Separatrix Pt. 02 Ch. 06

Chapter Six

So I shuttled down to Mars. I tried to like the Red Planet, I really did, if only to expunge the residual guilt about my savant. But Mars is fundamentally cold and monochromatic and dusty, even in the domed and the underground cities. Yes, Mesopotamia had its share of dirt and sand and mud, but the dust on the Red Planet is that nasty superfine stuff, as bad as the stuff on the Moon, the result of being exposed to the radiation and micro-meteoroids of space for billions of years. It's a strong irritant, low-level toxic. You don't want to get it on your skin or inhale it. Royal pain to keep out of domes and vehicles and suits. And Mesopotamia is the opposite of cold.

Another aspect of visiting Mars that I might charitably call "interesting" or perhaps "idiosyncratic" is the work requirement. The Martian Development Organization, which dominates the culture and controls immigration, doesn't acknowledge tourism. Any visitor is a "candidate immigrant" and is expected to join the work force as part of the grand Martian program to build out, terraform, and populate the planet. I'm a trained and experienced archaeologist, but Mars isn't interested in the past. They'd already done digs of the various probes with remnants still around after centuries on the surface, and the first settlements of the early days that failed, and considered the work done. Unlike Earth, which is obsessed with its past, Mars is all about the future. The immigration officials were as polite as you could ever want, and admired my contribution to historiography, but had no position for me that suited my world-class skills, either the world we were on or the world of the Bronze Age. No cuneiform on Mars.

If you're wondering why Mars was still in pioneer mode after so many centuries-- I get that the Europeans only needed a few hundred years to overrun the Americas--

I got work on a construction site. Most of the human labor on the planet, even after centuries of development, is either working in construction or out homesteading, which is just more construction at a less sophisticated level. And more dangerous. I volunteered to work in a new domed city out towards Tharsis Ridge and was assigned to work on one of the taller buildings.

This was actually fun. I talked the manager and the construction savant into letting me work as a rigger-welder. My job was to climb up the frame with a team of robots to install beams and columns that the drones lifted, and then weld them into the structure. I quickly became one of the top riggers. My extra strength meant I could scoot like a spider up the frame in the reduced Martian gravity. Also, the Martians installed only the minimal points in their brains, barely enough to communicate and control their devices, but of course I had multiple sets integrated into a network way beyond that. Whereas most riggers could only control a single robot, I could easily control four and, if I needed, six of them. The robots were simple industrial equipment, not conscious. Mars was constantly short on savants, which was an Earth tech they resisted. The robots were built like spiders, six-limbed, and I was too. The management insisted I wear a backpack that had two robotic arms that were programmed to grab onto the frame as I climbed, a safety system. So I seemed to have six limbs while I was up there. I didn't think they were necessary, but I didn't mind. They didn't get in the way and they were often useful. Extra limbs.

So I was content. I was working, it was satisfying to see a building grow under my hands, the days passed, and I slept well at night. I didn't try any of the men there. They were okay, but after my experience with the Director, not to mention my prince and warrior, whom I thought about daily and dreamed about at night, they just couldn't compare.

But then I got involved with my roboticist.

Mars is a man's world. They're actually sexist. I know that won't surprise you, but it did me. Earth in my era has sexist cultures, but they swing both ways. No lack of matriarchies. But on Mars, brawn seems to win out over brains much more than it should. Strength still counts in construction, even with powered equipment and robots to do the heavy lifting, even with the gravity being maybe a third of Earth's. Mass is still mass and you have to be careful.

They also have a strange custom. Of course they have in vitro wombs and they do a lot to promote procreation. But the custom is for women to get pregnant naturally and move the fetus to in vitro after several weeks. They publicized something about hormones and enzymes working better that way on Mars, but none of that made sense to me. Or to anyone else not resident on the Red Planet as far as I could read. One fallout is that women are extra protected. I was just a candidate immigrant, not joined to a man, so I could climb, but the woman who maintained and programmed the robots -- yes, they still programmed on Mars-- could only wait at the bottom of the structure and watch. She was young, very smart, and totally in awe of me, of what I had done-- my fame preceded me-- and what I was doing in front of her. And I depended on her. Up a few hundred meters with a couple tons of steel beam swaying next to me, I depended on those robots to do exactly what I told them to do-- which meant I depended on her. I decided she would be my lover.

