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"Ah, but you can be master only of your own dance, my friend," he cautioned me.
I must say I was quite sad when our journey ended. As he had promised, we were back at the ship in time for supper. I could have gone on and on, with perfect ease. The last step, therefore, seemed somewhat difficult. He practically had to push me through the hull of the ship again.
Once inside, I realized that I was breathing air again and was feeling hungry too. Also Natalia came back to mind again when I saw her at the supper table.
What could I tell her about my adventure, or even to the captain?
As I came closer, I noticed that the captain was sitting at her table, locked in some intense discussion with her. He always waved his arms about when he gots exited.
When I was close enough to get her attention, something caused me to stop. My own words startled me that I had spoken to Martin, that I would explode if I moved into outer space. Did I have a right to force the captain into an environment in which he was unable to exist? He would explode. His blood would boil. He would suffocate in a vacuum.
Indeed all this was already happening. The realization came like a shock to me.
When Natalia noticed me I must have been standing for some moments in the restaurant. Slowly I began to notice that she waved to me. I waved her off, and pointed to the captain. She nodded gently, but did she really understand?
This short excursion into space had a much greater affect on me than I realized. Things that I touched, that I came in contact with, appeared different. The restaurant hadn't changed, although it was quite empty that night for the time it was. But I had changed.
It wasn't that I had a problem with finding a table or had lost my appetite. No, to the contrary, there were plenty of free tables and I was looking forward to dinner as I had seldom done before. Three different dishes were offered that night. I loved the Hungarian goulash that the ship's kitchen offered, even though it was made with simulated meat. But it was made with real vegetables. It was always done to perfection. Only now, there was something extra about it all. After having seen the raw majesty of the universe, there was something very special about this meal and what it represented. It had majesty of its own. The red peppers, the potatoes, the centuries of tradition in fine cooking, were all drawn into one. They were drawn together into a work of art that projected an image of a world that is wholly different from the universe of space; a separate sphere with its own separate reality standing as far apart on its own as any planet inside a black hole.
We had built this ship to explore the universe. Now that I had gained a glimpse of it, it began to dawn on me what a marvelous universe lay right inside this ship. I suddenly relished this human world. As if someone had thrown a switch, its wonders became alive, a world of marvelous things. Their depth can never be measured with references to material law coming into view. These things pertain to what humanity is, to what it has built, to what its efforts represent, things of exquisite care, delicate balance, gentle benevolence.
I could feel the burning of the red peppers of the goulash all the way down to the bottom of my stomach. What a feast! What wonderful complexities were embedded in this simple meal, served with a glass of red wine that was ingeniously produced aboard ship?
I knew how the vegetables were grown, how the agro-plant operated, but not how the wine was made. The agro-plant, a marvel in itself, functioned on a rather simple principle. Meal planing was done four months in advance. A computer generated from it the appropriate orders to the nurseries. From there on, the process continued automatically in an assembly line fashion. A long string of machine seeded flats are passed through brightly illumined growing areas, through watering stations, feeding stations, etc. etc., until at the right moment, the required plants arrived at the harvesting station at their absolute prime, ready for immediate use. In this respect, the meal represented a marvel of ingenuity.
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Stories about
Sex
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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