A small girl — maybe five years old — walks along a pedestrian lane in Demeter, the main city on the asteroid Ceres. Her left hand is firmly attached to her father; her right trails along the handrail, and she wears gravity boots. She is not native to Ceres and will not be there long, so she needs the boots most of the time to counteract the muscle decay that comes from living on a low-gravity asteroid. She doesn’t argue about the boots, although they are clumsy and ugly and she much prefers the sensation of floating around you can get without them: her daddy told her to wear them, and she is a well-behaved child.
The father who walks beside her is not a tall man, but he has wide shoulders and powerful legs. His hand dwarfs his daughter’s, but he holds hers gently. His skin is light brown, as is his daughter’s, though her face shows more traces of Asian heritage than his. He, too, wears gravity boots, but they look less clunky on his feet and go better with his Marine uniform than they do with his daughter’s shorts and t-shirt.
As they walk down the street — it’s their first visit into the city since they arrived at the military base two days ago — several Ceresians come floating by. They use the handrails to pull themselves along.
They are young people, their hair cut and dyed in the furthest extremes of this year’s fashions, their bodies showing implants chosen with care to shock their elders, their legs dangling. Their feet are bare, the toes curled under.
“Look, Daddy,” the little girl says, staring in fascination. “Aliens.”
Her daddy laughs. “No, honey,” he says. “They are people, just like us. They just aren’t wearing their boots right now.” She isn’t old enough to be told the whole story: that these people have adapted to the low gravity and their muscles have atrophied. In some ways, the father muses, they are becoming a new species. But that’s too complex for a five-year-old, who means “non-human intelligent life forms” when she says aliens, even if she doesn’t know it yet.
The child is disappointed. She very much wanted to see aliens. She tells her father — in that deadly serious tone young children use when they’ve figured out something important and need to educate their parents — “Someday I’m going to meet aliens.”
And her father — to his credit — does not say, “There’s no such thing as aliens.” He says, “You bet you will, Caty. You bet you will.”