Ian Knight: A Memoir of My Early Years

Okay, so what I do, you may find a bit weird. You might even think it’s disgusting. But, let’s face it, everyone does things that the next person finds odd or unpleasant. What I do is just a bit more... let’s say... overt than your average pervert. But it’s very useful in my line of work. I’ve always said that I do it as my Duty to My Emperor and My Planet.

It started off when I was just a kid. I was born shortly before the peace broke out. No-one yet knew much about the Sluzarni, except what they looked like. That was enough for most people. They just didn’t want to get to know them. After all, Sluzarni may look almost human, but there was something different... something other. The only obvious differences between us and the Sluzarni are the orangey tinge to their skins, their pointed ears, their lack of any obvious gender-defining features and the rigid way they always wore rank-denoting coloured epaulettes, people found them (and still find them) harder to deal with, I think, than they would if they were green, scaly Bug Eyed Monsters. They should have been more like us and yet they weren’t. It was this that had started the war. I mean, how many people find it an extreme religious offence to grasp someone’s hand and shake it? So when Major Phil Stevens, as the official representative to their homeworld, did just that to the Sluzarni Minister-Priest For Extra-Sluzarni Communication, he was being both insulting in the extreme and blasphemous. He was of course killed immediately. The Imperial Space Carrier Imaginative that had carried Major Stevens to the Sluzarni homeworld immediately took off and performed a standard scorched earth procedure on the area and declare war.

But, as I said, I was born just before the war ended. One of the Sluzarni officers (originally an anthropologist, before being drafted) finally managed to make one of their commanders see sense, that it could have been a mistake - although it was nearly killed for heretical thinking. After all, wasn’t the hand used for basic, dirty work? It was unclean and the only method of contact should be speech, that is except for procreation - something else the Sluzarni don’t understand - how can we enjoy making babies? After all, there is serious physical contact involved in that.

Sluzarni started to arrive on Earth for intelligence-sharing meetings soon after the peace agreement. I was about three then. This didn’t really affect the populace of Earth, who had, throughout the thirty years of warfare, been trained to view the Sluzarni as dirty, evil, stinking, Orangies. Which is pretty much the way it has stayed ever since. That’s why most humans have never seen one except on the television. I did actually see one when I was a kid. I was about twelve at the time and for some reason, I don’t remember what it was anymore, the Sluzarni ambassador came to my town to make a speech. I think it was something to do with extending the boundaries of friendship between the two races. It didn’t quite work - the ambassador was locked away in a mobile glass cage to prevent accidental physical contact - so it came across as being arrogant and cut off from us. Mind you, it needed it, I don’t remember anything about the speech, but I do remember the cage being pelted with vegetables and eggs by protesters. Seeing a Sluzarni that close to me was quite something - they didn’t really look anything like they were portrayed in the political cartoons and propaganda films that I saw when I was younger. It looked fascinating, its androgyny and skin colour made it really quite beautiful.

The most popular game that kids played, me included, was Marines and Orangies. I was, for some reason, I guess because I was always quite small - and therefore easy to pick on and force into what the other kids wanted - made to play an Orangie. This, essentially, involved threatening the forces of the heroic human Marines, before being overthrown and jumped on by several of the largest boys. The ‘fun’, at least for me, came from trying to work out the different ways in which I could threaten the Marines. One of the best came after I had just read Lord Of The Rings. I was twelve and I had thrown myself whole-heartedly into Tolkien’s fantasy world. I realised that the Orcs could quite easily be interchanged with Sluzarni - even though there are no real similarities between them, but they are both ‘evil’ races, so it made sense at the time. This led me to start imagining an entire scenario where the Sluzarni had a powerful device in the form of a ring. It had somehow fallen into the hands of the Marines and I, as the Dark Lord of the Sluzarni (I was allowed to do this, because I was now the oldest boy to play at being Sluzarni) had to organise my forces to try and get back the Ring of Sluzarn. This was actually the closest I came to victory as a Sluzarni. I would have won, but my subordinates suddenly realised what was happening and stopped trying. After all, even in a game, the Orangies couldn’t win - even if that meant that they themselves were on the losing side.