Already I'd been approached by more than one of the men to join up in some way. I'd refused them all. I could have told myself, and maybe even them, that after my time on Khufu I wanted to take it slowly. They would have accepted that. They didn't like Khufu. But I kept quiet. Really, I just didn't find any of them interesting. It didn't help that their point sets were downright primitive, just enough to operate their various pieces of equipment. Yours are actually much better.

So the roboticist and I spent a lot of time together. It was expected that the only two women on the site would team up. That wasn't news. But when, at the first topping out party, I kissed her on the mouth in front of everybody, that made headlines.

I'd already seduced and conquered her. After our shift we liked to go together to a local bar-restaurant, where we'd eat the drab Martian cuisine and get drunk together-- or rather she would and I'd fake it. She was in love with me. It was love at first sight. I saw it in her eyes when we met. I was everything she wanted to be: free, successful, powerful, running my own life. But she didn't know what to do with such a new emotion. At my urging she talked about herself and her past, something Martians didn't normally do.

"I had this boyfriend. We were going to join. He wanted it right away, but I wasn't ready. I needed something, I don't know what. So I volunteered."

She meant this job. I put a hand on her shoulder. It was the first time we'd touched. It made her shiver a little. "Are you still involved with him?" I knew that young Martians had a complicated social system built around promises to join and levels of intimacy surrounding those pledges, long term stuff that seemed to hold even if they were thousands of kilometers apart for months or years. She just shook her head.

Have you ever had a thought that was so profound that you felt like your head was turning inside out and you had to hold onto something to stay upright? Maybe when you had your idea for the generator? I had a thought like that on that night, with her. I realized that on Mars, at this moment, I was the princess and she was the servant and apprentice. 4500 years and the same themes were playing out. I pinged her. It was the first time I'd tried that on Mars with anyone.

"You're doing that, aren't you?" she responded.

"Good," I answered. Her work with robots required her to have a significantly bigger point set than was considered seemly there. I sent her an image.

She looked off into space. "That's an interesting idea."

I sent her a decision tree of possible places we could discuss the idea alone. The restaurant was noisy and there was always a man with his eyes on us. We soon ended up at the obvious place, the workshop where we stored and maintained the robots. Robotics, I suspect because it didn't require strength-- and in fact added artificially to one's strength and also required more mental communication-- was considered women's work. Our workshop was thus considered women's space and men only showed up to ask a favor, maybe get us to print a part for them, or discuss a scheduling issue. The parallel to the princess's textile workshop was obvious.

We talked at first about the idea I'd sent, an improvement to robot control. I'd become used to being touched from my months in Khufu and missed it. And after my treatment and sexual feast there I was quite horny. The Martian men, I've mentioned, hadn't appealed to me. The Khufuans had told me that there were a couple of outposts of Martians who, despite the considerable cultural pressure, had formed Khufu-style communities, but they were small and far away.

I touched her as we talked. Mars is the opposite of touchy-feely. First I just put my hand on that same shoulder as I'd done briefly at the restaurant, but gradually I became more intimate.

She didn't know what to do about that. She wasn't going to refuse me, but this was not something women did with each other here, at least that was the moral environment. That was okay. It was a moment.

Nothing happened between us then, but after that I owned her. That was how I thought of our relationship. In a way I was channeling Sherua. I was careful not to do it while men were around, but any time we were alone her body was mine. I touched her all over, often lightly, just claiming my territory, her neck, her thighs, places no one ever touched her. Sometimes I massaged her, which she pretended to endure but which I could tell her body craved, even without signals from her points, which Martians always kept shut down between people.

