My Library

CLICK! I was closed tightly, turned inward, stunned. My first reaction was, there had to be some mistake, this was not the story-history of earth, BB had it mixed up with some other port of call on their cruise schedule. Yet as I ran the rote again, the overlay of what little I knew of earth’s zoological and human history was uncomfortably accurate, albeit from another perspective. The food chain of earth’s ecobiologic system had been well established. Knowing this about Mother Nature, some of the hard-core philosophic speculators had often pondered where the human animal fit in the process. The downside was obvious, who ate us! Before, it had been just that, speculation. Now … BB opened, plied. (You get the percept, RAM?) I dulled. (Yeah, I get it.) (Well, then,) BB went on, (what’s Loosh got to do with learning?) I opened slightly. (And you got the rote before you came to Earth?) BB smoothed. (Like I gave you, it was in the TSI cruise brochure. It was in with hundreds of other rotes we got before we left.) I opened more, but tightly. (Where did the brochure come from?) (Why, uh … yeah, from the Cruise Director.) (Where did he get it?) BB flickered. (I don’t have a rote on that. He just dumped them on us and rolled, “Here’s the exciting and interesting stops we’ll make on the cruise.” I got a good percept because it was the last one we’d visit, so it was the last rote we got. That’s why it’s so clear. Some of the others are dim because they were in the middle. Not the earth rote, or humans. It’s all clean, not wild at all.) I hardened. (And where did the Cruise Director come from?) BB lighted. (Oh, he and the rest are a bunch of curls from the system next to us.) (Why did they offer the cruise to you in KT-95?) BB smoothed. (Well, it was sort of a, uh … trade. We do it all the time with systems near us.) (What did they get in trade?)