He turned away from the window and eyed the other passengers, people for whom such conditions were normal. There were fourteen in the car. Four adult women, three adult men, and the others adolescents or younger children. Two of the women and two of the men gazed into space, their lips moving. The other three adults were sitting around a table, talking and laughing. The adolescents, four of them, were doing the same but louder, and the small children were playing some complicated game that involved running from one end of the carriage to the other. Horrocks was relieved to see that they, at least, wore intelligent clothing that would protect them if they fell. The adolescents were so lightly clad that they evidently counted on luck or reflex. The adults were better covered, but in structured or loose outfits that showed no sign of intelligence or ready adaptability to emergencies, and open at the cuffs or hems at that. All of his fellow-passengers adjusted to changes in the train’s motion by subtle muscular reflex, and appeared quite untroubled by its speed.
None of them made to get off the train at Horrocks’s destination, Big Foot. He uncurled himself from his seat and walked to the door with as much dignity as he could muster. The platform was empty. He noticed a lift to ground level, but decided to take the stairs, and this time to take them upright. Clutching the handrail and moving hand over hand, step by step, he made his way to the ground. There he sat on one of the lower steps and contemplated his surroundings and his next move. In front of the station stood a couple of self-driving wheeled vehicles with bubble canopies. One of them started up and rolled over to where he sat.
“Do you need a ride?” it asked.
“No, thank you.”
The machine backed off.
A path led from the station’s paved concourse through a couple of hundred metres of rolling grassland divided by a stream of water and dotted with clumps of trees and shrubs. Beyond that lay the Big Foot estate. Low wood or stone buildings set in gardens with lakes fed by the water stream formed its main living area. Its design drew the eye: curves and lines, light and shade, rough and smooth were integrated as in a complex abstract sculpture. This area was overlooked from a central rise by an imposing three-storey house about fifty metres long, built from wooden planks, with tall and wide windows and a verandah at the front. Somewhere a dog barked. Ponies cropped the park. Strange aromas, not all of them appetising, wafted from the low sheds that housed the food synthesisers. Off to one side lay a long semicylindrical segmented hut of glassy black ceramic. That would be the incubator, shielding racks of artificial wombs in a warm reddish dark. To Horrocks’s eyes there was something larval about it, almost sinister in its insectile insistence on reproduction. In the cones, women carried their own foetuses, but they didn’t have the acceleration field and the necessity of rapid increase to contend with.
The estate would have looked even more impressive if its pattern hadn’t been repeated, with variations, for kilometres around in all directions. There was something of a relief to the eye in seeing in the far distance, hanging like a pictorial map on the upward curve of the ground, the closer-together and taller buildings of a town. Imagine growing up in a place like this! The first thing you’d want to do, as soon as you could if not sooner, would be to get out. For the first time Horrocks felt what he’d long understood: the outward urge of the ship generation.
This was what he had come for. Something like this. He turned away and climbed back up the steps to the platform and waited for the next forward train.
14 364:09:27 20:38
Sorry about the two-and-a-half-month hiatus, everyone. (Note to self: months, huh? Re primary origin myth question.) I’ve been too busy living to biolog. It’s all very well for adults, who can stick their thoughts on a site for anyone to see. Well, not their thoughts and not anyone, but you know what I mean, and frankly subvocalizations and saved sights and sounds and smells and such seem like cheating compared to writing. When all that adult stuff comes on in my head I’m going to keep on writing. I promise to you my faithful reader(s).
So… to catch up. I’ve turned fifteen and I’ve moved to town. Only the nearest town to Big Foot, mind you, but it’s surprising how different living among ten thousand is from living with five hundred. The town is called Far Crossing — another of these pioneer names — and it absolutely rocking fucks, as I heard somebody say the day I arrived. It’s nearly all ship generation, most of them a bit older than me, not that that’s a drawback. And the buildings and the streets are dense. You can walk a hundred metres and not see a flower or a blade of grass or another living thing except people, and that’s not a drawback either. You appreciate these things more when you’re not surrounded by them all the time. When we go out we’ll have to get used to that, for a while anyway. It’s like with the shops. When you’ve had everything you want all your life you appreciate shops. They’re full of things you don’t want but somebody does. Most of them are owned, if that’s the word, by people who’ve thought of or made something that’s never been made before, and they sell them. Like, you know, somebody might sell space and time on a training habitat, but it’s strange to see small material objects being sold.
Even stranger to buy them. I now have more bracelets and pendants and hair-slides and clothes and would you believe shoes than I ever imagined I would want, and that’s the point I think, I would never have imagined them. I used to get given gifts or take what I fancied from the estate store or make things myself. Even my own business was nothing to do with stuff like this. Atomic’s Enterprise (now Magnetic’s Magic) used to (still does) trade in phenotypic expression derivatives, which is something so rocking abstract that it bores even me.
But enough about me. You know what’s dragged me back to this, it’s what everyone else is talking about too. Doesn’t matter. Someday we’ll look back on this. Eventually everybody in our light-cone will know about this and wonder how it felt, so I think it’s worth noting our first reactions for posterity and our future selves.
This morning I rolled out of bed and made a coffee to wake up and went down to the cafe along the street to have a proper breakfast. There I met Grant—
Let me tell you about Grant. I met him the day I arrived. The thing is, Far Crossing isn’t on the monorail. It isn’t even on one of the roads. You either arrive by air or on foot, slogging across the estates. Guess which way I arrived?
So there I was, leaning on my rucksack where the road runs out at the edge of town, looking along the streets and up at the towers like, well, like someone who has just walked in from a little estate out in the middle of nowhere. Somebody said hello. He was standing in front of me, a boy about my height and age, with very short black hair and a wispy beard. His eyes were very dark, he had broad shoulders and thick biceps and he was wearing a loose black T-shirt and long shorts and scuffed sandals.
“You’ve just arrived?” he said.
I looked down at the pack. “You guessed?”
He stuck out a hand. “Grant Cornforth Dialectical,” he said. He kind of winced. “Sorry about the name, but it’s mine.”
“Atomic Discourse Gale,” I said, shaking his hand.
He brightened. “I can see we’re going to get on well.”
There’s a notion that gets kicked around the cohort that our names have some occult connection with our genotypes, and that names that seem to go together indicate compatibility. It’s not one I’ve ever found plausible, and anyway atomic and dialectic are counterposed. Everyone knows that.