Planetary Parlay

by Cameron Cooper

  “Then do so,” Jai said.

  Slate’s shoulders twisted in little, jerky movements. I got the distinct impression he was feeling stress, which was ridiculous…unless, were the Terran’s androids actually sentient?

  “I think you’ve confused him,” Lyth said, moving closer to study Slate.

  Jai pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. “Okay, what should I say?”

  “That is entirely your discretion,” Slate said.

  At the same time, Lyth said, “Try being literal.”

  Jai tilted his head. “Very well. Slate, you are permitted…no, it is my wish that you interact with everyone in this group.”

  Slate stopped twisting. “This group?”

  “Everyone who landed upon Earth today, who comes from Carinad worlds.” Jai hesitated. “Do you need names?”

  Slate actually straightened, his chin lifting. “I do not need names to interact with everyone, Jai Van Veen, but I would like to speak to everyone so I might learn their names and also process their voices. It would be…efficient.”

  I grinned. “Take your literalness and eat it, Jai Van Veen.”

  Jai glared at me. “Slate, please tell Juro to continue on.” The slave was hovering three paces away and showed no sign of impatience. He didn’t fidget. He simply stood, his gaze unfocused. It was a disturbing form of non-waiting.

  Slate said something. Juro bent his head in a shortened bow then turned and continued walking at a pace we could all keep up with. We had by-passed the spiral staircase and were into a section of the building that, while still open on all sides, had thin oval rugs scattered across the core of the area. Sofas and armchairs made of slender versions of the building logs were grouped upon the rugs. Both rugs and the chair cushions were made of light materials. They were printed with abstract versions of the feathery leaves we saw everywhere.

  The chairs looked cool and comfortable, but no one was using them. The front of the building, where we had entered, many people had been crossing to and fro, but back here, there was no one.

  Ahead of us, the floor narrowed down to a curved ending and I realized the building was an oval shape, with the front end chopped off to let the steps run up to them.

  Another curving staircase rose to the next floor, which Juro climbed. He did not put his hand out to grip the railing twining up beside the stairs, even though he had moved to the very side of the stairs, as close as one could get to the railing without touching it.

  We all followed behind, still twisting and turning to try to see everything. As we climbed, I saw what lay beyond the stairs. The floor ended in the oval shape I had spotted, but what I hadn’t seen until now was a covered walkway of the same smooth, gleaming floor material leading to another building which looked as grand in scale and open-sided as this one. I could see people moving about inside that one and bent to watch them as I climbed. They were hurrying about in a way that reminded me of every administrative office I’d ever seen, full of busy clerks and officers rushing to their next task or meeting.

  Were the Terrans keeping everyone out of our way? There was no one near us. No one using the stairs.

  We emerged upon the next floor, and I saw another walkway across to the same busy building, directly over the top of the one below. I glanced up as far as I could see above the walkway and spotted a third crossing to the same building, directly above.

  Juro moved away from the stairs, heading deeper into the building we were in. On the floor below, this was the section where all the empty sofas and armchairs had sat.

  On this floor, there were walls.

  My shoulders relaxed at the sight of them. They looked like perfectly ordinary walls, if you ignored that they were made of the same stuff as the rest of the building and sealed in the same fashion as the floors. They rose from the floor all the way to the tall ceiling. They gleamed with a similar warm golden color.

  Between the walls and the very edge of the floor, where the logs propped up the next roof, was an opened-sided passageway perhaps four meters across. There was no safety railing along the edge of the floor, either. Just the end of the flooring, then a drop to the ground below. Perhaps five or six meters down.

  I had never been afraid of heights or claustrophobic, but I could feel myself trying to draw closer to the wall as we walked along the perfectly solid passageway, which was generously wide.

  Annoyed, I distracted myself by moving up beside Slate. He walked with a measured tread, but his footsteps were light, despite his mass. “Slate, my name is Danny Andela. Please call me Danny.”

