former rioter through the rows of men. They sat.
“Please, don’t stare at me like this. I feel like some flat-nosed. They’re strange, not I. Who are you, anyway?”
The young man had to clear his throat to find his voice again. He felt struck by an alien eight-fingered hand. His head was numb and it took him a moment to remember his name.
“I’m Kianto.”
“Welcome, Kianto. Don’t expect a prize ‘cause you made it down here. It’s much easier to get here than to get back.”
“It is said you are dead.” Kianto slowly recovered and shook his head. “Well, I did not believe it, but still… Man, there are stories around you wouldn’t believe.”
“I heard them all.” Hanjek made a dismissive gesture. “And some more. Some are good and some are simply unbelievable. The best was that the flat-nosed took me to their home planet to cross-breed me with some of the home animals or else. Ah, it still gives me the creeps just thinking of it!” He slapped his thigh. The other men around laughed. “That was a good one, really. I don’t know why they should have done this. To make their own men jealous? Train their men how to do it right? Well, if you want my two cents they could use some training.” He put a hand to his groin, still laughing. “They are slow-witted, the ones they call their guards. And I haven’t seen any of them fuck a woman right. Not once!” He shook his head, grinning. “But that’s not what you wanted to hear, right? Well, I can tell you, if we had had weapons it would’ve been easy to send them back tails between their legs, but so…Granted, they don’t have tails. But still we might have won.” He sighed and looked at Kianto as if he suddenly realized that the young man was a guest without knowledge. “Now, my friend, enough chit-chat about me. Tell me, what brought you here?”
Kianto was too flabbergasted to react at once, which caused more happy snorting around him. Hanjek bent forward, eyes big and bright with amusement.
“Want to save us all, ey?”
Kianto looked around, from one smiling face to the next, unable to believe his eyes.
“You are prisoners here, aren’t you?”
Hanjek weighed his head.
“Yes. You could call us prisoners. You could call us survivors. You could call us the more intelligent lot that understood.”
“Compared to others who did not,” another man said, nodding in unison with the group that had gathered around Kianto.
“They gave you the choice to live and stay imprisoned?” he wanted to know. His voice tilted high at the end so he cleared his throat.
“Imprisonment is a question of definition,” Hanjek pointed out and slapped Kianto’s shoulder heartily. “But tell us about you. Do you want to join us? We’re a fine group. Have always been friendly with them all. You’d fit here pretty well. Now, the thing around your cock would have to go, but we could arrange that so you’d have more fun. We are all called to have fun here, believe it or not. And the women…well, you wouldn’t throw them down the balcony, I swear.”
Kianto was at a loss.
“You want to stay here?” The happy faces irritated him. He had sworn that if Hanjek still lived he would find and rescue him. He had never believed the stories about his death. Now he sat with him and he seemed pleased as punch with his situation. “You don’t want to go back to your families? Your homes? They all think you were killed by the Mawanies.”
Hanjek upturned his eyes.
“They don’t understand! The Mawanies are no killers. They caught us, yes, but they brought us here and told us to stay. So we stayed.”
Kianto frowned. The sound of it was too light, too easy.
“Did they torture you so that you obeyed?”
“No! They—” Hanjek blew out air. The other men sat down, murmuring to themselves. Hanjek upturned his hands, grimacing as if the words to come would hurt. “Listen, it was a hard time. We were pressed into a corner. The riot had seemed fine in the