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Subject: {ASSM} Summer Sleeps in Winter Orbit, Part 1 - by Unlucky (MF, scfi, clone, nosex)
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Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 13:10:02 -0400
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Summer Sleeps in Winter Orbit, Part One - by Unlucky

MF, scfi, clone, nosex

Note: This story takes place in the same "universe" as my other
(similar) clone story "The Long Run". It is basically a not too
distant future where space travel is common, but only within the solar
system.

Summer Sleeps in Winter Orbit, Part One - by Unlucky

It had been three weeks and Mars High Orbit still just felt wrong.
There wasn't anything different, orbit was orbit, but some undefinable
something felt off. Maybe it was the fact that Mars was such an
industrial world, not bound by the same rules that made Earth's
various orbital unions so clean and beautiful. Mars orbit was riddled
with riffraff trade ships, derelict stations, various debris that
formed a sort of muddy ring around the once red planet.

His name was Baker and he had another three weeks to wait until Mars
was in the right position for him to get back home and he couldn't
wait. Orbiting Mars was like being in one of those month long winters
in cities near Earth's poles he read about near. He could quite shake
the feeling of being cold, no matter how much he fiddled with the
environmental controls.

As much as he hated this orbit, he couldn't go down to Mars to sleep
anyhow. Too expensive, too foreign, too scary. His little ship was his
home, anyway. It was his womb, his world. 90 meters long by 10 meters
wide, split into three even 30 by 10 meter sections. Control and
Engineering in the front, Sleep and Entertainment in the middle, and
in the back was Food and Medical as well as Waste.

It was in that aft section that "she" waited.

A few weeks ago his boxy vessel was connected to a half a kilometer
chain of cargo freights. Things that couldn't go through a hyperspace
jump and things from people who couldn't afford one of the big freight
companies' prices. Heavy metals for complex scientific work, art, even
a few tons of pressurized coffee beans. Shipping them all from Earth
to Mars got him enough credit for supplies that will last him two
years. It also bought her.

She came in a cheap tank. The material was like those big bottles of
water he got when he was in flight school. Perfectly smooth, very
strong but it gave if you pressed on it. Totally transparent. Lights
on the top and bottom, even during night cycle. The red alphanumerics
on the top on the tank that read 96:24. Ninety six hours to go.

The tank was warm, 38°C which was just a little over his own body
temperature. He liked to watch her float and he leaned against the
warm plastic at night. Two weeks ago it was just a tank full of cloudy
liquid. Then a little tadpole looking bit floating dead center. Then
an embryo, a fetus, all the cycles of pre-life. After 100 hours she
looked about four or five. She would age faster as it went on, rushing
towards her preprogrammed maturity.

Some nights he would wake and the weight of loneliness would feel like
it was crushing him and he would curl up at the base of the tank and
sing the old mining songs he heard his mother sing when he was a
child. Corporate hymns that were once religious, when such a thing was
allowed, maybe they were even older. It had been years since he'd had
a real conversation with someone. He'd been going hard on the trade
routes from the mining colonies in the Asteroid Belt where he was born
to Mars and to Earth. He had to fly a company ship for a while until
about three years ago when he made enough to get his own ship.

It was a hard life out there. He was always waiting. Waiting for the
planets to line up so you could fly the millions of kilometers between
them. It was a hard and lonely life.

At T-10 hours she looked like she was in her early teens. Her hair
floating around her in a little curtain of dark brown. Age was such a
malleable thing now. He didn't want a child, but he didn't want to
wait much longer. Either way she was really only a month old.

As the clock ticked down, Baker spent all of his time back there,
watching. It wasn't a thing anymore, it wasn't a little girl either.
She was in her mid teens now, her breasts forming. Her areolas pink
circles tipped in little nipples. The cleft of her sex pulling his
eyes down every time he looked at her. The reality of it coming on.
Soon she would be there, warm and naked and his.

At 30 minutes her eyes opened and she watched him. She had a peaceful
smile. She moved her fingers experimentally and stretched as much as
she could in the confines of her tank. He touched the tank and she
touched the place where his hand was on the plastic. Her hair floated
about, now shoulder length and as long as it would ever grow. She
reminded him of a holo he watched as a kid of a mermaid.

*

She was not Harriet Boyer-Johnson. She was not an astro-navigator. She
did not have three lovely children who grew up into fine people and
went off to have beautiful children of there own.

