Family Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 12)

by E. M. Foner

“Huh?”

  “They eliminated the whole functionality issue through thinking outside of the box. By not covering the head, there’s no problem with letting light or moisture through.”

  “But it’s not really a hat then, is it?”

  “You have no imagination at all. Of course it’s a hat. But Fabulous was, like, it has to be flat and rigid, and being Frunge, they made them out of a light alloy that may as well have been plastic.”

  “Wait. Do you mean that game the kids were playing last year with the flying disc was…”

  “Exactly. The hats were a smash hit with the Frunge until the other species started using them as a toy, and then anybody actually wearing one just looked silly. Fabulous went from a trendsetter to a flop in less than a cycle.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair. It’s not that I get why anybody would wear a hollow hat brim to start with, but to have a business wrecked because the other species misused your product is pretty rough.”

  “Oh, they made a mint selling the hats as flying discs, but nobody takes them seriously in fashion anymore. There’s nothing worse than getting laughed at.”

  “All right, but what does accidentally creating toys have to do with following trends and artists pushing each other?”

  “Bite him,” Dorothy commanded, turning Alexander’s muzzle towards Kevin and pointing. The dog yawned. “Who told you to remember everything I say like some kind of Horten advocate? Living with you is like being constantly on trial.”

  “I thought you liked it when I asked questions about your work.”

  “Oh, so you’re only pretending to be interested to get on my good side?”

  “This isn’t like you, Dorothy. You always speak your mind, but you’re usually not this argumentative. Are you going to get mad if I suggest taking that Farling patch off of your neck for a while?”

  Dorothy clamped her hand over the patch and let out a growl that would have done Beowulf proud.

  “Just asking. Still, we might want to cut the next one in half, and maybe try it on your ankle instead.”

  Alexander barked his agreement.

  Six

  “Give me the blue five-point, Sam.” Joe’s legs from the knee down were the only part of him visible because the rest of his body was wedged in under the heat exchanger. “Just slide it in and I’ll grab it.”

  “You should let me do this stuff, Dad,” the teen replied, even as he complied with the request. “Vivian says it’s inefficient for the most knowledgeable worker on the job to do the grunt work. You’re supposed to be promoted to your level of incompetence, and then backed off a fraction, like seating a bearing.”

  “Wrong blue,” his father grunted, and the socket came rolling back out from under the heat exchanger. “I meant the darker one.”

  “Navy blue?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Your old man really is getting old when he can’t even tell socket colors anymore.”

  “The Sharf should size their pentagonal bolts with numbers instead of color shades and then you wouldn’t have to guess.” Samuel retrieved the socket that had rolled past him, replaced it on the holder strip, and selected its neighbor, which was somewhere between blue and black. Then he squirmed partway under the heat exchanger so he could see what was going on, and placed the socket directly in his father’s hand.

  “We had numbered sockets on Earth when I was a kid, two different kinds of them. Your grandfather’s old pickup used metric sizes on the power train, and what we called ‘English’ sizes for the body.”

  “That sounds crazy. How could you tell which was which?”

  “If you didn’t know the vehicle, you just had to try both and go with the best fit. There were some sizes that were pretty close to being the same thing in both measurement systems, but it was easy to round a bolt by mistake.”

  “So you needed two sets of ratchet wrenches and everything?”

  “No, the drive size was always in inches, rather than millimeters. It might have been different in other countries. Hey, can you hold this copper tube in place?”

  “Just a sec.” Samuel tried to roll over on his back, but there wasn’t enough clearance for his shoulders, so he wriggled out from under the densely packed tubes and then slid back under in the proper orientation. “This one?”

  “Thanks.” Joe installed the hold-down bolts with his fingers and then used the ratchet wrench to tighten them, alternating back and forth to keep the manifold pressure even. “How are things going at the university?”

