Author: David Barber

Shantytowns sprang up around every Jirt hiveship, infamous marketplaces of greed and filth. This must be the opinion of the Jirt, because without warning they sometimes reduced them to sterile white ash.

Surely no one would risk living in the volcano’s shadow, but time passed and always the humans came creeping back.

This solitary Jirt was a drone, and therefore idle and curious, with wealth to squander, though his glittering isolation field protected him from the grubby attention of human peddlers.

The drone halted, as if studying the word Clinic above a door, though he had no need to puzzle over human script, since that was the function of the translator-bug that clung to his thorax. No one had yet decided what function humans might serve.

Close up, the human medic was soft and pulpy as prejudice claimed. Humans reminded some Jirt of newly-hatched larvae, which must be why they were not swept away, their world cleansed like a diseased hive.

Reluctantly, the drone began to explain. An itch between the maxillary palps, also some soreness and discharge from the proboscis. Of course this was easily remedied by Jirt technologies, but the Queen and Court was bound hear and the drone could not bear to be gossiped about.
Dropping the isolation field left the drone exposed and vulnerable. It was a difficult moment.

While the human busied itself obtaining samples, it gave a tiresome lecture on germs. Humans were obsessed with these invisible entities and the drone buzzed his vestigial wings with impatience. How much simpler to be sterile inside and out!

The white-coated medic shook his head. “Was it a rubbish tip? A cess pit? Or perhaps road kill?”

A million years ago the ancestors of the Jirt had indeed looked for food and mates in such places, but civilisation changes everything.

The medic was extolling the virtues of penicillin, though the drone had stopped listening. Perhaps these incantations encouraged belief in their potions.

Hurrying to open the door for its customer, the human offered uncalled-for advice. The honoured one should be more careful in future, faecal matter was not the sterile food paste that the Jirt were used to.

“You are far from home and perhaps the primitive has awoken ancient instincts.”

Outside was the marketplace, where one might find amusing gifts for the Queen, though the drone headed deeper into the shantytown, abloom with colours and overripe smells, buzzing with raucous noises and disorder, the source of all that was vile, polluted and rank.
Only later, with a thrill of disgust, did the drone realise he had not rebooted his isolation field.

Waiting on the Queen the next day, the drone remarked he had visited the human market and was appalled. The disgusting place needed to be cleansed.

Only afterwards was the drone embarrassed to discover a whiff of corruption he had noticed was coming from himself.

It was the consensus of the Court that tidying up shantytowns was unlikely to impress Her Majesty, so there was consternation when the Queen summoned the drone to mate with Her.

But while the drone should have been concentrating on the mechanics of this honour, instead, he found himself recalling the tantalising odours of filth borne on the foetid air of the human quarter.

Few copulations in this modern age finish with the roused Queen biting off and consuming the drone’s head, and perhaps it was for this reason that the Queen declared it to have been one of the most satisfactory matings for many cycles.