by E. M. Foner
“I don’t hate it,” Maureen said. “It has all the keywords for marketing, and ‘Fan’ covers both fandom and fantasy.”
Yaem shook his head. “I won’t even tell you how badly that translated into Sharf. I can’t speak for Humans, but if you want any of the other species to buy tickets, come up with something shorter.”
“If you’re going to advertise and you want to reach a wide audience, I don’t think the exact name is that important,” Geoffrey said. “Maybe AllCon, or OurCon? Something universal.”
“Both taken,” Flower said a fraction of a second later.
“How about MultiCon?” Julie suggested.
“No active registered trademarks in the tunnel network database.”
“I think it would work well with an advertising slogan,” Maureen said. “Multimedia, multispecies, multi-track…”
“Multiverse,” Yaem added. “MultiCon it is. Now that Flower has explained that she’s open to all possible con activities, we have to decide what to include so that our marketing department,” he nodded at Maureen, “can get started on promotions and we can begin putting the program together.”
“Will attendees need to see the program before they sign up?” Brenda asked. “Ticket sales are a form of implied contract, and I wouldn’t want to deal with tens of thousands of refund requests if the con doesn’t meet expectations.”
“That’s why we should set the parameters right now so that we don’t end up making any false promises,” the Sharf said. “Anime is obviously in, lots of screenings, plus at least one production track for writers and artists.”
“Plan on separate tracks for writers and animators,” Flower said. “And my immigrants from Bits will stage a mutiny if we don’t have a gaming track.”
“Right, I was going to suggest that next. With Geoffrey here, I definitely think we should push books. If you’re really planning on large numbers, we’ll want a track for aspiring authors and at least one per genre for pure fans. What sort of venues do you have available?”
“I have ten auditoriums with five thousand seats each on my theatre deck, along with an open area equivalent to the size of the bazaar and the amusement park, which we can set aside for an art show and merchandise. There are fifty thousand cabins on the same deck that I’ll fill as the guests arrive, and if need be, I’ll start putting attendees on the decks above and below.”
“Art show?” Julie asked.
“Of course,” Yaem said. “We’ll want to start taking reservations immediately so we can build-out a proper-sized area, and I’d like you to take charge of communicating with the artists. Will we have trouble finding laborers for the setup, Flower? Most cons rely heavily on volunteers. And when Maureen gets the word out, there will probably be submissions from artists who want to show but can’t attend. We should have a mechanism in place for them to pay a little extra to ship their work in for display.”
“I can supply all the volunteers we need, though I think I’d rather see if I can tempt some con guests into showing up early,” Flower said.
“Filk,” Geoffrey suggested. “A good con needs at least one Filk track, with open jam sessions and a songwriting contest.”
“Good point,” Yaem agreed. “And the art show should have a contest as well. Can we offer prize money?”
“How about prize fruit baskets?” Flower countered.
“As long as there’s a purse of creds attached, I’m sure the winner will enjoy the fruit.”
“Don’t forget a masquerade ball with prizes for skits and costumes,” Geoffrey reminded the Sharf. “I can’t tell you how many times I won the Best Human Costume award at alien cons I attended.”
“Isn’t that cheating?” Julie asked.
“If they were willing to offer a prize, I was happy to take the money,” the author said. “Besides, I got beat out by Vergallians on more than one occasion, including a face dancer who posed as me.”
“How many tracks overall do we want to program?” Brenda asked.
“I’ve been to cons that seemed to have more tracks than attendees, and I’ve definitely sat on panels where there were more speakers than audience members,” Geoffrey said. “If we’re going to push the workshops, let’s keep a lid on the number of talking heads.”
“But weren’t you a talking—, er?” Julie asked.
“And one day I woke up and realized I’d turned into a bore,” the author said. “At the time I got locked up, I was planning a colony where creative people could come and work rather than talking about it. I can’t help wondering if an interview I gave promoting the idea was what triggered my ex-wife’s kids to make their move. They probably didn’t know I had money until I stuck my big nose into philanthropy.”
“I think that hands-on activities, like role-playing and crafting, fit well with Flower’s goal of creating a positive experience for the whole family,” Yaem said. “We’ll plan on limiting the expert panels for now and see how the early registrations run. Maybe when you start promoting the con to the people on those contact lists you can include a few potential tracks for them to choose from.”
“But keep it short,” Geoffrey advised Maureen. “If you give them a laundry list, you’ll get check-offs on everything. Maybe you could segment the lists and present binary choices at random, so people think they’re being asked to choose which of two activities they would prefer for the final open slot.”
“Clever,” Flower said. “We’ll do that.”
“How many Human days will the con run?” Yaem asked.
“Three was the norm for cons on Earth, usually with partial programming on Friday and Sunday,” Geoffrey said. “There were some mega-cons that ran for a whole week, and I suppose if there’s going to be a couple days of travel time involved for most of the attendees, we’ll want to make the trip worth their while.”
“Are you sure we can pull all of this together in just ten weeks?” Brenda asked.
