better.
No race had been able to overcome such vast distance, and so they had striven to overcome time. And it was in this that humanity at last found some small niche in the crowded, chaotic darkness of the universe. Enye and Turu saw the damage done by humanity to its own environment, the deeply human propensity for change and control and the profoundly limited ability to see ahead to consequences, and they had found it more virtue than vice. The vast institutional minds, human and alien both, entered into a glacially slow generational agreement. Where empty planets were, intractable and inconvenient and dangerous, with wild flora and unknown fauna, there humans would be put. For the slow decades or centuries that it required to tame, to break, to pave over whatever marvels and threats evolution had put there, the Silver Enye and Cian and Turu and whatever other great races happened by would act as trade ships once had in the ancient days when mankind had displaced itself from the small islands and insignificant hills of Earth.
The S?o Paulo colony was barely in its second generation. There were women still alive who could recall the initial descent onto an untouched world. Diegotown, Nuevo Janeiro, San Esteban. Amadora. Little Dog. Fiddler's Jump. All the cities of the south had bloomed since then, like mold on a Petri dish. Men had died from the subtle toxins of the native foods. Men had discovered the great cat-lizards - soon nicknamed chupacabras, after the mythical goat-suckers of Old Earth - that had stood proud and dumb at the peak of the planet's food chain, and men had died for their discovery. The oyster-eyed Silver Enye had not. The insect-and-glass Turu had not. The enigmatic Cian with their penchant for weightlessness had not.
And now the great ships were coming ahead of schedule; each half-living ship heavy, they all assumed, with new equipment and people from other colonies hoping to make a place for themselves here on S?o Paulo. And also rich with the chance of escape for those to whom the colony had become a prison. More than one person had asked Ramon if he'd thought of going up, out, into the darkness, but they had misunderstood him. He had been in space; he had come here. The only attraction that leaving could hold was the chance to be someplace with even fewer people, which was unlikely. However ill he fit in S?o Paulo, he could imagine no situation less odious.
He didn't recall falling asleep, but woke when the late morning sun streaming through Elena's window shone in his face. He could hear her humming in the next room, going about the business of her morning. Shut up, you evil bitch, he thought, wincing at the flash of a lingering hangover. She had no talent for song - every note she made was flat and grating. Ramon lay silent, willing himself back to sleep, away from this city, this irritating noise, this woman, this moment in time. Then the humming was drowned by an angry sizzling sound, and, a moment later, the scent of garlic and chili sausage and frying onions wafted into the room. Ramon was suddenly aware of the emptiness in his belly. With a sigh, he raised himself to his elbow, swung his sleep-sodden legs around, and, stumbling awkwardly, made his way to the doorway.
"You look like shit," Elena said. "I don't know why I even let you in my house. Don't touch that! That's my breakfast. You can go earn your own!"
Ramon tossed the sausage from hand to hand, grinning, until it cooled enough to take a bite.
"I work fifty hours a week to make the credit. And what do you do?" Elena demanded. "Loaf around in the terreno cimarron, come into town to drink whatever you earn. You don't even have a bed of your own!"
"Is there coffee?" Ramon asked. Elena gestured with her chin toward the worn plastic-and-chitin thermos on the kitchen counter. Ramon rinsed a tin cup and filled it with yesterday's coffee. "I'll make my big find," he said. "Uranium or tantalum. I'll make enough money that I won't have to work again for the rest of my life."
"And then you'll throw me out and get some young puta from the docks to follow you around. I know what men are like."
Ramon filched another sausage from her plate. She slapped the back of his hand hard enough to sting.
"There's a parade today," Elena said. "After the