binds. Every old human culture locked to the soil of Truehome understood that, on one level or another. Share salt, and an enemy becomes your friend. If you want to forge links with a sophont, try eating with/on/around/against him.
Inside the big, open, high-ceilinged room that was the refectory, there were members of species that employed all those prepositions.
There were humans who ranged from the Conservancy-unmodified norm to those who were altered into the nearly alien. There were godhorses (so beautiful) and axolotls (so comical) and slidewhistles (so noisy). Not to mention a dozen other races I haven’t the heart to detail, because I miss them so. All were unclothed and busy eating, from trough and plate and bowl and hopper. The pungent aromas were making my belly sit up and beg.
So I plunged in.
When my hunger was assuaged and my spirits restored, I hit the showers in the room ante to the exit. (Some races seem to enjoy wearing their food more than actually eating it.) I picked out a new jox and sandals and liftharness (my standard outfit) from the clothing alcove, and exited onto the streets. (Such necessities are freely disbursed in the Commensality. But there’re still plenty of private possessions for me to lift.)
I headed then for the Bayside locks. A quiet place to think was next.
At the locks, I took a quilt from its rack and donned it. The living flesh (no brains, just ganglions) molded itself to my body, sealing my precious hide away from the deadly atmosphere I was about to step into. For a second I was blind and deaf. Then I TAPPED into the feed from a camera mounted in the locker room. I saw myself as I looked now to others: something like an inflated rubber biped balloon.
I switched the TAP to receive the sensory inputs of the quilt. Since it “saw” exclusively by infrared, had no hearing, and “tasted” over its entire surface, you can imagine that the world altered rather radically.
I cycled through the locks and stood on the shore. It tasted like acid and salt beneath my squishy soles.
The surface temperature of our satellite hovers around the triple point of methane: minus 168 degrees Centigrade, the critical temperature at which that compound can exist as solid, liquid or gas.
The shore was solid.
The turbulent sea that stretched away was liquid.
The air was gas (gases, actually, nitrogen supplying the major component.)
Breathing the oxygen suspired by the quilt, I started walking around the curving marge that lay between the city-shell and the lapping sea. It looked like the tide was coming in (courtesy of the primary’s gravity), and so I had to be careful not to get isolated on some inaccessible spit. The quilt could stand immersion in the liquid methane, but the damn stuff tasted just like gasoline, and you risked getting swept out into the 400 meter-deep sea. I kept myself oriented by the hottest pointsources of heat within the dome, and the more feeble beacon that was the distant shrouded sun.
Now I could think about my future.
But wouldn’t you know, my stubborn brain could only focus on the past.
I remembered my youth.
Did you ever realize that the Heisenberg drive promotes specialization? When transport is cheap, it makes sense to import what you can’t produce efficiently. And if there’s a big market for whatever you do best, then you tend to do it more and more, until pretty soon almost your whole world’s doing it. (This applies, of course, to Conservancy and neutral worlds, the worker ants, and not us lazy Commensality grasshoppers, who traffic more in intangibles.)
I was born and grew up in a grain field. The whole damn world was hairy with wheat and oats and other assorted hybrids. There was no such thing as a city. The one other family on the world occupied the antipodes. On clear days you couldn’t see forever, but only about as far as the next stalk. It was boring as a stint in a sense-dep tank.
So I said to my brother one day (over the master combine’s radio, for he was a thousand miles away), “Buddy, I’m leaving this world when I hit sixteen.”
“Yeah, sure,” he staticked back. “And where’re you going and what’re you gonna do?”
Even then, I was developing “peculiar” (by the lights of Buddy) tastes. For instance, I used to study the native locusts for hours, and was sorry when we had to kill them, lest they eat our crop.
“The Commensality,” I said, yanking on the steering bars to avoid an eroded spot. I squinted against the newly angled sunlight, as the big machine responded sluggishly and I wished for illegal mind/machine interface.
“Yuk,” Buddy said. “Those exteelovers. What a creepy idea. You wouldn’t really go there, would you?”
“Yes. I’m serious. What’s the sense of living on a neutral world if you can’t choose one side or the other? And I choose the Commensality.”
“You’re crazy. The Conservancy is the only way to go.”
I said nothing in reply; I was too stunned. It had never occured to me that Buddy would object. We had never really argued before. Oh, sure, some sibling spats that sprang up and blew over like our world’s circumpolar storms; hell, there weren’t even any girls on the whole planet to fight over! But I could sense that this topic, this tone, was deadly serious, the source of potential great dissension. So, with untypical wisdom, I hid my adolescent certitude with a bland comment.
But Buddy wouldn’t let it go. I guess I had really shocked him. After work that day, as we sported in our favorite shady swimming-hole, half a world away from home, he kept pressing me on it, until I finally asserted myself, saying that I wasn’t joking about my desire to join, or at least investigate, the Commensality when I was old enough.
That was when, amid harsh words that stopped just short of blows, he quit talking to me, and I, perforce, to him.
There was one last time before I left, when I knew Buddy still cared for me.
I was overseeing a force of meks who were sowing half a continent with winter wheat, up in the northernmost latitudes amenable to cultivation. I was about a klick from my ship when a sudden unseasonable blizzard blew in, white-ing out the kilometers of flatness into featureless oblivion. At first I didn’t worry. I was dressed for a certain level of exposure, and my ship had a homing beacon.
Which I soon learned I had neglected to flip on.
I started trudging through the howling snow-inferno, heading toward where I thought my ship lay. After covering about five klicks I knew I had guessed wrong. I started tromping in a circle. When I couldn’t do that any more, I lay down to die.
I woke up to find Buddy bending over me. (I later learned he had made the instant transition from home to low orbit over my assigned territory, zoomed in on my near-corpse with infrared sensors, then split the atmosphere with a quick descent.)
Through frost-crusted lips I murmured, “Thanks.”
And do you know—that lifesaving bastard wouldn’t unbend enough even to say, “You’re welcome”?
So attaining my majority (age, not size; I still had plenty of growth beyond the two-meter mark I stood at then) I took off, with no goodbyes.
At the spaceport, I pondered travel as our age knew it.
