The Middle of Nowhere Page 13

  Armstrong was already up the five steps to the Operations deck. Quilla Zeta was quietly cleaning the astrogation display. She was a thin-looking woman, blue-skinned, with purple quills in a Mohawk array. Mikhail Hodel had the conn, Jonesy sat at the astrogation station, running a series of battle simulations.

  “Crewman Armstrong?” said Zeta.

  “Uh—I can’t talk now.” Armstrong ducked into forward port accessway. “I’ve got work to do—”

  Halfway up the passage, he encountered Quilla Theta; she was even smaller than Gamma, almost child-like. “You have been avoiding us for some time now. We need to talk.”

  “Not now,” Armstrong replied. “I told you, I’ve got too much to do, with the detox and all—” He shoved past Theta almost rudely and kept going.

  Quilla Delta stuck her head out of a cabin door as he passed. “When?”

  “I told you—later.” He held his hands up in the air, as if to ward her off and kept on moving.

  Quilla Beta was just coming out of the forward magazines, carrying the empty housing for a fibrillator assembly. “You said that before, Crewman Armstrong. Later never comes. Something is the matter. Are you embarrassed about the sexual coupling we had?”

  “Look, it didn’t work. Please, let’s just drop the subject.” He pushed past her into the storage compartments. His face was flushed.

  Quilla Lambda, the only male Quilla onboard, turned to face him. He was just unpacking the rest of the fibrillator assembly. Lambda was as big and as well-muscled as Armstrong; his skin was a darker shade of blue than the females, and his quills were also larger. “No, Brian,” he said firmly. “It did work. That’s the problem.”

  “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “We need to talk about this. And we need to talk now. It’s getting in the way of your ability to function. If you won’t talk to the others, you will talk to this one. Wait—”

  Lambda did something then, Armstrong wasn’t sure what, but suddenly, he wasn’t a Quilla anymore. He was a man with blue skin and purple quills. “I’ve disconnected,” he said. “Now, you and I may talk privately. If you wish.”

  “You disconnected? I didn’t know you could do that.”

  Lambda nodded. “We don’t do it very often; there’s rarely any need to. But you need to hear this. I know what you’re feeling.”

  Armstrong didn’t answer. He looked off to one side, at the floor, at the ceiling. “Look,” he finally said, coming back to Lambda. “Do we really have to have this conversation?”

  “Yes,” said Lambda. “We do. You enjoyed having sex with us. We enjoyed having sex with you. Quillas are very sensual. You’re very attractive. It was very enjoyable for all of us. So what’s the problem, Brian?” Lambda looked sharply into Armstrong’s eyes, waiting for an answer.

  Armstrong looked away. He wouldn’t meet Lambda’s studying gaze.

  “Do you really think that you’re the first one who ever felt this way?” Lambda asked softly.

  The question was too direct. Armstrong reacted angrily. “I appreciate your concern, okay? But I don’t have a lot of time for this right now.”

  “Yes, you do. You just laid off a large piece of your workload on Crewman Gatineau. Please don’t insult my intelligence. It’s very hard to lie convincingly to a Quilla. May I tell you something?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “Actually, no.” Lambda reached out and placed one blue hand gently on top of Armstrong’s pink one. Armstrong tried to pull away, but Lambda held on tight. “Are you having trouble with the fact that there was a male component to the sex?”

  “You cut straight to the heart, don’t you?”

  “You don’t have a lot of time,” Lambda said dryly.

  Armstrong shook his head, a convenient excuse to look away again.

  Lambda reached over and, with one finger, turned Armstrong’s head back to face his own. “The coupling was joyous, it was delightful, it was filled with laughter and amazement. For us as well as you. The experience has clearly shifted your perception of sexuality. And in ways you’re not comfortable with. For the first time, sex wasn’t about you, it was about us. And that is precisely because so many of us were tapped into it. That is where the enthusiasm came from—on both sides, Brian. I’m part of the us too. I’m sorry that disturbs you, but it doesn’t change what we all experienced.”