  “Greetings, Danny,” Slate replied. “To answer your previous question, I would be pleased if you call me Slate.”

  “Do you have other names that Terrans use?”

  “Slate is the rendition of my name in your Common language.”

  “And Terrans use the Terran version?”

  “I have a serial number that is sometimes used to reference me.”

  “Then everyone calls you Slate?” I asked, with forced patience.

  “I noted your use of the adverb ‘please’, which is not normally directed toward assistants. I merely intended to respond in kind, as per the directions on politeness outlined in your language guides. Did I speak out of turn, Danny?”

  Dalton glanced at me and raised a brow. He was grinning.

  “No, you did just fine,” I told him. “Can you tell me what this building is made from? It seems to be something organic, as far as we can tell, but it isn’t the feathery trees we saw everywhere on the way to the palace.”

  “The feathery trees you refer to are palm trees. Coconut palms—cocos nucifera, to be precise. The Parliamentary Palace Complex is made from bamboo, which is grown upon one of the islands in this archipelago. It is a resource which renews itself within a year, which is the only form of building material permitted on Earth by the Resurrection Accord.”

  “Bamboo…” Mace said, just behind me. He had crept up closer and listened in. “That is a word I recognize from when I was combing through dictionaries, trying to figure out Terran ideograms and dialects. It is ancient. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use it before.”

  “I am using the word which your dictionaries supplied,” Slate said. “May I know your name?”

  “Sorry. I’m Mace. Mace Badalt, but Mace will do. So this word, bamboo, is a Common word which no one ever uses, because it is the name for something that is only found on Earth?”

  “That is correct, Mace.”

  “Damn,” Mace breathed, sounding awed. “We’ve got Common words that have been around since we left Terra…”

  Dalton clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m going to guess we’ll be using a lot of them over the next few days. Bamboo. Palm trees.”

  Juro came to a halt at what appeared to be a perfectly normal door…just one made of bamboo. A round handle sat in the center of the door. The Terrans liked their symmetry, clearly.

  Juro twisted the handle and pushed the door open, then stood aside.

  Jai moved through the door with a barely noticeable hesitation, and we all followed, including Slate, who stayed as close to one meter from Jai as was possible.

  The room inside was a lot smaller than all the walls had suggested it would be, but there were two corridors shooting off in either direction, following the spine of the oval floor. Along the corridors, I glimpsed more doors with round, centered handles. Bedrooms?

  The room we stood in had many comfortable chairs similar to those on the floor below, with colorful patterned cushions. In one corner of the room was a very neat stack of our freight crates, their dinged and scraped blue color a jarring note amongst the warm gold and casual fabrics.

  Juro began to speak, and Slate interpreted immediately.

  “There are twenty-four rooms, and twenty in your party. Do your creatures require rooms of their own? We can arrange for the installation, if they do.”

  Vara looked up at me and licked her chops, as if she knew she was being referred
to.

  “We don’t need extra rooms for the parawolves,” I said and drew in a sharp breath as my voice issued from Slate’s…somewhere near his head, although I didn’t know if it was from the mouth slit or not. My voice spoke Terran like I’d been born to it, except in the middle I heard ‘parawolves’. There wasn’t a Terran equivalent, then.

  Everyone laughed or grinned at me. I put my jaw back in place and raised my brow at Juro. “You say ‘installation’—does that mean these rooms were built for us?”

  Again, I heard myself speaking Terran. It was a disconcerting echo.

  Juro bowed again and said, “We are most happy to have anticipated your needs, yes.”

  “Sort of like the Lythion, huh?” Eliot Byrne murmured, scratching at his chin.

  I grimaced. Programming nanobots to build themselves into a room was one thing. Telling slaves to do it was completely different.

  Jai cleared his throat. “Thank you, Juro,” he told the Drigu. I suddenly preferred the Terran name for the lowest of the classes. Now I was face to face with what a slave really was, the Carinad name for them tasted foul in my mouth…and in my thoughts.

