more from THE LESSON

Gustav Vorax led me along the line of his astronautic team members while making this little speech to them:

“This is the Government man that will be flying with me to Mars. This was my decision. I do not have to take him. I do not have to go. The Government is not making me go. I think I am going because I like this guy. He has a mission of history and that intrigues me. I’m sure we will have an enjoyable trip. And we will learn a lot about the interplanetary flight characteristics of Spor with passenger and cargo.” With that he raised his arms towards me. I felt like cargo.

Gustav turned to the introductions. “Here is Philippe my Quantum Mechanic.” Philippe hardly looked up from the vid display of rolling calculations that floated before his face. Carla has explained to me that a Quantum Mechanic handles the calculating programming that tweaks the fields generated by the spinning neutrons. Never satisfied with performance the quantum mechanics job is never done. Kind of part space gravity weatherman and part pit crew boss. He will remain in contact with Gustav continuously.

Next the crystallographers. “Yuki, Isa, Junko, and Sue.” All young beautiful and Asian. I had seen them around while exploring the station with Carla. In their stylish plaid mini skirt hot suits they looked like a gang of high tech schoolgirls. They will monitor the shape and structure of the Star Spor’s hull. After them the names and jobs started to blur for me, Margret Floph test pilot, assorted geeky theoretical physicists, systems designers, engineers, sub-contractor reps, anybody who wanted the afternoon off for ceremonies. This was an important flight for them. I tried not to think that perhaps they were there for one last look at Gustav because he might not come back if the ship cracked up.

Soon the scene evolved into “Goodbye”s all around. Some last minute ENT-Media interviews for Gustav with product endorsements. Gustav pitched a soft drink: “I always drink Cargo Cola to blast off!”. There was a last minute gravi drive tune up by the Quantum Mechanic. I, basically the cargo, was ignored.

I entrusted Spacey dog to Carla Carla. She was disappointed that she could not go. I haven’t seen much of her lately though we shared her compartment. Busy with long goodbyes to Gustav I imagine. I don’t have a choice but to leave Space with her. Gustav had been adamant “No dog! I will not share a record setting test flight with your dog!” It’s just as well, I would have worried the whole way that the food would run out and he’d want to eat dog again. These are the sacrifices I must make to get to Mars. Helen’s not ready yet with her ship. She’s pissed at me that I couldn’t talk Gustav into letting me borrow it so she could fly Star Spor herself.

While the multitude of admirers looks on Gustav approaching Spor pulls from a pocket lami printer a small square sticker and peels the backing away from the adhesive side and presses it onto the crystal surface. It flashes and a keypad of mash bumps appears on it. He presses some of the tabs and a slot in the bottom edge delivers a long thin lami that Gustav unfolds into the shape of a hatchway. The sticky side is exposed and pressed onto the hull next to the control pad. I help. When fully adhered the keypad display flashes ‘open‘. This pressed the lami hatch shape with a hiss cuts an entryway into the side of the Star Spor. I board first the empty sphere. “Welcome aboard” chirped the interior at me. As soon as I’m in I’m glad I don’t have much with me, its small inside! Gustav and Carla assured me that the little craft could supply me with anything I could need including suit sani liners. From the inside the edge of the door is discernible by dim twinkling lights. The edges of the gravi wave interior furniture twinkled with white or yellow colored lights. Along the inside of the hull a lami print port was bordered by green lights. Controls lami's, navigation and instrument system lami's designated by red lights, bio and housekeeping by blue lights. ENT and com lami's by multicolored neon borders.

We launched silently in a long slow curved arc away from the greasy soapsuds glob pulled along from the open hanger bay hatch by the momentum of Earth orbit. After awhile, about an hour I’d say, I found myself sitting there bored wondering what would be next. Then I am suddenly left again without any doubts about Gustav’s gender anatomy. He has, right before me, not three meters away, pulled out his genius penis and has taken aim with both hands at the inside wall of Spor and is urinating. Through the transparent hull I can see droplets of urine burst free of the outside of the hull into space. His target was a grated looking lami. Drops sped away into the star dappled blackness.

“What are you doing?”

“Ah! Relief.”

“What? That.”

“It’s a relief panel. If I need to piss and I can’t get to the facility, but there really is no facility on Spor, I just piss out through here or over there” He points as he tucks away personal bio equipment. Until now I hadn’t considered that Spor has no bathroom.

“You can piss there too but aim good or you’ll be electrocuted!” This wit requires uproarious Gustav laughter. “It works for other liquids too. Not exactly for the Ladies!” More cackling. “It uses for the ship whatever it can remove that is needed the rest is jettisoned, there are no holding tanks on Spor.”

