Read Interstellar Pig for Free Online Page B

would have seen it.
    "Obey me, Barney, off with the shirt and on with the cream," she said, coming out with the board. She had changed into her bikini.
    Obediently, I took off my shirt and applied the cream. My body was so white, compared to hers, that we could have been members of different species.
    She set down the board and then sank to her knees on the towel and tossed back her hair. Muscles rippled on her abdomen. She opened the board between the two towels.
    I shaded my eyes with my hands and peered down at it. The background was black, sprinkled with stars. The stars seemed to be tiny reflectors, for they glowed—unblinking—as they would in space. They also varied in intensity, from big bright ones to pale clusters, distant nebulae so vague they were difficult to see in the bright sunlight, in shapes of spirals and crabs and amorphous clouds.
    The effect was so realistic that it could have been a vast photograph of the cosmos, taken by an outer space probe—if it hadn't been for the planets. They were strewn across the void, appearing to float above the board in startling three-dimensional relief. There was a fat bulbous one aswirl in luminous gasses. Several sported dazzling complex colored rings that made Saturn's look as dull ll. as Hula Hoops. There were planets of deserts and | terrifying jagged mountains; lonely barren 4" pockmarked planets as dead as the moon.
    "Comprehend?" Zend was saying. "The objective is to have The Piggy in your hand when the alarm goes off at the end. You will stop at nothing to gain possession of it. Otherwise, when the alarm goes, you and your home planet will be destroyed. Grasp it? Now, there are lots of manners of getting hold of The Piggy and preserving it from the other players. For instance, you can . .
    I wasn't really listening, hypnotized by the board. The larger stars seemed to be arranged in a kind of pattern—like the warped reflection of a chessboard grid in a distorting mirror—that undulated across the entire board. As if the stars could be used as a kind of path of stepping stones. And there were also several absolutely empty spots, small starless areas carefully contoured to give the impression that they were funnels, leading down into nothingness. Black holes?
    "... so that if you happen to be a water-breathing gill man from Thrilb, you can't set foot on Vavoosh without special breathing equipment, or you'll drown in boiling ammonia—not a pretty way to go. Or let's suggest you're an arachnoid nymph from Vavoosh, and you somehow end up on Mbridlengile, God forbid. The carnivorous lichen on Mbridlengile"—she pronounced it with a soft g—"aren't terribly sapient, but they're thorough. It would take them quite a time to digest you, and you'd be conscious for most of it—they go for the brain last." She nodded eagerly at me. "Okay, Barney? Prepared to play?"
    I had barely been listening to her and had no idea what she was talking about.
    It seemed complicated and grisly. "It's kind of hard to take it all in so fast," I said. "Could you just go over it once more?"
    She rolled her eyes. "You're going to have to be a little quicker on the uptake, Barney. This game goes vite. Maybe I miscalculated your abilities."
    "I'm a whiz at games," I insisted. "I just got distracted by the board. You have to admit it's pretty spectacular. Please, this time I'll pay attention."
    She sighed. "Well see that you do. Now. There are three kinds of cards: character cards, attribute cards, and instruction cards," she said, expertly shuffling one of the packs. "First you deal the character cards." She began laying cards out, upside down, on the cement beside the board. They were black on the back.
    "Those are the character cards?" I asked her.
    "Uh-huh," she said, her tongue between her teeth.
    "But we don't get to see them? We don't get to choose which character we want to be?"
    "Decidedly not. It's random, like life. Whatever creature you turn out to be determines what kind of