the wind.

He actually did those things.

He kicked his legs like a tail and held a hand upright above his back, like a fin cutting water. He flapped his arms and pressed them to his sides like a gull spearing into the water.

It would've been enough for the metaphor to have worked. For his grace to match theirs. But it was more than that. Because even in silly mimicry, he moved more fluidly than any animal on Earth.

His beauty wounded me, like a spear through the heart. The clenching ache was real.

I needed space.

That phrase didn't have the same weight in the current environment, but it still applied. I needed to turn my brain off with sleep. Let my subconscious chew on everything I’d learned. Maybe morning would bring an answer.

I started to fake a yawn and then a real one took over. I rubbed my eyes and suddenly realized I was exhausted. An afternoon nap wasn't enough by half.

“Is our date over so soon?” His joyful expression foundered.

“This was never a date, Mr. Sinclair.”

“What am I going to do all night? I was sure we’d be engaged in penetrating conversation.”

“Daylight hours are for interviews, Mr. Sinclair. Nighttime hours are for sleeping.”

He shuttered.

Why?

Was he that disappointed not to round home base on our first not–date?

“Nights are cold and weightless in space,” he said. “This one could be hot and heavy.”

Despite the longing between my legs, I shook my head. “I’m sorry to be a party pooper, but I need to decompress.”

He bit his lip
 
and nodded. “Your will is my command.”

“I may put that to the test, Mr. Sinclair.”

“I hope you do, Ms. Gabarro.”

He kicked off the back wall and drifted over. His thick arms curled around me. The magnetic attraction between us strengthened with proximity.

“Please give me the pleasure of taking you to bed, Ms. Gabarro.”

He grinned and waited, baiting me to make his meaning clear. “I will accept an escort to my door. Lord knows I would never make it alone.”

“So I'm an escort now?”

“Only for certain services, Mr. Sinclair.”

“You do understand that I only accept one form of payment?”

“You do understand that I could never be bought?”

“Are you always so feisty?” he asked.

“Sugar makes me crazy.”

“You
make me crazy, Ms. Gabarro.”

Gah. Why did he have to make it so hard? So hard to think straight.

“To my room, sir. And only one of us will be staying.”

“I may part with you at the door, but I'll join you in your dreams.”

The symbiote Rama Chandriss rose to consciousness. That was the name of his last host and it still held resonance. Rama had forgotten his first name long ago. It was no longer important. He wondered if he might someday come to think of himself as Noah Sinclair.
 

Eight years after this latest Joining and the Rama pattern still felt more dominant. The symbiote shared Rama Chandriss for hundreds of years, so it was to be expected.

The symbiote knew the instant awareness settled that his host hadn't slept in weeks. Their bio-electrics functioned below optimal levels. Rama slowed their heart and measured its pacing to metronomic perfection. He routed excessive triglycerides to the appropriate waste glands. An even more excessive level of testosterone production required an adjustment to the hypothalamus and pituitary glands.

The human showed signs of being in heat. Of the mating rut. Rama knew such things were necessary, for him more than most, but he still found it to be distasteful. He would surrender to the primitive lust of a necessary mating. His thinking matrices could be occupied elsewhere while the host’s body completed the cycle.

Rama paused for a moment in reflection as other parts of his consciousness carried on with the routine maintenance of the host.

He marveled for a moment that he had begun to identify himself as he. As having a male sexual identity. Rama Chandriss had no sexual aspect. The being he was before Rama had no physical aspect at all. So sexual differentiation was even more removed from his psyche.

It was a good sign.

The deepening integration with the host was going as planned, despite the growing resistance. They all resisted. They all surrendered. It had always been so and the symbiote would ensure the cycle continued.

His existence and the fate of his kind depended on it.

Rama had successfully halted the aging process in the host, so time was somewhat irrelevant. In the earth man's temporal reference, the symbiote and Noah Sinclair had been joined for nearly eight years. It was a single flame on the face of the sun for Rama’s kind. Time was a malleable concept for those that could effectively live forever.

The statement required the “effectively” qualifier because they had not solved the problem of degenerative signal loss over long spans of time. They had also not solved the problem of pattern procreation. Even when his people existed, the mechanism for electromagnetic reproduction was lost in the shrouding mists of time. If it ever existed.

Both problems were solved with this host. A host provided the organizing focus that was required to regenerate. Rama was particularly pleased with this host and its member species as it also provided the opportunity for pattern procreation.

The eventual Parting always killed the host. It was an accepted necessity. The cost was inconsequential compared to his continuing consciousness.

