Family Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 12)

by E. M. Foner

  “Humanese. I gave you the most advanced version, just like you asked.”

  “These are Humans and I can’t understand a word that they’re saying,” Barzee complained.

  “Hang on a sec,” Kevin said, and both of the aliens paused to look at him without understanding his words. “Wrong Humanese,” he explained in Frunge. “We different tongues speaking. You sell her Chinese, wanting English. This one,” he concluded, pointing at the English text in the holographic list.

  The clerk scratched his head and shrugged. “Apparently they speak all these different languages even though they’re the same species,” he told Barzee. “I thought these others were just all vocabulary-limited versions of the expensive one. Weird, huh?”

  “Does that mean I’ll get something back?” Barzee asked.

  “Yeah, it’s like thirty percent cheaper, but I have to outload the original one first.” He pointed a device that looked like a small microwave dish at the Frunge woman’s head. “Ready?”

  “Learning mode enabled,” Barzee responded.

  “Done,” he said almost instantly. The clerk swiped a hand above the register and the drawer popped open. Then he extracted a few coins and slid them over the counter, where they were appropriated by the children.

  “Can you hear me now?” Dorothy asked.

  “I can understand you now,” Flazint’s cousin replied. “I could hear you before but it sounded like desert cats fighting. Welcome to our world. Let’s grab the maglev and get out of the docks area. It’s all wholesale import/export around here.”

  Dorothy walked next to Barzee, answering her questions about Flazint’s courting life and SBJ Fashions, while Kevin found himself accompanying the two children, who kept on looking up at him and giggling. Talking to them with his limited trader Frunge only brought on temporary hysterics, so he settled for pointing at things and looking puzzled. The children quickly caught on, providing fanciful names for the objects.

  The Frunge woman waved a pass as they entered the maglev station, and they took their seats on the waiting train. By the time it reached the mixed residential and retail complex where Barzee’s family lived, the children were kneeling on the bench to either side of Kevin and pretending to find insects in his hair, which they offered him as snacks.

  “I think they have me confused with a Dollnick,” Kevin said. “Humans don’t eat insects.”

  “You don’t?” Barzee’s face fell. “Well, let’s just drop off your things and we’ll go out for a bite to eat. You must be hungry after the elevator trip.”

  “I brought along extra ship’s rations, just in case,” Kevin said, thumping the pack at his feet. “We don’t want to drag you all over the place looking for synthesizers.”

  “We aren’t that far out of the galactic mainstream. There’s even a store in this district that sells wine and cheese from your Earth, though it always seemed like an odd combination to me. My husband buys wine there, and he brought home a bag of chocolate-covered insects that were supposedly exported from your world. I thought you’d make a meal of them, but I guess the salesman was having him on,” the Frunge woman concluded as the maglev came to a silent halt.

  After a brief walk through a park area that consisted mainly of metal and stone sculptures, they were halted at the entrance of Barzee’s complex by a gnarled old guard.

  “What are these two?” he demanded.

  “Humans,” Barzee replied.

  The doorman folded his arms across his chest and stayed right in front of them.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m sure they have a contract,” the Frunge woman elucidated. “My cousin wouldn’t associate with libertines.”

  “It’s in the outside pouch of my pack,” Kevin said, turning his back so Barzee could remove it.

  The old doorman skimmed the terms and handed it back, limiting himself to the comment, “Kids these days.”

  “Why does everybody keep asking to see our contract?” Dorothy asked Barzee. “We only got it because your cousin insisted.”

  “Later,” the Frunge woman said, indicating the children with a nod. “Little logs have big ears.”

  When they reached Barzee’s apartment, she sent her children to water the grass, apparently a Frunge euphemism for trying the bathroom. While Kevin and Dorothy put their backpacks in the guestroom, the young mother rummaged through a storage closet and produced a shoulder bag with a transparent side.

  “It’s a contract carrier,” she explained to Kevin. “It’s better to have it with you in public since my people are convinced that aliens are all decadent. It’s the fault of those Grenouthian documentaries.”

  “Do you watch them?” Dorothy asked.

  “Everybody watches them,” Barzee replied, though her hair vines changed shades in embarrassment. “I don’t believe half of it, but it’s important to see how other species live. Speaking of which, are there any special sights you wanted to see while you’re here?”

  “The petrified cities of ancestors,” Kevin said immediately.

  “And I promised Flazint that we would visit the closest metallurgical museum and buy lots of gift shop samples,” Dorothy added.

  “We have to take them to that place!” one of kids yelled from the bathroom, proving that little logs did have big ears. “You promised.”

  “And I’m hungry,” the other child cried.

  “It’s on the way to the museum,” Barzee called back to the shrubs. “My husband is planning to take you both to the petrified cities tomorrow,” she continued, turning to Kevin. “He’s long overdue to visit his ancestors anyway.”

  “Let’s go already,” the older child said, coming out of the bathroom and appropriating Kevin’s hand. “Maybe they’ll give us something free for bringing Humans.”

