Red Zone - 16

A Novel

7

He opened his eyes, and they were filled with her eyes, a rich mahogany pair that locked into his, surrounded by pale tea with cream skin, and divided by an aquiline nose.

“I have to admit, I've simulated this many times, but never done it.” She smiled sheepishly and there was a nervous pounce to her voice. It stroked the lower registers and tickled upwards at the end of sentences. “What about you Deeshandir?”

What should I tell her, that I have had sex? Or that I've, he mentally stopped and corrected himself, I have spent far too much time thinking about almost everyone but her. His memory peered back at all of the different shapes and kinds of women that he had blundered across in simulations, from the very simple and repetitive ones which were almost childishly easy to get off the track, to the more subtle and complex ones that almost sucked the mind into them.

“I can truly say that being here with you is totally different from anything I have experienced before.”

She smiled slightly.

“Is that a nice way of saying you have before? It is alright if you have. I would have if my family had taken their eyes off me for more than five minutes at a time.”

“It is hard to do anything in five minutes.”

She allowed herself a tiny giggle.

“Now that I am here, I have no idea what to do.”

“This is the part that sims skip past.”

“Which part is that?”

“The part where you are staring at your partner, and it is intoxicating but paralyzing.”

They were seated facing each other, cross-legged. He was painfully aware that he was lying exposed, and his erection was duly visible. He was also aware, but could only steal glances downward, that she was both exposed and not exposed. There was a black thicket of hair around her thighs, but more than that, he had not been able to absorb.

He tried to keep his eyes on her, remembering how many sims rewarded this, but he could not help looking downward. However, he could never allow himself to look down for long enough to soak in her features. He had some impression of her shape, with her breasts Poetry comes from wanting to stare, but only being able to glance. He had a vague sense that her nipples were inverted, pointing in rather than out, and that her areolae were large, but not strongly pigmented against her skin. Her breasts were not small but were close to her body, like low rolling hills. Beyond that, he had only a sense of a slight chubbiness in her mid-section. But by that point, his eyes had bounced up to hers again.

By the time they had, she was smiling in embarrassment.

“I know I am different from the images.”

He felt his face get warm.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stare.”

“It is fine. We are,” she almost halted, “married now.”

She reclined outwards, and rolled sideways, lying across the covers that were rumpled up, and rested her head in her hand, and her elbow on a pillow. She bumped her thighs together. Her hips were rounded by the way she had bent slightly, his eyes followed their outer curve, set clearly against the velveteens of the hotel room's décor. The browns and reds of the stripes set off by golden designs of some antiquity made her shape more pronounced in both his mind and his imagination.

“I had some gardening done.”

He paused, confused.

“My hair down there, I had it shaped. I wasn't sure what you liked.”

I am not sure either.

She had hesitated, clearly waiting for something.

It felt as if there were a stopper in his throat as if his stomach were one giant vat of trepidation waiting to spill outwards. Nothing in any sim had prepared him for this. Nor had his trysts, for that is what they were, he was as hungry and unwilling to worry about any future moment as his partners. There was a wall here. Well then, best to say that.

“What makes this different from anything else is that you will still be here... tomorrow and the day after.”

Her eyes glowed.

“I did not know you could be so sweet. You have always been so cold. I was worried that you were a stone jar, with nothing in it, but cobwebs...” She trailed off. “I do not mean to hurt your feelings, but this is the first moment you have shown anything to me.”

“Today was one long ritual, not very much different for me than a military parade.”

She frowned.

“You did very well. At least very well at going through the motions.”

It was not what he saw, because he had been stealing glances down at how thin her waist was, and how it tapered to her hips, and then there was a peculiar coming together into a point, like the point at the top of a pyramid. However much he had seen in simulation, it was not the same. Perhaps because in simulation it all moves from one point of erotic obsession to another.

“You do think a great deal don't you Deeshandir?”

“Yes, perhaps too much.”

She sat back up again, and draped her arms over his shoulders, locking eyes with him.

“I do not want you to think too much, I do not want you to wait too much, I do not want you to worry too much.” She tilted her head forward and looked directly at him. In every simulation, and in every real-life event, I have always had to push. This is beyond my expectations. It felt quite giddy.

She laughed, almost as if she was laughing for him. She lowered her face so that her eyes seemed as if they were looking up at him. She wrapped her knee over his leg, the softback of her thigh lying on his foot.

I am a blind man who sees the sun, I am the starving man who walks to a banquet. She is laid out before me; richer than all the meals I have ever eaten. Pause. And I cannot even open my mouth.

She gazed at him with a worried half-smile. “I thought you would like my breasts? Don't you?” It was in a sing-song tone low in her voice that somehow set on him. His body felt twice as large, his shoulder

Strangely, her use of Anglo-Englishisms was more erotic than that she had perfumed and made herself up. The blue across her eyelids, the gentle sculpting of her cheeks with a soft dust soft distance of flowers that hung about her in a wreath, seemed like the props of a street performer, overdone, over-calculated. It was that she wanted him to like her, like her in her best and worst attributes. The soft folds and roles of her waist, the way her breasts hung, suddenly took on a different life, now that he knew that she needed something from him.

He fell into her, a move that he had learned often enough in simulations, and held himself on his elbows, cradling her face with his hands. Their eyes locked, and finally, he was on f, familiar ground, where touch and response would lead wherever they needed to go.

