Beastchild

than this. Humans were cold, with little laughter and even fewer tears. This unemotional, stoic reserve was the thing that made them so basically alien to the naoli. And alien to all of the other races as well-all of which were gregarious.
        Then the understanding came.
        It sliced through his brain, stabbed upward into his overmind, jolting the entire foundation of his reason.
        It hurt.
        The first inklings of comprehension stirred and began to blossom when Leo pointed to a distant light of a rising naoli starship, easily a hundred miles away to the east. He watched the flame and the blue-green haze it created with the gaze of a washed and restructured naoli longing for his past He sucked in his breath as the majestic plume grew longer on the velvet backdrop of the still dark sky. (just the horizon rim was touched with orange daylight). Hulann's mind leaped into the chasm of discovery when Leo said:
        "I wanted to be a spacer. Always wanted it. But I wasn't chosen."
        "Chosen?" Hulann asked, not realizing yet where the conversation was leading.
        "Yes. My family stock was not what they called "prime.'"
        "But you are too young to have applied for space work."
        Leo looked confused.
        "You said you were only eleven."
        "You're chosen before you're born," the boy said. "Isn't it that way with naoli?"
        "That makes no sense!" Hulann said. "You can't be trained for space work until you're older, able to grasp basic physics."
        "It would take too long that way," Leo said. "To be a spacer, you have to know so many things. Hundreds of thousands of things. To learn them as an adult-even with the help of hypnoteachers-would require too long."
        "Forty years. Fifty at the most," Hulann said. "Then there are centuries ahead in which-"
        "Exactly," Leo said when Hulann failed to finish the sentence. "Humans only live to an average age of a hundred and fifty years. Only the first two thirds are 'strong' years in which we can withstand the rigors of intergalactic travel."
        "That's horrible!" the naoli said. "Then your spacers spend their entire lives doing the same thing?"
        "What else?"
        Hulann tried to explain that the naoli held many occupations in one lifetime. It was unthinkable, he said, that a man should spend his short years doing the same thing. Limiting. Boring. Deadly to the mind. But it was not easy to press across this basic naoli principle of life to someone of so short-lived a species.
        The understanding was hovering closer. Hulann felt the weight of it, though he could not understand exactly what was weighing on him…
        "Once," Leo said, "in the early days of our space programs, spacers were not trained from before birth. They grew up, led normal lives, went to the moon, came back. Maybe they remained in the space program, maybe not. Some of them went into business. Others entered politics. One of them became President of the major country of that time. But when the faster-than-light drives were perfected and we began to accumulate more and more relevent data a spacer had to learn, the old way of choosing astronauts had to be replaced."
        There was now full understanding. Hulann realized why there had been a war, why Leo was different from the humans the naoli had met in space.
        "The fertilized egg is withdrawn from the mother soon after conception," the boy went on. "The Spacer Institute then takes it and develops it into all the things a spacer should be. A spacer has toes twice as long as non-spacers, because he needs them for grasping in free-fall The big toe is also an opposable thumb after the genetic engineers are finished. His range of vision runs into the infra-red. His hearing is more, acute. When the foetus is four months developed, it is subjected to a constant learning environment where data is fed directly into its developing brain. The human brain never learns faster than during that five month period."
        Hulann found he could barely speak. His voice was thinner, hoarser than normal. His lips kept drawing in over his teeth in shame, and he had to withdraw them to speak clearly. "How… did the non-spacers feel… about the spacers?"
        "Hated them. They were different from the rest of us, of course. They could survive much better in space, in any alien environment. There was talk of beginning to send out non-spacers as passengers,