  Armstrong didn’t answer immediately. After a moment, he said, “You’re very glib. You talk good. But you don’t know what’s going on in my mind.”

  “No, but I know what went on in my own mind before I became a Quilla.”

  Armstrong’s eyes widened. He stared at Lambda for a long moment, suddenly trying to see who this man had been before...

  Lambda nodded. “That’s right. I did the same thing. And I spent days walking around in a blue funk, trying to figure out what it meant. I wanted to go back for more, and I was terrified to do so. And all the time I was curious what it felt like from the Quillas’ side. Eventually, I realized that the only way I’d ever understand, the only way I’d ever see myself from the outside was to become a Quilla myself.”

  “Stop trying to recruit me. I’m not interested—”

  “I’m not trying to recruit you. In all likelihood, you don’t even have the right mindset. You probably couldn’t be assimilated into a cluster without driving it crazy. And this cluster isn’t interested in expanding until the ship situation stabilizes. So don’t flatter yourself.

  “And don’t look so surprised,” Lambda added sharply. “I might be a Quilla, but I don’t have to be polite where it isn’t going to be appreciated. There’s a lot about Quillas you don’t know. You obviously didn’t do your research. You were leading with your dick. It was charming at the time, but it’s getting old, Brian. It’s time to move on.

  “The point is, we do know what you’re going through. It’s part of our history too. And we’re sorry that you’re feeling that way. If we had known you were going to react like this, we would never have accepted your invitation to have sex. But it happened, and now we all have to live with it. So, do you want to keep on walking around like an angry Morthan, or are you ready to grow up?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing, really. Be our friend? Share a smile with us when you see us in the passages?”

  Armstrong hesitated. Then something clicked inside and he smiled at some private joke. “I don’t believe this.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I’m usually the one who says, ‘Can’t we just be friends?’”

  Lambda smiled back. “And how do the women usually respond?”

  Armstrong grinned ruefully. “They get angry. You should see it. I remember one who bawled me out, screaming, ‘No, we cannot be friends, you scumbag. I don’t want friends. I already have the best friends money can buy. I want more than just your friendship, goddammit.’” He laughed. And then he dropped his eyes in embarrassment. The memory was too painful.

  “Go on,” said Lambda quietly.

  Armstrong swallowed hard. “All right, yeah. It was good. And um, to tell the truth, I did want to do it again. But then . . . with all the teasing and everything, I didn’t think that you—I mean you, the whole cluster—felt the way I thought you had, and then when you—I mean you, Lambda—winked at me, I thought for sure that you were all laughing at me for . . . well, for being so stupid about it.”

  “We weren’t laughing at you,” Lambda said. “Believe it or not, Quillas are incapable of mocking a human soul. We empathize too much with all souls. It’s our weakness as well as our strength.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. But . . . you did scare me. I thought that maybe you, Quilla Lambda, would want to . . . well, you know. And I . . . don’t, you know.”

  Lambda nodded. “First of all, as an individual, I am not homosexual, so you need not worry about that. Secondly, as an individual, I would never have sex outside the cluster. That would be a betrayal of my relationship with my mates. Regar
dless of any attraction I might feel as an individual, I would never place personal gratification above the cluster.

  “As a cluster, however, there is always a certain curiosity about all sexual combinations, and it does not particularly matter to us which body we use for a specific sexual encounter; we usually let the other individual choose which partner most appeals to her or him. So, yes, this body has been used for homosexual encounters.

  “And,” Lambda added thoughtfully, “I must also acknowledge that among all of the sexual possibilities, the fitting of male to male or female to female is often one that the cluster finds interesting because the parallel physical responses of two males or two females can produce some remarkable experiences. I’m sorry if you find that unnerving. The limitation is yours, not ours. Among ourselves, we often arrange encounters between two or three of our units, and that is always quite intense. Because I’m the only male Quilla in this cluster, most of our private encounters are all-female.”

  Armstrong stared at Lambda, not knowing how to react to this information. He’d heard stories. He hadn’t realized the Quillas would be this candid. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear the details.