  “It’s different. I mean, you’d think that a course titled ‘Introduction to Space Engineering’ would include something about either space or engineering, but it’s all math. I asked Paul if it was that way when he went, and he said I should just take the competency exam and skip forward as soon as possible.”

  “Sounds like good advice.”

  “Yeah, but Libby never gave us tests like that so I’m kind of nervous.”

  “It seems to me that when I was a kid, all we had in school were tests.” Joe put a final torque on the bolts. “Then again, the tests are probably the only thing I remember. How’s Ailia doing these days?”

  “She’s practically a prisoner in her own palace, what with tutors and all,” Samuel replied, before the significance of the question hit him. “Wait. You know?”

  “Baylit told me a couple of years ago about the linked toy robots that Jeeves set you up with, but I remember how important privacy is to kids.”

  “Does mom know too?”

  “Not unless somebody else spilled the beans. I’m bringing it up now because I figure that you’re old enough to understand that we’re all part of something bigger, and too many secrets just sets up walls between people. I used to spend a lot of time by myself as a boy, and I remember my father warning me that it’s no good going through life alone. I’m glad you didn’t take after me.”

  “But you’re not a loner. You even adopted Paul before you got married, and dogs love you.”

  “I was already on the wrong side of forty when I married your mom, and there are people who would say that dogs don’t count.”

  “Crazy people,” Samuel said indignantly. “And you’re not mad about me hanging out with Ailia in secret all these years?”

  “I might have been worried if you didn’t spend so much time with Vivian. She’s a great kid. I liked Ailia a lot too when she was with us, but you must have figured out by now that she’s not free to do whatever she wants.”

  “You know that drama I’ve been watching the last few months? The one with all the good sword-fighting scenes I export to the fencing bot for practice?”

  “I had enough of Vergallian culture serving on their worlds, Sam, but I’ve noticed your sister and Aisha watching with you.”

  “It’s titled, ‘Throne of Chains,’ and Ailia recommended it. There’s a young queen who everybody thinks is on top of the world, but in reality she has less freedom than her least subject. It’s pretty sad, and Ailia’s been missing more of our meeting times lately because she can’t get free.”

  “Well, I hope that drama exaggerates the situation,” Joe said sympathetically. “Let’s get out from under here and test for leaks.”

  Once they were back on their feet, Samuel headed out to fetch Beowulf, and Joe climbed the ladder to the Nova’s bridge to manually activate the cooling system. A few minutes later, they met back on the technical deck, where they stood back out of the dog’s way.

  Beowulf approached the heat exchanger and cocked his head, listening to the circulation of thermal fluids. Then he carefully sniffed all around the base of the unit, at times sprawling on his belly to stick his nose underneath the tubes. Finally, he stretched, shook himself as if he were wet, and broke into a big doggy smile.

  “Now what would Vivian say about the most knowledgeable worker on the job?” Joe said, scratching the dog behind the ears.

  “Beowulf passed the heat exchanger?” Paul asked, appearing at the top of the Nova’s cargo ramp. “I was worri
ed that we’d have to pull the whole thing for a complete rework.”

  “Dad replaced the filter, cleaned off the catalyst, and changed out a leaky tube,” Samuel answered for his father. “You guys have put a lot of hours on her the last couple years.”

  “Yeah, the catalyst was the real problem,” Joe said. “It was covered with some kind of film that prevented it from de-acidifying the condensate. I’m not really sure why it happened, but we probably need to flush the whole system sometime.”

  “I’ll bet the Nova feels like the shoemaker’s son, now that we have so many ships to work on,” Paul said.

  “What’s that?” Samuel asked.

  “The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot,” his father explained. “It’s just another way of saying that people who work for others all day don’t always have the time or energy to take care of their own.”

  “Sounds like the answer to one of those word games that mom and Dring are always playing.”

  “Speaking of which, are you sure you don’t want to go on the mission with your mother? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “It’s going to be all diplomats and salesmen,” Samuel said dismissively. “Besides, the open Vergallian ballroom trials are coming up again, and I’m too busy with school and work to just take off without even knowing how long it will be.”

