Chapter 14: Saturday, Night

(zero-G dancing, drug use, zero-G ff, rom)

I got to the suite just as Botilda was going in, and we didn't get the door closed before Rashida showed up.

"You ready to jee-up 'till you burn?" the somewhat sweaty-looking dark Monroe asked.

Botilda started laughing, and couldn't seem to stop. I was entranced by the musical quality of my lover's laughter. Rashida rolled her eyes, but then she looked at me as if studying my body.

"You're not really wearing a see-through scarf, are you?" she asked, "'Cause I don't think that's allowed, unless it's the 'shrooms or PLeaSe-D."

By this time they were both peeling out of their costumes, as they would just be too hot for hours of raving. At one point, we were all three naked at the same time, and I just floated there, blinking. These two women are just too damned beautiful to look at when they're both naked and I'm rolling.

"Hey," Botilda chirped, "why don't we all shower together. We need it, and it'll be faster than taking turns."

I thought this was the best idea I'd heard all day. I was really wanting some excuse to get my hands on Rashida. It wasn't so much horniness, really. Well OK a little bit, but mostly I just wanted to feel her skin and keep looking at her. That blonde pubic hair really shone out against her skin. If I'd been on PLeaSe-D, I'd've thought it was part of the trip.

Rashida looked at us, and seemed to hesitate. After almost a full minute she said, "OK, I'll shower with you. But if you're thinking threesome, you can forget it. I already tried a girl, and I just don't swing that way."

Fair enough. I didn't really want to DO her so much as I just wanted to TOUCH her.

We climbed into the shower, a prettier and slightly larger version of what I'd already experienced in the locker room. The water felt great, of course, and soon the three of us were wet and soapy. My own skin felt wonderful, and I knew that Botilda's or Rashida's would feel even better. But Rashida made no move to touch either of us, and after what she'd said it didn't seem respectful to touch her, nor to touch each other in front of her. Sure, we brushed against each other from time to time, and I loved that, and I knew they did too. But I made sure not to exaggerate this, and they seemed to be careful, too.

"Could one of you wash my back?" the hot blonde asked.

"I'll do it!" Botilda and I said together.

The three of us started laughing, Botilda almost uncontrollably so. Rashida turned herself around to look at us.

"I said 'wash my back, '" she pointed out, "not 'make hot soapy love to me.' So as long as you keep it to my back and above my ass, go for it, both of you."

We went for it, both of us. That woman had the cleanest back in cislunar space by the time we were done, and then of course Botilda needed her back washed. I did let my hands drift to her ass, but didn't go for the front.

Then it was my turn. I felt hands glide over my cheeks, and I don't mean the ones on my face. That was Botilda; I recognized her touch. Rashida was making sure my back was as clean as hers, and then, just like that, we were back to rinsing ourselves off, not touching each other any more than we could help.

We floated out of the shower and each dried off. Rashida kept looking at us, and we kept looking at each other. The sexual tension was thick enough to cut with Darth Vader's light saber, and one of us was going to have to say something. Maybe it's because of my Program experience, but I was the one to acknowledge what all three of us knew.

"Look," I said, "all three of us are about ten centimetres from coming. Now I don't know about you two, but I'm gonna jill myself before I go out there and mix with all those people. I can go back into the shower if you don't want to see it."

"I wanna see it," Botilda offered. Big surprise there.

"You know," Rashida murmured, "I need it too. Why don't we all do it right here? If Anzu can fuck Bret right in front of everybody, I can handle jilling myself in front of you two."

So we did. We formed ourselves into a sort of triangle, and as each of us fingered herself, I felt like we were family, but not family, because family isn't supposed to be sexual together, but something like that. It was like a sort of love, sexual but more tender than it was sexual, even though we were fingering our pussies together. Some of that was the X3, but some of it was just the sweet sharing of something as intimate as masturbation.

Rashida came, and then I did, and Botilda started before I was finished. Rashida seemed satisfied at this point, and calmly watched as my lover and I each jilled ourselves to another, and another after that.

We laughed then, and as they put on their dancing clothes I thought about how sweet sexuality is, and how we seem to want to make it dirty. Why? How can anything so wonderful, and so bonding, and so much fun be a bad thing? It isn't bad. In fact it's one of the purest expressions of goodness a person is likely to experience.

