Nothing about the experiences was real, of course, except your own side of the experience, and that felt very real—when you were coming out of hyperspace, every representation the senses made, the brain had to find some symbol for, so things would always appear chaotic.
And it could be sex. It could be very good sex. Or, for no reason at all, it could become a very disturbing nightmare, out of symbols a brain started calling up from some closet of the half-awake mind. Though sex was the most common.
So of course if you were a stupid kid who’d heard from his peers about fantastic trips, you tried flying that way a couple times, getting yourself off by the time-tested methods until you scared hell out of yourself at least once, ended up on deep trank for maybe the next two trips, and learned to do math problems instead while you went null.
Didn’t want to go into jump seeing the brig around him.
Didn’t want to think about piracy and ships getting blown.
Didn’t want to wonder about Marie. That was a deep, deep mental pit he didn’t want to excavate on this trip. He tried equations, tried programming problems, and he kept losing them, kept finding fantastical bits of nonsense running through his head… childhood rhymes and Rodman’s poetry, Tommy’s a Corinthian, Tommy’s a Corinthian, lock him up with iron bars, iron bars, iron bars, then throw away the keys…
London’s bridge is falling down, so leave them alone and they’ll come home, pretty maids, pretty maids all in a row…
Pack of holo sex cards turned up in his study cubicle. Aunt Pat found them. Marie said, So? What’s new? But nobody believed he hadn’t put them there.
He wasn’t stupid. If he had them, he wouldn’t have left them there, in the study cubicle, for Roberta R. to find, next session. Roberta cried and said he was a pervert.
Pervert, pervert, pervert, Roberta said to him when they met in the corridors, and somebody wrote it in ink on the cubicle desk, where he’d find it…
Incest, aunt Lydia informed him severely, isn’t a nice word, Tommy. Do you understand incest?
He hadn’t. He didn’t. Aunt Lydia explained it.
Sex isn’t a thing we think about on-ship, ever, ever, ever, Tommy, we don’t tease our cousins that way. We don’t think thoughts like that, now do we understand, Tommy?
He understood, all right: he went and bloodied Rodman’s nose for what he understood, which settled one bit of business, and got him tagged as a bully, this time, but he still hadn’t got it. He understood some of the pictures, when aunt Pat showed them to him and accused him of putting them there, but he’d been so stunned by the images that his guilty curiosity couldn’t muster a defense… he couldn’t quite identify some of the images as body parts until he was older, but he could still play back that memory like a tape in his head, and after that, just to figure it out, he told himself, he kept sneaking looks at books he wasn’t supposed to have and tapes he wasn’t supposed to see, trying to resolve what he’d only half-guessed, and getting feelings aunt Lydia said he wasn’t supposed to have. It was what That Man had done with Marie. It was his beginnings. And the feelings became his, not That Man’s, and he couldn’t leave it alone, and couldn’t stop thinking about it, until he was doing it in jump, and the nightmares and Marie’s stories all tangled together.
He came out screaming and aunt Lydia said he’d better have deep trank next time. Marie said somebody’d better watch him and he couldn’t come home like she’d planned, she had to be on duty. Kids went through that sometimes, Lydia said, meaning nightmares in jump. They got over it or you had to leave them on some station—he wasn’t supposed to hear that part, and Marie got mad and said if he had a few less of Lydia’s theories he’d be saner.
So he resolved to keep his mouth shut and not to have the nightmares again, because being left on station was the worst one… he only had Marie, and Marie wouldn’t leave him, Marie had told aunt Lydia go to hell and keep her advice to herself. He’d been terribly proud of Marie, then, and told himself Marie did really want him, she just wasn’t good at showing it. So he did calculations the way the seniors told him to, next time.