It ate more and more of it. The atmosphere created a light show that had no equal. Arms of amber encircled the black hole in the sky, changing colors quickly through the entire spectrum: pure, luminous colors against the deepest black imaginable. The sun became a brilliant point, seemed to flare sharply, and was gone. What was left was one side of the corona, the halo of Earth's air, and stars.
Millions of stars. If tourists ever complained about anything at the Bubble, it was usually that. There were no stars. The reason was simple: space was flooded with radiation. There was enough of it to fry an unprotected human. Any protection that could shut out that radiation would have to shut out the faint light of the stars as well. But now, with the sun in eclipse, the sensors in the field turned it clear as glass. It was still opaque to many frequencies, but that did not matter to the human eye. It simply vanished, and they were naked in space.
Cooper could not imagine a better time or place to make love, and that is exactly what they did.
"Enjoyed that a little more, did you?" she said.
"Uh." He was still trying to catch his breath. She rested her head against his chest and sighed in contentment.
"I can still hear your heart going crazy."
"My heart has seldom had such a workout."
"Nor a certain quarter of a meter, from the look of things."
He laughed. "So you figured that out. It's exaggerated."
"But a fifth of a meter would be an understatement, wouldn't you say?"
"I suppose so."
"So what's between? Nine fortieths? Who the hell needs a nickname like 'Nine-fortieths-of-a-meter Cooper'? That is about right, isn't it?"
"Close enough for rock and roll."
She thought about that for a time, then kissed him. "I'll bet you know, exactly. To the goddamn tenth of a millimeter.
You'd have to, with a nickname like that." She laughed again, and moved in his arms. He opened his eyes and she was looking into them.
"This time I rock, and you roll," she suggested.
"I guess I'm getting older," he admitted, at last.
"You'd be a pretty odd fellow if you weren't."
He had to smile at that, and he kissed her again. "I only regret that we didn't get to see the sun come out."
"Well, I regret a little more than that." She studied his face closely, and seemed puzzled by what she found. "Damn. I never would have expected it, but I don't think you're really upset. For some reason, I don't feel the need to soothe your wounded ego."
He shrugged. "I guess not."
"What's your secret?"
"Just that I'm a realist, I guess. I never claimed to be superman. And I had a fairly busy night." He shut his eyes, not wanting to remember it. But the truth was that something was bothering him, and something else was warning him not to ask about it. He did, anyway.
"Not only did I have a rather full night," he said, "but I think I sensed a certain... well, you were less than totally enthusiastic, the second time. I think that put me off slightly."
"Did it, now?"
He looked at her face, but she did not seem angry, only amused.
"Was I right?"
"Certainly."
"What was wrong?"
"Not much. Only that I have absolutely no sensation from my toes to... right about here." She was holding her arm over her chest, just below her shoulders.
It was too much for him to take in all at once. When he began to understand what she was saying, he felt a terror beside which fear of impotence would have been a very minor annoyance.
"You can't mean... nothing I did had... you were faking it? Faking everything, the whole time? You felt—"
"That first night, yes, I was. Totally. Not very well, I presume, from your reaction."
"...but just now..."
"Just now, it was something different. I really don't know if I could explain it to you."
"Please try." It was very important that she try, because he felt despair such as he had never imagined. "Can you... is it all going through the motions? Is that it? You can't have sex, really?"
"I have a full and satisfying sex life," she assured him. "It's different than yours, and it's different from other women's. There are a lot of adaptations, a lot of new techniques my lovers must learn."
"Will you—" Cooper was interrupted by high-pitched, chittering squeals from the water. He glanced behind him, saw Charlie the Dolphin had been allowed to re-enter the Bubble, signaling the end of their privacy. Charlie knew about Cooper, was in on the joke, and always warned him when people were coming.
"We have to go now. Can we go back to your room, and... and will you teach me how?"
"I don't know if it's a good idea, friend. Listen, I enjoyed it, I loved it. Why don't we leave it that way?"
"Because I'm very ashamed. It never occurred to me."
She studied him, all trace of levity gone from her face. At last, she nodded. He wished she looked more pleased about it.
But when they returned to her room she had changed her mind. She did not seem angry. She would not even talk about it. She just kept putting him off each time he tried to start something, not unkindly, but firmly, until he finally stopped pursuing the matter. She asked him then if he wanted to leave. He said no, and he thought her smile grew a little warmer at that.
So they built a fire in her fireplace with logs of real wood brought up from Earth. ("This fireplace must be the least energy-efficient heater humans have ever built," she said.) They curled up on the huge pillows scattered on the rug, and they talked. They talked long into the night, and this time Cooper had no trouble at all remembering what she said. Yet he would have been hard put to relate the conversation to anyone else. They spoke of trivia and of heartbreaks, sometimes in the same sentence, and it was hard to know what it all meant.
They popped popcorn, drank hot buttered rum from her autobar until they were both feeling silly, kissed a few times, and at last fell asleep, chaste as eight-year-olds at a slumber party.
For a week they were separated only when Cooper was on duty. He did not get much sleep, and he got no sex at all. It was his longest period of abstinence since puberty, and he was surprised at how little he felt the lack. There was another surprise, too. Suddenly he found himself watching the clock while he was working. The shift could not be over soon enough to suit him.
She was educating him, he realized that, and he did not mind. There was nothing dry or boring about the things they did together, nor did she demand that he share all her interests. In the process he expanded his tastes more in a week than he had in the previous ten years.
The outer, promenade level of the station was riddled with hole-in-the-wall restaurants, each featuring a different ethnic cuisine. She showed him there was more to food than hamburgers, steaks, potato chips, tacos, and fried chicken. She never ate anything that was advertised on television, yet her diet was a thousand times more varied than his.
"Look around you," she told him one night, in a Russian restaurant she assured him was better than any to be found in Moscow. "These are the people who own the companies that make the food you've been eating all your life. They pay the chemists who formulate the glop-of-the-month, they hire the advertising agencies who manufacture a demand for it, and they bank the money the proles pay for it. They do everything with it but eat it."
"Is there really something wrong with it?"
She shrugged. "Some of it used to cause problems, like cancer. Most of it's not very nutritious. They watched for carcinogens, but that's because a consumer with cancer eats less. As for nutrition, the more air the better. My rule of thumb is if they have to flog the stuff on television it has to be bad."
"Is everything on television bad, then?"
"Yes. Even me."
He was indifferent to clothes but liked to shop for them. She did not patronize the couturiers but put her wardrobe together from unlikely sources.