Creation (9 page)

Sam’s head was swimming from the conversation, from floating weightless among the vines, from muscles that had been made for walking attempting to fly. “Where does that leave Jess?”

Yoshi’s smile lit up his face. “She’s her own person. Not afraid to show compassion. No fear of people, even ones I don’t fully trust. Open, honest, strong. If she has sex with someone, it’s because she wants to. If she loves someone, it’s for who they are, not what they can do to or for her.”

Sam tried to envision a society based on how Jess had been raised. Women would be free to express their desires without the stigma of being considered promiscuous. Men would no longer compensate for their unfulfilled lusts by trying to conquer the world. The result would be a population of people understanding what others had to endure and helping each other with those challenges. “Is this the norm for her generation?”

Yoshi shrugged his shoulders. “Yes and no. Everyone’s different. Human nature, greed, jealousy, power—they all slip in when we’re not vigilant. We never thought our society’s evolution would happen in one generation. But people like Jess—and they are close to the majority—give us a lot of hope.”

Sam looked at the tangled vines of wisteria. “It all sounds so daunting. Based on your theory, so many of mankind’s problems are formed by fundamental biology. I wouldn’t even know where to start. But then, I guess that’s why you focus so much on the next generation.”

“All’s not lost for those of us burdened with a traditional upbringing. We just have to see how that past influences our actions. Decide who we want to be. And evolve beyond those limitations.”

“And what would happen if Jess did fall in love? I mean, in a one-and-only kind of way?” Sam prayed he hadn’t sounded too hopeful, but he couldn’t help the catch in his voice as he asked the question. He’d only just met Jess.

Yoshi ran his hand along the braided net they’d been working on. “You take these plants. You give them what they need to grow. You train them to be useful, even pruning back what’s not correct. But in the end, you have to let them be what they will be. I can’t answer what will happen when Jess finds a relationship she just can’t bear to let go of, one she might not want to share in spite of all our conditioning. This project was never taken on with the idea that we’d know the outcome.”

Sam shook his head. The village was toying with the lives of the next generation. Even for scientists, some barriers you just didn’t cross. And messing with the lives of a tribe’s children was one of them. “Experiments are meant to end in results, conclusions that can be used for the next steps. People are not experiments. You can’t treat your kids like you’re trying to develop the next greatest tomato.”

Instead of being offended, Yoshi beamed at Sam. “And that, my friend, is why you’ll make an excellent shaman.”

* * *

B
ack in the living pod
, Sam frowned at Jess. “Stop laughing. It isn’t funny.” He’d just finished his description of his breakfast with Doc, Yoshi, and most notably, Mira.

Jess put her hand to her mouth, covering her grin. “It is kind of funny. For Mira, that’s considerable restraint. Usually, she puts her hand down someone’s pants during a conversation. She was just trying to make you feel welcome.”

“How is that supposed to make me feel comfortable?” Sam could feel the blood race to his face.

She wrapped her hands around his waist. “Mira wasn’t trying to make you comfortable. Physical contact, sexual contact, is important to us. And the more uncomfortable the situation, the greater the need for that bonding. You should try to argue with her sometime. It’s impossible, physically impossible. I know—I’ve tried. Just when I thought I was making my point, when I was my most passionate about my argument, she brought me to orgasm. You just can’t convincingly argue with someone who has their hands on your genitals.”

In spite of Sam’s discomfort at the conversation, he had to laugh. “I don’t think I could even… hey, what are you doing?”

Jess’s fingers had worked around to the front of his pants and were playing with the ties. “You’re worked up. She made you excited without giving you what you needed. You’ve been cooped up in that builder’s pod for six months. I can’t even imagine six months without the feel of another person. You need my touch, Sam. Just relax.”

L
ife
in the agro pod was like being a fish that suddenly learned it could fly, but with fins instead of wings. Everyone around Sam moved with graceful ease among the plants, while he landed headfirst into a tree trunk. His clumsiness slowed down all who tried to show him around, the way a toddler’s stumbling would slow the pace of nearby adults. In exasperation, Jess finally told him to go explore on his own.

A dim memory from his youth haunted him. It’d been his first time throwing a baseball. All the other boys tossed it far out into the field. His attempt landed at his feet. Pathetic. The coach took him aside. Along the far end of the playground ran a fence. Together with two other boys, the fattest of his class and the sickly one, he was told to practice throwing rocks over the fence while the rest of the class learned to play softball.

That was what the day felt like.
Go explore
meant,
Let us get some work done without you
. He grabbed for a vine, an easy snatch for anyone else, as he slowly drifted down the length of the pod. His pride at grasping the dangling creeper quickly turned to terror as the plant let go of its tendril. Still grasping the useless length of wisteria, he floated out away from the security of plants and people. Someone was laughing at him from the dense foliage. Looking at the green stalk, he discovered why. It’d been cut.

Jess had explained that if he ever lost his handhold, he should just let himself float free. Eventually, he’d either end up along the pod’s transparent wall, which he could kick against to head back down to the plants, or the momentum of the ship would bring him to the back of the pod. Few ever bothered wandering back that far. Being so close to the ship’s engines, the noise and vibration hardly added to the tranquil nature of the village. But the reinforced disk of metal gave him an oddly comforting place to think. Lying against it, his back massaged by the freighter’s propulsion, he looked out along the entire length of the transparent cylinder.

What am I doing here?
But it’d be just as easy to ask what his other options were. To return to
Leviathan
’s main decks would mean an eventual return to Earth. He didn’t have a job and wouldn’t when he saw his parents again. Life in space hadn’t been what he’d expected, but it still beat what he remembered. No one judged him here—no parental disappointment, no boss who questioned his abilities, no society looking down on the one who had no direction. Maybe there was one guy who thought it was funny to cut the vine that he still held onto. But one among many sure was better than what he was used to.

