Galactose Intolerant or Soylent Cheese
A David Sands Competition story by A.L. Taur
This story was a winning entry in The Sands of Time Writing Competition and has since been published in the Sands of Time Anthology. All profits from the anthology support Scope, the inspiring charity dedicated to enabling and empowering people with disabilities. The book is available now in both paperback and ebook formats, directly from Rushford Editions or Amazon.
Galactose Intolerant or Soylent Cheese by A.L. Taur
“So tell me about the cheese.”
“What cheese?”
“What do you mean, what cheese? This cheese. That cheese over there. The cheese all around us.”
“There isn’t that much cheese.”
“This vessel is approved by Section 31b of the Unarian Code to be used for hauling asteroids. It can hold a lot of cheese. It is, in fact, holding truly vast amounts of—hold on, have you shoved—you have. You’ve filled the left M-dimensional pocket with cheese, too.”
“I never.”
“I am literally looking at it right now. It’s actually bulging a little. How did you even manage to fill up an M-dimensional pocket? It’s used to contain neutrino reactions. The amount of cheese it would have to hold must be, what, close to the biomass of that last planet?”
“Well. Not exactly close.”
“How can it be ‘not exactly close’?”
“Just exactly that.”
“What?”
“What ‘what’?”
“What ‘exactly that’ is it?!”
“The amount of cheese. Is the biomass of that last planet. Exactly.”
“That...seems odd.”
“I take the fifth.”
“The fifth what?”
“Unsure. The inhabitants did seem to take a lot of it, though. Frankly surprised there’s any left at this point.”
“Well, you certainly took a lot of cheese with that. You realize customs will have questions?”
“Can’t imagine why. It’s just cheese. What sorts of questions?”
“The same sort I’m asking, I imagine. Like ‘why’. And ‘how’. And ‘from where did you manage to get this much cheese’.”
“Look. It’s simple. We’re allowed souvenirs, aren’t we? Well, I brought a souvenir.”
“You brought a celestial body’s mass worth of cheese!”
“Hey, Leskei yanked an entire nebula 17 quarks to the right on his last rotation. Why are you picking on me?”
“He tripped on the third magnetic resonance string. Could happen to anybody, and he righted it as soon as he noticed. Don’t change the subject.”
“What is the subject?”
“The cheese! The cheese all around us is the subject! On a semi-primitive planet, with barely an orbital flight system in place and no external colonies, where did you get this amount of cheese?!”
“If you must know, it all began when a girl met a boy...”
“Yes?”
“She had just come down to survey his planet for the standard report and he—”
“Hang on, are you the girl in this scenario?”
“Of course.”
“You have tentacles for eyeballs and your species has 37.5 genders. You are not a girl.”
“Rude. Do you want to hear the story or not?”
“Fine, fine.”
“So there I am, doing the usual flyovers, atmospheric samplings, bio-surveys, all the good stuff.”
“Right.”
“Just ticking off the boxes, filling specimen jars, noting gas concentrations, all that.”
“Right.”
“When lo and behold, here comes one of the local inhabitants, sounding off and brandishing some sort of weaponized stick. Apparently, he took exception to one of the specimens collected.”
“Family member? Happens.”
“Sort of. They bond with this kind of 4-limbed alarm system that gets a bit excitable when it sees something it hasn’t seen before. This one was called a ‘Rover’.”
“Seems questionably helpful, but all right.”
“So he demanded I give the specimen back.”
“Ah. But you’d already tagged and bagged it?”
“I had. And you know what that means, of course. Can’t open those jars in N-space; it’d make a hell of a mess. Have to get it back to the lab for proper containment.”
“Right.”
“So you know encounter regulations—engage with the locals, be a good sport, always remember we’re only ambassadors. All that jazz.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I explain. I’d love to give him his specimen back, but it would collapse the local space-time continuum, yadda-yadda, survey, yadda-yadda, pleased to meet him, all that. And he’s a bit upset at first, but you know, he plugs in pretty quick and before you can say ‘centripetal parlance’, he’s inviting me to dinner.”
“Admirably hospitable.”
“Right? And considering I’d just entombed his beloved alarm system in sub-orbital quantum space for the foreseeable future, surprisingly gentlemanly of him. So off we trip to his, and it’s lovely, I have to say.”
“Good food? Well, it’d have to be, looking at all this cheese. Is this where the cheese comes in?”
“Sort of. Hold your horses. So yes, there’s cheese—quite a selection, in fact—as well as all sorts of other goodies. Their salami is to die for and don’t get me started on the condiments. So I figure I’ll stick around a while. Really do the survey right. And, well, I don’t know. He got to me. With the salami and the talking, what can I say? I’m a sucker for romance, you know?”
“You’re practically made of actual suckers. While I am a being made of the vibrational equivalent of chaotically structural gluon bonds. I am not sure I am familiar with ‘romance’.”
“Oh, hush. You’re just a prude. Anyway. Romance in the air. Rose petals, quince slices, more salami than you can shake a salami stick at—”
“And cheese?”
“Oy vey, yes, cheese. You with the cheese!”
“Me with the cheese?!”
