It's Tuesday and I haven't done anything this week, so here's another installment of the Space Guys, specifically a chapter I revised more than anything else, which is the "spicy" chapter. As usual, a table of contents is at the end.
Within
12 hours of the ceremony, preparations were begun for the most complex
operation of the voyage, refueling. The ship pulled into orbit over Ganymede,
the largest planet’s largest moon, where almost 300 people lived in the
sprawling settlement of Minerva City. A flotilla of ships gathered, always
flaming desperately to match the speed the Janus held by momentum, while
the great ship released its own little fleet of 3 medium shuttlecraft and 6
utility pods. Jason and Alek were chosen to pick up a load of volatile hydrogen
tanks. It was Harrison who discretely told them, “Some of the crew were
concerned you might be having trouble. The captain has offered to reassign you,
or take you off duty.”
“No,” Alek said, as if genuinely puzzled. “We are fine.”
They passed Anastasia and Donald. The former was bolting the latter into a barrel-like hard suit that the engineers had repurposed as radiation gear. As she calibrated a mechanical accordion arm, her husband tried to pinch her. She screeched and gave the headpiece a sharp rap with her tool. Alek smiled; Jason shook his head and kept walking. He paused as they passed Moxon, leaning against a bulkhead with one leg propped against the wall. His lips were moving; Jason realized that he was humming the Major Maxon theme. He almost called out to the officer. Then he took a closer look. Only then did he realize that Moxon was asleep. He backed away before hurrying to catch up with Alek.
The shuttlecraft was really quite large in comparison to anything but the Pegasus and the Janus itself, 8.4 meters long and able to carry either 8 passengers or a metric ton of cargo. It launched from a double docking port on either side of the Mission Fuselage, an arrangement that allowed loading and unloading at the same time. Because of the airlock configuration, there was usually one moored on the left facing backwards or turned sideways as theirs was. They entered through the belly airlock and climbed into the cockpit. Harrison joined them at a communication console at the rear. The cockpit was a panoramic half-ovoid that seemed to suspend the pilots in space. What they could mostly see was the Janus, an impressive sight on its own. As they unmoored, Alek took Jason’s hand. They drifted to the side for a few moments before the thrusters kicked in. The craft wheeled about and headed for the moon.
Through
the return trip, they remained in surprisingly comfortable silence. As they
approached the dock, Jason turned to Alek. “We should talk to someone,” he
said.
“Who?” Alek said.
They
started with Anastasia. She went with them to Dr. Cahill. They had barely begun
to talk before she sighed and said, “Talk to Tanya.”
They found the officer in the communications cabin with Smith, the American. The Union officer amicably left to make room as they entered, with Anastasia tagging along. Tanya swiveled to look over Alek and then Jason. “You may not have noticed,” she said, “but you two are getting more talk than any other couple on the ship. So, what brings you here?”
“Well,
ah, they told us you used to help people with, um, this sort of thing,” Jason
said. “Ah, what is it you do?”
Tanya smiled. “I gave my husband five children, to start with,” she said. “That scandalizes the enlightened people more than you three ever have. A while later, I was made the head of the Federation’s health and education program, along with another woman, Abakumov. It was really to increase birth rates. We had slogans, `shells for the Motherland’, ‘the pleasure of duty’. We were the laughingstock of the Federation and the Union. We let them laugh, they knew we were getting results.”
“All
right, that makes sense,” Jason said. “Wait… You said there was another. Was
that Sasha Abakumov?”
“That’s
right, if she didn’t finally drop her married name,” Tanya said. “She took a
ticket to Mars when she fell out with the Party. Did you know her?”
Alek
smiled at that. “You could say that,” she said. “He’s told me about her.”
That made Anastasia gape. “Why in the heavens would you tell an Earthwoman about- Damn. I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.”
“It is funny story,
really,” Alek said, grinning. “I tell him at beginning, there are things you do
for me, things I do for you, and things I do for myself. But he tells me, there
is a crazy Federation woman on Mars who shows men how to take care of a woman.
