Mother part 3
#3 of Mother
The next day, George and Maria were absolutely brimming with confidence and it had nothing to do with the fact that they had just wonderful sex the night before (although that most definitely helped). These two wolves would explore that mean, old, scary cave that everyone else was just to check to go in and come back with treasure, which they almost knew had to be in there. They knew what would happen yet chose to defy the words of that elderly fox couple and enter the cave anyway. They started out the day like they would any other day, George and Maria did. They went by the lake to sit and meditate upon the beauty of nature here on this mountain, removed from and higher than, the profane world they knew they would return to in a few weeks. Only this time, our two lupines continued past the lake after a few moments of reflection.
"You feelin' up for it- I know I'll come back alive" George said, climbing confidently up the cliffs. He had done this before and using some ropes he had stolen from Robert's shack, he helped Maria up as well. The open mouth of the cave grew closer and closer until they were next to it in a clearing. There they saw what looked like a gravestone, near the entrance to that supposedly evil cave. It was marked with wedges and lines and symbols that George and Maria, no experts in the field of deciphering ancient Indian glyphs could not decode. But what did strike them was, just as Robert and Juana had told them the night before, the presence of two letter Xs on the grave, arranged back to back. They knew that this rock made of granite had to have been cut by someone and there was obviously a message these ancient carvers were trying to send to the people reading it.
"You know, maybe what they said was right about those Indian stories. Maybe it would be better to just stay here and come back down- that cave might just be as evil as they say it is," Maria said, a sense of fear and terror now running through her blood.
"What are you saying? We ran through this whole mountain- I did all that climbing and here you are complaining- I know what this was now; you only wanted to see me in a muscle shirt, isn't it." The wolf's muscles strengthened through years of exercise and outdoorsmanship rippled through his ill-fitting sleeveless shirt, which he ripped off and flexed.
'Are you happy? I'm a strong, sexy, handsome wolf. I'm your husband- I got you this far and I am not going back. Whatever happens to me, happens to you. We are going in this cave and there's no turning back now."
What could Maria do now? Her husband had gone to such troubles and now she would have to join him in this foolhardy expedition inside the cave. Besides, if anything happened to him at that cave, she would be all alone, having lost a husband in the romantic phase of the relationship, having also lost him at a time in which he was upset at her. So she took his paw inside her own and with hands held, these two wolves, husband and wife, masculine and feminine, entered into the cave.
A flashlight that George had carried with him in his pocket proved to light the way through this cave. It was a little dark but certainly not evil.
"See what did I tell you nothing wrong her-"
"FOOLS! YOU SHOULD HAVE RUN! INSTEAD YOU WILL DIE!" Aloud voice could be heard coming to them and they were frozen in fear. In mere seconds, confidence had turned to unspeakable terror as the flashlight's battery ran out and evil forces grabbed the two wolves and pulled them deeper in the cave. Both wolves were knocked unconscious and fainted.
"Where exactly am I?" George declared, now totally naked. His wife was gone and instead of the cave, he looked up and saw gray rooms, mostly filled with equipment like he had never seen before. A white-clad humanoid figure approached him, with a black strip where his eyes should be on a dome-shaped head and a badge-like triangular design around his chest. His arms and legs were extremely long and he had no fingers but somewhat exaggerated hands and feet. There was not a single hair to be found anywhere on his body.
"Greetings, earthling! We are the Starmen, who have come to do research on the people who live here, as per the orders of our immortal king Giygas who has sought samples from the planet known as Earth for study," the alien relayed information directly into George's mind.
"Where is my wife?", the wolf asked, anger inherent in his growling voice.
"She still lives and she is currently telling Giygas, our king about motherhood on our home planet. You have been sleeping for a long time and we will soon reach Earth"
"What would a king need to know about motherhood?" the wolf asked perplexed.
"Well, for your information, our culture is proud and highly-advanced yet due to a freak of nature, a female birth never happens. Our race is entirely male and we reproduce asexually. We have no fondness towards reproduction whatsoever, for us it is merely a function. So when we need more Starmen, we simply divide through mitosis to manufacture more of us. But we remain curious about females, a foreign concept to us as is sexual reproduction. At one point, we had no words for these in our native language. They have the ability to create life and show affection towards their offspring"
"Well, what happened to all the others who entered that cave?" the wolf unaware of how rude speaking out loud was to the aliens. The Starmen made noises during their childhood but soon learned to express themselves through telepathy when they became mature. They also learned to show no emotion towards anyone.
"They were all males, just like you and just like us. They gave us no clues to the female anatomy so we killed them like trash but it seems to us that your wife has a special room inside of her for her offspring."
"That would be her womb, genius", the wolf said, still snarling in rage and anger.
