Starquake.pdf

fairly good imitation of Qui-Qui's famous ripple-wink.
"Like this?" she said, leaning heavily on him and letting her fleshy eyeflaps rub against his topside edge.
"It's a good thing you are there to lean on or I might topple over and bruise something."
They got real friendly again, and she even let him reach into her heritage pouch to feel her clan totem.
However, the totem wasn't familiar—so she wasn't a member of one of the out-clan families related to his
clan. She was willing to rent a pad-room and go further, but Heavy-Egg still felt a strong allegiance to his
in-clan and its out-clan families. Any egg he might be responsible for must end up in his clan hatching
pens. There were already too many clanless hatchlings on the streets.
Heavy-Egg parted reluctantly with Glowing-Tread. She
found someone else and went off to turnfeast with him. Frustrated, Heavy-Egg invested a few stars in a
private holovid screen room and watched the rest of the Qui-Qui Show.
Qui-Qui was of his in-clan, and he had actually seen her at a clan gathering. Of course she had been
surrounded by admirers. His dream since he became old enough to realize that females were different
from males was to have Qui-Qui lay his egg. He knew it would never come true, but that didn't stop him
from dreaming.
The Qui-Qui Show was finally over. Heavy-Egg played it back again using the automatic replay feature
while he pouched a turnfeast meal without seeing or tasting it. Most of the rest of the off-shift crew were
going to take a few turns of break-time, but he made his way back up to the top of the mountain and
reported to the Web Construction scheduler. There was always some roustabout who got too lazy or too
full of pulp to make it back to work on time. He was lucky; there was a Topside job open. He grabbed it
eagerly, for the only thing that he liked better than thinking about Qui-Qui was the nearly sexual thrill of
working on the tower, where the tiniest slip meant instant death.
Heavy-Egg enjoyed work, and often wondered what it would feel like to be a human and have to spend
a third of your life unconscious. He had heard that humans would fall asleep even when their lives were in
danger. He then remembered hearing long ago on the holovid that the humans were in some kind of
danger and wondered if any of them were asleep.
06:53:21 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050
Amalita crawled slowly along the passageway ladder from the Science Deck to the Central Deck, her
muscles fighting the high outward-going residual gravity tides. She was careful at each step to maintain a
tight three-point grip with feet and hands on the rungs as the varying forces from the errant compensator
mass alternately tried to pull her up and down the ladder. As she passed the protection tank containing
Seiko, she looked inside. Seiko had her eyes shut, and her limbs hung limply in the water. She was sound
asleep.
"I guess thirty-six hours of strenuous activity is enough even for a super-human like her," Amalita
muttered. She clung to
the handholds near the communications console. Pierre was strapped into the seat.