Turtles, however, were not common at all, anywhere but here.
Most Earthmen would have been startled by what Sork was seeing. Most Earthmen seldom saw a living Turtle, and only a few humans were ever permitted the privilege of serving the Turtles in one of their compounds. Most humans would have been dazzled by the noise, the lights, the eerie strangeness of that part of the compound. To Sork Quintero it was an old story. He had spent his entire life in one part of the compound or another, without ever going outside.
That was the price you paid. Human beings who accepted memmie service with the Turtles also accepted the Turtles' rules. When you worked in the great northern ground terminal for their space ladder on the ruins of old Kansas City or any other Turtle compound, you stayed on Turtle territory all the time. The only exceptions were when you were sent somewhere on a Turtle errand, and then you usually were chip-driven and knew little of where you went. The compound was where the Turtles provided food, clothing and housing for their full-time memo disk employees. That was a significant fringe benefit that went with the job—
It was also, Sork thought bitterly, the same fringe benefit that was given to the inmates in any prison. Although working for the Turtles paid well, it was even worse than being in one of those old-time armies. It was not a human life at all.
While outside—
Sork shook his head. He didn't want to be outside, either. He wanted to be free.
That thought would have startled most of the humans outside the Turtle compound if they had heard him say it. They felt free enough. After all, the Turtles did not interfere with human activities in any physical way. They hadn't outlawed war, for instance. They had simply traded Turtle technology for military hardware until every nation on Earth was overflowing with Turtle aircraft, Turtle ground vehicles, Turtle appliances and Turtle machines—and had nothing left to conduct a decent war with. The Turtles hadn't abolished nations. They had simply insisted on making their trading contracts with smaller political units, and over a generation or two the superpowers had simply dissolved away. Every human being on Earth knew that the Age of the Turtles was a time of unparalleled peace and plenty for most of the human race. Now human beings lived longer and more prosperously than ever. Humans were generally unmolested by the Turtles—not many humans ever even saw one—as long as they didn't interfere with trade.
It was different, though, with those particular human beings who had become memmies.
When you signed up to work in the Turtle treaty compounds as a memo disk employee, your life changed. By human standards, it wasn't even a comfortable life. The Turtles lived cold. The frigid air of their underground parts of the compound were edged with their acrid muskiness. Their odor was as penetrating as menthol, as eye-tearing as ammonia and, when you got too much of it, as foul as an exhumed grave.
But the memmies had something the free people in the outside world never had. They had access to Turtle technology. Almost all of it.
For all the good it did them, Sork Quintero thought savagely. You could operate any Turtle machine, perform every Turtle task, however complex . . . but, once the memo disk was out, you couldn't any longer remember how.
Sork knew where his direct superior, Lidun, would be waiting for him. His brother, Kiri, would be in the same place, because the brothers had arranged to work the same shifts so that neither would have an advantage over the other with Sue-Ling Quong. But when Sork arrived at the Turtle "refectory" Kiri was not there yet, and Lidun himself was in a part of the place where neither Sork nor any other human could go.
The Turtle was "at meal."
That was to say, Litlun was taking that part of his daily nourishment which did not involve actual eating. To be sure, Turtles did eat in more or less the same way as humans, now and then. Sometimes they even ate organic food, like Taur steaks, or the tart, heavy globes of redfruit—or simply a clutch of grass or weed or a tree limb that came to hand. More often what they ate was inorganic materials. It seemed that almost any kind of matter could form part of a Turtle's diet, since they did not depend on what they chewed and digested to supply them with energy, only with raw materials to replace the cells of their bodies as they wore out. The Turtles' life-giving energy came from a different source entirely. It came directly from radiation.
For that reason, what Litlun and half a dozen other Turtles were doing was basking. They were lying belly up in a sealed room, with a crystal panel through which Sork could look, but which he dared not pass. He was well aware that the radiation inside that room would kill him. Even the Turtles lay there with their eyes covered by the nictitating membranes that prevented blindness.
The Turtles, however, were soaking the radiation up. It was presumably what they had evolved to live on, ages past, on that mysterious home planet no human being had ever seen. But even through the shielding crystal, the light from the globes on the ceiling of that chamber felt as though it were scorching Sork's eyes.
"We'll have to wait, I guess," said a familiar voice, and Sork turned to see his brother, Kiri.
Genetically Sork and Kiri were identical, but few people would have believed that in looking at them. They were the same height, almost to a centimeter; they had the same jet hair, straight as string and almost as coarse; their eyes were the same piercing black. But they were antiparticles of each other. Kiri was an electron, Sork a positron; they were identical in every respect, save in sign. Where Sork was slow and thoughtful Kiri was always in motion; Kiri was the athlete and the impatient one. "You were trying to make time with Sue-ling, weren't you?" Kiri added, feinting a punch at his brother's shoulder—but grinning as he did it.
Sork dodged automatically. He was sensitive to everything that concerned Sue-ling Quong, most sensitive of all when it came from his brother. The trouble was that in their contest for her undivided love, Kiri had the advantage of seniority. It was he who had first met Sue-ling, at her old school called Harvard, while running an errand for the Turtles. He not only met her, but fell in love with her. When her school was abandoned, it was Kiri who persuaded her to come to work in the Turtle compound.
And then all the complications followed when Sork, too, fell in love with her, and Sue-ling found herself loving both at once.
It made for confusion. Not for the first time, Sork wondered if the Turtles had made a mistake in accepting them for memmie duty. Both of them had volunteered, of course, as soon as they were old enough, but the unusual configuration of their brains had bothered the memmie surgeons. He remembered lying there on the operating table, his entire head numb from the jaw up, his eyes frozen on a point in the operating-room ceiling but his ears missing nothing, while the surgeons debated whether the abnormal configurations of their brains disqualified them for the memo disk implant.
In the long run, the surgeons had decided to go ahead with implant sockets for both of the Quintero twins. But sometimes Sork wished they had not.
He turned his mind away from the familiar track. "I just wanted to get some more study tapes from her," he said, without total truth.
Kiri shook his head in mock reproval. He didn't have to say that he thought it was a waste of time. His expression, his whole body stance, said it for him. What he did say was only, "Memo disks."
"Oh, I know," Sork said wearily, "you think we don't need to learn things any more. Just slip in a disk, and then—and then we're somebody else. like us."