Soup Night on Union Station

by E. M. Foner

  “Samuel is a cooperative education student assigned to my embassy by the Open University. Coincidentally, he’s the son of the EarthCent ambassador.”

  “And where is your graceful daughter?”

  “Working for Samuel’s mother.”

  The Farling’s carapace jerked convulsively, as if his wings were about to deploy in a display of mirth, but he regained control almost immediately. “I see the Stryx are busy manipulating all of you soft-skins as usual. Shall we talk in your office?”

  “Yes. Come along, Samuel. You’re part of this.”

  The ambassador led the way to her office, but rather than heading for her desk, she chose the casual seating area with the couch and the overstuffed chairs. The beetle, who had obviously been there before, pushed the recliner lever on one chair forward, and the seat cushion rose to meet the back, creating a padded surface on a forty-five-degree slant. G32FX leaned against it and rubbed out a satisfied sigh. “You’re the only diplomat I know who bothers with Farling-friendly furniture.”

  “And how are things at Farling Seventy?” Aainda inquired politely.

  “The Stryx have been giving us the usual grief about our pharmaceutical exports and threatening to close the tunnel connection,” the beetle replied. “Our position has always been that if we get out of the recreational drug market, somebody else will move in, and they’ll never match our quality.”

  “I understand that you were instrumental in returning Gem genetic samples to the clones for diversifying their population.”

  “I just happened to be the Farling on the spot,” G32FX said modestly. “The request came in when I was doing my community service time training new controllers at Market Orbital. I understand that more genetic samples have been discovered in storage and sold to the Gem since then.”

  “Yes, Samuel?” the ambassador said, noticing that the young man was clenching his jaw to resist interrupting. “You have a question?”

  “How do you know each other?” he asked. “I thought that the Farlings and the Vergallians were on such bad terms that they almost went to war after Baylit’s raid on…”

  “I see you’ve figured it out,” Aainda said after Samuel trailed off. “I was sent to negotiate a settlement after my cousin’s daughter showed up at Market Orbital with her squadron and threatened to attack if the Farlings didn’t hand over certain pharmaceutical export records. I believe you know how it worked out.”

  “And I was her counterpart for the negotiations,” G32FX said. “All’s well that ends well. Is the young Human privy to the second stage of our deal?”

  “He’s about to be,” Aainda replied. “Samuel, would you be willing to undertake a confidential mission that includes travel away from Union Station? I ask because it’s clearly outside the scope of the co-op agreement you signed with the Open University.”

  “I would be honored, Ambassador,” Samuel replied immediately.

  Aainda turned to the beetle and nodded. G32FX lifted his external translation box, opened a small panel on the back, and pressed a button. The air in the office began to shimmer, and Samuel thought the small background noises suddenly sounded different, as if they were being filtered somehow.

  “There,” the beetle said. “I have no doubt that the Stryx can reconstruct our conversation if they care to take the trouble, but none of the tunnel network species have the computational capacity to decode speech from inside our random molecular vibration shell in a timely manner.”

  “Thank you,” Aainda said. “I’m mainly concerned with Vergallian Intelligence, which is why I can’t use my own people for this. Samuel, my reparations negotiation with the Farlings led to an opportunity for rapprochement between the expansionist Imperial faction and royal families like my own. As with all such peace-making efforts, if word gets out before the deal is complete, the firebrands of the respective factions will make it impossible for leaders to negotiate in good faith. I need a trusted courier, and the fact that you’re Human is a bonus in this case.”

  “Because I’ll be seen as a neutral party?” Samuel speculated.

  “Not exactly. There is also a Human component to this deal that G32FX and I will soon be negotiating with your mother.”

  “A three-way treaty?”

  “Think of it as a trade, like in the professional LARPing league. One faction offers a mage to a second faction, which sends a barbarian warrior to a third faction, which ships a bard back to the first faction. Everybody gets something.”

