"They
aren't part of the Alliance yet, are they?" Jayna said.
"No.
We consider it a major step forward toward joining, that they are sending
merchants out to the rest of the universe. I haven't heard of them sending any
students to the Academy, or diplomats to confer with the Alliance Council, but
they are allowing trade to take place on the outer orbital station in their
solar system."
The
rest of the trip to the arboretum was filled with information on the planet O'goal.
The genotype and standard features of the people, the style of their clothes,
the characteristic dishes, what kind of music they seemed to prefer, and the
few exports from their planet.
Tress
thought she saw two O'goali men following them down the long corridor to the
arboretum on the sunward side of the station. When she looked for them a few
minutes later, they were gone. She supposed she thought she saw them because E’bett
had been talking about the O'goali.
Two
men in what her mother called Wannabe Gleaner-but-cleaner clothes were walking
toward their group as they walked down the wide corridor with the arboretum at
the end. Gleaners were what her father called the garbage pickers of the
universe. They were sloppy, filthy, and loud, and were very happy when they
heard about colonies failing or ships that wrecked or crashed. Gleaners went
through the universe, breaking into archeological sites and raiding damaged
ships and taking everything that survived after a disaster. If a ship was
having trouble, the crew was better off waiting twice as long for a rescue ship
to respond to their distress signal than to accept help from Gleaners. If they
let Gleaners into their ships, they ended up worse off than when they were
drifting in space.
These
two men approaching E'bett and the four girls looked like their clothes had
come from a salvage bin. They didn't look greasy or filthy-dirty. Tress took a
tiny testing sniff and didn't smell disgusting things like bad breath and dirty
hair and sweaty clothes. She didn't like them, though. They stopped as the
girls approached and turned to watch the party of five walk past them. One of
them laughed. It was a rough, broken kind of sound. It made Tress shiver a
little.
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