Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 28

"That's horrible."

"I know. The animal welfare agitators on Earth who pressed governments to outlaw natural meat thought that farmers would just retire their herds and flocks to spare fields and leave them to die of natural causes. It was centuries ago but they still teach the story in first-year economic classes as an example of the law of unintended consequences. That's another feature of the way economists think. We always look at the unintended consequences as part of the real cost of a policy."

Now their food arrived and Yael began with the venison sausages.

"What do you think?" Mrs Hubbard asked.

"Mmm! Delicious," Yael enthused.

Mrs Hubbard was pleased. She was even more pleased when she saw how heartily Yael tucked into the big plateful of food. So many skinny girls only picked a few morsels off their plates but Yael was a girl from Samothea who always ate well and never left anything.

Satisfied, Mrs Hubbard went back to her counter.

"So why are there sheep, cows, pigs and deer here on Celetaris?" Yael asked. "Who keeps them?"

"Some are kept for food because there are rich people who believe that natural meat tastes better than synthetic meat, and they are willing to pay extra for it. They also say that milk from a cow tastes better than synthetic milk. The same for hen's eggs, which are difficult to synthesise convincingly. Also, sheep keep grass trim and pigs eat leftovers. Some arable farmers say that natural fertiliser is better for crops than artificial fertiliser. There's also the ecological balance from having a large variety of animals.

"Some people like to watch animals in the wild, especially rare ones. But I think the main reason is that people like animals and want to be around them. Even people who hunt animals also love animals."

"I understand that. I was brought up a Herder and we never went far away from our horses, cows or sheep. ... But Danielle said hunting is forbidden in Fanshaw Park."

"It is, but there are forests elsewhere on Celetaris, where hunting is allowed. My parents have a cabin halfway between here and Waterfall City ..."

"Where you took Wildchild and Hazel?"

"That's right. ... there are deer, wild boar, wolves, bears and mountain lions in the forests. Besides hunting, predators keep down the numbers of deer and boar. In Fanshaw Park, where there are no natural predators and the public cannot hunt, gamekeepers regularly cull the deer. They sell the skins and carcasses for much more than the price of synthetic venison."

"Oh, the poor animals!" Yael sympathised. "I want to eat one, to see if I can tell the difference."

Rod smiled at Yael's mixture of sympathy and lust for flesh.

"You've told me how economists think," she said, "and I'm learning how physicists think. So, tell me how biologists think."

"In a similar kind of way to economists. We both study complex adaptive systems. Biologists think of organisms and ecosystems as symbiotic systems whose balance emerges from the interaction of their parts. No one can design an ecosystem. All we can do is ensure a big enough quantity and variety of organisms and leave them to it.

"It's the same for an economy. No one controls or designs it, at least not successfully. A market orders itself. Instead, we make simple rules for everyone to follow and leave them to it. The co-ordination between producers and consumers naturally emerges."

"I'm going to be an engineer as well as a physicist," Yael said. "So how do engineers think?"

"I can explain with an old story. Before there was synthetic meat, a farmer once asked an engineer what he could do to increase the milk yield from his herd.

"'No problem,' the engineer said, taking out his computer tab. 'Step one: assume a spherical cow' ..."

Yael laughed.

"I designed a spherical cow," she said, "only it was a whale not a cow. But now it's at the bottom of the Central Ocean and we need to wait for spring before we can salvage it and find out what I did wrong."

Rod knew about the engineering project to make self-powered submersibles for the planet Samothea, which Hazel called 'Yael's whales'. They were designed to sink and rise in the ocean to circulate its waters and prevent it from becoming sterile in the absence of large deep-diving mammals. The whales were football-shaped, about 12 feet in diameter, powered by a hydrodrive motor running on batteries and solar panels, and controlled by clockwork depth-gauges and timers.

When it sank, the assumption was that the elastic glue that held the 32 sections together, sealing them against the water, had failed due to the cold, causing leaks.

"You're not alone to blame," he said. "You had partners."

"I know, but I calculated the properties of the sealant and ordered what I thought was the right product. I should have checked how brittle the seals became at low temperatures."

"Why didn't you make the whale in one piece without the need for sealant?"

"Because it needed to be packed as small as possible to go into the hold of the shuttlecraft. That's why it also had to be as light as possible. We decided on glue to hold the whale together and act as a sealant because that would be easiest for assembly on Samothea."

