Author's note:
Thank you for your patience. Apologies this has taken so long. I have been beset with work commitments and other delays. It is the longest chapter by far.
Erinaceous
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1 Physics lessons
2 Complications
3 More complications
4 Even more complications
5 Summer destinations
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1 Physics lessons
There was a sombre mood in the Samothea Project team immediately after the Equity Court judgment that recognised the settler company, Outworld Ventures, as the legal owner of the planet Samothea.
No one knew what the decision meant for the women of Samothea. The greatest risk was that Outworld Ventures would be tempted by short-term profits to open the planet up to wanton immigration, allowing incomers to destroy the fragile culture of the planet, exposing the women of Samothea to exploitation and abuse.
With the girls from Samothea there, however, the downbeat atmosphere couldn't last. The games, teases and innocent joy-of-life of Hazel, Wildchild, Yael and four-year-old Freya always lightened everyone's mood.
The girls were vagabonds, staying mostly at Danielle and Roger's apartment, sometimes with Ezra and Annela, sometimes at Joan and Peter Mayfield's house, but rarely missing the nightly dinner at Danielle's and always begging to do chores. Yael often took Freya to stay with her friend, Kelly Mayfield, allowing Annela more time alone with Ezra to have sex.
Annela's daily medical treatment gave her inexhaustible energy and made her unquenchably horny. She was buzzing with sensual joy, her cheeks flushed with colour, skin tingling and muscles primed with sheer animal energy. Requited love and non-stop sex made her as happy as a child, content as a kitten.
It also made her radiantly beautiful, as joy-filled women always are. With shining pale-blue eyes and lustrous red-gold hair (a shade more blonde now in the bright Celetaris sunshine), her perfect complexion included a few summer freckles on the bridge of her straight nose.
Ezra, on the other hand, had the gaunt cheeks and sunken black-rimmed eyes of a marathon runner who had just completed his course. He rarely made it to the end of a family dinner without retreating to the couch for a snooze. But he always woke up to kiss and tickle Freya when she demanded his attention before bedtime. He also roused himself to listen to Yael, who had something new and urgent to tell him every single day.
Besides fucking Annela many times a day, Ezra spent many hours on the videolink to Samothea, chatting to his bedmates, his children and his friends. He also talked to business contacts on Earth, planning some things that he kept to himself for now.
The main activity of the girls was studying. Yael brought Hazel and Wildchild into her school lessons, persuading them by her enthusiasm that physics and maths were the perfect subjects to learn.
As with everything they did, Hazel and Wildchild threw themselves into the project wholeheartedly. Yael was an informal student at the Celetaris Institute for Science, so Wildchild and Hazel snuck into the theatres with her and listened transfixed to the lectures. The lessons were beyond them at first but they absorbed the atmosphere, made notes on the topics they wanted to understand and split the tasks up between themselves, studying the textbooks in the university library and in Danielle's apartment after dinner to catch up on what they'd heard.
Yael also studied with Kelly, who was nearly seventeen and preparing for the summer exams at the end of her first year of advanced studies. Yael made Kelly share her physics and maths revision. Now Hazel and Wildchild joined in those sessions, racing through Kelly's old textbooks, helping each other along, reading ahead and around the subjects.
By the time Danielle formalised the girls' lessons, starting their morning classes herself and deputising one of her graduate students to teach them in the afternoons, they'd caught up with Kelly.
Danielle was impressed. She knew how bright Yael was. The other girls were just as quick. Wildchild never showed off but Danielle thought she was the brightest of them all, revealing touches of genius, especially in mathematics, where she grasped new ideas almost before they were explained.
Nor was Hazel an intellectual slouch, but Danielle didn't know how often she re-read sections of the textbooks to herself.
When Roger asked her how she found the time to give remedial lessons in physics, Danielle said:
"I'm willing to make time for the girls. I love teaching them. They're so eager to learn. I never have to twist an idea around to fit it into a reluctant mind. It's what teaching was meant to be like. But do you know the best part of it?"
"Tell me."
"It's the relief of not having to say everything twice."
"What do you mean?" Roger asked, quick as a flash, but he wilted under Danielle's wifely death-stare, until she relented and brushed her hand through his hair, smiling indulgently.
"You know, you might have died for that joke," she said.
"What joke?"
"Ooh, you are taking a risk. You're lucky you're married to me."
"That's something I say to myself every single day."
******
Shortly after the court-case, a representative of Outworld Ventures arrived on Celetaris with a team of analysts. They rented an office and apartments in Arts City, only ten minutes away from the Science Institute by levitating ground car.
Andrew Claydon was an executive but competent, with none of the arrogance that the settler company had shown in the courtroom after the women of Samothea rejected the original compromise. Aged about forty, he was a polite but vigorous man in a conservative grey suit and plain tie. Under his stewardship, Outworld Ventures took legal possession of Samothea in a businesslike manner.
Rather than send his own team of scientists to Samothea, Andrew proposed a generous contract with the Samothea Project to co-ordinate their fact-gathering.
A sizeable donation to Eva Welwyn's Women's Support Group (usually called the 'Petticoats') secured access for Outworld Ventures to anthropological data from Samothea. The donation allowed Eva to recruit more Petticoats.
Andrew engaged the Petticoats to perform more scientific tests on Samothea, analysing the soil, the atmosphere, the ocean temperature, its salinity, pH, and oxygen levels, to fill in gaps in the data already collected.
Outworld Ventures hired junior members of the Samothea Project Team on good salaries as consultants. The company paid handsomely for the Project's data on the astrophysical anomaly near Samothea, from whose x-rays delicate electronic equipment needed shielding. Andrew also booked space in the hold of the Samothea Project's shuttlecraft for test equipment and gifts of technology for the women of Samothea.
Both sides agreed a full disclosure agreement for all scientific data collected on Samothea, including medical data.
Madam Gloria, the Prefect of Samothea, and her Advisory Council were invited to discuss their concerns directly with Andrew Claydon in a weekly videolink.
With the agreements in place, Andrew made a videolink broadcast to outline his plan. He spoke in confident well-modulated tones to the women of Samothea, the Project Team and his head office:
"Our principal task is to discover what measures we need to improve the living conditions on Samothea, to make human life comfortable on Samothea and a sustainable ecosystem. This will tell us how much it will cost to start the colonisation process again."
"Thank you all for agreeing to co-operate with my team. In a month, I'll deliver my preliminary report."
******
Danielle had a girly lunch every few weeks with three of her best friends: Doctor Rosa Silverstein, once her doctoral student and now her colleague; Doctor Joan Mayfield, Vice-Chancellor of the Celetaris Institute for Science; and Doctor Cassie Leighton, chief neuro-surgeon at the Institute's medical centre. Depending on how busy they were, the women met in one of the restaurants on campus or at a place in Arts City, often in the shopping mall.
