The Pearl (Galactic Jewels Book 1) (4 page)

At the blank gray doors to the simulation room—boring as hell when a sim wasn’t deployed—Fransín keyed the code and activated her sim. The doors transformed into glowing opaque glass slabs, hinting at the fascinating world beyond. Fransín pulled me tight against her side and grinned. “Are you ready?”

I got caught up in the brightness in her eyes, our reflections in the glass doors, the vibration of the music against my feet as it curled beneath the doors like fog. This was our last night together as single women.

We pressed our palms to the glass and the doors receded, opening up another world. She’d brought the galaxies inside, swirling the ceiling and walls with explosions of purples and oranges and blues amid glittering stars. Hundreds of dancers crowded the space, stretching to infinity and gliding across the magical backdrop. My favorite scents ruled the air, sweet Pai apples and Tyrill peppermint mingled with the tang of my favorite aftershave—one made famous by a Samarian Emperor that made my heart race.

Music drenched us and the beat controlled my body. We danced our way onto the floor, shimmying against the sim dancers who were in full swing. Sims didn’t have names, and their faces were blurred features that Fransín hadn’t bothered to waste time creating. We didn’t need dancers with features, we needed dancers who could
groove.
She’d built them off a Lyrica template, giving them gaunt, bendy bodies that pulsed with the music, their bodies swelling and shifting with each beat.
 

Girls and guys accepted us without question, all a part of the sim and how Fransín had designed their reactions. Here we could be anyone. No rules. No judgment. Here, we could give into the beats, the motions, the dancers with nothing to fear and a promise of complete safety. My hips wiggled and gyrated, hands moved across my belly as another note of the pounding music.

She’d made the ultimate playlist for us—sexy, sensual beats impossible to resist. Wallflowers didn’t exist in her sim; they needed walls and she’d designed the club without a single one. An endless dance floor continued to infinitum, packed with epic dancers leading us through song after song of pulsating encores. I danced with boys, girls, Fransín, multiple partners. This was a safe zone and signals couldn’t be misinterpreted here. Here we could simply be dancers, not targets, not flirts, not sluts. Here we were not the pearl and her consort, beings held to a higher standard of behavior where rules and judgements held the weight of the universe, here she’d built into the sim all the judgement-free zone a girl could want.

Tonight existed for nothing more than dancing. And I wanted to dance. We all wanted to dance.

I pressed my body into Fransín’s as we rotated our hips and waved our arms in the air, moving in sync to the beat. Joy and friendship entwined around us and language became unnecessary. At the end of the Samarian presentation, there would be less than one week of deliberation afforded me before I made the final announcement. Our time together had ended. I put my hand on her belly and swung us in a wide circle, dragging my fingers down the underside of her raised arm. She twirled away from me, spinning in a frantic circle as the music built in a crescendo.

Bodies moved between us, holding us apart, then swinging us together. We laughed and swayed, fingers barely touching as we bent toward each other like tall, willowy Tipper trees. Partners drew us away, moving us across the dance floor, arcing closer, then apart. The dance became a story and I opened my heart to it, acknowledging the coming space as well as all our years of closeness.

We laughed. We cried. We drank.

Stumbling, we half-carried each other up the ramp to the bar for refills. I laughed and clung to her while another dancer held my elbow.
 

We leaned on the bar, gasping for breath as the bartender handed us our champagne blitzbombs—a drink I’d found in the archives and we’d tested, along with dozens of others. Blitzbombs were sustainable; enough buzz to keep us tipsy and silly, not enough to give us crushing hangovers in the morning.

“Ready for your birthday surprise?” She asked, laughing.

I swallowed a large mouthful of the bubbly drink, sending a tingle of fizz up my nose. “This isn’t it?”

She grinned devilishly. “Not quite.”

I drained the glass and set it down, then stretched forward like a runner awaiting the starting shot. “Ready!”