  Lambda continued anyway. “I will tell you this, Brian. It can be very . . . exhilarating for a man to experience feminine sexuality. It has taught me more about women than I could have learned any other way. I’m sorry if this disturbs you, but you need to understand who we are. I often wish that everyone could be a Quilla for a while. Then you would truly understand. Then there wouldn’t be so many ignorant jokes, and you wouldn’t have to have the fears you have. We like you. We don’t like seeing you uncomfortable.”

  “Okay,” said Armstrong grudgingly. “I got it.” He relaxed and sighed and nodded his acceptance. Some of his discomfort was actually easing. He met Lambda’s eyes for the first time willingly. “I have been pretty stiff about the whole thing, haven’t I?”

  “Actually,” smiled Lambda gently, “you’ve been a jerk.”

  “Yeah,” Armstrong admitted. “I guess I have.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.” And then he asked, “So what do we do now?”

  Lambda patted Armstrong’s hand gently. “Nothing. Or everything. Or anything you want. We’re here to serve. You want a back rub? Call me. I’m an expert in shiatsu. And yes, I know about the pinched nerve in your back that sometimes gives you trouble. That’s why I offered. You want sex? Call me or Delta or any of the others. The second time is even more fun than the first. You want someone to talk to? I’d consider it a privilege. You can talk to me as an individual or as a member of the cluster. Whatever you want, Brian. That’s the point.”

  “Thanks,” said Armstrong, both surprised and embarrassed. “I mean it. Thanks.” He patted Lambda on the shoulder, like a buddy, and Lambda patted him back like a lover. Armstrong stiffened... but he didn’t flinch. He had a lot to think about all of a sudden.

  Meerson-Krikes

  The Orbital College was an adjunct to the Meerson-Krikes orbital assembly lines. For several quiet centuries, Shaleen had earned the reputation as the place to go if you wanted a sunjammer, a lightweight but sturdy fuselage. The polycarbonate-titanium hulls were extremely versatile; they could be rigged with chemical propellant engines, fusion drives, plasma-torches, or even solar sails. The resultant yachts were perfect for journeys between the inner planets of the system, and even occasional forays to the midworlds.

  Occasionally, some foolhardy soul would order a craft with a singularity stardrive, with the intention of using the vessel for interstellar travel. Despite significant cautions on the part of the manufacturer about the problems of maintaining the focus of the singularity grappler fields in a hull of such small size, and despite the even more significant cautions about the difficulties of maintaining a hyperstate envelope and manipulating it for FTL velocities, there was no shortage of bold eccentrics willing to brave the dark between the stars. Who wouldn’t want to own his own starship? The great leap outward was an irresistible pheromone. Over the years, Meerson-Krikes built up a considerable market in light cruisers of all sizes.

  Beyond this particular horizon, however, darker clouds were gathering and eventually the growing buildup of military strength in the Morthan sphere of authority began to alarm the Allied Worlds. The Defense Authority contracted with the Meerson-Krikes company—as well as with corporations on numerous other worlds—to begin production of a series of small, but extremely powerful, interstellar military vessels. These destroyer-class cruisers were called “liberty ships.”

  Because of their considerable experience with light cruisers, Meerson-Krikes was able to gear up quickly for production. Within a year, they were building liberty ships at the rate of one new vessel every eleven days. The ships were pre-fabbed and spartan, lacking all but the most essential life-support services and amenities. The best that could be said of them was that they held air and moved. It would be up to each ship captain to finish the outfitting of his or her vessel.

  The high volume of production represented the Alliance’s most cost-effective strategy—a swarm of interstellar killer bees. The sting of any individual bee might be insignificant; the combined fury of a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand stings should be enough to stagger the Morthan war machine. An Armageddon-class juggernaut would be unable to withstand such a concentrated assault; she would be overwhelmed like a lumbering hippopotamus in a tank full of piranha. At least, that was the game plan. This strategy was designed to give the Allied Forces incredible flexibility, but at a terrible cost—ultimately it was based on the expendability of individual ships and crews.

