For Sneezy the sea was neither greatly exciting nor any fun at all. He had seen seas on his own planet, inside the core. Why not? They were not considered particularly recreational, because Heechee couldn’t swim. Bone and muscle don’t float well without a sizable wrapping of fat, and there were no fat Heechee. So, to keep Oniko company, he allowed himself to be tempted into a rubber boat sometimes. But only rarely would he let himself drift into waters deeper than his own height.
Harold, at first, found a home on Moorea.
Earth was very much like Peggys Planet, he explained to their classmates. No, said some of the classmates, he had it the wrong way around: Peggys Planet was very much like Earth. Indeed it was, actually. That was what had made human beings so anxious to colonize it in those early days when the fecundity of human bodies outran the carrying capacity of the planet. Well, maybe, said Harold reasonably, but any half-wit could see at once that Peggys Planet was better.
Harold found it disappointing, not to say outrageous, that other children showed so little interest in hearing that from him.
The three children from the Wheel shared one special handicap. They were outsiders. They were the newest kids in school, entered well after the beginning of the term. Friendships and alliances had long since formed. Of course, the human principal had invited every student in the school to show special courtesy and consideration to the waifs from intergalactic space. The students did, for a while. It didn’t last. Once the questions had been asked (“Did you see any of the Foe? When are they going to come out?”) and the lack of satisfying answers had been noted, the powerful lines of roommateship and fellow-soccer-player status tightened up and squeezed them out. Not meanly or violently. But out.
It was worse for Sneezy and Oniko. Sneezy was the only Heechee in the school and Oniko the only child who had been raised in Heechee ways. They were simply too alien to easily be best friends with anyone else. Harold had no such problem at first. Harold had only the problem of himself. He gazed up at Moorea’s startling central peak and said, “You call that a mountain? Why, on Peggys Planet there’s a peak fourteen kilometers tall!” He watched scenes from New York City and Brasilia and said disdainfully that on Pegjys Planet people kept their cities clean. After the antiquities class discussed Pompeii and the Great Wall of China, Harold was heard to say in recess that on Peggys Planet, thank heaven, people knew enough to throw old junk away. Since there were students in the school from Khatmandu, New York, Brasilia, Beijing, and Naples, Harold’s disparagement of their local tourist attractions did nothing to endear him. The schoolthings pleaded benignly, but the students were under no obligation to respect their wishes.
In the long run, Harold was more of an outsider than either Oniko or Sneezy. Those two studied hard. When they had spare time, they used it at the datamachines, learning even things they were not required to learn. Both were quickly at the top of their classes, and Harold, straining to maintain a respectable + average, was jealous. Ultimately he was furious. When the schoolthing handed out test results one day, the light bulb went on over Harold’s head, and he leaped from his seat and cried, “Schoolmaster! It isn’t fair. Naturally those two get better marks, because they’re cheating!”
“Now, Harold.” The schoolthing smiled patiently-it was the end of the day’s lessons, and all the students were getting restless, if not irritable. “Certainly Sternutator and Oniko do not cheat.”
“Well, what do you call it? They’ve got those A. I. databases with them all the time, and they use them. I’ve seen them do it!”
The schoolthing said firmly, “Really, Harold, you know that Sternututor, like all Heechee, requires a constant source of low-level microwave for his health—”
“Oniko doesn’t!”
The schoolthing shook its head. “There’s no grounds for using words like ‘cheating’ simply because a student carries his own data-retrieval system on his person. You have your own desk console, don’t you? Now, please go back to your seat so we can discuss this evening’s conceptualization assignment.”
And that afternoon, down at the lagoon, Harold sat rigidly on the shelly beach while Oniko splashed in the shallows and Sneezy dug for bits of coral. “I am sorry you don’t like us,” Sneezy said.
“What are you talking about? We’re friends! Of course I like you,” Harold lied.
“No, I think not,” Oniko called from two meters away. “Why is that, Harold? Have I ever harmed you?”
“No, but you’re a human being. Why do you act like a Heechee?”
“What’s wrong with acting like a Heechee?” Sneezy asked, hissing in annoyance.
“Well,” said Harold reasonably, “you can’t help what you are, but you’re such cowards, you know. You ran off and hid from the Foe. I don’t blame you,” he added, looking as though he blamed them very much, “because my father says it’s natural for a Heechee to be yellow.”
“I am actually rather tan,” Sneezy said proudly; his color had been changing, a sign that he was growing up.
“I don’t mean color. I mean chicken. It’s because you’re not as sexy as people.”
Oniko splashed closer to hear better, squatting in the wavelets. “I have never heard such a strange thing!” she complained.
“It’s a matter of biology,” Harold explained. “My father told me all about it. Human beings are the sexiest creatures in the Galaxy, that’s why they’re so brave and smart. If you look at some lower animal, say a lion or a gorilla or a wolf—”
“I’ve never seen any of those.”
“No, but you’ve seen pictures, haven’t you? And Sneezy has, too? Well. Did you ever see a gorilla with boobs like a girl’s?” He caught Sneezy’s eye going to Oniko’s flat chest and said irritably, “Oh, God, I don’t mean now. I mean when she grows up. Human women have big breasts all the time, not just when they’re feeding a baby like some dumb animal. Human women can do, you know, can do sex all the time, not just once a year or something. That explains it, do you see? It’s evolution’s way of making us better, because human women can get men to hang around them all the time. So that’s how civilization started, like hundreds of thousands of years ago.”
Oniko painfully waded out of the water, frowning. Trying to follow Harold’s line of reasoning, she asked, “What does that have to do with being brave?”
“That’s how human beings worked out so well! My father told me the whole thing. The human fathers stayed around all the time because they wanted to, like, make love, you know? So they got the food and stuff, and the mothers could do a better job taking care of the kids. Heechee don’t have that going for them.”
“My parents stay together,” Sneezy said forcefully. He wasn’t angry. He hadn’t decided yet whether there was something to get angry with Harold about, but he found the argument confusing.
“They do because they copied us, probably,” Harold said doubtfully, and Sneezy looked thoughtful, because he suspected that part might be almost true. In the core, he knew, Heechee lived in conununes, not nuclear families. “Anyway, they don’t, uh, do sex all the time, the way my mom and dad do, do they?”
“Certainly not!” cried Sneezy, scandalized. Heechee women made love only when it was the biologically right time for them to do so. His father had explained that to him long before. The woman’s body told her when it was time, and then she told the man-somehow or other—it didn’t seem to need words, but Bremsstrahlung had been vague about that part of it.
“So you see?” Harold cried in triumph. “That makes human men, like, show off for their girlfriends all the time! In the old days they maybe hunted, or fought some other tribe. Now they do different kinds of things, like they play football or make scientific discoveries-or go exploring, don’t you see? It makes us braver.”