It took a few seconds for me to register that last statement, spoken as it was in a carefully offhand way.
“You’re going? You mean … you’re going as essential crew?”
“Third biologist,” he said, trying out a casual, dismissive wave of his mid-hands that didn’t fool me for a second. There was no hiding the pink glow that began at the tips of his quills and spread toward his head.
I was happy for Lackofa. I really was. Except for the part of me that was screamingly jealous. I had a one in five hundred chance of going aboard the Zero-space ship as a nonessential. He had a guaranteed berth as essential crew. We were almost the same age. But somehow he had managed to accomplish a great deal more than I had.
There’s a wake-up memm, Toomin, I told myself. Can you read the time cue?
I was an idiot. I was wasting my life in game playing, free flying, and face-face. Meanwhile Lackofa was on his way into deepest space to see first-hand the things I would see only later, and only on some net sim.
I fell silent. Lackofa didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
“Well, congratulations, Lackofa,” I said, doing a very weak job of ginning up enthusiasm. “That’s really an honor.”
“Is it? Yes, I guess it is.”
I shut up after that. It was wrong to be bitter, but I was. Bitter at myself. I’d steadfastly refused any intellectual specialization. I’d told myself I didn’t want to limit my mind by picking one particular discipline. Laziness, that’s what it was. I was lazy. I was a daydreamer. I was a juvie at an age when I could easily be taken seriously as an adult. The only thing I cared about was the game, and I wasn’t even good at that.
I resolved then and there to change my life. To turn it around in mid-flight. No more nonsense, I had to bear down, I had to grapple, I had to dock-and-hold. I was going to do it: My shunt was going to burn out from the load of educational memms I would download. I could do it. I had the brains, I just hadn’t decided to get serious.
Okay, well, time’s up, Toomin. Make some choices. Make some commitment. Right now. Do it!
Only it was free-flight time. The others would be expecting me. I’d told Inidar I’d be there. Wasn’t right to just abandon all my friends just because I’d decided to change.
Free flight first, then I’d explain to my friends that they might not be seeing all that much of me anymore.
The time-cue memm popped up and I released my docking talons and disconnected. I felt the blessed silence in my head. No memms. No time cues, no updates, no alerts, no “items of interest,” no nagging about jobs not done, no urging to examine this or that or the other uninet publication, no guilt-inducing “why don’t you perch with us?” memms from the dam and sire.
Free flight! I drifted down, down and away from the spar that was my home.
Wings folded back and up, I dead-dived through the masts and spars and rough-hewn new growth protrusions, shot past a swirl-quilled female who cast a languid, unimpressed, but wonderfully turquoise glance my way.
Down and out of the matrix, out into the bare air beyond the reaches of the crystal, out into bare air where I could look down and see the surface clearly. Or as clearly as anyone could, given the yellow, slowly twisting swamp gas clouds down there.
I opened my wings, canceled my momentum, equalized buoyancy, straining my dorsal intakes a bit as I sucked air.
From here I could get a fuller picture of my home crystal. It’s terribly cliché to find it beautiful, but beautiful it was. It filled most of the sky, of course, but even from this distance I could see the generally spherical shape, the ball of brilliant, reflective masts, spars, and yards.
The sun was up and shining bright, and as the crystal moved in a slow rotation the sunbeams blazed, reflected, from a million facets. Ice-blue, palest green, yellow, violet, and pink: It was a lovely sight.
The population was just over half a million now, and at any given time ninety percent of that number would be docked, wings weaving the eternal pattern, providing the endless, tireless lift that kept the crystal from settling slowly to the ground below. The remaining ten percent could be in free flight, if they chose, but in reality it was mostly the younger Ketrans who indulged. Older folks only free flew if they had to commute to some specialized work.
Standing off from the crystal itself, looking like a small moon in tight orbit, the ship: Mapping Crystal Quadrant Three. MCQ3. The EmCee.
