Mom and I had made good time on our drive from Silicon Valley to the Sierra, and had arrived at the secluded campground just on the California side of Lake Tahoe with plenty of daylight left. Our tent was up and our sleeping bags were rolled out, our cooking gear and our food supplies were squared away, and we'd built a small fire just as the last blush of sunset was fading into the jagged black outline of trees against sky. We were the only people in the campground, and the silence and solitude were as vast and as comforting as the forest itself.

This was Mom's and my celebration, our way of rewarding ourselves for the effort we'd invested in our successes. I had just graduated from the eighth grade, with top honors in science and math. I was looking forward to a summer of rest before I started high school and turned fourteen in September. Mom had just been promoted to director of education and documentation at the computer company where she worked--no small accomplishment for her. Dad had simply left when I was three, and in the ten years following, Mom had put herself through college and worked her way up the ranks to where she was today. It had cost her a lot of long days and lost sleep to do what she did. I remembered many lonely nights and weekends as she attended classes or did homework, but she reminded me often that we were working together to build a future for ourselves. And I think it had been good for both of us. Mom now felt that, at age 33, she had plenty of time left to build a career and enjoy the fruits of her labors. For my part, I had developed a sense of responsibility far beyond that of my peers, and was fully ready to embark upon what I considered to be the beginning of my real academic career.

Mom and I sat and watched the fire wrinkle the darkness deepening around us, both alone and together in our thoughts.

"Well, kiddo, what do you think?" Mom asked after a while. "Do you think all the work was worth it?"

"Yeah, Mom, I do," I said. "Just being here and being able to relax, feeling satisfied with what I've done, tells me that it was worth it."

"So, what shall we do tomorrow?"

Mom and I had made loose plans for what we thought we'd do: I wanted to try some fly fishing in a nearby creek. Mom had brought a couple of books she'd been wanting to read for a long time. We thought we'd spend several days swimming and sunning at Tahoe. Take a trip to Virginia City and look at the old silver mines. Just sit and breathe the smog-free air and forget about freeways, streetlights, work, and school for a week.

"How about it we start with a day of swimming?" I said.

"You got it, pal."

We sat in silence for several minutes.

"Mom?" I said at last.

"Yes?"

"Do you ever wish that you'd remarried?"

"No, not really," Mom said. "At first, I was too busy going to school to have time to date. As time went on, I decided that I didn't really want to invest trust in a man again." Mom put an arm around my shoulders.

"You're the only man I think I can trust all the way," she said, giving me a little hug.

I leaned my head against Mom's. She smelled good. Mom wasn't given to wearing a lot of perfume. She smelled mostly like herself, clean and fresh. Soap, a hint of shampoo, just a touch of perfume; maybe the scent of her deodorant; barely a suggestion of fresh perspiration from the drive through the 100-degree heat of the Central Valley.

"Hey," Mom said, suddenly, "how about some hot chocolate and marshmallows before we turn in?"

I went over and pumped up the Coleman stove while Mom rummaged around for the chocolate and marshmallows. Before long, we had steaming cups of chocolate and were toasting marshmallows in the glow of the coals. We sat and sipped, relishing our sugar treat, as we chatted inconsequentially about the world we'd left behind. After perhaps half an hour, Mom stretched and yawned.

"This mountain air makes me sleepy," she said, "and I'm pooped after the last-minute rushing around at work, the packing, and the drive. How about you?"

"Yeah, I'm tired too," I said. And I was. The relaxation after a year of intense study and nightly homework suddenly made me feel as if I were going to have to crawl into the tent.

"I'll go first," Mom said. "After I've got into my sleeping bag, you can pour some water on the fire and come along."

I wasn't surprised at Mom's request for privacy. Mom was very modest around the house. She always changed clothes in private and locked the bathroom door except when she was just brushing her teeth or combing her hair, and if she was going about the house in her underwear or nightclothes, she always wore a substantial robe. She turned on one bulb of the fluorescent lantern and went into the tent.

The 8' x 10' tent, according to the claim on the box, would sleep four, but I think that would be possible only if they were very friendly or very small. For two, it had plenty of floor space for bags of clothes and paraphernalia, and enough elbow room to sleep comfortably, and it was high enough almost to stand in. Mom zipped the door shut.

