played the surprised worker that Ching genuinely was. There we were informed that we had shown ourselves more than capable of higher positions. Effective immediately, we were being promoted to In-Service Passenger Attendants, Grade 6, and would shortly be assigned for a week of training and evaluation. Since we’d been Grade 3s (I never did learn what Is and 2s were—I could hardly imagine anything lower than bus cleaners) this was a substantial jump, although it was, of course, contingent on our successful training and initial job performance evaluations. The job actually only warranted a Grade 5, but the extra bump was given because we would now have two homes many kilometers apart, and would have double toiletries and the like. At our previous level you owned virtually nothing at all—you couldn’t afford it—but, while we wouldn’t be very well off compared to many others, we7 would now have a bit left over from basic expenses for luxuries.
We presented our cards, which were run through a computer and popped back to us apparently unchanged, but we knew that the information now reflected increased grade and status. We also had two days until our new shift, an afternoon one, would properly cycle so we could join our crew. We actually had some time to kill and made the most of it. Ching was particularly excited and pleased by the turn of events, and I tried as hard as I could to share in her joy and excitement. Doing so was tough when you knew what was really going on.
Two days later we went down to the main passenger terminal and found Shift Supervisor Morphy, a distinguished-looking woman in early middle age who looked a little like civilized worlders. A native most definitely, I decided, but a child or grandchild of a civilized worlder and a frontier type. These were very common on Medusa.
The job wasn’t very glamorous or exciting, despite the fancy titles. Basically we patrolled the cars, wiping passenger’s noses, answering then: stupid questions, explaining how to get food or drink or how to operate the seat terminals as well as making sure that all the amenities were working properly. In some ways this was worse than cleaning buses. In that job, I mostly stood around and goofed off while seeing that the cleaning machines did their jobs properly, while here I was constantly exposed to the public and observed by shift supervisors as I walked from one end of the train to the other and back. And I had to be
In one way the job was similar to tracking down and confronting criminals. Both were filled with repetition and long, boring stretches, yet both were at the same time interesting and disgusting.
Our train usually had two or three passenger cars and the rest freight. The freight level remained constant but the passenger car number increased or decreased according to demand. In the first week we had one six-car passenger train and another that had only one, but never did we have a run with none.
The training period was really grating at tunes, with every little thing criticized. I almost belted Morphy more than once. The week seemed to last forever. Finally, though, we were on our own and less closely supervised, and things eased up a bit.
Train crews had distinctive uniforms, nicely tailored and with overly large insignia on them. Since a lot of our own Guild’s members used the trains to get to and from where they were needed, there had to be some way to tell the specific train’s crew from others in transportation. We looked, in fact, pretty elegant by Medusan standards, but that was par for the course. I remember a fancy resort once, long ago, that used a lot of human attendants just to give the place a more elegant and personal feel, and the best-dressed people in the joint were the doorman and the waiters.
Our new room in Rochande was virtually identical to the one back in Gray Basin, the only difference being that it was on the third, not the fourth, floor and the beds were against the left rather than the right wall. A mirror image, basically, to remind us where we were.
Rochande, however, was quite different from Gray Basin if only because of its geography. It was a food- distribution center for the region, and, therefore, a space-freight port. It was also pretty far south, comparatively speaking, and while the winter still hit it was neither long nor hard, and the city was on the surface rather than dug in and roofed over. There were also huge forests around, and quite a number of exotic plants, which gave the place a whole different feel, even if the city’s pie-shaped design and dull, blocky architecture was depressingly familiar.
The trip south, once through the electronic barricades of Gray Basin, was interesting, too. You could see the climate gradually change as you moved south, with occasional breaks in the thinning snow patches, showing hardy grasses at first, then some bushes, and eventually increasingly larger trees. Finally we were more or less out of the hard winter and into a more temperate zone. The world was not nearly as bad as Gray Basin made it seem, though there was not a sign of cultivation or even roads in sight for the entire distance. More than the climate and vegetation changes, that was the true contrast on Medusa, one brought home with every trip. In the cities and towns, and on the sleek, smooth, modern trains, you were in a highly technological, modern society though a regimented one. Outside the cities was a primitive world.
It was a world that was said to have genuine threats although I’d been able to learn very little about it. Basically, the people were very secure in their modern pockets on this wilderness world and most of them had never been beyond their society’s protection. What exactly was out there, other than wild and vicious animals, some of whom could change their shape, was really unknown. I found the stories about shape-changing most interesting and made it a point to research those animals as much as I could with the library access on the terminal. Apparently the Medusans didn’t even like to study these creatures, at least not publicly. If, in fact, some of those creatures could shape-change—something not even alluded to in the descriptions—I could see why Medusan authorities wouldn’t want the opportunity to plant ideas like mine into crooked heads.
The dominant life forms were mammals, however, something I found interesting but logical—reptiles couldn’t really have much of a future on a world as cold as this, and insects would have too short a developmental season each year to do more than fill an ecological niche. Even the ocean creatures, as far as was known, were air- breathing mammals, since, apparently, the algae and plankton that would support a real fishy evolution was low, and the seas were relatively shallow.
The familiar pattern of animal development was here, though, with one vegetarian species called vettas eating mostly grasses and another called tubros eating mostly leaves and other parts of trees, apparently instinctively trimming but not killing. The big, nasty brutes were the harrar, who mostly ate vettas and tubros. There were several hundred subspecies of the two vegetarian types, and several varieties of harrar. The rest of the animal kingdom was varied, vast, and mostly invisible, but fitted into the normal balance of nature in totally expected ways. I concentrated on the dominant life forms, except for the smaller creatures that were poisonous or nasty, because I hoped to find some clues in the big ones to what I was looking for.
As for looks, the vettas had large, flat, toothy bills, big, round eyes, short necks, and legs that were very wide, clawed, and padded, and yet they could move when they had to, at speeds up to forty kilometers per hour for short distances. The tubros had long, thin snouts, necks that bent in all directions and were longer than their bodies, and enormous, clawed limbs that were almost handlike. Their tails somewhat resembled their necks, and they occasionally used these tails as decoys when checking to see if the coast was clear. Apparently the tails came out if bitten. Tubros weren’t very fast, but they could climb trees in a flash and could sleep either right side up or upside down, clinging to strong branches or trunks. Vettas had no real defense except their speed; tubros, however, could be nasty when cornered, and could use that tail of theirs like a whip.
The harrar was the hardest to phi down. Mostly it looked like a huge, undulating mass of fur, skin, and taloned feet that were almost birdlike. It generally walked, looking ridiculous, on those legs; but when it caught prey, two small, nasty hands in that fur were strong enough to tear heads off. Somewhere in that lump, was the biggest mouth relative to body size that I’d ever seen, with row upon row of teeth. The harrar interested me the most, since it was, according to the legends, a shape-changer. This critter would need to eat a lot to feed that big body, and it could hardly climb trees or outrun anything going forty kilometers per hour.
The sea creatures seemed to mirror those on land, except that there were more levels with far greater interdependence, starting with the little slugs that ate bacterialike organisms near the surface and also scavenged the bottom, up to water-born counterparts of the vettas and tubros. Despite smooth sides and flippers and fins, these looked very much like their land counterparts—but were omnivores, eating smaller animals as well as surface and bottom water plants. There was also an amphibious version of the harrar, which appeared to be a one-ton or more lump of gray or black with dorsal and tail fins, little beady eyes, a big, big mouth—and little else. This sea carnivore, called makhara, seemed totally unable to cope with swift prey—yet it had to do pretty well to keep that mass of fat happy. How did it do it? How, in fact, could
