Meaning a spacer could get motion-sickness walking across the floor, if he was a cabin-dwelling merchanter whose well-loaded ship didn’t regularly do the maneuvers those shots described, but whose stomach knew when a g-shift ought to happen. Tom kept his eyes on the level surface where the floor was real as the waiter captain led them to their table. A stationers’ revenge on spacers, that tape was, that produced those images… or the stationers that produced it had no remotest idea they’d made an amusement ride for a spacer’s force-trained body.
Dance, did the woman want? Damned show-off spacer-femme. He was going to fall on his ass before he reached the table. Tripped over his own feet, but the chair saved him.
Grace under pressure.
They sat. They had cocktails. The food was good, if scant by his reckoning, small vegetable things he hadn’t seen on the tour, and a good sauteed fish with, they advertised, genuine herbs (not difficult) and genuine citrus sauce, an expensive and tongue-puzzling treat. But not an extravagance at Pell. He’d seen oranges growing. He’d got himself a leaf—well, Saby had it, but he’d caught it in mid-flight. He’d seen fish swimming in a man-made brook, almost enough to put him off eating this one. But not quite. It was good. The lights came and went and whirled about the polished floor.
And against the light, shadows came, once, that he took for children, until a handful of spacer-diners near them stopped, and stared.
He looked, too, and saw the glint of breathing-masks with a little increase of heart rate. Downers, a handful of them, and the sight richocheted off the study he’d done as a boy—off all the sense of the strange and unfathomable that a boy could romanticize. Alien intelligence, if eccentric and even childlike to human estimation.
“Look,” he whispered to Saby, not to be rude, because they were quite near.
“Local sun’s sacred to them,” Saby said. “They can come here. It’s the law.”
“Law, hell. They’re people. It’s their world. “ He’d thought he almost liked Saby tonight. Not with that attitude.
“Yeah,” Saby said. “But good there’s a law. Damned shame we have to make a law. What I hear… we had to explain crime to them.”
“They have deviants.”
“Not criminals.”
He was discussing criminality with a Corinthian crewwoman. “No kidnappers?”
“No reason, I guess. “ Saby refused the bait. “But I wouldn’t be a Downer. I’d rather have our faults… since we can’t figure theirs. Seems safer.”
The waiter came. Saby ordered a drink. He did. The band had started. He saw the Downer-shadows bobbing to the music, knees bending ever so slightly, to tunes light, classic, rather than current. Couples were walking onto the floor.
Going to fall on my ass, he thought.
They had the cocktails. His was lime and vodka, hers was import Scotch. The music was slow and soft, and the Downers had filed away to the edges of the dark. They lived in the arteries and veins of Pell Station, where their oxy-ratio was law. They maintained, they worked, they asked no pay but the sight of the Sun of Downbelow, Pell’s Star. They worked a season or two and then went down again to the world, in the springtime of their main continents, when, the brochures said, Pell had to take to human resources, and make do without its small and industrious helpers. No Downer would work in springtime. Mating consumed them. Females left their burrows and took to walking, simply walking, wherever their fancy took them; and males followed them, far, as far as their resolve and their interest could drive them, until the last gave up, lost interest, resigned the Downer lass to his last rival, who had still to find a place, and dig a nest, and satisfy the far-walking adventuress of his craft and his passion and his worth. What need of nations or boundaries, or such territorial notions? The object of their desires went where she pleased.
Not likely they’d form a government. Not likely they’d fight a war.
Not likely they’d have achieved their dearest dream, to see their Sun, except as human guests.
But they traded their agriculture for human goods, they maintained complex machinery they had no innate impulse to invent themselves. Ask what they might become, or understand, or do, in centuries to come.