Russian Spring (52 page)

So too was the indiscriminate and frequently drunken nature of space-monkey sex a necessary adaptation, and one that the authorities had wisely encouraged by bunking men and women together. In such tight and closed quarters, passionate romances and deep relationships would only lead to jealousies, rivalries, angst, feuds, fistfights, and explosions.

Sex in Sagdeev was more like sport than an expression of personal affection or even lust. Zero gravity opened up a whole new world of possibilities, and the premium was on inventiveness, on the most bizarre configurations possible, rather than the simple act itself.

One could simulate groundside sex by doing it inside the webbing, but nobody was much impressed with that. One could do it up against a bulkhead easily enough, head to toe or crosswise, for variety’s sake. Doing it floating in the middle of a chamber, using countervailing thrust vectors alone, was a more advanced configuration that frequently led to scrapes and bruises when it tumbled out of control. Real experts could screw themselves around a module in a controlled trajectory.

Franja grew accustomed to all these sexual athletics long before she became enough of a true monkey to indulge in them herself, for monkey-cage sex also tended to be a
spectator
sport, especially when enough “space vodka” had been consumed. Couples showed off their latest moves or tried out experimental configurations before the critics. There was even a certain amount of wagering on the sidelines. Would orgasm be achieved before the configuration lost its stability and began to tumble? Could a twosome screw itself across a module in under two minutes?

At first Franja had been appalled by this behavior and never imagined she would sink low enough to indulge in it herself. But the work was tedious, the TV and the library boring, she was simply not one to drink herself into oblivion, she was going to be here for a year, she was a healthy young woman with normal urges, any kind of meaningful relationship was entirely out of the question, and slowly but inevitably she began to face the fact that sooner or later she too was going to have to make the final adaptation to Cosmograd life.

Franja had certainly not gone without offers, but monkey etiquette, scrupulously observed by even the coarsest of louts, frowned heavily upon excessive insistence, and as long as she refrained from rising to gentle and humorous baiting, she was more or less left alone.

Boris Waseletski was recommended by all the women, and a Hero of Zero-Gravity Sex from what she had seen of his public performances; she was just about the only woman in the cages he
hadn’t
screwed yet, and he made it perfectly obvious that he was eager to complete his collection.

But for that very reason, not to say the fact that Boris was a nikulturni lout, Franja decided that she would be better off with Sasha Gorokov. Sasha might be crude, but he was no cruder than the average monkey, and at least his crudity was leavened with a certain good-natured sense of humor.

So when a time came that they happened to be alone together in the dormitory module, Franja asked him for a drink of the stuff he always had in his locker. Sasha raised a surprised eyebrow, but otherwise made no untoward reaction as he fetched a squeeze bottle, and then they were strapped in across the table just as they had been that first day aboard, what now seemed half a lifetime away.

This time, however, Franja forced herself to slurp down an impressive quantity of the vile stuff, determined to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible and get this over with. With luck, they might be able to get in and out of the webbing before anyone else showed up to watch.

“I
told
you you’d get used to it,” Sasha finally said when her head was really reeling and she could stomach no more of it.

“Yes, maybe,” Franja muttered, “I guess since I’m here for the duration, I don’t have much choice.”

“We’ll make a real monkey out of you yet.”

Franja giggled drunkenly. “I think I’ve made a monkey out of myself already, thank you,” she woozed dizzily.

“Not yet you haven’t . . . ,” Sasha said slowly.

“I’m
getting used to it
, am I not?”

“Is that what this is all about?”

“Oh the hell with it!” Franja declared. “Let’s just screw like good honest monkeys! It’s time I got used to that too, is it not?” She unbuckled herself, floated across the table, threw her arms clumsily around his neck, fumbled with his seat belt, freed him, kicked off the table, propelling them toward the sleep cubicles, mightily relieved to finally be getting this business over with.

“Wait a minute!” Sasha said, disengaging himself. “For your first time, we really should do something special.”