I had been putting my homers on: one on each fingernail, one on each toenail, all set to strobe. The fireflies were each the size of a grain of rice (long-grain rice, but still), and there were two for each homer. They would fly around me, set to pulse in alternating colors, always maintaining a half metre separation from the homers. If I moved my hand or foot too fast for them to keep up, they would close the distance as quickly as possible. By moving just right, I could create a light show that would give pleasure to those watching. In addition to the homers and fireflies, though, I was going to attach lights to my body. My two friends were also using lights tonight.

Botilda placed non-lit homers on several parts of her body, and she had at least fifty fireflies to go with them. She was going to be surrounded with a small cloud of them. She also put a white strobe in her mouth and a pair of earrings which would change colors and pulse with the music.

Rashida used no homers or fireflies at all, but she did have the same sort of earrings and a metre-long string with a light-stick on each end. I'd seen Rashida light-string all of once, and she's good.

I waited for Botilda and Rashida to finish attaching their own lights before I spoke. "'Tilda," I asked, "would you attach the lights to my chakra?"

"Gotcha," she giggled, "so spread 'em."

I spread my legs wide and smiled as she attached the tiny light, same size as a firefly, directly between my vagina and anus. This light I would soon program to glow red. The next was placed about halfway between my navel and my clitoris, and would glow orange. The next was between my naval and breasts, and its glow would be yellow. The next was between the breasts themselves, a bit high, and would be green. Finally, one was placed between my eyebrows and another directly on the top of my head, facing up. These two would glow blue and violet, respectively.

Now if you were paying attention Wednesday, then you might remember that these chakra and colors are also associated with the frame drum strokes of, from bottom to top, ka, daum, tak, brush, and mwam (there's one for the chakra between the eyes, too, but I didn't cover that). They are also associated with the elements earth, water, fire, air, and space. The one betwixt the eyes is associated with "will," for all that this has never seemed like an "element" to me.

I used my cell to set each to its correct color, and I also programmed them to pulse in time with the music.

"There," the gorgeous Orin cooed when she was finished, "you're all set to shine tonight. But you're showing some stubble; you might wanna renew the shave."

I'd forgotten all about that. I smiled at Botilda. "Wanna shave my coochi, hot stuff?"

"You betcha!"

We quickly located the extra razor I'd brought. Rashida leaned in close, though why it was so interesting to her I don't know. I thought I was going to cum again when Botilda spread the cream on me and started shaving. Every stroke sent chills up my spine, and the hot wet washcloth made my whole body seem to pulse like my fireflies were about to.

Rashida made one last comment before we left the room. "That was, like, utterly cool, you know?"

Botilda was in silver short shorts with matching T-shirt, spaghetti straps, and Rashida's shorts and sleeveless T-shirt were the exact color of her hair. But as hot as they both looked, it was (surprise!) the naked woman who got the most attention as we headed to the Planets Ballroom. We were running late and had to stop at the three-quarter G level and wait another several minutes for it to arrive.

The Planets Ballroom is an enormous elevator. Over the course of an hour the entire 2,400 square metre ballroom would move from the full-G level to the zero-G level. It would immediately start moving back to full-G. This would be repeated eight times over the eight hours that the rave would last. As the Constellation is only fifteen hundred metres in diameter (meaning only 750 metres radius) the trip is so slow that there is no appreciable Coriolis effect. This ballroom was a technical marvel and had only been added nine years ago. Seventeen other hotel ships had them now, but the Planets Ballroom is the original.

We entered the dance space and the music hit with a physical force. The music at a rave is loud, and is strongly rhythmic, sometimes with one than one rhythm playing at a time. A tempo of two hundred beats per minute is common, and four hundred isn't that unusual. Dancing to this music can involve intricate steps with different parts of the body moving to different rhythms and several light-producing devices coordinated in a fantastic whole, or you can simply wave your arms in the air. Me, I basically do veegeewushu moves while keeping to the main beat. As I've said before: I'm only a passable dancer, but I can hold one beat.

Right away we started dancing. There were some people hopping up and down already, but that wouldn't be a major feature of the dancing until we go down to a quarter G. I could see a lot of fireflies, and some light-stringers were making arcs of light that swerved and curved and brought faces briefly to light. I was entranced by all the colors, the movement, and the music.