“God you’re a genius!” I marveled at his sanitological genius.

“God is a genius. I am not God! Everybody should be glad of that!” Demonically he laughs his way over to his favorite place to sit by the red lit lami's, I see there is a convenient relief panel nearby.

“What do we drink? Where are the water tanks?”

“No tanks. We drink purified pee! Water you will drink from the big nipple lami up there and over there. Water, coffee, tea, milk, whatever. Just press the tab.”

“Will it make me a Marstini?”

“No.” Damn! Well the sippy tube bar in my suit has enough mix for about twelve liters of Marstini if I keep refilling with pee water from the Lami tit. I’m not so sure I’ll be able to make it the whole trip! I’ll be laughed off Balance if word gets out I drank pee Marstini’s all the way to Mars!

After ten days the monotony of travel has become almost unbearable. I find myself lolling about the ship in ever more disparate poses. I feel I’m immune now to Gustav’s endless eccentricities. There is now no effect on me when he stares, I stare back. I pick my nose. I scratch my butt. Sometimes upside down in reference to him I watch him play marathon games of ‘pong’ the ancient vid arcade game. We are like moths trapped inside the light bulb, we flit and flutter about the hollow center. No filament for a source of light we bat back and forth within the glowing sides. I cannot even bump into a corner. There are no real corners. Move across the inside of Spor fast at a gravi field edge and it melts away with a cushion affect close to the hull. Walk up the inside of the ship and the virtual furniture parts as I go. Then stopping perpendicular to my companion moth the mad genius trillionaire I can say couch and one appears beneath my butt. The glowing edged couch will stay so until I sit or until reconfigured. It makes me truly miss a traditional lumbering gigantic mass of a double hull vessel with strap in bucket seats, a solid one with sturdy girders and beams.

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…

The routine of the ship had settled in with ironic vengeance. As I tapped away on my lami pad I could occasionally glance up to meet the never wavering gaze of Doctor Vorax. He stared across the inside of this space beach ball at me with his head held low, his chin resting of the virtual line of the backrest of his control area seat. This level of interest in me was particularly unnerving as he would pick his nose, or move his mouth as if cleaning his teeth with his tongue or he talked silently to himself. Only his lips moved, occasionally a nostril. His silent conversation grew animated. He stopped suddenly, his bushy brows furrowed, his whisker twitched, his mouth gaped open. It appeared he was about to speak out loud. He hesitated perceptively in indecision.

 from THE LESSON

The hanger decks on the VORAX I orbital station looked typical enough. The outermost margins were of the curved bubble construction. Everything well organized. No confusing holographic scenery here.

After passing many varied and sundry craft parked in rows, there sat the first great Vorax contribution to space travel: The Star Slipper. Over fifty years ago Gustav Vorax with the debut of this vehicle started the cloud hopper craze where tens of thousands of people worldwide built their own privately owned short duration orbital trans atmospherics. I had seen vids of its sensational space flight trials. As a child I had built a model of it that I later inadvertently blew up. An elegant craft of oblong centrimorphic cultivated chrystopoly design hull with hyper ion hydrogen drive. It looked very on museum display. A tiny lami vid placard described its features and specifications in detail in five linkable media and seventeen languages. I took the tour of its opalescent beauty.

About a hundred meters away along a gantry and scaffold storage area I found my destination with first sight of the vessel Gustav would take to Mars: the Star Spor. It sat away from the other space craft. Set aside by its small size and it’s round shape. Not really round though, multifaceted like a highly polished gigantic marble shaped gem stone. From far away it looked to be a perfectly rounded sphere. Closer approach revealed countless facets in each a transparent backlit glow. There was also a tourist’s helper vid info placard here. I asked it for the little ships details:

“Star Spor is a semi liquid crystal hulled lamiware interplanetary vehicle designed and built by Gustav Vorax.”

That’s all that was said. Brief indeed. Star Spor is chock full of interesting secrets no doubt. The Government is supposedly mulling over the decision to purchase several dozen of like craft. And a limited capability prototype is purportedly in the hands of the taxi shuttle manufacturing cartel. Carla dutifully explains to me that Gustav’s real vision for the Star Spor’s technological innovations is as extra-large heavy tonnage interstellar ‘crystal ships’ of legend and rock and roll lyrics. She went gleefully on to tell me in a tour guide style a presentation of Star Spor specs peppered with many catch phrase slogans and neologisms and wave after wave of statistics that it was the most advanced space craft ever flown by humans. Her duties as staff epistemologist covered translating the quantum speak of the theories that it flew on. She practiced her trade on me to help me understand how a space ship without tremendous fuel tanks and rocket nozzles could ever get to Mars.