“You’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” Flower said. “Leave all of the hospitality arrangements to me and just concentrate on early registrations and preparing activities for participants. Are you still a member of any professional groups you can tap into, Geoffrey?”
“I’m a lifetime fellow in the SciFi and Fantasy Authors Guild, and unless it’s changed that much since I was away, there are thousands of authors with writer’s block wishing they had an excuse to be anywhere other than their home offices. I imagine that live conferencing to Earth costs a fortune—”
“I have an always-on Stryxnet connection, unlimited bandwidth.”
“Then I’ll ask you to put me in touch with them as soon as I get back to my cabin,” the author said.
“Forgive me for asking a stupid question, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about with programming and tracks,” Julie said. “Do you give people schedules they have to follow?”
“Cons are multi-track, meaning there are sessions planned in each track throughout the day catering to a particular interest,” the Sharf explained. “A simple example would be an anime screening track, where each session would include a showing of new or classic anime, perhaps with the addition of a brief panel discussion to comment on the work and take questions from the audience.”
“But where are you going to find all of those experts on such short notice?”
“Ten weeks is forever in the con business, and the problem is never finding enough experts, it’s finding quality experts. You never know how they’re going to perform unless they have con experience.”
Four
“I’m six,” Em informed the Farling doctor. “I’m going to a real school now.”
“I thought that the Open University had a height requirement,” M793qK said. “Climb up on the table and I’ll stretch you.”
“Nooooo!” the little girl squealed and scurried away to hide behind Lynx. “Don’t let Uncle Beetle stretch me, Momma.”
“Uncle Beetle is teasing, as usual,” the third officer told her daughter, and sc
owled at the towering alien. “Em’s teacher thinks she’s having trouble seeing the display board.”
“Then why isn’t Em’s teacher here?” the doctor asked. “I can’t fix her eyes remotely.”
“The teacher thinks Em is having trouble seeing the display board. She squints.”
“You have a squinty teacher?” the giant beetle asked the little girl.
“You’re silly,” Em scolded. “My teacher says that I squint.”
“It’s your language that’s silly,” M793qK retorted with mock indignation. “Move the parts of a sentence around and it means something entirely different, not to mention half of your words sounding exactly the same. Here we’re talking about eyes, and I’m not sure when you mean your single-faceted viewing organs as opposed to we, ourselves, and I’s.”
“Try explaining it to him in a civilized language,” Flower suggested via a speaker in the ceiling.
Em began to whistle energetically, and the Farling doctor stopped waving his mandibles around and listened. “You’re right, Flower,” he rubbed out on his speaking legs when the little girl finished explaining her problem in fluent Dollnick. “My namesake is an exceptional child. Climb up on the table, Em, and I’ll have a look at your peepers.”
Thanks to the gymnastics training Em took for her required team sport, she was able to vault onto the high table without help. The doctor reached towards the ceiling and pulled down one of the alien medical devices attached to articulated arms. “Put your chin in the spoon,” he instructed her.
“Are you going to eat me up?” Em asked.
“I’m going to look inside your head and see whether we need to send you back to the Human factory.” The doctor adjusted a few knobs on the device to focus the holographic projection of the front-upper quadrant of the inside of the girl’s head. “My, what big eyes you have.”
“The better to see you with,” Em replied immediately.
“It’s too many books about the big bad wolf that got you into this fix,” the doctor said, and he turned his own unblinking multi-faceted eyes on Lynx. “Your daughter needs glasses.”
“Glasses? You can’t just wave something and make her eyes better?”
“I don’t do eye surgery on growing children for minor issues that can be corrected with glasses. It would be like putting braces on baby teeth.”
“I lost my first tooth this morning,” Em said proudly and gave the Farling a gap-toothed smile. “See?”
“Did you get a visit from the tooth fairy?”
“Daddy says that where he grew up in Korea, he had to throw the tooth on the roof to get the tooth fairy to come. I asked Flower, but she said our roof is always spinning, so the tooth would go flying through space forever.”
“Do you still have the tooth?”
“It’s under my pillow. That’s what Mommy said to do, but I don’t know how the tooth fairy can get into our cabin while we’re sleeping. We don’t even have a chimney.”
“You’re mixing up your stories,” Lynx told her daughter. “And I would know if we had a store on board that sells eyeglasses, M793qK. I’ve seen traders in the bazaar displaying reading glasses from time to time, but won’t Em need a custom recipe?”
“Prescription,” the Farling doctor said, “and I already took the measurements directly from her optical mechanics. Let’s see…” He began rummaging through one of the deep drawers under the counter, pulling out all sorts of unlikely prosthetics that might have been intended for aliens, and then removed a small black eyeglasses case. “What’s your favorite color, Em?”
“Purple!”
“What a coincidence.” He tapped away at a control panel on the case with one of his smaller appendages and it went from black to blue to purple. “Something like this?”
“Can you make it purpler?”
“Purpler isn’t a word, honey buns,” Lynx told her.