  The demand for skilled labor in the orbital assembly lines was intensive. Even with robots and nanotechs doing much of the work, the need for human supervision remained critical—and as fast as ships rolled off the assembly line, the Allied Defense Authority recruited the most skilled workers to crew them. Replacement of those workers became such a critical need that the orbital college was established for onsite training and education. For those young men and women who wanted a career in space, the liberty fleet was a very fast—but also very dangerous—track.

  With his father’s reluctant permission, Jon Korie signed up for the orbital college on his seventeenth birthday. After two months of intensive training, during which more than fifty percent of the applicants were washed out, he was sent up the beanstalk. For his first twelve weeks, he was apprenticed as a galley slave—a cook’s assistant. As unglamorous as food preparation service might have seemed at first, the essential lesson was that nutritious and attractive meals were the single most important part of energizing a ship’s crew. Korie was lucky; he liked cooking as much as he liked eating. He tackled the job with enthusiasm and graduated with a rating of ninety-four percent.

  On his last day, the crew chief, a diminutive little woman named Bertha Fleischer, made him a going-away feast of beet borscht, stuffed cabbage, fresh egg-bread for mopping the plate, and a magnificent strawberry shortcake. She wept copiously, as if her only son were leaving. Korie was surprised by her demonstrative affection; he had never been the target of such warmth before. The feeling stayed with him long after the meal was only a memory.

  From the kitchen, Korie went to the farms.

  Food preparation was crucial to the morale of the crew, but production was essential to basic survival. The farm not only produced food; it processed sewage, turning it into fertilizer. The fertilizer was liquified and fed to aeroponically grown plants with steady-state drip irrigation. Some of the crops were harvested for food, others were liquified in turn to make nutrient solutions for the meat tanks. The green leaves of the plants also regenerated the air in the ship, taking in carbon dioxide and putting out life-giving oxygen.

  The assembly lines maintained their own vast farms, partly to maintain their own ecology, of course, and partly to serve as a seed farm for the new ships taking shape on the docking spurs. Each new ship would be launched with a complete farm installed in it.

&n
bsp; After a time, Korie was assigned to one of the teams that installed new farms; later he became a team leader. No ship was ever delivered to the Allied Defense Authority until her farm was certified as fully functional, able to feed a crew of 145 individuals. Jon Korie signed off on fourteen farms. He found the work both exhausting and satisfying, and he never looked at a meal the same way again.

  On the farms, Jon Korie learned about proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and sugars. He learned about photosynthesis and atmospheric pressure, day-night cycles and seasons. He learned about planting and harvesting, pollinating and cross-breeding, grafting and splitting. Most important, he learned patience. It doesn’t matter how many cabbages you plant. You won’t get sixty cabbages any faster than you get one.

  If you think you’ll want stuffed cabbage in August, be sure to plant cabbages in February, and start the meat growing in the tanks no later than April; the longer the meat ages in the nutrients, the more flavor it will have when it reaches the plate. If you want bacon and eggs regularly, you have to monitor the pork belly tanks and the egg-production lines daily. If you want fresh butter for your toast, the udders have to be fed and massaged.

  There were no real animals aboard the starship, but parts of many different species thrived in various growth tanks. Throughout the inner hull ranks of glass tanks stood three high, each with its own lump of flesh growing inside.

  After tending three complete seasons of corn, peas, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, asparagus, barley, rice, oranges, apples, plums, grapes, peaches, apricots, kiwis, garbanzos, olives, and lychees; not to mention beef, lamb, chicken, mutton, pork, ostrich, buffalo, venison, as well as catfish, tuna, salmon, shrimp, giant clam, octopus, sea bass, yellowtail, swordfish, shark, porpoise, and whale; Korie graduated from the farm with a rating of eighty-nine percent. It wasn’t as high a score as he should have earned, but Korie had never quite accepted the most fundamental tenet of ecology: Life is messy.