"No need to raise your voice. Instead, be thankful- the woman you were with convinced Giygas to spare you. We now know that in species which reproduce through sex that the woman is the key player. She plays the role of keeping the egg, a tiny earthling warm and alive during the incubation- all the male does is fertilize the egg. The child lives inside of her, safe and protected. There's something sacred about this because while everyone in your people can destroy others only the woman can give life."
"Cooperate with us and you will return to the earth and you will return alive back to the earth and we will not rape your wife." A camera feed came through a screen, showing a recording of Maria calming Giygas, who was throwing a temper tantrum of epic proportions after his tail was cut off in an accident. She sang a song of her own invention, clearly heard through the tube in George's holding room.
"Take a melody, simple as can be. Give it some words and sweet harmony. Raise your voices, all day long now, love grows strong now. Sing a melody of love, oh love" and upon hearing that Giygas feel asleep and his tantrum stopped. In spite of his strength, Giygas without love was a man-child. He had grown fond of her songs and love primarily because he, like every other member of his race, lived in a world without love, without affection, and without females of any kind. He might have been a king based upon his physical strength and amazing powers but Giygas had never experienced a mother's life.
A message was displayed across George's psyche, a strong telepathic statement more powerful than the other aliens, a feeling that would have long-reaching consequences for both George and Maria and their alien captors "I... a... m... h... a... p... p... y!" was Giygas' thought. "S... h... e... w... i... l... l... b... e... q... u... e... e... n."
The wolf was thankful for this bargain until the alien started telepathically sending his messages to the wolf again.
"However, Maria will need to stay with us so we may continue our research. You return home, we take your wife and you survive this whole ordeal. Someday we will return to conquer your planet." This was a terrible deal but George was in no position to argue. He was now on a spaceship, which he soon found out was now hurtling back to the Earth. He could see a yellowish star get brighter and brighter through the window before he returned to the green-blue orb that was Earth.
"How long have we been adrift, if you do not mind me asking?"
"By our calculations, two cycles of the Earth around its star have taken place."
"I'll never see my wife again and two years have passed- people think I've passed away," George said before realizing that the weightlessness of space had turned his six-pack into something not so impressive.
"An unfortunate side effect of space travel is the breakdown of bones and the muscle groups they control," the alien relayed. But his haggard condition and loss of muscle tissue was the last thing on George's mind as he saw America get larger and the craft land in the mountain. The ship landed in the hangar built into the cave.
"Never return to the cave or you will die. Whetehr you choose to spread news of this is irrelevant to us- few Earthlings would believe your story. And know that someday we will return and not be so merciful." was the alien's last message. And so George left the cave as quickly as he could, naked and having never seen the sun in so many years. He collapsed by the gravestone and woke up in a familiar-looking house.
"You have returned, George. It has been two years and didn't we tell you not to go into the cave," Juana said. "Where's your wife?"
"She's gone!" except the wolf didn't actually speak but projected his thoughts into Robert and Juan's minds. He had picked up telepathy. George wanted a cup of water in a nightstand, reached out his arm and the cup floated towards him and Robert watched astonished. His loss of those wonderful muscles was more than made up for by the acquisition of new and wonderful powers, many of which he would have to study. But he had lost his wife and could not be consoled.
Soon, he would come down from the mountain, broken and perpetually upset over his lost love. Whenever anyone asked what had happened to his wife or how he had spent the past two years, George would shrug them off with a disinterested, impolite grunt. He continued his back-breaking work in the fields and developed his muscles once more, but this was more out of frustration than anything else. One of the females, a she-wolf like Maria, took pity on him and the unfortunate wolf did not remain a widower for long but not even she could find out George's whereabouts the past few years or where his first wife had been. His new wife gave birth to several children and he continued the odd study of the powers which were made manifest to him during his intergalactic voyage across the universe. But every night George would look up at the stars and think of Maria- his first wife, kidnapped, taken from him at the height of their love.
40 years later...
An old wolf wizened by years of loneliness began writing in his diary. Even though he had long since remarried and had children through another female, he still missed his wife more and more each passing day.
"I have traveled to the edge of the universe and back and I now realize that love is the universal currency. The Starmen don't have it but we do and their obsession with finding what true love is led to their kidnapping of my wife. I also believe that even if they try to invade our planet, the fact that they don't know true love will be their downfall.
I know them- Giygas, I saw him, he had his tail hacked off in an accident and no one would help it back on except for Maria, but even she could not finish the job. However, she tamed that savage beast because her compassion was so great to love the ones who had kidnapped her. So I tell my children to be ready for the invasion and to look for he who lost his tail. The forgotten one of the ship that sails the cosmos."
Dedicated with thanks to Shigesato Itoi, whose "Mother" series of video games served as the inspiration for this story series.