  The old doorman nodded approvingly when he saw that Kevin was carrying the stone tablet in a proper holder. Dorothy asked their host, “Why do you even have a contract bag?”

  “It’s a newlywed thing. Once you’ve been married for a while, everybody can tell just by looking at you together, but we never would have made it through the door of the honeymoon hotel without one.”

  Barzee kept Dorothy at her side, now quizzing the girl about human behaviors as depicted in the Grenouthian documentaries. Kevin went back to practicing his limited Frunge on the children, who impressed by his tenacity, began giving him the correct names for the things he pointed at. Most of the long walk took place in a sort of covered mall which their guide had chosen to limit exposure to the red sun for her guests. The children were just starting to get hungry for real, when they turned a corner and were nearly blinded by a dazzling chromium storefront.

  “It can’t be,” Dorothy said.

  “Human Burger,” Barzee announced, as proudly as if she had opened the restaurant herself. “I’ll bet it’s just like home for you.”

  “It doesn’t look very busy,” Kevin commented.

  “We’re between mealtimes. I told the children to have a light breakfast to save room for frozen food.”

  “They bring in frozen food from Earth?” Dorothy asked hopefully. “That would be great.”

  The children rushed the counter, where a young man wearing a hat that looked like raw steak waited behind the register.

  “We brought Humans,” the shorter shrub declared.

  “It’s about time,” the young man addressed the newcomers over the heads of the Frunge children. “We’ve been expecting two new fry cooks and a half-a-dozen waitstaff. Which are you?”

  “Uh, customers?” Dorothy responded.

  “Why?” The counterman pointed at the menu items etched in chrome, which Kevin and Dorothy had trouble reading through the glare. “Even though the Frunge can eat our dairy products, we use local sources for almost everything on the menu. It’s human style, not human food.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Barzee said. “Isn’t there anything here you can eat yourselves?”

  “There’s the canned fruit sala
d,” the young man replied. “Personally, I prefer ordering off the synthesized menu at the place across the street. What can I get you kids?”

  “Ice cream,” they screamed together.

  “Two ice creams, coming up.”

  “Why can’t we have that?” Dorothy asked.

  The counterman held a metal cup under a machine that produced a thick slurry of what appeared to be frozen raw meat. After finishing it with a practiced twist of the wrist which left a little spiral peak on top, he asked the shrubs, “Do you want sprinkles on that?”

  “Yes,” they cried enthusiastically, and the counterman used what looked like an antique pepper grinder to deposit colorfully dyed bone chips over the frozen meat slush.

  “I think we’ll stick with the fruit salad,” Kevin said.

  Twelve

  “Did you catalog anything interesting today?” Vivian asked, hopping up on the counter of the lost and found.

  Samuel shrugged. “The Grenouthian who worked the shift before me shelved everything before she left. I’d ask Libby to change my schedule so I could come in after the lazy Drazen kid, but with all the different clocks on the station, it’s not that simple.”

  “At least you have plenty of time for homework. It is a work/study job, after all.”

  “I finished all of my homework at home this week. I still haven’t filled in the time from dropping our dance practice, and with Mom and Dorothy gone, it’s really quiet. What did you bring?”

  “My Dynastic Studies homework. I try to keep a few days ahead on everything, but we have a competency exam tomorrow so I can always use the extra preparation. Do you want to quiz me?”

  “What do I know about Dynastic Studies?”

  “A lot, unless you’ve been tuning me out whenever I tell you about my classes. Just use my notes and make up questions. The exam theme is contrasting the differences in property law implementation as practiced by the tunnel network species.”

  “All right,” Samuel said. He accepted the proffered tab and skimmed a few pages. “Detail the main difference between the Dollnick and Vergallian versions of usufruct, but first, explain to me what it means.”

  “Usufruct? It’s just usus fructus, you know? Use of the fruit.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Say we got married…” Vivian began.

  “You’re not even fifteen yet,” he cut her off.

  “Not tomorrow, in like five years or something. I’ll be super rich because my mom will give me part of her share of the business. Now think of InstaSitter as an orchard, where the business is the trees and the profits are the fruits. As my husband, your rights will be limited to usus fructus.”

  “How about selling?”

  “Can’t do it. That would be abusive, abusus. But there’s a big difference between the way the Dollnicks and the Vergallians practice usufruct. Can you tell me what it is?”

  “You know, you sound more and more like Libby these days,” the boy grumbled.

  “The Dollnicks live in a rigid patriarchic culture while the Vergallians live in a matriarchic culture. So the property rights of a Dollnick wife or heiress are limited by usufruct in the same way the property rights of a Vergallian husband or heir are conscribed. Same idea, different target.”

  “So how is what you said about InstaSitter different from the Vergallian approach?”

  “Because you’d be married to me, not my brother,” Vivian explained. “In Vergallian culture, males can’t inherit income-producing property, and the opposite is true with the Dollnicks.”

  “That’s not very fair. So if you’re born the wrong sex, you end up with nothing?”

