by Calista Skye
“Slightly after?” the doctors looked at her sceptically. It was unheard of. The Madness of Love always showed itself immediately when a Derigaz first met his or her Hon'eekoh.
“Yes!” Dr. Mon'Toc roared. “For you see, only minutes before this Earthling conference, the prince was in another meeting, being orientated about Earthling psychology! And that's where he was in the company of his true Hon'eekoh!”
There were mutterings of “nonsense”, “no, no” and “insanity” from the doctors around her, but Dr. Mon'Toc was not deterred, only straightened her back and stared right at the Chief Physician.
“Then I'm sure, Dr. Mon'Toc, that you will grace us with the knowledge of who his Hon'eekoh is, in your opinion,” he said, very calmly.
“Certainly. It is none other than my own daughter, the psychology student Hecs Mon'Toc!” Dr. Mon'Toc exclaimed.
It briefly occurred to the Chief Physician that his team seemed to consist of doctors who were very easily stunned into silence, because now they were all quiet again, only staring at Dr. Mon'Toc in disbelief.
Then they all started talking at once, angrily refuting her theory.
“That's completely against all know medical science!”
“It's entirely unheard of!”
“Such horrendous nonsense!”
“This is dangerously close to malpractice!”
“You're setting medicine back by centuries!”
But Dr. Mon'Toc was just looking the Chief Physician straight in the eye in a clear challenge, only the excited silver roses high on her golden cheekbones betraying how thrilled she was with having come up with her far-fetched theory.
The Chief Physician coolly returned her gaze. He instinctively noticed her breath coming fast and shallow, her skin going silver, her heart rate increasing greatly. She saw something here, a real chance, he concluded. Her theory was plainly nonsense. She simply wanted any chance to set her daughter up as a possible Empress of Derigaz. It was quite unethical, of course.
But at the same time it was not a badly chosen goal, Dr. A'Atk thought. An empress would wield considerable power, and so would her family. And if the Emperor were to meet with an untimely demise, she would rule the vast galactic empire all by herself, possibly for decades. And, it was well know that a male Derigaz who had found his Hon'eekoh, but was being kept away from this One, would die of heartbreak very soon after.
Yes, thought the Chief Physician, for some people, it was worth setting aside any ethical and medical consideration to reach that goal. And Dr. Mon'Toc was only here because of her extraordinarily good connections at the Emperor's court. She was very dangerous. It was a gigantic risk with very little chance of success. But to her, the immensity of the prize was worth that risk.
And yet, Dr. A'Atk thought, Dr. Mon'Toc's daughter Hecs would be the worst empress imaginable. He knew her, because Dr. Mon'Toc had wasted no time in bringing her daughter into the Prince's surroundings. She was said to be studying psychology, but Dr. A'Atk suspected that she was far too stupid and lazy to ever have sat foot inside any academic place of learning.
The girl was thin as a rail, with vapid, red eyes and a tendency to drool because her mouth was always hanging half open. The prince had met her many times, but never shown any interest in her before or even talked to her, to the doctor's knowledge. She could be safely ruled out as the prince's Hon'eekoh. But still, Dr A'Atk knew that Dr. Mon'Toc would not give up. She was far too ambitious for that.
He sighed deeply. “Very well. For now, as Chief Royal Physician, I must mainly consider what millennia of medical experience with the Madness has taught us. We must of course get hold of this Earthling female and see what can be done about marrying her to the Prince as per the ancient rituals.”
“Halt!” Dr. Mon'Toc screeched. “I will not have my opinion ignored. I protest against this pairing and demand that the prince instead be married to my daughter, who is obviously his true Hon'eekoh.”
Dr. A'Atk knew that Dr. Mon'Toc could be extremely persistent. “So noted,” he sighed “I will present our findings and recommendations to Admiral Vun'Sic. He will make the arrangements that he finds appropriate. Yes,” he said when he saw Dr. Mon'Toc draw breath to protest once more, “I will also present your dissenting opinion, Doctor. Let us now all remember that in the state he's in, the prince must not be made aware of any arrangements we make. And there must be no talk of the Earthling female around him! But we must get hold of her immediately.”
