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Authors: Roger MacBride Allen
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significant increase on their original life span.
Metrannans require a relatively high gravity field. A force much below the one-sixth-gee field of the Earth's Moon will eventually prove fatal. Metrannans lose consciousness after about thirty seconds in zero gee, and die if not returned to a strong gravity field within a few minutes.
METRAN--The human name given to the home world of the Metrannans (see reference), an intelligent species that was in turn named for the world. The Metrannans have their own names for themselves and their home world, but both are unpronounceable to most humans.
The world, and by extension the species and the culture, are named for the species' cultural habit of living exclusively in giant, highly planned and rigidly controlled cities--and only one city per planet.
The planet itself is somewhat larger than Earth, with a higher gravity and a denser atmosphere. Metran is unique among the human-cataloged home worlds of sentient species in that the species known to humans as the Xenoatrics (see reference) have had a colony established there so long that it predates the evolution of the Metrannans themselves. (The Xenoatric home world is not known to humans, but it is definitely not Metran.) The Xenoatric Enclave, estimated to be several million years old, still stands in the center of the Metrannan City. The Enclave is completely surrounded by...
Jamie blinked, jerked upward in his chair, and shook his head. It was far from the first time he had caught himself starting to drift off. He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and turned to stare out the viewport for a moment, if only to rest his eyes.
It wasn't that he wasn't interested in learning about Metran. It was just that he was so tired, so burned-out from reading, reading, reading the query results.
Working the file had never been the most exciting part of police work. Sifting through a pile of papers, or grinding through screen after screen of data, was just plain dull. Most of what was written in the average case file was set down in the most blindingly boring bureaucratese.
A report might spend pages and pages on the most trivial side issues and gloss over the key facts with no details at all. A file would have so many obvious sloppy errors and misstatements of fact that it became impossible to rely on anything in it.
And yet, examining the files was absolutely essential. They might contain--they ought to contain--that one golden nugget of information that could break the case wide open--or maybe just keep a certain James Mendez alive.
Of necessity, the query results covered not just the case in question--what little they had on it--but all the information BSI had about the culture, history, biology, and psychology of the species in question--a species that the assigned agent in question might never have so much as heard of before being tapped for the mission. Besides which, the files on a given xeno species were never complete and were often highly inaccurate.
It would be as if a xeno investigator had to come to Earth to solve a murder, and her sum total of information on the human race consisted of what she had time to learn en route from an old out-of-date encyclopedia with half the entries missing, plus some old newspapers and a stack of gossip magazines--with perhaps The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Diaries of Samuel Pepys thrown into the mix on the off chance they might be of some use and because they were the only history books available.
"Getting on toward dinnertime, Jamie," Hannah called from the lower deck.
"Good," he said. "I'm too punchy to accomplish much of anything. Let me just tidy up my references, and I'll be down in a minute."
On previous cases, Hannah and Jamie had fallen into the habit of studying the query results individually, then meeting up at mealtimes to discuss what they had found. Having both of them shoehorned aboard the Bartholomew Sholto , a ship that was a tight fit for a
Metrannans require a relatively high gravity field. A force much below the one-sixth-gee field of the Earth's Moon will eventually prove fatal. Metrannans lose consciousness after about thirty seconds in zero gee, and die if not returned to a strong gravity field within a few minutes.
METRAN--The human name given to the home world of the Metrannans (see reference), an intelligent species that was in turn named for the world. The Metrannans have their own names for themselves and their home world, but both are unpronounceable to most humans.
The world, and by extension the species and the culture, are named for the species' cultural habit of living exclusively in giant, highly planned and rigidly controlled cities--and only one city per planet.
The planet itself is somewhat larger than Earth, with a higher gravity and a denser atmosphere. Metran is unique among the human-cataloged home worlds of sentient species in that the species known to humans as the Xenoatrics (see reference) have had a colony established there so long that it predates the evolution of the Metrannans themselves. (The Xenoatric home world is not known to humans, but it is definitely not Metran.) The Xenoatric Enclave, estimated to be several million years old, still stands in the center of the Metrannan City. The Enclave is completely surrounded by...
Jamie blinked, jerked upward in his chair, and shook his head. It was far from the first time he had caught himself starting to drift off. He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and turned to stare out the viewport for a moment, if only to rest his eyes.
It wasn't that he wasn't interested in learning about Metran. It was just that he was so tired, so burned-out from reading, reading, reading the query results.
Working the file had never been the most exciting part of police work. Sifting through a pile of papers, or grinding through screen after screen of data, was just plain dull. Most of what was written in the average case file was set down in the most blindingly boring bureaucratese.
A report might spend pages and pages on the most trivial side issues and gloss over the key facts with no details at all. A file would have so many obvious sloppy errors and misstatements of fact that it became impossible to rely on anything in it.
And yet, examining the files was absolutely essential. They might contain--they ought to contain--that one golden nugget of information that could break the case wide open--or maybe just keep a certain James Mendez alive.
Of necessity, the query results covered not just the case in question--what little they had on it--but all the information BSI had about the culture, history, biology, and psychology of the species in question--a species that the assigned agent in question might never have so much as heard of before being tapped for the mission. Besides which, the files on a given xeno species were never complete and were often highly inaccurate.
It would be as if a xeno investigator had to come to Earth to solve a murder, and her sum total of information on the human race consisted of what she had time to learn en route from an old out-of-date encyclopedia with half the entries missing, plus some old newspapers and a stack of gossip magazines--with perhaps The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Diaries of Samuel Pepys thrown into the mix on the off chance they might be of some use and because they were the only history books available.
"Getting on toward dinnertime, Jamie," Hannah called from the lower deck.
"Good," he said. "I'm too punchy to accomplish much of anything. Let me just tidy up my references, and I'll be down in a minute."
On previous cases, Hannah and Jamie had fallen into the habit of studying the query results individually, then meeting up at mealtimes to discuss what they had found. Having both of them shoehorned aboard the Bartholomew Sholto , a ship that was a tight fit for a
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