"Are you sure it was the cold that made the seals brittle? Could it be something else?"

"It could be pressure, I suppose, which can act like cold. Heat is the motion of atoms, but pressure slows atoms down, which is like cooling them. I'm just starting in physics and I don't understand all that much, but I know that pressure does odd things to crystals, so I need to study some more."

A frown played over her beautiful forehead as she went quiet to think about the mechanical whales. She pushed a piece of bacon rind around her plate with her fork.

Rod waited. When she next looked up, he said:

"Do you want any more sausages?"

"No, thanks. I'm full."

"Shall we go?"

"But we haven't talked about Wildchild yet."

"Up you get. I'll settle with Mrs Hubbard and walk you home. We can talk about Sam on the way."

When they reached the counter and Rod flashed his credit stick on the till, Mrs Hubbard said:

"You wait outside, lad. I want a private word with this young lady."

With his slightly crooked but beguiling smile, Rod obediently went outside and put up his umbrella.

"You're the girl from Samothea," Mrs Hubbard said.

"Yes, ma'am. I'm Yael."

"You'll excuse my interfering, but we're a close-knit community in this part of Arts City. We're like a village. Everyone knows everyone else and we all stick our noses into each other's business."

"Yes, ma'am. I understand. On Samothea, we care about each other much more than we care about privacy."

"Then you'll tell me if it's nothing to do with me ..."

"I wouldn't do that ma'am."

"... when I ask you exactly what you see in that young man."

"Rod's good looking and he's fun to be with. I love him ..."

"Is that so? In which case, I'm sorry to interfere."

"Please, ma'am, I don't mind! Tell me whatever you want. We're naïve and simple girls on Samothea. We always attend to advice from other people on their customs."

"Very well. I've seen Rod in here with many young women over the last three or four years. Sometimes they wear his clothes, like you. But he never sticks with one girl for more than a month or two."

"Oh, yes. I know all about that."

"You don't mind?"

"Not a bit."

"I see. ... He's not been here so often lately and when he comes in, he's with the same girl, a very pretty but quiet black-haired girl ..."

"She's beautiful, isn't she?"

"... I thought he was serious about her because it's been at least six months, but it seems he's moved on and you're fine with it."

Light dawned on Yael's face and she smiled her big happy smile.

"Oh, it's not like that at all! That quiet black-haired girl is my best friend. She's Rod's girlfriend and I was going to say that I love him because Wildchild loves him - however reluctant she is to admit it, especially to Rod himself."

"This Wildchild: she's from Samothea as well?"

"She is."

"And she's serious about Rod?"

"Very."

"I see you girls from Samothea don't do things by half."

"No, ma'am, we don't."

"Then I hope it turns out better for her than for the others."

Yael was stunned into silence for a few seconds. She was a quick girl. For all her admitted naivety, she could read the deeper meaning of statements very well.

"Do you mean that Rod split up with his ex-girlfriends not because they weren't the perfect girl, like Wildchild, but because he was bored with them?"

"Something like that."

"Oh, Gosh! I never thought it possible. I've seen some of Rod's old girlfriends. They smile and wave at him. They all still like him."

"He's very charming. Doubtless he let them down easily, or never made any commitments in the first place."

"No, he didn't. But I thought that now he's found the best girl there is, he would never want to let her go."

"I heartily wish it."

Yael paused to puzzle over Mrs Hubbard's words for a minute, then with a bright smile of thanks skipped out of the door. She took Rod's arm so he could walk her home. They talked about Wildchild all the way.

At home, later that day, Yael began to think about the permanence of sexual relationships. She also looked up the word 'symbiotic' and checked the properties under pressure and cold of the glue sealant for her whales. She learned about crystallisation of supercooled liquids and the defects it can cause in crystal lattices, making weaknesses and dislocations. Like everything she learned, it was filed somewhere in her capacious memory, for potential use another time.

2 Asteroids

Onboard the spaceshipSunrise, on its prospecting mission to the hot blue star, Tatiana Tcherenkova enjoyed a well-deserved sleep while Hazel and Wildchild played asteroids.

They were commissioned to survey the unusual solar system by the businessman, Viktor Bogdanov, who wanted them to prospect for minerals in its asteroid belt. He also gave them detectors to expose to the star's radiation, though he did not say what kind of radiation he was trying to measure.

