Read Online Shipstar by Larry Niven, Gregory Benford - Free Book Online Page B

effect in his vision had gone away. Not much else had.
    “It’s a failure to express feelings either verbally or nonverbally—that would be, just using your usual grunts and shrugs.”
    He kept watching the view out the cave opening and shifted uneasily on the inflatable bedding the Sil had given them. It was a bit small. “Can’t say much after what we’ve been through.”
    “I learned this in crew training. They gave it to us because we could go through traumas if we get to Glory—”
    “ When we get there. This Bowl, this is an … interlude.”
    “Okay, when. There might be pretty heavy events to get through on Glory, our trainers said. So we trained to deal with shock, combat fatigue, stress disorders. Recognize the symptoms, apply a range of therapies. You’ve had low affect for days now.”
    He could not claim he didn’t feel differently, so he said nothing. That was always easier.
    “Look me in the eye.”
    Reluctantly, he did. Somehow it was easier to peer out at the blasted and sunny landscape … though now that he thought of that, it made no real sense. Still—
    Irma leaned forward, took his head in both hands, and looked fiercely into his eyes, shaking his head to get him to focus on her. “Good! Trust me, this is a problem and we both need to work on it. They told us to expect it especially when a subject—”
    “Now I’m a subject?”
    “Okay, a fellow crew member. It’s when people talk about issues without engaging their emotions.”
    “I’m … sorting things out.”
    “Another symptom is lack of expressive gestures, little animation in the face, not much vocal inflection.”
    “Um. Ah. So?”
    “Do you split your feelings away from events?”
    “Not … by design. I’m just trying to hold it together here.”
    “Taking pleasure in real things can help that.”
    “Um.”
    Pleasure. Good idea, quite distant from here …
    He looked out at the ever-bright sunshine that was beginning to weigh on him. The stellar jet cut across the sky, adding its neon glow to the hammering sunlight. They had experienced some darkness here and there on this long “expedition” through the strange, incomprehensibly large Bowl … and in his dreams now, he longed for more darkness. He dreamed of diving into deep waters, where a murky cool leafy world wrapped itself around him. He was always sorry to wake up.
    He was thinking of this when he realized she was deftly pushing his buttons. Her voice turned furry, intimate. Hands stroked, caressed. Pretty clearly she wasn’t being made wanton and reckless by his fabulous magnetism.
    This was therapy. Not that the fact mattered.
    It became a matter of silky moments and building readiness. Then a gliding delight, sweetly enclasped, and a long exultant shudder for both of them. The artful ease lasted him into a sliding sleep.…
    When he woke she took him through some softly worded moments he only later saw were exercises. Irma asked him in her soft, insistent voice to report the lurid dark nightmares he had. She walked him through those, tracing out moments like the rattling wheeze of corpses, the leaden weight of stiff bodies, the sharp acrid stench of rot … and then she asked him to watch her hand weave, left to right to left … a sway of motion that somehow called up calming spirits in him, let him lapse into a silent, quiet place where he could rest and feel and not swirl back down into those tormented whirlpools. She sighed and stayed with him while he sobbed silently, yet at least not alone. And slept again.
    He woke while Irma slept and reflected on good ol’ plain human sex among all this strangeness. Making love worked just fine here. He knew that aliens would have other such modes and they would be odd indeed. Earthside, male honeybee genitals exploded after sex; wasps turned cockroaches into zombie incubators; male scorpion flies produced wads of saliva to feed their mates—a nuptial gift that distracted her front end while her hind