Soup Night on Union Station

by E. M. Foner

  After the young Stryx left, Dorothy discussed her ideas in more depth with the Hadad sisters, and then returned to the design room, where Affie was demonstrating a boxy new purse prototype for the mage.

  “Doesn’t it hurt if you get prodded in the side by a corner?” Baa asked the Vergallian girl.

  “Fashion demands sacrifices,” Affie replied. “Besides, I thought Flazint might come up with rubber bumpers for the corners. She’s good with mechanical stuff like that.”

  “But it looks like a shoe box. What do you expect women to carry in it?”

  “Shoes? I should have worn a dress with shoulder boards for you to get the full effect. It’s all about planes and angles.”

  “I think it’s interesting,” Dorothy said, her go-to expression for Affie’s creations that she didn’t quite understand. “Did Baa tell you about my latest marketing idea?”

  “Glass slippers?”

  “What?”

  “My solution to promoting your dances,” Baa said triumphantly, and presented Dorothy with a glass slipper. “Try it on.”

  “Like Cinderella?” She took a seat on the low changing bench, removed her left shoe, and then paused. “Will I be able to stand in it?”

  “Just try it on and see.”

  The EarthCent ambassador’s daughter pulled the glass slipper over her foot and nothing happened. After rising awkwardly because the heights of her heels didn’t match, she invoked the heads-up menu for the shoe that she still wore on her right foot, and manipulating the control slider with practiced eye movements, adjusted the heel to bring herself into balance. Then she took a few steps. “It’s not very comfortable.”

  “It’s not supposed to be comfortable. Take it off now, and when you get home, have Kevin put it on your foot.”

  Dorothy’s eyes lit up. “It’s enchanted? It does something? I love it.” She sat back on the bench and rapidly swapped shoes, then stuck the glass slipper in her purse. “Can you two babysit for a few minutes? Something important came up.”

  “You’re running home to get your husband to put on the glass slipper for you.”

  “No, it’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, it can wait until lunch,” Dorothy said. The baby began to stir. “It looks like Margie is waking up anyway.”

  “Hey, everybody,” Flazint said, entering the design room and making a beeline for the baby. “Let’s have a big smile for your Frunge aunty. There’s a good girl.”

  “What do you think?” Affie asked, displaying her new purse concept to the Frunge girl. “Some of the Vergallian royals have been sporting Brutalist fashions lately and I thought we might want a cross-species interpretation.”

  “I suppose it can’t get much more brutal than that,” Flazint said. “I’d add some rubber bumpers on the corners as a safety precaution.”

  “That’s exactly what I told Baa,” the Vergallian girl said triumphantly.

  “We better call Tzachan in for a legal opinion about our liability.”

  “I knew it!” Dorothy said. “You don’t really like the purse, you just want an excuse to see your boyfriend before our next scheduled date.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Baa said. “Tzachan stopped by when you weren’t here and left a note. Now, where did I put it?” She conducted a search of her cluttered workbench while Flazint stood by with bated breath, but eventually gave up and muttered an incantation. There was a crash from the other side of the room as something fell to the floor, and then a plastic sticky-note with a shard of glass attached to the back floated into the mage’s outstretched hand. “Oops,” she said apologetically. “I must have stuck it to that empty beaker on your desk. I’ve always said that the Dollnicks should use a weaker adhesive on these notes.”

  “I thought that Horten glass was unbreakable,” Dorothy commented, while Flazint concentrated on reading the note without cutting herself.

  “I probably shouldn’t have gone with such a strong incantation,” Baa said apologetically. “It might have interfered with the crystalline structure of the beaker while trying to overcome the adhesive.”

  “This is terrible!” the Frunge girl exclaimed. “Tzachan has a source in Hazint’s legal shop who tipped him that Mizpah is planning to conduct a field inspection on our next date.”

  “The matchmaker?” Dorothy asked. “So what’s the problem? We’ve been doing everything by the book.”

  Flazint’s hair vines turned dark green. “We’ll talk about it later. I better find a dustpan and clean up the glass.”

  “Let me guess,” Affie said to Dorothy after the Frunge girl fled the room. “Whenever you have a question about what’s allowed, you’ve been asking Flaz.”

  “The dating calendar with the built-in calculator I had to buy is all in Frunge so I can’t even understand it without her help. You don’t think—”

  Baa let out a short trill of laughter. “It’s always the shy ones,” she said. “Back when I was in a pantheon on Mengoth Four, our worshippers carried out arranged marriages through bride-napping. If you could have seen how some of those girls dressed up for the occasion and then pretended to be surprised—it was almost worth all of the time I had to spend controlling that planet’s terrible weather.”

  Margie finally came fully awake and voiced her objection to being stuck in the bassinet.

  “That’s it,” Dorothy declared, grabbing it up by the double handles. “Lunch time. I’ll be back.”

  Affie checked the time on her implant. “It’s not even ten in the morning on your clock.”

  “I mean I promised Kevin that I’d—oh, I don’t know. I’ll be back.”