The trouble and beauty of electrons is you can so easily manipulate them into power grids or vid screens or memory strips. They are either right there flowing where you want them or not. Putting them to work for you by controlling the electrons interactive behavior can become many useful products. The trouble and beauty of gravity is it is everywhere absolutely only in varying degrees of intensity and strength due to densities and mass and rotation and proximities. Despite being everywhere it is almost impossible to pin down and control. Hard to make a product out of gravity; except in space. The best way to influence it is with tremendous masses or very fast rotations. Star Spor carries a six cube mass of neutrons that spins in a dark matter filled antimatter bottle. This is not an engine but a gravity detector. What the detection of gravity allows is an awareness of its existence as a wave force. Detection of gravity in the most subtle of increments allowed systems to be designed to appreciate the differences in the wave forms. Mapping the situation of gravitational fields and the newly devised detection technologies allowed the manipulation of a craft in relation to the apparent subtle forces. Quite a lot of acceleration can be expected in a gravitation transitional proximity.

The instruments of gravitational measurement become ships themselves. The gravi-drive ship is a massive gravity field instrument tuned to either fall toward any great mass, attractive, or rise, repellant, away toward low gravity proximities. The best detection is the result of the creation of a gravitational field in a sensitive environment set to respond to differences in all nearby apparent gravitational fields. The reaction of the instrument itself is amplified by its own gravitational field. The instrument/ships gravitational field is controlled by reaction to nearby gravitational fields in order to move along on the waves produced by them.

Carla says to think of a ship in space as being nothing more than a barrier. It’s a moveable barrier that is not to keep something out but keep an environment within. Our spaceflight efforts of the past were restricted to super strong hardened hulled bullet type rocket projectiles carrying fireproof bottomed glider planes. The interplanetary product of our planets human compliment amounted to bolted together shelves for boxes of gadgets, slow solar sail craft, giant fuel tanks with thruster nozzle ends. Ships like this still blast off from the surface or are hurled out of close orbit still to this day. Compared to the Star Spor these are the human equivalent of ‘puffballs’ made of tissue and spit.

The semi liquid crystal lami ship like Star Spor is grown from the outside in. It was built at nano scale by nanobots. It gets larger and smaller, expands and contracts, rounder or more faceted. In fact the faster you go the rounder it gets. The outermost layers are lain atom by atom into the semi liquid crystalline matrix. Subsequent layers that are lain inside the outer layer number into the many trillions, each to its predetermined purpose. It is this crystalline shell facet construction that creates the great thickness in cross section. Inside the facets are layers of nano sized manifold chambers conducting substances that feed the crystals structure for repairing the surface, transmitting heat, or transforming the structure itself according to conditions. The hull is an alive electro chemical liquid crystal. That is if you consider gazillions of nanobots alive. It is a crystal structure in a state of controlled arrested development. Its surface due to subtle influences can solidify where it has to, liquefy, add layers, or just soften up a little. Careful tuning of the electromagnetic fields within and without and the nanoscale machinery makes use of piezo discharges and ionization. This provides the environment inside without bulky elemental system equipment. Everything needed is in semi-solid state ion oriented flux in the crystalline structure. Essential elements and molecules sort of cooked by tiny chef bots to order as needed.

It is paste up lami controlled. Systems are created and lami’d up where needed. Essentially it is hollow, empty. Anything needed that is gravity centered on a horizontal plane is created with gravi-solid field manipulation. A table or seat is built by gravi fields defined by fine colored border lines. The lamiware program controls the fields shapes. The surfaces have a gentle give equal to the finest cushions.

The whole ship prepared for interplanetary travel is completely transparent or mirrored or black or any color and sometimes all those at once depending on active states and conditions. There is no need to carry fuel, no need for masses of elemental substances, there are no control engines or antenna or solar arrays. It is a huge mirrored disco ball of space.

Star Spor does not have any engines at all. The ship is powered by gravity. Pulled and propelled by gravity. It is a super sensitive instrument for the measurement and calculation of gravity waves. Gravity permeates the universe. The waves and reverberations ring upon all masses always. The Star Spor can ride these waves, ahead of these waves and hypothetically it has been calculated as able to accelerate to near light speed by slingshot maneuvers. Steered by the sensitivity of its attractions and repulsions Star Spor is the first true gravity powered interplanetary. Not much room on there though and Carla wants to go too.