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Take our android, for example. Her name is Kelly Watchman, and her specialty is vacuum-core excavation.
Kelly is probably about ninety years old, judging by her vat number, which is someplace around fifteen thousand. (They’re up over a million now, aren’t they?) But, being an android, she doesn’t age at all, and so she looks about nineteen. A very sexy nineteen, naturally; if you’re going to make artificial human beings, you might as well make good-looking ones, the android companies say, and I quite agree. Kelly is highly decorative, and goes around the ship wearing next to nothing at all, or sometimes less. Since an android doesn’t have any more sex life than the Venus de Milo, Kelly doesn’t stop to consider the effect that all those jiggles and curves might have on normal human males who keep bumping into her in corridors. Not me, incidentally: the first day Kelly stripped down I noticed that she doesn’t have a navel, and that turned me off thinking of her as a real woman. I mean, there’s no reason why an android ought to have a navel, but even so I can’t help visualizing her as a kind of rubber doll that walks, and I don’t have any romantic interest in walking rubber dolls no matter how lifelike and voluptuous they may be. Some of the others, though—
Well, I’m off the track, and maybe my prejudices are showing a little, since a lot of people do find androids desirable. The important thing is that Kelly Watchman is aboard this ship because she’s a member of a downtrodden minority, not because she’s an outstanding vacuum-corer operator.
She can’t be an outstanding vacuum-corer operator. It’s well known that the android nervous system, clever as it is, doesn’t match up with that of a real human. The android just doesn’t have that extra sense, that ability to know that if he digs another tenth of a millimeter he’ll damage some valuable artifact. An android is always 100 percent efficient at any skill he learns; the trouble is that humans, unpredictable as we are, can come through with 105 percent efficiency when the situation demands it. Maybe we aren’t as cool and mechanically perfect as androids, but when the protons are popping we can rise above ourselves for brief periods of superhuman performance, and androids simply aren’t programmed to do that. By definition, there can’t be any android geniuses. The vacuum-corer operator on an archaeological dig needs to be a genius. I admire Kelly for having won her emancipation and all that, and for picking up a difficult skill, and for devoting herself to something as abstract as archaeology. All the same, I wish we had a flesh-and-blood vacuum-corer man on this dig, and I don’t think that’s just my bigotry coming out.
Our other digger is also part of our racial quota, but I don’t feel quite the same way about him. His name is Mirrik, which is a contraction of a label as long as my arm, and he’s from Dinamon IX. He’s our bulldozer.
Mirrik’s kind come big. Have you ever seen pictures of the extinct Earthly mammal called the rhinoceros? It was about the size of a big pickup truck — I’m sure you’ve seen trucks in your hookups with other tele-paths — and twice as heavy. Mirrik is almost as big as a rhinoceros. He’s higher at the shoulders than I am tall, and a lot longer than he is high, and he weighs and eats as much as the rest of us put together. He also smells rather ripe. His skin is blue and wrinkled, his eyes are small, and he has long flat tusks in his lower jaw. But he’s intelligent, sophisticated, speaks Anglic with no accent at all, can name the American presidents or the Sumerian kings or anybody else out of Earthside history, and recites love poetry in a kind of throbbing, cooing voice. He’s a pretty fantastic sort of vidj, and on top of all this he knows archaeological technique like a star, and he can lift loads that would rupture a tractor. He’s going to do our heavy digging, before Kelly gets in there with her vacuum-corer, and I think it’s terrific to be able to combine an archaeologist and a heavy-duty machine in the same body. He digs with his tusks, mostly, but he’s got a pair of extra limbs to help out, aside from the four pillars he stands on. I like him. You have to watch out around him, though. Most of the time he’s awfully gentle, but he goes on flower-eating jags and gets drunk and wild. A dozen geraniums tank him up like a liter of rum. We have this hydroponic garden on top deck, and once a week or so Mirrik gets homesick and goes up there and nibbles blossoms, and then he starts carousing through the ship. Last Tuesday he almost smeared Dr. Horkkk into a puddle on the wall.
Dr. Horkkk is one of our three bosses. He comes from Thhh, which is a planet in the Rigel system, and he’s the galaxy’s leading expert on the language of the High Ones. That isn’t saying much, considering we can’t understand a syllable of their language, but Dr. Horkkk knows more than anyone else.
I like to think of him as a German. He reminds me of the nutty therapist who used to commute from Dusseldorf every Wednesday to try to teach you to walk. Dr. Schatz, remember? Dr. Horkkk is just like him in an alien way. He’s very small, very fussy, very precise, very solemn, and very sure of himself. Also he seems to spit when he talks. Underneath it all I think he’s kind-hearted, but you can’t really tell, because he works so hard at being ferocious on the outside. He comes up to just about hip-high on me, and when he stands sideways you can hardly see him, he’s so ski
No matter what his race was, Dr. Horkkk would belong on this trip. But Steen Steen is here purely on the minority thing. I hardly need to tell you: Steen’s a Calamorian, a real militant one, as if there’s any other kind. He/she is one of the other apprentices, slipped last year from a Calamorian university, which must be even more of a diploma mill than rumor has it. This one doesn’t know a thing. Casual discussion reveals that Steen’s knowledge of the theory of archaeology is about as deep as my knowledge of the theory of neutrinics, and I don’t know anything about neutrinics. But I don’t pretend I do; and Steen is supposed to be a graduate student in archaeology. You know how he/she got here, of course. Calamorians are forever yelling about status, and threatening to make war on everybody in sight if their intellectual attainments aren’t universally recognized and admired. So we’re stuck with Steen by way of keeping his/her people cool.
At least Steen’s good-looking: sleek and graceful, with shiny emerald skin and long twining tentacles. Every movement is like something out of a ballet. Nobody admires Steen more than Steen, but I guess that’s forgivable, considering that Calamorians have both sexes in the same body and would go crazy if they didn’t love themselves. But Steen is dumb, and Steen is excess baggage here, and I resent his/her presence.
The third apprentice isn’t up to much either. She’s a blonde named Jan Mortenson, with a B.S. from Stockholm University, with a cute figure and lots of big white teeth. She seems friendly but not very bright. Her father’s somebody big at Galaxy Central, which is probably how she got into the expedition — these diplomats are always pulling rank on deals like this. I haven’t had a whole lot to do with her, though: she’s got her eye on our chronology man, Saul Shahmoon.