On the Starry Road

--

The view out the viewport that evening was cold and lifeless. We'd come awfully close to ending up two lumps of frozen organic matter jumbled out there amidst the lonely apogalactic talus field. It was by no means certain we wouldn't end up jumbled out there yet. If we couldn't get the tool locker closed. If we couldn't get the matter compactor motor started. If any one of a hundred other things on this ramshackle tin can of a spaceship didn't operate the way it was supposed to.

The cabin lights clicked a notch lower, letting in another smutch of cold, purple darkness.

"Come to bed," said the girl.

We rigged the bag. But this time, as we got in, she turned toward me rather than turning away. My first thought was that she was feeling the same glumness that I was feeling. Not only had I gotten myself into this precarious situation, I'd dragged her along with me. I put my arms around her. Perhaps I'd been running too taut a ship. A captain has to tend to the emotional needs of his passengers as well as the physical ones.

But the needs she was thinking of weren't exactly the same ones I was. She let herself settle into my embrace. She rested her head against my shoulder. She ran her hand suggestively along my side. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was no use, that we were too close to the intergalactic discontinuity.

She directed her hand more anteriorly, gently surveying my surface topography. And out of force of habit, I guess, I let my own hand begin to wander as well, down over her trim posterior flare, taking in the full measure of her sleekness.

She was probing more systematically now, assessing whether any trace of my apparatus still remained. And, somehow, to my surprise, her probing did indeed begin to elicit a response. Tepidly at first, but then more enthusiastically, my apparatus began to engorge. As if the laws of physiology were still in effect. And, as if she had known that all along, her hand lingered there, welcoming, coaxing, admiring.

She fiddled with my waistband, and I helped her pull my tighties down and off, setting free my burgeoning protuberance. I caught the hem of her T-shirt, and she helped me peel it up and away, baring her anterior projections, each one now punctuated with a nubby hood ornament of its own.

The craving was back, but it was subtler, more intimate than it had been at the zoo. It was just the two of us now, no longer strangers--fellow travelers rather, crewmates, partners.

We removed the remainder of our coverings so that we were naked again, naked in each other's arms. She looked into my eyes. We kissed, She reached down and helped me dock my blushing protuberance into her oystery bay.

Making love in outer space is different in some ways than it is on terra firma. Newton's laws are harder to ignore. Actions, reactions, bodies in motion all require continual compensation and redirection. But as you learn in space camp, that's what arms and legs are for: to hold, to guide, to shepherd so that every action and every reaction converge toward a mutually desired objective.

Because when it comes down to it, the most important thing you learn in space camp is that creatures evolved in the loving embrace of a rocky planet can nevertheless manage to do pretty well on their own.

Because, as it turns out, making love in outer space is not really all that different after all. Because two bodies that come into orbit around each other create their own gravitational curvature, they grind their own interplanetary tectonics, they spark, they incandesce, they emit their own shimmering rainbow of spectral lines that fly out iridescently at the speed of light in all directions, farther than the local system scanner can track, beyond the edges of the galaxy, across the intergalactic void, out to the uttermost ends of the universe.

--

The next morning while the chronostat was still dialing up the cabin lights, the girl was out of the sleeping bag rooting around in the odds and ends drawer. She came up with a roll of mylar tape. She held it up to me with an accusatory glare. Why hadn't we used it in the first place?

She cut strips of tape and pieced them over the whole back of the suit to reinforce her original handiwork. She made sure they overlapped and didn't skimp on the glue.

This time we worked out our plan more carefully. We'd connect the tether to a stanchion inside the cabin so that if necessary we'd be able to pull ourselves right back in through the hatch. We'd strap the basket to my chest and just bring the rocks into the cabin with us.

She reassumed her perch on my back. We pulled on the suit. We depressurized the cabin. Her patching held. We went out. I got another basket from the locker and then closed it up tight. I used a spare piece of angle iron as a ski pole. The grabber had fallen close to the rock pile. I collected four softball sized specimens and ski-poled us back to the ship, avoiding another hard collision. I got the basket on my front and the passenger on my back safely back inside the cabin with plenty of time remaining on the life support.

This time our return was a bit more triumphant. The rocks were mesmerizing: a deep purple metallic color, like anodized titanium. They couldn't be scratched, not even with a diamond scribe. They were tremendously massive. Even without gravity you could feel their inertia as you hefted them around in your hand. They were too big to fit into the spectrometer, but we were able to shake in a few purple grains from my glove.