He had not expected how much like tasting her it would be to penetrate, how it felt as if she were rich fatty meat, like the one, grown from an actual pig, he had savored at a military dinner. It was lush fattiness. And so it felt to be in her as if he could taste the way she melted over him.

They slept, bathed in sweat and their coruscated union.

6

He opened his eyes, as if clearing some particle that irritated them, and then looked around. His remembered self was lost. But lost in space, or thought, he did not know. He was inside, in a building.

The halls were made of an older stone, and dated, he knew, from Old Earth, before the cataclysm. He looked down the corridor, once, they joked it was infinite. The heavy green double door was 20 meters before him, with squares inlaid in it. Above him stretched three floors of columns, and then, the roof of a dome. It was small compared to myriad structures, but he could feel the weight of the stone.

Once, they carved from their cities from flesh and stone and wrought them with bones and iron.

He was momentarily pleased with this floating bit of eloquence, though he knew he had absorbed it from someplace. Someday, just once, I would like to do something that is mine alone. But I am here at ivy-university to learn what I should already know.

He continued to walk across the vast vestibule that was the floor of the dome, and towards the doors. He had been told he had to walk to the end of the “Infinite Corridor” and then turn right. His course load was light, because, of course, he was on a visiting semester from the Military Academy. He could see the face of the admissions officer here, slightly bemused, and with a dash of pity.

Thus, bemusing on the chain of events that had allowed him to take physics and other courses from this old and prestigious place he continued to walk. It must have been more impressive when it was above sea level, and not underneath its dome. Sufficiently so that they reclaimed it after the seas rose.

Equilibrium has its costs.

“Last semester we left off with the implications of the basic equation of General Relativity. I'm going to do a quick review of it here, and then get on to the important term that came, went, and returned to physics.”

This lecturer had a sharp voice, one whose basic accent was of Terringlish, which was not surprising given that he was from the Confederation, a way whistling through the material at breakneck speed.

On a vaguely white space, shaped like a rectangular box, bright neatly written symbols appeared:

R_μν – 1/2Rg_μν + Λg_μν = κΤ_μν

“I'm sure you've all loaded the course material by now, so who we can skip the recitation of the basic equations and focus on the term which would generate both controversy and beauty.”

“Of course, I'm speaking of the Λ term in his original formulation, and what is now called space energy, or vacuum energy by some of our older Kamis. If you ask for help from a Kami, just remember that your definitions of help differ in sign, magnitude, and tensor. In the form here, it is rolled into the T or stress tensor.”

“As hard as it may seem to grasp, at that time, the universe was smaller and younger. The age of the earth and the sense of the universe were conditioned by ideas that the sun could only be a few millions of years old, fed by the heat of gravitational contraction, the way Jupiter is. The universe was only the galaxy. It would be two decades before Hubble established that the universe was billions of years old, and billions of highlight-years loss.”

“So, Einstein, seeing that his equations predicted an expanding universe, added a term, the 'cosmological constant' which is the topic of today's discussion.” He called it his biggest mistake, though, of course, no one would agree with that assessment now.

He had always been good with loading, and with wandering through and incorporating. Much of the lecture was contained in his mind, forward in his real memories already. He had processed this. Paying attention was hard because he was trying to go to the next step, which was visualization. The course would get to that, and the exercises would force it, but at the moment, he didn't need this.

He only realized he had allowed his attention to wander when he heard his name.

“Deeshandir, I think you should come up here and draw out singularity lines for us.” He looked at the board. Coming up there was intentionally meant to make him sweat. He did. Profusely. Panic is not going to improve this. I have this, it is inside me, I just need to let it flow out.

He walked up and drew out the equations for the minimum energy of two light rays under the influence of gravitation, which follows the geodesic, the straight line in a curved space.

The prof shook his head.

“This is simple. Tensors are collisions of vectors, they can be made to have no basis. You are still trying to draw a line on the space that I have put up. That's not how it works. That's Newtonian and Euclidean, but it isn't relativistic. Matter and energy flow along  with space, but they warp it at the same time.”

There was a pitting glance.

“This is as simple as walking through mud. Your boot flows down, mudflows around it, shaping how you can push with your foot. Now try again. Have the light rays flow a with long the space.”

He finally drew the light rays, they converged exactly at a point.

“So, there's the singularity. Now ask yourself every there? Even without spin, which we've neglected here, can they get there?”

Deeshandir paused.

“No.”

“Why not.”

“Because as they get closer time slows. Matter cannot reach the speed of light, and it will never actually get to the singularity because it has to pass an event horizon.”

“Correct as far as it goes. What happens when the event horizon evaporates? Remember it will do that faster and faster as it gets smaller and smaller.”

“Then...”

“Well.”

He paused.

“If the space energy term is positive, no, because the pressure of space itself will go to infinity as it gets closer.”

“Negative infinity, but otherwise correct as far as it goes. We need to move on. I'll ask you more about this tomorrow.”

He was embarrassed but not humiliated. Back in his small room, with its narrow bed, he went over this point several times, drawing lines in the air above until he could feel the resistance getting closer to the singularity.

As long as there is expansion, there is no singularity, as long as there is positive void energy, there is negative pressure.

He slept, bathed in a river of symbols.