The Meat Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

imagined that I could be two. Gilfaethwy and doe. No, three, I’m Campion, rapist and submissive doe all at the same time. How the body responds with joy to the rutting, spirit extends…
    To have sex with my brother! With my assistant! To know the sound of her grunting behind me. That bastard Math.

    Apprentice
    Forget about weirdness. This feels so right. I’m swimming a stream which goes through her back, into her body and I feel inside…

    Inspector of Wrecks
    Mind of a man in a stinking animal…

    Apprentice
    Mind of the body, as the lichen lays in the moss and the tree sucks sweet water up, like a tide…

    Inspector of Wrecks
    Passive, like soil, no will of my own…

    Apprentice
    Till it explodes. And I’m falling, light-liquid, falling back down from a red doe’s haunches.

    Inspector of Wrecks
    Oh, the shame.

    Apprentice
    To be complete as an animal, nothing is better. To smell of come.

    Inspector of Wrecks
    With my brother!

    Apprentice
    What have I done?

    *

    Synapse Log 2 Feb 2210, 11:00

    Apprentice
    Campion hasn’t met my eye since our last turn in the VR. It’s not as if I raped him. It was all perfectly natural. That’ll teach him to take what I experienced lightly. I feel like telling him that it’s only VR, but I don’t quite dare.
    For me, it was a really interesting experience, a chance to see what it’s like to be a wild animal. I’m quite looking forward to the next visit. He’s given us a day off, shut himself up in the lab, pretending to do dust analysis. But I bet he’s just recovering from the shock of being a doe and being fucked by me. No, by a buck. Or should I say his brother Gwydion?
    I want to say sorry, but how do you apologise for being a stag in rut?

    Inspector of Wrecks
    There’s far more vegetable matter here than you’d expect in the atmospherics of a ship, even an Earth one. Of course, they had the usual hydroponics system to keep the atmosphere sweet and to give the crew fresh food. But those early systems were highly risky. Like keeping a fire alive by making sure it never went out. If for any reason you had a disease which killed all your plants at the same time and you weren’t able to save a seed, then you were in big trouble.

    She
    I liked being a stag. OK, there was the hunger and the constant nerves but I felt fit as a flea and I loved the forest. All those smells!

    He
    Now that we have those vegetable stem cells, we can grow anything from scratch, without having to propagate.
    I know I shouldn’t object to what happened in the VR, but I can’t help feeling that the story’s making it hard to be professional. I mean, how can you supervise someone you’ve mated with and whose child you’ve borne against your will?

    She
    Poor Campion, I thought he was going to have a fit when he realised that he was pregnant.

    He
    I’m an experienced enough traveller to know that you lose all dignity on a space trip. But that’s usually to do with toilet matters, not being banished to a forest with your student, turned into an animal and forced to reproduce.
    Mind you, the birth was kind of interesting. I’ve often wondered what it feels like to have a baby. Though I guess that bearing a fawn doesn’t quite count. Animals are better at it than women; they seem to suffer less pain. Even that was enough. But I never even lay down, just stood. And oh, the baby’s sweet aroma when he came out!

    She
    So Campion and I are parents! And when the year of being deer was over, we went back to Math and showed him the fawn.

    He
    What’s amazing, though, in all this, is that the sensations of being a mother were so much more sophisticated than they should be, given the primitive VR equipment we were wearing. I can’t understand it. How did I know to lick the fawn’s faeces and urine in order to hide his scent? It’s as if instinct was wired into the game in a way I