And he took her by the hand, and, brachiating with the other, led her out of the dormitory module, into the maze of passageways, bumping and reeling, to the big satellite repair air lock.

The work-bay was empty now, except for the Octopus. This was the latest piece of equipment to be boosted up to Sagdeev, and was still in the process of being evaluated. It was an
EVA
work-pod with six waldo arms, flexible cylinders ending in clusters of grippers and tools that did indeed resemble segmented metallic tentacles. Three
people could work inside the thing at once in a shirtsleeve environment; it had its own maneuvering system, and a big bubble canopy with internally heated double-glazing to prevent cold-burns from random contact.

“What say we give the Octopus a workout?” Sasha said. “The poor stupid bastard certainly needs one!”

Franja grimaced. The Octopus had proven to be a nightmare to the space monkeys. Three people could in theory work inside it at once, but the tentacles were forever interfering with each other, and the geniuses on the ground had neglected to provide any of the waldo control panels with an overriding master control system.

“The Octopus!” Franja cried. “That damned thing is entirely useless for any real
EVA
work. . . .”

“Quite so,” Sasha said, “but it’s perfect for fucking!”

So saying, he popped the bubble canopy, they crawled inside, resealed the Octopus, and opened the clamshell air lock. Sasha fired the Octopus’s main thruster, and they rose up out of the air lock and into the starry blackness.

The Octopus might not be exactly spacious by groundling standards, but since the pod was designed for a work crew of three, it was roomy enough with only the two of them inside. There were three seats one could strap into, three sets of waldo controls, and the maneuvering console; other than that, it was mostly empty space, though Franja could see no comfortable surface free of angles and protuberances against which they could perform the act, and not much room for free-fall drifting, either.

Sasha maneuvered the Octopus well clear of the Cosmograd, then rolled it over so that the view beyond the bubble canopy was truly magical.

The Earth hung overhead, an immense curve of blue, green, and brown, fleeced with snowy swirls of cloud, illumined brilliantly around the edge where the sun seemed to be setting behind it, the limb of the planet glowing in the Gegenschein. Thousands of multicolored stars peered down upon them unblinkingly from the velvety blackness.

With Cosmograd Sagdeev eclipsed by the body of the Octopus, the illusion was complete. There they were, weightless, seemingly alone in the immensity of space, soaring free above the Big Blue Marble. It might almost be called romantic. . . .

Sasha peeled off his coveralls, and Franja did likewise, and they floated nude in the center of the Octopus, heads upright, looking out at the Earth and the stars. Being monkeys, and dormitory mates at that, the sight of each other’s naked bodies was not exactly novel, and hardly arousing in and of itself, at least as far as Franja was
concerned, though Sasha, good monkey that he was, had no trouble raising an immediate erection.

“Well, now what?” Franja said uncertainly, glancing about the interior of the work-pod for a place of comfortable purchase.

“Now I will show you a whole new meaning for the phrase ‘going down,’ ” Sasha said, and grabbing her frankly by the breasts, shoved her upward, so that the velocity carried her up and back against the transparent and heated bubble canopy.

Perspective underwent a sudden shift. Suddenly Franja seemed to be floating in the starry blackness itself, with the Earth
below
her. A moment of reflexive fear and vertigo overcame her, for with her back up against the glass, vision told her that she was falling backward down through the void toward the planet, with nothing visible between her and the big drop to reentry.

Sasha laughed when he saw her expression. “Don’t worry,” he said, “the canopy is designed to take a hundred-gram meteorite impact, it’ll certainly stand up to what we have in mind, so just lean back and enjoy it.”

So saying, he swam beneath her, pried her legs open wide, and forthrightly buried his face between them.

When Franja snaked a hand in his hair and looked at him floating between her thighs as the tingling waves of pleasure began, perspective shifted again, and
down
became Sasha’s direction. Now she seemed to be floating light as air on the tip of his tongue, purchased on a point of pleasure, lifted upward and outward into the heavens surrounding her, rising like a goddess toward the stars on a wave of ethereal energy.