It was the second prospecting mission for the girls, who could manage daily tasks on their own, so Tatiana developed a peculiar method of working. She laboured flat-out for five days, resting only in short naps. Then she slept for two days, tucked up in a cocoon-like sleeping bag attached by stickleback clasps to the cabin wall.

Meanwhile, Hazel and Wildchild reverted to their normal rhythm of 25-hour days (the length of days on Samothea), with eight hours of refreshing sleep, holding each other in the sleeping-bag they shared.

In their overlapping waking hours, Tatiana gave the girls more lessons on prospecting, sending them out in spacesuits to collect samples from the asteroids, scraping up surface materials, collecting loose rubble, drilling into the cores and setting small charges to expose deeper sections.

In two weeks, they surveyed more than fifty asteroids, choosing them for their colour, size and shapes. Some were big enough to build mining factories inside. Others revealed rare minerals under chemical tests in the ship, but most were jagged chunks of nickel-iron. The settled galaxy was full of nickel-iron.

The girls photographed and mapped the asteroids, placing tracking signals to stake prospecting claims to the mineral sources.

While Tatiana and Hazel analysed rock samples for their chemical contents, Wildchild consulted her physics textbooks, to puzzle over the hot blue star and its thick belt of frozen asteroids.

"What problem?" Tatiana asked when she saw Wildchild staring into space, her books open but abandoned.

"What kind of radiation do Viktor's detectors read?"

"How to tell? Fat man keep secret."

"I know, but it interests me. The star has a strong x-ray signature, like we have at home."

"Here is young hot blue star. Your home star is old warm yellow G class star, like at Earth. You have planets at Samothea. Here only asteroid belt."

"I know," said Wildchild.

"What other problem?"

"How did the asteroid belt form?"

"Some asteroids can be left over from the original cloud that formed the star," Hazel said, eager to share her knowledge.

"A new star is born in a cloud of gas and dust. The central part of the cloud forms the star. When heat and pressure ignite nuclear fusion in its core, light-pressure sweeps the rest of the cloud away, leaving a gap. As the cloud spins around the star, it becomes a disk. Small rocky planets break off the inside and outside of the disc, while larger gas giants coalesce from the middle part. But most of the cloud remains at the edge of the system as a vast swarm of icy particles and comets.

"Asteroid belts are sometimes formed between the orbits of the rocky planets and gas giants. They're remnants of the disc that never formed into a planet. Or they're planets that were ripped apart by tidal forces from the opposing pulls of the star and the gas giants. Asteroids can also wander in from nearby solar systems."

"Da. You have good book-learning, Hazel. But what is case for this solar system?"

"I don't know," Hazel admitted. "This system is unusual. There are no planets; just a large belt of asteroids and a cloud of icy comets much further out; but there's enough material here to make a large rocky planet."

"I go to bed. You and Sam work on mystery of solar system and pilot us to next location. No crash my ship!"

While Tatiana slept in her cocoon, the girls prepared to steer to the next survey location. This was best done by moving sun-side of the asteroid belt into free space and using the ion drive to follow a chord of the circle.

But it was too safe for Hazel, the competitive girl who enjoyed danger.

"I bet you I can navigate through the asteroid belt to the next survey point using only the magnetic grapples," she said to Wildchild.

"I bet you can."

"It's not much of a bet if you agree with me."

"Sorry. I meant to say: it's a silly risk and you can't possibly do it."

"Then I accept your bet."

Sunrise had two extensible arms, like radio masts, which could project magnetic fields. The grapples had many uses. They could scoop up ionised gases, especially hydrogen for the fuel cell. They helped with close manoeuvring at a space station. They could gather up small ferromagnetic rocks. And they could sense nearby nickel-iron asteroids, to avoid risky encounters with dark rocks invisible in the blackness of space.

Hazel proposed a novel use.

"I'm going to pull Sunrise toward an asteroid to build up speed then swing her around toward the next asteroid. I bet I can propel us through the asteroid belt without using the rockets."

"How are you going to slow down?"

"If I go too fast, I'll just hold on a bit longer to an asteroid."

"It might work."

Wildchild sounded sceptical because Hazel's proposal was an inexact science. But even in the densest part of the belt, the asteroids were hundreds of miles apart, and they had 10,000 miles to travel to the next survey region, so most of the journey would be coasting.