As Mom moved about in the tent, I could see her silhouette come and go against the light nylon material as she passed from one side of the light to the other. After some comings and goings, she moved the light to the far side of the tent and began to undress. I couldn't tear my eyes away. Her clear, crisp shadow unbuttoned her shirt and took it off. Then it reached behind her back and unfastened her brassiere. And then her breasts hung free and jiggled. All of a sudden, my cock was rock hard and I was thinking thoughts I shouldn't about my mother. With Mom's leaving a good deal of household responsibility to me and my attention to my schoolwork, I hadn't had much of a social life either. I didn't have a girlfriend, and I'd never seen a woman or a girl naked. Mom's shadow reached over her head to pull on a tee-shirt, and her breasts stood out, high and proud. I just started to think about stepping behind a tree to jack off when Mom called out, "Ok, I'm ready."

With a silent groan, I poured enough water over the fire to reduce the few remaining coals to steam, then unzipped the tent and ducked in.

"Are you in?" Mom asked.

"Here I am," I said. Mom turned off the light. In the dark, I undressed down to my underwear--grateful, actually, that I didn't have to try to conceal my hard-on from Mom--and slipped into the silken lining of my sleeping bag. I wrapped one hand around my cock and wondered, briefly, whether I could jack off quietly enough that Mom wouldn't hear me. Unfortunately, I decided to give it up as a bad idea because even if Mom didn't hear me, I'd make a mess of the sleeping bag, I'd have to sleep with a wet cummy spot all night, and Mom would probably smell it as soon as I unzipped the bag in the morning. Even as I was making this unhappy decision, bam! I fell asleep.

The next thing I knew, I was clawing my way up from an incredibly deep sleep, my ears--my entire being--filled with a low humming sound. A low humming feel. The hum was so pervasive that it seemed to have no source or direction. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I unzipped my sleeping bag and sat up, trying to determine where the hum was coming from, trying to figure out what was going on. As I sat there, wrapped in fear, trying to regain sensibility, the tent was suddenly illuminated from without by a bright blue light. I looked over at Mom, and saw her sitting, too, apparently as dazed as I was. At the same time, we crawled toward the door. I unzipped it, and we went outside. The forest all around the campground was bathed in the same eerie blue glow. We stood and looked up, shielding our eyes with our hands, trying to see past the glare to its origin, but I could see nothing but light.

And then we were floating, levitating, going up. There was no sensation of being touched or pulled, we had simply become weightless. As we rose, the light seemed to take on substance and close beneath us. Our tent and the campground disappeared, and all I could see was blue light.

Then we were inside an enclosure, a room, a laboratory, a cockpit. Something. Around us were six creatures, not human. And then it hit me: Mom and I had been abducted by aliens.

I was scared shitless, there's no polite way to put it. The aliens looked pretty much like the currently popular depiction. They were generally humanoid in shape, which is to say that they had a head, a body, and spindly arms and legs that ended in what looked mostly like hands and feet. They had the large, black eyes we've come to expect, nostril slits, and a small mouth. Their skin was a greyish color. But they had no ears and no genitals, and their three fingers were not rounded like ours, but ended in palps, or suction cups... After observing the aliens long enough to register their shapes, I remembered all the stories I'd read about the medical examinations abductees had been subjected to at the hands of their alien captors, the weird instruments, painful jabbings and pokings, special attention to genitals, and forced matings.

"Hi," one of the aliens said. Thought. They weren't talking, but I could hear a voice in my brain as if a human were speaking conversationally across a dinner table. "Welcome aboard."

"Are we really in a space ship?" I asked.

"I suppose you could say that," the "voice" replied.

"Are you going to hurt us?" I blurted. "Cut us open to see what's inside, or poke us with sharp instruments?"

"Why on earth would we want to do that?" a second voice asked. "If we cut you, we'd probably damage your circuitry or disrupt your functioning, and that would ruin our observations."

"I've read all about you guys," I said. "I know what you do."

