Dreamspinner Press Year Five Greatest Hits Page 3

  He still wished for more knowledge—and for help. For, as Bobby called it, “participation.”

  He wasn’t stupid—he knew what “participation” meant. Melody had been thinking very seriously about taking a lover before… before. Anderson had liked the young man—liked him well enough to not dump worms on the two of them when he’d caught them kissing under a tree and he’d had a bucket of worms handy… well, because a twelve-year-old-boy never knew when a bucket of worms might come in handy when he knew his sister wanted privacy in the colony orchard.

  (He still could not bring himself to think about what a wretched child he had been. The knowledge that he’d almost dumped those worms on Mel was not as painful as the thought of the things he’d more than almost done, like, say, left a couple of them in Jen’s bed and given Mandy one to eat. He wasn’t that kind of boy. He wasn’t. He couldn’t be. If he was that kind of boy, then his sisters might not have known… they may have thought that he was mean and evil and that he wanted to leave them behind. Dammit, Melody! I could have come with you!)

  So he hadn’t dumped the worms, and Mikey had been allowed a kiss in the orchard, and Anderson remembered that he knew. He knew what a lover was. A lover was a kiss under a tree. A yearning. The way Melody’s cheeks had turned red when Mikey touched her hand, her arm, the side of her breast.

  A lover was what he’d wanted from Bobby but what Bobby had not been programmed to do.

  So eventually he may have figured out what he wanted from the holodeck that the holodeck didn’t know how to provide, but one morning, shortly after the privacy protocols had been instituted, Bobby and Kate woke him up excitedly, both of them talking so quickly they babbled over each other’s words.

  “Anderson! You’ll never guess—”

  “I was accessing the homework tablet—”

  “Bobby suddenly saw all of this data!”

  “And Kate took a look at it, and it’s those files—”

  “The ones that Mr. Kay said were locked—”

  “Today is your birthday, Anderson!” Suddenly Bobby stopped and looked embarrassed. “Happy Birthday, Anderson. We will, of course, have cake after dinner.”

  Kate rolled her eyes and smacked Bobby on the back of the head. “Actually, genius, I’m taking care of the dinner and the cake. Remember the last time you tried to program a food synthesizer? We ended up with hamburger that tasted like metal bolts but chewed like meat?”

  Bobby turned a dull red. “That was years ago, Katy. I’ve grown up a little since then!”

  “Taller,” Kate growled, because it was true.

  Bobby shook his head and muttered, “More than taller,” to Anderson, and Anderson had to laugh, because it was true. Both of them had matured quite a bit in the last two and a half years, even though getting Kate to admit that was like getting her to program the food synthesizer for bug soufflé.

  It didn’t matter. That bit of normalcy was enough to calm the little family down, and Anderson rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and pulled a T-shirt on over his head. He’d been sleeping in his underwear lately, a thing that neither of his two roommates had remarked upon and that he had done as a kid, living at home with his parents. There was no one there to offend by being out of dress, and he was between sizes in the regulation jumpsuits anyway. It was just as easy to wear the oversized ones, but he didn’t want to sleep in one!

  “Thank you,” he said, still bemused. “Now tell me about the files. Will they help us find a closer outpost?”

  Their faces fell. “No,” Kate said softly. “We’re sorry, Anderson. They’re not about how to change direction in hyperspace or where you would travel. They’re about human anatomy and reproduction.” She brightened again. “You would not believe what your body can do!”

  Anderson thought he might have figured some of it out on his own, but as it turned out, he’d barely touched the tip of the cloth-covered penis.

  Chapter 2

  Introducing…

  THEY DID not engage the school program that day but instead gathered around Anderson’s tablet and the various vid-screens and pored over the new information.

  A lot of it was diagrammed, and Anderson did a lot of squinting at words like “glans” and “vesicles” and thought detachedly about what happened when he stroked himself in the privacy of his own room.

