-SALOON AT THE EDGE OF EVERYWHERE-

Chapter Six

They drew for high card to pick a dealer. Ox drew a queen. Little Frodo drew a king and favored the big alien with a shrewd smile. Ox gave a growl from deep in one of his throats. Ox did not like to lose.

“The roof always covers the dwelling,” he rumbled, somewhat menacingly. Ox tended to be just a little bit menacing. He came from a warrior race and didn’t ever seem to mean it too personally, but Rufus had decided that he would not like to see the looming Xxo if he ever did get truly mad.

Xxo tended to use military phraseology and also vague expressions that reminded Rufus of the wisdom of the blind monk who had taught little Grasshopper the ways of Kung Fu in the old TV series. As Frodo shuffled the cards and dealt the hand with great dexterity, (he was a Hand-Helper after all), Rufus took the opportunity to study the larger alien. The Xxo, and no, I don’t know how to pronounce that word or any other word in their language, and neither does anybody else who is not one, was an interesting life form.

They are often called, by humans that is, the Giant Broccoli, in that they are 8 or 9 feet tall and there are similarities in their appearance to that Earth vegetable. The Xxo are not divided into right and left halves, nor are they oriented in one particular direction, either front and back, or even top and bottom. They are symmetrical in almost every regard. Flip one upside down or spin it around, if you dare, and it did not matter. You can in fact, I presume, lay one on its side and it would still function quite nicely, though I assume it would return to a more upright stance because this would put their eyes higher off the floor and give them a better field of view.

The Xxo are a purplish green color very similar to broccoli and they have a stalk, though it is really a torso. Their tentacles, which grow from each end of their bodies, branch into smaller and smaller tips. Both sets of tentacles can be used as either legs and feet, or arms, hands and fingers as needed. These are not like the tentacles of an octopus but as I mentioned they split and divided and grew new tips off in all directions getting ever thinner towards the tips until they were as fine as human hairs. It is similar to how a huge oak tree produces a mass of branches in random direction. The Xxo simply uses the thickness of tentacle suitable for the job at hand, as it were. They are able to achieve feats of incredible strength as well as remarkable agility and surprising delicateness. Their largest limbs can easily pick up a medium sized automobile yet the tiny thread-like ends could supposedly perform micro surgery with great finesse, provided any Xxo ever decided to attend medical school that is. Whichever limbs happened to be on the bottom, and were therefore used for propulsion, could move a Xxo along at close to 30 miles an hour. And talk about stable. One never sees a Xxo fall down, which is why I said I can only presume that they can move about while lying on their sides if they chose and still function quite well.

The Xxo are also symmetrical in that their eyes and their vertically slit mouths, which alternate with each other, form a circle around the center of their torsos like a belt. Both eyes and mouths connect with stomachs and a brain which occupy the center of the torso. The stomachs surround and protect the brain, but have openings to allow the eye nerve bundles to reach the cortex. There is little else in the way of internal organs. The torso and tentacles are very fibrous and tough and resist damage exceedingly well. They also heal quickly.

The Xxo used to eat only a certain kind of a moss from their home world, and only a little of that. They drank only water and rarely. Their digestive tracks are simple tubes which extend from the stomachs to either end and culminate in a small sphincter in the center of each tentacle bunch. They can eliminate waste, in the uncommon need, from either the lower set of tentacles, which seems practical, or from the upper set, which seems as if it might be messy. Recently some Xxo had taken to consuming small amounts of human food as well as consuming a few adult beverages. If this is affecting their digestive systems and waste elimination processes, they have as yet made no mention of it. Ox liked his beer, and would sometimes drink two whole bottles on poker night. And two beers were about as much as he needed, despite his large bulk. Rufus quietly kept an eye on his consumption just to be on the safe side. He had noticed that Ox tended to sway after a beer and a half, and he had no intention of seeing how far that sway could go.

To Rufus’s right sat the Stleeb, VarnTa. Because the Stleeb’s legs had knees that bent backwards from the human point of view, he did not use a chair, but folded his legs back and perched on the little mushroom shaped hump, and then bent forward to lean against the table. The Stleeb had a set of testicles which, and once again I mean this from the perspective of the human male, were even more impressive than his other endowment, and were carried side by side on the upper chest. Because of the way he sat, VarnTa found it most convenient to rest his testicles on the table while he played cards. This gave rise to another of Rufus’s favorite jokes. He glanced across the table at Jimmy, and sure enough, true to the human male’s natural tendency to stare at anything of that shape and size and in that general position on a body, Jimmy had let himself be caught once again.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Rufus said with an impressively straight face, “you are staring at his balls again.”

