“Two trillion?” Llyra exclaimed. “But wouldn’t it take centuries to—”
“Was assembled here by large team of Japanese robots controlled by artificial intelligence resident in Kenneth M. von Flurchick memorial superduper computer in Luna City, industrial suburb west of Armstrong. Comedian graduate students there let computer call itself ‘Mycroft Holmes’.”
Familiar with both literary references, Llyra and Jasmeen laughed simultaneously.
Saladin nodded. “Yes, yes, Sir Robert Arthur Anson Conan Heinlein. On weekends they hold sawhorsey tournaments with graduate idiots in Spider.”
“But you are right, Miss Ngu,” Ali told her. “Even with hundred robots and twenty-four hour supervision by Mycroft, assembling mirror took one year. Seemed longer. Chrome wires controlled by nanomachinery in base, each individually adjustable for height, allowing us to change optical characteristics of telescope and adjust for day-to-day fluctuations of temperature, instabilities of Lunar geology, and so on.”
“It sounds expensive,” said Julie, who was used to big, expensive undertakings.
“Was painfully expensive,” Saladin told her, grimacing. “Woefully expensive. But worth every grain Avoirdupois. This is very profitable operation we are running. And from here, with image-enhancing help from our own, less-gifted computer—without foolish name—we can resolve Pluto as disk, or even see Ngu house on Pallas where niece lives.”
Jasmeen’s eyes got big. She was accustomed to sunbathing naked on the roof of the house when nobody else was home, or flying about the place.
“Do not worry,” Ali told her in a stage whisper. “Secret is safe with us. We could find missing Fifth Force if we only knew where to look.”
“Is not on roof of Ngu House,” Jasmeen offered with an annoyed frown, “If you knew where to look, Uncle, Fifth Force would not be missing.”
Ali looked puzzled. “Didn’t I just say that?”
***
Wilson swept Amorie into his arms. He was astonished at how light she was, and how warm. She lay her head against his chest and murmured something.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, having missed whatever she said while he was catching his breath and trying to regain control of himself. “I didn’t—”
She laughed. To him it was like droplets from a sunlit fountain. “I said that’s my door, right there, dear Willie. Go ahead, it isn’t locked.”
Lacking a hand to spare, Wilson pulled the latch handle down with one knee. The oval door swung open easily. Stepping carefully over the pressure threshold, he swung the door shut with a heel. Amorie kept her quarters warm, almost at blood temperature. A soft light came from somewhere.
There was also faint, formless music in the background, vague and insubstantial. The room was so small three quarters of it were taken up with Amorie’s bed. It had decorative posts set at each corner that nearly reached the ceiling, with wispy curtains hung between them on rods.
Wilson took the single step that was required to get to the bed. He laid her down gently on the coverlet. She had draped the posts and rods with the same filmy, almost-transparent scarves, in pastel pinks and oranges, that he’d seen in the background while communicating with her over the SolarNet. Her dress tonight seemed to be made of them, as well. He could also smell an elusive, pleasant scent—somehow, it reminded him vaguely of cinnamon—but it was very subtle and not overdone.
Wilson stood for a moment, looking down at Amorie—his Amorie—the blood sizzling through his veins like carbonated water at all the beauty and the promise that he saw before him. Amorie turned on her side, her eyes downcast, one long, smooth leg exposed from the heel—he’d already noticed that she had tiny, shapely feet—to the waist, one small, well-formed breast visible to the rim of its pale brown center.
She allowed him simply to enjoy the sight of her for a long, long moment, then arose to her knees on the bed, facing him. Her dress had now fallen open completely and what he saw was almost painful to behold.
Reaching up, she put her arms around his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers. They kissed for what seemed to him an hour—an hour spent in paradise—and Wilson learned more about the power of a kiss in whatever time it really lasted, than he had ever realized was possible. By the time she finished kissing him, he was shaking all over.
Pulling free a moment, Amorie looked deeply into Wilson’s eyes, took his big right hand in both of her tiny ones, spread it flat, and laid it on her left breast—she radiated heat—pressing it firmly against her. Wilson felt her heart, thudding almost as hard as his, and faster. He felt her nipple, swollen hard against the center of his palm.
Leaving his hand where it was, Wilson pulled Amorie to him for another kiss, an eon long, perhaps two eons. He shifted his hand and took her nipple between his thumb and forefinger pinching it and rolling it gently. Amorie moaned into his open mouth as if she’d been mortally wounded, and where her legs came together, pressed herself hard against him. Then her filmy dress was off the rest of the way, and she began frantically attacking the fastenings of his shirt and pants.
When Wilson’s chest was bare, Amorie surprised him. She put her lovely mouth to one of his nipples, and began biting it lightly and sucking it. It felt as if a fine steel wire running the length of his body had been heated red hot. He hadn’t known that girls did that to boys.
That women did that to men.
He badly wanted to do it to her. He’d dreamed of it a thousand nights, both sleeping and waking. He pressed her backward, onto the bed, to do it. Her legs were still in the kneeling position. Pushing her back onto them made her gasp—possibly with pain—and spread them wide. Possibly she even liked the pain. As he took both of her breasts in his hands and did what he had planned to do, he could feel her grow hot and damp where her legs almost wrapped around him at the waist.
