Disconnecting the induction leads from his head, Krzakwa rolled over in his seat to a position that left him uncomfortably back-bent, despite the zero-g float, and grinned at the two women. "This must be how it was for the first astronauts. I feel like an elephant in a birdcage." Sealock, still hooked up to the control element, glanced over and said, "That's a consistent visual image, . . . You're going to have to go on a diet if you want to get to the food, you fat bastard." Tem smiled. It was true—he'd never be able to squeeze his bulk between the two women to reach the provision cabinet. "No, but I can have a lot of fun trying. I feel like I'd be a lot thinner if I could just take a good crap. This shitless food is accumulating somewhere inside me. . . . Anyway, these here cabin boys can cook our meals and serve them to us in bed."
Sealock began unplugging leads from his skull. "They're not boys, my friend, if you haven't noticed. And they should have at least one shit apiece coming, if you would like a little empathic elimination." Krzakwa laughed.
Grimacing, Ariane said, "This is the grossest conversation I've ever heard! Are you two that bored already?"
"Just call it ennui," said Brendan.
Tem said, "Remember, we've been sitting in these very same positions for a good part of the last two weeks. I guess we've been developing ways to entertain ourselves. . . ." Methol laughed. "Well . . . if it's entertainment you want . . . the rest of you can watch me making up for lost time." She peeled off the inertial harness and slithered out between the forward seats, climbing atop Brendan, her legs locking about his waist.
Krzakwa settled back into his couch with an expression of interest. It was not immediately obvious whether Hu was even paying attention. Her eyes were open but she was looking at nothing in particular. Watching them have sex from a close perspective turned out to be no novelty for Tem. After an initial bout of writhing, held in place by Brendan's harness, they coupled and quickly settled into the slide and grind rhythms of woman-on-top sex. There was no real sound beyond the coarse whisper of cloth on cloth and the even quieter one of meshing organs. Tem stole occasional glances at their faces, but in their fixed expressions there was nothing new to learn. The only noveltywas the way Sealock pulled apart Ariane's buttocks and inserted his finger between them as far as he could reach, apparently so he could get independent verification of the sensation of his penis being alternately engulfed and decoupled. After a while Krzakwa fell into a sort of reverie. Contained within himself, he was back on the Moon again, thirteen now and starting his apprenticeship. The surging arcana of sex, though fascinating for their strangeness, were distinctly alien —not unlike the behavior of the exotic small particles that, he was learning, represented the even stranger forces that made up that which was. Perhaps he was thinking about Sadie, and what had become of her when she graduated . . . and then again, perhaps not. It was like a waking dream, and a reverie was like DR, but unaided and alone. It was private, and seemed pleasant: he walked alone down the endless dim hallways that led to the underground rooms in which he received his Met-stat training. He was late because of an incident involving an accusation of "overindulgence," so in all probability that's what he was thinking about. He did not walk as quickly as he could have, and perhaps there was more trouble waiting for him at the class hall. Occasionally he had to stop before closed seals and wait for them to slowly iris open. He would be at least twenty-five minutes late, but he didn't really care. He would blame it all on the residence counselor.
Finally he came to the widening out of the corridor that was the atrium to the Met-stat section. Now he began to skip, hurrying to give the impression that he had run the whole way. He passed through the halls, past the numbered empty rooms, and finally looked into the class hall in which he was supposed to be having a lesson. He looked again, harder; no one was there! Where in the fuck was the class? It reminded him of a dream he had had hundreds of times. Shit!
Now he really was running. He slammed through the door into the administrative section, then stopped and tried to compose himself, walking up to the secretary's desk. He was a young, balding man who Tem had sensed was rather in sympathy with the students. "Mr. Tamura. I was delayed by my counselor and just got here. Where's the class?"
Tamura looked up, smiling slightly. "Calm down, Kracka —that's it, isn't it? You haven't missed anything. That is if you've paid attention to the suit-up lectures. They are just going over that material again. In Room K4. Take the Qal7b elevator, that's quickest."
It took him under five minutes to get there. The corridor ended in a small chamber lined with lockers and benches, like the anteroom to a gym. There was a door there with a round bull's-eye for a window, and by standing on the very tips of his toes he could look through. There was an instrument panel, and another door with an identical window. The light over both doors was green, so he pulled the handle and went in, walked to the other door, and pressed his face to the window. His classmates, all twenty of them, were there, in a room larger than any he had seen. And they were putting on space suits!
Of course! This was an airlock! His class was being taken on an unannounced trip outside! And, by Christ, he had almost missed it!
He flung open the door and, going up to his instructor, proffered his planned excuse. "Very well, Krzakwa," the man said, "get a suit from the rack there and put it on—you know how to do that, don't you? You've been lectured enough. Just remember: if you put it on wrong you're dead. Got it?" He nodded.
The room was large, and it was evident that Met-stat didn't just use this airlock for individual egress. There was a large orange machine mounted on five-meter-wide treads that Tem recognized as a bulldozer. The floor was covered with a dull gritty dust that he knew was dirt. He barely had time to take in what was about to happen as he followed the precise steps and put on the suit, piece by piece, and sealed it. He caught up and had it fully on before some of the slower members of the class. Inside the suit it smelled, but he didn't mind. He looked out through the old-style faceplate, scratched and fingerprinted, and turned on the radio channel with his tongue.
They gathered before the large pressure curtain that was the far wall. It was bathed in an internal red glow, indicating that the room was depressurizing. There was a diminuendo hiss, and the curtain turned green. The curtain began to slide aside, more quickly than Tem had expected.
"Oh, my God . . ." You couldn't tell whose whisper that was. The next room had an irregular gray floor and a dead black ceiling decorated by a brilliant blue and white crescent. His breath whispered in his helmet. It wasn't a room . . . and he found himself confronted by the world outside his world:
TemujinKrzakwa, at thirteen, stood on the headway of a long ramp, under an infinite black sky, dotted here and there with impossibly remote points of light barely visible in contrast to the flat gray surface. This was a parking lot, and, besides the occasional great trucks, there were several rows of small rollagon cars. In the distance another of the cars moved slowly along a road of fused regolith, still raising a small smear of dust. Farther—farther away than Tem had ever seen before—was a row of lollipop coils that marked the beginnings of a mass-driver. His eyes felt fatigued already, but he couldn't stop looking. Back over his shoulder was the hemispherical dome that was a surface manifestation of the universe that had heretofore contained him. Under the Earth, on the horizon, sat a tiny spaceship. As he had been instructed, he didn't look in the direction of the sun. Over the radio the instructor said,