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And even further removed was the spacer crew–who gambled too, for credits, in other games, because their voyage was a roundtrip and they would go on and on doing missions like this. The spacers pushed odds–even following the route a probeship crew had laid out for them, themselves following a drone probe: Venturewent with navigational records and all the amenities, but it was a nervous lot of spacers all the same, and none of the games mixed–Wouldn’t gamble with you, the conversation was reported between spacer and reg: Cheap stakes.
People remembered the room numbers, with the manic attention they deserved, because it was the games that took one’s mind off an approaching jump–that let them forget for a while that they were travelling a scarcely mapped track that had the spacers hairtriggered and locked in their own manic gamblings.
Cheap at any price, that little relaxation, that little forgetting. One forgot the hazards, forgot the discomforts to come, forgot to imagine, which was the worst mistake of all.
There were assignations, too: room shiftings and courtesies–for the same reasons, that with life potentially short, sex was a stimulus powerful enough to wipe out thinking. And liquor was strictly rationed.
It took a cultivated eye to discover the good points of any of them at the moment, but it was appreciated all the more when it happened.
vi
T20 days MAT
Number two hold, Venture
It was duty, to walk the holds–inspecting what was at hand, because so much of the mission was elsewhere, under other eyes, on the other ships. Co
Cloned‑men, male and female. So was one of the specs with the mission, lab‑born; and that was no shame, simply a way of being born. Tape‑taught, and that was no shame either: so was everyone. The deep‑teach machines were state of the art in education. They poured the whole of the universe in over chemically lowered thresholds, while the mind sorted out what it was capable of keeping, without exterior distractions or the limitations of sight or hearing.
But the worker tapes were something else. Worker tapes created the like of these, row on row of expressionless faces staring at the bottom of the bunk above them day after day–male and female, bunked side by side without difficulty, because they presently lacked desires. They regarded their bodies as valuable and undivertible from their purpose, the printout said regarding them. They would receive more information in transit–the PA blared with silken tones, describing the world they were going to. And there were tapes to give them when they had landed–tapes for all of them, for that matter. Tapes for generations to come.
He walked through–into the exercise area, u
“You,” he said to one taller and handsomer than the average of these tall, handsome people, and the azi stopped in his bending and straightened, an immediate, flowerlike focussing of attention. “How are you getting along?”
“Very well, sir.” The azi breathed hard from his exertions. “Thank you.”
“Name?”
“Jin, sir; 458‑9998.”
“Anything needed?”
“No, sir.” The dark eyes were bright and interested, a transformation. “Thank you.”
“You feel good, Jin?”
“Very good, sir, thank you.”
He walked back the way he had come–looked back, but the azi had resumed his exercises. They were like that. Azi had always made him uncomfortable, possibly because they were not unhappy. It said something he had no wish to hear. Erasable minds…the azi; if anything upset them, the tapes could take it away again.
And there were times he would have found it good to have peace like that.
He passed through the hold again, u
He had no idea, much as he had studied them, what thoughts passed in their heads at such times–or if there were any thoughts at all.
And he went topside again, into the silence that surrounded him in this long waiting, because Ada Beaumont and Pete Gallin handled the details. He studied the printouts, and dispatched occasional messages to the appropriate heads of departments. There were his pictures, set on his desk; and there were memoirs he was writing–it seemed the time for such things. But the memoirs began with the voyage…and left out things that the government would not want remembered. Like most of his life. Classified. Erasable by government order. He put it on tape, and much of it was lies, why they came and what they hoped.
Mostly he waited, like the azi.
vii
T20 days MAT
Gutierrez, from a series of free lectures in lounge 2.
“…there’s as varied an ecology where we’re going as on Cyteen…somewhat more so, in respect to the vertical range of development; somewhat less, since you don’t have the range of phyla–of types of life. Plants…that’s algae, grasses, native fruits, pretty much like Cyteen, all the way up to some pretty spectacular trees–” (pause for slide series) “I’ll repeat those in closer detail later, or run them as often as you like. This is all stuff that came from the survey team. But the thing you’ll have heard about already, that’s the calibans, the moundbuilders. They’re pretty spectacular: the world’s distinct and crowning achievement, as it were. The first thing I want to make clear is that we’re not talking about an intelligence. The bias was in the other direction when the Mercury survey team landed. They looked at the ridges from orbit and thought they were something like cities. They went down there real carefully, I can tell you, after all the orbiting observations.” (slide) “Now let me get you scale on this.” (slide) “You can see the earthen ridge is about four times the man’s height. You always find these things on riverbanks and seacoasts, on the two of the seven continents that lie in the temperate zone–and this one’s going to neighbor our own site. The moundbuilders happen to pick all the really good sites. In fact you could just about pick out the sites that are prime for human development by looking for mounds.” (slide) “And this is one of the builders. Caliban is a character in a play: he was big and ugly. That’s what the probe crew called him. Dinosaur’s what you think, isn’t it? Big, gray dinosaur. He’s about four to five meters long, counting tail–warm‑blooded, slithers on his belly. Lizard type. But trying to pin old names on new worlds is a pretty hard game. The geologists always have a better time of it than the biologists. They deny it, but it’s true. Look at that skull shape there, that big bulge over the eyes. Now that brain is pretty large, about three times the size of yours and mine. And its convolutions aren’t at all like yours and mine. It’s got a place in the occipital region, the back, that’s like a hard gray handball, and pitted like an old ship’s hull; and then three lobes come off that, two on a side and one on top, shaped like human lungs, and having a common stem and interco