Alien Earth by Megan Lindholm Page A

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 musicwas 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