Laki rolled her eyes. Even up to the final hour, Se-se was full of optimism. Laki pinched the message globe and it deflated. She flattened it against the wall with the palm of her hand and watched as it melded into the wall. She took a deep breath and climbed to her feet. She peeled off her white dress and threw it on top of the heap of discarded white cloths. She plucked a short length of black fabric from her clothes rod and wrapped it around her body. With the heat from her hand, she fused the cloth’s edges to create one seamless dress. She pinched along the waist, the dip of her back, and under her bust to give it shape. She picked out a shorter length of cloth to wrap over her shoulders and melded it to the dress, creating sleeves. There was a lump around her middle revealing the silhouette of a marriage belt resting on her hips. Nothing to be done about that.
She pulled a blank message globe from the wall and closed her eyes. She projected images of a wild party into the globe, purred “the rendezvous-less zone,” then sent the thought, “Maturation tomorrow.” She opened her eyes.
“Twelve messages,” she said. The message globe split into twelve tiny spheres—each carrying an identical invitation. She touched each sphere while saying a name, and they zipped away to deliver her invitation.
Laki walked to the pod landing room with a grim look on her face. She didn’t look like a woman going to a party, she looked like a prisoner headed to her execution. In the pod landing room, she stood briefly in reverent silence. This, she thought, is the end of my life. She decided to savor every second. She treasured the whirling sound of her pod ballooning to full expansion and the whisper of the exit portal opening in the roof. She craned her head back and reveled in the pull of velocity as her pod shot away from home up into the upper atmosphere.
When she had left her domed city behind, she reached for the sound module. With quick fingers, she programmed it to record the sound of friction, a static-like screeching bristling between her pod and the thick weightlessness of space. She amplified the sound, adding an echo, then slowed its frequency to match the beat of her pulse. She flipped through her archives and sampled sound snippets before selecting a loop of her siblings laughing through the hallways at home. She mixed in a distorted recording of her own voice, and the jumble of sound built into an aural assault. At Laki’s signal, the sound module found a unifying tempo and tamed the layers of noise into a repeating melody. Laki blended it with one of her preferred beats and blasted the mash-up into her pod—a newly created soundtrack for the moment.
For a painfully short stretch of time, the music obliterated Laki’s worries. She turned the music up until she could feel it vibrating the soft translucent walls of her pod. She started by swaying her head back and forth. By the time her pod was approaching the twinkling lights of the Velvet Stretch, her limbs were flailing, her hips were swaying, her knees were gyrating. She had given herself so completely to the music that there was no space for anxiety, heartache, and other demons.
At the entrance to the Velvet Stretch, Laki turned off the music. She pressed her palm to the thin wall of her pod to register herself with the concierge. As she waited for him to complete his procedures, images of lovers she had rendezvoused with started to flash through her mind. She remembered the sweetness of her sessions with Pemfi, the hilarity of hanging out with Benko, and one heart-stopping moment she’d had with Asla. She could hear Se-se’s nagging scorn ringing in her ears—“Do they even have marriage belts to offer, Laki?”
She responded to the concierge’s questions absentmindedly, grinning at the memory of her usual entrance into the Velvet Stretch. Were it a normal visit with a rendezvous awaiting her, she wouldn’t be standing there, half listening to the concierge; she’d be flat-out ignoring him, crawling around her pod in search of props to enliven her rendezvous.
“No rendezvous,” she told the concierge while in her mind she was remembering placing peacock feathers, a pouch of honey, and a latex strap on the floor of her pod.
He slid his fingers over his data machine. “You only have clearance for the rendezvous-less zone. You must return to the concierge’s desk if you wish to enter another level.”
Laki indicated her consent with the tap of her finger, then turned away. Everything else the concierge said was useless to her. He cleared her entrance, and she plunged into the Velvet Stretch.
Savoring the freedom of flight, she went flitting through the rendezvous-less zone. Even though the Velvet Stretch was all about connection, she steered clear of other pods. She didn’t need a date or even a momentary flirt, she needed a private, remote area for her party.
It had been quite some time since she had searched the Velvet Stretch for anything. Amongst her friends, she acted as if she harbored the same appetites that had defined her pre-maturation stage, but the truth was she had changed. She could no longer sustain the intense curiosity of her early days when she had roamed the Stretch, electrified by her quest to find a sexy someone whose love was so intense that being together would feel like a desperation, a feverish need.
Her identity was so twisted up in her reputation that she didn’t know how to embrace a new facet of her personality. She had spent so much time orchestrating fantastic episodes full of intrigue and mind-blowing carnal consummation that solitude seemed like a foreign language. Who would she be if not voracious and doggedly determined to create magical encounters?
Yet somehow the allure of the Velvet Stretch had faded. Gorging on pleasure and emotional intimacies began to tire, rather than excite, her. While pursuing her fantasies, she’d mysteriously transformed into a woman more interested in the workings of her own brain than the mysteries of a stranger’s heart.
Laki found a lone star bar with a dim yellow glow. She lodged her pod right next to it, squinting before turning away from its glow. The way that it seductively illuminated her skin told Laki that it was the perfect location for the evening’s festivities. She checked the time module, then cursed softly. She realized too late that she hadn’t specified a time in the invitations—it could be hours before the first guest arrived.
She felt the silence of the Stretch invade her pod. If you weren’t hopped up on adrenaline, or some other intoxicant, and distracted by your frantic search for a rendezvous, you would immediately notice the Velvet Stretch’s profound lack of sound. The depth of its silence was stunning, yet it had taken Laki years to notice it. She had been too focused on the pods of strangers, and the anatomy of the people ensconced within them, to take note of the majestic expanse of deep space. Now, she was older and irritatingly aware that she was just a noisy little fleck in an infinite field of silence. The loudest thing in the vicinity was her thoughts, thoughts she had come to the Stretch to escape.
She sat on the floor and flicked the sound module on. Instead of hearing the song she had just mixed, she heard a deep voice say, “Let’s do this by starlight.” Her back stiffened. A heat sparked in her chest and shot straight down into her pelvis. She looked around, but no one was there. The voice repeated:
“Let’s do this by starlight.”
“Fogo,” she whispered, remembering the owner of that voice—the last rendezvous she had had in the Stretch and, quite possibly, the last rendezvous she would ever have.
She touched her waist, running her fingers over the concealed marriage belt, then leapt up to examine the sound module. She didn’t remember making a recording that night, and she couldn’t understand why his voice was filling her pod now. She vibrated her fingers in front of the sound module, commanding it to spin Fogo’s voice into a faster loop. She rubbed one hand over her body, guiding it downward to grasp between her legs as Fogo invited her to do it by starlight over and over again. With the other hand, she added the sound of dripping water to the background and mixed in her favorite song—a love-laced anthem by Mahini.