There was a murmur of genuine puzzlement in my head. Then one voice sorted itself out. "You must have us confused with someone else," it said. "We've never been here before. We were just passing by. Your planet looked so different from most that we decided to stop and check it out. When we realized that there was apparently intelligent life, we decided to check you out, too."

Without realizing it, Mom and I had edged toward each other until we were standing shoulder to shoulder. I pinched the skin on my forearm, just as a double check. No, I wasn't dreaming.

"Now," a voice said, "we'd like to make some observations. Apparently parts of your outer surface are not you. Please remove them."

"We can't do that," Mom immediately said. "We don't run around naked in front of each other."

"But we found you in very close proximity to one another," the voice went on. "Do you mean to tell me that you always put coverings on your surfaces whenever you're together."

"Yes," Mom said.

I heard something like a sigh in my head. All six of the aliens turned their faces toward me. I didn't hear a voice, but I felt the sensation of a command to take my clothes off. I stepped away from Mom and complied. But I didn't believe for a moment what the aliens had said about not hurting us. I was still so scared that my balls had retreated up somewhere beneath my ribs, and my cock had almost turned itself inside out trying to get away. I glanced at Mom and saw her run her eyes up and down my body.

One of the aliens approached and put his palps on my shoulder, indicating that I should turn around. His touch was slightly cool, but soft and gentle. I turned around, like a model showing off clothes. I heard a murmur of mixed voices in my head. Then the alien who had touched my shoulder pointed at my retracted cock and said, "What's that?"

Mom looked where the alien was pointing. "That's my p-penis," I croaked.

"What is its function?" another voice asked.

The aliens didn't look exactly alike--there were variations in their height and in the configuration of their facial features. Because they didn't actually speak, I couldn't tell which one was "talking," but I was beginning to be able to tell the voices apart. That one, I decided, was Scientist.

"It's for pissing," I said.

"Pissing?" Scientist said.

"Eliminating waste water."

"Waste?"

Time to try another tack. "It's part of our fuel and energy system. We take in water to help with our energy processes. After the water has been used and contains by-products of energy conversion and system maintenance, we eliminate it. Piss."

"Ah, fuel and energy," Scientist said, amid a background of understanding murmurs.

The six alien faces then turned to Mom, and I felt the command to her to remove her coverings. She looked at me. I shrugged.

I could not, of course, look away as Mom undressed. Chances were, I was more curious and fascinated than the aliens were. Mom peeled off her tee-shirt and stepped out of her panties. The same alien who had instructed me to turn around (Leader, I decided) performed the same action with Mom. Mom was, in my opinion, a knockout by anybody's standards. She had rich, black hair, medium length, surrounding a face that was truly beautiful. Her breasts were neither large nor small; exactly the right proportion for the rest of her body. She kept herself in shape, and was trim and firm.

I realized then that the hormones of a thirteen-year-old male have no respect for either fear or incest. Despite myself, my cock had poked out to about 1/3 of a hard-on. It had swollen and lengthened, but still drooped below horizontal. Mom checked me out, and blushed a bright pink--all over.

A voice from somewhere in the crowd said, "Will you look at that! They change color, too." And Mom got even redder.

"Why are you changing color?" Scientist asked.

"I'm blushing," Mom answered.

"Blushing?"

"Blood has rushed to my skin because... oh, never mind."

Leader pointed at my mother's breasts. "What are those protrusions?" he asked.

"They're my breasts." Mom blushed.

"What is their function?" Scientist asked.

"Their function is to nourish--uh, provide fuel for--newborn children."

"You are consumed by your young?" Scientist asked. His face didn't move, but I had the distinct impression of eyebrows being raised.

"No, no," Mom said, "they create nourishment, milk. The young suck it from them."

"Wow," a voice I didn't recognize said. "This gets weirder by the minute."

"Never mind that for now," Scientist said. He pointed at Mom's bush. I looked too, of course. Compared with the pictures I'd seen in magazines, Mom's bush was really lush. It was wide, and stood out from her body like, well, like a little bush of hair. "Where's your penis?" he asked.

"I don't have one," Mom said.

"How do you... piss?"

"I have a different kind of place to piss," Mom said.