It was at this point that all my problems began. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but after years of desperately trying to persuade my friends to let me be a Marine and being told that I was such a good Sluzarni that it would be a shame to see me just as an ordinary Marine (or at least, that’s what I told myself they meant when they said that I had to be an Orangie), I started to enjoy doing it. I started to do research into Sluzarni culture. I bought books on their religion, on their society (the two are, of course, virtually interchangeable). I found myself identifying with them. This started subtly, with me beginning to dislike the physical contact that the endless games of Marines and Orangies would entail - even as Dark Lord of the Sluzarni, the marines would inevitably, leap upon me and pound me into the dirt - a method that they considered to be a much more satisfactory way of disposing of the Orange Peril, than shooting us with imaginary blasters (which was all that the Sluzarni were allowed to do - despite our constant threats of dire tortures to be inflicted upon the heroic Boys In Purple). This final combat was never the part of the game I enjoyed - it almost always meant that I would get told off by my mother for coming in from play, covered in mud and with ripped clothes. Although, she would always - in her lighter moments - put it down to ‘boyish high jinks’ and part of the ‘growing up experience’. But my friends who played the marines frowned upon running away. I tried it a few times and it always meant a worse beating the next time - after all, Orangies may have been Evil Scum, but they were honourable. They never, ever ran away. So, I had to wait for them to jump on me, pronouncing dire revenge for their terrible deeds as they grew closer, all the while hoping that they would tire quickly and allow me to get away with only minor muddying. But as I got older, it took more and more will power to avoid running as they came for me. I started to have nightmares about being naked in a room full of people, all of whom had their hands outstretched to touch my skin.

I decided that the only thing to do was to stop playing with the other kids. It sounds like a perfectly obvious solution when I say it like that, but it took me weeks to come to that conclusion and more weeks to finally stop playing. I had to come up with a reason for not playing that didn’t sound like cowardice or - potentially even worse - boringness. I thought of all the obvious ones - my mother wouldn’t let me play with them anymore, I had more homework to do - things like that, but couldn’t come up with any strong justification for these sudden changes in my lifestyle. In the end, however, I just said that I was unable to come out - there was other ‘stuff’ I had to do. This sounds even worse than anything else I could have said and I remember cringing and blushing when I said it, but, much to my amazement, it was accepted without any comment, other than one of ‘okay, see ya’.

So, I was free of having to play a Sluzarni of any rank from lowly private up to Dark Lord. It’s a cliché but I really felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I no longer had to worry about being jumped on. Of course, there was still the usual bullying at school, when I was ‘jumped on’ in much worse ways, but I at least managed to avoid it in my normal, everyday interactions. This didn’t stop my fascination with the Sluzarni, though, or my dislike of physical contact. I started to avoid touching people as often as I could. And, when I had to, I felt a shiver of disgust go through me, one that I often had trouble disguising.

Of course, at the same time as I was discovering the Sluzarni and starting to copy them, I was also discovering the opposite sex. Don’t misunderstand me - despite everything I am telling you here, I still find women attractive. I’m married to one. I know that this isn’t much in the way of proof, but believe me when I say that I do love her and find her very sexy. As long as she doesn’t try to touch me. The first girl I ever fell in love with was called Janet Grey. She was in the year above me at school and she had large breasts. At least, I thought they were large. Compared to those of all the other girls around me, they were huge. And I was also looking at them through the magnifying effect of rose-tinted glasses. Her breasts were the most perfect specimens I had ever seen. No-one, not even some of the CGIrls that I illicitly downloaded from the Net, had breasts to compare with those of Janet Grey. Janet - if you’re reading this, I’m really sorry. I hadn’t stopped having nightmares, if anything, they had got worse. And my teenage lust for Janet led to one of the worst. I dreamt that I was naked in a room, as usual, but this time, the only other person there was Janet. She was naked as well and her breasts were every bit as wonderful as I had imagined them. We drew closer and she reached out and started to touch me all over. I had a strange reaction to this. One part of me loved what she was doing, especially when she started to stroke me. The other part of me was overcome with feelings of extreme nausea.