  “Hey, Anderson,” Bobby said excitedly, about the time Anderson had found the placement of the prostate and was tracing the gland on the screen with his fingers, wondering what practical purpose a bundle of erogenous nerves would have so deeply buried in the rectal orifice. It wasn’t particularly easy for a man (because the nerves were only present in males) to access those nerves on his own.

  “What did you find?” Anderson looked up, and what was playing on the personal vid screen Bobby held up made his mouth go dry.

  “Oh,” he said softly. “That’s what sex looks like.”

  He’d known the basics. Even before the files were released, he’d understood that people took off their clothes and that girls had a vagina and a uterus meant for procreation.

  Much like the prostate, he hadn’t understood why the erogenous areas would be placed so deep in the body. He hadn’t realized that males had a tab that was meant to fill every slot.

  “Why is she putting her mouth on it?” Kate asked, and it wasn’t Anderson’s imagination. Her voice was breathy and soft when normally it was analytical and matter-of-fact.

  Bobby tilted his head and looked speculatively at her. “I think… I think it would feel rather nice, don’t you, Anderson?”

  Anderson thought of Bobby’s mouth on his penis, and his entire body flushed hot and cold, and, sure enough, his groin grew full and ached fiercely. “I think it would feel outstanding,” he muttered hoarsely. “If you two could, uhm, excuse me for a moment?”

  He’d read a list of words for what he was about to do—words he’d actually heard in the schoolyard but whose definitions he hadn’t known the specifics of.

  Whacking off, beating off, spanking the monkey, varnishing the pole, smacking the salami, jerking the chain, yanking the snake, lubing the lizard, tickling the pickle, choking the chicken, etc., etc., etc.

  Now that he’d spent a couple of months “waxing his rocket,” he knew how long it would take and how quickly he could clean up and be back with his friends, talking about this new and interesting influx of information.

  He was in his bed, his cock (that was a new word, courtesy of the new information) in his fist, when Bobby and Kate violated their programming and did something that real friends might do instead.

  Or maybe just Anderson’s friends.

  They violated the rule of standard deviation and intruded. They were quiet—he was barely aware that they were there, watching, as his pre-come (another good word to have) spurted over his fist. This time, because they were stealthy, he ignored them, continued to stroke, continued to squeeze, became lost in the sensation, and, when the fabulous, amazing, tremendous pressure built up, allowed himself to groan out loud as he came. (And he loved what that word had come to mean. Came, came, came, coming, come! Auuugghhhhhh… God… Come!)

  When he was done, he lay there, panting, before taking a cloth he’d been keeping by his sleep hammock and started to wipe himself off.

  “How was that?” he asked hoarsely. “Like the videos?”

  “Better than the videos,” Kate said, her voice throaty. He looked up, expecting to see her customary scowl, and saw that she was staring instead at his limp, shining cock. She met his eyes unhappily. “Bobby said you wouldn’t appreciate my help with that.” Kate looked away, which was unusual as well. She was the forthright member of their group—the moral center. Anderson had made her that way, and he appreciated that she was blunt and strong and open. “That’s too bad.”

  Anderson looked at her and felt bad, and then looked at Bobby, whose gaze was fastened hungrily on Kate’s face.

  “Bobby would probably like the help,” he offered, and Bobb
y turned red.

  Kate turned to Bobby, her expression soft. She was older than the two of them, built tall and strong, with proud breasts and solid hips. If Anderson was going to room with a woman, he wanted her to look different from men and boys, and so she was.

  She was three years older than Anderson and Bobby, but Anderson had grown in the past three years, and so had Bobby. They were taller than she was, although their wrists were still thin and their hands and feet seemed abnormally large. (According to the newly released files, that was not uncommon among adolescent males, a thing Anderson really wished he’d known before he’d started sprouting out of his coveralls like a bean plant.) She was also….

  God. Was she as lonely as Anderson?

  Anderson looked at his friends, who were staring at each other as though frozen, although Anderson could see a pulse throbbing in Bobby’s neck and Kate occasionally licking her lips. He recalled a box he’d checked during their programming, a time he tried more and more not to think of. The box had been irritatingly vague.

  The box had read “Proclivity.”