  Dorothy made it all the way to her husband’s chandlery in Mac’s Bones in less than five minutes. She set the bassinet on the counter, hopped up next to it, and removed the glass slipper from her purse. “Kevin?”

  “You got here quick,” he said. “Baa was asking for you a couple of minutes ago. She must have gone around the back.”

  “How did you get here before me?” Dorothy demanded when the Terragram appeared a moment later. “Are you really here, or is this some sort of mage trick?”

  “I’m here,” Baa said. “Did you think I would miss seeing my handiwork in action? It’s the most complicated spell I’ve cast since coming to Union Station.”

  “What’s with the glass slipper?” Kevin asked, coming around the front of the counter.

  “You have to put it on my foot,” Dorothy said, removing her left shoe and straightening her knee so she would be able to see the effect. “It’s Baa’s marketing idea.”

  Kevin took the glass slipper, ran his fingers around the inside part that he could reach checking for burrs, and then slipped it onto his wife’s foot. For a moment, nothing happened, but when he pulled his hands away, the slipper was suddenly replaced with a dancing shoe.

  “It’s our top of the line model with height adjustment, gyroscopes, and variable heel contact area,” Dorothy exclaimed. “And my other shoe transformed to match! How did you do that? Is it real or an illusion?”

  “They’re real,” Baa said. “It’s been so long since I used that particular combination of spells that I don’t really remember how they work, but it has something to do with altering your frame of reference in the space-time continuum. When we get back to the office, you’ll find your other shoe and the glass slipper on my workbench. I pulled the shoes that you’re wearing now from stock.”

  “How can you do magic or whatever and not even know how it works?”

  Baa shrugged. “I’ve seen you use regular scissors to cut a nearly perfect circle out of a bolt of cloth without a pattern. Can you explain how you do that?”

  “It’s just something I picked up over the years.”

  “Same here, and I’ve had a lot more years.”

  “The glass slipper is perfect, Baa. I may even brand the dances as Cinderella balls.”

  “So how is this going to work?” Kevin asked. “Are you going to have a
dance contest or hold a raffle?”

  “No contests,” Dorothy said firmly, hopping down from the counter and grabbing the bassinet again. “Maybe a raffle, maybe something else. Come on, Baa. Let’s get back to work and make this happen.”

  Six

  “You better get out here, Eminence,” the Vergallian doorman’s voice came through the comm link on the ambassador’s desk. “Code Yellow.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Samuel replied, not bothering to correct the doorman’s intentional error. After nearly four months working as Aainda’s assistant, most of the embassy staff took Samuel’s presence for granted, but the doorman kept trying to bait the EarthCent ambassador’s son by addressing him with inappropriate titles. He heard the yelling before he even reached the lobby.

  “—to the ambassador or I’m going to file a complaint with the Stryx!” a man shouted in English.

  Samuel arrived just in time to prevent the security staff from zapping the visitor, who looked like a pretty tough customer. “The ambassador isn’t here at the moment. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  “Who are you?” the man demanded. “You speak decent English for a Vergallian.”

  “I studied Humanese in school,” the EarthCent ambassador’s son replied to save time. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “I don’t know,” the man shouted, becoming irate again. “That’s the problem.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “I was out at the Camelot with friends last night, having a few laughs and playing the table games. Then the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life comes up to me, and after that, it’s all a blur.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with us,” Samuel said, though he had a feeling he knew where the conversation was headed.

  “When I went to practice this morning, one of the other fighters who was at the casino last night started laughing and calling me a boy-toy. He said an upper-caste Vergallian woman dosed me with pheromones and I followed her off like a love-sick puppy.”

  “That’s a serious accusation. Do you have any proof?”

  The man hesitated, but then he pulled down his collar to show a bite mark on his neck. “You going to say I did that to myself?”

  “No, that would be physically impossible,” Samuel acknowledged. “Are you missing anything? Money? Jewelry? It’s been a long time since any high-caste criminals were reported on the station.”

  “Nothing is missing, that’s the first thing I checked,” the man said. “But she dosed me against my will.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t just captivated by her beauty? It’s been known to happen.”

  “I’m with the Ultimate Cage Fighting tour. I can take care of myself, but we’re talking about chemical warfare here. You people can’t go around enslaving us with pheromones just because you can. And I have a match today. What if I’m still under the influence?”

  “I don’t think it works exactly the way you’re thinking,” Samuel said. “Are you absolutely positive that the woman who approached you was Vergallian?”

  “Listen,” the man said, leaning closer. “There are plenty of drawbacks to the life of a professional cage fighter, but lack of female companionship isn’t one of them. There are women from all species who make a competition of collecting us, if you know what I mean.”

  “I can guess. Would you mind if I consult with the station librarian?”

  “How’s a librarian going to help?” the fighter demanded, but he waved a hand as if he had resigned himself to dealing with bureaucracy. “Go ahead and do your worst, but I’m not going to let this drop.”

  “Libby?” Samuel subvoced. “Would it violate any of your rules to check the surveillance video for when our guest—”

  “Dominic Ryan,” the station librarian interjected.

  “—Dominic was approached by an upper-caste Vergallian woman in the Camelot casino last night?”