"Please explain further," Scientist said.

Mom parted her magnificent bush and spread her labia. My cock elevated above the horizontal. Mom looked at me and made a disapproving shape of her mouth.

"There," she said, pointing, "right there is the opening from which I piss."

"I see," Scientist said. "But why does the other one have a penis and you do not?"

"It has to do with our reproductive mechanism," Mom said, "how we make more of us."

"Please explain further," Scientist said.

"We are diploid organisms," Mom said, with evident exasperation. "The female--I am a female--produces an egg. The male--he is a male--produces sperm. The egg and the sperm unite to form a child."

"And how are the egg and sperm united?" Scientist asked with apparent puzzlement. "I do not see any mechanisms for removal of an egg from your body."

"Between the legs of females is a special opening called a vagina," Mom continued. "It's a pathway to the egg. The penis of a male is inserted into the vagina, and sperm are deposited there."

Twelve alien eyes suddenly shifted to my crotch. "You mean the penis detaches?" Several voices asked at once.

"Of course not," Mom said. "The male inserts his penis into the female's vagina."

"Ok, let me see if I have this right," Scientist said. "An egg resides within the female. When another unit is desired, a male inserts his penis into the vagina and deposits a sperm. The sperm and egg unite, and a new unit is formed. Is that right?"

"More or less," Mom said. "But there's a little more to it than that."

"Please elaborate," Scientist said.

"You guys wouldn't happen to have a white board, would you?" Mom asked.

Scientist gestured toward what looked like a computer screen set in a table top, angled slightly upward from the surface. "You may use this."

Mom went over to the computer screen, and, using the tip of her finger, drew a hasty sketch of the standard front cross-sectional view of the female reproductive system. Kind of a touch-sensitive Etch-a-Sketch.

"Now," Mom lectured, "these are the ovaries, which contain millions of eggs. Each month, one of the ovaries releases a single egg, which travels down the Fallopian tubes, here. The egg enters into this area, which is called the uterus. When conditions are right, the male inserts his penis into the vagina and deposits millions of sperm, which swim upward toward the egg. If the timing is right, one sperm pierces the egg, which causes the union of the genetic material in each, and a child starts to grow in the woman's uterus."

"And if the male does not insert his penis into the vagina, what happens to the egg?"

"It just falls out of the woman's body, along with the uterus lining, which would have been used if conception had taken place."

"You mean that the female's essential genetic material is just lost? Gone? Wasted?"

"Yes."

"And what about all the sperm that do not pierce the egg. What happens to them?"

"They die within a few days."

"You mean that all of the male's unused essential genetic material is just lost, too?"

"Yes."

"Boy," said another voice, "I wonder who was the junior engineer who designed this system." The Joker of the lot.

"What are the conditions that are 'right' for the male to insert his penis into the vagina?"

"Well, uh, it requires some... interaction... between the male and the female. Under normal conditions, the penis looks like this." Mom sketched balls and a limp penis.

"When the male is prepared to insert his penis into the vagina, the penis becomes erect, like this." Mom sketched balls and an erect penis. Then she sketched a standard side cross-sectional view of female reproductive organs. Then she drew the erect penis inside of the vagina, balls hanging out.

My cock elevated to about 3/4 erect. I can get a hard-on just reading the definition of "vagina" in the dictionary.

"This is very interesting. That one is a male?" Scientist said, pointing to me.

"Yes," Mom said.

"And you are a female."

"Yes."

"Then please demonstrate for me the insertion of the penis into the vagina."

"WHAT?" Mom exploded. "Not on your tintype, buster!"

"Uh, why not?" Scientist asked.

"For two reasons," Mom said. "First, he's my son. My unit. He grew from my egg. We cannot combine the genetic material from his sperm and my egg. The child might be faulty. Mothers and sons do not have sex together. Second, he's too young." Mom eyed my crotch dubiously.

"Sex?"

"That's the word for putting the penis inside the vagina."

