“What say we give the Octopus a workout?” Sasha said. “The poor stupid bastard certainly needs one!”
Franja grimaced. The Octopus had proven to be a nightmare to the space monkeys. Three people could in theory work inside it at once, but the tentacles were forever interfering with each other, and the geniuses on the ground had neglected to provide any of the waldo control panels with an overriding master control system.
“The Octopus!” Franja cried. “That damned thing is entirely useless for any real EVA work. . . .”
“Quite so,” Sasha said, “but it’s perfect for fucking!”
So saying, he popped the bubble canopy, they crawled inside, resealed the Octopus, and opened the clamshell air lock. Sasha fired the Octopus’s main thruster, and they rose up out of the air lock and into the starry blackness.
The Octopus might not be exactly spacious by groundling standards, but since the pod was designed for a work crew of three, it was roomy enough with only the two of them inside. There were three seats one could strap into, three sets of waldo controls, and the maneuvering console; other than that, it was mostly empty space, though Franja could see no comfortable surface free of angles and protuberances against which they could perform the act, and not much room for free-fall drifting, either.
Sasha maneuvered the Octopus well clear of the Cosmograd, then rolled it over so that the view beyond the bubble canopy was truly magical.
The Earth hung overhead, an immense curve of blue, green, and brown, fleeced with snowy swirls of cloud, illumined brilliantly around the edge where the sun seemed to be setting behind it, the limb of the planet glowing in the Gegenschein. Thousands of multicolored stars peered down upon them unblinkingly from the velvety blackness.
With Cosmograd Sagdeev eclipsed by the body of the Octopus, the illusion was complete. There they were, weightless, seemingly alone in the immensity of space, soaring free above the Big Blue Marble. It might almost be called romantic. . . .
Sasha peeled off his coveralls, and Franja did likewise, and they floated nude in the center of the Octopus, heads upright, looking out at the Earth and the stars. Being monkeys, and dormitory mates at that, the sight of each other’s naked bodies was not exactly novel, and hardly arousing in and of itself, at least as far as Franja was concerned, though Sasha, good monkey that he was, had no trouble raising an immediate erection.
“Well, now what?” Franja said uncertainly, glancing about the interior of the work-pod for a place of comfortable purchase.
“Now I will show you a whole new meaning for the phrase ‘going down,’ ” Sasha said, and grabbing her frankly by the breasts, shoved her upward, so that the velocity carried her up and back against the transparent and heated bubble canopy.
Perspective underwent a sudden shift. Suddenly Franja seemed to be floating in the starry blackness itself, with the Earth below her. A moment of reflexive fear and vertigo overcame her, for with her back up against the glass, vision told her that she was falling backward down through the void toward the planet, with nothing visible between her and the big drop to reentry.
Sasha laughed when he saw her expression. “Don’t worry,” he said, “the canopy is designed to take a hundred-gram meteorite impact, it’ll certainly stand up to what we have in mind, so just lean back and enjoy it.”
So saying, he swam beneath her, pried her legs open wide, and forthrightly buried his face between them.
When Franja snaked a hand in his hair and looked at him floating between her thighs as the tingling waves of pleasure began, perspective shifted again, and down became Sasha’s direction. Now she seemed to be floating light as air on the tip of his tongue, purchased on a point of pleasure, lifted upward and outward into the heavens surrounding her, rising like a goddess toward the stars on a wave of ethereal energy.
She threw back her head and let herself dissolve into the sensation, gazing up at the Earth floating above her, like the queen of the world riding up and out into the infinite blackness, until a tremendous orgasm took her in an explosion of stardust.
Loose-limbed, dreamy-eyed, creamily content with no further sensation of up or down, she opened her arms, and her legs, and, luxuriating back against the bubble canopy, took him into her, and they coupled there naked in the vast emptiness between the stars like true space monkeys.
“That was . . . that was . . . ,” Franja muttered afterward as they quite literally came drifting down from the star-spangled ceiling.
“Cosmic?” Sasha suggested with a grin. He laughed. And then, quite unaccording to normal space-monkey etiquette, he leaned forward and planted a little kiss on her lips.
“What was that for?”
Sasha laughed again. “For a special moment,” he said. “At last, Franja, you are a true space monkey!”
And so, at least for a time, she was. After that, Franja went through a period of several weeks when she was determined to try everything and everyone.
She had never been very promiscuous, indeed, for someone born well into the post-AIDS Second Sexual Revolution, she had been something of a prude, channeling a good portion of her libidinal energies into her studies and her single-minded pursuit of a life outside the gravity well.
But now, here she was, after all, a space monkey in Cosmograd Sagdeev, and for the first time in her life, there was no real reason not to loosen up.
However, after she had screwed her way through about twenty of her fellow monkeys, after she had learned how to do it floating free in the center of a module, after she had relaxed to the point where screwing in front of an audience seemed neither perverted nor particularly arousing, after there finally was nothing much new or novel, nothing that she hadn’t done already, even space-monkey sex palled as an escape from the boredom of Cosmograd life, and she found herself spending more and more time wrapped in her own thoughts.