  “Bards aren’t usually worth that much,” Samuel observed. “I’ve heard people say that the Farlings could create drugs to extend our lives if they wanted to, but we can’t afford them. Is that what you’ll be offering us?”

  “Actually, we want something from you, and if we were able to provide the pharmaceutical products you mention, we would already be selling them on credit,” G32FX said. “Instead, we are willing to forgo the remaining reparations we’re owed for the Baylit incident, and the Vergallians will complete the triangle by giving Humans something you want.”

  “A naval ship?” Samuel guessed.

  “That would be a cheap price, but the Stryx would never allow it,” Aainda said. “I’ll work out the details with your mother, but the first step is getting the expansionist Imperial faction and Fleet on board, so you’ll be carrying a message to each.”

  “I thought the deal was between Imperials and independent worlds in the Empire.”

  “That’s the endpoint, but Fleet has a stake in this as well. The fewer who know all of the details the more likely this will work. I can’t promise that you won’t be intercepted by Vergallian Intelligence and interrogated.”

  “I won’t last a minute against those pheromones unless you can do something to protect me.”

  “Which is why I won’t be telling you any names or places. My only method of granting you immunity is to dose you myself before another royal does, but that protection only lasts a few hours.”

  “Does this have anything to do with—no, I’m better off not knowing.”

  “Smart boy,” the Farling said. “This deal has been fourteen years in the making and we don’t want to take any chances.” He touched a control on his jammer and the shimmering field vanished. “And that, Ambassador, is why I’ll never meet your price.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Aainda said in a threatening voice while winking at Samuel. “I believe you know the way out.”

  The Farling harrumphed and stormed out of the office without collapsing the recliner. The EarthCent ambassador’s son went over and fumbled with the mechanism until he figured out how to convert the inclined plane back into a chair fit for humanoids.

  “You’ve been working too hard and I’m beginning to worry about your health,” Aainda said, though the humorous expression on her face belied her words. “Perhaps a few days off would do you good.”

  “A vacation? I didn’t think co-op students earned any vacation days.”

  “We’ll call it a bonus. Why don’t you take your fiancée somewhere and relax? When’s the last time you left Union Station?”

  “I’d have to think about that,” Samuel said. “Other than going out with my dad or Paul to the parking area, I guess it’s been since we went with my mom to EarthCent’s first convention on Earth.”

  “Ah, yes. When a young Imperial officer took it upon herself,” the ambassador put an ironic stress on the pronoun, “to kidnap the three of you on your way home. What was her name again?”

  “Aarinia. She really treated us well enough.”

  “I understand that she and her cousin are still in exile,” Aainda said, and Samuel noticed that she was directing her words at a potted plant. “Maybe she was overworked as well.”

  “I’m not sure Vivian will be able to get time off from her, uh, job,” Samuel said. “She’s also a co-op.”

  “I imagine I can work something out with her employers. After all, what’s the point of being an ambassador if you can’t call in the occasional favor?
”

  Seven

  Wrylenth entered the EarthCent embassy conference room barely a half a step behind Blythe and took the Verlock-sized chair at the table. Chastity arrived a few seconds later, deep in conversation with the paper’s managing editor, Walter Dunkirk. Kelly glanced at Aabina and nodded, but the Vergallian co-op student shook her head in the negative and held up one finger, indicating that somebody was still missing. Then Daniel entered from the lobby and took the seat next to Donna.

  “Welcome to the kick-off meeting for the Twelfth Edition of the All Species Cookbook,” Aabina began. “Thanks to the winning bid subsidized by the founders of InstaSitter,” she inclined her head in the direction of Blythe and Chastity, “and their offer of ongoing technical support, the embassy believes we will be able to handle this project without any need for additional staffing. Our embassy manager will be the official editor of the cookbook, but her preference is to concentrate on the recipes, so she’s asked me to handle the administrative details.”

  “Decades of work,” the Verlock co-op student said, and looked across the table at Donna. “Will your lifespan be adequate?”

