Muck turned to examine the wreckage of the scout ship. "Christ, Enemy Mine reflex flashback," prosed Muck, banging a spanner on a fusebox

Muck and bones by MF Korn, DF Lewis & Hertzan Chimera

Due to a crewmember going unmentioned, coming off leisure shift halfassed out of his mind on feel good EZ-Drack and then shit as all stupid to spec-calc a landing, the scout ship crashed into an alien cathedral it looked like. The thing was ten times bigger than the ruins of the Milan or Chartres, made of some kinda weird crystal all oozing glowing, and empty.

From scanning full blown it looked like the whole planet was once teeming with smart-as-crap enough life-forms to worship something and build these cathedrals all over the place, but now vanished like gone, all gone. A five year sentence. It wound on and on. The ideas were full-stopped at the constipation centre. Nothing could come through and the unmentionable crewmember looked askance at the dance: as the pillars, statues, gothic gargoyles foxtrotted past the flushroom’s spyglass, in a tangible form of downward, dragging motion—not so much slow-motion as a quickstep in fast setting sunglue.

"Hey, Mr Muck, we’ve biffed an ancient building even while the choirs were still line-dancing inside to Handel!" Mr Muck looked at the latecomer: a cameo cowboy of a yawning pretence, coming from low-down ablutions in waving with new-webbed fingers and saying as if his tongue were fisted. "Mr Muck, I couldn’t have eyes in my arse!"

"Nope, but you sure made us crumple a few holy souls in the process as a result of your too turgid flesh, Mr "

"Bones."

"Well Mr Bones, let me describe what your inattention has caused. A huge holy monument, with seven steeples and seven spires has been skusemeed from high church to low. I’m sure I spied wide over-reaching fallen arches where thousands once passed like mechanical dolls swirling round a black twirling pillar—and prayer ducts above a roaring river, straddling the faiths as if God were no more than simply a sight better than a man’s waterworks" If holiness be a sieve, honesty is just a secondary drain. Bones and Muck outstared each other. Which was giving Bones the aching neck, don’tcha know. Muck was seven foot tall in his pinstripe knickerbockers and Bones, well, Bones was of inferior genetic backwash. How the hell had he scrounged his way on board the maiden flight of the Harry Celeste? "I’ve been over that ridge" Bones panted, scratching the black plague boils under his arms he kept for decoration. They had somehow landed, somehow escaped the crash and could have lifted off, using the ricochet as motive force, but no they would land, come what may, even if folk round here called where they landed not land.

Muck turned to examine the wreckage of the scout ship. "Christ, Enemy Mine reflex flashback," prosed Muck, banging a spanner on a fusebox. Lilac static charge leapt into the air from the rooftop mounted coms dish. "I found something" Bones was a child of nine, bouncing on the spot desperate for a pee. "I have FOUND something, shipmate." "Why don’t you shut up, jo-boyee," spat Muck, uncharacteristically unverbose. (space ref 4083: jo-boy was a term they invented for genetic inferiors like Bones. Basically a surrogate genesplice haunter like a cuckoo baby jo to the pouch of a backbroke kangaroo). There came a rumbling sewer stench from over the ridge. The sky psychedelic’d a ferocious display and river of alien lifeforms soared through the sky, scurried over "land" through dust made of pure diamond. Slice your eye right out to look into the storm. All escaping the horror from over the ridge...

Celestial revenants of heavenly choirs of alien choruses rimed through the foetid alien-vegitate air.

"What is happening, Muck?" spewed Bones.

"Don’t know. My box won’t read it."

"That river of dead aliens came outa nowhere."

"Let’s get back to the ship."

Singing flames elucidated and enunciated to the back pews. A stick figure of alien in golden-oozing raiments flowing and bouncing as he hobbled, sort of waltzed up to them slowly in float-shuffle. "Welcome, my brethren." it said.

Muck turned to Bones: "Teepers. Telepaths. Why didn’t the box read this life form?"

"Aim it at him."

The alien figure with round cherub face of green ichor smiled a toothless smile at him.

"Okay, Bones, give him the standard Trans-Greet speech..."

"Okay, I’ll get it..."

Bones cleared his throat of spurs.

In a monotone voice: "We come in peace. We are your friends. Greetings from the Humankind. We want to help you..." He turned to Muck because he forgot the rest. "Oh yeah, We come from far away. We want you to join a group of people who will embrace your diverse civilisation and nurture you."

The alien old man looked at him and smiled more from a glowing countenance of peace and pax.

"You think he got it?"

"Probably. You never can remember the lines, dang you." "Shaddup. I did it." The alien old stick figure hovered there in glowing beauty, the raiments made one dizzy to gaze upon their belovedness. He nodded his bulbous head to the Terran men.

