Watson, Ian - Novel 08 by The Gardens of Delight (v1.1) Read Free Book Online

his hands up and down his chest with the engagingly simple sensuality of
a kitten preening on a soft rug. He said rather a lot in this single word.
                 “I
do feel quite hot in this gear,” laughed Muthoni. “I think that fruit juice has
gone to my head! I prescribe some liberty for us.”
                 “Licence,
you mean,” snapped Tanya. “I didn’t come here to be —kak pa-angliski? —gang-banged!”
                 “Dejeuner sur Vherbe , ” mused Denise. “Only, this time the gentlemen don’t wear any suits!”
                 Austin
Faraday looked totally nonplussed.
                 “What
do you suggest?” Sean asked him quietly. “Lock ourselves up in Schiaparelli? Play cards for the next
fifty years in a dead hull? Or live out the part, instead—till we know who
scripted it, and why?”
                 Muthoni
was already parting her jumpsuit with a trim fingernail.
                 “Very well.” Austin shuddered. “Those who would like to go for
a, er, swim—they may undress. But otherwise—” He swallowed. His hands were busy
straightening his own clothes, checking their integrity, as though by some sort
of servocontrol this would overcome Muthoni’s action.
                 But
Muthoni let her jumpsuit fall around her ankles. She kicked her boots off along
with the suit.
                 “If
the planet’s gone nudist, Austin, surely it’s rude to go round dressed?”
                 “This
is disgraceful,” said Tanya. “It’s . . . mutiny. Assert yourself, Captain.” She
clutched herself, as though it was her breasts instead of Muthoni’s that were
bare. Her jumpsuited legs quivered together tightly—a reluctant virgin at the
Annunciation confronted by a beach-boy archangel, a gigolo Gabriel.
                 “I
used to assert myself a lot,” said Jeremy. “Just look at me now! And, do you
know, I feel much better for the change? Really I do—-despite the occasional
misgivings and resentments.”
                 Earth,
with its megapopulation, was—if not a puritan world—one at least where screens,
veils, of whatever kind, between people were (or had been) the order of the day
to prevent society from becoming a mere hive. This was true, at least, of the
West and Euro-Russia, though not to such a degree in Muthoni’s Africa . Yet there were leisure zones, nudist
solariums and such, for relief from the antiseptic screenedness elsewhere; and
the six star-travelers had all seen each other hygienically naked on board Schiaparelli , besides. It wasn’t
entirely the problem of nudity as such, thought Sean—nor even of the sexuality
of this world (since Tanya could hardly be a virgin) but rather that she, and
Austin, and Paavo too were refusing this world’s rules, refusing to admit what
had happened to the colony on the flesh and blood, and bare skin level—as a
subjective, opposed to merely an objective fact. It was this, coupled with the
over-developed Earth phobia about too intimate personal contacts, except in the
right places at the right times, that was sickening Tanya. On a highly
organized Earth, too, other screens than clothes or—sometimes—masks must stand
in the way, particularly data privacy screens, for the sheer preservation of
the notion of a human individual; this was true to some extent even in Russia.
If a superior authority now said, ‘Let there be no screen between us’ it must
be bent on driving all men and women mad—humiliating them, robotizing them. How
could the whole planet possibly be a solarium? Free space—and labor—they had
expected to find; never this leisurely nakedness.
                 “We
shan’t get anywhere by wearing character armor,” said Sean gently. “We just
happen to have landed on a planet where a God ,
not a government, runs the show—something that sees right through you by its
very