Botilda and I started forms where we punched and kicked past each other, never hitting of course. Like me, she can hold one beat. Of course, with all those fast movements, our fireflies were streaking like mad to keep up, and my twenty were mixing with her fifty or more (I later found out it was fifty-seven). In the semi-darkness of the room they left trails of light behind, trails that changed in color, intensity, and location. Her earrings were keeping to one rhythm, but we were moving our bodies to another one. Soon, one song blended into another, and now our bodies and lights kept the same beat, but as I looked at Rashida, she was keeping two with her body and another with her head.

"Holy shit, are you naked!?"

"As a jaybird," I answered, turning around to see who it was: a boy of about fourteen, a strobe in his mouth and a row of lights across his forehead, each a separate color. He was wearing the standard shorts and T-shirt, with a Martha's Igloo logo.

"So is this some promotion," he asked, "or a Program thing, or what?"

"Program thing," I answered, still dancing.

"I hope I'm as cool about it when it's my turn," he said, shaking his head.

Botilda made herself known at this point. "If Anzu here were any cooler, she'd have icicles hanging from her nipples."

He seemed to give Botilda as much of the eye as he had me. Can't say as I blame him, though. About that time Rashida stepped over and started dancing with Botilda. Glowsticks and fireflies shared airspace and strings somehow crossed without tangling. Suddenly, Rashida's sticks were strobing instead of just glowing, so that instead of being surrounded by arcs of light, she and Botilda were surrounded by bars of light in curving formation. Botilda kicked a leg high into the air, held it, and the sticks went back to a steady, blue glow as they swooped around and interacted with my lover's upright leg. Strings wrapped and unwrapped while fireflies swarmed about and dodged sticks.

Botilda put her leg back down, threw some open-hand chops to either side of Rashida's head, and then the two women parted, Botilda continuing her veegeewushu moves and Rashida hopping into the air and swooping sticks beneath her feet, or bending at the waist to spin them behind her back. And all the time, she kept to the main beat.

"Wow, she's good!" the boy shouted, shouting being the only way to be heard over the music. "I think she's better than Ricky Owodu."

I frowned. It's considered bad form to say that one light dancer is "better than" another. Rave culture isn't about competition, and dancing in particular is about giving pleasure to others, not about beating others. It wouldn't just bother Owodu to have heard that comment; it would have bothered Rashida. She put considerable effort into being better, but better than she used to be, not better than somebody else.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for competition, in its place. I mean hell; I'm on the spoccer team, right? That's all about competition, except that it's also about teamwork. And veegeewushu; that's even more about competition. And make no mistake: I like to win and I don't like to lose. It's just that a rave isn't the place for that sort of thing. That's why a passable dancer like me can enjoy shaking her ass and throwing kicks, even if she's dancing next to Rashida the Lightstringing Wonder.

"What'd I do?" the boy asked.

"You said one dancer was better than another," I pointed out, "that's not really..."

"Omigod that's right!" He seemed genuinely contrite. "Sorry, I'm new to this."

"That's OK," I told him. "PURL."

"PURL," he nodded, and then we danced together, Botilda soon joining in.

PURL is kind of the raver code of conduct. It stands for Peace, Unity, Respect, Love. In your time it was called PLUR, and it's not that different from the hippy maxim of Peace, Love, and Understanding from the 1960s. For that matter, it isn't too far away from the teachings of Jesus or several other religious founders. Peace, Unity, Respect, Love. If you have these four, how can you wrong another?

The boy eventually wandered off, and by the time we were weightless I'd lost track of Rashida. I'd even lost site of Botilda for a few minutes, but then she was right there, swinging a foot over my head and blocking a dozen punches. But again, our moves were timed to the music, and we were dancing, not fighting.

We were at about a tenth G as the Planets Ballroom was on its way back down, when somebody asked if he could touch me. This is a pretty common request at a rave, because so many people are on X3 and touching skin feels wonderful when you're rolling. Being touched is great stuff too, so I said yes. This wasn't like a Reasonable Request; it wasn't a sex thing; it was just somebody asking to touch me.

He ran his fingers up my legs, over my hips, across my belly and between my breasts, up over my shoulders, and down my back, taking his fingertips off of me just as he got to my butt. It felt so good! I'd done this before, of course, but it had always been limited to short strokes on arms, legs, or face. This had just gone on and on and on, without any interruption because of clothing. Yes, he had touched my breasts, but just a little with his fingertips, on the inside, and he hadn't tried to squeeze or go for the nipples. It was sensual without being sexual.