The Chief Physician left the room and went to find Admiral Vun'Sic, the prince's chief of staff. He walked very quickly.
6
Mrs. Deveaux was shaking with rage. The junior assistant sub-secretary stood behind her, looking over her shoulder and likewise scowling at Jen when the two confronted her in the Earth Delegation section.
“Sullivan, your behavior at the meeting was quite... quite... convergent! I've never seen such discontinuity!” Mrs. Devaux yelled.
“Very discontinuous behavior,” the junior assistant sub-secretary agreed.
“But I had no choice,” Jen pleaded. “He grabbed me by the arm and sat me down beside him! Did you want me to punch him?”
The bureaucrat drew her breath sharply in feigned shock, and the junior assistant sub-secretary did the same with only a short delay.
“Of course you must not punch the prince!” the senior secretary said, clutching her pearl necklace in horror. “Sullivan, promise right now that you will never strike an alien royal of any species!”
“Promise!” shouted the junior assistant sub-secretary from safely behind Mrs. Deveaux' back.
“Fine, fine. I promise. But what was I supposed to do?”
“Why were you walking beside him in the first place?” Mrs. Deveaux pressed. “Your place is with your ambassador! And don't get me started on your failure to provide him with his skin lotion! Do you have any idea what the air here does to his skin? Now he looks like an ancient mummy! He might not regain his smoothness for hours!”
“Hours!” repeated the sub-secretary sternly.
“Well, I'm really sorry,” Jen said. “But I had to borrow shoes and my purse was still in my quarters and I can't really carry four bottles of water when they're this slippery and the pads are pretty hard to get a grip on-”
“Stop,” said Mrs. Deveauz, holding her hand up. “Just stop. All these are very basic things that most chimpanzees should be able to handle without much trouble.”
“Trouble!” the junior repeated automatically.
The middle-aged woman took a deep breath. “Sullivan, I can handle most things and I can forgive them. But today, you didn't take care of a single one of your duties. And this was the most important meeting in history, a true historical event. It could have been completely ruined. I'm going to have to end your internship here and now. You're just too... equivalent.”
She looked at Jen with hard, unyielding eyes. The junior secretary opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind and just looked away.
“You're firing me over something that I couldn't control?,” Jen blurted out. “What the hell did you want me to do in that situation? The guy grabbed hold of me, for fuck's sake, should I have kicked him in the balls?”
“You would not have been in that situation in the first place if you had done things the way you're supposed to,” Mrs. Deveaux said coldly. “You could have come into the meeting room and calmly sat down the way all of us did. Instead you were behaving like a fat, clumsy buffalo on roller skates out in the corridor. It was absolutely multivariate!”
“You know,” Jen said, “you like to use long words that sound scientific. But you know that they don't make any sense, right? And that everyone is laughing behind your back? Consider that information my going-away gift to you, you crazy old bitch.”
The older bureaucrat went pale in indignation. Hey, Jen thought, as a retaliation, it's not much. But it's something.
She turned around and marched off on unsteady feet in far too big
shoes.
“A transport shuttle will take you down to Earth immediately,” Mrs. Deveaux called after her. “It will be waiting. And don't let me ever see your fat ass around the ambassador or the prince again! I'll make sure that you'll never get within a hundred yards of any diplomat! You're far too parabolic- um, I mean, you're not any good at things like that!”
“And don't steal any pens!” the junior assistant sub-secretary added for good measure.
Jen felt tears burning in her eyes as she made her way to her quarters to get her things.
She had been assigned a tiny space in the giant Derigaz spaceship that orbited Earth. It was obviously a storage locker for cleaning supplies that had a mattress on the floor and about two square inches of floor space beside the mattress. There was no bathroom, of course, and she had to use a common one in a hallway on the other side of the ship.