  Blythe elbowed her thick-skinned Verlock protégé, who hadn’t fully adjusted to human sensitivities around the issue of longevity, but her mother took the question at face value.

  “Thank you for your concern, Wrylenth. While I hope to live long enough to achieve EarthCent’s ever-moving target of a retirement age, I don’t see this cookbook project taking more than a couple of months. We won’t be creating any new recipes, and I imagine that most of the real work will revolve around obtaining high-quality images of the finished dishes and desserts suitable for all of the publishing formats.”

  “I mean the time it will take to create the twelfth version of Universal,” the Verlock explained. “It’s not just gobbledygook. The language must be fully functional, yet impossible to translate with a high degree of accuracy.”

  “I’ve already spoken with our president and he’s agreed that we’ll be publishing the cookbook in Humanese, I mean, English, with translations into all of the tunnel network languages,” Kelly announced. “I’ll be informing the other ambassadors immediately after this meeting and soliciting favorite recipes from them. Daniel will be doing the same with members of the Conference of Sovereign Human Communities.”

  “I don’t understand. You intend to create a cookbook without plausible deniability? What if somebody actually makes the recipes?”

  “The ambassador asked me to do some historical research about the origins of the All Species Cookbook and we want to return to its original mission,” Aabina informed the flabbergasted Verlock co-op student. “Thanks in part to the success of Drazen Foods in exporting Earth products, it’s been proven that with the exception of the odd allergic reaction, oxygen breathing tunnel network members can ingest a broad range of Earth produce without harm, and often with some benefit. In fact, the recently formed Gem Catering Guild, which operates on the majority of Stryx Stations, has certified over a thousand Earth ingredients as all-species safe.”

  “But the political risk,” Wrylenth protested. “Food culture is a minefield.”

  “That’s why we’re going to get all of the ambassadors on board,” Kelly told him. “Even if it’s fruit salad or a plain chocolate bar, everybody has some Earth food they like. Instead of publishing alien recipes with ingredient substitutions that are doomed to failure, we’ll publish human recipes that aliens can enjoy.”

  “Don’t worry, Wrylenth,” Aabina added. “I checked the rules before we submitted our bid, and the original purpose of the All Species Cookbook was to promote foods that would help bring the species together.”

  “We could publish next week if we stuck with reader-submitted recipes from the archives of the paper’s food section,” Walter said. “One of the most popular Galactic Free Press features in recent years has been the weekly supplement on tribute foods developed by human populations that have gone native working on alien worlds. In fact, our For Humans book publishing division was already building a collection of the most popular recipes to publish their own cookbook, but that project got out of hand, and now they’re planning one for each species.”

  “Humans can’t eat alien food,” Wrylenth insisted. “I recompiled the list that we give EarthCent Intelligence agents who work in the field, and when it comes to ordering in restaurants, the only recommendation is Vergallian vegan.”

  “I’m talking about recipes for dishes that pay tribute to the host species through their appearance, aroma, or general presentation,” Walter explained. “Although there are a limited number of our people living on Verlock open worlds, the paper has published quite a few volcano-themed desserts that substitute chocolate for lava. What’s your favorite Earth product?”

  “Stone soup.”

  “I love that story,” Kelly enthused. “Don’t you think it would make the perfect introduction to the cookbook, Donna? The way the villagers who had nothing to offer a stranger end up contributing ingredients to make a communal meal would be an inspiring message.”

  “I’ll see if I can find an edition with good artwork that’s out of copyright,” the newly appointed cookbook editor replied.

  “It’s a story too?” Wrylenth asked. He reached in his backpack and brought out a bottle with Verlock printing on the label. The fluid had a grainy whitish color, like poorly diluted whole milk. “Stone soup from Earth. I buy it at a health food store on our deck. It’s too expensive to drink by itself, but I add a capful to my coffee.”

  “What’s in it?” Donna asked.