Religion only landed, come dusk. Muck decided that stigmata were all the rage even in places where the land was a river and nobody had riparian rights because there was no land making banks or towpaths just shaddupyaface mock-ups of marginal terrain (terra-in), and he told Bones to flex his muscles and crucify the stickman better to crucify a creature on its own limbs than play pooh-sticks with them underneath the arches that had somehow built themselves back into cathedral shipshape, as if time went backward, but whether it went forward, it was still in tow to the biggest river-steamer this side of the tenable universe. To the sounds of choirs regrouping in messianic anthems, Bones, childishly, grabbed the alien scarecrow and probed for sustenance up its back passage, expecting delicacies like river-food (a bit ranker than fruits-de-mer), inching towards the host’s stomach for a feed themselves on the higher ground of a twig-plaited gullet. Bones only retrieved a whelk or two still encased in a weedy shell (often used as eucharist pellets in cathedral rites) and Bones knew more about history and faith round here than he did about his own on Earth because of the severe osmosis prevalent like a disease off the quickly turning into stagnancy of the river, almost into land, if not bog.

Having chewed his way through several bowel walls, like wood shavings, Bones hammered guy-pins into the alien’s gnarled muscle-trunk and stretched out a huge canopy of mosquito-netting from the pinions of a ratchet-branch of painfully pulsing river life that flowed syrupy and then slowly hardened into the bones that’d make a new Bones come the morning. "This isn’t right...." chirped Muck. He ran up the face of the Eiger that the alien had been trestled into. His naked feet had amazing friction of the stretched surface as if running on super crampons. The light hurt his dilated eyes. Snow blind. A sudden gust of alien exhalation ripped into him, inflating his lungs to twenty times their normal capacity. You could hear his ribcage creak under the strain like an old mahogany rape bed. His eyes, my god his eyes...... Wonder of flesh movement wove miracles in the air. And the Mucker-that-he-was found itself spliced with the shining genes of alien daydream, gametes fornicating. Out popped Bones’ fat gristle head. He sweated a bit, that night, our Bonesio.

Let me begin somewhere near the beginning. Bones was not one of us. He was particularly non conformist in his genetic makeup, numero one. Nummer zwei, he had an IQ off the fucking scale, mannnnnnn. Samban, in a nihon stylee, big mistakes had been made in his lifetime, a fair number of them his, and this was a doozie. A real fist f*** of the mind aplenty. Him and Mucker (whom he had rescued from the brink of alien-breath-intoxicated nutso-crazed-fool lost in space insanity) lay in their beds like Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, Simon Templar and a fat stash of succulent femmes.... Muck was fast asleep, of course, recovering his neural pathshite. Snoring, as you do. But Bones, oh Bonesio, many are the things Bonezee saw that night. First a flower. Small one, huddled in the scorching blaze from million suns. Second off the bat, a googlie caught mid flight. Half running down the chain when his feet exploded under him, ankle bone shrapnel took the umpire’s head clean off his shoulders. Whammo. Bones was on his feet. Dripping. Muck was no longer snoring. Under the corpulent matter-fusion of his new flesh something wicked this way and that moved, didn’t slither, just shuddered, as if with cold.

In the vast interior where the ship lay dormant and cooled off aplenty, the cathedral echoed even with the new damage to the alien basilica. Muck and Bones had drank the green blood and ate the flesh of the alien Christ, a wicked transubstantiation of body and blood of what was left of a husk of mottled past-glowing saviour. Muck and Bones heard the echoes within the unseen dank sunken cathedral, une cathedrale engloutie, repeating in unholy alliance of vespers, the intervention of rabid unnameable saints, foreign matter translucent and whipping around each of them as they stood outside the ship.

"What made us do what we did?" Bones asked Muck. "Something made me. I don’t get it. We’d better not tell when we get back."

"I ain’t sayin’ nothing," Bones retorted as heavenly principalities of parallel vortices tingled them all giggly.

"I’m trying to get back in the damned ship, and I can’t move!"

"Me too!"

A glittering foment of chaotic cherubim and seraphim flux of imponderable beings whispered iorizons into their ears each. The sacred requiem of non-understandable dies iraes and benedictus, maledictus, rex tremende matte statis, in excelsus deo penetrated them right to the bones of their swollen-belly click-jumpers.

Who could guess where they’d come out. On a ghost train in the fifties, breathless weeping schoolchild as his mummy crushed muck and bones with love?

Or star trek track of the cross-millennium pantyhose screwing a mussely messiah back-up with no nous but syntax?

Neither, for the two saploose buddies shook hands and wondered who’d make a duo into a holy trinity.

EPILOGUE: The cathedral WAS a mighty edifice, beyond the imagination of the greatest minds, but it did exist, it fomented the skies into hurricanes of footloose fictions of delta terrains that only reality could beat with something so very very wild nobody would or could or should have whisked the over-egging of the cake into something that was beyond words, beyond anything but the syncopation of three separate souls erected like a circus tent of mosquito netting, streaming rivulets of rivers into one huge spout called space opera. By Debussy. A cruel summoning of the stones that were soaked in godhood. A melisander creature creeping on all threes. A king roger of a fuck. Simminoski did it. Who was Simmonski? Only the sky with ribbons of farbright cobras wrapped like choral twig-plaits upon the gigantic bone-cross.

Hey Mr Bones, give us your golden ass. But for your cutshort ablutions, we’d be bleeding in a far worse spiritual haven than this crazy religion seems to offer. Muck and brass icons.

The end