by E. M. Foner
“How about bathrooms?” Lynx asked. “You’re going to need hundreds of toilets in this area for the number of people you’re expecting, and with the Union Station crowd, we could get a lot of aliens with, er, special requirements.”
“All of my decks are fully plumbed, and I have enough modular toilets in storage to equip five events like this,” the Dollnick AI replied. “I’ll direct the maintenance bots in setting them up once you determine the basic floor layout for the show.”
“I thought you were planning to use early registrants to do the setup work,” Woojin said.
“Plumbing for all-species facilities is a specialty. Our con workforce will be busy enough putting up partitions, preparing conference rooms, and decorating.”
“The conference rooms are going to be on this deck as well?”
“It makes more sense than having people running in and out of lift tubes around the clock,” Flower said. “The next section of deck, where I set up the con offices, is also practically empty. We’ll partition it into conference rooms and workshops. On the last day of the con I’ll have my bots break everything down to open the area for a grand ballroom.”
“Aren’t you forgetting about food?” Lynx asked. “Unless you’re planning on everybody going back to their cabins and eating takeout, the lift tubes are going to be packed with people leaving the deck to eat. Either way, it would take a lot of time out of the day for guests.”
“I’ve already asked all of the main food court vendors to set up temporary service here, and I’m going to halt production of prepackaged soups for the week and have my factory workers prepare and serve hot soups instead. I’m told ramen noodles are very popular at cons. If the turnout exceeds my expectations and the current food workers can’t meet the demand, you know I have ten times as many kitchens on board than I’m using. Have you forgotten the machine I showed you before I set up the original fruitcake baking lines?”
“I remember a giant oval with the conveyer belt. You said it could do everything from baking cakes to shelling nuts and making ice cream, not to mention washing the dishes. But I thought you only used machinery to prepare food in an emergency.”
“If there are more guests than we can feed without using the machines, it’s an emergency,” Flower said. “Bill just got in a lift tube for the docking bay and I’m going to divert the capsule to your location. I’d appreciate it if you could give him a pep talk, Captain, before he heads down to the planet’s surface with the independent living tour group.”
“Note that when she wants something, I’m the captain even if I’m not wearing the hat,” Woojin said to his wife as he turned back to the lift tube. “Are you all set here, or do you want me to return after I talk with Bill?”
“I’m going to meet with Julie and Yaem to sketch out a floor plan on a long roll of paper, and then we’re going to tape the ends together to make it a cylinder so we can stick our heads inside and see how it really works,” the third officer said. “Don’t forget to pick up Em on your way home.”
The lift tube doors hissed open and Bill stumbled out, looking puzzled. “This isn’t the right deck,” he said out loud.
“Flower added an unscheduled stop,” Woojin told him. “Did you trip over your own feet?”
“I already activated my magnetic cleats because I thought I’d be exiting on the docking deck, Captain.”
“Did you read that book I gave you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how much of it really applies,” Bill said as they entered the capsule together. “I hope I won’t be doing anything with dead-letter drops or one-time pads, and the whole section on disguises was intended for undercover agents. I just plan on trying what Jorb said, talking to people I meet and asking if they ever get to the spaceport. If they do, I’ll tell them I work for a Sharf who’s interested in the used ship market and he’ll pay for information.”
“Honesty is the best policy when you can get away with it,” Woojin concurred. “Are you going to stick with the tour group the whole time? Jack told me they’ll be heading for Floaters, a factory town that I visited with Lynx on our honeymoon tour. Flower will put the shuttle down near the town, but the main spaceport is probably a few hours away.”
“Do they have public transportation?”
“Floater buses, but if you decide to go off on your own, you’d probably do better by renting a floater. That way you’ll have time to spend a couple of hours at the spaceport before you have to return to catch the shuttle back up to Flower.”
“I’ve never driven anything in my life,” Bill admitted. “I guess I’ll stick with the bus.”
“Dollnick floaters are perfectly capable of navigating themselves,” Flower interjected. “You just need to tell it where you’re going. If you get in trouble, shout for me over your implant. I’m maintaining a geosynchronous orbit and I’ll keep an antenna pointed your way.”
“I meant to ask you why the high orbit,” Woojin said. “Is it just so you can stay in one spot and keep an eye on everybody?”
“It’s part of my new deal for visiting Dollnick space,” Flower said. “I’m staying in one spot so they can keep an eye on me.”
The capsule stopped and the lift tube doors opened on the docking deck. Bill shuffled out, letting his magnetic cleats maintain contact with the deck.
“Break a leg,” the captain called to him. “Let me know how it works out.”
A minute later, Irene nudged her husband and said, “Look, Harry. Bill just got on the shuttle. He must be joining us for the day trip to Chianga.”
“Over here,” Harry called to his assistant. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming with us?”
“I just found out last night,” Bill said, taking the seat next to Irene. “Julie told me that she used to enjoy tagging along with your independent living tour group.”
“I swear that Flower is working that poor girl too hard,” Irene said. “All of the volunteer greeters and information desk helpers for the bazaar and the amusement park have been offered paid shifts if we work at the con. Julie met with us yesterday to talk about the art show and she looked a bit frazzled. When Harry and I were growing up, everybody understood that young people need lots of free time to find their way.”
