Falling Free

Leo smiled. “They can’t possibly be worse than the crew of roustabouts I trained at Jupiter Orbital #4.”

“I didn’t mean trouble from them.” Yei smiled again. “You will find they are very intelligent and attentive students. Quick. Quite literally, good children. And that’s what I want to talk about.” She paused, as if marshalling her thoughts like the distant cargo pushers.

“The GalacTech teachers and trainers occupy a parental role here for the Habitat family. Although parentless, the quaddies themselves must someday—indeed, are already becoming parents. From the beginning we’ve been at pains to assure they were provided with role models of stable adult responsibility. But they are still children. They will be watching you closely. I want you to be aware, and take care. They’ll be learning more than welding from you. They’ll also be picking up your other patterns of behavior. In short, if you have any bad habits—and we all have some—they must be parked downside for the duration of your stay. In other words,” Yei went on, “watch yourself. Watch your language.” An involuntary grin crinkled her eyes. “For example, one of our creche personnel once used the cliche ‘spit in your eye’ in some context or other… not only did the quaddies think it was hilarious, but it started an epidemic of spitting among the five-year-olds that took weeks to suppress. Now, you’ll be working with much older children, but the principle remains. For instance—ah— did you bring any personal reading or viewing matter with you? Vid dramas, newsdiscs, whatever.”

“I’m not much of a reader,” said Leo. “I brought my course material.”

“Technical information doesn’t concern me. What we’ve been having a problem with lately is, um, fiction.”

Leo raised an eyebrow, and grinned. “Pornography? I’m not sure I’d worry about that. When I was a kid we passed around—”

“No, no, not pornography. I’m not sure the quaddies would understand about pornography anyway. Sexuality is an open topic here, part of their social training. Biology. I’m far more concerned about fiction that clothes false or dangerous values in attractive colors, or biased histories.”

Leo wrinkled his forehead, increasingly dismayed. “Haven’t you taught these kids any history? Or let them have stories…?”

“Of course we have. The quaddies are well-supplied with both. It’s simply a matter of correct emphasis. For example—a typical downsider history of, say, the settlement of Orient IV usually gives about fifteen pages to the year of the Brothers’ War, a temporary if bizarre social aberration—and about two to the actual hundred or so years of settlement and building-up of the planet. Our text gives one paragraph to the war. But the building of the Witgow trans-trench monorail tunnel, with its subsequent beneficial economic effects to both sides, gets five pages. In short, we emphasize the common instead of the rare, building rather than destruction, the normal at the expense of the abnormal. So that the quaddies may never get the idea that the abnormal is somehow expected of them. If you’d like to read the texts, I think you’ll get the idea very quickly.”

“I—yeah, I think I’d better,” Leo murmured. The degree of censorship imposed upon the quaddies implied by Yei’s brief description made his skin crawl—and yet, the idea of a text that devoted whole sections to great engineering works made him want to stand up and cheer. He contained his confusion in a bland smile. “I really didn’t bring anything on board,” he offered placatingly.

She led him off for a tour of the dormitories, and the supervised creches of the younger quaddies.

The little ones amazed Leo. There seemed to be so many—maybe it was just because they moved so fast. Thirty or so five-year-olds bounced around the free fall gym like a barrage of demented ping pong balls when their creche mother, a plump pleasant downsider woman they called Mama Nilla, assisted by a couple of quaddie teenage girls, first let them out of their reading class. But then she clapped her hands, and put on some music, and they fell to and demonstrated a game, or a dance, Leo was not sure which, with many sidelong looks at him and much giggling. It involved creating a sort of duo-decahedron in mid-air, like a human pyramid only more complex, hand to hand to hand changing its formation in time to music. Cries of dismay went up when an individual slipped up and spoiled the group’s formation. When perfection was achieved, everybody won. Leo couldn’t help liking that game. Dr. Yei, watching Leo laugh when the young quaddies swarmed around him afterwards, seemed to purr with contentment.

But at the end of the tour she studied him with a little smile quirking her mouth. “Mr. Graf, you’re still disturbed. You sure you’re not harboring just a little of the old Frankenstein complex about all this? It’s all right to admit it to me—in fact, I want you to talk about it.”

“It’s not that,” said Leo slowly. “It’s just… well, I can’t really object to your trying to make them as group- centered as possible, given that they’ll be living all their lives on crowded space stations. They’re disciplined to a high degree for their ages, also good—”

“Vital to their survival, rather, in a space environment!”

“Yes… but what about—about their self-defense?”

“You’ll have to define that term for me, Mr. Graf. Defense from what?”

“Well, it seems to me you’ve succeeded in raising about a thousand technical-whiz—doormats. Nice kids, but aren’t they a little—feminized?” He was getting in deeper and deeper; her smile had quirked to a frown. “I mean—they just seem ripe for exploitation by—by somebody. Was this whole social experiment your idea? It seems like a woman’s dream of a perfect society. Everybody’s so well behaved.” He was uncomfortably conscious of having expressed his thought badly, but surely she must see the validity…

She took a deep breath, and lowered her voice. Her smile had become fixed. “Let me set you straight, Mr. Graf. I did not invent the quaddies. I was assigned here six years ago. It’s the GalacTech specs that call for maximum socialization. But I did inherit them. And I care about them. It’s not your job— or your business—to understand about their legal status, but it concerns me greatly. Their safety lies in their socialization.

“You seem to be free of the common prejudices against the products of genetic engineering, but there are many who are not. There are planetary jurisdictions where this degree of genetic manipulation of humans would even be illegal. Let those people—just once—perceive the quaddies as a threat, and—” she clamped her lips on further confidences, and retreated onto her authority. “Let me put it this way, Mr. Graf. The power to approve—or disapprove—training personnel for the Cay Project is mine. Mr. Van Atta may have called you in, but I can have you removed. And I will do so without hesitation if you fail in speech or behavior to abide by psych department guidelines. I don’t think I can put it any more clearly than that.”

“No, you’re—quite clear,” Leo said.

“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “But until you’ve been on the Habitat a while, you really must refrain from making snap judgments.”

I’m a testing engineer, lady, thought Leo. It’s my job to make judgments all day long. But he did not speak the thought aloud. They managed to part on a note of only slightly strained cordiality.

The entertainment vid was titled “Animals, Animals, Animals.” Silver set the re-run for the “Cats” sequence for the third time.

“Again?” Claire, sharing the vid viewing chamber with her, said faintly.

“Just one more time,” Silver pleaded. Her lips parted in fascination as the black Persian appeared over the vid plate, but out of deference to Claire she turned down the music and narration. The creature was crouched lapping milk from a bowl, stuck to its floor by downside gravity. The little white droplets flying off its pink tongue arced back into the dish as though magnetized.

“I wish I could have a cat. They look so soft…” Silver’s left lower hand reached out to pantomime-pat the life-sized image. No tactile reward, only the colored light of the holovid licking without sensation over her skin. She let her hand fall through the cat, and sighed. “Look, you can pick it up just like a baby.” The vid shrank to show the cat’s downsider owner carting it off in her arms. Both looked smug.

“Well, maybe they’ll let you have a baby soon,” offered Claire.

“It’s not the same thing,” said Silver. She could not help glancing a little enviously at Andy, though, curled up asleep in midair near his mother. “I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to go downside?”

“Ugh,” said Claire. “Who’d want to? It looks so uncomfortable. Dangerous, too.”

“Downsiders manage. Besides, everything interesting seems to—to come from planets.” Everyone interesting, too, her thought added. She considered Mr. Van Atta’s former teacher, Mr. Graf, met on her last