She threw back her head and let herself dissolve into the sensation, gazing up at the Earth floating above her, like the queen of the world riding up and out into the infinite blackness, until a tremendous orgasm took her in an explosion of stardust.

Loose-limbed, dreamy-eyed, creamily content with no further sensation of up or down, she opened her arms, and her legs, and, luxuriating back against the bubble canopy, took him into her, and they coupled there naked in the vast emptiness between the stars like true space monkeys.

“That was . . . that was . . . ,” Franja muttered afterward as they quite literally came drifting down from the star-spangled ceiling.

“Cosmic?” Sasha suggested with a grin. He laughed. And then, quite unaccording to normal space-monkey etiquette, he leaned forward and planted a little kiss on her lips.

“What was that for?”

Sasha laughed again. “For a special moment,” he said. “At last, Franja, you are a true space monkey!”

And so, at least for a time, she was. After that, Franja went through a period of several weeks when she was determined to try everything and everyone.

She had never been very promiscuous, indeed, for someone born well into the post-AIDS Second Sexual Revolution, she had been something of a prude, channeling a good portion of her libidinal energies into her studies and her single-minded pursuit of a life outside the gravity well.

But now, here she was, after all, a space monkey in Cosmograd Sagdeev, and for the first time in her life, there was no real reason not to loosen up.

However, after she had screwed her way through about twenty of her fellow monkeys, after she had learned how to do it floating free in the center of a module, after she had relaxed to the point where screwing in front of an audience seemed neither perverted nor particularly arousing, after there finally was nothing much new or novel, nothing that she hadn’t done already, even space-monkey sex palled as an escape from the boredom of Cosmograd life, and she found herself spending more and more time wrapped in her own thoughts.

She would spend hours just floating freely in the observation deck, staring out the big bubble canopy at the Earth and the stars, her thoughts too drifting along freely in zero gravity.

This experience was, after all, what she had spent her whole previous life pursuing, and now here she was, with all the time she wanted and then some to commune with the stars, with the Earth as seen entire from on high.

She would stare at the Earth; huge, luminous, and with its green forests and savannas, its blue oceans, its ever-changing swirling white cloud patterns, palpably alive, the only living thing in all that cold black immensity. She would watch the lights of its cities sparkling in the darkness behind the terminator as the Cosmograd’s orbit swept it around the planet.

And then she would turn her back on the Earth and look out at all those stars and imagine each of them as a potential abode of life, each of them another Sol, another Barnard’s star.

She imagined them circled by living planets, each the home of a civilization as rich and complex as the one that lay behind her, and, orbiting on some space station like this around them, beings much like herself, gazing out at a different configuration of these same stars, at the unknown distant Earth, at
her
, and thinking these very thoughts.

That
was the dream that had drawn her up out of the gravity well, that was the dream that she and her father shared, that was the vision toward which the best in the species was yearning—to cross that
daunting immensity, to meet those fellow beings out there among the stars, to peck through the eggshell of the solar system and be reborn into a grander and wider realm.

But the more she stared out at the distant stars, the more she realized that was a future she really had no hope of living to see. She would never even live to hear the reply to the messages being sent to Barnard’s star, if indeed the Barnards ever answered. The distances were so immense, present human technology was so puny in the face of that immensity, that the best she could hope for was to play some small part in these early stages of the great adventure and then be gone.

In her lifetime, humans were never going to walk the surface of another living planet, breathe the exotic intoxicating air of an alien atmosphere, explore an unknown biosphere, meet the citizens of a whole new world. The Moon was dead. Mercury and Venus were infernos. If there was life in the clouds of Jupiter or the superheated ocean of Uranus, it could never be touched and smelled. At best, she might live to walk the surface of Titan in a bulky suit and see living things through a helmet-glass darkly.

And Mars was a bitter tantalization. Life had started there when the planet was wet and young—proof, like the discovery of the Barnards, that life on Earth was no improbable chain of coincidence—but long gone now, leaving humans alone in this solar system.