by E. M. Foner
“I’ve created a marketing monster,” Hildy groaned.
Five
Dorothy sat on the corner of a ratty couch which was covered with a Vergallian horse blanket, wishing that she had gone to Pub Haggis to wait for the end of David’s shift rather than telling him to meet her at the party. She felt horribly overdressed in the crowd of alien hippies and she wasn’t used to wearing the high heels that Chance had pushed on her. Even worse, the artificial person hadn’t shown up yet, and Dorothy was beginning to wonder if her impulsive friend had gotten sidetracked by something more interesting.
“Want to dance?” a copper-colored Horten boy asked her abruptly.
“I’m just waiting for my boyfriend,” Dorothy replied with a polite smile. She’d never seen a copper Horten before, and though she suspected it might be a compliment, she decided she’d rather not know.
“Dorothy? What are you doing here?” asked a Drazen woman, plopping down beside the girl on the couch.
“Tinka!” Dorothy’s face lit up with pleasure and relief. “Did you just come in? I thought I didn’t know anybody, and a human in this place sticks out like a sore thumb.”
“I’m here on an arranged date,” Tinka said. “He’s waiting for his turn on stage. Where’s your boyfriend?”
“He’s cooking tonight, but they must be having a late rush because he should have been here by now.” Dorothy lowered her voice and leaned closer to the Drazen. “I hope your date is a better singer than that Fillinduck trio. I don’t get how anybody can dance to that music.”
“If you call it music, or dancing for that matter,” Tinka said. “My date won’t be singing though. He’s a poet.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. My mother’s second cousin sings in a chorus with a friend of his brother’s meditation tutor. Sometimes I wonder if I should just let my mother hire a professional matchmaker, but I thought if I asked them to stick with informal introductions there would be a better chance of getting dates with guys I know.”
“Don’t you have any say in the matter?”
“I get final say if the guy proposes, but it’s traditional for the families to line up candidates and handle the contract negotiations when it gets serious.”
“Drazens have marriage contracts too? I just found out that Frunge have contracts a couple weeks ago.”
“All of the species have marriage contracts, except you guys,” Tinka said. “I was shocked when Blythe married Clive without even establishing a pre-marital asset-holding structure for her InstaSitter share, though I guess that Effterii ship of his is worth quite a bit as well. But I know they didn’t stipulate the number of children she would bear or any of the important stuff. And then when Chas got married, the only thing her husband brought to the partnership was his wardrobe.”
“He’s pretty nice,” Dorothy said. “My brother has been taking dance lessons with him for two years now. Blythe says that she’s going to enter Samuel and Vivian in the next Vergallian Junior’s competition if she can get my mother to go along with it.”
“Uh oh. I’m afraid my date is about to start.”
There was a polite round of applause as the Fillinduck trio stepped down from the small stage, which was really just a few sturdy folding tables with their legs clamped together to keep them stable. A Drazen male with a string of beads wrapped around his tentacle carefully ascended the improvised stairs, stepping from a small box, onto the seat of a chair, and then onto a table-top. There was a flurry of movement as some of the dancers sought seats and the more knowledgeable party-goers decided to see what was going on in the other rooms. A Vergallian couple wedged onto the couch next to Tinka.
“So, hello,” the Drazen poet said. “I’m Jord, and I’d like to give you a Dinge I’ve been working on about the station.”
“What’s a Dinge?” Dorothy whispered to Tinka. “It didn’t translate.”
“It’s one of the traditional forms of poetry males do,” Tinka whispered back. “No structure, no meter, no rhyme or rhythm.”
On the stage, the Drazen cleared his throat and began striking and holding a series of poses that reminded Dorothy of the warm-up exercises Woojin did before teaching unarmed combat.
“Is he working up the courage to start?” Dorothy whispered after several minutes of almost painful silence.
“No, he’s doing it now,” Tinka replied. “Did I forget to mention, no words?”