  “Jeeves said he expects the whole mission to take less than two weeks, and half of that is just Wylx going slow so the passengers don’t suffer from jump sickness,” Paul commented.

  “I was just mentioning it,” Joe said. “I guess that between mom’s colleagues and your Stryx friends, neither of you can get too excited about meeting new species.”

  “Were there really no aliens at all where you grew up?” Samuel asked his father.

  “There were barely even any people, Sam. It was just wide open country, a patchwork of cattle ranches and abandoned farms. You have to remember that Earth’s population began falling rapidly after the Stryx opened the planet, and by the time I was your age, the world was losing a hundred million people a year. That’s a lot of food production that wasn’t needed anymore, and most of those farms and ranches barely got by even before the great opening.”

  “But you still own land on Earth?” Paul asked.

  “Nearly a thousand acres,” Joe replied. “The local government had long since packed it in, so there weren’t any property taxes to pay, which meant nobody had an excuse to take it from me after my parents died. Sam and I visited when we were on Earth last time, but the old house was gutted, and the whole place had pretty much gone back to nature.”

  “Still, it means we’d have somewhere to land a ship if we ever had a reason,” his foster son said with a grin.

  “It’s something to think about. I know that Kelly wants to get back to visit her mom again now that Marge is no longer traveling.”

  “I’ll come along for that,” Samuel said. “When is Aisha going back to work, Paul?”

  “A couple more weeks. Who would have thought that the Grenouthians would offer nine months of paid maternity leave? I guess it’s just a standard part of their contract for show hosts because Aisha said it never even came up in the negotiations.”

  “Funny they should have hit on nine months,” Joe remarked.

  “I never explained it? The bunnies believe that the mother should get time off equal to the length of the pregnancy, so it varies with the species. Her producer told me that they’re looking into hiring more human hosts now that they know we’re such a bargain. The older the species, the longer it takes to carry a pregnancy to term.”

  “Didn’t you say something about needing to start your homework before supper?” Joe asked Samuel, adding a wink.

  “Grains!” the teen swore in kitchen Frunge. “I’ll see you later.” He tore out of the Nova, running for the ice harvester, with Beowulf charging alongside just for the exercise.

  “Ailia?” Paul guessed.

  “You know about that too?”

  “Jeeves hinted about it a couple of times, and I couldn’t help noticing when Aisha and I still lived with you guys that the time Samuel spends alone in his room cycles through a regular pattern. It just made sense that he was accommodating the schedule of somebody on a completely different clock, and Ailia was the only logical guess.”

  As soon as Samuel reached the ice harvester, he dodged his way through the living room furniture and ran for his bedroom. There he rapidly pulled on his customized flight suit from the Physics Ride and activated his toy robot. A moment later, Ailia stood in front of him, her hologram so solid that it could have fooled anybody in low light.

  “Sorry I’m late,” the boy apologized. “I was helping my dad with some repairs.”

  “I kept busy reading,” the Vergallian girl replied, setting aside a scroll. “If I could just cut back on the legal studies, I’d have more free time, but I’ve only got twenty years to get through it all.”

  “Twenty years! I thought you finished everything early and the new tutors were all for electives.”

  “There’s no such thing as elections in the empire,” she joked, intentionally misunderstanding him. Unlike Vergallian, English had no built-in error correction mechanisms to prevent listeners from mishearing words that began with the same sounds. “Baylit said that to be respected as a queen, I at least need to master the basics of jurisprudence, economic management, and diplomacy.”

  “But twenty years. We’ll be thirty-six by the time you’re queen.”

  “Twenty years is just for the law. Baylit has promised to continue as regent until I’m at least fifty, but I’m hoping she’ll stay on a couple of decades longer. Being queen isn’t just who you are and what you’ve studied. Nobody will take me seriously before I’m old enough to marry.”

