“Yeasay, throwin’ dust in their faces,” a man joined in. A Fiver.
“We can outrun any damn mech,” another woman announced proudly. Her accent was of Family Deuce, so thick Toby could barely understand her.
Toby gritted his teeth. “Yeasay, yeasay. I was just wondering—”
“Not right, Cap’n’s son goin’ on like that.” The hawk-nosed woman’s elbow poked him again.
“Sorry, brothers and sisters,” Toby said, though he was getting irritated. “Uh, ’scuse me.”
He got up and worked his way out of the press of bodies. Everybody seemed to be looking at him, sour-faced. Or else avoiding his eyes. Besen followed, whispering, “That old bag, she’s a flap-mouthed gossip. All those Trump Families are.”
Toby was already feeling bad about the incident, and he stopped before leaving the room to catch another glimpse of the screen. Family Bishop members were murmuring, speculating, even laughing—and not just among the Snowglade folk, either. They argued and elbowed and laughed with the Trump Families, too. An electric smell came from the crowd, a fidgety excitement.
It struck Toby that the room was jammed not so much because they wanted to see the gaudy pictures, but to provide a place to gather, gossip, and grumble. All to sharpen their sense of themselves as a fragile human Family in the face of the abyss outside.
That was essential—holding together. Argo held mostly Bishops, from Snowglade, but also Families of the planet they had just left, which its natives called Trump. Those Families had names Toby didn’t understand—Aces and Deuces, Jacks and Fivers. There were Queens, though, which by logic should have had the same customs and history as the Family Queen of Snowglade. But they didn’t.
Killeen called these Trump Families the Cards. They were fiercely loyal and prone to follow hot-eyed leaders. Back on Trump some had obeyed the crazy man who called himself His Supremacy, a fierce-faced type the Bishops had finally had to kill. Somehow this had meant that the Cards then transferred their loyalty to Killeen.
It made no sense, but then, not much about Trump did. Toby flatly disbelieved the idea that the Cards had gotten their names from some ancient game. Maybe a game had been made up using those names, sure. But Families were ancient and hallowed and not the stuff of trivial matters.
Still, the Trumps were a bit hard to take, butt-headed and ignorant. But the Snowgladers were no prize, either, when you looked close.
Rooks liked to blow their noses by pinching the bridge of the nose and letting fly into the air. They laughed if anybody was in the way. The hawk-nosed woman was a Rook, true to form.
On the other hand, Pawns saw nothing wrong with taking a crap in full view of anybody who happened by. A perfectly natural function, they said. What’s to be embarrassed about?
Knights burped and farted at the most formal occasions—they didn’t even seem to notice doing it.
Bishops spit whenever they felt like it, which was pretty often.
Rooks preferred to pee on plants, maintaining that since this was part of the Great Cycle of Life, it must be good for them.
And Kings would cough smack in your face, smiling after they did it. Some said that in the old Citadel days the lost Family of Queens had even made love in public, feet pointed at the ceiling, rumps thrusting in the air free as you please. They had some sort of theory about doing it as a show of demented social solidarity. Toby didn’t really believe that, it was utterly fantastic—but who could truly say what people of the deep past had believed and done?
Still, the Snowglade Families overlooked these differences, acts that seemed to others like gross social blunders, and held together. And aside from minor incidents, they extended the same hand to the Trumps, even if they were butt-stubborn and ate with their mouths open. The Family of Families.
Toby knew he had an obligation to keep the social glue in place. Not that he had to like it. He smacked a fist into his palm as he walked away from the jammed room.
Concerned, Besen asked, “She really got to you?”
“Naysay. Forget it.” But he knew he wouldn’t.
TWO
The Shredded Star
Toby missed having Quath live outside. Anything that big should be free beneath the stars, not closed in.
He was sure of this despite knowing that Quath’s kind had evolved out of a burrowing species that liked to dig in snug and tight beneath the ground. How such a race developed intelligence was a riddle. It seemed unlikely that something that wormed into dark, smelly crannies and ventured out to hunt for game would need much in the way of smarts. On the other hand, he reflected, humans had holed up in caves a lot, or so Isaac said. What made a creature develop intelligence was a deep question. After all, mechs came to have quick minds and nobody remembered when or how. Not even Isaac.
But the real reason Toby thought Quath should be outside was that Toby now had no excuse to go hull-walking himself. He felt an itchy, restless energy that he couldn’t erase with workouts in zero-grav. At least when he did visit Quath, it was in spaces so big that Toby could practice his low-grav skills.
At the moment Quath was in the abandoned agro dome. The high arch reflected back Toby’s huffing and puffing as he did rebounds off the walls. He would coast across the dome, maybe try to bank a little in the ventilator winds. Zooming toward the opposite wall, he pinwheeled his arms in mid-flight to bring his legs around, so that they could absorb momentum and rebound like coiled springs. A lot more fun than lifting dead weights, like some kind of demented machine.
Quath stood at the dome floor’s center, eyes swiveling to follow Toby’s ricocheting. She sent a hissing note of derision:
<You make much needless effort.>
“I wouldn’t expect a giant cockroach to understand.”
<My people would never sup in your foul kitchens, as did roaches.>
“You eat stuff that would gag any self-respecting pest.”
<My people once hunted such as you for an occasional stimulating mouthful.>
This startled Toby. He grabbed a steel strut and clung to it, panting. “Really?”
<They were native to our world and of the order primate, as you call yourselves. Not so skilled as your kind—not hunters. They smacked their lips over blue-green worms that thronged in brittle trees.>
“Were they, well, like us?”
<Intelligent? No. They had thin little arms and legs, like you. Also the same fixed eyes, each locked into a side of their heads. They could not revolve those heads all the way around, either. Very limited creatures—like you. But they tasted wonderful, and their spines, heated long over a fire, snapped open to emit a famous blue odor. To suck the thick, crisp marrow from the blackened bones was a great delicacy.>
“Ugh. I’m trying hard to think of you as a buddy, big-bug, but if you go on like this—”
<It was an honor to be even a small morsel for The People.>