She knew that it was Mrs. Deveaux who had insisted that the nice suite the Derigaz had prepared for Jen instead be given to someone else. She knew it because a Derigaz hospitality robot had just been showing her the finer points of the giant entertainment system in the suite when Mrs. Deveaux had come and angrily told her to get her things and leave the suite to “an important official”.
That important official had turned out to be the ambassador's cat groomer. And he hadn't even brought any of his cats!
When the Derigaz had offered to give Jen another suite of a similar standard, Mrs. Deveaux had said that it would not be appropriate and against the rules for a such a low-ranking member of the Earth delegation to be given quarters that were larger than eighty square feet.
The confused Derigaz robot had said that they didn't have any room of that size. But Mrs. Deveaux had insisted, in the most charming way, that she was sure they would find a tiny little “cubby” somewhere. And, perfect hosts to their guests that the hospitality robots were, they had. And this was it.
Jen had asked others what the rules were for accommodation for interns in the diplomatic service, and she had been told by them all what they were: Any member of the delegation, no matter how junior, was entitled to at least six hundred square feet of living space on a mission that lasted more than eight days.
When Jen had politely asked Mrs. Deveaux for a larger room, the bureaucrat had been very reasonable and had promised to get right on it. Of course she never had.
Jen changed into some more comfortable shoes that were her own and that actually fit her. And then, her purse and little suitcase in her hand, she left the closet that had been her home for six weeks and walked towards the hangar bay where the transport shuttles were located.
It was a long walk through deserted hallways and large galleries with wonderful views of space and the planet Earth hanging outside as a giant, blue-white disk.
Despite the size of the spaceship, it was rare to see any Derigaz, because their ships didn't need big crews and because Derigaz had grown bored of spaceflight after centuries in space, and now much preferred to stay on planets, regardless of how luxurious and pleasant the spaceships may be.
The hangar bay was very large, too, but there was just one ship there: the shuttle that would take Jen off the Derigaz ship and down to Earth forever. It was impossible and forbidden for everyone except the diplomatic corps to travel to the alien spaceship, so once she was gone, she would never be back.
The shuttle was automatic and didn't have a pilot.
She entered it. It was a lot like a commercial airplane inside, and she noticed that this one was not the nice business-class standard shuttle she had traveled on when she arrived at the spaceship, but a less luxurious one. It was Mrs. Deveaux' doing, of course.
She dried her tears on her sleeve. It had been fun, anyway. Not many had been up in space, much less on a real alien spaceship.
And she would remember Prince Tar'Shoc forever. He had awoken something in her, something she hadn't even known was there. It was strange, too – she had only been in his company for a few minutes, but she could still recall every second of that time in her mind. And still, something was missing in her mind and her soul. The feeling was getting stronger.
The shuttle engines started with a whine, and the doors automatically closed. There was a loud click as they were locked, now completely airtight for the hour-long voyage down to Earth.
The shuttle trembled as the engines powered up and started lifting it up from the hangar deck.
7
Colonel Dec'Hor ran along a corridor as fast as he could, cursing the lack of turbolifts or conveyors or anything that would help him get from one end of the ship to the other faster.
This diplomatic vessel was in many ways a primitive spaceship, because the Derigaz did not want the various aliens who would visit it to know exactly how technologically advanced the Derigaz empire really was. Because the ship was mostly staffed by robots, there was rarely any reason for any living being to walk more than a few hundred yards at a time, no matter the reason.
But now, Colonel Dec'Hor had to run much farther than that to get to the hangar bay before the Earthling female left forever.
He was in good shape, and one part of him cherished the opportunity to use his muscles and his stamina for something real, something important. But this mission was a little too important. The future of the Empire may depend on whether he was able to reach the alien hangar bay at the far rear of the ship before the Earthling left.