“God, Willie,” she gasped, “don’t make me wait any longer!”
Wilson obliged, turning within the grasp of her thighs and sliding up through them. He fumbled for just a moment—he knew the mechanics well enough, but had no practical experience with them—then found her.
In an instant, they were one being, and it was his turn to gasp as Amorie proceeded to do more things to him that he hadn’t known were possible.
At last came blinding release, a white light like he’d been told indicated enlightenment—or death. He had no doubt it represented an epiphany of some kind. He lay within her for a while—how was it possible that Amorie, who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred standard pounds, could be comfortable beneath him? He weighed twice what—
Then shock so sudden and complete that it felt as though he’d been dashed with a bucketful of ice cold water. “I … oh my god, Amorie, I … I wasn’t prepared! I didn’t even think—I’m so sorry! I was just so—”
She put a tiny, gentle hand over his mouth. Reflexively, he kissed it. “I don’t think that’s going to matter, dear, sweet Willie. Not at all.”
***
The fastest gun on the Moon was of two minds.
An exceptionally tall man—which was very unusual in his field of endeavor—he leaned on the steel pipe rail in front of ten rows of fiberglass-topped concrete bleachers, overlooking the working floor of the Armstrong Space Traffic Control Center, a private corporation that kept track of, and advised vessels that traveled in space near and around the Moon. The cost of the service was covered by port fees. Visitors were encouraged to watch the great square dance being called here, twenty-four Earth hours every day, twenty-eight days every Lunar month.
On one hand, the man thought, there was the boy who deserved his attention, presently getting his teenage ashes hauled, likely for the first time, up there in that space-traveling collection of junk full of scavenger rats. But the scavengers would be jealously protecting him, at least for a while, which would make his job impossible. The boy had something they wanted—they’d space an obviously deformed newborn, but he was morally certain that they still had monsters chained i
n their “basement”—and it would take them a while to get it.
On the other hand, there was the boy’s kid sister, that little ice skating devil girl who, he was certain, would someday make a great assassin. At the moment, she was visiting the other side of this freeze-dried owl pellet of a world, which was exactly the same as this side, only there were no decent hotels. If the information he’d just paid for was correct, whether she knew it or not, she’d be taking an even more exotic and spectacular excursion within the next couple of hours.
Because the boy had been spending most of his time aboard his own ship, where he was hard to keep an eye on, mostly in the company of someone he regarded as the most dangerous woman in the System—and the member of the Ngu family the little skater took after most—he’d been watching the girl and her pretty Martian coach, skating every day at the Heinlein, for weeks. He’d even gotten to the point where he enjoyed it. She had powerful protection, too, although she probably didn’t know it. He wished the boy and his sister would stick together. The whole thing was putting quite a strain on his capacity for making decisions.
***
Amorie excused herself for a moment, but she was back before the sheets beside Wilson had cooled. During that brief interlude, he began to worry a little. This first time, it hadn’t mattered to him that everyone onboard the Esmeralda—every member of Amorie’s family—knew exactly where they were now and exactly what they were doing. It had never occurred to him, and he’d been too excited to care in any case.
Now, however, all he could see in his mind’s eye were their faces. He was afraid that thoughts like that were going to keep him from … from being ready for her a second time, or a third, or a fourth … Between the perverted bragging that went on in sex magazines online, and the dry clinicality of the pamphlets his mother had given him to read when he’d turned thirteen, he had no idea what was natural or normal.
“You look unhappy, sweet darling Willie,” Amorie said, startling him. She’d returned quietly through the hatch she’d left by, which no doubt led to a bathroom, one almost certainly shared with the next cabin.
“Not unhappy,” he said, then explained what he was worried about. She was much more than just a girl he’d taken to bed with him tonight, after all. She was the friend—his best friend—with whom he’d shared his every secret on a daily basis for more than a year. He wanted to marry her, to keep her with him forever, have children with her, and grow old with her. There was nothing he felt he couldn’t tell her.
Amorie grinned at him. “I understand what you’re talking about in theory, darling Willie. There’s no such thing as privacy on a vessel like Esmeralda, although we all try hard to respect each other’s space.”
“But I—”
“But nothing. Watch this.” She kissed him long and languorously before she pushed him back into the pillows. She kissed his throat, his chest—when she reached his nipples again, he knew he wasn’t going to have any trouble, after all. But he wasn’t going to tell her, and she probably knew anyway—working her slow, tormenting way down and down and—
Damn! He did know that women did this to men, sometimes. He’d often wondered about it.
“Here,” she said, freeing him for the briefest possible moment so she could talk. “Hold my wrists behind my back.” She put them behind her.
“But Amorie—”
“Just do it! It’ll help!”
He obeyed, clamping her wrists behind her as she went on giving him pleasure while pretending to struggle against him. She was right. It did help. Everything else was forgotten. All too soon, he felt an almost irresistible need to finish right there, right where he was. But he resisted a temptation to put a hand on the back of her head and take her.