It was an omen, perhaps, of our own future, for it looked at first glance like a miniaturized version of the Equatorial High Crystal, except that the spars and masts were clearly not grown and trimmed to form a spheroid, but rather to form an elongated oval with a definite top and bottom. At the bottom the MCQ3 had four massive stems, twice the thickness of a late-growth mast or spar. And attached to each of these four stems was an ugly, thoroughly opaque metal cylinder. These were the Zero-space engines. And they were nothing subversive. The thing that disturbed many people was the much smaller disk located at the junction where the stems met the core crystal. For there, at that strategic point, the MCQ3’s builders had installed an anti-grav generator.
The MCQ3 floated effortlessly, kept station perfectly, defied the planet’s relentless pull, all without the beat of so much as a single set of wings.
It made perfect sense, the ship was destined for planet-fall on unknown worlds. We obviously could not predict atmospheric makeup, pressures, updrafts, and so on, in advance. It was entirely impractical to imagine a wing-supported crystal cruising the atmosphere of some unforeseen alien world. The anti-grav made perfect sense.
But the problem was, it made sense for our own home crystals as well. The anti-gravs were easy enough to build. If they were installed on the home crystals it would free people up for things other than the main task of lifting. Life would be nothing but free flight!
As a gamer I found it fascinating. It was exactly a game scenario: Make a single, vital change in a society, and watch what happens. What would happen if we Ketrans were freed from this cooperative need to keep home afloat in the atmosphere? No one knew.
I gazed up at the MCQ3. There was no avoiding the emotions that accompanied that sight. I’d have sold my sire and dam into surface mining to go aboard. Deep worms, I wanted to go.
Wasn’t happening. “What?” I mocked myself savagely. “No need for a game-playing adolescent aboard the greatest interplanetary expedition ever?”
Let it pass. Let it breeze on by, Toomin. Not on the past but on the future fix your range finder.
“That’s right,” I muttered darkly, “take refuge in platitudes.”
I flapped wing and headed up. Not toward the MCQ3. No, not that way, but vectoring away from it, up toward the violet perches where I was to meet my friends to listen to the announcement. The last place I wanted to be in this frame of mind, but they, poor fools, still held out hope.
We had all applied to be accepted as nonessential crew. Why not? There’s a natural affinity between gamers and planetary explorers. Or so we told ourselves.
I caught a lovely baffle breeze and soared effortlessly upward, up and up past all of Azure Level, up to Violet Level and the scooped-out hollow of the perches.
Redfar/Inidar was there waiting, zooming lazily with Escobat (whose game name was Wormer), and Doffnall, a rare female gamer, who used the game name Aguella.
“Hey, Ellimist,” Aguella called out when she saw me. “I memmed that you managed to exterminate the Pangabans in record time.”
Among ourselves we tended to use our game names. It was a silly affectation, another sign of the immaturity I was now able to see so clearly in all of us.
“I was playing a hunch,” I said a little too gloomily to match her bantering tone. Then, trying to lighten the mood, I added, “I demand a rematch. Next time I’ll manage to exterminate my side in even less time.”
My friends laughed at that. We competed in the game, but there was also a sense that we four competed against the game, as though it was a co
mmon enemy we had to learn to subdue.
I recalled what Lackofa had said about the game being necessarily limited. No doubt he was right. No doubt over time the patterns would become all too obvious and the game would thus become boring. But then, by that point, the game makers would have a new and improved game. They always did.
Wormer started talking about a scenario involving a three-way competition among a parasitic species, a predator species, and a symbiotic species. He was the only one who had played it so we listened closely. We quickly slipped into game speak as we free flew around the perches, checking out others of interest and being checked out in return. The violet perches were a great hangout for free-flying youths.
No one brought up the announcement, not at first anyway. No one wanted to seem unduly interested. We were breezy. Way too breezy to be obsessed over some slim chance at a true-life adventure. Anyway, we were gamers. The game was the thing.
And yet I noticed each of us in turn glancing at the pulpit where a Speaker would soon appear to deliver the news.
I wasn’t nervous. I’d given up hope. There’s nothing like a surrender to despair to settle your nerves. But the others were twitchy and it was hard not to catch a little of their turbulence.
