THE LESSON has Paul Dvorak's travels to Mars with Gutav Vorax

I had configured an overstuffed style recliner oriented to a particularly interesting section of space sky, I even gave it leather colored sides to help it have a stronger sense of solidity, so power lounging on the verge of a nap I noticed an unusual area of lami ware band running past my raised feet. It glowed the soft blue of the house keeping systems. I followed the strip by eye to the place where it intensified around a doughnut shaped depression in the hull about 6 cm in radius. A misty vaguely hyperbolic cone spun above the spot. I leaned over off the seat and like a good ape descendant I stuck in my left index finger. It could not be pulled back out. Yup my finger is stuck in the hole which sucked it gently further in up to the knuckle. It was like a Chinese finger cuff. My finger was being clenched tight like by an angry asshole. I pulled. The joints in my finger popped. It hurt. I yelped. I could feel my heart rate rise. What the hell! I panicked a little.

This amused Gustav greatly.

"She’s got you huh! I caught you with your finger in my womyn eh! You pig!”

“What do I do? What do I do? Do something! Do something!”

“Didn’t your mother teach you to keep your fingers out of strange holes?”

“Come on!”

“I should leave you to keep you from pushing any more lami tabs!” He mocked me in his version of my voice: “Oh what does this do eh?…I’ll just push it and see….” His accent makes it barely an imitation. “Then we fly into the sun like bugs into a flame! You idiot!” He narrates the moral of his mocking as himself.

“Come on, come on, it’s getting numb!”

“You weenie, you sissy girl! Our Government pays you? You figure it out!”

I looked closely. Ah! Lami tabs in feint blue colors. I press the closest, nothing, the next nothing. Press all. My finger was free! It came out with a champagne bottle corks “pop” covered in hair and dust and crumbs and lint. Yuck and ugh! I tried wiping it on my suit and it stuck to my fabric. In fact it wouldn’t brush off. Highly electrostatic stuff. Still there today I suppose.

“What the hell?”

“That’s the belly button.”

“Huh?” typical Dvorak progressive query.

“The belly button.” He pulled open the Velcro to show me his. The hole now made sense to me weirdly and I was strangely reassured by that fact that he actually had one too, it meant that somewhere he had a mother.

“It’s for sucking in dirt and shmutz and Researchers. Must be working good today! Ha ha! Look what it sucked up! Yes it knows its job. Don’t get your dick near it!” And on and on for hours…

“Gustav.”

“What?”

“Gustav explain to me the gravi-drive again. Please?”

“I told you no more questions until you pass your algebra exam.”

“Look I’m finished! Here see!”

“Hhhmm eh well ah…a sixty seven percent. You missed number eleven! The answer was in the lesson! It was an open book exam and you still missed number eleven! Ha! You didn’t learn anything! Multiple choice even!”

“I passed didn’t I? Didn’t I pass?”

“I bet your watch lami asked your suit half these questions. Number twenty seven! Just the sort of answer a shuttle suit would give! Well it’s…a sixty seven is a D!”

“D!”

“Still you passed I guess. A “D” is not total failure. Algebra is hard for an imbecile. You did somewhat better than a monkey with a lamipad”

“Oh. What praise! You’d make a great dog trainer.”

“So you want to see the motor?”

“Yes. How’s this giant ping pong ball fly?”

“Look down there below your feet and I will show you. You see the crystal margin, the space beyond? Above that oriented there…to make it easier for us to tell us what is up, is the gravi-gyro. In a field that reacts to mass a known mass is spun very fast; so fast it is invisible.”

“How come I can’t see the container of antimatter?”

“Because nobody has seen antimatter! I’ve never seen antimatter. It doesn’t exist long enough to be seen. You can only see what it does, and here it is surrounding the neutron mass spinning in the dark matter. As long as that down there…”

“That I can’t see…”

“Yes. Keeps spinning so we can accelerate ahead of the waves of gravity.”

“Like sailing.”

“No. We are not pushed by the photons and particles of the solar wind. We skip over waves of gravity, we bounce off ripples. Like surfing. Except for our food it needs no fuel because it generates no thrust kinetic energy. The crystalline structure gives us enough electric power for systems and to keep the neutron grapefruit spinning and the dark matter in the bottle.”

“What would happen if it stopped spinning?”

“What?”

“What if it stopped?"

“The explosion would vaporize us and everything within twenty kilometers.”

“Wow!”

“But nobody would see it!”

“Huh?”

“Nobody has ever seen a dark-matter explosion. Not like anti matter! That explodes with fireworks! You see the results of the explosion with anti-matter. Dark-matter you don’t see nothing!”

The lami printer flashed it’s chameleon colors. Like a moody squid its hued spectrum deepening to red. Then with a hum it spit out a steaming fresh sheet of lami. It hung there waiting to be torn away and pressed somewhere into place.

Even the lami printer is hard to see in its dormant state against the translucent hull backed by the dark of space. Above and below of each lami adhered to the hull streamed bands and strips like ribbons made of multicolored strands. When touched by a hand anywhere along the hull a four times the hand sized area would illuminate. The brightened areas reveal all within the crystal matrix by color according to purpose. Certain areas are broad and brightly colored membranes that function like tanks. Certain areas are streaked with many colors at opposing angles to make, I assume, antennas. There are amorphously colored parts that look transparent tie dyed. Some places were not to be touched ever and the place itself would make this clear with recorded warnings or mild electric shock. I found this out the hard way. Gustav got in the habit of locking off control tabs for all but the most local environmental systems.

Gustav keeps busy tearing off and then aligning and pressing up the lami sheets as they arrive at the printer slot though he was falling behind the printer by several sheets and one long strip. His frenzied obsessive genius pace slackened momentarily.

“Hey you want to see something my printer can do?”

“What?” I asked in innocence.

“Look! It’s you!” The next lami torn from the printer was a transparent 3D framed portrait of me. My portraits eyes rolled comically as the curve of the lami got straightened out. The holo eyeballs twitched back and forth in my face.

“Hey! It’s me!”

“Here Let’s stick you up somewhere.” Over to the gravi-plane couch he sleeps on, that faces away from the inside of the Spor, he tabs up a virtual surface for the back of the seat with pink light borders then presses the lami against this area. My nose mush’s. He makes a seat next to my picture. Its looks little like he is conversing with my disembodied head.

“You know…” he says to my portrait “you really are a son of a bitch arrogant bastard over inflated over important piece of fly shit.”

“What!?”

The holo head speaks: “I’ll research you until I get something. I’ll get the dirt on you Gustav.”

“What!”

“How much? How much to buy you off you corrupt parasite?” Gustav pantomimes counting out money. He holds up some imaginary stack of bills..

“One dirty dollar.”

“No way. Maybe you could blow me.” Mirage money gets folded away.

“Ok.”

“Shut up you!” I lay a quick hand over the lami mouth creating another glass smooshed me face. 

“You know you’re insults and jokes are getting hard to put up with!”

“Please don’t hurt yourself. Let the poster breath.”

“Hey I can’t peel it off!”

“No. your face is there till it runs out of energy and fades. Then eventually you will flake off to end up in the navel with the lint.”