His steps reverberated through huge, empty halls and galleries with giant picture windows to space. He didn't notice the view, he just cursed the insane designers who had decided not to allow the alien shuttle hangar bay to be controlled from the main control room. If he succeeded, he vowed, he'd track down the people who'd made that decision and give them a piece of his mind.
And if he did not succeed... Well, then he would probably soon have a civil war to worry about. The prince's Madness of Love would become stronger, and if his Hon'eekoh could not be found, then he would die. And a man as strong and passionate as the prince would likely die pretty soon after, the Chief Physician had said.
Then, everyone at court would start fighting to become the next Emperor.
No, the colonel thought as he somehow found a way to run even faster, the civil war would start long before that. The rumors that the prince had been deprived of his Hon'eekoh would get out very quickly, and then all the noble houses would start their positioning and fighting, each trying to disable its most serious opponents before the war started for real. And people like Colonel Dec'Hor, who were not nobles but were only professional soldiers, would be the first to die.
Finally he had reached the rear part of the giant spaceship and spun around a corner for the final hallway that led to the hangar bay. His breath was ragged and his legs were protesting against this sudden and intense use of them, but he was an Imperial officer and his willpower was stronger than his physical body.
He slammed into the opposite wall and slapped his hand on the door release. Slowly, impossibly slowly, the heavy blast door started sliding up.
The colonel didn't have time to wait. He dropped down to the floor and rolled underneath the door as soon as he would fit through the narrow space. He rolled to his feet and saw the shuttle. It was still there! But the hangar was filled with the piercing whine of its graviton engine powering up, and it had just lifted off the floor. Soon it would be on the other side of the transparent forcefield that separated the hangar from empty space.
The colonel found a last reserve of speed, covered the last fifty yards of metal floor and pounced at the shuttle, jumping three feet into the air and reaching up as high as he could to slam his palm on the emergency button on the outside of the shuttle. Immediately thin glass sheets were introduced into the engines, shattering into a billion sharp shards and destroying the engines once and for all, which was the only way to stop graviton engines in an emergency.
The shuttle unceremoniously fell to the hangar deck with a crunching sound, then flung open all its hatches and doors. It w
as broken and beyond repair, but that didn't matter at all right now.
Colonel Dec'Hor was just able to jump out of the way, then pounced on the shuttle once more to get the Earthling safely out.
She was sitting in her seat, alone, clutching a little purse and a worn suitcase, her eyes huge and round and a very surprised look on her face.
“I think I broke your shuttle,” she said.
8
“This is the royal part of the spaceship,” the alien officer explained.
Jen looked around in awe. It was much nicer than the sections she had seen so far, which had seemed to her to be pretty nice. But this was something else completely. Most of the walls were transparent, so that it seemed that she was walking in space, and there were no visible light sources, but it was still bright. White, pristine walls and floors everywhere and many more robots than elsewhere made it seem very science-fiction-like.
“You are the first alien who's allowed to see this,” the officer said as they walked the final few yards towards an important-looking door.
“But I'm not an alien,” Jen protested. “You are the alie- oh, I see.”
“Now, I can't take you to see the prince yet,” the officer explained. “In fact, he must not see you right now, not until... hmm... later.”
The alien officer was being very mysterious. He had hinted at royal influence and princely illnesses, but he had not really explained anything.
They reached the door. It had a black crest on it, and although there was no crown to be seen, it did have a royal vibe, Jen thought.
The officer opened the door and gestured for her to go inside. She did.
And there was a room full of more aliens.
9
“Welcome, dear Miss Sullivan,” one of them said in the same kind of accent that the prince had talked with. “We are so very happy that we were able to catch you before you left. It might have been very bad for us all if you had. I am Admiral Vun'Sic, the chief of staff for His Royal Highness Prince Tar'Shoc. These are members of his cabinet, his physicians, his advisers and officials. It will make no sense to introduce them to you, because their functions will be hard for you to understand. Rest assured that they are all very important people. But, possibly, not quite as important as you.”
