Bodies of Light by Lisabet Sarai
Scifi Ménage Erotic Romance
Five flames
17,800 words, 63 Kindle pages
Can you make love to beings without bodies?
Physicist Dr. Christine Monroe has devoted her lonely life to research on hyper-space travel. Her continued failure leads her to sign on to the Archimedes, a sub-light-speed mission aimed at establishing a colony in the Sirius-B system. Waking from suspended animation, she discovers that the ship is wildly off course and the rest of the crew are dead due to equipment failure.
At first she thinks the two virile strangers who show up on the ship are figments of her imagination - erotic hallucinations created by isolation and stress. However, Alyn and Zed are solid, real, and ready to sacrifice their lives for the strong woman they've found stranded in deep space. As her ship begins to disintegrate, Christine must choose between the planet she was sent to save and the two aliens she's come to cherish.
Note: This book was previously published by Totally Entwined. This new edition has been revised and re-edited.
First Flight
Dr. Christine Monroe, heroine of my new science fiction romance Bodies of Light, is part of Earth's very first inter-stellar expedition. She and the other crew members of the Archimedes are on their way to colonize a planet orbiting the nearby (by astronomical standards) star Sirius-B. Humans have never before escaped the bounds of Earth's solar system, but dire conditions on Terra mean that humanity needs to find a new home.
I set Bodies of Light in the relatively near future rather than in a time when space travel was commonplace, because I wanted to imagine what it might be like to voyage so far when no one else has preceded you. Christine is the first human being to see the vast expanse of space between the stars. She reacts with both terror and awe.
Both Christine's parents died in a plague (perhaps something like the COVID pandemic, though the story was written before those sobering events) and she was raised by her elderly grandmother. The grandmother told her young charge a tale from her own childhood, when she watched the first manned flight in America's Mercury space program. The entire elementary school population trooped into the cafeteria, where they sat glued to the black and white television broadcasting the mission. At that moment, the grandmother decided she would become an astronaut, although she never fulfilled that goal.
This experience comes from my own childhood. I was in the fourth grade when the powerful Redstone rocket sent Alan Shepard's capsule hurtling into the stratosphere. Like many of my generation, I was inspired to dream of space. For several years afterwards, I nurtured an ambition to reach for the stars. I didn't realize that women were excluded from the astronaut program or that I never would have satisfied the physical criteria, with my extreme myopia and fallen arches.
Christine, in some sense, inherits her grandmother's dream. Guilt and a sense of responsibility, rather than passion, leads her to join the Archimedes mission, but when she gazes out of the ship's viewport for the first time, she is a true pioneer.
I'm excited by recent advances in space travel, though I worry about both the commercialization and the militarization of space. I may well live to see humans land on Mars, or even exit the solar system. I wouldn't personally want to be speeding through the vacuum in a glorified tin can, but I'll applaud when someone else takes that first leap. Here is an excerpt from the book.
Excerpt From Bodies of Light
The alarm buzzed in Christine's ears like an angry wasp. Electric current crackled along her skin, goading her long-dormant nerves into responsiveness. Her attempt to inhale turned into a racking cough as her body expelled the last traces of fluid from her lungs. Her eyes flickered open. Dim as it was, the blue-tinged light within the suspension pod made her head pound.
Her limbs felt weighted with lead. She tried to wiggle her fingers. They were stiff, as though encrusted with rust. The gel that cradled her gradually warmed. As it did, her joints grew more flexible. Little by little the pod thawed her long-immobile body.
As soon as she could lift her arm, she groped for the release switch. Her movements were clumsy and slow. The curved hatch over her face slid back, exposing her to the cooler air outside. Goosebumps rose on her bare skin. She pulled the tubes from her arms and pushed aside the tangle of cables strapped around her brow. When she struggled to sit up, a wave of dizziness crashed over her. She waited for the vertigo to subside.
The fog in her brain thinned a bit. She remembered where she was—the Archimedes, en route to Sirius 2. Had they arrived, then? Listening closely, she heard nothing but her own breathing.