He turned the wisteria stalk in his hand. This was his life: cut off from his past, with no source of nourishment, he’d die without the help of others. But there were also buds about to bloom. He still had potential in the right environment. Out here in this strange new village, people made all the welcoming gestures that showed they could be the help he’d long sought. A place to be transplanted. He fell into a peaceful sleep, gently rocked by
Leviathan
’s engines.

* * *

B
eing laughed
at was nothing new, but having it happen twice in one day did tend to affect Sam’s sense of self-worth. He opened his eyes to the long, slender legs of Jess as she stood on the back wall of the pod, towering over him like a jungle goddess. Laughing.

He struggled to stand up—though the concept of
up
in the agro pod still eluded him. At least the thrust of the engines gave him something to prevent his body from flying off again. “What’s so funny? Hasn’t anyone ever taught you it’s not polite to laugh at the uncoordinated?”

“I’m sorry. It’s not that you ended up back here. We’ve all lost our way at some point and
based
.
You’re holding that wisteria bloom tight to your chest like a little girl.”

He looked at the stalk in his hand. Maybe it’d been the warmth radiating from the engines, but a couple of the buds had managed to burst into flowers. He held it up, cut end first. “Someone’s idea of a joke? Or is this an initiation ritual? Because I know I heard a man’s voice laughing at me as I floated free.”

Jess ran her finger along the severed vine. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Just give each handhold a little tug before you trust it with your life.”

As she ran her thumb along the sharp edge, he knew she wasn’t telling him everything. “This is a small village. You know who cut it, don’t you?”

He shouldn’t care. If he wanted to live with these people, it’d be best not to create enemies so soon. But then, not standing up for himself could be just as bad. Last thing he wanted was to become the village’s laughingstock.

Jess nodded. “Had to be Jonathan. We have a history. He was the oldest of the original children who moved into the agro pod. I was five, and he was eleven, just entering puberty, when the village got started.”

She pulled Sam back down to sit against the metal base. “The goal for my generation is polyamory. Not that we’re expected to love everyone the same—just be open to that love. But there were only twelve kids when we started out, five boys and seven girls. Kind of hard to form multiple attachments when there aren’t a lot of choices.”

“There were adults. I thought age wasn’t supposed to be an issue. Maybe I just assumed that didn’t matter to you.” So much had been explained the previous day that Sam had trouble keeping it all straight.

“Age doesn’t matter to me,” Jess said, “but most of the original villagers were already married. Not that that mattered either, but it is nice to not feel like someone added into a relationship. The point is, polyamory is the goal, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Jonathan was just entering puberty, and most of us girls wouldn’t be sexually ready for quite a while. I won’t bore you with the details, but he came to think of us as being committed to each other. It was partially my fault.”

“You were a kid. I don’t see how anything that happened would be your doing.” Alarm swept through Sam. He’d had a girlfriend who’d been assaulted sexually. The incident managed to infect every aspect of their relationship. It’d taken professional counseling to convince her it hadn’t been her fault.

Jess quickly shook her head. “No, no, nothing like that. See, this is why you don’t leave details out of a story. Growing up, Jonathan’s sexual education was handled by the village women. He wasn’t stifled or anything. Far from it. When I say it was my fault, I mean that it stemmed from my own education. Jonathan and I were actually quite close by the time I entered puberty. He was a strapping teenager. All of us girls fancied him. And up to that time, he’d been like a big brother to me. So when Mira started teaching me different techniques for dealing with sex, he kind of volunteered to be my test subject.”

Sam leaned away from her, trying to envision a younger version of Jess eager to test out what she’d learned. “So you were the assailant?”

She looked at him and laughed. “Oh, no. You really are full of those Earth sexual repressions, aren’t you? Everyone has sex. Get over it. Everything we did was mutual, and no one got hurt.”

“I’m confused.” Sam held up the vine. “Why did he cut this wisteria?”

“Polyamory doesn’t work for Jonathan. He sees us as something we’re not. Even though we’ve had ten years to talk about it, he still can’t accept that I might find other people attractive to the point of wanting more than friendship. There were only four other boys of my generation, so he hasn’t had too much trouble fending off their advances toward me over the years. But he’s not as successful as he’d like to believe. Even with his education, he tends to forget that women have as much a say as men—sometimes more—about who initiates a relationship. And the time I spend with married couples doesn’t bother him much due to them having each other.”

“But I’m someone new. Worse, someone you’re responsible for taking care of and someone you’re spending a lot of time getting to know,” Sam said.

“Exactly. And he’s not stupid. We have known each other most of our lives. When I find someone interesting, he knows about it, sometimes before I do.”

Sam tried not to smile, but the warmth around his face gave him away. “Am I to understand you find me attractive?”

“Did you truly learn nothing from your conversation with Mira?”

Equal sexual authority was not an idea that came naturally after a lifetime on Earth. “Some lessons might take a while for me to learn.”

“Fair enough.” Jess’s sly smile warmed Sam’s face again. “The village wants you and accepts you. I know you haven’t been raised the way I have, but you’ll bring a new perspective to our society.”

“Are you flirting with me, or just setting me up?” Sam asked.

“Maybe both. Just because most of us want you here, that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to be as welcoming as me and Mira.”

“Then I’ll have to rely on those vast skills as a shaman—which I don’t have, by the way—to win them over.”

* * *

A
s he followed
her back along the vines toward the village, he knew he’d made up his mind. He wanted to stay. And not because he didn’t have any other options. There were always options, even if he didn’t like where they led. But following Jess toward a future with these people who spoke so openly about human connections, who cared so deeply about each other, and who wanted him sparked a desire for life he’d never known before. The aimless drifter had found a home. And setting down roots might even give him a direction in which to grow.