She was not Harriet Boyer-Johnson, but she did have her memories. The
images and sounds and recollections were held back by the thinnest
membrane deep inside of her. It was like accessing some external
device, some psychological peripheral. There was this silent spinning
latency when she thought of the memories of the person who she was
not, but there was no real time delay, just some strange internal
temporal adjustment, just some imagined nanosecond of jet leg.

If she wasn't Harriet, then who was she?

In the first days questions came and went in her head. Some were
answered by her half remembered other life, some were answered by some
internal compass that told her what was true. She knew she was still
unborn. She knew she was in a tank. She knew she was being grown for
someone. She knew all this in the way children knew about the tooth
fairy. It was something that she believed with all of her heart... but
would feel a lot better about once she actually got some evidence.

Later, things came to her. She remembered that she knew languages, it
was like imagining a door and then opening it to find a whole other
room of your house that you had forgot about. Basic Eastern, Basic
Western, Miner Common and a wealth of High Orbit creoles and trade
pidgins. It was all there, but not quite "there" yet. It was like
knowing how to play baseball, but never actually participating in a
game.

When the clock inside of her started swelling, making her heart beat
fast, making her face flush, she knew the next step was coming soon.
Her breath came fast, taking in the water around her, which was still
rich with vitamins. She felt warmth in her face and then saw white,
red and finally gray. Then, there in front of her was her man. It was
the easter bunny, santa clause, an angel. It was proof that it all
wasn't just a prolonged dream.

When he put his hand on the glass, she touched it with hers, feeling
the warmth through the thin wall of plastic.

When the pain started, when the amniotic fluid with it's little nano
helpers and vitamins and soothing drugs finally became nothing but
water she panicked. Her lungs weren't able to get as much oxygen from
the liquid now and soon it would drown her.

*

What came next was an odd mix of things. It was part birth, part
opening a present on Christmas morning and part wedding night. He
couldn't wait for the tank to drain. It was only water now anyhow, the
amniotic fluid washed away hours ago. He pulled at the bottom of the
plastic tank when the clock ticked down to zero. The water spilled out
onto the floor of the aft section. It pooled around his feet for a
moment before circling down the drain in the center of the room, the
manufactured gravity pulling it towards the ships center like a tiny
black hole.

She came slipping out of the bottom of the tank with the water and
Baker knelt to catch her. She turned to face the floor and coughed
wetly, spitting water and fluid from her lungs and then she took deep
gulps of air.

She clung to him like a wet and frightened cat, shivering and naked.
He wiped the hair away from her face and she stared at him. Her eyes
were huge and gray. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came
out. She instinctively held on to him, slipping her naked arms around
him and hugging him tightly. He hugged her back.

He didn't know why, but he felt some dam in him break. He started to
cry against her and they cradled each other on the the wet floor of
the ship. He wouldn't be alone anymore.

He closed his eyes for a second and thought about the room, the
hardware in his head he told the ship to turn the heat up 10 degrees.
He turned down the humidity and he felt a hot dry breeze float over
their wet bodies.

When they finally parted, she looked into his eyes and smiled. Her
smile was so full of joy and her eyes were shining with curiosity and
hope, he had to laugh. And then she kissed him.  A soft kiss on his
lips, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. He
closed his eyes and kissed her back. She tasted... like nothing he
could explain. She tasted like skin after a hot shower. She tasted
clean and new and perfect.

*

She was in the arms of The Man, the one who she was for, the one who
meant everything. His arms were warm and his body was solid. She
looked into his eyes and he looked huge, intelligent, strong. He held
her as she shivered and then as he cradled her the world grew less
cold and then warm. He smiled and she started to relax.

"Is this my life?" she wondered, her heart swelling. "In his arms,
with a warm breeze on my body." She couldn't imagine anything better.
Harriet's memories, behind their invisible curtain didn't show any
happiness greater. The girl felt the warmth flowing through the ship
and saw, in half opaque memories, summer days and sun kissed beaches.

She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him everything, but her
mouth didn't know how yet. Her head, knew, but her mouth couldn't yet
form the words. She just looked at him, his gray eyes, his stubbly
face, his large expressive mouth and she smiled. And then she was
moving forward, pushed by pure instinct and then his lips were on hers
and the world became nothing but the taste of him and new swirling
warmth inside of her.

end transmission of part one

This story is being released under a Creative Commons Attribution
Non Commercial 2.5 License. You may non-commercial re-post this
where every you want as long as you acknowledge
dr.unlucky@gmail.com. You may also remix, tweak and build upon
this work non-commercially, although new works must acknowledge
dr.unlucky@gmail.com and be non-commercial.

_

unlucky
dr.unlucky@gmail.com
www.asstr-mirror.org/~ unlucky

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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