The next step in my conquest-- I was channeling my inner Assyrian-- was to wash her. The dormitories at this site only had public bathrooms, but since we were the only women that bathroom was in reality ours alone. It was simple. One evening after work when I knew she was showering I just walked in, took off my clothes, and joined her under the shower. I ignored her shock, got some soap, and washed her all over. Everywhere. She let me. But she kept her body stiff.

"You know," I said in her ear as I soaped up her small tits, "every man on this site would give his left ball to be in your place right now." She let a smile escape. "Wash me." Which she did, though she avoided my private parts. That was fine.

I saved the best for last. When finally, after going over every other part of her body, I put my hand on her bush-- she had a nice one-- I said, "You're mine."

"I-- I'm not, I mean, I've never been unproductive."

That's not going to make any sense to you but I'd been on Mars long enough to understand perfectly. The word was both a euphemism and a slur. Mars is all about building Mars. And all about making more Martians to live in it and build still more Mars. They still bought into the idea, ridiculous on the face of it to anyone who's ever done it, that sex is meant primarily for reproduction. Sex between members of the same sex was, by their definition, 'unproductive'. Therefore anti-Martian. Therefore wrong.

"Fuck that dust," I answered, and washed her nearly unused pussy, thoroughly exploring it in the process. 'Dust' is the Martian equivalent of 'shit'. Everyone on the planet hated the miserable stuff.

The urge to just kneel down and take her right then and there was nearly irresistible. But I had a plan. I wanted to do it right. I left her naked, wet, and trembling under the water and left. She stayed in the shower, I think scared to come out while I was still there, so I dried off, got dressed, and left.

I'd been urging her to install more points. She was qualified for more but social mores, especially in a new pioneer dome like this, discouraged it. I promised her she wouldn't regret it and when she returned one evening after work and told me she'd had the injection (they still used that primitive method) I immediately took her to the workshop, even though she said that the medical savant had told her to rest. "I am your princess," I told her. I actually used that word. I had her stand in the middle of the workshop's assembly space and undressed her. Just like that. She let me.

She'd studied the debrief of my Bronze Age time, I'm sure one of the few Martians to do that. The report had not explicitly mentioned sexual acts, but I'd left hints, from which one could infer what had happened. She'd asked about it during another restaurant conversation.

I'd explained: "Yes," I told her, "I serviced my princess, and my princess serviced me." I also explained what they considered to be perversion back then, which made no sense to her and led to a lot of questions, which I did my best to also explain.

"And then, then, she, Showa--"

"Sherua. Princess Sherua."

"Sherua. She gave you to the prince? Just like that?"

"She owned me. She could do whatever she wanted."

"And you were okay with that?"

"I didn't have a choice. Anyway, Prince Dagan was delicious."

That word produced wide eyes. Apparently Robot Girl and her boyfriend, or fiancé, or whatever the term was here, hadn't engaged in oral pleasures. Or maybe they had but it hadn't been a pleasure for her.

"My princess was delicious also. And she found me delicious," I added, seeing how that word shocked her. I looked her in the eyes when I said that. She had to look away, a clue that maybe she'd had similar fantasies about me. And perhaps was having them right then. My enhanced cones and rods were picking up something. I watched her and waited for her to return her focus to me. "And you will be at least as delicious as they were," I said. I expected her to turn away again, but she just looked into my eyes and finally I let myself look away, smiling in satisfaction. I owned her, and we both knew it was only a matter of time, and not much of that, before I would take her and enjoy her.

"So, um, Princess, what should I do?" she asked as she stood naked for me in the middle of the assembly space.

I didn't reply. She had to be wondering why I'd gone to the trouble of taking her to the workshop instead of my room, or hers. You may be wondering too. In the silence she heard the robots disconnecting from their maintenance stations. She turned toward them, surprised. I'd already engaged them. One came forward to take her clothes in two of its spider-like appendages and place them folded on a counter. The robots were remarkably dextrous as well as powerful. They had to be to put a beam in place for welding, often to within a millimeter, and then run a weld bead carefully along a joint. Two other robots walked up to us then on four legs. We kept a wide variety of end effectors and I'd had these two attach to their upper two arms the very soft ones used for moving delicate objects and accessories. They stood to her left and right, waiting for my command. As she did.