I said, “You know, the truth is that underneath it all, the game has a set of assumptions. If we could codify these assumptions we could win every game.” I was quoting Lackofa and passing it off as my own insight.
“Of course we could,” Inidar said. “If. Very big ‘if.’ Huge ‘if.’ In fact it’s so …”
He fell silent. He stared hard: Four globes, no clouds, as the old saying goes. Wormer and Aguella rotated and watched without even a pretense of disinterest.
What was I going to do? Pretend to fly away and tease some face-face with some strange female? I had to stay and wait. It was only polite.
I watched, waited along with them, as the Speaker drifted at a fuzzball’s pace to the pulpit.
He was an oldster, his long quills more rust-red than clear. Speaker was a job for oldsters. They had the voices for it.
I didn’t want to be nervous. I was. My entire brand-new edifice of indifference was washed away in an updraft of desire. Get it over with! Get it over with, oldster, and let me get on with my newly serious life.
“Here are the announcements,” the Speaker said in a loud, carrying, professional voice.
“Violet and Pink Levels will begin cultivation of new spars. Each new spar will eventually grow eight yards, radial.”
We didn’t care. I didn’t anyway. Maybe Aguella or Wormer did, they’re both Violets.
The Speaker went on. “There are seven days left before the Dance By of our own beloved home, with the Polar Orbit High Crystal. As most of you know, this is an event that takes place only once in every nineteen years. Free flights will be scheduled in half-intervals to allow the largest number of people to meet and mingle with our brothers and sisters of the Polar Orbit High.”
I shrugged. Well, that was something different, at least. A change of routine. A chance to meet strangers and make cross-connections. I wasn’t ready to propagate fortunately. So at least there’d be none of that pressure. None of us were old enough. Except maybe for Aguella.
I glanced at her, watching to see her reaction to the announcement. Was she blushing? What a strange thought to imagine Aguella becoming a dam. Disturbing somehow. She looked nothing at all like my dam. Far younger, for one thing. Prettier.
Aguella had a seriousness that Inidar and Wormer and I lacked. She had more than the game going on in her life. She was very into passive sensor theory. In fact, one of her designs had been incorporated (in modified form) into the sensor array of the EmCee.
“Finally,” the Speaker said portentously.
“Here it comes,” Wormer muttered.
“I will announce the names of the nonessential crew chosen for the upcoming trip of the Mapping Crystal Quadrant Three. The names will be announced by level. From Pink Level: Pink Level, Seventy Spar, Yard One, Down-Messenger, Nine. Pink Level …”
“We could run a game before he gets to any of us,” Inidar grumbled.
The moment of high drama was rather undercut by the realization that we had a long wait ahead of us. And yet, we did not budge. There was some desultory conversation, but with always an ear cocked.
And then, “Violet Level, Two Spar, Main Branch, Left-Messenger, One hundred twenty-nine.”
Aguella gasped. For a long moment I had no idea why.
“Is that you?” I asked stupidly. I’m sure I’d known her formal name at some point but I’d long since forgotten it.
She nodded. She started to speak, then just nodded some more. She looked troubled more than elated. Almost worried.
I had no more time to be concerned with her strange reaction to good news. The Speaker had at long last reached Azure Level. Wormer sagged. Violet Level was done, and his name had not been called.
There were just seven names from Azure Level. My name was the fifth name spoken.
For a frozen moment of time my brain stopped synapsing. I stopped breathing. My wings faltered and I did a droop. “Did he say my name?” I whispered. “Forty-one, right? Not Thirty-one?”
Wormer did his best to be nice about it. He tried to breeze it. Maybe Inidar did his best, too, but his best wasn’t great. He looked like a crasher, and I knew that anything I said to try and take away the hurt would just hurt him worse. Pity is never very comforting to the pitied.
But at some level their reactions were already irrelevant. I knew it, and so did they, sadly.
The four of us were now two and two. Wormer and Inidar would stay behind. Aguella and I would go.