  At the time, Anderson assumed it had meant the things that were important to him at thirteen years old—sports, comedy vids, music, amusement parks (he and Bobby spent hours planning theirs), dogs (he and Bobby had been trying to program a dog for the holodeck since their very first sentient conversation), and playing games (they had graduated from games to three-dimensional multi-faceted jigsaw puzzles, and it was one of their favorite things to do when they were playing a vid or listening to music). He had tried to type in these proclivities in the box and had wondered why it seemed redundant along with “tastes,” “hobbies,” “interests,” and “skills,” but none of those things seemed to be what the computer had wanted. In the end, he had simply programmed “standard” and left it alone.

  After this morning’s reading and his conversation with Bobby months before, he thought that maybe “proclivity” meant this—this thing that had Kate and Bobby staring at each other with hunger in their eyes and skin as flushed as a red sun.

  “Would you two like to….” He flushed, uncertain how to phrase this. “Would you two like me to leave the room, so you can…?”

  “No,” Bobby said breathlessly. “Don’t leave the room.”

  Kate stepped into Bobby’s space then and caught his chin between her fingers. Bobby was taller than she was by three or four inches, and he looked down at her with an expression that was so crushingly vulnerable Anderson doubted he would ever have the courage to show it to another being.

  Their lips touched, and Anderson gasped. His own skin flushed hot, and a chill took up residence in his groin. His cock began to swell again. Bobby’s bunk was across the room from his own bed, and Bobby pressed Kate there, kissing, kissing, his hands rasping on her pale skin. Bobby had a tan on his neck and the backs of his hands—he and Anderson spent time outside and in the greenhouse—and Anderson watched, his breath frozen in his chest, as those dark hands cupped Kate’s pale cheeks, her chin, her neck, then unzipped the front of her coveralls, baring her breasts to the air.

  Anderson could see every detail—the way Kate’s nipples puckered in the air, the way her vulva glistened when Bobby spread her thighs to explore. He watched Kate’s expression as she bit into her palm to keep from making sounds of arousal and then saw how frantic she was as she scrabbled to bare Bobby’s skin to the air so that she could touch him the way he was touching her.

  Anderson watched as she opened her mouth and pulled Bobby’s cock into it while Bobby was pleasuring her own erogenous zones, and he thought of someone—a male—performing the same act with him, with the same hot desperation, and without even quite realizing it, he shuddered, convulsed, and climaxed without even touching his own body.

  And still he could not take his eyes off of the sight of two people making love.

  Yes, he’d read those words too, and this was what Bobby and Kate were doing. As Bobby poised his cock at the entrance of Kate’s body, and nuzzled her lips, asking her to open her mouth for him, open her thighs, allow him entrance, Anderson realized that it was these two words, “making love,” that had prompted his friends to request his presence.

  They wanted him to see what he should aspire to.

  Kate gasped, a pleasure sound, and moaned Bobby’s name as Bobby moved faster. Anderson’s mind both recalled and ignored the dry medical words he’d read about friction stimulating nerve endings and where in Kate’s body the most sensitive nerve endings were located, and what Bobby’s uncircumcised penis was doing as it rubbed against her tender inner walls. He realized that what those words said and what they actually meant were as far apart as… as planets in a solar system to a vessel without a hyperdrive. The touch of two people, skin to skin, was electric—it was the hyperdrive that powered what he was seeing in front of him.

  Kate cried out, lifting her hips, wrapping her legs around Bobby’s bare backside, and Bobby’s expression became frightening. His eyes bulged, he grimaced—he looked frightened, angry, and ferocious, all at once, and Anderson wondered if he looked like that when his climax was upon him. At that moment, Kate let loose a sound. Anderson shuddered again, his spent member giving a pulse that indicated arousal. Even though she was a woman and her breasts and vulva did not attract him, the sound was… raw. It was passionate. It was need and hunger for the contact, for the convulsion of electricity and nerve explosions that was climax, and Anderson’s body throbbed in sympathy for it.

  He needed and hungered too.