  “No, you end up with usus fructus, which is the whole point. Say I was a Vergallian and we got married. If I died first, you wouldn’t inherit, but you’d still have the income from whatever part of InstaSitter I left you for as long as you lived. The rest would be divided by our children, but the boys would only have usus fructus over their share.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. What if our daughters sold their share to somebody who wrecked the business? That would leave our sons with nothing.”

  “That’s the problem with the model, which is why almost all of the dynastic families on the tunnel network practice some form of entailment.”

  “That sounds familiar. I think entailment is part of the plot in that book my mom is always talking about with Dring.”

  “What do they say about it?”

  “I kind of tune it out,” the boy admitted. “I got the impression that men and women could both inherit, but differently.”

  “It was probably set in a time and place where they practiced primogeniture,” Vivian surmised. “Some cultures are so focused on preserving property and position that pretty much everything goes to the oldest son, like the Dollnick clans, or the oldest daughter, like with the Vergallians. With humans who practiced primogeniture, if there wasn’t a son to inherit, then the estate got split up between the girls, and they all lost status.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My first assignment in this class was to contrast human inheritance traditions with those of the other tunnel network species, so I had to do a lot of reading about the history of property laws on Earth. You wouldn’t believe the questions I got at the end of my presentation. A bunch of the alien students had their facts about humans all mixed up from watching documentaries. They were sure that human heirs were always burned at the funeral and the government took everything.”

  “A Vergallian queen once tried to sign my dad up to be her sacrificial king,” Samuel said. “If he hadn’t got killed in battle, they would have burned him.”

  “They have a lot of whacky codicils in their family contracts. A couple of Vergallian students presented, and one of them was a girl who is fourth in line for her family’s throne, but only if she marries a guy with blonde hair who is at least a head taller than her.”

  “Is she Fleet? It’s hard to imagine an Imperial family letting a heiress that high up in the line of succession run off to a Stryx station and attend the Open University.”

  “She’s not Fleet, she just doesn’t like blonde guys, and she’s already the tallest Vergallian female I’ve ever met. The poor girl said she’d rather work as a hostess in a dance bar than have children who couldn’t walk through a normal doorway without braining themselves. I guess a lot of Vergallian royal families have aesthetics codicils in their succession contracts, but just going for height generation after generation is bound to lead to health problems.”

  “Did you figure out how it works for the Drazens? With my mom away, my dad let me sit in on a poker game last week when a couple of the players were late. Herl was trying to explain to your dad how consortium ownership passed through families, but it seemed really complicated.”

  “Consortiums are funny because they require active participation, and how do you inherit a career? Say we were Drazens and we got married…”

  “How come all of your examples start with us getting married?” Samuel protested.

  “It just makes it more real,” Vivian justified herself. “Abstractions are for lawyers. Do you want me to say, ‘Imagine the party of the first part enters into a state of matrimony with the party of the second part?’”

  “All right, say we’re married Drazens.”

  “And say InstaSitter was a consortium, where my mom and Aunt Chastity were the primary stakeholders. My mom couldn’t just give me, say, twenty-five percent of her holding, unless I starting doing a quarter of her work.”

  “Really? But what if you already had a job?”

  “That’s where you come in. As my husband, you could take over twenty-five percent of my mom’s workload, and the other stakeholders would all accept that.”

  “Say your mom didn’t have any children and she wanted to retire.”

  “Then she’d have to find somebody else to do her work, and maintaining her income would depend on that person’s performance. Since you can’t con
trol what somebody else is going to do, and since it’s hard to find a replacement who sings well enough to get approval for a high administrative position in a Drazen consortium, stakeholders without a family member willing to replace them usually sell out.”

  “So somebody else buys their stake and takes over the job, like the Dollnicks sell commissions in their military?”

  “I think that’s pretty rare because consortiums prefer to promote from within. From what I understood, the buy-out payments are usually designed as pensions, a variable share of the profit depending on external factors.”

  “You mean, even though your mom and aunt founded InstaSitter and built it into what it is today, if it was a Drazen consortium and one of them retired without a replacement from the family, all of their equity would be converted into an uncertain royalty stream that died with them?”

  Vivian looked at Samuel in surprise. “You really have been paying attention when I talk about business, haven’t you? From the standpoint of the major stakeholders, it seems unfair, but all of the small stakeholders celebrate when a founding family lets go. It’s how the Drazens redistribute wealth without wars or economic collapses.”

  “What do the other species think of it?”

  “The Dollnicks and Vergallians obviously think that the Drazens are nuts. The Hortens actually practice something similar to the consortium structure for large businesses, and the Frunge are somewhere between the two groups.”

  “What about the older species, the Grenouthians and the Verlocks?”

  “The Grenouthians organize everything along family lines, but they also give points in their enterprises to whoever contributes the most to making them successful. And they pool a lot of their family wealth, so everybody ends up with something. The Verlocks pay a ton of taxes to their emperor, but the emperor is required by law to spend it all on public welfare, most of which is funneled through their academies.”