Suddenly, the poet knelt with a dramatic thud, and reaching down with his tentacle behind his back, pulled one of his ankles up until it projected over his shoulder. His body trembled with the strain, and Dorothy heard a sharp “pop.” Several of the Drazens lounging about whistled. Then it was over, and he limped off the stage. A Horten band immediately began deploying their equipment on the tables as the poet made his way to the couch.
“What did you think?” Jord asked, eyeing Tinka hopefully.
“That was truly painful,” the Drazen woman said, though the translation the human girl got through her implant gave the words a strangely complimentary intonation. “Dorothy. Please meet Jord.”
“It was really interesting,” Dorothy said, exchanging a limp handshake with the poet. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Tinka cringe.
“Interesting?” Jord repeated, looking like he’d been slapped across the face.
“I meant, uh, boring,” Dorothy stuttered, looking to the Drazen woman for confirmation. Tinka shook her head in the negative and pulled her tentacle over her mouth. “I meant, it’s a new human expression, you know?” the girl tried desperately. “When something is, like, really painful, we say it’s interesting and boring.”
“Thank you,” Jord said, regaining his composure. “I was afraid you detected some structure in the movements that I’d failed to eliminate.”
“No, no,” Dorothy protested vehemently. “Nothing but pain, start to finish.”
The Drazen poet’s chest swelled up and he couldn’t suppress a broad smile of self-satisfaction. “Can I bring you ladies some drinks?” he offered.
Tinka nodded her head and mumbled the name of a drink without taking the tentacle away from her mouth, and Dorothy added, “Water, if you see any.” Jord headed off to the bar.
“I almost died,” Tinka exploded the instant the poet was out of earshot. “An interesting Dinge. That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. I thought I’d bite through my tentacle to keep from laughing. Look, I really put teeth marks in it.”
“I’m so sorry,” Dorothy said. “My mother taught me that ‘interesting’ is the safest thing to say when you don’t know what to make of alien art.”
“It’s not supposed to be art,” Tinka said through her laughter. “The idea of Dinge is to be anti-art. I don’t have a clue what the point is.”
“Does that mean that Jord isn’t your Mr. Right?” Dorothy ventured.
The young Drazen woman rolled her eyes. “A Dinge poet? Besides, didn’t you see that thing on the side of his nose?”
“The little black spot?”
“It looks little now, but in a hundred years or so it will be the size of a five-cred piece. My father has one, so I should know.”
“Couldn’t he have it removed?”
“Drazens don’t go in for that sort of thing,” Tinka said. “I shouldn’t complain, though, since the last guy my parents set me up with smelled completely wrong.”
“Do you mean bad?”
“No, just wrong. Like you came home from work and found yourself in somebody else’s apartment kind of wrong. You know.”
“I guess,” Dorothy said uncertainly.
“Hey.” The Vergallian guy sitting next to Tinka exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and offered her a smoldering stick. “Kraaken Red, fresh off a trader.”
“Thanks,” Tinka said, carefully accepting the stick. She blew on the tip to freshen the ember, then waved a handful of smoke towards her nose and inhaled it before handing the stick back.
“None for your friend?” the
Vergallian asked in wonder. “It’s good stuff. I see humans do it all the time.”
“She’s younger than she looks and I know her mother,” the Drazen replied, exhaling blue fumes.
“I’ve inhaled stuff,” Dorothy protested.
“Yeah, like smoke from your father’s barbeque,” Tinka retorted. “I usually wouldn’t do this myself, but I have to put in a full shift with Jord or it doesn’t count.”
“Count for what?”
“For an arranged date,” Tinka replied, looking surprised that Dorothy didn’t get it. “I have to go on six a year or I’ll never hear the end of it. Hey, let me see your hand.”
Dorothy held her hand up for the Drazen woman, who placed her own hand against it.
“I always feel funny about you guys missing a thumb,” she continued, waggling her sixth digit to make the point. “I guess the Stryx don’t get everything right after all.”
“Tell me about it,” said the Vergallian man, offering Tinka the Kraaken stick for another hit. “I’m afraid to go on a date without taking anti-pheromone pills.”
