"So they've got you by the gonads."
"Sure. They charge what they like."
"Could they be putting the wrong chemical cues in some of the food blocks?"
Matt looked up, startled. "I'll bet that's just what they're doing. Or too little of the right cues; that'd save them money at the same time. They won't let us grow our own, of course. The-" Matt swallowed the word. After all, he hadn't seen Hood in years. The crew didn't like being called names.
"Time for dinner," said Hood.
They finished the beer and went to the town's one restaurant. Hood wanted to know what had happened to his old school friends, or schoolmates; Hood had not made friends easily. Matt, who knew in many cases, obliged. They talked shop, both professions. Hood was teaching school on Delta. To Matt's surprise, the introverted boy had become an entertaining storyteller. He had kept his dry, precise tone, and it only made his jokes funnier. They were both fairly good at their jobs, and both making enough money to live on. There was no real poverty anywhere on the Plateau. It was not the colonists' money the crew wanted, as Hood pointed out over the meat course.
"I know where there's a party," Hood said over coffee.
"Are we invited?"
"Yes.
Matt had nothing planned for the night, but be wanted reassurance. "Party crashers welcome?"
"In your case, party crashers solicited. You'll like Harry Kane. He's the host."
"I'm sold."
The sun dipped below the edge of Gamma Plateau as they rode up. They left their bicycles in back of the house. As they walked around to the front, the sun showed again, a glowing red half-disk above the eternal sea of cloud beyond the void edge. Harry Kane's house was just forty yards from the edge. They stopped a moment to watch the sunset fade, then turned toward the house.
It was a great sprawling bungalow, laid out in a rough cross, with the bulging walls typical of architectural coral. No attempt had been made to disguise its origin. Matt had never before seen a house which was not painted, but he had to admire the effect. The remnants of the shaping balloon, which gave all architectural coral buildings their telltale bulge, had been carefully scraped away. The exposed walls had been polished to a shining pink sheen. Even after sunset the house glowed softly.
As if it were proud of its thoroughly colonist origin.
Architectural coral was another gift of the ramrobots. A genetic manipulation of ordinary sea coral, it was the cheapest building material known. The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral's special airborne food. All colonists lived in buildings of coral. Not many would have built in stone or wood or brick even were it allowed. But most attempted to make their dwellings look somewhat like those on Alpha plateau. With paint, with wood and metal and false stone-sidings, with powered sandpaper disks to flatten the inevitable bulges, they tried to imitate the crew.
In daylight or darkness Harry Kane's house was flagrantly atypical.
The noise hit them as they opened the door. Matt stood still while his ears adjusted to the noise level-a survival trait his ancestors had developed when Earth's population numbered nineteen billion, even as it did that night, eleven point nine light-years away. During the last four centuries a man of Earth might as well have been stone deaf if he could not carry on a conversation with a thousand drunks bellowing in his ears. Matt's people had kept some of their habits too. The great living room was jammed, and the few chairs were largely being ignored.
The room was big, and the bar across from the entrance was enormous. Matt shouted, "Harry Kane must do a lot of entertaining."
"He does! Come with me; we'll meet him!"
Matt caught snatches of conversation as they pushed their way across the room. The party hadn't been going long, he gathered, and several people knew practically nobody; but they all had drinks. They were of all ages, all professions. Hood had spoken true. If a party crasher wasn't welcome, he'd never know it, because no one would recognize him as one. The walls were like the outside, a glowing coral-pink. the floor, covered with a hairy-looking wall-to-wall rug of mutated grass, was flat except at the walls; no doubt it had been sanded flat after the house was finished and the forming balloon removed. But Matt knew that beneath the rug was not tile or hardwood, but the ever-present pink coral. They reached the bar, no more jostled than-need be. Hood leaned across the bar as far as he could, which because of his height was not far, and called, "Harry! Two vodka sodas, and I'd like you to meet-Dammit, Keller, what's your first name?"
