Author's note: a small space adventure for the
Pink Orchid 2024 for Women-Centric Erotica Challenge
(Omenainen requested space hippies, so there are space hippies :-)
Many ideas borrowed from Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling and Babel-17 by Chip Delaney.
~~~~
Freya jolted awake to her ship's klaxon blaring and alarm strobes flashing. She crawled from her bunk towards the cockpit controls, stomach flipping as the artificial gravity surged and waned—one moment crushing her to the deck, the next floating her weightless and scrambling for handholds.
A collision! And from something big, judging from the sea of red indicators on the cockpit displays. A one-in-several-million chance when orbiting a protostar where nothing but gas and dust swirled. The soon-to-ignite stellar core should have drawn anything dense enough to damage her ship into itself eons ago.
A breeze caressed Freya's face, followed by a whistling hiss from somewhere behind the secondary instruments overhead. It became a roar and she leaped into the coffin-like escape pod, sealing it just as the ship's hull blew open, sending fragments and loose objects spinning into the void.
With a spine-crunching lurch, the pod rocketed away from the remains of her ship on a trajectory to intercept the nearest space lane. The navigation display showed Freya that what would be seconds jumping through hyperstasis would take about a thousand years coasting through Newtonian space.
Freya drew on all her training and conditioning to fight back despair. Her first ship, her first solo science mission—all lost. The colony council would strip her of rank, if her pod was ever found.
~~~~
Tiny tinkling bells and the sweet, spicy stink of patchouli. Someone humming. No—chanting. Freya woke, her limbs leaden, and tried to sit up and focus in the too-bright room and the blue shape standing beside her.
"Peace," the blue shape said, guiding her to lie back on the medbed. "You're with friends." The low chanting resumed.
Freya's eyes focused: it was a woman, hands pressed together in meditation, her entire nude body opalescent swirls of aquamarine, crimson and amber. Freya had never seen that style of cosmetisurgery. If she could have pushed aside her revulsion of all purely decorative body mods, she might have thought it beautiful. The woman's full swaying breasts and shapely figure certainly were.
"How—how long?" Freya croaked.
"Eight standard months," the woman said. "Not that long for hibernation, but you'll feel the aftereffects for many hours. So mellow out and just...
be.
Dig it?"
Freya tried deciphering those last words, wondering if her translation implant had been damaged. "I must contact my colony," she said. Her head spun as she sat up and the woman put warm arms around her, steadying her. Freya realized with horror she was naked too.
"Don't get uptight," the woman said. "We sent a signal to fill them in. Now, chill. You've just had a real bad trip, babe."
"Babe? I'm no crecheling," Freya snapped. "You will address me as Captain-Doctor Freya Chiang. And where is my uniform?"
"Don't freak, Captain-Doctor. No offense intended. You'll find we're all laid-back here. Titles and honorifics just don't cut it. No one calls me Major-Doctor Thabisa Torres, and I'd be super bummed if they did."
Freya studied the woman. Under her remarkable iridescent skin, she bore a slight resemblance to the long-vanished xenobiologist.
"If you are her, you were rumored to have joined the Invaders. Or been killed by them. Instead, you went rogue? Turned sundog?"
The woman turned and strode to a narrow closet, returning with a pair of tie-dyed harem pants. Freya noted that, like her, the woman had the same anonymous beauty and perfect figure of all genetically reshaped.
She handed the pants to Freya. "Your uniform was wrecked. Most in our collective go nude, so there aren't a lot of threads around to choose from. You can wear these. We have a loom and spinning wheel if you want to make your own clothes."
Freya didn't know what a loom or spinning wheel were, but gratefully pulled on the pants. She stood, leaning against the medbed for support and covering her breasts with her arms.
"I might find you a top somewhere," Thabisa said, "but you'll fit in better if you meet the commune members half-way. Besides, you have such lovely natural breasts."
Her smile made Freya tingle. Months in hibe then the decantation process had depleted her serotonin regulator.
"Now, I'd better lay out the rest," Thabisa said. "You're on
Beneficio,
a repurposed freighter and home of an autonomous anarcho-syndicalist commune. To you we may seem like sundogs, but the collective aren't criminals. We explore in peace and harmony with the cosmos. I left my colony when I first encountered this group."
"You were a respected scientist," Freya said. "I studied all your papers."
"I'm still a scientist. One of many here—biologists, botanists, astrophysicists, psychochemists. Lucky for you, or we wouldn't have gone to that protostar looking for space whales and found your pod. Life is long, Freya, especially for us Shapers with our sculpted genes. It's too long to spend squashed under one stifling ideology. Here we go with the flow, following the teachings of an ancient faction on Earth-that-was."
"Are we still at the star? It's only two jumps to my colony..."
"We only found you when we were outbound. We just completed jumping to a new protostar system and are gonna chill here for a few months. Don't you love how the eddies of gas and dust waltz like lovesick suitors before merging with the core?"
"Then when will you get me back to my colony? If we're near a space lane..."
"Chill out," Thabisa said. "We're far from everywhere and staying a while. Come meet the rest. They're a groovy bunch. And don't get strung out by the archaic lingo... you'll grok it soon enough."
~~~~
The warmth and humidity of the dim corridors were a contrast to the stark clean white of the sickbay. Freya noted seemingly purposeless woven textiles hung on every wall that were not already covered by abstract, fantastical murals.