I returned to my dock, barely making it in time. I clamped on and yelled up to Lackofa.
“Hey! Hey! Lackofa!”
He opened his eyes and favored me with his usual disapproving scowl. “What now?”
“I made it. I’m nonessential!”
“As nonessential as it is possible to be,” he said dryly.
“Very funny, Lackofa, but you don’t even have a faint chance of annoying me. Not today. I’m on the EmCee! We’ll be crew together. I’m going!”
“Oh that. Yes, I know.”
“How do you know? It can’t be on the uninet yet. There’s a mandated quarter-hour lag time for official announcements.”
The uninet was a relatively recent development, barely a hundred years old, and no one wanted to obsolete the Speakers and their traditions.
Lackofa closed his eyes. I accessed the uninet. No, the announcement wasn’t on yet. Wait, here it was, just coming up. I punched in and read my own name, my lovely, lovely name. I highlighted it in crimson letters and read it again.
A very fine name that looked very, very fine placed neatly near the bottom of the list. The sight of it filled me with profound satisfaction.
Then, I realized. “Hey, Lackofa. How did you know, if it’s just now coming on the net?”
No answer.
“You did it,” I accused. “You sponsored me!”
“Why would I do that?” he growled.
“Why would you do that?” I echoed with a different emphasis. “You don’t even like me. I’m a gamer. A losing gamer. I’m a hundred and seventy-ninth in the rankings, out of nine hundred and nine registered gamers in my set. Why me?”
Lackofa didn’t answer at first, but I guess he realized I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. He sighed again, grumbled inaudibly to himself for a moment, then, sounding like a person who is being forced to confess to a crime, said, “I have developed a morbid curiosity about your failures, Toomin. I’m a biologist so I have access to your DNA map. You are in fact one hundred and ninety-fourth in the rankings — your loss earlier has bumped you fifteen slots.”
“Ouch.”
“But in terms of pure analytical intelligence you are very near the peak.”
“I am?”
“Yes, and don’t play coy with me. You know you’re sma
rter than gamers who beat you regularly. You lose games you should win, not deliberately, but stubbornly. You’re playing the game at a different level. Not trying to win, trying to win with kindness. Altruism.”
I was embarrassed. Amazed that Lackofa had been paying attention to me at a level that I never suspected.
“Anyway,” Lackofa said. “We have any number of brilliant scientists, brilliant analysts, brilliant communicators, brilliant theoreticians, brilliant physicists, brilliant techs, and brilliant astronomers on board the MCQ3. I asked myself what we didn’t have, and the answer came to me: We had no brilliant losers. So, yes, I sponsored you. Now please shut up, I have work to do.”
He closed his eyes and shut me out, this time for real.
Brilliant loser? Was it possible to be simultaneously flattered and insulted?
Evidently.
A memm popped up, an invitation to a game from a gamer named Dryhad. I refused. This was not the time for a game. I had deep thoughts to think; plans to make; arrangements to arrange.
Didn’t I? Yes, absolutely. It was definitely not time for a game. First and foremost, I had to learn everything there was to learn about MCQ3, about Zero-space engines, about Quadrant Three and its major star systems.
I accessed the data on MCQ3. The summary alone would take me a year to digest. No time for all that. Besides, I didn’t need the technical stuff, I just needed … well, for now I just needed the pictures.
Yes, yes, there she was. A true deep-space ship. My deep-space ship. My own personal MCQ3, I loved her already.
Brilliant loser?
At least I wouldn’t go aboard her unprepared, looking like some lost fool who couldn’t tell inner from outer. I was going to memorize every square inch of her.
So little time. Nineteen days. So much to do and no time at all. Practically no time at all. Nineteen days!
Deep worms, it was going to seem like forever.
My mind was focused sharply, even obsessively, on the MCQ3 and its launch, but everyone else was more interested in the Dance By of Polar Orbit High. The Polars were Ketran, of course, just like us, but with a possibly different society. I say possibly because we only encountered them every nineteen years.