I touched her front all over, neck, arms, abdomen, hips, but not any erogenous zones. "I really like your body," I said. She was, like most Martians, on the thin side. She was also taller than me, but almost everyone on any planet is. As another throwback policy, Mars didn't do genetic engineering except for the most obvious and damaging defects, so they all took various drugs regularly to maintain their muscle strength and bone density in the low gravity. The drugs tended to make them all a bit skinny.

I liked keeping her just like that, waiting. I just stood there and enjoyed looking at her. I did my best to keep from smiling, to maintain the regal posture my princess had assumed so effortlessly when she was in the mood to use me. But a little smile escaped. Just when she was about to speak I raised my hand to stop her. And still I kept just looking. She prepared to speak again-- with the new points beginning to come online I could see that-- but stopped herself. A good sign. She finally relaxed and just looked back at me. I could see her going through the process. Her new points were coming online. She knew very well what I could do with robots, and she knew I was going to do, to her, whatever it was I wanted to do. She didn't know if she could take it. She didn't know how she could get out of it. She didn't know if she wanted to get out of it. She actually thought, surprising herself, that maybe she wanted to find out how it would change her. She didn't know what she would find out about herself, but she wanted to be changed and she wanted to find out.

I waited for the confusion inside her to subside and then had the robots lift her. They took her by her thighs and back, stabilizing her torso, then raised and rocked her back, making their end effectors into a sort of lounge chair. Of course, they also held her securely so that there was no question of her falling out or even climbing out of this comfortable reclining position.

I stood with my hands on my hips. "Come here," I said, though we both knew she was helpless.

The robots obeyed for her. Under my command they opened her legs and lifted her so her sex was wide open right before me. She was trembling all over. It was a good thing the robots were securely holding her or she might have shaken herself off. I gave her a few moments to comprehend what was going to happen to her and enjoyed the crude, vague pictures that arose in her mind, half fear, half desire. I had the robots move her closer, close enough that she could feel my breath on her.

She struggled. Not against me. Against her body's desire to wrap itself around my head and envelope me. Her conscious mind, I could see, had reached a point, in the onslaught of overwhelming sensations, in which she had lost coherence. I let her body win. The robots allowed her legs to close around my head as I moved to merge my mouth and her sex. Her moans were as delectable as her slit. I had the robots move her hips up and down in a slow rhythm that let me bob my head and fully explore her. I could sense her new points continuing to install themselves in her. Points settle themselves in the prevailing patterns of the brain. I could not think of anything better for a person than to have the points installing themselves while she was experiencing a long, mind-exploding orgasm.

I'm sure you remember. That's what I did for you too. You and I had made love many times before, and I knew you wanted to experience yourself what you'd done to me-- for me-- as well as the other treatment enhancements, so I knew you trusted me to take control. With Robot Girl, it was our first time but we were already connected and I could see what she wanted, to be taken by a lover to the next level.

I let the robots respond and adapt to her as she flailed. I knew she had to let out the incomprehensibly strong emotions going through her, so I let her writhe and jerk and bend, and even had the robots encourage those movements. But through all of it the robots kept her gushing pussy exactly at the best spot on my mouth where I could fully enjoy her lusciousness and fully enjoy the extremely intense orgasms my tongue was forcing her to endure.

After the first wave of orgasms, maybe the first she'd ever had, certainly the best, I had the robots rock her gently while I just held her pussy in my mouth, as much to comfort her that way as to continue stimulating her. She wriggled a bit but it only served to rub her over-sensitized clit over my tongue, so she soon surrendered to just holding still while I continued to press her clit, which still drove a strong erotic current up her spine. Sensing the points self-assembling, it looked like I'd just imprinted her to have a constant, if very small, orgasm all the time. That's just the way she was wired now. Same for you, by the way.