The suspension bay was located near the center of the ship in order to protect it from possible meteor damage to the hull. There were no viewports. It hardly mattered. Christine was a physicist, not an astronomer or a pilot. Even if she could have seen the stars, she couldn't have read them. She needed to get to the bridge, to figure out how far they were from their destination and whether it was time to revive the rest of the crew.
She swung her legs out of the coffin-like suspension capsule and took a stab at standing. Her knees buckled when she transferred her weight, leaving her slumped on the rubber-clad floor. Her head swam. When her vision cleared, she tried again. This time she managed to stay upright although she had to lean on the capsule for support.
Christine took a deep breath. She felt the strength returning gradually to her body. Her skin was slimy with residue from the nutrient gel that had nourished her inanimate form during the months —or was it years?—since the ship had departed.
At point-nine lightspeed, the maximum velocity of which the Archimedes was capable, the journey to the Sirius cluster should have taken almost thirteen years. Was that long wait really over? It had seemed like the blink of an eye. A kind of rosy haze hung in her mind, a sense of peace and well-being, but she couldn't remember any details about her time in stasis.
She surveyed the nineteen other capsules arranged around the perimeter of the bay. She seemed to be the only one the ship had awakened. She stumbled over to the closest pod—Ravin Conter, the xenobiologist and her assigned partner—and peered in through the curved glass. She could just make out his rugged features, pale and composed.
Something wasn't right, though. Her thoughts still disordered by the transition, it took her ten seconds to put her finger on the problem. The capsule should have been lit from within by the same low-intensity blue as her own had been. However, there was no interior illumination. Only the ambient light of the bay made Ravin's face visible.
"Ravin!" she cried. Her voice woke hollow echoes in the metal-walled chamber. The vital sign indicators on the control panel were blank. She keyed the emergency revival sequence into the controls on the top of the pod. Nothing happened. There was no power running to the capsule. It was dead, and so, it was obvious, was the person within.
"No!"
She stared at Ravin's naked form, cradled in blue-green gel and twined in wires and hoses. How could he be dead? What had happened? Christine whirled around to check the next capsule—Amber Stone, ship's doctor and the closest thing she had to a friend. Like Ravin's, Amber's pod was dark and unresponsive.
Fighting down her panic, Christine examined the remaining suspension capsules. All appeared to have malfunctioned. All the occupants lay in darkness within, perfectly-preserved corpses.
"No, no—please, no!" she keened, sinking to her knees in the center of the room. "Oh, please…" Her eyes burned as tears welled up for the first time in years.
She had not really been close to anyone on the Archimedes—she and Ravin had been paired solely on the basis of genetic and psychological compatibility—but she had liked and respected them all. They'd had the courage to volunteer for Earth's first interstellar mission, to risk their lives for the future of humanity. Hell, they'd fought hard for the opportunity, beating the hundreds of other candidates. They'd endured the two years of grueling preparation. They'd climbed willingly into the suspension capsules knowing they wouldn't emerge for years—if ever. Each had left his or her life on Earth behind, well aware that the odds of the mission succeeding were small and that, even if it did succeed, they could never return.
Now they were gone and, with them, all hope of establishing a colony. The mission was a failure—one final failure in the long series that had been her life.
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About the Author
Lisabet Sarai became addicted to words at an early age. She began reading when she was four. She wrote her first story at five years old and her first poem at seven. Since then, she has written plays, tutorials, scholarly articles, marketing brochures, software specifications, self-help books, press releases, a five-hundred page dissertation, and lots of erotica and erotic romance – over one hundred titles, and counting, in nearly every sub-genre—paranormal, scifi, ménage, BDSM, LGBTQ, and more. Regardless of the genre, every one of her stories illustrates her motto: Imagination is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
You'll find information and excerpts from all Lisabet's books on her website (http://www.lisabetsarai.com/books.html), along with more than fifty free stories and lots more. At her blog Beyond Romance (http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com), she shares her philosophy and her news and hosts lots of other great authors. She's also on Goodreads, BookBub and Twitter. Join her VIP email list here: https://btn.ymlp.com/xgjjhmhugmgh