“All right, all right, yes, me also with the cheese. Anyway. So there we are. A little time goes by. We hit the sights, hit the town, hit the hay. Survey’s going swimmingly, best one I’ve ever done. Certainly the most thorough. And, well, one thing leads to another and before you know it, we’ve got a couple of rugrats running around.”
“Progeny?”
“So much progeny. Almost a little too much. Frankly, I was tempted to eat a couple—hey, don’t knock it ‘till you try it, my species habitually swills back three-quarters of the next generation and be grateful we do, or the whole cosmos’d be swimming in nothing but us and then where would we be, never mind that the little buggers taste like smoky caviar—but I digress. Apparently, cannibalism is heavily frowned upon by these people and when in Rome, you know. So I let ‘em all live, so sue me.”
“You’re all heart.”
“Well, I should be, I do have 17 of them. And what the heart wants—”
“Which one?”
“Second in from the fifth tentacle, I think. Anyway. Rugrats, rugrats, all around. And then, of course, before we’d even noticed, they’d gotten old enough to run about and have some of their own, and before I know it, I’m dandling grandrugrats from every limb.”
“Well, as you say, when in Rome.”
“Right. And hereabout is when hubby starts sounding off about that alarm system still in stasis and isn’t it about time we let him out, surely the seal can be safely cracked by now and, well—”
“Hang on, you didn’t explain the containment procedure? That you’d have to get it back to the lab to open it and that the trip—one way, mind you—would take, what, around 100 of his lifetimes?”
“More like 200. They don’t live long, especially the males. Keep sticking their bits where they don’t belong and more often than not it’s fatal. More than half die off in their adolescence! Really don’t see that we would have missed them if I’d eaten a few of mine… But no, I might not have explained precisely…”
“In other words, you didn’t explain at all?”
“Wellllll, have you ever tried teaching Trinagorian physics to a being stuck in only four dimensions? Half the time, their heads explode. Literally. And I’d gotten rather fond of the old duffer.”
“But where does the cheese come in?”
“Keep your hat on, I’m getting there. So I try and put him off, but he’s not having it. And anyway, by this time he’s pretty good at sussing me out, so out it comes. The containment issue, the timeline, the survey. And, well…”
“Oh, no! You didn’t!”
“I might have. I did. He winkled it out of me. Look, the survey had gathered enough material by this point to satisfy even my old prefect. It was beginning to hit redundancies in sampling. Believe me, by the time you’ve filled 37,000 containment jars with sheep specimens, you’ve seen enough sheep.”
“What’s a ‘sheep’?”
“A hideously mobile brick of terror-soaked protein with the intelligence of an asteroid chunk peacefully floating through deep space. Awfully tasty with a rosemary rub, though.”
“And speaking of asteroids—”
“Exactly. The more I explained, the more he tangled me in details, and the more I had to explain.”
“Couldn’t you have just claimed you couldn’t say?”
“Not after 68 years of marriage! That bugger had enough emotional blackmail stored up for another 37,000 containment jars, believe me. Every day with the damn dishes, and how I never remembered which orifice the cat wanted the pill in, and don’t get me started on what happened to his mother, as if it were my fault the daft bat wandered into the line of the neutrino scanner and got herself well and roasted—”
“The neutrino scanner? Doesn’t this vessel come with the Q616 model, the one with the two tiers of redundant safety locks?”
“Yes, well, shush, will you. ‘Oh, but the tentacles! Oh, but there are so many! Oh, oh, but what will the children be like! Oh, oh, little Marci’s being ever so teased in school!’ All the livelong day, I swear. Not all of us can be ideal vibrational equivalents of chaotically structural gluon bonds, all right? Some of us just want some peace and quiet eventually.”
“Yes, yes, we all have mothers-in-law. Go on.”
“So one explanation led to another and then another and then another and you get it—out pops the reason for the survey.”
“You told him.”
“I told him.”
“Never tell them.”
“I know, I know. But it’s hard, you know? There he was, with all that pinkness and his adorably glassy eyeballs and all our ridiculously numerous progeny frolicking around us. And incidentally, little Marci was being teased in school, too. And I just blurted it out.”
“And how did he—hang on, did that cheese bit just move?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I’m going to worry about it.”
“Trust me, it’s fine. Anyway, he took it rather well, all things considered. Went away for a while, stood on a hill with some of the sheep that hadn’t fit in the specimen jars—they breed like mad, you know, the sheep, that is, not the jars—set a chunk of bark on fire and licked it a bit, then came back.”
“Religious rite? The flaming bark licking?”
“You know, I never could figure that out. So back he popped and wouldn’t you know. The man demanded I do something about it.”
“About what?”
“Why, the asteroid, of course.”
“Do something? About the asteroid the size of this ship, due to demolish at least two planetary systems before hurtling through their corner of space and wiping out the whole lot?”
“That’d be the one.”
“What in the world was he expecting you to do?”
“Why, save them, of course.”
“Save who?”
“The whole bloody lot of them, that’s who. The people, the chickens, the alarm systems, even the vegetation. I asked if we could at least forget the sheep—would’ve lightened the load considerably, let me tell you—but noooo, the sheep had to come, too. Apparently, it just wouldn’t be the same without them.”
