Hark ran an uncomfortable hand down Conchela's back. Her skin was so smooth, all he wanted to do was make love to her again. He wanted to repeat the sensation of losing himself in her body. He had no idea how to cope with her sudden anger.
"Come on, now, it can't be that bad."
She slowly turned to look at him. He wanted to put his hands on her breasts, but suddenly he didn't dare.
"It can't be that bad? You troopers are so damned ignorant. It can't be anything but that bad. That's how it's been designed. They keep you stupid, and they seduce you with power, the power to run all over the universe and stomp and smash and blow up anything that gets in your way. It doesn't matter that you die somewhere along the line, you've got to die anyway."
Hark thought of the jumps and the dry, bitter taste of fear going down in the dropcraft. "You don't really know."
"Sure we know. We know better than you do. We've seen thousands of you. We've screwed thousands of you. It's a lifelong line on the old recstar."
Her mood was changing. The anger had diminished to bitterness.
"The only way to keep yourself from the stare is to not see the faces. The men come through, but you don't know them."
She shook her head. "Why the hell did you have to come here, Hark?"
Hark propped himself up on one elbow. He simply couldn't follow her mood swings. "Maybe it was our destiny."
"You men still believe all that. That's what keeps you ignorant. There is no destiny. Our destiny was sold to the Therem Alliance centuries ago."
Bitterness gave way to a terrible sadness. Her arms slid around his neck, and she pulled him to her. His face was between her breasts. He felt her sigh.
"Why the hell did you have to come here, Harkaan?"
Before they made love again, she gave him a small whiff of sweet gas from a tiny vial, only a fraction of the size of the ones they'd been passing around in the-dome. It wasn't enough to make him dizzy; it just slowed everything. The previous desperate, rushing need was reduced to warm, easy desire. With so much more time, it seemed that she was able to aid and abet his pleasure in a dozen ways, ways that Hark hadn't imagined were possible. Her hands and mouth played games with his body. His eyes closed, and his breathing became deep and labored. He began to groan. His nerves spasmed. He found that he was talking to Gods that he'd thought were long forgotten. He was perfectly ready to die at any point except that the floods of sensation kept building and building. Why the hell did men have to fight when they could spend their time doing this? She was right. Men were ignorant.
At the finish, they were grunting and screaming and clawing at each other. In the afterglow, they clung for a long time, but eventually they had to fall apart. Hark lay on his back with his outstretched arm under Conchela's shoulders. He opened his eyes. Hers were closed. Could she be asleep? He turned his head and looked at the place where Conchela lived. It was nothing more than a cubicle, but compared to the messdeck, it was a haven of privacy. The bed took up exactly half of the chamber. It was draped with multicolored fabric hangings, irregularly shaped silks and satins that looked like offcuts from the manufacture of flags, banners, and decorative clothing. They turned the bed space into a shadowy, mysterious cave. The other half of the chamber was a complete contrast. It was stark and functional. There was a small workbench with a tiny lathe, a quartz arc, a bench-top anvil, and a miniature welding ring. In addition to her basic duties as a thumbprint prostitute, Conchela designed and made metal jewelry, which she bartered with the other women for clothes, cosmetics, extra food, and small luxuries such as alcohol and sweet gas.
"It's the only thing that keeps me sane," she had explained.
Alongside the workbench there were the survival basics of the Therem system: a water spigot, a diet gooper, and a waste swallow. These, at least, were the same as on the cluster. In a maze of shelves, there were jars and bottles, bunches of herbs, and vials of chemicals. There were the raw materials of her trade, the rolls of metal shim that she turned into small works of art. Hark envied her the ability to direct her own time even in this very minimal way. On the ship and in combat, there was always someone to tell one what to do.
Conchela opened her eyes and looked at Hark. "What are you thinking about?"
"Me?"
"There's no one else here."
Hark stared at the patchwork canopy above his head.
"I was thinking about all the stuff that you've got. We don't have anything up on the cluster, only what we can hide in the cavity behind our lockers."
"You have to remember that I'm so much older than you. I've been here on the recstar much longer than you've been on your ship."
"How can that be? We were picked up at the same time."
"You make the jumps. They do things to relative time. Didn't you think I looked older?" "I don't know. I…"
"You thought it was all a result of the life of degradation I've been leading." "I knew you'd changed." "You could lie."
Hark's embarrassment robbed him of words. Conchela leaned over and kissed him. "You're still such a boy."
The hours passed slowly, and Hark luxuriated in the unique sensation of having nothing do and nobody shouting at him. They ate and drank and made love. In between, they slept. Each time Hark woke, he experienced a moment of panic, sure that he was back on the messdeck and that it had all been a dream. Then he saw that he was still in Conchela's cubicle, and he eased down under the covers with a sigh. He didn't want to think about going back to the ship.
At times, Conchela talked. Along the track of her swings of mood, she seemed to feel a need to explain. She wanted Hark to know exactly what it meant to be a woman and to live on a recstar.
"I guess you could say that we remember. You men see nothing but combat. You're isolated in your crews and your twenties. We see thousands of you guys. Over the years, millions of men pass through a place like this. Each one has his own part of the puzzle."
"What puzzle?"
"Who we are, of course. Where the human species came from and where it's going. It's the one way we can fight against the system, against the Therem, if you like. They've stopped us having children. That's for the primitives out on i e planets. All that's left for us is to maintain the memory."
"You mean you remember what the men tell you?"
"That's what they come here for. To get laid and to tell it to somebody. You all have to tell it to somebody. You don't want to believe that after you've gone, nobody will remember. I guess that's what we're doing. We're remembering you all."
"I don't have anything I want to tell."
"Oh, yes, you do. And you will. You'll sob it out to someone before you leave this rock."
Conchela swung her legs over the side of the bed. The flow of words had temporarily halted. The story seemed to be unfolding in fits and starts and snatches. She poured herself dark, amber wine from a stone jug.
"You'd better thumb my sensor a few times. I'm supposed to be working. I don't want to be closed out of this place because I didn't make the norm."
Hark pressed his thumb into her sensor five times. "Is that enough?"
"It'll help." Almost an hour passed before she picked up the story again.
"Bit by bit, we get parts of the picture. It wasn't always like this. That's one thing we know for sure. Before the Yal came, we had our own civilization. We had even colonized the closest planets in our home system."
"Before the Therem came?"
"In the very beginning, it was the Yal that occupied our home world. The Therem took it and us from them."
"You learned all this from listening to the men talk? The men on my messdeck know nothing of these things."
"You have to realize that this knowledge has taken centuries to acquire. Also, there are those of us who go up to the clusters to service the medians. The medians know much more than anyone suspects."