“Fiddlesticks,” the Dollnick AI said privately over Bill’s implant. “I’m sure that Irene was as miserable as all Humans her age before she got married and settled down.”
“We’re visiting the factory city called Floaters, so you can guess what they make there,” Harry told Bill. “We used to spend half of our time on these trips trying to recruit new cooperative members, but we’re growing so rapidly at this point that we stopped handing out flyers.”
“Except for me,” Dave said, plopping down in the seat next to Bill and handing the young man a colorful sheet of paper. “What do you think of this?”
“Osteoporosis special,” Bill read. “Free bone density testing this week only at the walk-in clinic on Flower. Stop by while you visit the library.”
“Turn it over.”
“Trouble reading that library book? If you’ve got cataracts, we’ve got the solution. Twenty creds an eye includes permanent correction of most vision problems. Forget about primitive lasers and weeks of messy eye drops and get repaired the Farling way.”
“I had my cataracts done and I was in and out of the doc’s office in eight minutes,” Dave boasted.
“He doesn’t do one eye at a time?” Irene asked.
“When I mentioned that, M793qK asked me, ‘Would you bake one cookie?’”
“I guess he has a point there. Are you getting anything for all the business you send his way?”
“I used to take it out in trade but I’m running short of problems for him to fix. I just bank the extra credit now since I’m not getting any younger and I’ll need to get more work done sooner or later.”
“Aren’t you going to fold down your footrest, Bill?” Harry asked. “Your feet are dangling.”
“Oops,
I guess they are,” the young man said, and reaching under the seat, folded down the footrest intended for Dollnick children. “I usually fly with Dewey on the bookmobile when I leave Flower and that’s set up for people our size. How long will it take to reach the surface?”
“Normally around an hour once we get going. Flower accelerates halfway there and then spins the seats around and decelerates the rest of the way so we have some weight.”
“You look like you must have been up all night dancing with Julie,” Irene added with a wink. “Why don’t you take a nap and we’ll wake you when we arrive.”
Bill couldn’t tell her he stayed up late reading Espionage for Humans without blowing his cover, and while he was sure that he’d never get to sleep, he leaned back and closed his eyes. The next thing he knew Dave was shaking him awake.
“Let’s go, sleeping beauty,” the retired salesman said. “You looked so peaceful that I let you snooze until everybody else disembarked.”
“Wow, I guess I really was tired,” Bill said, undoing his safety restraints. He rose from the seat, folded up the footrest, and followed Dave to the front exit, where Jack and his wife Nancy were handing out tracking bracelets.
“Will you be joining us for the tour of Floaters?” Jack asked.
“I think I’ll just snoop around a bit on my own,” Bill replied.
“Snoop?” Dave inquired with a grin. “That sounded like a Freudian slip if I’ve ever heard one. Don’t tell me that your cafeteria crowd has roped you into spying for them.”
“It was Flower,” Bill blurted out. “She told me I’d be doing everybody a favor if I helped the new Sharf make his recruitment quota, and the captain approved it.”
“Did they give you any training?”
“Just a book. It had lots of helpful hints and little pictures of spy stuff, but after reading the whole thing, I don’t feel like I know anything more about recruiting sources than when I started.”
“Why don’t we team up?” the old salesman offered, and gave the surprised neophyte spy a wink.
“Do you mean…?”
“M793qK stands out like a, well, like a giant alien beetle, so I’ve been doing a little recruiting for him on our field trips. It’s an old sales trick, really. If they aren’t interested in a medical procedure, I hit them with the ‘Do your best for Humanity’ pitch.”
“Isn’t that from the EarthCent oath?”
“Do you think I tell the people that I work for a Farling? How many sources do you think I’d be able to recruit?” Dave took hold of Bill’s arm as if he was using it to steady himself, but he applied surprisingly strong pressure to steer the young man away from the tour group. “Doc is mainly interested in finding out which aliens have been visiting Chianga so I’m going to grab a taxi for the main spaceport.”
“A taxi? Won’t that cost too much?”
“Doc covers my expenses,” Dave said, and waved to an attractive young woman who was standing next to the open door of a low-slung floater. “Spaceport?”
“Are you talking to me?” she asked, taking a quick look around to see if there was another vehicle parked behind her.
“We want to visit the spaceport but we need to be back before our tour group leaves at the end of the day. Can you make us a special rate?”
“Fifty creds and I’ll wait while you look around and guaranty getting you back on time,” the young woman offered with a predatory grin. “I only take cash.”
“I’ll have to do a withdrawal from my programmable cred at the spaceport,” Dave said. “Is that okay?”
“No problem, hop right in.”
“I’m Dave and he’s Bill.” the old salesman said, getting in the back seat.
“Sephia,” she introduced herself. “So you guys are visiting from Flower?”
“We’re with the independent living cooperative,” Dave said from the back.
Sephia glanced at Bill in the front passenger seat. “You look a bit young to be retired,” she said.
“I just tagged along to, uh, keep an eye on Dave.”