“You do have me curious about the sheep.”
“Well, you’re welcome to grab one of the specimen jars. I certainly have enough of them.”
“Much obliged. So how did he take it?”
“Uh. Take what, exactly?”
“When you said there was nothing you could do? You did tell him eventually, didn’t you?”
“I did not, in fact, do perhaps exactly that.”
“Surely you didn’t just abandon the man? Oh, no, you did, didn’t you? And then absconded with all his cheese?”
“You do insist on thinking the worst of me.”
“True, but that’s only because I know you so well. So?”
“Of course I didn’t just abandon him! How could I? The big lug picked flowers for me! He filed down my dewclaws, even the worky ones on my left hind tentacle! He once named a sheep for me—incidentally, currently contained in specimen jar #13,471—and then for some fool reason, refused to let me eat it! As I said, it was girl met boy—”
“Still not a girl. Way too many tentacles.”
“—girl fell hard for boy—”
“Seriously, we could pave an interstellar highway with the regulations you’ve trampled.”
“—girl turned entire boy’s planet into cheese to save them. The end. Timeless story. They’ll be singing it for ages.”
“You what the WHAT.”
“What?”
“Don’t start that again. Oh, Lord Quinzlchthuihl of the 12th Dimension, I’m having heart palpitations—”
“Do vibrational equivalents of chaotically structural gluon bonds have hearts?”
“Shut up. Is this what you meant by the amount of cheese being exactly equivalent to the biomass of that planet? Do you mean to tell me that you somehow transmogrified every living thing on that Quinzlchthuihl-forsaken rock into cheese?!”
“I did.”
“HOW?!”
“I tinker in my spare time. It’s a hobby. I might have altered a few of the scanners here and there.”
“And are you—that bit of cheese is moving again! Are you telling me they’re still alive? As cheese? Is all this cheese sentient?!”
“Of course not. What kind of monster do you take me for? They’re not aware. Just—semi-aware. As much as cheese ever is. Which, actually—well, never mind. And I’ll turn them back. As soon as I get back into the lab, we can pull up a nice empty Red Dwarf, dust it off, and slap ‘em right back on. Moss and chickens and sheep and all. It’ll be great.”
“Are you insane? Customs will never let you through with them! They could be carrying anything! Put them back now!”
“I will not! You just said—customs would never let me through with them.”
“I mean put them back where they came from or so help me!”
“Spoilsport. They’ll get wiped out.”
“But they’re cheese! They’ll have to spend the next—what has it been? Already 20? They’ll have to spend roughly another 180 of their lifetimes as cheese!”
“So what? Cheese doesn’t spoil. The cheese will abide.”
“The cheese is moving! Look, that lump right there, it’s wriggling!”
“Oh, no, that’s just an experimental bit. I had to make sure I could flip them back and forth safely, you know.”
“I don’t think you managed it as well as you think. Is it supposed to look like that?”
“That’s what it originally looked like, yes.”
“But it’s oozing!”
“They call it ‘drooling’ and yes, apparently it’s normal for this type of alarm system. I believe it’s called a ‘pug’.”
“It’s certainly alarming me. Look, you can’t do this. There’s a natural order. You have to put them back.”
“But they’re so cute! Did you know they think they invented hate and were trying really hard to feel bad about it?”
“Oh, please. Wait until they meet the Zsx lot. Actually, don’t I remember the historical brief noting those bastards did a buzz-through through their neighbourhood?”
“They did. Left a few of their own behind, too. The descendents devolved a bit, naturally, but they’re still around. Locals call them ‘mosquitoes’.”
“Do not tell me they’re in the cheese, too?”
“Afraid so.”
“Oh, that is just disgusting. Zsx-infested cheese. Customs will have you up on sanitation charges, if nothing else.”
“Nah, it’s all cheese at the moment. Pretty homogeneous.”
“Except for that alarm system.”
“Except for that, yes.”
“All right, tell me something.”
“Yes?”
“What are you going to do about that bit?”
“Which bit?”
“The bit the alarm system just ate.”
“It—well, shoot. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. It’ll separate out at the end.”
“...”
“Admit it. You’re a little impressed.”
“You turned a planet. Into cheese.”
“I did.”
“And you’re going to turn all this cheese back into a planet?”
“I am.”
“‘Impressed’ is not the word I’m looking for.”
“Aw, you’re just cranky you didn’t think of it first.”
“Did hubby know he would be cheese?”
“Define ‘know’.”
“The usual amount of awareness, I would think.”
“Well, I warned him I’d have to conglomerate the intended biological volume into an appropriate matrix.”
“And?”
“And he muttered something about how he wasn’t about to go the way of the dinosaurs if he could help it and told me to do my worst.”
“You certainly did that.”
“Thank you.”
“Just one last question.”
“Yes?”
“If the left M-dimensional pocket is full of cheese—”
“Yes?”
“—and between that and the rest of the cheese in here, that accounts for the entire biomass you perverted the laws of nature and all known sentient races for—”
“Yes?”
“What is that in the other pocket?”
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