Finally, I tell him, you can try. I will tell you when you fail. Should have
let him do it much sooner. After, I tell him, you have very enlightened women.”
“It was my parents’ idea, actually,” he said. “They paid for, well, private sessions. Jax’s folks chipped in, too.”
“Well, that’s different,”
Tanya said. “How did you get from there to here?”
“So, I wanted to do my
part,” Alek said. "Maybe give him a few ideas. I got a special record to
show Jason…”
“I hate to say it, but I
heard,” Ana said.
“So did I,” Tanya said with a curl of her lip. “About the record, anyway. So how badly did that go?”
“He watch for maybe 5 minutes,” Alek said, holding Jason’s arm. “It started with a woman walking. She passes a man, he tries to talk to her, she tells him to get lost, he follows her. Then he asks her to come to his apartment, she says yes. So he tells her to take her clothes off, she says no… then Jason walks out. I find him when he walk all the way back. I try to make him tell me what didn’t no work…”
Jason nearly walked out then and there. “I did tell you,” he said. “He hit her. That’s never okay. Good boys don’t hit girls…” He trailed off with a blush. He calculated leaving the cabin. The first thing that stopped him was that Anastasia was in the way. The second was Tanya’s genuinely kind gaze.
“She could have told you, it wouldn’t work,” she said with a cool glance at Anastasia. “Not on a man who had been to Sasha. Things like that are made for men by other men, which really means men who know what they want. A man with nothing but that will have more to unlearn than learn. On Mars, things are different. Why is looking for a needle in a stack of needles. We investigated, when the Federation was still enforcing morality rules. Things like that had always come in with the offworld spacers. It wasn’t catching on with the Martians, and it was virtually non-existent with the ones who were born on-planet. The people who wrote up the report decided that the conditions had removed the demand: Good education, close-knit families, and older, progressive women raising children. They gave all the credit to the Party’s progressive policies, of course. It was as good an explanation as any, really.”
Anastasia snorted. “There’s progressive women here and there, mostly on the Union side,” she said. “In the Federation sectors we still have old women who say, a man is good enough if he only hits you with an open hand and only when he is drunk.”
“It’s not that complicated,” Jason said. “The whole time I watched that film, I just kept thinking it wasn’t real. I’ve talked to Martians who saw things like it, and they all said the same thing. Really, I almost got space-sick watching it. I couldn’t even tell if the girl looked that good. They just kept doing closeups of things, like nobody ever walked in on his sister before…”
“It’s the camerawork,”
Ana affirmed. “I looked at a few myself. Most of them are made with cheap
equipment by people who barely know how to use it. If they do know what they’re
doing, they still shoot what the men on Gaia care about. And of course, with
our enhancements, any movie is at three-quarter speed and 5 to 10 times
magnification....”
Tanya nodded. “We never even thought about that,” she said. “Figures.” She looked intently at Alek. “So, why did you really show him that?”
Alek crossed her arms in
a pout. “I want him to act like a man’s man,” she said. “When we are making
love, he is always talking, talking, talking. I keep telling him, why don’t you
just grab me and violate me?” She glanced at Anastasia. “Like you and Donald.”
“All right, I don’t want
to be here,” Anastasia said.
“Then go,” Tanya said in bemusement. Again, she looked intently at Alek. “What do you mean?”
“She doesn’t understand
what it means,” Jason snapped. Inside, he was fighting an urge to recoil.
“We’ve talked about this. Making love isn’t about what we do, it’s about doing
what we both want. I keep telling you, anything you ask for, it isn’t- that!”
“Then why don’t you listen to what I say?” Alek fumed. “Why won’t you listen when I am not talking? Be boss to me! Stop asking me what I want to do when what I want is for you to be quiet!”