By the time we reached full G, an hour later, two other people had touched me, and I'd touched one of them back. Neither of them tried anything sexual, and neither did I. I was starting to think about maybe doing something sexual with Botilda, but in private, not here.

But for now I just wanted to dance, and by God I did. I also drank plenty of water, because you sweat buckets dancing like mad for hours in a crowded room. One problem with the ecstasy of your day is that it sort of turns off the body's sense of thirst, so you can lose track of how much water your body is losing, forget to drink, and become dehydrated. This doesn't happen with X3, though. I felt thirsty and I drank water.

The ballroom started back up again, and Rashida relocated us about the time we got to 0.1 G. She was standing on one hand and spinning her sticks with her feet. I don't know how; she still had her shoes on so she wasn't using her toes. She switched to her free hand and spun them around her legs from time to time. Then she tossed them into the air, used both arms to propel herself upwards, and caught them, still spinning, with one hand as she did slow flips on the way down.

A lot of people were up in the air and flipping or spinning or cartwheeling. Botilda and I were in the air and in a sitting position. She put her feet on mine and, holding hands which we waved to the beat, she did a wide split, taking my bare feet with her. Our crotches almost touched, the pulsing red light between my legs reflecting off of her silver shorts. Just before we hit the ground we separated, and then we were dancing next to each other, but not with each other.

And to show how much a raver appreciates a good light show, please note that Rashida got more attention than the naked one did, and that I myself received nearly as many comments on my lighting scheme as I did on my nudity. Almost.

Before long we were back at zero-G, and the floor was less crowded because of all the people in the air. We'd been at this for three hours, and I was getting tired. Also, I was just overwhelmed with the sheer beauty of ... everything. It's hard to explain, but, well, you know how sometimes a guy will be in love with a girl who's a little bit pretty, but when he looks at her she's this utter knockout? When he tells her, "you're beautiful," he's not just being nice. This is called "love goggles," and when you're on X3, you look at everything through love goggles.

That goes for the music, too. The hard-driving, rhythm-based loud music of a rave is sometimes too much in any other setting, but here I was just drawing energy from it. This happens every time, whether I'm using psychtives or not. But with X3, it gets a bit overwhelming. Also, I think the nudity was adding to things.

Botilda and Rashida drifted over to me and Botilda put her head next to mine. "I think it might be time to hit the chill-out room."

"I agree," I told her, "Anybody know where it is?"

"Waitaminnit," Rashida shouted, "Surely there's some old movie that works for chill-out. Some psychedelic thing from the 1960s or something?"

Botilda and I grinned at each other, and then we grinned bigger, because each of us knew what the other one was thinking. We said it together, "Faaaaaan-tasia!"

We could have picked a lot of movies: Head, or maybe Hair, or even I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! would have been fine choices. Barbarella was pretty trippy. But while those were good tripping movies, none of them were really good chill-out movies, and Fantasia is. Funny thing is, it wasn't from the 1960s. Fantasia hit theaters in 1940, years before LSD was even synthesized and before the use of 'shrooms or other psychedelics became popular outside of shamanism. Even marijuana, while it was in use, wasn't well known or accepted outside of specific subcultures.

We floated out of the Planets Ballroom and took an elevator to the full-G level. We soon found a room that was being used as a theater. This was the sort of room where Rashida had seen Star Wars. Each of these rooms held twelve people, and would be cycling through any of a dozen or more movies. Holly-Kon is, after all, a convention dedicated to old movies, and since everybody has their favorites, there have to be a lot of these rooms, and it's best if they serve a smaller crowd. While it would of course be possible to show movies on people's cells, there is an effort to recapture the Twentieth Century theater-going experience, the use of many small Cinema Rooms was the chosen solution.

They did cheat some, though: each room had four rows of three, and the walls and ceiling were all very modern screens. These acted to make the four by five metre room with the five metre high ceiling seem like a much larger venue, usually Grauman's Chinese Theatre or Grauman's Egyptian Theater. The wall screens would show a packed theater, and the sound was remastered to sound as if it were also in a huge venue like Grauman's Chinese or something similar. There was even a little "audience noise" mixed in, though the crying babies, obnoxious hecklers, and fighting couples were always missing (thank God and Vishnu). Some Cinema Rooms were made up as drive-in theaters, with three reproduction cars per room and the wall screens displaying the appropriate views. These were slightly larger rooms, and you could choose the car you wanted from a menu.