Story Index

Flotsam Series Index

by Leem

Another variation on my long-running Flotsam concept. The planet and its inhabitants in this story are described a little differently from previous instalments, just because I felt like it.

Some of the concepts in this story were inspired by Margaret St. Clair’s 1953 story “Thirsty God”. The use I have made of those concepts is however original, and no plagiarism is intended.

The medbots were baffled.

“There must be something you can do,” I protested. “Nobody suffers from impotence these days!”

“It’s certainly a puzzle,” they told me. “Your sexual responses are completely blocked. Even virtual sex won’t give you any pleasure.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said morosely.

“If we didn’t know better,“ they said, “we might almost suspect it of being a biological weapon aimed at destroying human fertility, yet your sperm count is apparently unaffected by it, and you are the only known case to date.”

I sighed.

“We can certainly restore the physical function,” they told me, “by implanting mechanical stiffeners into your penis. Unfortunately your condition would still prevent you from deriving any physical or emotional satisfaction from the sexual act.”

“It’s not fair,” I muttered. “Sixteen trillion people in this stupid galaxy, and I’m the only one who can’t enjoy sex!”

The medbots appeared to consider this. Then one of them piped up: “Have you ever considered joining a celibate religious order?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said darkly.

After a longer pause, another of the medbots said: “We know this probably won’t be much of a consolation, but you will at least have the honour of having the disease named after you.”

“Oh, go and cure a common cold,” I said, and stormed out of the surgery.

That evening I did a bit of research on the mindweb. I couldn’t find any record of a condition like mine, but in the course of my searches I stumbled across a private medical centre called the Jacovian Institute.

Dr Jacovian and his team had scored some impressive successes in treating other rare medical conditions. Their fees were quite high, but if they were really the only ones with a chance of restoring my sex life then I was willing to pay for that chance.

The only other obstacle was the distance. The Institute was located on a planetoid ring in a solar system on the other side of the Adumreb Tetrahedron. Hiring a ship to get there wouldn’t be easy, or cheap either.

Well, my condition had become a minor cause celebre on the local web, before it was swept aside by more salacious fare, and in that short window of opportunity I had managed to persuade a few philanthropic souls to dip into their credit. It wasn’t enough for the trip, but I was also able to persuade the more sympathetic of my girlfriends, boyfriends and family members to contribute. Even then I also had to seriously deplete my own savings account, but finally I managed to scrape up enough to cover the Institute’s fees and hire a small ship.

In fact the ship was quite a bit smaller than I’d hoped for, not to mention older. It looked more like a one-sentient planet hopper than an interstellar ship, though the owner assured me it was fully reconditioned and had a working hyperdrive. The cockpit wasn’t big enough to stand up in, and there was no head so I’d need to pee and crap into tubes. What was more, I’d be drinking recycled pee as well.

I tried to tell myself that planetary ecosystems recycled water the same way, just on a bigger scale, but part of me was still a bit squicked by the idea. At least the food was all pre-packaged so I wouldn’t be worrying about where that came from.

Another problem was that the ship could only carry enough fuel for a one-way trip. Still, I didn’t have much choice. Nothing else in my price range had the necessary range.

I decided to worry about the return journey later. What the heck, if I couldn’t afford to refuel after my treatment maybe I’d settle down on a planetoid near the Institute and marry a local guy or two.

So after making my farewells I settled into the small compartment that was going to be my home for the next ten days and took off.

My course would take me directly through the centre of the Tetrahedron. Some of my friends had told me to avoid the area because they’d heard all sorts of weird stories about it. Well, I’d heard those stories too and dismissed them as superstitious rubbish. Besides, if I went around the Tetrahedron it would not only add two days to my journey, but would leave me with no safety margin on recycling filters and fuel.

So I punched the hyperdrive, put on some music and did my best to get comfortable, secure in the certainty that I wasn’t going to be swallowed up by the legendary ships’ graveyard.

The next eight days or so passed uneventfully. The navicomp assured me that I was on course and on schedule, hyperspace swirled by featurelessly outside, and I passed the time as best I could watching vids, listening to music, sleeping, sipping water and nibbling the food rations and taking care of the other necessities, or just reminiscing. Needless to say I would also have masturbated if I could, but that was the point of my journey after all.

