You get used to walking in spike heels, actually. I mean, I’m not going to run a marathon or climb the Matterhorn. Elena has all these theories of why men think spikes are sexy. Okay, they’re kind of a short term body mod. They stress the leg muscles, which makes you look tense, which leads most men to assume you could use a serious screwing. And they push your fanny out like you’re making the world an offer. But most important is that, when you’re teetering around in heels, it tells a man that if he chases you, you’re not going to get very far. Not only do spike heels say you’re vulnerable, they say you’ve chosen to be vulnerable. Of course, it’s not quite the same in micro gee. She was my mentor, Elena. Assigned to teach me how to live in space.
I was an ag tech. Worked as a germ wrangler in the edens.
Microorganisms. Okay, you probably think that if you stick a seed in some dirt, add some water and sunlight and wait a couple of months, Mother Nature hands you a head of lettuce. Doesn’t work that way, especially not in space. The edens are synergistic, symbiotic ecologies. Your carbo crops, your protein crops, your vitamin crops—they’re all fussy about the neighborhood germs. If you don’t keep your clostridia and rhizobium in balance, your eden will rot to compost. Stinky, slimy compost. It’s important work—and duller than accounting. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we could’ve talked on the job, but CO2 in the edens runs 6%, which is great for plants but will kill you if you’re not wearing a breather. Elena painted an enormous smile on mine, with about eight hundred teeth in it. She had lips on hers, puckered so that they looked like she was ready to be kissed. Alpha Ralpha the chicken man had this plastic beak. Only sometimes we switched—confused the hell out of the nature lovers. I’ll tell you, the job would’ve been a lot easier if we could’ve kept the rest of the crew out, but the edens are designed for recreation as much as food production. On Victor Foxtrot we had to have sign-ups between 8:00 and 16:00. See, the edens have lots of open space and we keep them eight degrees over crew deck nominal and they’re lit twenty hours a day by grolights and solar mirrors and they have big windows. Crew floats around sucking up the view, soaking up photons, communing with the life force, shredding foliage and in general getting in our way. Breakaways are the worst; they actually adopt plants like they were pets. Is that crazy or what? I mean, a tomato has a life span of three, maybe four months before it gets too leggy and stops bearing. I’ve seen grown men cry because Elena pulled up their favorite marigold.
No, all my plants now are silk. When I backed down, I realized that I didn’t want anything to do with the day. My family was a bunch of poor nobodies; we moved to the night when I was seven. So nightshifting was like coming home. The fact is, I got too much sun while I was up. The sun is not my friend. Haven’t seen real daylight in over a year; I make a point of it. I have a day-night timeshare at Lincoln Street Under. While the sun is shining I’m asleep or safely cocooned. At dusk my roomie comes home and I go out to work and play. Hey, being a mommy to legumes is not what I miss about space. How about you? What turned you into an owl?
Well, well, maybe you are serious about breaking away. Sure, they prefer recruits who’ve nightshifted. Shows them you’ve got circadian discipline.
Elena said something like that once. She said that it’s hard to scare someone to death in broad daylight. It isn’t just that the daytime is too crowded, it’s too tame. The night is edgier, scarier. Sexier. You say and do things that wouldn’t occur to you at lunchtime. It’s because we don’t really belong in the night. In order to survive here we have to fight all the old instincts warning us not to wander around in the dark because we might fall off a cliff or get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. Living in the night gives you a kind of extra… I don’t know…
Right. And it’s the same with space; it’s even scarier and sexier. Well, maybe sexy isn’t exactly the right word, but you know what I mean. Actually, I think that’s what I miss most about it. I was more alive then that I ever was before. Maybe too alive. People live fast up there. They know the stats; they have to. You know, you sort of remind me of Elena. Must be the eyes—it sure as hell isn’t the body. If you ever get up, give her a shout. You’d like her, even though she doesn’t wear shoes anymore.
Almost a year. I wish we could talk more, but it’s hard. She transferred to the Marathon; they’re out surveying Saturn’s moons. There’s like a three hour lag; it’s impossible to have real-time conversation. She sent a few vids, but it hurt too much to watch them. They were all happy chat, you know? Nothing important in them. I didn’t plan on missing her so much. So, you have any college credits?
No real difference between Harvard and a net school, unless you’re some kind of snob about bricks.
Now that’s a hell of a thing to be asking a perfect stranger. What do I look like, some three star slut? Don’t make assumptions just because I’m wearing spiked heels. For all you know, honey, I could be dating a basketball player. Maybe I’m tired of staring at his navel when we dance. If you’re going to judge people by appearances, hey, you’re the one with the machine stigmata. What’s that supposed to be, rust or dried blood?
Well, you ought to be. Though actually, that’s what everyone wants to know. That, and how do you go to the bathroom. Truth is, Jane, sex is complicated, like everything about space. First of all, forget all that stuff you’ve heard about doing it while you’re floating free. It’s dangerous, hard work and no fun. You want to have sex in space, one or both of you have to be tied down. Most hetero temps use some kind of a joystrap. It’s this wide circular elastic that fits around you and your partner. Helps you stay coupled, okay? But even with all the gear, sex can be kind of subtle. As in disappointing. You don’t realize how erotic weight is until there isn’t any. You want to make love to a balloon? Some people do nothing but oral—keeps the vectors down. Of course the breakaways, they’ve reinvented love, just like everything else. They have this kind of sex where they don’t move. If there’s penetration they just float in place, staring into one another’s eyes or some such until they tell one another that it’s time to have an orgasm and then they do. If they’re homo, they just touch each other. Elena tried to show me how, once. I don’t know why, but it didn’t happen for me. Maybe I was too embarrassed because I was the only one naked. She said I’d learn eventually, that it was part of breaking away.
No, I thought I was going to break away, I really did. I stuck it out until the very last possible day. It’s hard to explain. I mean, when nobodies on earth look up at night—no offense, Jane, I was one too—what calls them is the romance of it all. The high frontier, okay? Sheena Steele and Captain Kirk, cowboys and asteroids. Kid stuff, except they don’t let kids in space because of the cancer. Then you go up and once you’re done puking, you realize that it was all propaganda. Space is boring and it’s indescribably magic at the same time—how can that be? Sometimes I’d be working in an eden and I’d look out the windows and I’d see earth, blue as a dream, and I’d think of all the people down there, twelve billion ants, looking up into the night and wondering what it was like to be me. I swear I could feel their envy, as sure as I can feel your floor beneath me now. It’s part of what holds you up when you’re in space. You know you’re not an ant; there are fewer than twenty thousand breakaways. You’re brave and you’re doomed and you’re different from everyone else who has ever lived. Only then your shift ends and it’s time to go to the gym and spend three hours pumping the ergorack in a squeeze suit to fight muscle loss in case you decide to back down. I’ll tell you, being a temp is hell. The rack is hard work; if you’re not exhausted afterward, you haven’t done it right. And you sweat, God. See, the sweat doesn’t run off. It pools in the small of your back and the crook of your arm and under your chin and clings there, shivering like an amoeba. And while you’re slaving on the rack, Elena is getting work done or reading or sleeping or talking about you with her breakaway pals. They have three more hours in their day, see, and they don’t ever have to worry about backing down. Then every nine weeks you have to leave what you’re doing and visit one of the wheel habitats and readjust to your weight for a week so that when you come back to Victor Foxtrot, you get spacesick all over again. But you tell yourself it’s all worth it because it’s not only space that you’re exploring; it’s yourself. How many people can say that? You have to find out who you are so that you decide what to hold onto and what to let go of… Excuse me, I can’t talk about this anymore right now.