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 common 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