  Bobby gave a shout, and his buttocks clenched, and he shivered inside of Kate, and Kate moaned and gave a breathless little shriek before shuddering around him, and then the two of them grew still, after a few twitching pumps from Bobby’s hips in aftershock, and their movement subsided. Bobby laughed a little and nuzzled Kate, and Kate smiled at him shyly, when Kate was never shy, and Anderson, lying sideways in his bed, simply watched them through half-closed eyes.

  He was tired. His body had climaxed many times that morning, and his mind was overloaded with too many ideas to count and to catalogue. He watched as his two friends murmured, and touched, and whispered. He watched as Bobby rolled his spent body off of (and out of) Kate’s and then went to get a cloth to wipe her down.

  When Bobby was done, he pulled a blanket (he’d chosen a deep ochre for his bed, although it was not a favorite color of Anderson’s) up around the two of them, and they snuggled down together on the narrow cot, facing Anderson.

  “Do you know what you want now?” Bobby asked him when he’d checked to see that Kate was drowsing in his arms.

  “Yes,” Anderson said, his voice hoarse. He was unaware until that moment, but at some point, he must have shed tears.

  “Do you want our help to do it?” Bobby offered, almost excitedly, and Anderson wiped his nose with the sleeve of his coveralls and smiled shakily.

  “I don’t think I can do it without you,” he said, and this was the truth.

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to do it at all.

  Chapter 3

  Alex Leonard Peter Henry Aaron

  BOBBY AND Kate told him that they would brainstorm with him, but that they should do more research first. The research turned out to be… stimulating.

  As it turned out, the health and hygiene files contained quite a few entertainment files as well—and not all of it was as explicit as what Bobby had discovered that first day.

  “This is dumb,” Bobby snapped one day, pushing his chair back viciously so that the wheeled bottom went skidding all over the floor of the boys’ sleeping quarters.

  “Aren’t you reading one of the novels in the H and H info dump?” Katy looked up from where she lay on her stomach, her chin in her hands and her knees crooked so that her heels dangled over her bottom. She was reading her own novel—she’d discovered quite a few of them that she enjoyed immensely, and she and Anderson had been comparing notes. Bobby tended to prefer the visual media, the romantic comedy vids (Anderson liked those t
oo), and the sexually graphic “instructional” videos, although Kate often complained that the only thing those videos taught her was that she needed to take yoga if she and Bobby were going to do all the things those videos showed people doing.

  “Yeah, it’s only the romance!” Bobby complained now. “It’s not the… you know… the….” He made a hip thrusting movement in his chair, and Kate eyed him narrowly.

  “The sex?” she asked with an over-sweet tone, and Anderson looked at her curiously.

  She and Bobby had been experiencing sex in all of its forms: Bobby would watch the video or read the explicit passage, and then he and Kate would try it out. Sometimes they would do it in the room, and Anderson would watch curiously, but more and more often, Anderson would wake up at night and hear them in Kate’s quarters, where they were considerably louder in the added privacy.

  Bobby apparently did not recognize that her tone of voice was some sort of danger signal, but she reminded Anderson of Mel the morning after she woke up to discover the big, experimental black stripe down the back of her honey-blonde braid.

  “Well, yeah, the sex!” he said with a grin, and he was surprised (but Anderson was not!) when the pillow near Kate’s head was suddenly hurled at his face.

  “I think you’re disgusting,” Kate snapped, leaping from the bed and stalking toward the door. “I think you’re disgusting, and if you think you’re the only boy in this program who’s remotely attractive to me, you’re severely deluded. Good luck having sex with yourself, asshole!”

  The pneumatic door whooshed open and then shut behind her, leaving Bobby staring at her with his mouth open.

  “Do you have any idea what in the fuck that was about?” The health and hygiene files had also given them access to some of the more exciting swear words. Anderson had heard these words in the schoolyard, of course, but they had been used by the older boys, and he hadn’t quite gotten the nerve to use them yet before… before. Now that he had friends who were actually old enough and physically capable enough to fuck, using these words felt like sort of a privilege.