Hazel set off confidently and they advanced in a zigzag path, gradually gaining speed. The two small levers on the piloting console moved the grapple arms up and down and forward and back with stronger or weaker magnetism. Hazel could feel the attraction of a nearby asteroid by the resistance of the levers to her fingers. She soon learned how much control she had even with slight delicate movements.

She was doing well and there was a long gap coming up, so Wildchild decided to add to Hazel's problem by moving her girlfriend's hair to one side and kissing her neck. Hazel enjoyed the caress and hummed happily. She was a good pilot and not easily distracted.

Wildchild unzipped the top of Hazel's flying suit and slipped her hand inside. With the lightest fingertip touches, she gently stroked along Hazel's collar bone and down the middle of her chest.

"That's cheating," Hazel complained.

"I'm just making love my girlfriend. She's so pretty. I can't resist her," Wildchild said. She placed nibbling kisses on Hazel's neck, making circles inside the flight-suit around Hazel's tits.

"Cheat," Hazel repeated in a whisper.

Wildchild slowly unzipped Hazel's flying suit all the way down to her belt and put a hand inside, stroking over Hazel's taut belly, from the sensitive undersides of her tits to the top of her pubic hair, which she brushed with her fingertips.

Wildchild paused a second.

"No," Hazel sighed. "Don't stop."

Wildchild smiled. She made short flicking licks on Hazel's throat as her fingers gently explored further down. Hazel shut her eyes.

They crossed a gap between the asteroids and were cruising toward a region thick with rocks and dust. Wildchild's distractions were becoming a danger. Hazel released the grapple levers.

"Computer, take control," she ordered the automatic pilot. "Take us clear of the asteroid belt."

She grabbed a handful of Wildchild's hair and pulled the girl's face up to her own.

"I won my bet. Now I'm claiming my prize."

She kissed Wildchild's mouth, tongue to exploring tongue. Wildchild held Hazel tightly around the neck, with an arm inside her flight-suit, a hand on the inside of Hazel's thigh, giving her the kind of tensing pleasure she felt as a lump in her throat and a tingling on her scalp. Hazel sighed heavily. She leaned back on her pilot's chair and spread her legs.

******

With their magnestrip flight-suits unpeeled and abandoned, the naked girls held each other in a loving clinch. It was a new experience, making love in zero gravity, and not without problems, such as when an involuntary buck in response to a well-placed tongue or finger, or an arching climax with shaking legs, sent one of the girls flying across the cabin.

It was an erotic ballet, with laughs of joy. Then there was a laugh of surprise from Hazel, whose mouth had been on Wildchild's pussy, who writhed and bucked, pushing her away.

With a grin, Hazel kicked off the opposite wall and reattached herself. This time, she held tightly to her girlfriend, who gripped the bulkhead and hooked her legs over Hazel's shoulders, her back arched almost at right angles, not letting go even when Hazel's greedy tongue brought her off in tensing spasms.

******

The girls made love while Tatiana slept and the air scrubbers worked overtime, neutralising the heady aroma of passion. The computer took them the easy way across the asteroid field, toward the next location.

Two hours later, glowing from love and sexual contentment, with the ship half-way to its destination, Wildchild took her turn to pilot the ship by its magnetic grapples. Hazel did not attempt a distraction but fetched a silk scarf, a gift from her boyfriend Ed, and used it as a blindfold.

"Now that really is unfair," Wildchild protested.

"Nonsense. You've memorised the asteroid map ...."

"I haven't."

"Well, you should have. You'll just have to feel the asteroids through the control levers."

"But how can I tell if it's a big asteroid a long way away or a small asteroid nearby?"

"You should have thought of that before you made a bet with me. Now no more prevaricating, girl. Get on with it."

"I just hope we don't break the ship," Wildchild said as she settled into the piloting chair. "If we crash and die, I'll tell Tatiana it was your idea."

Wildchild made her first manoeuvre and they were off, zigzagging through the asteroid field.

They made good progress and, about an hour into the flight, Wildchild executed a strong swing around an asteroid toward a rock a few hundred miles away. They were travelling faster than ever through the inner edge of the belt. Hazel watched carefully as the rock grew ominously in size. It was a smooth grey boulder, not black and jagged like most of the asteroids they passed, and much bigger than normal.