Floor It
Very short short for the @inklings-challenge since that’s all I had time for. Go Team Lewis!
“Okay, okay, here’s one,” said Mathers.
Excitement crackled through the bow like Mathers had suggested some kind of death-defying feat. Mathers sat up, closing his eyes in the manner of a monk about to deliver a koan, and said with a wooden memorized-from-the-joke-book intonation, “Nobody tell me if the firmament theory is true.” Pause. “I’ll hit the ceiling.”
The crew howled. It was a bad joke, but Mathers, as a man, was humorless and the attempt was funny in itself.
“The permanent what?” said Liths, his three eyes blinking with interest.
“Firmament, Liths, it’s an Earth thing.”
“Yes?”
“People used to think the sky was sort of a…a solid thing. Like a dome over the ground. And if you went far out enough, you could hit it. Like this.” Jess, who was hovering near the starboard portal, tapped the knuckles of his glove against it. “Classic Earth, right?”
“How?”
Jess shrugged. “Well, full of ourselves. Thinking the whole thing revolves around us.”
“There’s only one way you guys are actually like that,” said Liths. Jess’s stifled laugh crackled the comm for a second; Liths had adopted “you guys” lately and it was funny coming out of a mouth that opened in four directions like a paper fortune teller. “It’s—it’s how you think that we’re not all like that.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re proud,” said Liths, his eyes widening as he hit on the English word he was looking for, “of your proud—your proudness. Of your pride.”
“We’re proud of how proud we are?”
“Yeah. Everybody else is proud, but they’re not proud of how they’re proud. They don’t think they’re prouder than other people.”
“God, it doesn’t even sound like a word anymore.”
“My planet,” said Liths, “the firm—the ceiling thing, we had that. We thought our planet was the uh. The floor, right?”
“The floor.”
Liths pressed his visor to the port window. There was an urgent bent to his posture all of a sudden, an aiming, as if he were about to dart forward at the sound of the starting gun. He didn’t look at Jess—Liths’ species found eye contact a little overrated, and went by touch, so that Jess, just as he was about to float elsewhere, suddenly felt two tentacles gripping the little finger of his glove.
“Ev-ery-one,” said Liths, in hard, distinct syllables, “thinks his planet is the floor.”
