Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  “Excuse me!” I said politely and twisted past them, wrinkled my nose in disapproval at Sergeant Anderson, who grinned even more broadly, and headed for my cabin without much further thought. Saudi Arabia had used some of its Himalayan mountains of cash reserves to buy eleventh place on the list of nations that financed TESS. This latest ship’s run in space was technically a mission in support of the fairly notional Saudi Space Program. The idea was to theoretically get a group of their agency people used to being in space preparatory to setting up a colony. With the typical Arab dollop of lackadaisical planning that colony location was officially “as Allah wills it” and the timetable for building it was equally misty. So far their entire space program seemed to consist of flying members of an apparently endless royal family on junkets to impress their wives and girlfriends. I knew the way they thought. I was sure I would get a sharp note on the letterhead of some Wahabi holy man flailing about against men flaunting themselves naked in front of innocent Islamic damsels. I also knew I would dump it out the garbage chute with the empty goop tubes. There was enough to do in TESS without catering to the lowest common denominators among the transported. As I reached my quarters I considered for a moment whether I should read up on what concessions the earthy captain of the Mayflower must have paid to the sensibilities of his Puritan passengers. I felt certain in the face of their religious sensibilities the Captain has probably apologized in public and smiled in secret just as I did. He’d undoubtedly stood impassively as his crew on the tiny ship had ostentatiously dropped their trousers and pointedly used the heads mounted out in open air by the bowsprit whenever there were ladies present. I could well imagine the pinched lips of the pax as they stared dourly at the crewmembers up there mooning them back in 1620. Somehow that crew had survived whatever recidivist censure came their way and I was certain TESS would too. It was a minor adrenal excitement of this job to leave all the burdensome limitations of the past behind us. TESS’ mission did not lie in that direction… . it lay in the future. I gave myself another dog treat of satisfaction at the thought and felt better.

  In my quarters I showered with an experimental vacuum shower on to catch the moisture. It still only worked marginally. Falling water is a game for the gravitied. I threw on a fuller work uniform that included pants this time and I got ready to exit my quarters just as Maureen came up. The Deputy Commander for Support of TESS had been helping out with the wiring too. She looked so good in her sweaty dirty skivvies as she floated into the hatch of our shared billet that I considered getting sweaty again myself.

  I twisted to kiss her in midair; by now a graceful practiced motion like a pair of seals rubbing noses mid-swim in the ocean.

  I paused and smiled into her eyes and wiped a smear of dusty grease off her chin.

  She grinned back.

  “I just had some ground pounder ogle me!” She said proudly.

  I laughed.

  “You too? You should have seen the gal who was just floating between my legs. She was measuring the universal lever. What an eye-opener that must have been for her!”

  She stuck out her tongue at me.

  “I swear these tourists can’t get enough of a girl in knickers!” She studiously ignored my threat of a new found girlfriend—she knew my essential monogamist nature too well by now.

  The crew had taken to calling any non-crew ‘tourists’ lately. It was probably because our TESS regulations required that non-TESS personnel had to have escorts whenever they left their own spaces inside the ship. Escorts served the purpose of protection from the dangers of outer space, damaging ships components carelessly, to keep newcomers literally out from under the crew’s feet and finally to make damn sure they did not get so much as a partial glimpse our scientific secrets in the locked and guarded engine component rooms here and there about the hull. For our normally short transits from place to place I often did not have the manpower to watch the yokels so they got locked in a lot which caused a certain amount of resentment on their part. They liked to articulate their complaints to me. A lot. Today I had taken pity on this particular bunch because the delays caused by our repairs had dragged out for almost two days now and I had let them out of the constriction of their allotted spaces to stretch their legs and walk about. It was a rare concession and was terribly exciting for them to be able to mingle with TESS crew—apparently in more ways than one.

  “Gotta Shower!” Maureen moved on absently, her mind already solving some other problem I could not see. I knew the look and sighed dramatically. She pretended not to hear. Sex was out for the moment.

  I began to wend my way towards the bridge pondering the notion of Maureen and sex in general. One oddity of building something as radically new as TESS was that I was required to hammer together the social construct of the ship’s crew and their interactions with each other from scratch. Passengers were purely secondary to that equation since they tended not to be on board very long – my real focus was on crew business instead. The obvious models to use as a quick template were the oceanic navies of the planet Earth. The problem was that their solution to sex in the equation for most of history was simply to forbid it and construct same-sex crews. Which probably reduced the sex a fair amount though almost certainly not eliminating it. I was going in another direction altogether though. I wanted both men and women aboard for what I presumed would be longer and longer periods in space and had taken great pains to try and balance the sexes out in our recruiting. Mingling the human sexes therefore meant sex… and plenty of it.

