"The idea of the exercise is not to exercise. Americans, especially Western Hemisphere people, think too much about doing too much. They don't want to admit that the world's doing a lot more than they are, only it's taking its time. Now I ask you, according to the Theory of Relativity, isn't the speed of light taking its time? So you can afford to too. Toot-toot-tee-toot! And while you're doing it, consider if you will the distance between yourself and the nearest star. Scientists will tell you it's X million light years away, and they'll also tell you that a light year is a good long time. What does that all mean? That if you got in your car and packed a good healthy lunch and took off driving straight up, you'd have to find so many gas stations and make so many piss-stops before you burned your ass off approaching the Infernal Toll Booth of the nearest star.
"Now there's only one reason that we're living, and that's because our planet is not too close to the closest star and not too far either. So it follows that the best place for us to dig any star from is right here. Now if you put this together with the fact that actually seeing is a sense and so is touching, and seeing has to have something in common with touching, and touching has to be more basic because you can be alive if you can't see but not if you can't feel, you come up with the inevitable conclusion that the stars aren't really far away at all. They're right here as much as any fire's right here. And what fire is right here? The fire of life! Which is, after all, the viewpoint from which we are aware of the stars. So don't be thinking that you're trying to take pictures of the stars when they're some unknown zillion number of light years away! Just dig it that those little twinkling pin-points are as close to you, as you are, and introduce yourself to them. Get to know your way around up there as well as you know your way around your own living room. GO!"
Sean massaged Andrea's pussy gently and listened. He really had not intended to pay too much attention to the Guru and his shenanigans-he hadn't made up his mind yet whether the guy was foxy or nuts but he was just out to have a good time so he didn't care-but Joe and Andrea had suspicions that the guy might have something to say, and he respected them enough to see if he could, as the Guru himself put it, get past the bullshit.
He looked up at the stars, and the first thing that struck him was the absurdity of trying to memorize their patterns. Why, he could pick out just about any patch of blackness he wanted and if he looked hard enough he could find a star in it. Well, he didn't need the Guru Baalow Nee to tell him he was little compared to the size of the universe.
Or did he? Or was that the opposite of what the Guru meant?
Sean and Andrea spent the next hour opening and closing their eyes, getting patterns of stars down in their heads, and checking them against the patterns that were really there when the Guru told them to. They heard a few more squabbles from the couple nearby-who turned out to be just on the other side of a funnel-and they couldn't quite understand what the hassle was about, because they had no trouble-blind stargazing and groping each other to their mutual satisfaction at the same time. In fact the activities seemed to complement each other naturally. Contemplating the heavens induced a feeling of consummate mellowness that helped them relax and concentrate totally on the genital pleasures, without that familiar frenetic feeling that something had to happen right away, or pretty soon, or ever.
Sean fingered Andrea for a good half hour, and she took it not as a preparation for an imminent fuck, but as a thing in itself; a massage of the place that naturally appreciated massages most. She couldn't count the times she came, not because there were so many or so few, but because it was hard to tell whether the saturating feelings of complete well-being, the passive acceptances of the natural positive of pleasure, that flowed through her continuously like ocean waves, were really orgasms at all, and if they were, whether they were one or many. They were simply nothing like-or it was nothing like-starting at the beginning and going through all the stages of sexual arousal until at last one reached that definite and delirious moment of consummation; after which, having reached the mountain's peak, one slid precipitously down the other side into oblivion or sleep or the decision to go to the bathroom for a piss. It was a single interwoven fabric of ecstasy. Sort of like the single interwoven fabric of the heavens with its random concentrations of energy-the stars.
While Sean was on the giving end of this operation he found to his surprise that he could really go quite a lot farther than he'd imagined in memorizing the heavens. Some of the work, of course, had been done beforehand. He recognized many of the constellations that ancient astronomers had imagined in the shapes of men with clubs and three-star belts, big gravy ladles, animals; and of course there was always the cosmic candy bar. But beyond that he found he could take a wide view and make large patterns in the sky as a whole, and within them smaller ones, and more and more, until when the Guru ended one of his incoherent orations with a sudden "STOP!", Sean found the stars he'd placed on the insides of his eyelids stayed where they were after his eyes opened. He envisioned himself lying in bed sometime in the future, half asleep, getting a sudden glimpse of the sky that was so complete and so accurate that he couldn't know whether he was inside or out. Maybe the Guru really did have something going for him. Anyhow, it was a sure thing-he could feel it in the tips of his fingers as they rubbed over Andrea's clit and delved into her hole-that Andrea was somehow spellbound by Baalow Nee. It was strange. The more the sky made sense to Sean, the more the Guru's rambling speeches did.
When Andrea rolled onto her side and reached for his crotch, indicated that it was his turn to do nothing but enjoy, he suddenly realized that the contrast between the huge empty lifeless void overhead and the warm regularly breathing body next to him made it all seem more purely and completely sensual than it ever had before.
She unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants and eased her cool fingers into his underwear. It all seemed too casual, yet so significant. He concentrated on not trying to get excited, not trying to call up images that would help his cock get stiff and ultimately produce a gusher of sperm, but on appreciating the physical contact itself for what it was; the stroking of fingers on a particularly sensitive muscle, the coaxing forth of nerve-impulses that were intrinsically positive.
He felt very close to Andrea. He suspected-he was almost sure-that because they were both engaged in concentration on the same external things-the stars-in the same way, their thoughts and reactions to their sexual activities would be almost identical. In fact he did not ask her. He didn't want to break the magic silence that had overcome the crowd on the ship's gently rolling deck. But in fact he was right
He was mesmerized. He felt his cock swelling of itself and oozing fluid in a slow, thick stream.
It seemed as if, under the continuous, relaxed ministrations of Andrea's fingers, the channels that normally burst open all at once for a brief instant of climax were opening slowly, regularly, and somehow staying open. He was maintaining that feeling that came with the usual rush of orgasm over many seconds, many minutes.
Andrea's educated fingers circled the tip of his cock. Her whole hand wrapped around it and stroked softly, lazily down. She ran her fingertips down over the hairy sack of his balls to his asshole, let them play there for a second, and then sent them on a return journey. She pressed her thumb to the underside of the tip and jiggled it up and down against the slimy flesh. It was simply and totally delicious.
"Okay, you freaks!" the Guru screeched, breaking the mood like you'd break a match stick, "time for the next ditty, which consists of making yourselves look as ridiculous as you are. Now that's damned near impossible, but I'm sure you'll all try your best. I think you'll agree that J look just about as ridiculous as I am-certainly much more ridiculous than any of you-but that doesn't exempt me from the doings, which I'm going to do too. Doo-too-tee-doo."