“That’s something the Stryx did get right,” the Vergallian’s gorgeous date said, leaning forward so she could wink at Dorothy. “Anyway, it’s not incompatible with free will.”
“Oh, no. Every time she inhales she gets like this,” the Vergallian guy groaned.
“I didn’t know Vergallians believed in free will,” Dorothy said. “I heard you were all Higher Determinists, whatever that means.”
“It means that if you believe you have free will, it doesn’t matter that you really don’t,” Jord said, handing Dorothy a glass of water. “Mind if I have a sniff of that?”
Tinka exchanged the Kraaken stick for the mixed drink her date had brought and sat back, letting her head flop to face the human girl.
“It’s like, if you have two choices, and you make one, does that mean you have free will?”
“I guess,” Dorothy ventured. “I mean, there was a famous poet back on Earth who wrote that choosing one of two paths, even if they’re practically the same, makes all the difference.”
“But what if the choices aren’t really free?” the stoned Vergallian girl asked, leaning forward again to make eye contact with Dorothy. “What if you have ten choices, or a hundred, but the results of every single option converge on some predetermined path?”
“But how could anybody know?” Dorothy protested. “The number of possible futures that come about because I did or didn’t get to inhale any Kraaken Red must be approaching infinity after just a few days.”
“Approaching infinity?” Jord repeated. “Don’t you guys study Convergence Theory in school?”
“We didn’t have that,” Dorothy admitted. “What is it? A kind of math?”
“Convergence Theory is the basis of Higher Determinism,” the Vergallian girl said. She put her elbow on one knee so she could hold her head up while leaning forward to see Dorothy. The muscle relaxant component in the Kraaken Red was taking effect on all of them, and Jord sat down cross-legged on the floor.
“We need a Verlock to explain it to her,” the Vergallian male said, lurching unsteadily to his feet. “I’ll go find one.”
“I can explain it,” his date said, pulling him back down. “She doesn’t need a formal proof. It just means that most paths don’t matter because they converge again anyway. Think about if you pricked your finger with a pin. Does it really matter whether the point sticks in a hair to one side or the other? If you make the pin infinitely sharp, there are an infinite number of places you can prick your finger, and which one you choose doesn’t make a damn difference to the universe.”
“Right on,” Jord said, staring at his fingertips. Tinka nudged Dorothy and giggled.
“But most choices aren’t about moving a pinprick this way or that way on a fingertip,” the human girl protested.
“Really?” The Vergallian girl coughed out a cloud of blue smoke. “How about to a—what do you call those little insects they say outnumber people on Earth?”
“Ants,” Dorothy replied. “Or maybe beetles.”
“What difference does it make whether one of your ants is having a bad day, or whether you step on a hundred of them without knowing it? Do they still have free will because they follow their own paths?”
“Actually, I think I saw in a Grenouthian nature documentary that they follow pheromone trails too,” the Vergallian man said ruefully.
“Whatever,” the beautiful Vergallian girl continued. “The point is, if the powers-that-be want you to end up somewhere, that’s where you end up. It doesn’t matter how many choices you make with your free will along the way because all of the paths converge.”
“Right on,” Jord repeated.
“But sentients aren’t at all like ants,” Dorothy said. “Unless, did you mean that we’re the ants and the Stryx…?”
The Vergallian held the fingers of the hand that wasn’t supporting her head up to her lips and made a twisting motion. Then she sank back into the couch and began to snore loudly.
“Can’t handle the Kraaken stick,” her date commented. “She’s a pretty good abstract sculptor though, and a great dancer.”
“Hey,” David said, looming over the sofa from the side. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I’m right here,” Dorothy replied, taking a sip from her glass of water. She felt a little light-headed, and she wondered how much second-hand smoke she’d been inhaling.
The Horten band finally completed setting up all of their gear and the lead keyboard player unleashed a torrent of notes. David began bobbing his head with the bass sound of a giant tube that another of the colorful musicians was playing.