Panting, Amorie slid up beside him and rolled him over on top of her again. He took her easily then, that time, and again, and again, until they were both covered with sweat, until the insides of their thighs chafed and their bellies ached from the pounding he was giving her.
He took her from behind, and that helped the pain a little. Each time Wilson reached a climax—one Amorie often reached with him—she excused herself briefly and came back to him clean and sweet- smelling.
He took a shower twice himself, but she followed him into the tiny stainless steel cubicle like a starving thing that would die without his not-so-tender ministrations, and his efforts at cleanliness soon degenerated into more violent and desperate lovemaking. The fourth or fifth time they did it, getting started was the very least of his problems. It took him a full forty-five minutes of fevered, relentless pounding just to feel that finishing was possible, and another twenty minutes to reach a climax that felt as if it would tear him in two. He didn’t understand how her tiny body could take it. She was made of titanium.
The seventh, and last time took an hour and a half, all of the special attention she could give him—this final time she let him finish in her mouth while she was helping him—and left him covered in sweat again, spent in every way possible for a human being to be spent.
Tomorrow, he knew, each cell in his body would scream, each muscle and every joint, as if he’d worked out all night, or cleaned his three engines. He stroked Amorie’s silky hair. What an art, to give someone this much painful pleasure. He never wanted to know how she’d learned it.
“Seven times, Willie! Seven times! I knew I was right about you! You’re absolutely magnificent!” Her voice sounded odd, as if her jaw hurt. He hoped he hadn’t injured her. She left the bed for the bath again. He’d wanted to say the same to her, but he was speechless and exhausted.
And drained.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: THE EGRESS
It has long been observed that, in some sense, a true individualist should be a “citizen” of every country, a free spirit without borders, at home wherever he happens to find himself.
It’s even more important to be a “citizen” of every age, the inheritor and beneficiary of every human experience, past present.
The first step in that direction is never to believe anything anyone in authority—politician, bureaucrat, most especially school teacher on the public payroll—has to tell you about history. Compared to any of them, a used car salesman is paragon of integrity and verisimilitude. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“Ali, this is another fine mess you have gotten us into!”
Despite the circumstances, Llyra, Jasmeen, and Julie burst into laughter, as Ali and Saladin stared at them in perplexed annoyance. Apparently neither of the men had ever seen or heard of Laurel and Hardy. They’d been among Julie’s favorites, however, growing up in an otherwise unpleasant and dangerous environment. She’d passed them on to her granddaughter, who had shared them with her mentor and best friend.
What they were all staring at, through the small, circular windows of a simple vehicle—little more than an inexpensive asteroid-hopper clumsily retrofitted to withstand the strains one sixth of a gee put on her, rather than the one tenth she had originally been built for—was Larsen Farside’s remote orbital telescope facility, mostly automated as the two scientists had told their guests, in roughly the same orbit as the Moon, but on the opposite side of the Earth, in a position affectionately called “L-Sex”.
There was no such Lagrange point, of course. This was actually L-Three, where gravitic forces almost balanced out, as they did at the other Lagrange points, and objects tended to stay put more or less by themselves. A small amount of fuel—”delta-V” Saladin called it, although strictly, that was an archaic Space Agency expression that simply meant a change in motion—had to be expended from time to time to keep the robot observatory in its proper place. People—graduate students for the most part—came here from time to time for various kinds of maintenance.
At the controls of the little spacecraft, apparently as usual, Ali let his fingers skitter over the pilot’s keyboard, bringing the little ship to a dead stop, relative to the space station. “Here we are, friends, at L-Sex, so-called, other eyeball of Lar
sen Farside Observatory.”
“Other eyeball?” Jasmeen asked her uncle, winking at Llyra. “How important is other eyeball when you are all the time squinting at sky like this?’ She made an eyepiece out of her fist and peered through it.
“How many one-eyed outfielders are in Solar Baseball League? Same number as one-eyed goalies?” Ali held his thumb and forefinger up, about three inches apart. “Average distance between adult human eyes. Very small in scheme of things, very large in human survival. Two eyes tell brain how far off next limb to swing to is. Helps locate prey, avoid leap of predator.”
Llyra spoke up. “I get it. Having telescopes both on the Moon and here widens that distance from three inches to half a million miles, helping you to accurately locate objects that are very far away.”
“And that are both predator and prey,” offered Jasmeen.
Julie gave her an interested look.
“In old days, Earthbound astronomers used Mother Earth for both eyeballs,” Ali told them. “Take picture in December, another in July. One hundred eighty-six million miles distance. Accurate, but takes six months.”
“Yes,” Saladin agreed. “In asteroid-hunting business, six days may be too long, or even six hours. Not so much because of danger—we detect dangerous asteroid average of nine years, two months before collision—but because valued customers are not wanting stale information.”
Ali turned to his partner and their passengers. “But we are having acute case of burglars precisely at present moment, do you not agree, Saladin?”
“I have never seen cute burglars before, Ali.”
The observatory was roughly T-shaped, where the upright of the T was a squat canister the size of a small apartment building—Llyra and her friends could see light in several rows of windows—housing research facilities, operating systems and machinery, and temporary quarters.
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