  I therefore entered my experiment in the ship’s new social order with the idea that social mores associated with a zillion years of past societies had no perfect place in something that was out here with us on the cutting the edge of man’s push into the larger universe unless it was actually useful in the new context.

  I had acted quickly to head off trouble spots. In addition to my rules on clothing I had also made it rule that actual sex acts between people aboard was not allowed in public unless by consensual agreement of everyone involved in the same space—those doing it and anyone watching. Rumor control indicated a few recent orgies had tested the outer limits of the premise, but I had not been physically there to observe them and therefore did not officially care. Actually, officially I did not care about sex at all as long as actual violence was avoided and no one had to watch the sex who did not want to. Being intellectually honest I knew the real problem with sex was not the act itself but the jealousy that came along with it instead. The consequences of the green-eyed monster inside a closed box like a ship ranged from hard-to-take emotional stress to an outer limit of disastrous insane violence. I therefore demanded my people avoid envy at all costs—easy to say—tricky to enforce.

  The premise behind most previous society’s notion of solid ‘relationships’ had always been a codified social construct that required acknowledgement by everyone in the community who started a relationship to get as much buy in by as many people in their immediate village as possible—usually with a wedding license and a religious figure to pontificate over the union. There also tended to be some added structure around monetary aspects of marriage since it was so often as much an economic interaction as dough was also emotional. Fair enough and reasonably logical when potential offspring were involved. To mimic the functions of all those ritual processes I used a much simpler tool that lay right at hand, the ship’s computer. I required all TESS personnel to register their sexuality and relationship status in the database. My essential notion was to get people to articulate their limitations and boundaries to help other people avoid stepping on them. As I expected, tracking software showed it was the most visited location on the computer. At the conservative end of things, those people who seriously wanted to make sure their Earth born marriage withstood the tests of what the unwashed tabloids regarded as freewheeling free love aboard ship during our voyages, simply registered themselves as “monogamous non-available.” Generally
this rare note was respected by fellow crew mates. I liked to think it was because of my stern warnings about indulging in envy and threats of dire consequences for anyone who did. Or it may just have been that there were actually very few of those entries. What I noted instead was the presence of a long list of registrations as geographical bachelors and bachelorettes. It allowed for practical marriages of convenience set up for short terms. It was a concession for those needing sexual partners, but only while out on their tour in space. We were the new Vegas. What happens in space apparently stays in space. What could I say? As long as it kept the basically monogamous people stable and working for me while we were in space as head of TESS I could care less. It would take a great deal of malignity to inform on a shipmate to an Earth side spouse and I actively discouraged malignity with a long list of punishments for that too. I was sure someone would slip up soon and it would cause problems back on the mother world, but Earth was not my concern. Mine was space. Interestingly a handful of newly committed and more permanent bonds down towards the monogamous end of the relationship spectrum had also appeared once my computer system evolved. Lieutenant 2 Woo and Warrant Officer Pinta served as an example if not a surprise. They had been in an unofficial relationship dirt-side while in the Q-Kink team, but lacked any ‘official’ relationship back on Earth like a marriage contract. Aboard ship they just wanted everyone in a growing service to know they were a pair out of respect for each other. I like respect. Among crew now they were an acknowledged couple and no one to my knowledge had ever tested the limits of the relationship since the database was coming to be regarded as oddly sacrosanct—something very like a marriage registry in church cultures without any of the religious doubletalk or baggage. Two days ago I had overheard a snippet of conversation containing the remark “No thanks… I can’t… it’s not according to DB” for the first time. Weird.

  An empiricist, I had experimented and registered myself as a “bonded couple” with Admiral O’Hara which had made her dimple prettily and earned me a very memorable night. As a result of this toe in the water I had noted that sexual innuendo about my person and flirting had dropped off precipitously among TESS personnel a short time after I made the entry. In my weak moments I checked my deodorant, but I suspected it wasn’t really me. Maureen was very well loved throughout the entire service and few of them wanted to offend her by hitting on me. Not that I am saying that people hitting on me was a problem day to day anyway—still I like to fantasize as much as the next man.

