the formidable couches and work surfaces his ancestors had used. Only this was like being invited into a creche’s playroom. Eyes turned to him as he passed. He hadn’t felt stared at in the corridors, but here the attention was impossible to ignore. His close-cropped hair and traditional orange flight suit were enough to mark him as a Mariner; his hulking size advertised his great age as well. He wasn’t sure which trait was drawing all the attention.
The host was very smooth about bringing a larger chair for John, but couldn’t do much about how low the table was. John waved off his apologies and accepted a small menu. He was studying its ornate print when he realized Deckenson was looking at him. John met his gaze.
“Feels odd, doesn’t it? To be so big in a world of tiny people. Like you’re an outmoded piece of equipment. Obsolete. Archaic.”
“So?” John asked coolly.
“So I brought you here on purpose. To emphasize it. To get you thinking. What will you find next time you come back from space, John? People that look even more like children? Will you be able to walk among us, to sit in our chairs, to drink from our tiny cups? Look at me, John, and see what we’re doing to ourselves.” Deckenson held out his hands, spread-fingered, as if to emphasize the slenderness of his fingers, the delicacy of his pink nails, the fragility of his white wrist with the pale blue vein pulsing in it.
John shrugged. “I’m a Mariner, Deckenson. It was my first option, and I’ve been with it for twenty-three years, my wake time. Yeah, every time I come back, things have changed more. But I’m adaptable to it. That’s why Mariner came out number one on my options.”
“There are also the factors that you don’t form bonds easily, and don’t seem to regret not having any close personal relationships. Are not those also prime personality traits for a Mariner?”
John took a sip of water from a narrow glass. “Of course. You say it like I should apologize for it.”
“No. I merely think it odd, in a man whose second option was Poet. One would think a man with a predilection for poetry would be closely enmeshed with humanity. I always thought of Poets as speakers for their species.”
It irritated John that they had somehow dug out this odd bit about him. Rubbed him worse that Deckenson placed importance on it. He wondered what else they knew about him. How intrusive were these people? His irritation came through in his reply. “Skill with words isn’t chained to love of one’s fellow man.”
“Poetry is more than skill with words. The option tests for Poet are quite exhausting mentally, and very demanding emotionally. I ought to know. It’s my first option.”
John should have known. “Really? Well, perhaps times have changed in that, also. When I took the tests, I came away feeling I had been the victim of a scam. All the questions seemed to ask one sort of thing while digging information of a very different sort out of you.”
“Exactly.” Deckenson took a quick breath as if he were about to go on, then paused abruptly. He let the breath out slowly, then breathed in twice, slower still, through his nostrils. John recognized the calming exercise. Deckenson looked up at him across the table and smiled suddenly, disarmingly. “Look, John. This isn’t going at all the way I’d planned, and I’m not going to let myself get sidetracked. Poet might be my first option, but Executive was my next, and that’s what I have to be right now. For the sake of poetry later. I have so much to convey to you, and such a limited time. And I desperately need to have your commitment.”
This sounded familiar. It would go like the last two meetings he’d had with Earth Affirmed people. There would be the same old song of their idealistic concept of a Human-centered civilization, usually followed by a monologue about how they had John’s best interests at heart and that was why he should give them cut-rates. It irked him that this time he might have to strike some kind of deal with them.
He thought about the previous times he’d been approached by Earth Affirmed. The first two times, way back when, he’d taken on consignments from them. Sticky ones. Never again. The last two times they’d approached him had been, oh, about sixty-five of their years ago, and again about thirty-seven years before that. They’d used the same pussyfooting techniques, long talks that hinted at a very profitable and exciting mission, but somehow never came around to making a direct statement of what that mission was. Each time, after protracted talks, John had gotten impatient and taken his option offer from Norwich and gone on his way. He wished it was that easy this time. He was starting to wonder why he even bothered with Earth Affirmed overtures. He hated to think it could be something as prosaic as curiosity.
The waiter came and hovered. Deckenson looked almost annoyed. “My regular meal. And John will have the same, but double portions. And more water, please. John, anything to drink besides water?”
“Stim.”
Deckenson turned to the waiter apologetically. “Do you have stim here?”
The waiter frowned consideringly. “Not in the old style, no. But I think our chef can come up with something that is both stimulating and refreshing. Will you trust us?”
“Certainly,” Deckenson replied without consulting John, and the waiter hustled away.
“So stim isn’t commonly drunk anymore, either?”
“I’m afraid it’s regarded as a bad habit. The better restaurants don’t encourage it.”
“I see. Last time I was in port, it was ‘purity of experience.’ Restaurants discouraged patrons from ordering more than one kind of food or drink at a meal. Background music was regarded as distracting one from the immediate experience. Wearing a perfume that could intrude on another’s olfactory experience was regarded as the height of rudeness. All of that seems to have been replaced.”
“So you see all this as merely another brief change of consciousness, a swing of the pendulum,” Deckenson indicated the whole room with a wave of his diminutive hand.
“For me, that describes it perfectly. For you, it’s your life.” The words came out more bluntly than John had intended.
“Exactly. But some things change in one direction, John, and keep changing. You’ve seen it, though you don’t seem to have attached any importance to it. The Conservancy’s ‘guided evolution’ has not swayed an iota from its headlong drive to keep Humans from having any effect on Castor’s and Pollux’s ecologies. They blindly refuse any of Earth Affirmed’s suggestions to integrate us into the ecologies, preferring instead to force us to live as outsiders, as parasites who try to sustain themselves on the natural flows of life here, without either contributing or detracting from that flow.” Deckenson’s voice was beginning to quiver with fervor. John braced himself against the current of fanaticism.
“Look what their breeding controls have done to us. People keep getting smaller, in an effort to make even less impact on the planet’s ecologies. Puberty keeps getting pushed back, a side effect of the growth inhibitors. We’re supposed to believe that’s good. The Conservancy talks about an extended juvenile period undistracted by internal hormonal riots, as if sexual maturity were a form of insanity. Our bodies have become little more than mobile containers for our brains.”
John tried a shrug. It only seemed to electrify Deckenson more.
“What was puberty when you were generated, John?” he demanded, almost angrily. “Onset at about fifty-two, fifty-five? I see you haven’t made it yet, so that has to be about right. Now it’s sixty-five to seventy, and climbing. Of course, the inhibitors have also pushed our life spans up beyond two hundred years, so that shouldn’t sound so bad. In fact, all the time a Human has before his hormones become obsessed with reproduction is supposed to be why we’ve advanced so far intellectually. We’ve successfully moved a bit farther away from our animal natures. Supposedly.” Deckenson drew breath, and sipped his water.
“Supposedly?” John was resigned now. The man was a typical poet: he communicated to use words, rather than the other way around. John would just have to ride out the chatter until Deckenson got down to business.