She would spend hours just floating freely in the observation deck, staring out the big bubble canopy at the Earth and the stars, her thoughts too drifting along freely in zero gravity.
This experience was, after all, what she had spent her whole previous life pursuing, and now here she was, with all the time she wanted and then some to commune with the stars, with the Earth as seen entire from on high.
She would stare at the Earth; huge, luminous, and with its green forests and savannas, its blue oceans, its ever-changing swirling white cloud patterns, palpably alive, the only living thing in all that cold black immensity. She would watch the lights of its cities sparkling in the darkness behind the terminator as the Cosmograd’s orbit swept it around the planet.
And then she would turn her back on the Earth and look out at all those stars and imagine each of them as a potential abode of life, each of them another Sol, another Barnard’s star.
She imagined them circled by living planets, each the home of a civilization as rich and complex as the one that lay behind her, and, orbiting on some space station like this around them, beings much like herself, gazing out at a different configuration of these same stars, at the unknown distant Earth, at her, and thinking these very thoughts.
That was the dream that had drawn her up out of the gravity well, that was the dream that she and her father shared, that was the vision toward which the best in the species was yearning—to cross that daunting immensity, to meet those fellow beings out there among the stars, to peck through the eggshell of the solar system and be reborn into a grander and wider realm.
But the more she stared out at the distant stars, the more she realized that was a future she really had no hope of living to see. She would never even live to hear the reply to the messages being sent to Barnard’s star, if indeed the Barnards ever answered. The distances were so immense, present human technology was so puny in the face of that immensity, that the best she could hope for was to play some small part in these early stages of the great adventure and then be gone.
In her lifetime, humans were never going to walk the surface of another living planet, breathe the exotic
intoxicating air of an alien atmosphere, explore an unknown biosphere, meet the citizens of a whole new world. The Moon was dead. Mercury and Venus were infernos. If there was life in the clouds of Jupiter or the superheated ocean of Uranus, it could never be touched and smelled. At best, she might live to walk the surface of Titan in a bulky suit and see living things through a helmet-glass darkly.
And Mars was a bitter tantalization. Life had started there when the planet was wet and young—proof, like the discovery of the Barnards, that life on Earth was no improbable chain of coincidence—but long gone now, leaving humans alone in this solar system.
No, in her lifetime, it was all going to be like Sagdeev, cramped little contained environments, long hours of boredom, frail bubbles of life floating in a deadly immensity, submarines in a cosmic sea.
When she tried to share these thoughts with her fellow monkeys, what she got were glazed stares, sexual advances, jokes, the offer of a squeeze bottle of rotgut to lighten her mood. It was contrary to space-monkey etiquette, perhaps of necessity, to consider these things, or at least to voice them aloud, and she soon gave up trying.
More and more, she found herself alone with her thoughts, alone with her doubts. All her life had been focused on getting here, but now, she had found, as the old saying had it, that there was no here here, only dull labor, boredom, and mindless screwing, nor could she see an end to it in her allotted span.
More and more, she found herself looking down on the Earth and wishing she were there. There was more life and excitement in the Mad Moscow she had hardly known than up here in any of these tin cans. The stars were cold and dead and unreachable, but the Earth hung huge and alive and eternally tantalizing before her.
Behind the terminator, the Earth too was a galaxy of stars shining in the darkness, but each star was a city—Beijing, Tokyo, Jakarta, Rio, hundreds of them, thousands of places she had never seen—teeming with life, bright with possibility, beacons of adventure. Compared to that, what was a lifetime spent confined in these miserable little submarines in space?
Day after day, Franja came to the observation deck to look down on the living Earth, longing for something as deeply, in the end, as ever she had longed to be where she was now.
She had fought her way up out of the gravity well seeking some sort of magical transformation. And now that she had found it, it had turned out to be something quite different from what she had imagined it would be.
Up here on high, she had seen the Earth from a new perspective, and it would never seem the same again. That was the transformation. She had sought a new land of wonder and adventure. And there it was, shining in the darkness before her, where it had been all along.
It took a long time for her to admit it, but finally she knew that she wanted to go home, home to a world that the woman she had now become had never seen before. And she started counting the days and the weeks and the months till her release.
* * *
CARMELO TO CHALLENGE MICHAELSON
State Assemblyman Albert Carmelo (D-Berkeley) announced today that he would seek the Congressional seat now held by Republican Dwayne Michaelson. “Berkeley has a long Democratic tradition,” Carmelo declared, “and without Presidential coattails to help my opponent this time around, I feel confident that I have a good chance of unseating him.”
—Oakland Express
* * *
XVIII
In Robert Reed’s junior year at UC Berkeley, Nat Wolfowitz decided to run for Congress. He announced this in the middle of a poker game, right after he had raked in a pot at seven-card stud with nothing better than tens and sixes.
“You’re out of your mind, Nat,” Bobby told him. “You’d be lucky to carry Telegraph Avenue.”
“I bluffed you out of this one on the sixth card with nothing but a lousy pair of sixes showing, didn’t I?” Wolfowitz said.
