Skip to main content

Tanya's Dance



This is going to be another excerpt from Star liner. By popular demand (well, a couple of people requested it) this one will be about Tanya’s dance, as our main character Jan and the other three from the entertainment crew get to see Tanya's performance for the first time:

Having adjourned from lunch, we all went up to theater space 2 on Deck B. It was a small auditorium with raked seating, so everyone had a good view of the stage. It only held a maximum of about seventy people, but by the time Tanya’s show was to start it was more than half full and was about equal parts men and women.

“Just goes to show you what is popular,” Simon said. “It’s hard for magicians and singers to compete with scantily clad women floating around in null gee.”

Half the stage was taken up by a container that nullified the gravity. The lights got very low. Soft ambient music filled the space. A very faint glow came from the container. Tanya slowly drifted into view. No. She was not naked. But she was pretty close. A thin band of cloth covered part of her breasts. Another small patch of fabric covered her groin. She also had a very sheer cape or wrap that was trailing her body as she floated across the container. Her arms slowly moved across her body. Her left arm extended as her right leg extended in the opposite direction. Her body became a diagonal line moving to the right. The wrap, sheer as it was, was in a fixed shape as if it were a solid sheet of metal. Then her left hand touched the container wall and she gently rebounded. The gossamer cape now continuing in its original direction flowed over her body as if it were a second skin, conforming to every curve, covering and highlighting the topography of her body. It was the most sensual thing I had ever seen.

Now she curled herself into a ball and began a slight rotation. The music changed, now more beat driven. When her leg came around to the top, she reached out a toe and touched the top of the container. She was propelled downward at an angle. She touched the bottom, then the front, now rebounding from surface to surface with the beat of the music. As the tempo increased so did her movements. At times she could arrest her momentum, so that from a fixed position she stroked, and slid, and flailed herself in ways that were sometimes frankly sexual.

Her show progressed through stages that were slow and sultry to rabid and hot. When the end finally came the audience erupted in applause. Tanya was covered with sweat. I was aroused, as I suspect everyone in the audience was, except for the one or two who had decided that this was not their thing and had walked out.  This was not porn, but you could call it erotic art. The audience drifted out, but the crew mates hung back to talk with Tanya. Eventually she made her way out wearing a loose robe. She was smiling a knowing smile.

“So, what did you think?” she asked.

“Wow!” I said. “Just, wow!” Now everyone was talking over each other and Tanya was loving it. Her cheeks were flushed and the smile never left her face.

“Okay,” Simon said. “Redd and Jan are officially no longer virgins.” Everyone laughed and I blushed which brought ribbing from the others.

“Fun is fun,” Sara said. “But I have to get ready for my next show, which I am afraid will be far more sedate that this one was. With a damn sight less audience too I’ll wager. But that’s okay. They will come around eventually.”

“And I have to go get showered . . .” Tanya look right at me and raised her eyebrows suggestively.  “and changed.”


(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon, or the other usual online sources)


Star Liner on Amazon

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Empathy

  Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...

Polar Bears and Entropy

  Extinction is a normal part of the evolution of life on our planet. You and I and all individual organisms eventually die. That is the way of things. Entropy happens. Entropy is a word from the third law of thermodynamics that basically means: things fall apart. The natural tendency is for things to become less orderly as time goes on: things break down, things erode, things rust, things wear out. Entropy is a measurement of how fast that is happening in any given system. Individual death is a natural outcome of entropy.   But an extinction is where all the members of a species are no longer living. Millions of species have gone extinct over the lifetime of our planet. There are natural background extinctions that happen continually. But sometimes there are events that trigger mass extinctions, where vast masses of species go extinct all at once (all at once in geologic terms, which might mean over the course of hundreds of years). There have been 5 mass extinctions over ...