NaNoWriMo Excerpt: Waking

It is a great round bed in a shaded place, a bower built in the peace and shelter of a cave I know from my earliest days. The sounds of surf and light breeze moaning at the mouth of a cave play in the distance, highlighted by the dripping of dew to tidal pools nearby, but here it is warm and dry, with the faint feathering of morning light seeping in to brush the curves of her sleeping smile, her dancer’s arms arrayed above her head, the valleys and ridges of the sheet drawn carelessly over her outstretched torso.

I place a knee onto the bed, then another, taking care not to wake her. I settle onto my bare feet, now clean of sea and sand, to stare, to admire her.

She is perfect.

Time slides away, but does not intrude. The morning never brightens. The tide never comes back in to soak this hideaway bed. I have a private eternity to stare, though eventually she shifts, turning her face to the other side and rubbing her cheek on the pillow, never dropping the soft smile still reminiscent of her ever-present smirk.

I take a deep breath, but rather than the salt air of home, I am filled with the merest wisps of her perfume, that sweet smell of spices and precious oils that lingers in the sheets and on her body. I close my eyes to savor it. It makes me want to give her my soul.

Slowly I lean down to prostrate myself across the altar that is her, my knees by her hip, my face lying in the hollow of her plexus with only a thin and aromatic sheet between her skin and my own face, my hands reaching up to cradle her bare, perfect shoulders. Here, I do nothing but breathe and worship. Ancestors, do not be offended. Gods above and below, do not be jealous. None of you have offered me the love and care this woman has promised. None of you have ever so pleased my eyes, or offered me tender flesh for the joy of my hands as they slide up her extended arms. No incense of worship have I ever inhaled which gave me such intoxicating peace.

She stirs, inhales. I ride these subtle movements with the focused joy of an epicure. I do not yet move.

“Good morning,” she whispers, and reaches down, one hand to my upraised arm, one to my back. I look up toward her face, across where her movements have exposed her breasts, to the eyes that transfix me.

“What are you doing?” she asks, still in a sleepy whisper, with that tiny smile.

I lift and reposition, laying my face across her bosom, hugging her breasts with my hands, her ribs with my elbows.

“Worshipping,” I answer, with no sarcasm. Her smirk deepens as she repositions one of my hands more intimately, her nipple square in my palm as she squeezes it against her, the knuckles of both our hands brushing my temple. With her other hand reaches to caress my upturned ear.

“Well you should,” she says. It has the ring of familiarity. She is silent for a time before she speaks again. Her nipple hardening in the palm of my hand threatens to commandeer all my attention, but I am determined to take in all of her.

“I am glad you aren’t ugly and crass,” she said. She is grinning, but her words are soft, sincere.

I smile, and manage not to blush.

“Me, too,” I say.  I cuddle her close, revel in the touch of soft skin and full breasts. I kiss between her cleavage and she folds her arms around my head and shoulders, kisses the crown of my scalp.

“Come, my Lord,” she whispers, with only a hint of humor. “Your children await. Do your duty.”

She cannot say this last without a lascivious snicker. I grin in response, and lift myself forward to kiss her throat, to -

The lifeboat pinged and shuddered, and Kas came awake. He blinked, then stiffened and kicked, trying to run as he realized where he was, how vulnerable, how helpless, but the straps held him in place. His ears filled with the sound of a siren. His throat filled with bile. The dream memory of a warm embrace was crushed and wiped away.

The Pilot veered out of the debris and quieted the proximity alarm. The sudden silence was deafening, then slowly filled with the sussurance of the engine and his own ragged breathing.

Some people live in ships and spend their lives travelling from world to world, Kas thought. I’d go insane.

It occurred to him that his father had been posted here, to duty on this station, and Kas would likely be here for another year or three at least.

The flash of a brilliant explosion from ahead dismayed him. There soon might be no more station.

For the first time, his fear for his own life sunk beneath a horrible epiphany - his father might die.

The universe began to turn sideways.

Sample Post: the opening scene from Bubbler

Prelude

1

Kas flinched, blinking and rolling his eyes against the sudden brightness of the lights through the clear liquid perflourocarbon filling the room. Not again.

Maith’s voice filled the room, drifting from the speakers as she glided from her niche.

