FRUIT LIT BY A MOON

Not science fiction, just a piece of tongue-in-cheek wannabe SF...

When Joanne bumped into Ernest late one night on her way home from the village hall where she’d bopped the hours away to seventy year old music and enjoyed every moment of it, something she couldn’t understand might easily have changed her life for good. Because what she didn’t know was that Ernest wasn’t a human being at all. He had come from an unpronounceable planet somewhere in the distant reaches of outer space and had come to Earth for one special reason and that was to bump into Joanne. And only her.

Firstly though I want to make it clear that anyone who thinks that travelling between the stars, when huge speeds are required if the traveller is going to have any chance of getting anywhere like another system of planets, is impossible in a lifetime or even ten lifetimes. I would just like to ask them if they know everything there is to be known and if they don’t why can’t they keep their primitive ideas to themselves because they have no place here. Okay? Somewhere in this vast universe it’s probable that everything is possible...

Because Ernest (that isn’t his real name, which is not only unpronounceable but unwritable using the characters of any known Earthly alphabet, so to me he’s simply Ernest) is here and living amongst us with the rest of his family and a few friends.

His people, a species that has evolved spookily in exactly the same way as we humans have but with one major exception can walk the streets just like us, can even talk like us once they’ve learned a few sounds and are, to all intents and purposes, identical to us. With that one exception.

They have a totally different way of reproducing their species involving the fruit of a particular (alien) tree and the alignments of their full moons. Notice the use if the plural there. They live on a planet (unpronounceable) that spins in space enjoying the companionship of half a dozen moons, all of which performed until recently a complex astral dance that meant that only once in every quite a long time are all the moons in the night sky over the one and only piece of land that is inhabitable. And it is that configuration of moons that is essential when it comes to the breeding habits of the people there. There’s nothing physical. It’s that during a long evolution the people have developed a psychological blockage when it comes to when they should or shouldn’t enjoy the pleasures of a member of the opposite sex.

The particular tree I mentioned is also relevant because it can only produce fruit when the wavelength of light reflected by one of the moons is bright at night, and part of the mating ritual involves the chewing of the fruit from that one particular variety of tree. You know, the lad slides up to a lass of his choosing and pops a slice of fruit into her mouthe, and she goes all wobbly and lets her underwear slide down.

But all was not well on the unpronounceable planet. Not well at all.

The trouble is, there was a war between two of the otherwise highly intelligent races of people who look so exactly like humans that they might well be taken for humans, and when the ruler of one of the tribes was convinced he was going to lose the war he made a spectacular attempt at convincing his opponents that he was winning by causing a huge nuclear explosion on one of the moons, and that explosion not only went bang spectacularly but also sent it rocketing off into the distant reaches of space, far away from the home planet and its own orbit.

I suppose you can all guess which of the half dozen moons that was? It was the one that reflected a particular and important wavelength of light every night when it put in its appearance on cue.

The canny of you might have by now concluded that this had an adverse effect on the increase in the planet’s intelligent population, and you’d be quite right.

The birthrate dropped to nil. Not one female develpped a growin embryo inside her. No babies were born, yet people, like us on Earth, grew old and died when their number was up.

This is where Joanne came into their calculations.

As has been observed above, they can quite comfortably live amongst us, and they have done just that since before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. Not too many of them, true, but enough of them for them to have worked out that human reproduction isn’t hidebound by the fruit of a tree that doesn’t exist here and the light reflected by a moon we’ve never heard of.

So those of them living amongst us have put out a search for a human female who might just be genetically close enough to them for one of them to take pleasure in a night or two between the sheets with her in the hope that she conceives and that the offspring isan’t psychologically scarred by the need for munching on the fruit of a tree and the particular wavelength of moonlight that’s gone missing. And it was going to be Ernest’s joy to be the only one of their species who could do the job. I don’t know why that should be, but take my word for it, it was the case. According to their complex calculations they developed an algorithm that suggested that he was their only compatible lover-boy.

It was planned down to the last detail, and he bumped into her when she was on her way home from a night dancing to sixties music, it having been a sixties extravaganza she’d enjoyed and songs from Freddie and the Dreamers still burbling around her mind.

“I must apologise for bumping into you so violently,” he said, choosing words from what was to him an alien vocabularly very carefully.

“Er, that’s all right,” she replied, blushing because he had jostled her right breast exactly as she liked it being jostled: you know, gently, tenderly and almost affectionately.

“It’s just that I’ve been ordered to perform a task, and you might well be unique out of all the girls on this benighted planet, and are suitable to my important task…” He was being verbose because, in truth, he was embarrassed. He had never had to use words in order to seduce a fair maiden because, back home deep in the nether regions of the Universe a slice of a particular fruit would have done the job much better.

She frowned at him. “And what might that be, chum?” she asked, “because if it’s got anything to do with you-know-what it’s not on. You see, I’m gay, and I’m already late for Wendy, who’s waiting for me to slip out of my togs…”

© Peter Rogerson 09.04.23

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Reviews

[AYVID N]

All that effort and planning for naught. Poor Ernest. Can't imagine how disappointed he felt. But hey, there are many other nice ladies around who'd fancy a nice alien. To be honest, they didn't really strike me as very civilized with their preoccupation with reproduction. Loved this story from start to end.

[Peter Rogerson]

Uou may have noticed I have written a part 2 of this story because I found myself trapped in a stange world so like our own, yet also most unlike.