Reefs by Kevin O'Donnell Jr

Author:Kevin O'Donnell Jr [O'Donnell, Kevin Jr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII

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By his third day on Delurc, McGill Feighan was lonely and depressed. Between shifts that day, he moped around the core of eD City, looking for someone to talk to. The spoke was deserted; he stared out the wall. A school of blue and gold fish slalomed through the weeds.

Behind him a door closed. As he turned, a tall, hook-nosed man bumped into him. Sam hissed. " 'Scuze," said the stranger. Though off-balance, he tried to brush past. "That's okay." Feighan righted him. "Hey—do you have a minute?" "No." He whisked away.

An hour later, a scar-chested Timili delivered the same rebuff, as did a second human that night, when the Flinger walked wearily home. Whatsa matter? It was nice that they respected his privacy, but they did not have to do it so abrasively. He stepped into his dome and dropped onto his pallet. They got something against Flingers? He sniffed his armpits. A little stale, perhaps, but certainly not offensive…

It surprised him. He would have thought that since there were so few aliens on Delurc, all of them confined to the domes on the reefs, a small-town mentality would have taken hold. After all, when one has nothing to do but to mind his neighbors' business…

Bewildered, he took to watching the passersby as he roamed the spokes and wheels. And began to understand. They all hurried; they all buffered themselves with tense preoccupation. They pursed their lips and avoided eye contact. It was as though each hunted a buried treasure and suspected the others of racing to find it first.

By the fifth day, he had stopped making overtures to friendship. He filled the lonely hours with Sam and Sherman, instead. Sam, for all his swift intelligence, was still a child, and the games he loved to play distracted the Flinger only because his ward took joy in them. It warmed Feighan to have someone respond to him favorably and uncritically; the child projected so much happiness that it enveloped Feighan like a weather field, and insulated him from the indifference of the City.

He pulled Sam's tail. "Gotcha!"

Sam stuttered a wheezy hiss and clashed his teeth like castanets while he waved his snout in the air. "Don't you love that laugh, Harry?"

The older man shook his head. "Sounds like faulty brakes." "That's why you never pay any attention to him, right?"

Sherman drew back his tickling fingers. "Well…"

"Uh-huh."

When time really weighed heavy, when the very lights seemed to slow their spin through the spectrum, he'd wander. Up a spoke, around an entire wheel, he'd walk, and pause, and peer for differences. There were none, except for the air in the various sectors. ED City was stamped from a mold that showed no signs of wearing out. And every alien ignored every other.

The only breaks in the monotony of his restless explorations came when the occasional translator hailed him. One would invite him to take a test, another to explain a point of Earthlore, a third to read a passage from Terran literature.

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