Dorothy fought the urge to put her hands over her ears and stood up, which caused Tinka to slowly list over to her right. The Drazen woman picked up her legs and ended up curled into the fetal position on her half of the couch. Jord looked disappointed, but he settled for turning around so he could sit facing the band with his head leaning back against his date’s legs.
“We should find Chance,” Dorothy shouted in David’s ear. “She invited us, after all.”
The tall boy shrugged and followed Dorothy into the next room of the Studio Club, a cooperative work and play space maintained by a group of artists and performers from various species. The bar area was packed solid, and everybody was shouting so loudly to be heard that it felt more like a racetrack than a party. David grabbed Dorothy’s hand and pulled her through an open doorway into a darker room with flashing lights.
The moment she crossed the threshold, Dorothy realized they had stepped through an acoustic barrier, because the overwhelming noise generated by the Horten band was replaced by the easily identifiable sound of Dollnick techno-music. Chance was at the center of a knot of leaping and gyrating dancers, lost in the hard-driving beat.
“At least it’s not as loud,” Dorothy said. “Want to dance?”
“I do my aerobics at work,” David replied. “Were you inhaling back there? You shouldn’t do that stuff.”
“I was just sitting there,” she protested, joining him against the wall. “Did you recognize Tinka?”
“That was Tinka? I’ve never seen her dressed down like that. When I was introduced to her at one of your picnics she looked like a rich Drazen business executive. Is she an artist?”
“She runs InstaSitter for Blythe and Chastity but she’s here with her arranged date, who performed earlier. You’re lucky you missed him.” Dorothy turned to greet an alien youth. “Hey, Mornich. Long time no see.”
The Horten’s skin blurred through several color changes as he tried to place Dorothy. Finally he guessed, “The ambassador’s daughter?”
“Dorothy. This is my boyfriend, David. So that band was too noisy even for a Horten, huh?”
“I’m the lead singer,” the Horten ambassador’s son replied stiffly. “It’s traditional to leave the stage during opening instrumentals.”
“About time you got
here,” Chance said, leaning around the Horten youth’s shoulder.
“Where’s Thomas?” Dorothy asked.
“He hates techno-music, he wouldn’t come,” the artificial person explained. “Do you dance?” she asked the Horten.
“I guess,” Mornich said, somewhat overwhelmed by Chance’s aggressive approach. “But I have to sing,” he continued, pointing towards the other room.
“It can wait.” Chance grabbed his extended arm and pulled him onto the dance floor.
“Don’t even try it,” David warned, as Dorothy gave his hand a tentative tug. “Hey, did you know that your brother and Jeeves are advertising for medieval cooks? Mrs. Ainsley says I should try out for it, but Ian acts like I’d be stabbing him in the back. I didn’t know anything about cooking when you got me the job working for him.”
“Never mind Ian,” Dorothy said firmly. “You paid your dues washing dishes for two years and he’s never said anything about making you a partner or leaving you Pub Haggis, has he? They have grown children of their own who they didn’t want following them into the restaurant business so they must have had their reasons.”
“I don’t know if I’d want a job at Libbyland, though. The nice thing about working for the Ainsleys is that they’re there all of the time, and they wouldn’t ask me to do anything they wouldn’t do themselves. When I worked for that mining outfit, I doubt the owner knew or cared how many kids were getting killed or crippled, or whether we got enough gravity time to stay healthy. We were all just numbers to them.”
“Are you forgetting who owns Libbyland?” Dorothy asked. “You’d be working for Libby and she’s there around the clock. The Stryx don’t have to employ biologicals for anything, you know. They could do it all with bots.”
“Well, maybe I’ll look into it, but I still don’t get why the station librarian runs a theme park.”
“She makes money on it, especially the gift shop,” Dorothy explained. “I’m not saying that’s her main motivation, you never know with the Stryx. But they do use their own businesses, like renting space on the stations, to help keep the monetary system in balance. It’s not for them. It’s for the rest of us.”