Then on the ninth day I was awakened from a shallow doze by an insistent alarm. The navicomp readout was warning me about a dangerous obstacle ahead. I stared out of the cockpit and saw a strange, swirling disturbance in the otherwise almost featureless grey of hyperspace. Whatever the disturbance was, I was approaching it rapidly.

I tried the controls, but no matter what I did the damn thing just kept getting bigger and bigger in the windscreen. Was it a black hole? I always thought normal space gravity didn’t affect hyperspace. Maybe it was some new type of hyperspatial black hole. I could be the discoverer of a brand new cosmic phenomenon. A discovery like that could make me rich and famous... if only the damn thing wasn’t about to kill me.

Whatever it was, it seemed that I’d discovered the source of all the legends about missing ships. I was wrong: I was going to become the Tetrahedron’s next victim. In the few remaining moments, I silently apologised to everyone who had warned me to steer clear of the region.

And then it was right in fro

Whoah. What the hell had happened? I could almost have described it as like being swallowed and spat out again. Only wherever I’d been spat to, it was back in normal space. Stars were drifting in front of the cockpit.

Before I could congratulate myself on having survived that... whatever the hell it was... more alarms began blaring, and as the ship rotated I could see why. The stars were replaced by the huge disc of a blue-grey planet. I couldn’t have been more than a few hundred kilocubits above it, and the ship was falling fast.

Grabbing the control column, I fought to get the ship on an even keel. I was falling too fast to make it back into space. Atmospheric friction was already heating the hull. All I could hope to do was try to avoid becoming a smudge on the planet’s surface.

Emerging from a bank of grey cloud, I surveyed the planet’s surface via the external vid feeds. It didn’t look very inviting. There seemed to be life of a kind in the form of scrubby vegetation, but the surface was mostly rocky. Nowhere to make a soft landing. I’d just have to hope I could kill my descent velocity before my descent velocity killed me.

Well, I managed to reduce my vertical speed to virtually nothing and had lowered the landing gear, hoping to decelerate safely to a stop before descending the last few cubits. But then I felt a jarring impact. I’d miscalculated my altitude! Either that or the ground had inclined unexpectedly. Either way, I was still moving forward too fast. The front undercarriage snapped off, and as the ship pitched forward I struck my head on the front panel.

I don’t know how long I was out for. Probably no more than a few minutes. My head was sore and bleeding slightly, but apart from that I didn’t seem to have any serious injuries.

Then I felt a cool breeze on my face. For a moment I thought the air vent had malfunctioned, until I looked up and saw that the canopy was open. Either my arm had hit the control when I jolted forward, or it had shorted out on impact. Either way, I was now breathing the planet’s atmosphere, so if it was poisonous I was already done for.

Well, just for the moment the alien atmosphere didn’t seem to be doing me any harm, so I examined the ship’s control system.

Or rather, I examined the place where the control system was supposed to be. All of the holographic controls were dead. The control panels were just... well, panels. I jabbed at some of the places where the control buttons should have been, just on the off-chance, but there was no response.

I had to face the facts. The ship was dead, and unless I could find something to eat on this godsforsaken dustball then I soon would be too.

My legs hadn’t had much exercise apart from electrostim for the past eight days, so I stood up slowly and carefully before easing myself onto the ladder. I was taking with me as many of the concentrated food packets as I could carry, the ship’s small medkit, a hand lamp, a thermal blanket, and a small water bottle containing all that I’d managed to coax out of the recycler faucet. I just hoped I could find water here.

I had to face the facts. Realistically my chances of survival on an unknown planet weren’t great. Even if the air wasn’t slowly poisoning me, the local fruit and veg probably would. That was, assuming there were no predatory animals that would eat me first and only worry about whether my alien flesh might be poisonous later. Even so, I wasn’t going to just lie down and die. Some basic survival instinct stubbornly refused to let me give up.