  Jai continued on. “We will spend some time sorting out rooms and our belongings—”

  His voice issued from Slate, speaking the same rapid Terran. Jai blinked at that.

  Juro snapped straight and spoke swiftly. “There is no need to concern yourself with unpacking. It can be taken care of as soon as you direct us on which box goes into which room.”

  Jai hesitated, then said with diplomatic vagueness, “We’ll get to that later. For now, we would like to be alone for a while to rest and recover.”

  “Only…” Fiori said, raising her hand.

  Jai glanced at her.

  “There are no printers, of course,” she said. “But there are no kitchen facilities, nothing resembling a tap. We’re all stressed. How can we acquire some water? I have a pump that will sterilize it...and I think we need to break open a food crate, too. Calories would help all of us.”

  “There’s twenty-one of us,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me, including Juro, for Slate had carefully translated.

  I shifted on my feet. I could even feel my cheeks heating. I glanced at Ven, and he shook his head. It was a tiny movement, but I understood. And I didn’t like it. I turned to confront Juro. “There are twenty-one of us in this group. You miscounted.”

  “Danny…” Jai said in an undertone as everyone grew still.

  Juro didn’t look away from me, but his gaze slid toward Ven. He knew damned well what I was saying.

  Then he bowed, the same toe-scraping movement as the first time he had been presented to us. “I regret all my short comings, Great One—” Then he stopped, his mouth popping open as he looked from me to those around me, and back. He spoke slowly, picking each word with care. “I mean…great…Carina…peoples.”

  Then he bowed again and hurried from the room.

  —10—

  When novelty is piled upon newness, which is built upon utter ignorance; when everywhere you look, strangeness presents itself, pretty soon you run out of energy to be curious about everything. Numbness takes over.

  I think we all felt that way right then, and we hadn’t been on Terra for more than a couple of hours. Were our standard hours the same as a Terran standard hour? I had always assumed they were. That was what the “standard” meant. But now I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps our standard hour had warped over the millennia.

  I didn’t care right then. I could feel a headache starting to build up and was immensely glad we were alone. Almost alone, for Slate found a corner to stand in and stayed out of the way. He did not speak unless spoken to, and no one spoke to him. I think we all wanted a flavor of “normal” while we deflated and prepared for the evening ahead.

  We all picked rooms. The rooms were all the same—a tiny sitting area with a desk and chair. The desk was not automated in any way. It was a horizontal surface supported by four legs. Both desk and chair were made of bamboo, too. Narrow steps climbed to a mezzanine holding a bed big enough for two. And yep, it was made of bamboo. Intricately woven thin strips of it made up a pattern along the sides and over the headboard. A cupboard with drawers beside the bed. No railing on the edge here, either.

  A wall closed off the area beneath the bed balcony. A normal sized door in the wall led into a bathroom. At least, it had what I presumed were bathroom facilities, but my attention was taken by the shower. I’d never seen anything so…extravagant. The shower was a room of its own, three meters by four meters. Three shower heads were controlled from a panel on the wall next to the doorway. I tested the water. It was instantly close to scalding. So they used hot water for bathing. Thank the stars for that. I had been half-braced to learn that hot water was against that mysterious Resurrection Accord Slate had mentioned.

  The drain in the floor seemed quite normal, too.

  “I like this shower,” I told Dalton.

  Dalton was testing what turned out to be a faucet. Water bubbled up from inside it to cascade down an artistically arranged slope of white fan-like things, into a depression on the counter. A drain was hidden under the bottom of the fan cascade and the water slid away beneath it.

  “How did you turn that on?” I asked.

  “I pressed this…I think.” He pressed one of the bigger fan-like things and water spurted. He pushed on it again, and the water stopped. “Yeah, that’s what I did.”

  I grinned. “You’re bunking with me, then?”