I think I must be one of the few people whose first real sexual memory is that of waking up, ejaculating and then throwing up into his lap. I think in a way I was quite lucky that the one covered up the other, because I would have died if my mother had seen any signs of sex. Mind you, I think you’ll agree that it’s a fairly twisted kind of good luck. Over the next few weeks, this dream recurred several times. After the first time, though, I managed to control both reactions. It was close a few times, however.

I think that all of this led me to identify with the Sluzarni even more. I grew more and more dissatisfied with the pinkness of my skin. Once, I loaded a holograph of myself onto my computer and played with a graphics package until the image had orange skin and pointy ears. Of course, it looked terrible- there are actually more subtle differences between the two races than that (for a start, I just changed the colour of the face to orange and ignored the subtle shadings that a face has) - but I liked the result. For the first time in a long time I looked at an image of myself and was truly happy with what I saw. Well, perhaps not truly happy, but I was certainly happier with that image than I was with the original.

This led me to start to contemplate perhaps maybe considering doing something that would be maybe be a little bit more drastic. Although, I didn’t know what to do, until I heard someone say that if you ate enough carrots your skin would turn orange. Overnight, carrots became my favourite food. Or at least that is what I told people. I didn’t really care for them, but I ate them constantly. When other kids would eat a bar of chocolate or a bag of crisps, I would be munching on a nice, fresh, crunchy, orange carrot. This started to draw comments from people along the lines of "you’re going to start looking like a carrot". If only they knew...

Now, I don’t know if what I heard is a myth or if I didn’t eat enough of them or if genetically modified carrots don’t affect people like that. Whatever the reason, my skin tone did not change. I stayed my normal pale pink. I’d stare in the mirror for minutes at a time, trying to persuade myself that - yes! - my skin was changing. But any change I saw was only for moments and then I realised that I was fooling myself. Looking back on that time, I realise that it was actually a very lucky thing that nothing happened. I dread to think what would have happened at school if my skin had taken on anything approaching any orange tint.

After a couple of months, I started to get very bored eating carrots. I would sit in the playground and look at the other children eating their chocolate bars and get very jealous. Especially when one of them would share with Carol Jones, whose breasts had overtaken those of Janet Grey.

I knew that I had to find another way of looking more Sluzarni. Eventually, I realised that this probably meant some sort of make-up. This really worried me. I mean, only girls wore that stuff and anyway, how was I going to get some orange make-up? I knew nothing about it, except for the obvious colourings- lipstick and eye-shadow. I was aware that some of the older girls used something to make their faces look smooth like a dolls, but I had no idea what they did or how they did it. Perhaps it was a phase that some girls went through naturally, exuding this stuff from their pores, the way I seemed to start exuding pus. No-one had told me that I would start getting these red eruptions on my face, why would they have mentioned that girls faces had this beige matt stuff on theirs? It wasn’t until I got friendlier with one particular girl - Susan Jameson, whose breasts were not as nice as either Janet Grey’s or Carol Jones’s but who would at least let me talk to her - and went into her bedroom (which I had to steel myself to do, who knew what she would want to do in there - she might even try to kiss me! She didn’t, but the thought was there, mixed in equal parts hope and despair) that I discovered foundation.

After that, I knew what I needed. If I could find some foundation that was the same colour as Sluzarni skin I would be sorted! I also wanted something that was odourless. I couldn’t understand why girls make-up smelled funny. I was stuck at that point. I didn’t know where to get orange foundation. I didn’t feel like I could just go up to a make-up counter and ask for some. They’d think I was really weird.

Finally, when I was sixteen, I got the chance! Susan was a member of the school drama society. In fact, she was the senior member. She was the best actor, singer, dancer and director in the school. (She is actually performing on Broadway at this very moment, although I won’t embarrass her by giving away any further details that may identify her real name) Anything she wanted to do with the society happened. Mostly. I remember once when she turned up this ancient musical called ‘Hair’ and decided that it was going to be her next project. This was given the go-ahead until one of the teachers read it and realised that some of the cast were meant to be entirely naked. It was swiftly killed and no more was officially said about it. Although Susan’s desire to strip off and certain people’s desire to see just that and what they would do, if they ever did see it was discussed at great length in the school yard for quite some time afterwards.