Jimmy turned a shade of red almost as bright as Frodo’s. There were general laughs and groans. They had all heard it before. Just as they had heard his comment that you would not want to sit behind a Stleeb in a porno movie theatre. Rufus was fairly sure that one lost something in the translation. He also had a nebulous plan to contact the Fruit of the Loom Company back on earth and see if maybe they couldn’t design some sort of underwear hat for the male Stleeb to wear. He hoped there might be a market for these, especially for the Stleeb traveling to Earth, where the majority of the population was not used to seeing such a large and impressive display of body parts. Like all of Rufus’s get rich quick schemes, this one was going nowhere fast.

Returning his consideration to VarnTa, Rufus was again struck by the fact that other than having wrong facing knees, and the unique placement of the sex organs, the Stleeb was built very like a human. Their legs were a trifle longer, and their torsos were a bit squat for human standards, and they had only three fingers on each hand, which all faced each other like a little tripod. But other than that, the physiology was very similar. Their coloring was also similar, though they were a slightly pinkish hue when compared to most humans who were not suffering from mild sunburn, and there were yellow veins under their skin which were quite visible, running up and down their limbs and bodies as well as up their faces and into their most prominent physical attribute. These were quite visible because the Stleeb, who are quite hairless, do not wear any clothes.

Stleeb females were never seen off their home planet. This was due largely to the fact that their sex organs were also placed on the tops of their heads, and this evidently left little room for more than a rudimentary vestigial brain. The female Stleeb were, in short, as dumb as cows. They were used only for breeding and raising the young.

Rufus had heard a disquieting rumor that VarnTa was wanted for some sex crime or other on some planet somewhere, but while he loved gossip, he was not a firm believer in its truth. He wasn’t even quite sure exactly what sort of sex crime a Stleeb could be guilty of, so he did not let it worry him. Much.

VarnTa also enjoyed his beer, and had a capacity for drinking roughly equivalent to a human his size. This put him one up on the Xxo. Even the little Bats could polish off three beers before their behavior became erratic. And the Slug could lap up a six-pack or more from the drinking bowl carried in one of Frodo’s pockets with no sign of inebriation, though in point of fact I am by no means sure how one would tell a drunken Muccassim from a sober one without running some sort of a medical test. Yes, poker night was always an interesting time for Rufus.

As Frodo sent the last of the cards flying around the table and Ox dipped a thin tentacle tip to grab up and pop open his first beer, Rufus let his gaze wander to the two Bats. They were perched on their big-topped stools settling into comfortable positions.

To human eyes, the Bats appeared both cute and friendly, but with just the slightest hint of something sinister thrown in. Humans do not naturally tend to look upon reptiles in an overly positive light. But the Bats were such small creatures, and so friendly in their own pompous way, that humans just took to them anyway. Humans delighted in the way the Bats scurried and scuttled about and mostly found them slightly amusing. This despite the fact that Bat mouths are equipped with a rather formidable array of very pointy little teeth, which are on full display when a Bat smiles.

The Tribes of Taaleem had gone through a brief evolutionary stage of flight, but as they themselves say, they hadn’t liked it much. Despite choosing to return to the ground, they retained vestigial wing flaps which run from under their arms, down their sides and to their legs. There are also steering wing remnants between the tips of their long, three- pointed tails. These, which were once used for balance in the air, now serve to stabilize the Bats when they squatted down to a resting position. When walking or running the Bats keep their tails pointed straight out behind them. It was these wing flaps, which are black and leathery and just a little ragged at the edges, which prompted the earthlings to call these aliens ‘Bats”.

The Prince and the Baron were now settled down comfortably, three tail tips flared out behind each of them, picking up an arranging their cards. Frodo picked up the dealers hand and showed it to Ssseeeet. Ox dropped another delicate tentacle tip to pick up his cards and dangle them in front of one of his eyes. Everyone else picked up their cards as well. The game could at last commence.

They always played straight poker. None of this Texas holdum new age crap for Rufus Blacke. If he was feeling particularly adventurous he would add a second wildcard to the customary wild aces.

