This story arose out of a
chance remark about goats on the Kashyk ONElist that turned into
a huge running gag. The challenge was to write a J/Ka story that
featured a goat.
The title is taken from Donne's poem A nocturnall upon S.
Lucies day, Being the shortest day.
DISCLAIMER: Paramount thought them up but doesn't let them have much fun. This story is mine; if you post it elsewhere without my permission, I'll set Prax on you.
"And that is Aldebaran," she said, pointing a languorous arm at a bright star low down on the horizon. "In the constellation of Taurus. The Bull. I was born under that sign."
"Born under a sign?" said Kashyk, turning to her as she lay beside him on the soft turf.
They were on the holodeck running Kathryn's Earth Familiarization Program, or what she had jokingly named Terra-informing.
It was no longer if they would get back to Earth. It was no longer even when (meaning at some unspecified time in a future that most of them could reasonably expect to see). In two years time they would reach the boundary of the Alpha Quadrant.
Invitatations were flying around to 'my thirtieth birthday bash back on Earth'; 'my kid's graduation from the Academy'; 'my silver wedding'. There was an end of term sort of feeling throughout the ship.
Kathryn was not immune to the excitement. She was spending replicator credits with a recklessness she could scarcely believe. Although much of it was due to the presence of this man in her life, she thought. The dress she was wearing tonight, the vintage champagne chilling in the bucket beside them: they were for Kashyk and the immediate present.
"Please", she said and held up her empty glass. Kashyk reached for the bottle and filled her glass and his own. They drank, he looking at her with intense, unknowable eyes.
Kathryn felt a pleasant stirring that had nothing to do with Earth or champagne. These sessions invariably ended with lovemaking. On this hot night, rich with the scent of night-blooming flowers and the glory of the starlight, an astronomy lesson seemed something of a waste of resources.
"He can get the data from Astrometrics," she said to herself. Then with her customary honesty she admitted to herself that this particular program had nothing to do with instruction and everything to do with pleasure. She had mixed together flowers from north and south hemispheres with scant regard for growing seasons. A Garden of Eden, she thought. Then let it be ... an introduction to Earth's mythology.
She smiled slowly and reached for him, lifting her face for his kiss. His lips were warm and tasted of wine as she insinuated her tongue between them.
Bu when she would have prolonged the kiss, he pushed her gently from him and asked again what she meant by being born under a sign.
So it was to be a mythology lesson after all, thought Kathryn. She had remarked before his eagerness for knowledge, not merely the dry-as-dust facts to be found in the database, but the knowledge contained, unknowing, in a people's hearts.
She told him of the twelve houses of the Zodiac, of their signs and attributes, and of how it was said a lifetime could be predicted by the stars.
"But Jenny Delaney could tell you much more about this," she said. "She's our resident astrologer, and very highly thought of, or so I understand. I haven't consulted her myself."
"But, Kathryn, you cannot mean to tell me that there are people on this ship, rational men and women, scientists, who believe this?"
"It's the craze of the moment."
Like mah-jong, or the Murder Weekends, or the rock-and-roll fever that had swept the ship after the success of Tom's 50s Nite party a few months ago. It was a necessary safety-valve for the crew. It was harmless enough, although this particular craze was being closely monitored. Kathryn would not tolerate people swapping shifts because the planets advised rest that day, or one person refusing to work with another because their star-signs were incompatible.
"You must surely have something of the sort."
"Well, yes," he admitted. "Our system is based on the cycles of the moon."
"The Chinese, one of Earth's most ancient civilizations, have a similar system. Jenny could tell you about that, too."
It was a measure of how well she had come to know Kashyk that she could speak of Jenny Delaney without any sense of unease. Jenny, for all her youth and bright beauty was too uncomplicated to attract Kashyk. He needed the unanswerable question.
He will take other lovers, Kathryn thought, but he will always come back to me, because he can never fully know me.
"Why a bull?"
She explained how the Greeks had believed the constellations were heroes and beasts who had been changed by the gods into stars. The archaic hero, Jason, had tamed a bull, and it was this creature that ruled the month of Kathryn's birth.
"But there is another bull and another story."
And she told him of the queen, Pasiphaë, wife to Minos of Crete. Of how she had conceived a passion for a sacrificial bull. Of how Daedalus, Maze-Maker, had fashioned an artificial cow into which she climbed to receive her bestial lover. Of the child born from that monstrous coupling, half man, half bull, whose name meant a star, but who was hidden from the light in a dark labyrinth.
While she was speaking, Kashyk's breathing became heavier and his arm tightened around her, one hand cupping her breast.
This excites you, she thought. But now it was her turn to make him wait.
"What would your sign be, if you'd been born on earth?"
They worked out that he would have been born at the end of December.
"Capricorn. The goat."
"Is that good or bad?" he asked cautiously.
She stood, the sea green dress clinging to her body. "Masculinity. Virility. Abundant vitality. Creative energy," she chanted. "The god, Dionysus. The God Pan." She looked down at him her hands held palm upwards in a strange hieratic gesture. "Lewdness," she whispered. And her lips curved in a half-moon smile.
"My Pasiphaë."
She trembled and her heart was a hammer, beating gold rivets on sheets of bronze. Slowly she raised her hands to the straps of the dress and slid them down her arms, then worked her breasts free of the material. The dress fell to her feet and she was naked. For a moment she stood, then delicately she stepped out of the glimmering folds and turned away from him.
She lowered herself onto hands and knees and waited.
END
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