Chapter 1
At this time John William Washington, who is usually called “Sandy” by his old nursemaid and his six friends, is biologically twenty-two years and eleven months old. He thinks of himself as roughly a twenty-two-year-old, although timekeeping in the Hakh’hli interstellar ship does not go by Earth years. His age doesn’t really reflect the elapsed time since his birth anyway. Time dilation has cooked the clocks; the ship has spent much of its time traveling at relativistic speeds. Sandy is an excellent physical specimen—not counting such minor problems as deafness (but that is easily remedied by the hearing aid his shipmates have made for him) and a certain squatness of form. He stands only five feet five inches tall, but he masses two hundred pounds—on Earth he would have weighed that, though in the gravity of the Hakh’hli ship he weighs thirty percent more—and he is strong enough to support his own weight in each hand, with his arms outstretched. But Albert Einstein had been right about that, as about many other things. Everything was relative. Among the Hakh’hli on their huge interstellar spaceship Sandy is as frail as a puppy, and his other nickname among his peers—the one they use when they are mad at him—is “Wimp.”
A tiny voice in Sandy’s dreams cried, “Unclasp, unclasp, Sandy-Wimp.” It wasn’t a dream; it was the voice of his cohort-mate Polly, filled with mixed affection and irritation. The reason it was faint was that Sandy’s hearing aid had come loose again during the night. “We’ve got work to do this morning!” she bawled, her sour but pleasant breath stirring his hair. He winced away from her. Polly was not the biggest of the six Hakh’hli in Sandy Washington’s cohort, but she was sometimes the bossiest.
Sandy let go of Demmy with one arm and Helen with the other, sat up, stretched, and yawned. He readjusted the hearing aid, gazing around. The whole cohort slept in a tangle on the matting in one corner of their exercise room, and it was not uncommon for him to wake up with Bottom’s immense right leg pressed across his back and, say, Titania’s two-thumbed claw in his mouth. But this time he was on top, and he jumped off the pile before the inevitable morning rough-housing started.
They splashed and rubbed themselves clean while one of them went for the morning meal cart—it wasn’t anything like the great gobbets of roots and meat they would devour at the main midday meal, just the broth and wafers they called “cookies and milk.” Being sleepy, they didn’t talk much. The morning music was going, since the Hakh’hli disliked silence as much as any Earthly airport manager. It was playing Earth tunes on the special program for the cohort quarter, of course. Sandy hummed along with the Beatles in “Yesterday” as he pulled his clothes out of the locker. He leaned forward to kiss the picture of his mother that was stuck inside the locker door. Then, because it was a work day, he hurried back to the meal cart. They all ate quickly of the salty, steamy broth and the crunchy wafers. There was no special ceremony about eating—on work mornings they didn’t take time for the Kitchen Game or the Restaurant Game—and when they were through they hurried out to the portal of their quarters. A sharp click, a shrill hiss, a deeper, louder thump as the pressure-lock door opened, and they walked through the pressure change. Sandy swallowed. The pressure change from their quarters, maintained at an Earthly 1000 millibars, to the Hakh’hli 1200 wasn’t supposed to hurt his ears any more, but it did. His Hakh’hli cohort, of course, didn’t even notice the difference.
Obie daringly hunched himself out into the corridor for a quick look in both directions. “ChinTekki-tho isn’t here!” he crowed. “He’s late! Maybe we’ll get the day off!”
“Maybe your turds will fly! Get back in here,” Polly commanded, and cuffed him at the base of his stubby tail when he did.
“But it’s hot,” Obie whined, lifting himself on his springy legs to present his tail to Sandy for comforting. It was there to be licked, and Sandy obliged. Everyone knew that Polly was right. Obie shouldn’t have gone out of their quarters without permission. That wasn’t allowed any more. But the whole cohort resented Polly’s bossiness, and besides Obie and Sandy were best friends.
Polly took it upon herself to lecture. “The reason the ship is hot,” she said severely, “is that the navigators had to bring us in close to this star so that we could do the course-change maneuver. That could not be helped, and anyway it is getting cooler now.”
“Praise the navigators,” Obie said instinctively.
Helen echoed, “Praise them a lot!” She was simply sucking up to Obie, of course. She was pre-positioning herself for the time, obviously not far away, when Obie would come into sexual season. Then it would be his whim that could spell the difference between rejection and a successful coupling in amphylaxis.
But Obie wasn’t listening. He was daringly peering out into the corridor again, his spirits completely restored, and it was he who cried, “Here comes MyThara!”
They flocked to greet her. Especially Sandy, who, grinning with the unexpected pleasure of seeing her instead of the teacher, hurled himself on her back as soon as she was within the portal. She shook him off, limping a little. She pretended to be angry. “Get off me, you! What ith the matter with you, Lythander?” Sandy winced; the full name meant she was really angry. “I call that improper conduct for a Cheth who will thoon be carrying out urgent work. ChinTekki-tho cannot come today, therefore I will conduct you to your job. Come along, all of you!”
Weeping amused tears, the cohort followed her into the corridor and across the ship. The whole Earth-mission cohort liked old MyThara, though it was only Sandy who looked on her as the closest thing he had ever had to a real mother. Her full name was Hoh’My’ik per Tharatok 3151. The “Hoh” and the “ik” had to do with her family bloodlines. “My” referred to her status—she was a mature adult, but not a Senior. Tharatok was her personal name; “per” referred to her age—now approaching the end of her life, as Sandy well knew but tried not to think about; and the number distinguished her from any other of her lineage and generation—it was something like the batch number of her particular set of stored, fertilized eggs. Sandy sometimes dared to call her Thara-tok, but formally, to young adults like those of the cohort, she was MyThara.
With the time before the Earth landing growing so short, even Sandy and his cohort had to take a turn at doing shipwork. Sometimes the work was harvesting, pulling out the food plants and cleaning their tubers of soil, separating the stalks and the leaves; before that it was picking the blossoms from the plants when they were in their flowering phase, or collecting the round, pale globes that came when the plants had fruited. Tuber-pulling was dirty work, but not as dirty as what they had to do when the harvest was complete. Then they had to get ready to seed the next crop—pour in the buckets of sludge from the recycling stations and mix them into the soil. The Hakh’hli food plants were marvels. Every part of them was edible, and every part could be prepared and eaten in a hundred different ways. But they left nothing in the soil. So all the nutrients had to be put back—once the remains of the food had gone through the garbage bins or the alimentary systems of the ship’s crew and turned up as sludge in the bottom of the recycling tanks.
Even that kind of shipwork wasn’t as bad as cleaning out the pens of the hoo’hik, the four-legged, hairy, pale, docile, hog-fat food animals. The hoo’hik were as big as Lysander himself and affectionate. They did smell bad. Especially their droppings did. But sometimes one of them would nuzzle up to Lysander, even when he was loading them to the slaughterers—they would even gently pat and stroke the slaughterer himself with their stubby paws as they waited dumbly for the blow that would end their lives. The hoo’hik weren’t much like the dogs and cats Sandy saw on Earthly TV. But they were the closest things to dogs and cats around. There were times when Lysander wished he could have had a young hoo’hik as a pet. But of course that was impossible. No such things as pets were allowed on the big Hakh’hli interstellar ship.