So I spent the next couple of hours dejectedly searching the barren terrain for anything that might be edible. I found a few of the scrubby bushes, and discovered that their leaves were tough and leathery and definitely no good for eating. I couldn’t find anything resembling fruit. I even tried to pull one of them up to see if it had edible tubers, but its roots were too strong and the thorny stem scratched my hands, drawing a few drops of blood.

I looked at my bleeding hands. If there were any harmful bacteria on this planet I guessed I’d soon know about it.

The sky was leaden and overcast, but now it was turning darker and I realised night was falling. Looking around for shelter, I saw a small, squarish opening in what looked like a low cliff face. Lighting the hand lamp I approached the cave warily and shined the light through the entrance. There didn’t seem to be any harmful animals inside, and it seemed as secure a place as any, so I made my way inside.

The cave was about the size of a dropvault arena, but was only about five cubits high. The walls, floor and ceiling were surprisingly flat and regular, and I could almost have suspected that the place of being artificial if the planet hadn’t been so primitive and arid.

The interior of the cave was surprisingly warm, so I folded the blanket into a pillow and lay down on the stone floor. I must have been more tired than I thought, because I was asleep almost as soon as my head touched the blanket.

While I slept I had the strangest dream. I dreamt that hidden within the cave walls and floor ancient machines woke and scanned my body from every angle, carefully probing and analysing my metabolism. Once all the data was collated, the machines compared it with their programmed criteria. My body wasn’t quite what they were expecting, but after careful consideration they decided that the readings all fell within an acceptable range of variation. My body had been approved; the conversion process would now begin.

Conversion? I thought. Into what? I didn’t want to be converted. I wanted to wake up and run away.

But it was too late. I couldn’t wake up. The machines wouldn’t let me. As the conversion equipment reawakened from its million-year slumber I fell into a deeper, dreamless sleep, and my fate was sealed.

I woke feeling refreshed. Grey daylight was visible through the doorway. I had a vague memory of a disturbing dream, but it faded almost instantly. I was feeling curiously optimistic despite being stranded on an uncharted planet with no food, little water and no chance of ever seeing my friends again. Somehow, though I didn’t know how, I was absolutely certain that I wasn’t going to die here.

Buoyed up by this newfound optimism, I sat up. That wasn’t as easy as it sounded. My ship suit felt strangely tight, as if the fabric had shrunk drastically overnight. I’d never heard of anything that could do that, but the suit was seriously constricting my movements. What was more, my feet were sore, as if my boots had also shrunk. Weird.

With an effort I managed to remove my shoes and clothing, massaged my feet, stretched, and sighed with relief at being able to move freely again.

Oh, gods, if only I’d known...

Naked, I rose to my feet... and only just managed to avoid banging my head on the cave roof.

Wait a minute. The previous day the ceiling had been more than a cubit above my head, and yet now I was as tall as the ceiling in my bare feet.

Dear gods. My clothes hadn’t shrunk at all. Somehow, I had grown! I was now five cubits tall!

What was more, I seemed to have changed colour as well. Looking down at my hands, I could see that they had turned a bright blue! I knew there were some diseases and dietary disorders that could affect skin pigmentation, but nothing I knew of could cause such a radical change overnight.

I couldn’t imagine how it had happened, but for some reason it didn’t disturb me. If I was the only man on the planet, then it didn’t really matter how big I was, nor what colour. Admittedly this big body would need more food to keep it going, but on the other hand I could walk faster to find it on these long legs.

So I stepped out into the grey daylight and looked around. The scenery was as uninspiring as ever, but it seemed to contain more subtle hints of colour amidst the grey, and I seemed to be seeing it with greater clarity as well. It was as if my eyes had grown more sensitive to colour and detail.

My eyes weren’t the only things that were more sensitive. I could feel every breath of the cool air on my naked skin, and it felt really good. I decided not to bother adapting my suit or blanket to make new clothing. The cold didn’t seem to be doing me any harm, and there was nobody around to complain about my nudity.

The breeze continued to caress my body, and I was content to just stand there for a while, luxuriating in the sensation. Dear gods, just feeling the breeze had never felt so good before. It had never felt so... arousing...

