The Girl in the Tank: Galactic Consortium, Season 1

Episode Five: Fraternization ch.10

A couple days later Dan was walking down the hall towards his room when a sailor approached him. He knew the man casually. He paused.

"Oleson, sir?" the sailor, Johnson, said. "Can we talk?"

Dan nodded.

"Privately?"

Dan nodded again and ushered Johnson into his bunk. His bunkmates were gone. "Private," Dan said to the door.

"What does that do?"

"It means the system will notify us and ask before opening," Dan explained.

"Cool, I didn't know it could do that."

"Yeah, there is so much we don't know that they take for granted. I feel like I learn something new every day."

"Yeah, I know what you mean."

"So, what did you want to talk about?" Dan asked.

It was an hour later that Johnson left Dan's bunk and made his way back towards his own. Dan considered the conversation they had. Should he go to Lannister with this?

He dismissed the notion as quick as it came. Captain Lannister had told him to keep an eye things, be the older, level head they need. That was his words, and that's what Dan had become.

Johnson's story was a doozy, but this was exactly the kind of misunderstanding they were worried about. He'd had a fling with a consortium female. They'd become a regular thing and he had feelings for her.

Then she casually dropped the news that she was part of something called a creche. He'd gotten the impression that it was some sort of group marriage arrangement and freaked out. He wasn't sure how he felt about sharing his woman with what sounded like more than a dozen others.

Dan had asked to include Janda in the conversation. Janda had explained that a creche arrangement was about child rearing, not sexual monogamy. The Consortium's culture included many nuclear families, mom, dad and kids, just like American culture. But they had a number of others common family structures as well. Tribes and extended families were common in places. The wealthy might hire nannies, and those nannies were essentially part of the family with as much involvement in the kids life as the parents.

Finally there were creches, a semi formal organization where a large groups of adults that got together to raise an almost equally large number of kids. It served, Janda said, two extremes. Big families and stay at home parenting were rare in the consortium for economic reasons, but a creche would gladly support "primaries," people who lived in the creche and had primary responsibility for the children, especially the young. It was a good fit for those wanting to have a big family.

Many professionals joined creches and paid to support the primaries because they wanted the legacy that children provided without the responsibilities. They were dubbed "secondary" members. As the creche children grew older, the secondaries became role models and mentors for them.

Membership in a creche did not imply any sexual relationship. Janda politely warned Johnson that it also didn't mean there wasn't one, and that sexual monogamy on a whole was not a given in Consortium culture, unless it had been discussed.

Dan had left Johnson much calmer, ready to go talk his girl again. He didn't know what she'd say, but he felt confident that while Johnson might get his feelings hurt, he wasn't on the edge of making a scene or lashing out.

And was it really that different from the time when Munsen found out his Thai girlfriend had a Thai boyfriend? Or when Madsen found his girlfriend back home was on some swingers website? Maybe we can survive a little fraternization.

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Klempke felt a rising, antsy feeling in his chest. He tried to fight it down. Almost three weeks stuck onboard this ship. It was grating on his nerves, begging for some release. He climbed off his bunk and set on Green's.

Green looked at him, irritated. He was restless, too. He could deny it all he wanted, Klempke could tell his nerves were as bad as Klempke's.

Murphy was right, they were prisoners on this ship. The others could deny it but it was true. This talk of radiation quarantine was bullshit. They felt fine. They had for a week now. Surely they were better? It was just an excuse, so the men wouldn't get suspicious about why they were still trapped up here. "We just need to find someway to convince the others that the Consortium aren't as friendly as they appear. Make them start treating us like prisoners, so the others see the score." That's what Murphy said, and he was right. They just needed to do something.

Klempke had an idea, too. One that would satisfy the itch and provoke a response. If Green went along.

"Remember that girl in the Phillipines?" he asked, his hand shaking suddenly in anticipation.

"Yeah," Green said, a feverish light in his eyes. "Thought she was hot stuff, didn't she?"

"At first."

She'd been a bar girl, a prostitute paid to flirt with tourist. Klempke had picked her out and he and Green got her back to their hotel. They had had two other sailors with them, no longer part of the crew. She'd been so eager, so compliant with the first one. When she realized they each intended to take a turn with her, her expression had changed, her compliance evaporating. It had excited Klempke even more, more than he cared to admit.

Green was sitting up now and Klempke knew he was thinking and feeling the same itch. "We really brought her down a peg, didn't we?"