“Hey, tell me something,” I suggested. “What would you call me?”
They looked puzzled.
“You want to know what I call you,” I explained. “Tell me first what you call people like me, people who are—who are born. You must have your own epithets.”
Lamehd grinned so that his teeth showed a bright, mirthless white against his dark skin. “Realos,” he said. “We call you people realos. Sometimes, realo trulos.”
Then the rest spoke up. There were other names, lots of other names. They wanted me to hear them all. They interrupted each other; they spat the words out as if they were so many missiles; they glared at my face, as they spat them out, to see how much impact they had. Some of the nicknames were funny, some of them were rather nasty. I was particularly charmed by utie and wombat.
“All right,” I said after a while. “Feel better?”
They were all breathing hard, but they felt better. I could tell it, and they knew it. The air in the room felt softer now.
“First off,” I said, “I want you to notice that you are all big boys and as such, can take care of yourselves. From here on out, if we walk into a bar or a rec camp together and someone of approximately your rank says something that sounds like zombie to your acute ears, you are at liberty to walk up to him and start taking him apart—if you can. If he’s of approximately my rank, in all probability, I’ll do the taking apart, simply because I’m a very sensitive commander and don’t like having my men deprecated. And any time you feel that I’m not treating you as human beings, one hundred percent, full solar citizenship and all that, I give you permission to come up to me and say, ‘Now look here, you dirty utie, sir—’ ”
The four of them grinned. Warm grins. Then the grins faded away, very slowly, and the eyes grew cold again. They were looking at a man who was, after all, an outsider. I cursed.
“It’s not as simple as that, Commander,” Wang Hsi said, “unfortunately. You can call us hundred-percent human beings, but we’re not. And anyone who wants to call us blobs or canned meat has a certain amount of right. Because we’re not as good as—as you mother’s sons, and we know it. And we’ll never be that good. Never.”