  “Dead Sea water,” the Verlock read from the label. “Contains over 26 minerals, including magnesium, bromine, calcium, and potassium.”

  “Are you sure you’re supposed to drink that?” Chastity asked. “I’ve seen something similar sold in the boutiques as a skin treatment.”

  “Very healthy,” Wrylenth asserted. “Supports the immune system. I’ve never been sick.”

  “Better stay with no more than a capful a day if you want to keep it that way,” Chastity advised, and then changed the subject. “Blythe and I agreed to split any manpower requirements you have using our own employees or contractors, but it would be good if you were able to provide us with a little notice, Aabina. My sister thinks it makes sense to use her photographers for the beauty shots since they’re used to doing studio work for her book covers. Walter?”

  “The Galactic Free Press publishes roughly a quarter million words a day, not counting sponsored content. Our station librarian provided me with some statistics about recently published cookbooks, and thanks to open formatting and illustrations, most of them run below fifty thousand words. So my suggestion is that rather than trying to establish a workflow with us, you assemble a rough draft and dump it on me in one shot. I’ll offer everyone in the office overtime and we’ll turn it around for you in less than twenty-four hours.”

  “That would certainly cut down on meetings,” Aabina acknowledged. “Donna?”

  “The less time spent on back-and-forth the better,” the embassy manager said. “I’m just in it for the recipes.”

  “Excellent,” Kelly said. “Can we agree on a total number of recipes for each species so we have a target to shoot for and don’t end up short-changing somebody?”

  “I don’t know if giving each species the same number of recipes is the best approach,” Daniel cautioned. “I’d be more comfortable sticking with featuring recipes related to the aliens we have experience with so we don’t accidentally offend them. All of our CoSHC host worlds would obviously be represented, and thanks to the theme park deal, that now includes the Grenouthians, but what do we even know about the Fillinducks?”

  “They like molded foods. You wouldn’t believe how many duplicate molds the Fillinduck ambassador unloaded at my tag sale.”

  “Do you really want me to separate the recipes by species?” Donna asked. “I was planning on something more logical, like appetizers, main dishes,
and desserts. Maybe we should include some non-recipe text about the culinary traditions of each species to cover all of our bases. Could EarthCent Intelligence help?” she asked her older daughter.

  “Wrylenth knows more about our filing system at this point than I do,” Blythe said. “I remember we assigned analysts to do that research years ago, in part for our subscribers who might want to buy gifts for alien businessmen or take them out to eat.”

  “EarthCent Intelligence can provide the required information,” the Verlock co-op student affirmed. “Just give me a word count and tell me how many illustrations you want for each species. We can provide summaries of ingredients, cooking methodologies, and facts about food production, but you’ll probably want somebody to rewrite it for a general audience.”

  “I have reporters who can rewrite intelligence assessments in their sleep,” Walter said. “Just get us the facts and we’ll flesh them out.”

  “How about meeting with the ambassadors?” Aabina suggested. “We could even ask them to bring something for a potluck.”

  “Do you think they’d go for that?” Kelly asked. “I’m not sure if Czeros or Bork have ever been in a kitchen in their lives, and I think Crute mentioned something about one of his wives doing all of the cooking for the family.”

  “They don’t have to make the food themselves, but if we’re able to include what they bring, they can hardly complain about being left out later.”

  “I wonder if we can’t add a few recipes from outside the tunnel network,” Chastity said. “It would seem odd to ignore the Sharf when more humans are flying around in their second-hand ships than any other kind, and I remember when the prospective members from the Cayl Empire were here that they were able to eat some of our food as well.”

  “Emperor Brynt stayed with us and he was especially fond of Aisha’s cooking,” Kelly said. “Is it within the rules for the bid, Aabina?”

  The Vergallian co-op student stared into space for a few seconds before replying. “There’s nothing specifically excluding recipes from non-tunnel network species, but we should probably check with the Stryx to be sure.”