Lovelock Read Online Free Page B

time. I was naive; my real education was still before me. All I noticed as we boarded the Grissom-bound shuttle was the way the other people looked at us. Rich tourists and serious travelers alike, they sized us up immediately: a family with two small children, a couple of old people, and a monkey. None were particularly happy to see us. I knew what they were thinking: The children will cry, the old people will jabber and whine, and the monkey will probably pee on somebody.
    How right they were.
    We started out well enough. Lydia was sitting with Red—to my relief. The child was so odious to me that I even preferred sitting next to Emmy and watching the inevitable diaper changes. Human feces, especially baby ones mashed into a diaper, are so repulsive. There’s nothing you can do with them, they stick to everything they touch, and they stink. Besides, at three years, the child should have been toilet-trained long before. I suspect her “accidents” were only attention-getting devices, oft repeated because they were so successful. But despite the attendant odors, at least Emmy had her pleasant moments; Lydia was a spoiled, petulant creature whose every breath was more offensive than a thousand of Emmy’s diapers.
    With Red and Lydia sharing one another’s company, Mamie and Stef were left to sit by themselves. Pink was nowhere to be seen—she had been sedated through her little piggy snout and placed in the cargo hold, which was where she belonged. Red had tried to trot her up the gangplank like a regular passenger, but the shuttle crew banished her to the hold like a pet. I knew Red resented the fact that Carol Jeanne got to keep her witness and he didn’t. But then, Red was no Carol Jeanne. And Pink was no me .
    Carol Jeanne and I had flown on suborbitals—subbos—a dozen times before, and I had the routine down pat. There was always a little bit of fuss at the gate, as they examined her letter from the ISA authorizing her to bring her witness inside the cabin; they were always impressed that somebody (never us ) was paying full fare for my seat. Then I’d coast into the cruiser on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder, hop down when we got to our seat, and put myself in place on my seat. The attendant would bustle up, inspect my harness, and then attach it to the human-size lap-belt. They always made sure that the fasteners were all where I couldn’t reach them—as if it wouldn’t be enough just to tell me to keep them fastened.
    This time was no different, except that instead of it being only me and Carol Jeanne on the two-seat row, Emmy’s presence forced us to sit on the three-seat side. Emmy had the aisle seat and Carol Jeanne was between us. There was no window on the wall next to me—there was so much white heat on reentry that giving the passengers a view would cause panic on every flight.
    My harness held me tight enough against the seat that I couldn’t reach the in-flight magazine. Carol Jeanne remembered, though, and handed it to me. An attendant noticed it.
    “He’s acting just as if he were reading,” he said, delighted at my antics.
    “He is reading,” Carol Jeanne said.
    “But he turns the pages so fast.”
    “He reads about two thousand words a minute,” she answered.
    I looked up at him and grinned. Humans always think my smile is cute, until they see how sharp my teeth are. He went away.
    Takeoff was takeoff. It felt like we traveled three kilometers on the ground before we finally shambled up into the air. And then, once we were aloft, the pilot laid us on our backs and climbed straight up—or so it felt. I could see across the aisle where Mamie and Stef were both gripping the armrests—they’d never flown on a subbo and the harsher movements were unnerving them a little. I knew something they didn’t know—that the initial climb was nothing.
    When we reached twenty thousand meters, the pilot came on the loudspeaker and warned us to face front and not to attempt any movements during the