Ox guided the beer bottle dangling from a tentacle thread into one of his mouth slits and took a swallow while he focused an eye on his cards. Rufus could catch no hint of how good a hand Ox had, but across the table the Princes’ leg claws scratched at the stool top as if he was shifting position to get more comfortable. Rufus from experience knew that this could signify a good hand for his Highness. Rufus had also noticed a ‘tell’, which I believe is poker slang for a subtle physical display which less skilled players sometimes produce in their excitement at being dealt a particularly good hand, in his friend, VarnTa. These ‘tells’ are involuntary reactions of which the givers are completely unaware. In humans these signs frequently involve facial muscles. A slight narrowing or widening of the eyes, or a tiny twitch, the flick of a smile. These ‘tells, and the ability to mask them and spot them in your opponents, accounts, as I understand it, for the origin of the expression; ‘having a poker face’. VarnTa, Rufus had learned to no small amount of amusement, when receiving a lucky deal, could not contain a slight quickening of the pulse of the blood flow up through his neck veins. It was not the pulsing of the large, yellow neck veins which Rufus had perceived, but rather the result. This increased pumping of the blood caused the remarkable rear-hanging penis to throb just slightly, which in turn caused it to swing back and forth just the tiniest bit, as if it were tapping VarnTa on the back. It made Rufus a little uncomfortable to have to keep glancing at his friend’s penis, but hey, this was poker after all. His friend, Rufus thought with a smirk, had a great poker face, but he had a lousy poker penis. He tried to keep a smile off his face, and used taking a drink from his own beer to cover it when he was unsuccessful.

I will not bore you with the details of the game, other than to say that Rufus won, but not enough to feel that he had taken advantage of his friends. The chips were worth only five cents, a dime and a quarter. The stakes were low. There were never any big losers or winners.

Everyone, except Gollum and Mr. Toad, who always considered themselves to be on duty, drank as much beer as seemed like a good idea. And as usual, not everyone had a good idea of exactly how much beer that was. The Prince and the Baron became quite chatty, telling stories and what the Bats took to be jokes. Ox began to sway slightly back and forth like a tree in a breeze, or a sea anemone in a shifting current. Frodo poured more than a few beers into Ssseeeet’s drinking bowl, and sipped himself from a beer held in his left lower hand. He smiled and nodded to himself a lot, and seemed, unless Rufus was mistaken, to turn a slightly brighter shade of red. However his hand coordination never seemed to suffer.

Ox took a hand with a full house. Three of his mouth slits said simultaneously, “Now my scout ships have found your flank, as the great Sea-Lord Xxx did to Oox, his nemesis.”  All of his table facing eyes swept around to take in his opponents.

The Baron opened his mouth wide and flicked his long, bulbous tongue back and forth in a Bat laugh. I suppose I could at this point mention that Bats do not impregnate their females by direct contact. Rather, the females lay five to seven eggs in a nest. The male Bats then fertilize the eggs directly by licking them with their sperm-producing tongues, which accounts for the unusual shape of these appendages. It may be just as well that the fact that the Trex’s have their sex organs located in their mouths is not yet common knowledge on Earth. This would undoubtedly be the cause for more nicknames being heaped upon the Bats, and Rufus would presumably make some inappropriate French-kissing jokes as well. However, their courting rituals are really quite charming and lengthy, involving love poems and expensive presents, and dancing that would put a high school prom to shame.

“A battle is not a war, my large friend,” said the Baron to Ox.

Ox, whose race had its own peculiar method of reproduction, replied to the Baron, “you are on the wrong side of the wind, little Admiral, and in the wrong end of the Valley of Woe as well.”

I mention the reproductive method of the Xxos at this point only because I happen to be on the subject. The Xxo have no need to involve others of their species to reproduce. Like some simple Earth life forms, they have the habit of splitting themselves into two completely separate beings. This is a very rare event, what with their exceptionally long life spans, and I am not exactly sure if the process is a chosen one, or comes about involuntarily. But when it does happen it happens in a matter of hours. A thick purple line appears, running up and down each side of the expectant Xxo. This line gradually forms into a deep crease or crevice going up one side of the stalk and down the other. The creases deepen, reaching for each other from either side. The stomach and brain split in two, but not quite evenly. One half, or slightly more than half to be precise, of the Xxo retains a marginally larger portion of the brain. This allows the original Xxo to maintain his name and identity, whereas the new Xxo becomes an entirely new being. Oh, he retains the recollection of the original Xxo’s memories, enough to speak and function quite well, but this brand new Xxo is responsible for learning most of the facts of life on its own. Born into the traditional warlike society of the Xxos of old, they rapidly became experts in the arts of sea, land and space warfare. But what might be expected to be learned by a Xxo born into the peaceful coexistence with human beings, no one can say. It hasn’t come up yet.

To remove this task from my list, so to speak, a brief word on the mating habits of the rest of Rufus’s poker buddies. As for the Dick-heads, I am afraid you will just have to use your own imagination. The details would seem to be straight forward enough, if you think about it. And I know you will.

As for the Slugs, their love-making involves great numbers of males and females, as well as copious amounts of various gooey substances. Fortunately this eventuality does not come up often, and then always on the home planets of the Muccassim. Rufus occasionally found himself wondering if the Nature Channel would be there to film one of these mating tangles in high definition, and with commentary by a naturalist, a biologist, or a clinical psychologist. Or just maybe; Slugs Gone Wild, spring-break edition.