Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

At the entrance to the Velvet Stretch, Laki turned off the music. She pressed her palm to the thin wall of her pod to register herself with the concierge. As she waited for him to complete his procedures, images of lovers she had rendezvoused with started to flash through her mind. She remembered the sweetness of her sessions with Pemfi, the hilarity of hanging out with Benko, and one heart-stopping moment she’d had with Asla. She could hear Se-se’s nagging scorn ringing in her ears—“Do they even have marriage belts to offer, Laki?”

She responded to the concierge’s questions absentmindedly, grinning at the memory of her usual entrance into the Velvet Stretch. Were it a normal visit with a rendezvous awaiting her, she wouldn’t be standing there, half listening to the concierge; she’d be flat-out ignoring him, crawling around her pod in search of props to enliven her rendezvous.

“No rendezvous,” she told the concierge while in her mind she was remembering placing peacock feathers, a pouch of honey, and a latex strap on the floor of her pod.

He slid his fingers over his data machine. “You only have clearance for the rendezvous-less zone. You must return to the concierge’s desk if you wish to enter another level.”

Laki indicated her consent with the tap of her finger, then turned away. Everything else the concierge said was useless to her. He cleared her entrance, and she plunged into the Velvet Stretch.

Savoring the freedom of flight, she went flitting through the rendezvous-less zone. Even though the Velvet Stretch was all about connection, she steered clear of other pods. She didn’t need a date or even a momentary flirt, she needed a private, remote area for her party.

It had been quite some time since she had searched the Velvet Stretch for anything. Amongst her friends, she acted as if she harbored the same appetites that had defined her pre-maturation stage, but the truth was she had changed. She could no longer sustain the intense curiosity of her early days when she had roamed the Stretch, electrified by her quest to find a sexy someone whose love was so intense that being together would feel like a desperation, a feverish need.

Her identity was so twisted up in her reputation that she didn’t know how to embrace a new facet of her personality. She had spent so much time orchestrating fantastic episodes full of intrigue and mind-blowing carnal consummation that solitude seemed like a foreign language. Who would she be if not voracious and doggedly determined to create magical encounters?

Yet somehow the allure of the Velvet Stretch had faded. Gorging on pleasure and emotional intimacies began to tire, rather than excite, her. While pursuing her fantasies, she’d mysteriously transformed into a woman more interested in the workings of her own brain than the mysteries of a stranger’s heart.

Laki found a lone star bar with a dim yellow glow. She lodged her pod right next to it, squinting before turning away from its glow. The way that it seductively illuminated her skin told Laki that it was the perfect location for the evening’s festivities. She checked the time module, then cursed softly. She realized too late that she hadn’t specified a time in the invitations—it could be hours before the first guest arrived.

She felt the silence of the Stretch invade her pod. If you weren’t hopped up on adrenaline, or some other intoxicant, and distracted by your frantic search for a rendezvous, you would immediately notice the Velvet Stretch’s profound lack of sound. The depth of its silence was stunning, yet it had taken Laki years to notice it. She had been too focused on the pods of strangers, and the anatomy of the people ensconced within them, to take note of the majestic expanse of deep space. Now, she was older and irritatingly aware that she was just a noisy little fleck in an infinite field of silence. The loudest thing in the vicinity was her thoughts, thoughts she had come to the Stretch to escape.

She sat on the floor and flicked the sound module on. Instead of hearing the song she had just mixed, she heard a deep voice say, “Let’s do this by starlight.” Her back stiffened. A heat sparked in her chest and shot straight down into her pelvis. She looked around, but no one was there. The voice repeated:

“Let’s do this by starlight.”

“Fogo,” she whispered, remembering the owner of that voice—the last rendezvous she had had in the Stretch and, quite possibly, the last rendezvous she would ever have.

She touched her waist, running her fingers over the concealed marriage belt, then leapt up to examine the sound module. She didn’t remember making a recording that night, and she couldn’t understand why his voice was filling her pod now. She vibrated her fingers in front of the sound module, commanding it to spin Fogo’s voice into a faster loop. She rubbed one hand over her body, guiding it downward to grasp between her legs as Fogo invited her to do it by starlight over and over again. With the other hand, she added the sound of dripping water to the background and mixed in her favorite song—a love-laced anthem by Mahini.

A soft smile spread across Laki’s face. She no longer felt engulfed by the Stretch, not while lust was tingling through her and enfolding her in its embrace. She lay back on the floor and stretched out her limbs. She watched the twinkling lights around her as she ran her hands over her skin, stopping to apply extra pressure here or added caresses there. Singing along with Mahini, she shrouded herself in arousal and buried time with repeated, focused strokes.

Time had long since abdicated to pleasure when Laki felt her pod rock. Disoriented, she sat up and looked around. Her surprise melted into delight when she saw that her friend Zaha had arrived. Laki scrambled to her feet without remembering that her cloth was hiked up over her hips and hanging open. With a rueful grin, Laki fixed her cloth.

As her pod fused with Laki’s, Zaha shook her head. “You’re so predictable,” she said into the hole that was opening between their pods.

Laki pushed her hands into a pocket in the wall of her pod. She felt the cool wetness of the disinfectant splatter against her hands, then she felt heat as her hands were dried. When the hole between their pods was large enough, Laki ran over to Zaha and embraced her.

“You’re predictable too, you know. I knew you’d be the first to come.”

“So that little show was for me?”

“Yes, consider me your maturation welcome committee.” Laki bowed with a mischievous grin.

Zaha laughed. “Last day! And you’re up here making jokes and playing with yourself. I thought you were going to be a mess.”

“I am a mess; why do you think I was half-naked on the floor? It’s the only cure for panic that I’ve ever known.”

“Well I hope they’re open-minded in your mother-unit, you can’t…”

Laki held up her fingers to silence Zaha.

“At this party, we will not speak those words. We’ll pretend that I have no date with the veil tomorrow and that you won’t have to give everything up in…” Laki paused and looked at Zaha. “I forget. How many days do you have left?”

“Well…” Zaha said, and theatrically pointed to the top of her pod. Laki looked up and saw a thin silver marriage belt hanging there.

“You’re saved!” Laki yelled. They both squealed. Laki hugged Zaha, but she froze when she looked at the belt again. Her arms dropped away from Zaha, and she fell silent.

“What’s wrong?”

“No, nothing. I’m sorry.” Laki stumbled over her words as she stepped closer to examine the belt. “That looks like my friend Pemfi’s belt.”

“Pemfi’s? It is. You know him?”

Laki nodded, but offered no explanation. She was, she knew, an idiot in so many people’s minds. Her friends, her lovers, and especially her sister Se-se thought she was sacrificing herself for no good reason. She didn’t know what Zaha would think if she knew how many marriage belts Laki had turned down, if she knew that the last time Laki had seen Pemfi’s marriage belt, he was holding it out to her with trembling hands and she was shaking her head, telling him, “I can’t.”