got to have rules. That's a rule. So the first rule of this cosmos is that there are no rules. Now the second one is the one I mentioned before, about nobody being allowed to stop something before they've started it. You might think that that comes naturally but it doesn't. What it comes down to is that you're never allowed not to do anything. I think you'll find that a truly useless rule. And the last rule is that the first two are not cancelled every time they go into force except on the direct authority of no one. GO!'
Sean and Andrea, lying on their backs beside each other under a blanket, snorted and guffawed and closed their eyes. There were ripples of laughter through the crowd. The night air was balmy and tangy and pungent with the crusty smell of sea salt Sean remembered once when he'd been eighteen; he'd got a summer job on a freighter. What he remembered most was the flying fish that flew into his porthole and joined him in bed one night.
He reached out and grabbed Andrea's tit. Better than the flying fish. It made him horny. The Guru hadn't said what to do if you were too horny. Could you blind stargaze and fuck at the same time?
'Everybody remembered what 'go' means?' the Guru asked. 'Good. Now you didn't know what you were supposed to be doing before you closed your eyes, which is a perfectly good explanation of why none of you did it. But then the secret of wisdom lies in knowing what you're supposed to be doing before you close your eyes. Be that as it may, you were supposed to be taking photographs of the stars. Fixing their positions. Putting them in their places. Getting the pattern. Remembering that the big fat white one is so far from the little green knobby one. Now since you didn't know what you were doing, right now you'll just have to make something up. When I say, 'stop', you open your eyes and compare what you've made up with what's up there. The object of the game is to get the whole thing, right? Memorize the heavens. Now the little buggers up there keep moving around, so that's going to make a pretty tough job harder. I'm going to say 'go' a lot of times. I'm also going to say-STOP! For instance, I just said it. Did everybody stop?'
There were mixed mumblings from the crowd. From very close to Sean and Andrea there was a sudden shifting under some blankets and a high-pitched female voice, half irritated, half playful, squealed, 'Freddy, is that all you ever think of? We can do that any time. Now why don't you just try to do what the Guru tells you? You could use some enlightenment!'
Andrea mimicked the voice with a whisper into Sean's ear: 'Sean, is that all you can ever think of? You can put your hand on my tit and squeeze my nipple any time…' Her breath was a little choked because halfway through her speech Sean gave her nipple an extra-lively little pinch.
'If I can squeeze your tit any time, I can squeeze it now,' he intoned in a voice obviously meant to be loud enough for the nearby couple to hear.
'See?' complained a voice from the darkness. 'They're doing it, why can't we? Besides, the guy's got logic on his side!'
'Well I don't let logic tell me when I want you in my pants,' the squealing voice replied. 'And it's not now. Shut up and try some blind stargazing. Maybe it'll do you some good.'
The Guru's voice was droning on from above. 'Man was not meant to conquer space. He was meant to appreciate it. That's what you've got here. A course in space appreciation. Forget about a bunch of robots with short haircuts playing golf on the moon. What does a hole in one mean to the Eternal Spirit of the Cosmos?'
Sean pushed his hand down along Andrea's stomach, below the hem of her dress, and then pulled back up, hooking a finger to catch her panties where they were smallest. He wiggled the finger inside and probed the thin mat of hot corn-silk for the feeling of wetness and the always-shocking presence of an aperture.
His finger slid in. Andrea shifted her body to receive it and ran a hand across his chest. 'If a hole in one doesn't mean this'-Sean curled his finger-'to the Eternal Spirit of the Cosmos, it doesn't mean shit!'
'I'll tell you something,' Andrea replied, trying at once to absorb the pleasurable feeling of Sean's fingers in her cunt and to catch the Guru's words and follow his instructions. 'I don't want to sound like that blushing young couple from Flushing over there, but I'd sort of like to try out the Guru's thing. I mean, I've got these weird vibrations that there's something special about the guy. Now that doesn't mean I don't want you fingering me in the meantime…' She grabbed his hand and pressed it enthusiastically into her crotch to demonstrate her point 'But I also want to try this thing.' She paused and they listened to the Guru some more.