  “You’re talking about starting life at the age most humans retire,” Samuel grumbled.

  “But you’ve always known that,” Ailia said, smiling at his boyish irritability over things that couldn’t be changed. “Give me your hand. I’ve learned a whole new set of steps to ‘Unending Glory,’ and we’d better get started if you’re going to have time to teach them to Vivian before the trials.”

  For the next fifty minutes, Samuel danced around his room with Ailia, the modified flying suit providing tactile feedback so lifelike that he could forget that his partner was a hologram when he closed his eyes.

  “You learn faster than any of the Vergallian boys in the dance class,” Ailia complimented him after a flawless performance. “It’s too bad…” The girl trailed off and looked away, but not before Samuel noticed the sadness around her eyes.

  “What’s wrong? Are the borderlands making trouble again?”

  “Those barbarians? Baylit could run them off the planet with one arm tied behind her back.”

  “Is it because your schedule is so packed? If you want to change times, I can always swap with somebody at the lost-and-found, or I can just work with Dad and Paul to pay the Open University fees. It’s not a big deal.”

  “That’s not it. Besides, you said that the lost-and-found job is ideal for studying because hardly anybody comes in. It’s nothing, really.”

  “Did you get another betrothal offer?” Samuel asked sharply. The girl didn’t respond, but she refused to meet his eyes. “That’s crazy. You can’t even get married for another forty years and they’re trying to tie you to some kid you’ve never met.”

  “My family’s world is a freehold,” Ailia reminded him. “Most of the planets in the empire are imperial grants, but our ancestors built this place up on their own and only chose to join later. We don’t have a seat on the council, but they don’t have the right to tax us. There are plenty of wealthy Vergallians who would pay almost any price to be able to use us as a tax shelter. It’s one of the reasons my family was killed through treachery in the first place.”

  “Just because some rich aliens want a tax shelter is no reason for you to marry their stupid son!”

  “They ar
en’t aliens to me, Sam, but there’s nothing they can offer us that we need. Baylit says we have to go through the motions, though, or we’ll just pile up enemies. Vergallians respect a woman’s right to reject a suitor for any reason, but if we don’t at least entertain reasonable offers, we’ll offend their honor.”

  “Reasonable offers? You mean there’s some kind of litmus test for who has a right to harass you?”

  Ailia couldn’t help laughing at her friend’s distress, and her dark mood passed. “It’s not harassment, Sam. It’s politics. I’m beginning to wonder what they teach in Vergallian Studies at your Open University.”

  “We haven’t gotten to any of the good stuff yet,” he admitted. “It’s all imperial history so far, and you guys have been around so long that there’s way too much of it. I know some kids from the station who major in Human Studies and they just party all the time. Watch a few Grenouthian documentaries and you know it all.”

  “I’m sure there’s more to Human history than that, Sam. What’s Vivian majoring in?”

  “Dynastic Studies. She’s like the only human taking it.”

  “It must be hard for her,” Ailia sympathized.

  “She’s not even fifteen yet, but you’d think she was a grownup,” Samuel said. “She says I should add three years to her age because girls mature faster than boys, and everybody else says I should add ten years to her age for being Blythe’s daughter.”

  “The poor girl will be an old maid before she’s sixteen if you keep piling on the years like that. Doesn’t she have a twin brother?”

  “Jonah. He’s cool, but I don’t see much of him anymore. He wanted to take a break from school before university, so he works for InstaSitter part-time, and he’s doing an internship at EarthCent Intelligence.”

  “Strong family, they sound like Vergallians,” Ailia said approvingly. “Is she pretty, your Vivian?”

  “Not like you,” Samuel blurted. “And we’re just friends, you know. She’s only a little kid.”

  “I thought you told me she was practically twenty-five.”

  “I was repeating what other people say. I mean, she’s really good at dancing and fencing, and she got through Libby’s school like two years faster than me, but I’m a head taller than her.”