"The male appears to be in the right condition to insert his penis into the vagina," Scientist said, stepping over to the table with the computer on it. He moved his hands around the edges of the screen for a few moments. "When you removed your outer covering, his penis increased in size by 412.29 per cent, and when you displayed the opening from which you piss, it increased an additional 10 per cent in size and, um, let me see, 28 per cent in rigidity, and it elevated an additional 17 degrees. Apparently the male had insertion in mind, did he not?"

Mom absolutely glowered at me. I studied my toes. Neither of us said a word.

"Please step back," Scientist said. He put a palp on Mom's arm to guide her to where he wanted her to stand. Leader did the same with me, and we all withdrew from the center of the room. An iris opened, a padded table rose from the floor, and the iris closed around its pedestal. My three-quarters hard-on disappeared in an instant. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I thought. Now come the needles and knives and stuff.

"Now, please get onto the table," he said to Mom.

"No way," Mom said, digging in her heels as best she could on the metallic floor. I sensed the aliens issuing a command to Mom the same way they had to me to remove my clothes. Mom still didn't move. I heard a murmur in my head, then two of the other aliens came forward, and with Leader and Scientist on one side of Mom and the two on the other, they tried to urge her to the table. Mom didn't move, and it was clear that physical strength was not one of the aliens' attributes. When it became evident that she wasn't going to get onto the table voluntarily, the four aliens stepped away from her. A cylinder of blue light appeared around Mom. She floated off the floor, rotated until she was horizontal, and then drifted over to the table. Scientist turned his attention to his computer screen. After a few seconds, there was flicker of red light from the ceiling of the room, and the blue light was turned off.

"Mom! Are you ok?"

"Yes, honey," she replied. "I'm fine."

"Did they hurt you?" I asked.

"I didn't feel a thing," she said.

"Will you please relax," Leader said to me. "I told you we weren't going to do any damage to you. We want to learn how you work and take information back home with us. If we damaged you, we wouldn't be able to learn anything."

Scientist turned away from his screen and stepped forward a bit. "I was only observing," he said. "From your drawings, I was able to locate the appropriate structures within you. I observed that an egg had separated itself from one of the egg masses and was moving in the direction of the uterus. Because that egg would drop from your body if it were not united with a sperm, I assumed there would be no harm in disassembling the genetic material it contained so that it would no longer able to create a new unit. You may now safely demonstrate insertion of the penis into the vagina."

Dammit to hell, my cock returned to life and twitched again.

Mom raised herself up on her elbows. "NO WAY!" she shouted.

"Now what's the matter?" Scientist asked.

"A boy does not insert his penis into his mother's vagina," Mom said. "That's all there is to it. Now, why don't you just put us back where you got us and go away."

I could have sworn I heard a sigh. "The male unit again appears to be in the right condition. You are in no danger of combining genetic materials. What on Pt~z/o is the problem here?"

"It's called incest. There's a law against it. It just isn't done."

"You are physically able and the action represents no danger, yet you say that you cannot do it?"

"That's right."

Leader's voice asserted itself. "Then we will wait. Time as you creatures measure it has little meaning to us. Perhaps you will reconsider."

"Never," Mom said.

Apparently, we were at a standoff. Mom lay back down and put her arm over her eyes. Before long, she was snoring softly, purring, almost. And then I realized that I was exhausted. We had been dragged out of sleep after a tiring day, we had been scared to death, we had been charged with adrenaline, and I had been on my feet ever since we arrived in the spaceship.

I turned toward Leader. "Excuse me," I said, "but I need sleep. Is there another table available?"

Leader didn't say anything. The floor opened, and another table rose next to Mom's. As soon as the floor had closed, I lay down, and was asleep almost the instant I closed my eyes.

When I awoke and looked around, Mom was just waking, too. She sat up and stretched, then announced to the room at large, "I have to go to the bathroom."

Scientist came over to her. "You can't go anywhere until you've demonstrated insertion of the penis into the vagina," he said.

"That means that I have to eliminate waste products... piss," she said. "Is there a place where I can do that?"

"You can do it here," Scientist said. "We will observe."

"I can't go to the bathroom in public," Mom complained. "That's something we always do in private, alone."

"Do the waste elimination systems of all you creatures function in the same way?" Scientist asked.

"Yes."

"Then why do you believe that you have to be alone to eliminate your waste?"