The floater lifted off the ground to about knee-height, and then it accelerated gently away from where the members of Flower’s Paradise were boarding floater buses for the factory tour. Then Sephia flipped a red switch on the dashboard and an artificial voice announced, “Safety interlock disengaged.”
“Uh, is something broken?” Bill asked.
“If you’re going to spend any time looking around the spaceport we can’t dawdle,” the driver said. “Fortunately for you, I race floaters for our factory, and I’m currently the top driver on the circuit.”
“My apologies,” Dave said. “I assumed this was an unregistered taxi.”
“No, but I have a little business at the spaceport I’ve been putting off taking care of,” Sephia said. “It’s not the most exciting place to visit,” she added. “Chianga is a relatively new world, and between the Dollnicks and us, there are just over two hundred million inhabitants. All of the cities have their own landing areas for shuttles like the one you came on.”
“Isn’t there a space elevator?” Bill asked, trying to stifle a yawn.
“Too slow,” Sephia said. “It’s cheap, but it takes over a day to get up to orbit. The elevator gets all of the freight traffic, and most of the Humans going on long trips use it to save money because if they’re going to be gone for a month, an extra day or two doesn’t matter.”
“How far is it to the spaceport?” Dave asked.
“On a floater bus, a bit over two hours. With me driving my special rig, maybe forty minutes. I have to keep it under the speed of sound or the Dollnick cops will be after me again. If my dad wasn’t the mayor of Floaters, they probably would have kicked me off the planet years ago,” she added, flashing a grin at Bill. “Hey, are you actually falling asleep while I’m driving?”
“Nerves of steel, that one,” Dave said. “Either that or he has his eyes closed because he’s terrified, but the ground here is so flat that it’s hard to tell how fast we’re going.”
A soft snore proved that Bill had indeed fallen asleep again, and after Sephia found out that Dave had lived his entire life on Earth before moving to Flower, she spent the whole trip peppering him with questions about the motherworld. Thirty-eight minutes later, she dropped them both at the main spaceport terminal and promised to return in four hours to take them back to Floaters with ample time to make the shuttle.
Bill finally began waking up once they entered the air-conditioned building, but he was at a loss for what to do next. Dave recognized the young man’s hesitation, and taking his arm again, led the way to the nearest pub.
“But it’s barely noon on their clock,” Bill protested. “The place will be empty.”
“Spaceport bars are never empty, and the posted menu looks pretty good so they probably get a big lunch crowd. See?”
The young man had to admit that his guide was correct because it seemed that there were more people crammed into the pub than he had seen in the whole terminal building on the way there. The seating was all Dollnick style communal tables, each of which sat a dozen people per side. Dave spotted two open chairs at the center of one table and half-dragged Bill over.
“Are these seats taken?” Dave asked.
“Help yourself,” a large man wearing coveralls with ‘John’ embroidered over the breast pocket replied. “We were just joking around about keeping two open seats to see if we could catch a couple more meal tickets like last night.”
“Big spenders?”
“Aliens down from the rogue colony ship that works for EarthCent. We couldn’t figure out if they were spies or just kidding around.”
“What kind of aliens?” Bill asked.
“There was a Drazen, with the extra thumbs and a tentacle, and a barky looking fellow with vines in place of hair,” a woman directly across the table replied. “Funny names. Lorb and Kazoo.”
“You drank one too many free beers,” John said. “It was Jorb and Razood. They k
ept buying drinks and asking questions about the local entertainment industry, like anybody in here would know anything about the glitterati.”
“I told Jorb about that Horten crew that came through surveying locations for a historical colonization drama, and he slipped me this and told me there would be more if I reported anything else,” another man said, displaying a thin gold wafer. “I mean, I’m a hundred percent loyal to Prince Drume, but if a Drazen wants information about the Hortens, that’s just good business.”
“The barky one was also asking questions about Weavers, the factory town that makes fireproof blankets for export, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t really in it,” John said. “Then I mentioned that I was beat because I spent the day trying to straighten the bent forks on a cargo stacker, and he insisted that I sneak him into the maintenance shop to give it a go. That Frunge looked wiry but he swings a mean sledgehammer. Straightened those forks out so you’d think they were new.”
“He’s a blacksmith,” Bill said. “I used to be his apprentice.”
“Apprentice blacksmith or apprentice spy?” the woman asked, and everybody at the table had a good laugh.
“Uh, right,” Bill said. “I’m trying to get into the used ship business with a, uh, friend, but I’m just starting. If anybody, er…”
“You’re supposed to buy me a drink before you start asking questions,” the woman teased him. “It’s lunchtime, though, so I’ll settle for dessert. Are you on an expense account?”
“I’m working for the—”
“Don’t tell us,” John interrupted. “It takes all of the fun out of guessing after you’re gone.”
Ten
“There’s fresh-squeezed fruit juice in the fridge,” the ship’s AI suggested hopefully over Julie’s implant.
“I’ve been dealing with correspondence about art show display space for the last three hours,” Julie replied out loud as she filled her cup. “Coffee is a must. If you want my production to fall by half, send a bot to take the machine away.”