It was an effort getting her back to her room afterwards. I let her nap in the robots' control for a while. When she woke I helped her cover up and then walk back to her room on unsteady legs. We didn't talk. I could feel questions beginning to coalesce way down inside her. But nothing yet was close to verbalization. That was fine. I lay her down on her single bed, undressed her, and put her under the covers. Then I joined her under them and just held her as she fell asleep.

When we woke up together in the morning she was shy and timid, even though we were under her covers, naked, cuddling, in the dark, and of course last night's erotic pleasure was still trickling through her nervous system. I could feel the tiny tingle that she felt. It turned me on also, and of course I was horny. Very horny. And her new points helped my desire reverberate in her.

She tentatively put her hand between my legs. I shared an image of what I wanted and hoped for. She shuddered. "I've never done-- I just-- teach me," she whispered. So I did.

I started with pictures, which she followed. Nipple biting. Rubbing. But we were connected. Soon she opened herself to the pleasure she was giving me and I almost came right then, and so did she, when together we could feel what she was doing to me. It was really so sweet. She put her face between my legs and got her first taste of a woman. I didn't have to do anything after that, just enjoy her. If it's possible to shyly eat pussy, that's how she ate me. But she sincerely wanted to make me happy and I could not have kept my image of coming in her mouth from her if I'd tried. To be the first woman, maybe the first person, to come in this wonderful woman's mouth. She got that desire. She used it to overcome her shyness and focus on the connection we had, the pleasure she gave me, and soon she was sending spikes of ecstasy into me and it was all I could do to contain the screams my lungs tried to force out of me. The dorm walls were thin.

That kiss I gave her in front of the crew at the topping out party? That turned out to be a watershed moment. She'd succeeded where the men had failed. Of course a few of them were appalled to find out they were working with a pair of "unproductives"; and a few others that still harbored the forlorn hope of somehow winning me in spite of my rejections were once again and firmly crushed; but most, to their credit, now viewed Robot Girl with a newfound respect. Strange, no? We were the best robotics team on the site, keeping them on track in an aggressive schedule, but that's what it took.

Robot Girl had a name, by the way. Martians had reverted to that primitive practice. But the crew called us the robot girls, and we even called each other that, a sort of reverse put-down, so why not?

After that party we were on fire. I mean it both professionally and personally. Between us, even with what was still a pretty basic connection, not even what you have with me, we were able to make improvements to the systems that let us overfulfill our quota every shift. During their Touchdown Day holiday-- the anniversary of the first human colonial landing, nothing to do with that weird sport you like to watch-- we were entered by the manager in a climbing race, one of a series of more or less athletic events, all organized around the idea of building Mars. We competed with various robot teams from around the crater city to get to the top of the tallest tower, one of the six around the middle that supported the giant dome. We won a titanium medal! I was so proud. Iron is top on Mars, equivalent to gold on Earth. Titanium is equivalent to silver, aluminum to bronze-- the metals the Martian civilization is being built on. It was super fun. And the view from the top was spectacular, even better than the view of the Khufu habitat from the microgravity suite. The dome stretched on and on. The story made the news media all over the planet, that the famous visiting Historian was working so hard to help build Mars and had so completely embraced their culture. No mention, of course, of who I was embracing in her narrow bed each night.

She also shared with me something she maybe considered more personal than her body: it turned out she was a secret artist. Art in pioneer cultures is always considered secondary to whatever the pioneer culture's priority is, and in the service of that priority. Robot Girl, down deep, wanted to make art just to make art. But again she didn't know what to do with that desire, except to pour over histories and virtual tours from Earth. She'd taken some Earth-based distance learning courses-- maybe in the process setting a distance record-- so was basically self-taught. A single glance told me she had talent. No matter what she drew-- she did it all by hand in true Martian style, no savant interpreting for her-- the composition was always just right.

"You're very talented," I told her. I think I was the first person she'd ever shown her art to.

"No, no, I'm no good at all," she protested. Her shyness about her art was even beyond her shyness about having sex with a woman. But I could see that deep down her art spoke to her and she was thrilled that it spoke to me too.

"Let's make love," I replied. "I want a true artist to make love to me."

