 What is a Mud-eater?
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim in the miasma of a planet without spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction! I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that scrawniness to last much longer. Either your arches and calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere and little grubby things just looking for you to crawl on. Worst of all, planets stink. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but not for me. We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up a level or down a level and be back in civilization. They don't let us grow for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to the Ship. Daddy says that something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach if it's really going to come back. The third was to join forces, though not with that meatball Jimmy D. No, he isn't really a meatball. In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking animals.
 A derogatory term for a person who lives on a planet, instead of in space
 A derogatory term for a farmer  A derogatory term for a person who lives on a planet, instead of in space  A derogatory term for a person whose job it is to herd Losels  A derogatory term for a person who breeds without restraint