My heart leapt. Arousing? Gods, yes! I was getting aroused! Whatever had caused me to turn into a blue giant had also cured my impotence... with a vengeance!

I’m alive, I thought. I’m a whole man again!

And what a man! My erection kept growing and growing until I thought it might burst, but it didn’t. It ended up rock-hard, almost vertical, nearly a whole cubit in length, and as thick as my forearm used to be before I grew!

Doctor Jacovian hadn’t gotten to earn his pay this time. Something had more than beaten him to it. And if the rest of my skin was now ultra-sensitive, that was nothing compared to my genitalia. Just the breeze on my balls and shaft was almost enough to give make me come, but I managed to hold back.

No! I thought. Not yet! I can’t let my first orgasm for almost a year be premature!

So, still standing naked in front of the cave, I took my foreskin in one hand and my scrotum in the other, and began slowly and gently to squeeze, tease and caress out of them every last bit of pleasure that I possibly could. After holding out on me for so long, they owed me big time... no pun intended.

I took it as slowly as I could, luxuriating in the blissful sensation of sliding my foreskin slowly back and forth while kneading and caressing my scrotum and the base of my phallus.

There might have been a whole pack of hungry predators right next to me and about to pounce, and I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. At that moment nothing in the universe existed for me except my own pleasure, nor for many moments after that.

As the moments went on I was vaguely aware of the wan sun rising higher behind the gloomy sky, but apart from my own slowly increasing pleasure there was nothing to mark the passage of time. Time and time I brought myself to the brink of climax but managed to hold back at the last minute, and each time was better than the last.

Then finally I couldn’t hold back any longer. Ecstasy built and built and then suddenly flared into the most unbelievable climax I’d ever felt. Sweet gods, if there’s a heaven it must be something like that. It just went on and on and on until I thought it would never end... but at last it did, in an interminable series of eruptions that rocked my body from head to foot until I finally slumped against the wall in a state of exhausted euphoria.

Surprisingly, for such a powerful orgasm I didn’t seem to have ejaculated much. I was vaguely puzzled about that, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter much any more. I was calm and sleepy and content. Adjusting my position, I sat back against the wall and stroked my erection lazily. Despite having just given its all my penis was still as firm and stiff as ever, and I slowly masturbated myself to sleep.

When I woke again I was surprised to see that I had company. Somebody was standing a few paces in front of me, looking me up and down slowly. At first I thought it was a man, but as my vision cleared from sleep I was able to see that the figure wasn’t quite human.

It was shorter than a man, maybe three and a half cubits tall, with an elongated vulpine snout and short pointed ears atop its head. It carried a spear and had what looked like a bow and quiver slung across its shoulders, which at least suggested some intelligence.

Its body was covered in light grey fur but was otherwise naked, and definitely male. By human standards it... he... wasn’t at all bad looking, and I couldn’t help speculating about his sexual preferences.

He soon answered that question for me. The moment he caught sight of my erection, he couldn’t help developing one of his own. Of course it wasn’t as big as mine, but it was impressive enough for a humanoid of his stature. He took a cautious step toward me, and I decided to meet him halfway.

Best not to startle him, I thought. No sudden moves.

But as he moved to kneel before me, my body didn’t make any move at all. I tried again, and still my limbs would not respond.

I could feel, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t make a sound. I was completely paralysed.

The native reached out a short-clawed hand to stroke my erection. Dear gods! I could still feel all right, even more acutely than ever! My cock grew hot and vertical from his caresses, sending an astonishing rush of pleasure through me.

I couldn’t push him away. I couldn’t open my mouth to protest. Not that he wasn’t doing anything I wouldn’t have been doing to myself if I could...

The humanoid soon tired of stroking me. Instead, he took the end of my erection into his long mouth and began licking and sucking me gently while masturbating himself with one hand and balancing with the other.

I literally couldn’t lift a finger. There was nothing I could do to stop him, even if I wanted to.