“Hold on,” Tanya said. “He doesn’t understand. Neither do you. There are men who hurt women, really hurt them. He’s not like that, neither is Donald. You don’t know what a bad man is like until you meet one. Honestly, I’ve never met another woman your age who hasn’t.”
“You’ve definitely got the wrong idea about Donald,” Anastasia said. “I let him be a wolf when we are out in the open. I like it, I love him for it. But when we are alone, he is a lapdog. I teach him his tricks, and reward him when he performs. Sit, beg, roll over. If he ever bit the hand that feeds him, he would be wishing he was fixed.”
“Let me tell you what a man’s man is like,” Tanya said. “When he was young, my man was handsome as a movie star. He never raised a hand. He hardly raised his voice. But he would whisper to me what he wanted. He could give me a look, and I would know. He would carry me to bed with the children watching. And he never did a thing to me that I didn’t enjoy as much as he did.”
Alek’s lips curled into a
wicked smile. “So what do the farmboys go for?”
Tanya grinned back. “Oh, we looked into that,” she said. “We found out about boys and men trading for things we would never have thought to restrict. Most of it was pretty obvious. You know, animal films cut down to just the parts about mating behavior. The thing that was catching on was animation. We looked at stuff the farmboys made themselves that was really impressive, I mean technically. God, there must have been a hundred with Sparky the Squirrel alone; we barely stopped a Party minister from accusing the studio of being involved. Then there was the stuff that was just weird…”
“I’ll tell you one thing,”
Anastasia chimed in. “They’ll watch anything with animals. There’s
plenty of ways to leverage that. Another thing you’ll see just from that, they
are good with body language, if you can get them to look at you.”
Alek looked at Jason
thoughtfully. “Yes,” she said. “When you put it that way, I can see that.”
As the women turned toward him, Jason broke his silence. “Okay, there was one thing,” he said. “It was one of the educational films, like Tanya was talking about. So, it was about whales…”
They all continued to talk, and laugh, until Anastasia blushed as she giggled. Finally, Alek said, “There is something I still do not understand. I talk to old woman in my hometown. She said to me, when you are grown, you may meet man who will say he will hurt you if he cannot have you. She said, do not fear that man, because he will not really hurt you, at least not so bad he cannot have you, or have you again. But there is another kind of man who would rather hurt you than have you. Run from a man like that if you meet him, because that man is mad. I did not understand, I still do not understand. Is that what this is about? What a man like on the disc is like?”
“No,” Anastasia said.
“Not really. But I can understand.”
“Look at it this way,” Tanya
said. “Think about Moxon.”
Alek’s frown became a
scowl. Jason saw Anastasia visibly stiffen. “What about Moxon?” Alek said. “He
would no never do that. He would not care about that. Any woman can see
that.”
“Yes,” Tanya said. “Now
just think, what might a man like him do instead?”
Alek considered, and paled. Anastasia did the same without delay. “Moj boze,” she said. She took Jason’s hand. “You are a good boy, my farmboy. I’m done trying to change you.”
They finally left the cabin when Tanya’s shift ended. Alek offered Jason her hand. He waved for her to go ahead. She did so without hesitation, still talking and laughing with Tanya. Jason remained seated, gazing at Anastasia. “I need to know,” he said. “What really happened?” Anastasia only shook her head. “Moxon said something, didn’t he?”
“He came to me, right after I talked with the captain,” she said. She gazed past him at the banded orb of Jupiter. “It’s still not like you think. He said I was going to marry Donald. I knew that, so did he. That wasn’t the point. What he told me was that I’m going to be a faithful wife. He told me I wasn’t going to spend time with Jackie or any other man again, even if Donald told me I could. He said if it came to that, I was to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble either.”
“Did he threaten you?”
Jason pressed. “Did he say he would do something to you?”
“No,” she said. Suddenly,
she threw her arms around Jason’s neck. Only then did she whisper: “He said
he could make Jackie do it.”
Table of contents
Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!
Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!
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