“Mer Joans thrashes again, young master Salipoor. He is having another nightmare. Shall I touch him?”

Kas set his reader down and glared across at his bunkmate, a standard-type human still twitching and straining against his netting, veins swollen and blue in his reddening face, his abdomen heaving. Do, he signed with an affirming nod, slowly squeezing a breath of the heavy fluid from his lungs.

She turned and kicked once, sliding smoothly the short distance across the room to rescue the frightened young sleeper. Kas grumped at the body sheath she’d taken to wearing while Cayleb Joans was aboard and might see her – not for her modesty, to which she’d never been conditioned, but for the young human’s comfort. Maith was modified, but was modeled after them, the standard type most common across the Dominion, if small and pale and lithe and perfect…so much more like Cayleb than himself, though Cay was darker than either of them by many shades.

He brooded and watched her trying to wake the dry-breather. A bubbler like himself, unable to breathe real water, but from a whole race where such a thing was considered normal.

Mom?

Cay was little again, maybe seven, trying to walk to the duty station where his mother usually sat her shift watching monitors. The hall was familiar, but reverted in memory to gargantuan scale; he moved his feet, always sure and steady in the familiar rotation, but now they only drifted in the strange, not-quite-weightlessness of an absurdly heavy medium.

He was afloat, and baffled. Mom?

He couldn’t speak. His throat was full of water. His lungs were full of it, his sinuses, his ears.

He panicked, but he couldn’t scream.

“Mer Joans. Cayleb Joans. You must wake, Mer Joans. You are safe. You are not drowning, Mer Joans. You must allow yourself to breathe, but slowly, so that you do not damage your throat or lungs.”

Maith managed to get the netting off him and free him into the room. He bobbed toward the ceiling just a little too near the door, where he might have bobbed up into the real water, though there was still no immediate danger; he’d have to take the netting off the hole, go through it, and then turn himself upside-down for his lungs to begin to empty of the hyperoxygenated PFC fluid fast enough to matter. Even so, she followed him up to help him calm down, but the rap on his skull when he impacted the ceiling did more than the soft drone of her voice.

Kas began to sign irritably. Maith’s voice translated over the speakers, freakishly morphing into Kas’ own.

“My master asks: What’s wrong with you, Cay? By the damned, there’s only one chamber fitted for us on this bottle, so unless you want to sleep up on the command decks, you need to stop it!” Kas rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his webbed hands before he continued. “And before you think you’re going to try that, those are full of crew running around doing ship stuff, and they’re too busy to have you sprawled underfoot. Damned! Take care of him.” She translated the last as well as all the rest, though it was directed to her.

He let go of his own net and drifted up as well, though not as fast as Cayleb. Standard humans were lighter than Hydrans, and could hardly stand more than superficial pressure changes. Yet I’m the handicapped one, he though bitterly. He sucked his lungs full before he opened the door netting and bobbed up into the next room, leaving Maith to take care of the drowned, trembling, disoriented Cay. He heard her switch back to her own voice over the intercom to sooth the distressed young man, dutifully treating him to the dressing Kas usually received himself. The light shining up from the bedroom below lit this room in streaks and shadows. Kas could feel the lesser weight of true water around him, the difference in the way it stuck to his skin. He breathed out just a little of the PFC fluid to make some room and felt it running slowly down his chin and chest and crotch, headed surely for the slightly sloped floor which would drain it back into the bedroom for reprocessing.

Real water, he thought, waving his hand through it to feel the currents. He knew it wasn’t really from Hydra’s seas, but was carefully constituted to be a clean and healthy approximation, plus a few harmless agents to help the life support system. In here it was cool to his skin, comfortable. He tasted the salt on his tongue as he breathed it in carefully, just a shallow breath to savor, though he didn’t pull it in far enough to reach his lungs. Real water. This is what my father is breathing in his room. He set his jaw and closed his inner lids, then slowly slid his true eyelids down over the nictitating membranes and swallowed reflexively. My father, Ra Salipoor Den, statesman and exemplar of our planet’s people…appointed Delegate for the planet of Hydra to the Federal Dominion Collegium, and last of the great gen Salipoor but for me, Den Salipoor Kas, his handicapped, melodramatic bubbler son. Alas, how the mighty have fallen.