I found myself kissing her; I have no idea how that happened.
We went back to my room, and fornicated for several hours.
Albinia was a passionate lover, and it was a pleasure to bring her to climax. I felt curiously detached however; for I hardly knew this woman I was so skilfully orgasming. Because this wasn’t the Albinia I loved; it was the “in trance” Albinia who captivated me. This Albinia, the real one, was just a shy awkward creature, oddly young in her ways, and emotionally needy to a degree that terrified me.
But I copulated her competently enough, then she fell asleep in my arms. And when she woke up she was crying and I had to ask her why; and then she told me what was wrong with her.
“I fear that I’ve lost my olarinity,” said Albinia.
I stroked her naked breast, and she shuddered. Her skin was warm, I could still taste the aroma of her soft flesh on my lips.
“You don’t believe me,” she said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I can see,” she said, and held a hand out in front of her, “the galaxies unfolding. I can hear the beat of pulsing stars, I can touch the pull of gravity-well stars, I can count supernovae in a single glance and I can smell the carbon and the iron and the uranium in the clouds of matter circling each and every star in my sightline.”
I touched her cheek with my fingers, and kissed her temples. “Feel that too?”
“I feel that too.”
“You’re Olaran.”
“Some of the time.”
I touched her skull plate, with its wirefree link to Explorer’s brain. I was somewhat shocked by it, in truth, for I’d never heard of such a thing.
“Then cut the link. Turn off Explorer, exist in the here and now.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re supposed to. It’s not customary to be permanently connected. It’s surely in breach of safety protocols.”
“I don’t care. I love it too much. I am the ship, the ship is me.”
“I just fucked a ship?”
“Well, yes.”
“That makes me feel,” I said, “odd.”
And, to my delight, she giggled again.
Here’s a truth I learned at an early age: females are not like males.
When I was twelve years old my six-year-old sister explained to me the fundamental principles of Olaran science. I had no idea what she was talking about, despite my several years of school. But she had accessed a single memory file and had learned it all, instinctively. She could do mathematics the way I could throw a ball. But she could also throw a ball further and more accurately than I ever could.
When I was sixteen years old I was given a degree in astrophysics with a distinction, and was considered to be one of the brightest students in my all-male class. But my sister, by this point, was building suns, with the help of a mind-machine link with the Olaran computer. Her intellect so far surpassed mine that I marvelled at our memories of being kids together, playing in a pool in the garden, creating imaginary friends.
But Albinia was the first female who ever explained to me the negative side of having such effortless intellectual proficiency. Since she was ten years old she had been cyber-linked with a computer or robot for large parts of her waking day. And so she’d grown up awkward, clumsy, and not at ease in her own body. Males terrified her, and the fact that all the males she met treated her as a superior being terrified her even more.
“All my life I’ve known I could have any male I wanted, with a click of my fingers,” said Albinia, trying but failing to click her fingers. “And a lot of my girlfriends did just that. They fucked their way through college and carried on screwing around in their twenties. What was there to lose? Pregnancy is volitional these days, males are getting more and more beautiful, and the sexual congress is officially an artform. But I hated it.”
“Poor little powerful girl,” I said with-or so I realised in the retrospect of a moment later-a hint of bitterness.
“Every male I’ve been with behaves like a servant. I never feel relaxed. I always feel in charge.”
I remembered Galamea’s words on the dark world and, for the first time, I began to doubt my understanding of my own species.
“Females are natural leaders,” I said tactfully.
“Have you ever been treated as an equal? By a female?”
“No,” I lied.
We fucked again that night, and when I reached the moment of her orgasm she stopped and she looked into my eyes. And she cupped my head in her hands.
And she transferred her consciousness into me, from her skull plate into my brain dot.
And then we carried on fucking.
And this time, I wasn’t me, servicing my goddess. I was her; I felt the heat of Jak’s skin, the hardness of his body, I felt his cocks inside me, and I saw it too, with my Explorer part; saw the two naked coupling bodies from the cameras in the wall, and then I was in the Command Hub watching the stars on the screen and I was also outside the ship, I was looking at Explorer/myself thorough space cameras, and I was travelling through space, and my telescopic and spectrographic and electromagnetic vision allowed me to zoom close to any sun I desired and feel the soft caress of its interstellar matter on my body.
I was no longer myself; I was Albinia; I was Explorer; I was everywhere; and data swirled around me and I knew it without thinking. And when Albinia achieved her orgasm, I felt it too, and the ship shuddered, and the engines roared.
Afterwards we lay silently and nakedly entwined.
“How was that?” asked Albinia.
“Let’s,” I said, “do it again.”
“Commence to rift, please,” I said, and unreality descended upon us all in the Hub; on Morval, Galamea, Albinia, Phylas and myself.
As the rifting process began, I kept my eyes carefully focused on the star screen, and on my work. I did not, thanks to my exceptional self-control, digress in my purpose by looking at Albinia: the cable trailing from her skull like a leash, her absorbed and haunted features, her distantly-staring eyes, her twitching lips. Though in truth I wanted to look at her so much; so extraordinarily much.
And indeed, I did, just for a moment, sneak a peek!
For I loved, I realised, both Albinias now. The real one that I had fornicated with so beautifully that night; and the other one, the trance-Albinia who I knew on the Hub; a beautiful child lost in dreams.
“Improbability is-” Phylas started to say.
But suddenly Albinia screamed. It was a scream of pure hysteria and it shocked us all. And the ship rocked and shook, as she broke her link with Explorer. We were flying through un-space without a Star-Seeker!
“Operating manual controls,” said Morval swiftly, as he took control of the vessel from Albinia/Explorer. He eased us back into reality. The Command Hub flipped and flipped again, until the walls and ceiling were whirling around us in our fixed points, held by the stay-still.
Then finally we were back in real space. I broke the stay-still with a murmur-link command, and hurried across the room to Albinia. Her face was twisted with pain. I reached for her cable.
“That could be traumatic,” Morval warned.
I touched Albinia’s face; she opened her eyes; she saw me and smiled.
I wrenched the cable out.
She sighed with huge relief; and was herself again.
“What is wrong Star-Seeker?” I asked, appalled at the look of emptiness in her eyes.
“I saw,” she said, “another world come to a terrible end.”
The genocided aliens in this case were the Maibos; a species of artificers, and we had done a great deal of business with them.
The Maibos had built for us some of our most magnificent furnishings and tapestries. They were an entirely non-violent species; it was a miracle they had survived so long. The Maibos had constantly refused all offers from Olara to equip them with a space defence system. And they refused to heed our argument that this is, and always has been, a viciously violent universe.