“It is in Dollnick,” Em protested. “It rhymes with oranger.”
The Farling did something to the case again, and the purple brightened. “Is that good?”
“It’s perfect. But where are my eyeglasses?”
The doctor opened the case and used two of his upper limbs to remove the pair of bright purple eyeglasses and place them on the girl’s head. “Now, what’s the lowest line you can read on the eye chart?” he asked.
Em whistled a few Dollnick characters in keeping with the language displayed.
“She’s wasted in first grade,” Flower complained over the third officer’s implant. “You should just let me keep tutoring her at home and in a few years she’ll be ready for the Open University.”
“Where she would be the only nine-year-old student?” Lynx subvoced in response. “I don’t think so.”
The doctor showed Em how she could change the color of the frames using the case’s control panel, which was sized just right for little fingers. Then he spent two minutes trying to convince Lynx to eat more green vegetables before throwing all of his appendages up in disgust. “Fine, but don’t come crying to me when you fail Flower’s new physical for ship’s officers.”
“You don’t want to fail a test, Mommy,” her daughter cautioned her.
“Mommy’s too big to fail,” Lynx said, and then a thought struck her. “How did you happen to have the right prescription for Em on hand, Doctor? Did you and Flower work this out ahead of time?”
“I programmed the lenses after reading the hologram results,” M793qK said. “The frames will stretch as her cranium grows, and the prescription will change according to the path I project for her ocular development, though I expect you to bring her in every three months so I can make sure we’re on track. These will be the only pair of glasses she ever needs.”
“I don’t know if I have enough with me to pay for something like that,” Lynx said. “What do they cost?”
“Twenty-eight creds. They’re actually obsolete Horten technology and I just happened to have a pair.”
“That a patient who was done growing and had his eyes permanently fixed left behind,” Flower interjected.
“It’s called ‘recycling’ and it helps me offset all of the charity work you have me doing,” the doctor shot back. “That last patient Dave brought in needed two replacement hips, extensive kidney and liver repairs, thirteen teeth, plus a double prescription of my best placeboes to wean him off that drug regimen somebody had him on. It’s a wonder he could form a coherent thought with all of those trace chemicals in his brain.”
“He was committed to a locked ward against his will and they kept him drugged up. Didn’t he tell you?”
“I wasn’t paying attention. What do patients know about medicine?”
“Are you talking about Geoffrey?” Lynx asked. “As soon as I drop Em off at her gymnastics class, I’m meeting with Woojin and our security chief about him. Tyrell already heard back from EarthCent Intelligence.”
“I know, I was listening in, but I won’t spoil the surprise for you,” Flower said.
Lynx paid the beetle doctor, brought Em to her class, and then took a lift tube to the security chief’s office. The officer at the counter waved her through to the conference room, where she was surprised to see Dianne, the Galactic Free Press reporter, and Brenda, the lawyer from the independent living cooperative who had found herself working full-time on Flower’s various projects.
“How did it go with Em?” the captain asked.
“Glasses. M793qK gave her a pair that should cover it until she’s done growing and can have her eyes permanently fixed,” Lynx told her husband. “Is Mr. uh, Harstang coming to the meeting?”
“He gave me the power of attorney to act for him in this matter,” Brenda said. “Geoffrey is willing to testify if the local government on Earth will take action against the facility where he was locked up, but he needs to get on with his life, and he doesn’t want to spend any more time thinking about his lost decade than absolutely necessary.”
“They had him drugged up for ten years?!”
“How much of this is on the record?” Dianne asked.
“I think all of it,” the security chief said, glancing at the captain for confirmation, “but you should probably double-check with Brenda before publishing anything that mentions Mr. Harstang by name.”
“All publicity is good publicity,” Flower declared. “Geoffrey has already agreed to let me use his name and likeness in promoting MultiCon, and he has no problems with our spinning his escape from involuntary commitment into a feel-good story about his return to writing.”
“I’ve been in touch with my paper’s Earth Syndication Coordinator who deals with the investigative journalists there,” Dianne said. “She found a reporter who was already working on a related story, so the Galactic Free Press is going to publish a whole series about eldercare abuses on Earth. My interview with Geoffrey will run alongside.”
“EarthCent Intelligence couldn’t find any traces of the ex-wife’s children who took control of the assets,” Tyrell continued. “It’s not that surprising since ten years is a long time to cover your tracks, and nobody seems quite sure about the statute of limitations because there are a number of different jurisdictions involved. Whoever planned the fraud was thinking ahead because they sold Mr. Harstang’s future royalty streams for lump sums wherever they could find a buyer.”
“And since the buyers were acting in good faith, and the assets weren’t stolen in the usual sense of the word, it would require extensive litigation for my client to recover the income he missed,” Brenda said.
“How about going forward?” Lynx asked.
“I think a combination of threatened legal action and bad publicity will be enough to get the current rights holders to surrender them back to Geoffrey. We aren’t talking about a large amount of money because he hasn’t published anything new in over a decade and his backlist sales have been falling steadily.”
