Free Moon Flower by James P. Hogan Page A

scare and legal battle — and moved on to the payment machine. As he slowed to select a chipped card from his billfold, the man behind lunged past, waved a hand at the reader, and marched through the gate haughtily when the green light flashed. Implants seemed to give people an air of existing on some higher plane above the lowly herd. Shearer cleared the transaction and emerged into the eating area, with its ceiling-to-floor wall of glass on the far side looking out across the lower end of the Bay. The booths by the window were all taken. He slowed again, looking for a table, causing the bearded man bounding through after him to swerve, almost spilling his tray. “Makeupyamindwhichwayyergoin’can’tcha?” the man snarled, catching his bottle of soda as it tipped.
    “Pardon me,” Shearer said. The man looked at him as if he had spoken a foreign language and walked away.
    “That’s the wrong way, Marc,” a more friendly voice said. “Don’t you know you have to be assertive?”
    He turned to find Jeff Lang, who was in the same class, holding a tray with some kind of salad and a carton of milk. “Oh, is that what it is? I thought it was just that some people don’t know there’s a difference between manliness and rudeness.”
    Jeff grinned. “You just don’t read the right how-to books.”
    “I guess not.”
    They were fellow oddballs in the group, which was what had drawn them together. Jeff was about Shearer’s own age, sandy-haired, with a boyish, freckled face and an obliging, easygoing nature that guaranteed social scorn and professional obscurity. He worked as some kind of freelance researcher and had been commissioned by an encyclopedia publisher to put together the bones of an entry on Cyrenean history. He looked around and inclined his head in the direction of the wall nearby. “There’s an empty table that way.”
    “Sure.”
    They moved over and sat down. Jeff peeled the lid off his salad, poured a measure of milk into a cup, and opened the pack containing cutlery and napkin. “So, how long does it take Cyrene and the two Ras to come back into the same relative positions?” he asked. “Figured it out yet?”
    Shearer groaned. “Jeff, gimme a break. It’s lunchtime. My head’s still aching from it all.”
    “Cramming it in all right, aren’t they?” Jeff agreed.
    “All right. So carbayis and doroyis.” Shearer challenged. “Which is which?
    “Carbayis is the hard years,” Jeff replied. “Blazing summers. Ice-age winters.”
    “You sure?” Shearer realized that he wasn’t himself.
    “Make up a memory aid,” Jeff suggested. “Carb is hard. Carborundum. Get it?”
    “Good one. So what about dor, doroy?...”
    Jeff shrugged. “I don’t have one. It just has to be the other. But thankfully we won’t be showing up in the middle of either.” Cyrene was currently some months out from perigee, and by the time the Tacoma arrived would be comfortably into the intermediate part of its year, with the two stars positioned such as to produce moderate extremes. He looked down at his salad as he prepared to eat. “No egg. I always used to like a hard-boiled egg with salad. How long has it been since everyone stopped doing them?”
    “I’m not sure. Not that long. I can remember having them at the university with breakfast. You can still get the powder mix they make into scrambled.”
    Jeff pulled a face. “Ugh! Wallpaper paste. Health departments. How long before I’m not allowed to cook myself an egg at home in my own kitchen?” He rolled some lettuce leaf around the end of his fork and speared a piece of tomato. “Yes, see, you smile, Marc. But can your remember the things we smiled at twenty years ago that have happened and nobody thinks twice about now? And there’s a whole generation of kids out there who’ve never known any different and think it’s the way things have always been. I mean, where does it all end?”
    Shearer chewed in silence for a few seconds, then