We went to the workshop, which had become our private place, locked the door, undressed each other, and used the robots. Robots make awesome sex toys. I wish the robots of your time were good enough, I'd show you. I really liked what I called Around the World. I would have the robots slowly rotate her, heels over head, while I enjoyed licking and rubbing whatever I wanted. Drove her insane. Or we'd each ride two robots and have them put us in whatever position we wanted. Sixty-nining in midair, slowly spinning together, was a fave. I liked it better even than the zero-g sex.

All of these transgressive acts-- sex with another woman, sex with another woman using robots, sex with another woman using robots in a non-personal space when the whole crew knew what we were doing in there-- were shocking enough to her, especially when she realized there would be no penalty-- we were the opposite of "unproductive"-- but most shocking to her was a small expedition I convinced her to go on with me, an art expedition.

We went out one night, leading our four robots, to outside the border of our building site, which was a temporary wall, much like the ones you see around here. In the Bronze Age they did the same but wove them out of straw. Some things are eternal. The construction site wall was as dull as could be, covered with warnings and official statements. I'd been sending her images of what I saw when I was climbing, the new city under construction and growing, that spectacular view from the dome pillar, and she was turning them into some really nice landscapes. We'd armed, if that's the word, our robots with sprayers and big tanks of ink, and before the dawn had arrived we'd transformed that wall into a long mural of crater city. Not just the construction as it was now. She'd used her considerable imaginative powers to show the city as it would be, the dome glowing in Mars' weak sun, parks and shining apartment buildings and factories, a dream of the future. Kind of time traveling through art.

The site managers weren't pleased. We'd painted over the warnings and the leadership banners they'd put all over. But the rest of the city was thrilled and came out in droves to view it. She was suddenly famous.

# # #

After the mural publicity, she received multiple offers to compose other murals on all sorts of structures all over the colony. I became her assistant, believe it or not. She was granted a pair of old robots that we (mostly she) refurbished and upgraded. She upgraded herself, too, installing more points so she could control the robots on her own. She became nearly as skilled as I was, and with her artistic talent she had both robots painting together what she visualized in her mind. It was, in some ways, a new art form, at least for Mars. I was very proud of her.

I looked into extending my stay for a while and returning on the next cycler. But Mars is strict about "candidate immigrants", as they insisted on calling us tourists. If I'd missed the Rud Kami, the sister ship of the Blau Kami, I would have had to stay until the next Martian season, which meant re-upping to "probationary citizen", with stricter limitations on rolls and behavior. Not what I wanted at all.

And definitely not what the Org wanted. Their updates had become more detailed. They'd located an anomaly, perhaps the bud of a new separatrix, in the Modern Age. That would be worth investigating in itself, to have a Historian witness the birth of one for the first time. Plus, some of the savants analyzing it were sounding alarms. They didn't understand it. Their internal models did not predict it. And your Modern Age, for all its deficiencies and mistakes, is at the root of the time stream my era is built on. No one, either human or savant, wanted to think about what would happen to us if we were cut off by this new separatrix, disconnected from the main stream.

They considered the question existential, as did the human experts. So did I, and I saw the Org's selection of me as the investigative Historian as a big vote of confidence after what I'd been through. And I was far from ready to give up time travel, even for Robot Girl.

I took the Rud Kami back to Earth. Like the Blau, it was a giant hab, basically a luxury liner. All habs contain their own weather system, but Rud Kami had a volume so big it had a tropical environment at one end and a snowy mountain range at the other. You could have almost fit the entire Khufu asteroid inside it. Everyone else on board seemed to think they'd rocketed up to heaven, especially after several months of work parties and red dust. But I was restless. I missed Robot Girl. Not just the sex. We'd become a team. The other travelers on the Rud Kami spent the five months relaxing and exploring the hab. I spent the time studying your era and physically training for the superposition the Org was scheduling for me as soon as I returned to Earth.

And did I mention I was horny?

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My thanks to my beta readers, @AlexFourways, @MormonJack, and @shelleycat1.