  Even more elastically from a social standpoint a database relationship could be changed or canceled with a key stroke so that one’s social status was never in question for more than a few minutes. There is nothing ambiguous about having your name deleted. The DB was becoming the bottom line among crew and TESS in general. Of course like most human constructs it was not perfect. Passengers were an ignorant exception who just would hit on you. They could not view the computer file and it came out that down Earth-side it was apparently become something of a status thing to sleep with a TESS space person—major bragging rights on a Saturday night at the pub apparently. Passengers then were becoming surprisingly frank about their expectations. Funnily enough, except for a very few members of my crew who liked sex with cattle there were only a tiny number of TESS personnel taking up offers from groundhogs these days—at least as a percentage of my team. TESS personnel were becoming picky and leaning towards their own kind. Very tribal.

  Overall the database had produced some useful secondary effects and unexpected tertiary effects outside the basic registry at the less conservative end of the relationship spectrum too. Besides a rather expected pair of complicated sounding polyamory shot groups, I thought it was also rather helpful that our homosexuals no longer had to guess to find out if a potential partner was gay or Bi using dated technology like ‘gaydar.’ A glance at DB eliminated what must have been a few painful approaches they might have made—and my heterosexuals need not make similar errors of attraction. The tertiary effects also manifested out on the edges of DB. They were ones I had not foreseen, but which were not surprising on consideration. Absently I had included a remarks section to the database and it had inadvertently turned into a bulletin board for tastes and proclivities from banking to spanking. I occasionally felt it was entirely too much public information for my own tastes, but it certainly provided clarity. I knew of at least two pairings between people that had no apparent commonalities other than the words actually in the remarks block. One couple who were a going concern set about each other based on a fairly obscure religious background who wanted to worship each other in “tantric bliss,” while a second couple had set up house with nothing apparently in common except a stated desire to tie each other up. Because this ad hoc relationship arrangement was chugging along like a locomotive it was evolving that relationships in the DB were increasingly sacrosanct among my people and an open part of my command policy that encouraged rather than suppressed candor. When DB relations were not honored, that was when I took enforcement steps against those who could not live with DB, tried to cross the lines or even tried to blur the lines defined in it. So far my few slaps on various body parts had gotten wounded looks but had worked out in the end. I had a heavy motivational stick. Fear of losing a billet aboard ship or even in the TESS organization in general for objecting to or messing about with someone else’s status in DB while out in the fleet was pretty great. Professionalism was already high in the growing TESS ranks and people who made it as far as an assignment to the ship hated to risk being part of something as elite as TESS’ space corps for something as essentially trivial as a sexual relationship. But human kind was in space; all of it—every variation there was had come aboard ship with us and it made me smile sometimes at the complexity and chewiness of humanity riding engines named after me throughout space. I was not shooting for perfection, only general success along new lines and so-far-so-good was damned well close enough. The DB arrangement had not been seriously down-checked yet and I was tentatively calling it a success. In my heart I felt that sooner or later the whole mess would be tested seriously, primarily because I am a realist. The river the human psyche is deep and wide and once human emotions were invoked by sex it held the power to trigger the violence that lies so close to the emotional heart of the race of men. When serious emotions of that kind raised their ugly head around old DB I would have to evolve it again in a way I could not now foresee. The demon of future precedent loomed out there on my event horizon. Like most other aspects of TESS I would get to it when I got to it. In the mean time it served everyone I knew well enough.

  One thing at a time was about my limit – I could do a hundred things badly, ten things well and only two or three perfectly. Every day a thousand things clamored for my attention and I just got by most of the time—I was thinking of adding it to my family motto—or my headstone.

  I arrived on the bridge and Maxmillian floated up to me with my thousand and first problem. Those on duty tended to treat everything super seriously. They had gotten in the habit of being responsible formally for anything that developed on their shift and tended to retain that formality in reporting to the Admiral—me. It was why it was called ‘duty.’ Somehow their speech got clipped and terse as if expecting their noses to be spanked with a rolled up newspaper. It felt very military. I liked it since it at least sounded professional even if it was against a backdrop of dangling wires, tools lying everywhere, panels drooping open and the odd tip of a penis poking forgotten out the slit in his underpants—everyone too kind to point it out.

  “Four out of six checks on our malfunctions are now final, sir.” His polite monotone would have made Jeeves proud. “Two were dead-ends like yours and have been lined out on the error database. We think the maneuvering thrusters are going to be back on line in about an hour – for the thruster ring they found a break in the electrical line outside on the hull that was just waiting to happen and are fixing it now. There were signs of seawater on
the wire and gravity had clearly been at work in rubbing the insulation off during landings and takeoffs. We have protected the wiring now and a test is scheduled at the two hour mark. The navigation equipment is not finished however… still working on finding the final problem there. We did discover a bad switch here on the bridge for the number two light at the head of the circuit and replaced that.”