She pushed drinks and empty glasses out of the way, making a space, then swiped her hand over the emptiness, illuminating a console beneath her fingers. Winking, she entered another sequence and snapped her fingers together, extinguishing the console. “You’re welcome,” she shouted above the music. I waited, but nothing extraordinary or obvious changed. Or at least, not enough to notice from behind the haze of blitzbombs.
 

She pointed toward the dance floor.

Gyrating bodies morphed as her command into the simulation generated new dancers. Their bodies shapes stayed static, no longer pulsing to the music, shrinking a few inches from the willowy Lyrical template. Sinewy musculature filled out the sims short stature, allowing them to move with a startling grace—like ballet dancers we’d seen in the archives. Thick locks flowed to the middle of their backs, undulating like waves to the music’s beat, extending their beauty. Indistinct round placeholders that had sufficed for eyes sank backward and became sockets; almond-shaped eyes appeared in the voids, hooded with eyelids and long, curving lashes. More dark lines became full lips and mouths, delicate ears peeked from beneath fine hair.

They were beautiful.

And unmistakably human.

Tears sprang to my eyes, touched at the amount of work she must have put into this; details like these took days. “You made human boys?” I laughed.

“I tried. Did I get close?” She watched for my reaction, breath held and nervously chewing her bottom lip. The gift of what she’d attempted was huge. Gratitude swelled in my chest. As the last human, I’d long-ago given up finding another of my own species, eagerly adjusting to all the galaxies offered. And yeah, okay, at times I’d wondered if a human would have matched me.

I didn’t get hung up on it though. Hardly anyone mated within their own race; too many variables existed now. The universe was the ultimate smorgasbord of delicacies to satisfy any palate. Fransín’s love for dance and music made her partial to the Lyrica galaxy, men and women who communicated, fed on, and pooped music. I’d had my obligatory time with their representative, but their views had been lost on me. Boredom reigned within the first five minutes of listening to their musical language. I’d had a lovely evening, but no different than lying in my bunk zoning out to tunes. Fransín would have spent the entire time in an orgasmic state.

I adored that about the time we lived in. Everyone got what they needed. If you weren’t hanging out with beings who spoke your love language and getting your emotional well filled day after day, that was your own fault. Finding your perfect tribe who not only
got
you, but wanted you every bit as you wanted them was too easy to pass up. As the pearl, I’d make it easier and better and more rewarding. On my watch, everyone was going to have what they craved at the tips of their fingers.

I looked again at Fransín’s version of humans. She’d clearly started with me as the model, mashed against what we had in the database of the final generation of human males before they died out. I’d met two when I’d been younger and these held shadows of what I remembered, at least anatomically. There were still things she’d missed, probably because she’d run out of time. “They’re perfect. Thank you.”

She’d made up for what she’d gotten wrong with a few modifications, the wide hands and stubby fingers piquing my curiosity. “The better to cup things with,” she said, leaning in to comment as she watched me catalogue her edits.

“Yes.” I drew her against me, grateful not only for the gift, but for her creative genius. I wanted tonight to last forever. Leaning into her, I pressed my lips to her temple. “I can see that.”

One turned and danced toward us, his hooded eyes dark with larger-than-normal pupils dilated to turn his eyes nearly black. “The better to see things with,” she whispered, winked, then twirled away to intercept a trio of dancers—two girls and a guy.

The music shifted to a slow ballad and his body adapted instantly, drawing me to him and rotating us around the dance floor, our bodies melting together as we twirled. Songs turned into another without pause and he traded me from one set of hands to another. Her human sims were both male and female, all created to be dancers, all lovingly crafted to give me Fransín’s gift tonight. I pressed my chest against a woman’s while her fingers traversed the length of my legs, then up to lift my arms above my head. We were sexless and sensual—committing to nothing.

And everything.