'The idea of the exercise is not to exercise. Americans, especially Western Hemisphere people, think too much about doing too much. They don't want to admit that the world's doing a lot more than they are, only it's taking its time. Now I ask you, according to the Theory of Relativity, isn't the speed of light taking its time? So you can afford to too. Toot-toot-tee-toot! And while you're doing it, consider if you will the distance between yourself and the nearest star. Scientists will tell you it's X million light years away, and they'll also tell you that a light year is a good long time. What does that all mean? That if you got in your car and packed a good healthy lunch and took off driving straight up, you'd have to find so many gas stations and make so many piss-stops before you burned your ass off approaching the Infernal Toll Booth of the nearest star.
'Now there's only one reason that we're living, and that's because our planet is not too close to the closest star and not too far either. So it follows that the best place for us to dig any star from is right here. Now if you put this together with the fact that actually seeing is a sense and so is touching, and seeing has to have something in common with touching, and touching has to be more basic because you can be alive if you can't see but not if you can't feel, you come up with the inevitable conclusion that the stars aren't really far away at all. They're right here as much as any fire's right here. And what fire is right here? The fire of life! Which is, after all, the viewpoint from which we are aware of the stars. So don't be thinking that you're trying to take pictures of the stars when they're some unknown zillion number of light years away! Just dig it that those little twinkling pin-points are as close to you, as you are, and introduce yourself to them. Get to know your way around up there as well as you know your way around your own living room. GO!'
Sean massaged Andrea's pussy gently and listened. He really had not intended to pay too much attention to the Guru and his shenanigans-he hadn't made up his mind yet whether the guy was foxy or nuts but he was just out to have a good time so he didn't care-but Joe and Andrea had suspicions that the guy might have something to say, and he respected them enough to see if he could, as the Guru himself put it, get past the bullshit.
He looked up at the stars, and the first thing that struck him was the absurdity of trying to memorize their patterns. Why, he could pick out just about any patch of blackness he wanted and if he looked hard enough he could find a star in it. Well, he didn't need the Guru Baalow Nee to tell him he was little compared to the size of the universe.
Or did he? Or was that the opposite of what the Guru meant?
Sean and Andrea spent the next hour opening and closing their eyes, getting patterns of stars down in their heads, and checking them against the patterns that were really there when the Guru told them to. They heard a few more squabbles from the couple nearby-who turned out to be just on the other side of a funnel-and they couldn't quite understand what the hassle was about, because they had no trouble-blind stargazing and groping each other to their mutual satisfaction at the same time. In fact the activities seemed to complement each other naturally. Contemplating the heavens induced a feeling of consummate mellowness that helped them relax and concentrate totally on the genital pleasures, without that familiar frenetic feeling that something had to happen right away, or pretty soon, or ever.
Sean fingered Andrea for a good half hour, and she took it not as a preparation for an imminent fuck, but as a thing in itself; a massage of the place that naturally appreciated massages most. She couldn't count the times she came, not because there were so many or so few, but because it was hard to tell whether the saturating feelings of complete well-being, the passive acceptances of the natural positive of pleasure, that flowed through her continuously like ocean waves, were really orgasms at all, and if they were, whether they were one or many. They were simply nothing like-or it was nothing like-starting at the beginning and going through all the stages of sexual arousal until at last one reached that definite and delirious moment of consummation; after which, having reached the mountain's peak, one slid precipitously down the other side into oblivion or sleep or the decision to go to the bathroom for a piss. It was a single interwoven fabric of ecstasy. Sort of like the single interwoven fabric of the heavens with its random concentrations of energy-the stars.
While Sean was on the giving end of this operation he found to his surprise that he could really go quite a lot farther than he'd imagined in memorizing the heavens. Some of the work, of course, had been done beforehand. He recognized many of the constellations that ancient astronomers had imagined in the shapes of men with clubs and three-star belts, big gravy ladles, animals; and of course there was always the cosmic candy bar. But beyond that he found he could take a wide view and make large patterns in the sky as a whole, and within them smaller ones, and more and more, until when the Guru ended one of his incoherent orations with a sudden 'STOP!', Sean found