The digits on the readout spun around like a crazy slot machine. The bell clanged!

Jackpot!!

Atomic number 126!

Eleventy - fucking - sixteenium!

Eka - fucking - multi - fucking - million - fucking - aires!

--

No use hanging around. We secured the cabin for takeoff. I switched on the avionics and the plasma pump. The fuel gauges read two thirds full. I started the fusion oscillator.

I crossed my fingers and pushed in the interlock. The matter compactor groaned... and started. The girl gave me a reassuring nod from her copilot seat. I engaged the flue. I throttled the engine. The ship rattled, jerked, and slowly began pushing us and the asteroid apart.

"Don't go anywhere," I waved out the viewport. "We'll be back."

We gave the RX87 another workout as we threaded our way out of the asteroid field. Then we began retracing our steps back in from the rim. Back to galaxia firma. Back to where the laws of physics and the laws of physiology did not require so much second guessing.

We steered a wide berth around a certain main-sequence yellow and plotted a course toward civilization. We didn't dawdle, but we didn't hurry. Let's just say that on the trip back the ship was not as taut as it had been on the trip out.

--

The first reasonably sized port on our route was 42 Draconis d. We needed fuel. We might even be able to find a serviceable tug. I wasn't sure if the girl would want to go back out, but if not, her rocks would buy her passage wherever she wanted to go.

Once we landed I put on my spare jumpsuit, and she redonned her skivvies and fashioned a utility-bag skirt to wear over them. They had a pair of diamond sheers at the port garage, and we were finally able to rid ourselves of the damn strap. We got her a pair of flip-flops at the convenience shop right outside the gate. The assay offices in the first block were pretty fly-by-night, but there was a reputable one in the second.

The sack was unbelievably heavy. The clerk did a double-take as he tried to pick it up, as if it had been nailed to the table. He took out a softball sized lump of purple metal, blew on it, and examined it with his loupe. He tried the scribe and the acid and then put it into the X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. He was a bit puzzled by the readout. It wasn't on the standard chart. He dug around in his desk drawer for a loose leaf sheet.

"Wrigglonium," he read. "Pretty pure."

"Say what? That's eleventy-sixteenium! A whole nugget of pure eleventy-sixteenium!"

He held up the sheet. "They call it wrigglonium now. The Alsatians figured out how to synthesize it. Apparently they've got a big facility somewhere, cranking it out."

The girl and I looked at each other. A big facility. Cranking it out.

The clerk examined the other rocks and weighed them all. "Pretty nice specimens. I've never actually seen it before. I didn't know it occurred naturally."

He typed into his computer. "So, there's a commodity price." He typed some more. "Fifty-three kilos... I can give you two thousand bucks for the lot."

--

We'd planned to live it up in town that night. Instead, we trudged back to the spaceport.

"So what are you going to do with your share?" I asked.

We pressed our thumbs on the scanner and passed in through the spaceport gate.

"How much do you think a refurbished matter-compactor motor might set us back?" she asked.

The ship was over to the left.

"What for?"

"To start the damn ship."

"What for?"

"OK, look," she said. "You've heard of diamond rain, right?"

It's a phenomenon that occurs on some ice-giant planets where the intense atmospheric pressure converts gaseous methane directly into diamond.

"So have you ever wondered what might happen in a diamond hurricane?"

"A what?"

"Well, don't you think that all that buffeting might fuse the particles into a polycrystalline aggregate?"

I could see what she was getting at. "Carbonado!"

"The toughest diamond there is."

"And just where might one find a diamond hurricane? If such a thing even exists."

"In a multiple star system maybe? Where the planetary orbits are wild enough to shake things up a bit?"

"Hmmm." Actually, it didn't sound all that unreasonable.

We'd reached the ship. I keyed in the code. She climbed up first, giving me an inspiring glimpse of her perfectly humanoid ass.

She looked back down over her shoulder. "Ever been to V Puppis?".

It was a binary star orbiting a black hole. And there were ice giants. And it wasn't that far away. And between her share of the assay and mine we could probably afford not only a refurbished matter-compactor motor but enough fuel to get us there and back.

"Might be worth checking out, don't you think?"