"John Varley - Gaea 1 - Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

before she left she glanced back at the two tiny dots still flashing on the screen overhead.

Bill's tongue had started at Cirocco's toes and was now exploring her left car. She liked that. It
had been a memorable journey. Cirocco had loved every centimeter of it; some of the stops along
the way had been outrageous. Now he was worrying her earlobe with his lips and teeth, tugging
gently to turn her around. She let it happen.
He nudged her shoulder with his chin and nose to get her turning faster. She began to rotate. She
felt like a big, soft asteroid. The analogy pleased her. Extending it, she watched the terminator
line crawl around her to bring the hills and valleys of her front into sunlight.
Cirocco liked space, reading, and sex, not necessarily in that order. She had never been able to
satisfactorily combine all three, but two was not bad.
New games were possible in free-fall, like the one they had been playing, "no hands." They could
use feet, mouths, knees, or shoulders to position each other. One had to be gentle and careful,
but with slow bites and nips anything could be done, and in such an interesting way.
All of them came to the hydroponics room from time to time. Ringmaster had seven private rooms,
and they were as necessary as oxygen. But even Cirocco's cabin was crowded when two people were in
it, and it *as at the bottom of the carousel. It took one act of love in free-fall to make a bed
seem as limiting as the back scat of a Chevrolet.
'Why don't you turn this way a little?" Bill asked. "Can you give me a good reason?"
He showed her one, and she gave him a little more than he had asked for. Then she found herself
with a little more than she had .asked for, but as usual, he knew what he was doing. She locked
her legs around his hips and let him do the moving.
Bill was forty, the oldest of the crew, and had a face dominated by a lumpy nose and jowls that
could have graced a bassett hound. He was balding and his teeth were not pretty. But his body was
lean and hard, ten years younger than his face. His hands were neat and clean, precise in their
movements. He was good with machinery, but not the greasy, noisy kind. His tool kit would fit in
his shirt pocket, tools so tiny that Cirocco wouldn't dare handle them.
His delicate touch paid off when he made love. It was matched
by his gentle disposition. Cirocco wondered why it had taken her so long to find him.
There were three men aboard Ringmaster, and Cirocco had made love to them all. So had Gaby


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Plauget. It was impossible to keep secrets when seven people lived in such a confined space. She
knew for a fact, for instance, that what the Polo sisters did behind the closed doors of their
adjoining rooms was still illegal in Alabama.
They had all bounced around a lot, especially in the early months of the voyage. Gene was the only
married crew member, and he had taken care to announce quite early that he and his wife had an
arrangement about such matters. Still, he had slept alone for a long time because the Polos had
each other, Gaby didn't seem to care about sex at all, and Cirocco had been irresistibly drawn to
Calvin Greene.
Her persistence was such that Calvin eventually went to bed with her, not just once, but three
times. It didn't get any better, so before he could sense her disappointment she had cooled the
relationship and let him pursue Gaby, the woman he had been drawn to from the first. Calvin was a
general surgeon trained by NASA to be competent as ship's biologist and ecologist as well. He was
black, but attached little importance to it, having been born and raised in O'Neil One. He was
also the only crew member who was taller than sirocco. She didn't think that had much to do with
his appeal; she had learned early to be indifferent to a man's height, since she was taller than