Susan was also the best party-thrower in the neighbourhood. Her parties were famous, usually for all the wrong (or right, depending on how you looked at it) reasons. One of the more famous incidents was the time that one of the assembled throng managed to drop an illicit bottle of beer down the toilet bowl. The bottle was intact, but a huge chunk of the bowl was knocked out, resulting in widespread flooding, several times through the evening, when extremely inebriated teenagers would flush it, having ignored the huge ‘DO NOT USE’ sign on the door. Mind you, the plumber managed to flush it when he was changing the bowl, so it just goes to show that alcohol-induced idiocy isn’t the only sort that is around. It just seems like it when you are at a party, stone cold sober. (That’s something else about Sluzarni - they are all tee total. It’s one of their religious codes. So, of course, I wouldn’t touch the stuff either.) Anyway, one of Susan’s parties was for her sixteenth birthday. She had decided that she wanted a fancy dress party. She had her heart set on dressing as a demon, in very skimpy, red lingerie. This was mainly due to the fact that she was desperate to seduce one of the boys. By this time, I had become just a friend. I think she thought I was gay - the number of times I saw her in her bra and panties, she obviously didn’t consider me in any kind of sexual way, although it gave me a lot of difficult times because she wore some very revealing underwear.

I was curious to know exactly how skimpy, red lingerie was going to mark her out as a demon. She looked at me as if I was an idiot and told me that she was going to get some red face paints from school that would help to make her look demonic. It was as if I suddenly woke up. Theatrical make-up! That would be much better than any ordinary make-up for making me look like a Sluzarni and comes in lots of different shades. She asked me if I had any ideas for what to go as and, half thinking about the possibilities of theatrical make-up I said ‘a Sluzarni’. Then I blushed the colour that Susan was intending to paint her face.

Susan didn’t notice. She thought it was a wonderful idea. She offered to help- she said that she’d get me the orange face paint and help me to do it. Much to my embarrassment, the thought turned me on. Once again, she didn’t notice. Over the years, looking back at that day - in fact, at my entire relationship with Susan Jameson - I have come to realise exactly how self-centred she really was. And, if you believe the news reports about her, still is.

The day of the party arrived. I had managed to gather a ‘Sluzarni costume’ together, consisting of a dark blue, baggy and ill-fitting jump-suit with purple epaulettes, knee-length boots and a pair of pointy ears. I went to Susan’s house early (where her parents went during these parties was always a mystery to me, but I never saw them on the day, no matter how early I went) she was getting ready. Believe me, the lingerie was extremely revealing. I had to persuade her to put a mini-skirt on over it, or she would have had everything on show. (Perhaps she would have got on stage for ‘Hair’ after all...) She sat me down and proceeded to plaster my face with orange make-up. I really had to work myself up to this and even took a large drink of my father’s whisky (it only occurred to me later how strange it was - breaking one Sluzarni taboo in order to break another one) in order to relax myself enough to let her touch me long enough to apply the make-up. Even then, it was a near thing and I had to get her to stop a couple of times on some made up pretext, in order to get my breath back. It was partly the fact that she was touching me and partly the fact that there was a lot of young, female, scented flesh bent towards me, showing more cleavage than I had ever seen in real life. But, eventually, I looked quite a lot like a Sluzarni.

That party was great - everyone thought that my costume was brilliant and I carried myself like a true Sluzarni all night, which had everyone in stitches. I was the talk of the party. Well, me and Susan were. Especially when she and Roger Blaine disappeared for a couple of hours and she re-appeared with a lot less red face-paint.