The thing was, I wasn’t sure I did want to. Obviously I couldn’t masturbate while I was paralysed, which meant that unless the paralysis wore off my only chance of getting any sexual pleasure at all was to be used by this guy or his friends. And it did feel good... oh, it felt so good...

Dear gods. If anyone had told me before I set out that I’d soon be sitting paralysed on an alien planet and getting fucked like a doll by a furry humanoid, I would have said they were crazy. Now, though, I was the one that was going crazy, with ecstasy.

My little lover was insatiable. Never mind how good it had felt when I played with my big new penis. This was ten times better - no, more. The knowledge that I was helpless to resist made me even hotter and harder as he sucked and sucked with that long, moist mouth of his.

That’s it, you little bastard! I thought. Come on! Harder! Harder! Give me all you’ve got! Don’t let up!

Eventually my sensations became so powerful I could scarcely think at all. I was in a trance of sheer pleasure that just went on and on and on.

At last he finally managed to push me over the edge, and I had a climax that was infinitely better than the last. If I thought I was in heaven before, that was just a cheap theme park ride compared to what I was feeling now. Time seemed to stand still, and I wondered if my climax would ever end.

Eventually, though, time began again, in a series of explosions that shook me from head to foot for what might have been ten minutes. My ecstasy gradually descended to a more human level as the native swallowed my semen and withdrew, giving my erection one last lick before rolling over and falling asleep. I would have thanked him if I could.

My erection remained hard and throbbing, and the breeze continued to caress it gently, giving me small spasms of pleasure. I was surprised to see that night had fallen sometime during our sexual encounter.

I felt calm and euphoric, and surprisingly optimistic about my situation. I was trapped without hope of rescue on an alien planet that might not have food that was capable of sustaining me. Even if it did, I couldn’t eat or drink because I was paralysed, and even if somehow I was able to survive without food or water, I might well be paralysed for life.

The only plus side was that I was permanently horny and capable of superhuman orgasms, and sexually attractive to at least one of the natives, and got even hornier from knowing how helpless I was while he was fucking me. Somehow that seemed to outweigh the minuses.

I don’t know if I slept exactly, but I went into a long reverie involving various ways I could be fucked while paralysed, and I was never sure at exactly what point I woke up to find it happening again for real.

Despite it having been hours since I had eaten or drunk, I didn’t feel hungry or thirsty. It seemed that in my new inanimate state I really didn’t need food or water. Perhaps I was being sustained by sexual energy, in which case I was in no immediate danger of starving.

It was daylight again, and this time there were more of the natives. The others must have arrived during the night.

They had posed me on hands and knees, and one of them was enthusiastically buggering me while another shafted my mouth and a third licked and stroked my erection. I heard more than saw several others, chattering away excitedly and moaning with their own pleasure.

They’re worshipping me, I realised. I’ve been accepted as their god of fertility. I’m never going to move again, and they’re never going to stop fucking me! Never!

The thought made my erection as hard as steel, and my worshippers responded by working me even harder, until they brought me to yet another indescribable orgasm.

I don’t know how many years or centuries ago that was, or how many thousands of climaxes. I don’t feel any different now than I did when I first became paralysed. My hair and nails don’t seem to have grown. I think I may be immortal.

I guess I’m addicted to superhuman orgasms now. It’s not as though I have any choice in the matter, is it?

There are other gods here now, in the meeting-ground between the natives’ villages; other living flotsam from all manner of space-time vessels: humans and humanoids, males, females and hermaphrodites, all big, blue, beautiful, mute, paralysed and permanently horny. The natives love us and worship us all in the only way they know how, and our bodies all respond in the only way they can.

I can’t talk to the others, of course, and I often wonder what they’re thinking. Do they obsessively tell themselves their own stories over and over again as I do?

But then, perhaps I’m not just talking to myself. There may be a small chance that someone, somewhere, will hear my thoughts. If they can, then please don’t get the wrong impression. This is not a distress call. I don’t want to be rescued.

The truth is, I’ve come to love being worshipped as a helpless sex toy, and maybe you would too.

One thing is sure: it’s one hell of a cure for impotence.

Comment on this story
Index to the Flotsam Series | Story Index
Return to Top of Page