“That’s not exactly the same thing!”
“Isn’t it?”
“Come on, Nat, you’re not really serious!” Marla Washington said.
She was the only person in the game who had been living at Little Moscow when Bobby had arrived in Berkeley, and she had never been too terrific at poker. The other two hands, Johnny Nash and Frieda Blackwelder, were relative newcomers whose skill did not at all match their enthusiasm, and while Bobby was still no match for Wolfowitz, and knew he never would be, he had long since learned that by playing defensive poker behind Nat and not getting greedy, he could win modest amounts more or less consistently enough to augment the modest living allowance he was getting from his parents in Paris.
“Depends on what you mean by serious,” Wolfowitz said. “It’s not as if I expect to win.”
“Huh?”
“Of course I don’t have a chance of winning,” Nat said blithely. “The district takes in a big chunk of Oakland as well as Berkeley, the whole economy is dependent on the Navy Yard, even Berkeley is more Gringo than Red, most people are not gonna like what I’m saying at all, and even if the Democrats and Republicans split right down the middle, I don’t have a prayer of sneaking in.”
He laughed. “Who the hell wants to live in Washington anyway?”
It was Bobby’s deal. “Straight draw,” he declared cautiously, not wanting to deal with anything more complicated while Nat was running this little psyche-out. If that was really what it was. Nat had the strangest look on his face, devilish and ironic, yes, but also somehow dreamy and faraway. He couldn’t really be serious, could he . . . ?
“Come on, Nat, what are you really up to?” Bobby said as he dealt the cards.
“Teddy Roosevelt, Jesse Jackson,” Wolfowitz said. “Writ small.”
“What are you babbling about?” Marla said.
“Was Teddy Roosevelt who called the Presidency a bully pulpit,” Wolfowitz said. “Jesse Jackson was this radical black preacher back in the 1980s and ’90s who kept running for President over and over again even though he knew he had no chance of winning.”
Bobby checked his cards. King high, without even a pair or a three-card flush. “Because running for President was also a bully pulpit?” he said.
Frieda checked. Johnny bet fifty dollars. Marla raised fifty. Wolfowitz glanced at his cards and folded. Bobby locked eyes with him for a moment and then dropped out too. Frieda called. Johnny called.
Wolfowitz beamed at him. “You’re getting it, kid,” he said.
Frieda took one card, probably pulling to a straight or a flush. Johnny took three, probably holding a pair. Marla took two, three of a kind, no doubt.
Bobby lost interest in the hand as they bet and raised each other, and so did Nat Wolfowitz. “I’ve won enough in the big games to finance a couple thousand posters, a few radio spots maybe, and we could start charging a few bucks’ admission to the Saturday night parties. Enough to generate a little free press coverage, if I keep saying the same outrageous thing.”
“Which is?”
“The United States has to do whatever it takes to get into Common Europe,” Wolfowitz said.
Marla looked up from her hand. “That’s crazy, Nat!” she said.
“We all know that it’s true,” Wolfowitz said.
“Yeah, but we’re a bunch of Reds!”
“Bet, will you, Marla!”
“Yeah, play poker?”
“Uh . . . call . . . ,” Marla said distractedly, shoving another fifty into the pot.
“What about you, Comrade Eurocrat?” Wolfowitz asked Bobby. “Does it look so crazy from your perspective?”
Bobby, by now, was one of the senior members of Little Moscow, and his European background gave him a certain intellectual cachet. So he felt that he really had to say something intelligent; it was necessary to his mystique.
The so-called Western Hemispheric Common Market gave America an enormous captive market and raw materials at artificially depressed prices. But this kept Latin America impoverished, and with the United States frozen out of Greater Common Europe, Africa a basket case, and the Japane
se pretty much in control of Asian markets, Latin America was the only export market America had.
The endless guerrilla wars all over the hemisphere kept the American defense industry humming and unemployment at a politically tolerable level. But, having stiffed Common Europe, the United States had firmly established itself as an international deadbeat, leaving no way to finance deficits overseas.
Domestic spending had to be cut to the bone, but the federal budget still ran a deficit, which meant floating rubbery paper inside the United States, which meant high interest rates, which meant inflation, which meant higher interest rates, which meant more inflation . . .
The only things that kept the economy from collapsing were cheap raw materials from Latin America, cheap food prices generated by unexportable surpluses, and government pressure to keep wage increases below the inflation rate and profit margins above the prevailing interest rates.
So the standard of living kept drifting downward, but not dramatically enough to rock the slowly sinking boat. Especially with Europe and Japan and guerrillas in Latin America to blame for the American people’s misfortune and the ever-tightening strictures of the constantly amended National Security Act to silence anyone unpatriotic enough to voice the awful truth.
“Sure, Nat, we all know that getting into Common Europe is the only way out,” Bobby finally said. “But how? They won’t even let in our exports. How do you propose to get them to even think about letting us join?”
Marla turned up three eights. Johnny and Frieda groaned as she raked in the pot.
“Pay them back what we owe them,” Wolfowitz said.
“You’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars!” Bobby exclaimed.
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