I managed to borrow the orange face paint and the ears and every now and then I would get myself dressed up in the privacy of my own room. It felt really weird, but also strangely relaxing to be able to do this whenever I wanted. Eventually I ran out of face paint. This meant that I would have to go and but more. Believe it or not, this took a lot of working up to. I thought that everyone who saw me buying face paints would immediately realise why I wanted them. That it was more than just fancy dress, it was a deep need. It was only looking back years later that I realised two things. Firstly, lots of people buy orange face paint and secondly, even if the shop assistants did think there was some deeper reason for my purchase, they wouldn’t have cared - my money is as good as anyone else’s and they weren’t about to turn me down.

This went on for a few years, dressing up secretly and washing off the face-paint before anyone caught me (although there were a few close shaves when I had to rush into the bathroom and pretend I was having a shower, so I could wash the paint off.) Then the time came for me to go to university. I was studying politics, with a view to going into the civil service when I graduated. Going away meant, at least for me, that I would be able to leave home and have somewhere with a bit of privacy. Somewhere I could dress up whenever I wanted. Perfect!

I dressed fairly regularly for the first couple of years, with no problems. Then, I was approached in the coffee bar, by someone I had never met before. He was dressed very smartly in a black suit, with a long trench-coat. He was obviously not a student, being at least thirty. Thirty still seemed ancient to me when I was nineteen. He said that he had been watching me for some time and as far as he was concerned I was perfect. He asked me if I was interested in working for the Empire. I mean, what could I say? To say no would be tantamount to treason and totally unthinkable anyway. I was well educated in my belief in and love for the Empire from a very early age, although I did have some difficulties with the lack of respect that was shown to the Sluzarni by people, I mean some of the jokes that comedians made were horrible and the fact that so many people thought they were okay gave me a lot of problems. He gave me an address and told me to go there the following week.

I can’t say what happened there - Official Secrets and all that - but I was rapidly commissioned in the Imperial Army as a Covert Intelligence Officer. I was a spy. It all started fairly quietly, I had to finish my studies and get a degree, but I was usefully employed finding subversives amongst the students and in the faculty. I am proud to say that I was extremely successful. I found a small group of lecturers who were intent on overthrowing the Empire. They weren’t exactly organised on a major scale, but they were still potentially dangerous. They were recruiting students into their plot. They and all their recruits were, of course, re-educated. One of them actually became an Intelligence Officer in her own right afterwards.

Over the next few years, I slowly built myself up in the ranks. I was still dressing, but I was very sure to keep that completely under wraps - I don’t dare imagine what would have happened if anyone found out about it. It gives me the creeps just thinking about the possibilities. I’d have been out of a job and blacklisted for all the decent jobs as unreliable at the very least.

Finally, the perfect assignment came up, the one I had been after basically since I started as a C.I.O. The operative installed on the Sluzarni homeworld was finally retiring. He’d been there since the middle of the war, so he was fairly old now and his abilities were starting to degrade. It was the perfect time for me - I had just uncovered a fairly major conspiracy within the Inner Circle of the Imperial Court and so my star was flying high. I knew that nothing would be refused to me, if I wanted it. And I did. When I asked for this assignment, people were a little surprised. The Sluzarni job had always been seen as a hard slog for very little glory. The joke was that you’d be assigned a stint keeping an eye on the Sluzarni if you’d really screwed up somehow. My C.O. tried to dissuade me but I knew what I wanted and refused to budge. Eventually, she relented and I was on my way!

The first thing that I had to undergo was some fairly major cosmetic surgery. This had the effect of making me appear completely Sluzarni. When I looked in the mirror for the first time after that surgery I knew somehow that this was correct. I was a little frustrated that I couldn’t choose my appearance - without resorting (ironically enough) to some pink make-up, but on the whole, I thought I looked like I should look for the first time ever. I felt great.

Getting to Sluzarni was easy, integrating myself into Sluzarni was just as easy - my normal epaulettes (unlike an ordinary Sluzarni citizen, I had no qualms about changing my epaulettes to either promote or demote myself as necessary) gave me a mid-level ranking in society - the rank that most citizens held. Do you know what the first thing I saw when I arrived on Sluzarni was? The thing that gave me the biggest shock of my entire life? I saw two Sluzarni teenagers, wearing pink face paint and holding hands.

Please write to me with any comments or suggestions. Thank you.

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