Mom groaned. "I don't know why we do," she said. "We just do. Now, is there a place on this spaceship where I can go pee? Piss."

"As I said, you can do it here," Scientist said.

Mom looked distinctly uncomfortable. "There should be something to contain the waste material," she said, in a small voice.

Scientist began walking toward a wall.

"Me, too," I called out.

A door suddenly appeared in the wall. Scientist walked through it, and it closed again. I walked to the same place in the wall. Nothing happened. I ran my hands over the wall, but could feel no seams or sensors. As I was standing there, the door reappeared, and Scientist nearly ran head-on into me. A voice in my head said something like, "Ack!"

Scientist handed a clear, bowl-shaped container to Mom, and one to me. I draped my cock over the edge of the bowl and took a long, satisfying leak.

Mom looked around the room apprehensively, then turned her back to me and squatted. She hissed forth a strong stream of piss that frothed into the bowl. Then I saw, I mean, I saw, Mom's tightly puckered little asshole begin to open, and out snaked a truly noteworthy turd, which curled fully around the circumference of the bowl. Boy, I guess she had to go to the bathroom! Somewhat to my own surprise, my cock suddenly went nearly vertical.

Scientist looked at my cock and then at the bowl under Mom's squatting form, and I'll swear that he shook his head. Maybe he was beginning to figure out when it wasn't going to do him any good to ask questions.

Not looking at me, Mom said, "Mark, will you please bring me my tee-shirt?"

I picked up her tee-shirt from where it had landed when she undressed and handed it to her, over her shoulder. She tore off one sleeve, and used it to wipe herself. She dropped the sleeve into the bowl and stood. When she saw my erect penis, she said, in a fierce whisper, "Mark, I do wish you'd quit doing that. You've going to give them the wrong idea. You're going to give me the wrong idea."

Scientist picked up the two bowls and scurried back through the wall.

I didn't know what Mom meant by my giving her the wrong idea. I supposed it meant that she'd think I was having unwholesome thoughts about her. But it also could have meant that she was beginning to have second thoughts about penis insertion. I decided not to press the issue.

"I'm hungry," Mom said.

"Yeah, me too. I wonder if these guys have any food for us."

When Scientist returned, I told him that we need food, fuel.

"I'm not surprised," he said. "Comparing body mass to mass of waste material and extrapolating from observed caloric activity, I've estimated efficiency of you creatures at 28.3 per cent." There was a collective mental gasp. "You must spend a good deal of time inputting fuel and outputting waste material.

"I'm sorry," he continued, "but we don't have any fuel suitable for you creatures."

"They're trying to starve us out," Mom said.

"We can get along for a while without food," I said to Scientist, "but we have to have water. Without it, we will cease to function fairly quickly."

I got genuinely alarmed thought waves from Scientist. Apparently he didn't want us to stop functioning too soon.

"Water. Two hydrogen, one oxygen," I said.

"I can do that!" Scientist said, rushing back to his hole in the wall again.

Presently, we heard a muffled explosion from behind Scientist's wall, and a few moments later, Scientist tottered out, holding a clear container something like an Erlenmeyer flask that had in it about two liters of what I assumed was water. He handed the flask to me, and I handed it Mom. She drank off half, and I finished the rest. Chemically pure water. Purely flavorless. But it was wet, and it would keep us going.

"Thank you," I said to Scientist. "We will need more soon." I heard a mental groan.

"So," I said to Mom, "what are we going to do now?"

"Wait some more, I guess. What else can we do?"

The answer to that question was obvious to me, but saying it out loud didn't seem like a very good idea. So we waited. And we waited, and we waited, and we waited. We slept, and we drank water, and we pissed, and that was about it. Since we weren't doing anything interesting, the aliens went about their business without paying a whit of attention to us. There were no windows, no sensation of motion. The level of illumination in the spaceship was constant. I had no idea whether we were still hovering a few hundred feet above our campsite or light-years away. I was bored, supremely bored. Time literally lost all meaning. When we slept, we had no idea for how long. The only clue I had of passing time was the gnawing hunger in my stomach. Thirteen-year-old boys need lots of fuel.