"Matt."
"Matt Keller. We've known each other since grade school."
"Pleasure, Matt," said Harry Kane, and reached over to shake hands. "Glad to see you here, Jay." Harry was almost Matt's height, and considerably broader, and his wide face was dominated by a shapeless nose and an even wider grin. He looked exactly like a bartender. He poured the vodka sodas into glasses in which water had been prefrozen. He handed them across. "Enjoy yourselves," he said, and moved down the bar to serve two newcomers. Hood said, "Harry believes the best way to meet everyone right away is to play bartender for the first couple of hours. Afterward he turns the job over to a volunteer."
"Good thinking," said Matt. "Is your name Jay?"
"Short for Jayhawk. Jayhawk Hood. One of my ancestors was from Kansas. The jayhawk was a symbolic Kansas bird."
"Crazy, isn't it, that we needed eight years to learn each other's first names?" At that moment a fragment of the crowd noticed Hood and swept down upon them. Hood barely had time to 'grin in answer before they were in the midst of introductions. Matt was relieved. He was sure he had seen Harry Kane pass something to Jay Hood along with his drink, Manners kept him from asking questions, but it stuck in his curiosity, and he wanted to forget it. The newcomers were four men and a woman. As an individual, Matt remembered only the woman. Her name was Laney Mattson. She was around twenty-six years old, five years older than Matt. In bare feet he would have topped her by a scant half-inch. But she was wearing double-spikes, and her piled confection of auburn hair made her even taller. Not merely tall, she was big, with wide pronounced hips and deep breasts behind an "M" neckline. She looked prettier than she was, Matt thought; she used cosmetics well. And there was a booming exuberance in her every act, an enjoyment as big as herself. The men were her age and over, in their late twenties. Any of the four would have looked normal dancing with Laney. They were huge. Matt retained of them only a composite impression of a resonant voice and an enveloping handclasp and a great handsome face smiling down from the pink ceiling. Yet he liked them all. He just couldn't tell them apart. Hood surprised him again. Talking along in his dry voice, keeping it raised to an audible bellow, not straining his neck to look anyone in the face, Hood somehow kept control of the conversation. It was he who guided the talk to school days. One of the tall men was moved to speak of a simple trick he'd used to rewire his school's teaching teedee, so that for one day he and his classmates, had watched their lessons both upside down and inside out. Matt found himself telling of the specimen bottle of apple juice he'd sneaked into the Gamma medcheck station, and what he did with it. Someone who'd been listening politely from the edge of the circle mentioned that once he'd stolen a car from a picnicking crew family on Beta Plateau. He'd set the autopilot to circle a constant thousand feet beyond the void edge. It had stayed up for five days before dropping into the mist, with scores of Implementation police watching. Matt watched Jay Hood and Laney as they talked. Laney had a long arm draped over Hood's shoulders, and the top of his head reached just to her chin. They were both talking at once, trampling the tail ends of each other's sentences, racing pell-mell through memories and anecdotes and jokes they'd been saving, sharing them with the group but talking for each other. It wasn't love, Matt decided, though it was like love. It was an immense satisfaction Hood and Laney felt at knowing each other. Satisfaction and pride. It made Matt feel lonely. Gradually Matt became aware that Laney was wearing a hearing aid. It was so small and so cunningly colored as to be nearly invisible within her ear. Truthfully, Matt couldn't swear that it was there. If Laney needed a hearing aid, it was too bad she couldn't hide it better. For centuries more civilized peoples had been wearing specks of laminated plastic buried in the skin above the mastoid bone. Such things did not exist on Mount Lookitthat. A crew, now, would have had his ears replaced from the organ banks ... Glasses went empty, and one of Laney's big escorts came back with replacements. The little group grew and shrank and split into other groups with the eternal capriciousness of the cocktail party. For a moment Matt and Jay Hood were left standing alone in a forest of backs and elbows. Hood said, "Want to meet a beautiful girl?"