C
HAPTER
6

I
WOKE
AND
untangled myself from the pile of bodies and entwined limbs where we’d collapsed on the dance floor after a full night of dancing, covered in sims of furs and silks. My dry mouth needed water and I entered the code to let me out of the room. As one final surprise, Fransín had keyed in the post-dance puppy pile, a heap of dancers exhausted and overflowing with love, all cuddling together past the break of dawn and into the new day that would see me to my final presentation. It had been the most perfect way to start what promised to be my favorite day of this Samarian moon.

Work days had been a mix of research and presentations, hours ebbing and flowing as we traversed the universe, working twenty hours one day and two the next. Today, my schedule included getting ready, but otherwise we had the day to blow off. We could sleep in, M at the helm, speeding us toward the next space station.

Most pre-date mornings were spent reviewing the packet before the presentation, brushing up on linguistics and political viewpoints I’d need to be aware of. Because the same-sex galaxies couldn’t be selected, they never offered one, alleviating the hours I’d devote to reviewing it. This was a new policy instituted by a Pearl in the last decade after one wasted three days on a mandatory review of a Bevi package during a female/female year. My date before the Spiznwix had been from the Bevi galaxy, the all-male mirror of the Samarians. Growing up, I’d spent plenty of time learning tantra and erogenous zones with Bevi’s, as their galaxy held the male courtesan houses.

Mornings on the ship held an early hours softness I adored. Maybe it reminded me of Samarian mornings, maybe I was too excited for tonight and the overload of memories I’d revisit while we discussed favorite places and foods. I wandered to the shower room the long way, peeking into the bridge. “Hello.”

“Greetings.” M looked up, his arms flowing over the controls. “Did you enjoy your surprise?”

I walked over and watched the hypnotic swish and swirl of the timegate as we passed through on our way to the destination. No wonder he enjoyed this up here and I could almost see the appeal of endless hours staring into the swirling mass. “It was perfect. She did a fantastic job.”

“As per her usual.” His body quieted and the glow dimmed like always when I was supposed to pay attention. “Hours of flight time ended up in that sim.”

I’d have apologized if his tone had warranted it, but he and I had talked about her responsibilities before he’d taught her. Controller wasn’t her job, and I’d secretly thought he’d fibbed about how much it helped him when in truth he did it to make her feel valuable and wanted. Most of his interactions with her ended that way and I’d noticed it the very first week the three of us had been together. He hadn’t changed since then. They had a strange relationship, arcing into and away from each other in a bizarre pairing. I loved having him around for the break from each other on those long stretches between presentations when Fransín and I spent way too much time together and smothered each other, Fransín valued him for other reasons that I wasn’t sure she recognized yet. Most pilots and consorts stayed teamed long after their first assignment and it would serve them both to stay together—whether Fransín wanted to admit it or not.

“She’s going to miss you,” he said. “We all will.” He opened his arms for me and I stepped into them, allowing his embrace to cage me from shoulders to hips. Light pulsed through his body, warming me.

“It’s going to be an adjustment. You’ll have each other, I’ll see to it.”

He released me. “I would like that.” A pink hue tinted his cheeks. “She needs looking after.”

I chuckled. “Don’t tell her that.”

His skin brightened and the pulses stopped, hinting that he was done revealing emotions. For all that M was a Twilip, he had a fascinating ability to flip his emotions on and off like a phay switch. I envied it. “I’ll see you in a bit, after I…” My throat closed on the words as my dreaded emotions surged. How silly to be upset about my final night dressing up in a pretty gown and spending a charming evening talking to a Samarian, when M and Fransín had so much more at stake. Tonight was merely the end to one portion of my role, not an extreme overhaul like they’d have to endure. M covered my hands with his. “Today will be difficult for each of us in our own way, but that does not lessen our struggle.”

Tears pooled in my eyes and I blinked to clear them.

He touched my cheek. “Go ready yourself. I’ll alert you when we are fifteen sectors out.”

“Gratitude.” I left him and went to the deserted cafeteria, entering a coffee order to arrive in my room’s food dispensary, setting the timer delay so it would stay hot.