  “Other way around, princess. This is my room you’re inspecting.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “I’m taking the side of the bed closest to the wall.”

  Dalton’s smile grew. “You don’t like the edges…”

  “I like a wall against my back, is all.”

  “The bed is three paces away from the edge,” he pointed out.

  “Don’t care. I’m taking the wall side.” I walked out into the little sitting area. I didn’t plan to spend much time in here, so the size and lack of facilities didn’t bother me. It was a place to sleep.

  Yet the suite the Terrans had built for us was strangely lacking in other ways. It wasn’t just the absence of food preparation facilities. When I moved out of the room and down the corridor to the common room where everyone was sorting through our freight crates, I learned of another omission.

  “There’s nothing like a drying unit,” Marlee Colton said in a low voice as she hefted a crate to the floor.

  “You can dial a drying cycle into the shower unit,” Yoan said over his shoulder. “Here, this is Elizabeth’s.” He grunted and lifted one of the smaller crates.

  Juliyana came up beside me and said in a low voice, “They don’t print anything, of course. We were braced for that. But if they don’t print clothes and recycle them when they’re dirty, how do they clean them? There is nothing like a washing facility here.”

  “That’s odd. They didn’t think we’d just bring enough clothes to last for some indeterminate time, surely?” I murmured back, watching the crates get sorted and shifted, and hefted down the corridors.

  “There’s no environmental controls,” Lyth added, moving up behind us. “No concierge panel, or anything I can find that might function the same way.”

  “That’s…not good,” I said slowly, for I had already noticed that twenty-one people packed into this enclosed area had raised the ambient temperature to an uncomfortable degree. I appreciated that the walls stopped wind from moving around me, but they were also stopping the replenishment of a comfortable atmosphere.

  “No outlets or intakes in the walls or floor or ceiling,” Sauli said, as he passed us, carrying a crate, his neck tendons standing out. “Maybe they like it humid like this?”

  I thought of Isuma Florin, with her all-over purple coverings. “Maybe,” I said. “We’ll figure it out,” I added, because I was tired of having to think through every single little thing I came across. “Did anyone ask Slate
about it?”

  Head shakes. That confirmed that everyone wanted “normal” as much as I did.

  “Although I could really use a glass of water, at least. Something cold, icy and maybe some fruit in it…” That was Marlow, the food aesthete. “Kristiana, does your pad say what crate has fruit juice in it?”

  “None of them,” Kristiana told him, her attention on the pad in her hands. “Fruit juice isn’t good for you if it isn’t fresh. No fruit, either.” She looked up as Marlow gave a theatrical sigh. “Slate, can you hear me?” She was standing on the far diagonal side of the room from the android and she murmured the question.

  Slate said, “I can hear you, yes. May I know your name.”

  “Interesting,” Kristiana said. “How sensitive is your hearing? Oh, I’m Kristiana. If you can hear me easily across here, how does one have a private conversation?”

  “Greetings, Kristiana,” Slate replied. He made no move to come closer. I didn’t know if that was because we did not tell him too, or because the crates and gear strewn across the floor between the chairs and the people working on them would make it too much trouble. “If you wish a private conversation, you can tell me to stop listening.”

  “Do you record everything you hear?” I asked quickly.

  “I have an internal record which allows me to study interactions and learn from them,” Slate said.

  “Does anyone have access to that record?” I beckoned to him. “Come here so I don’t have to shout.”

  The android moved across the room. Kristiana studied it carefully as it stepped right over crates with its long legs and weaved around people with a swaying motion.

  “I wonder what sort of gyroscope and balances system it uses,” Kristiana murmured. “No robotic humanoid-shaped mechanical we’ve ever managed to develop could handle even simple walking without looking clunky and falling over just trying to step over a door jamb.”

  “This is an expertise of yours?” I asked, astonished.

  “It was my thesis,” Kristiana said. She glanced at me. “That human-like substitutes would never manage to look human…and that might be a good thing.”