He expanded his thoughts into the station. The transformation was going well. The y
ushan
continued to grow and cover the station. When the transformation was complete, this station would no longer be the crude assemblage of metal and glass it once was. It would be a living organism ready to fulfill its role in the survival of his kind.

A nursery was needed. The y
ushan
would transform the station into the perfect growing culture for his offspring. And so his kind would rise again.

The aching vibration of his eternal loneliness disrupted his organized thought patterns. It had been too long since he shared a connection with one of his own kind.
 

The
Oberrai
hunted them into extinction. Only he escaped, weakened and on the verge of disintegration. In his degenerated state, he’d barely managed the Joining. The hibernating state of the host was the only reason it succeeded. In short order, Rama had reorganized the host’s biological processes. He cured a condition that would have made the host useless. It was one among many trivial tasks that every new home required.

Over time the host grew more robust. Rama expected gratitude, but the emotions he detected while submerged didn't fit the pattern. He still had much to learn about the species. There would be time.
 

Seeding the billions of females below would take time. Once other patterns emerged, the work could be shared and the inevitable conversion accelerated.

One thing puzzled him.

His deepening integration was meeting a building resistance in the host. All his experience informed him that acceptance increased over time. Yet, the human mind fought him, and with increasing vigor. The fact that he had not emerged in weeks was a disturbing trend that needed further categorization. He partitioned his mind and constructed a thought matrix for the task.
 

With that started, he pushed further out…

And encountered the female. The one he’d brought to him. She was the final experiment. The final test confirmation that this species was a suitable brood cocoon. His time in this latest Joining told him it was likely.

Told him that his long search had finally come to an end.

The humans below were a small sacrifice to guarantee the continuation of his kind. He knew they would agree if they could conceive reality at the level he did.

Just as the
Oberrai
obliterated his kind. So too would he do what self-preservation required.

He rose from the restoration pod the human insisted on using. That old habit would die in time, as would Noah and the resistance he offered.

Without conscious thought, Rama dissolved the gray
yushan
covering their skin. He disliked the additional constriction. Being clothed in a host was distasteful enough.

The cool station air kissed their bare skin. His pattern lifted. Exposure was marginally freeing. He brought more of his focus onto the female.

Her bio-electrics indicated a sleep state. It raised Rama’s vibrations thinking that someday soon another would emerge inside her.

He would no longer be alone in the universe.

The symbiote Rama Chandriss exited his quarters and barely glanced at the growling mechanical construction in the corridor. His host called it a dog, but the name didn’t match the biological creatures below that carried the same label.

He would have deactivated the primitive AI years ago, but it seemed to bring pleasure to the host. In the early days of the Joining, the integration was tenuous. Rama thought he would lose the host a number of times.

It would have meant the end of his existence too.

The host was much stronger now. Perhaps it was time to reconsider the dog's future. Rama cordoned another thought pattern and resolved to check in later when a decision had been reached.

He strolled down the hall with just a few stumbles. Host integration was a difficult process. It had taken him hundreds of years to fully integrate with the being Rama Chandriss. Once total integration was achieved, the regenerative process was complete and the host’s body discarded. Rama waited for the Parting with as much impatience as his eons-old mind could experience.

His current host had nowhere near the complexity of Rama, yet he knew it would still require time.
 

The symbiote arrived at the female’s door and swished himself in with a thought. He had no need for key cards or the station’s feeble AI. From his perspective, there was no difference between the dog and the station. To an ant crawling on the ground, the bird in tree was unimaginably high. But to a traveler of the stars, both were so low as to be indistinguishable.

He approached the bed.

The female slept fitfully. She tossed and turned like the bed was made of cactus needles instead of
yushan
. He affirmed his findings. She had the same condition his host had eight years ago. Rama fell sorry for the primitive life fighting to grow in her brain. It had no inkling that its growth would soon kill the host and itself in the process.
 

None of his kind could remember, but perhaps they once began in much the same way.

He extended appreciation. The growth in her head weakened the electromagnetic bonds to the flesh. It would make it easier to seed her with a shard of his consciousness. Yet, he also knew that further opening was required.

Less than a decade of pattern regeneration had stabilized his matrices. But he had not yet recovered to the point of having the power to forcibly seed a resistant host. That would come in time.

For now, he accepted that he would have to mate this female to gain the necessary pathways for a successful Seeding. Many sacrifices would be required for the reemergence of his kind.

He would make them.

He considered the female again. Her form was bare, As his was. He appreciated her desire for freedom. Fabric was a small Parting, yet it held the echoes of the bigger release.