 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. 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. 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 It turned out to taste pretty good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good that I couldn't keep on my stomach. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a hard base. One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when they dropped the colonies. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have draft animals. One of the eight, as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything else in the Solar System in 2041. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that could have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have had to be domesticated from scratch. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere. I rounded a tree-lined bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures alive. That one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
 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