  “There were no upper-caste Vergallian women present in the casino last night. There was, however, a professional escort employed by one of your guest’s companions.”

  “Can I get the video if he needs convincing?”

  “I only provide free holographic imagery for confirming ownership of items brought to the lost-and-found. Special imaging requests are charged on a sliding scale.”

  “Let me check with him.” Samuel cleared his throat. “Dominic?”

  “Sorry, I’m still a little out of it,” the fighter said. “Hey, how did you know my name?”

  “The station librarian told me. She also checked the casino’s surveillance video from last night and it appears that your friends played a trick on you. The woman you left with was a professional escort employed by one of them, though I don’t—”

  “Those dirty cheats,” Dominic interrupted. “I should have known better than to go partying with a professional gambler the night before a match. Horace must have put something in that orange juice he insisted on buying me, and then the escort cut my legs out from under me for today’s fight.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a human thing, I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” Dominic said. “Coach is going to kill me when I tell him. Sorry about all the trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. Here, let me walk you to the lift tube. You look a bit shaky.”

  When Samuel returned to the embassy a minute later, the doorman greeted him with, “Well done, Your Highness. There’s an urgent conference call waiting for you in the ambassador’s office.”

  “For me? As in, for Samuel McAllister, or for the ambassador’s assistant?”

  “The latter,” the doorman said. “You are the senior diplomatic staffer on duty.”

  “I’m the only diplomatic staffer on duty because the rest of them are at a seminar.”

  “And you’re not going to score any points with a queen by keeping her waiting.”

  Samuel ran to the ambassador’s office, noted the live holographic projection over the desk, and took a moment to straighten his jacket before moving around to the business side where he would be visible.

  “My apologies, Your Highness,” he said, inclining his head. “The ambassador and her senior staff are all at a seminar and I’m the only one available to take your call.”

  “So you’re Aainda’s wonder Human,” the Vergallian in the hologram pronounced in a regal tone. “We are not amused by the delay.”

  “My humblest apologies,” Samuel repeated, and this time when he inclined his head, he held it there for a three count.

  “I see that somebody has schooled you in court etiquette,” the queen said. “Is it true that you are also the EarthCent ambassador’s son?”

  “Yes, Your Highness, but I check my species at the door.”

  “That’s good to hear.” The queen stared at Samuel as if she could read his thoughts through the Stryxnet connection, and then nodded. “Tell Aainda that you’ll do. And get some sleep, you look exhausted.”

  “Yes, Your Highness,” Samuel said, and inclined his head for the third time. When he looked up again, the holographic projection was gone. He waved his hand in front of the desk comm to disable the security lock-out and said, “Raef?”

  “Present,” the doorman replied.

  “I’m going to grab a quick nap in the storeroom. Just wake me if anything comes up.”

  “I live to serve, Laird McAllister.”

  Samuel waved the connection shut and left the ambassador’s office for his storeroom. The cot was overhung with a rack of formalwear for his use at embassy affairs, and he slid it all aside so the suits wouldn’t be in his face when he woke up. Then he set his implant’s alarm for thirty minutes, stretched out on the cot, and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep.

  “Red alert, red alert,” squawked the improvised intercom the embassy’s technician had installed in the storeroom at Samuel’s request.

  “What is it, Raef? Are you yanking my sword belt?”

  “Scout’s honor,”
the doorman replied. “There’s a Farling diplomat here to see the ambassador.”

  “A Farling diplomat? I didn’t know they had any. I’ll be right there.”

  The giant beetle who was waiting in the lobby wasn’t quite as large as M793qK, but its carapace showed the same emerald green highlights, and it stood with the easy self-assurance of a high-status bug. Samuel approached the Farling and noted that it wore an external translation box, so it was accustomed to traveling to places where the locals couldn’t understand it otherwise.

  “Human,” the Farling rubbed out on its speaking legs. “Are you the ambassador’s idea of a joke, or is sending the janitor to greet me an intentional insult?”

  “Ambassador Aainda is at a seminar, though she’ll be back at any time now. Do you have an appointment?” Samuel asked, even though he knew there was nothing entered in the calendar.

  “I am G32FX,” the beetle replied, as if the name should mean something. “I made an appointment three cycles ago.”

  “That was before I started here but let me check,” the EarthCent ambassador’s son said, consulting the embassy’s calendar via his heads-up display. “I’m afraid there’s been some sort of mistake,” he reported after a few seconds. “Your appointment was scheduled for three cycles ago and you’re marked as a no-show.”

  “I’m here now,” the beetle replied. “Haven’t they trained you to offer a guest something to drink?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Samuel said. “What can I get you?”

  “Nothing. It’s the offer that counts.”

  “Ah, G32FX,” Aainda addressed the Farling as she swept into the embassy with her retinue in tow. “Fashionably late, as usual.”

  “Ambassador,” the beetle greeted her, and motioned with a few of his legs at Samuel. “I didn’t expect to find a Human working in your embassy. Is he from a community that has joined the Empire of a Hundred Worlds and accepted royal leadership?”