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
