by E. M. Foner
“Ready!” she finally announced. “I’m Yafu’s mother and I work as a Xenobiologist. What that means is…,” the woman paused dramatically and arched her eyebrows, “I make monsters!”
All of the children squealed and grabbed at the nearest adult or a robot friend, and Kelly was awarded one of Dorothy’s hands, even as the other grabbed one of Metoo’s pincers.
“So who wants to be a monster?” the Xenobiologist asked, and everybody present, including a few overly enthusiastic parents, shouted, “Me! Me!”
“No big monsters today, I’d need something to stand on,” Yafu’s mother scolded the adults. “How about five volunteers to start, and anybody else who wants to be a monster can see me after our picnic lunch. Who wants to go first?”
Being the first to become a monster must have struck the children as a little scary, because all of the hands went down. The monster maker pointed dramatically at a little boy of Chinese ancestry, who gamely rose and approached to face his mother, his back to the class. She worked quickly, dipping her small fingers directly into the face paint pots, and she moved so smoothly and with such concentration, it almost looked like she was playing a small piano. In less than a minute, she stepped back and held up her hands, each finger a different color, and whispered to Yafu to turn around.
The class gasped on seeing how his face had been transformed into that of a giant bird. She had even used shadowing to make his tiny nose look like a prominent beak, and his eyes appeared to be twice their normal size. The parents broke out in applause and started pushing their children towards the front of the class. The first volunteer to reach the artist was a little blonde girl with such a beautiful, bright complexion that the woman hesitated to cover it up. Then she assumed a mad scientist expression, leered crazily at the class, and set to work.
A minute later the little girl turned around and a mother shrieked and then began laughing hysterically. Half of the girl’s face was untouched and the other half looked like a wolf, complete with fangs and half of a lolling tongue reaching down her chin. The creamy white skin on the wolf side was replaced with the illusion of fine grey fur and one of her baby blue eyes even seemed to have acquired a yellow tint. The artist hadn’t quite managed to pull off the effect of a protruding snout on just one side of the face, but it was a miraculous transformation all the same, and everybody cheered again.
In rapid succession the next three children were transformed into mythical creatures, and Kelly began to pray that she wouldn’t be the next to receive the presentation baton. Fortunately, the woman handed the baton, which looked like a child’s magic wand complete with a paper star on one end, to the small, unassuming man who sat on Kelly’s right. The father, who looked like he might have been a clerk in a small office, rose nervously to his feet, gave his daughter’s hand a squeeze, and introduced himself.
“Hi! I’m Sarah’s dad and I’m an agronomist. That’s just a big word to say I grow food.” Then, without moving from his place, he began to sing:
Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O
And on that farm he had a snake, E-I-E-I-O
With a hiss hiss here, and a hiss hiss there,
Here a hiss, there a hiss, everywhere a hiss hiss
Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O
By the time he got to the end of the second line, all of the children and little Stryx were singing along. At the end of the verse, he pointed at a random child who instinctively knew what to do and shouted “Chicken.” The man launched into the next verse with a cluck cluck, and before Kelly knew it, she was singing along with the rest of them.
Old MacDonald went well over the five minutes allotted before the man pointed at a little Stryx, who suggested a spider. All of the children laughed, and Kelly overheard the little boy sitting next to the Stryx explain to his robotic friend, “The spider lives in a different song, the one with the rain and the waterspout.”
The agronomist yielded the parental baton to Kelly, and sat down looking flushed and happy. Kelly rose gracefully to her feet, though her knees made sounds like a boxer cracking his knuckles, and moved to the front of the group.
“Hi everybody. I’m Dorothy’s mother Kelly, and I’m the EarthCent ambassador on Union Station. Does everybody know what an ambassador does?”
Blank looks from all of the children were her only answer, so she turned to Dorothy and said, “Dorothy? Do you want to tell the children what an ambassador does?”
Dorothy stood up proudly and said, “A ‘bassador tells me when to go to bed and not to eat tasty things.” Then she sat back down and received an admiring look from Metoo. Kelly thought about asking her to try again, but decided it would be less confusing if she talked directly to the children.
“An ambassador is somebody who talks with different people and different species to promote understanding,” Kelly explained, but the sea of blank little faces remained unimpressed. Some of the parents began to show signs of conducting subvoced conversations over implants or reading from their heads-up displays. Twenty seconds and she was already losing her audience. Kelly began to panic.
“When I was taking diplomacy instruction, no wait, sorry, I’ll start over.” Kelly struggled to regain her composure and to ignore the parents. That’s the problem, she thought. I’m trying to talk to everybody when I should just be talking to the children. She concentrated on her daughter and tried again. “We used to play a game in ambassador school where we made friends. Does anybody want to play?”
All of the little hands went up, and all of the little Stryx pincers as well. Her confidence rushing back, Kelly tried to recall if she had learned anything in the EarthCent course that she could explain to a four or five-year-old. One of the little boys was holding a stuffed animal in the hand that wasn’t waving wildly over his head, so she pointed and invited him up. For the other half of the equation, she chose a girl from the front who was probably the biggest child in the room.
“What’s your name?” she asked the little boy, who grew suddenly shy and even tried to hide his face behind her leg.
“Xavier,” the boy’s mother answered for him from the crowd.
“And your name is?” she asked the girl.
“Bekka!” the girl asserted stoutly.
“Are you friends Xavier and Bekka?” Kelly asked, like a magician establishing that she hid nothing up her sleeves before performing a trick. Bekka shrugged, while Xavier shook his head energetically to indicate the negative.
“Good,” Kelly continued. “We’re going to learn how to make friends. Now Xavier, I want you to give Bekka your Teddy Bear. Bekka, I want you to take it from him.”
Xavier looked at Kelly horror-stuck and tried to back away from the girl, but Kelly placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“It’s just an ambassador game,” she cajoled him. “Don’t you want to play?”
Xavier stared at her wide-eyed and looked like he was about to burst into tears. Just as Kelly was about to admit failure and ask for another volunteer, Bekka leaned forward and seized one of the Teddy Bear’s legs, trying to jerk it away from the boy. The leg came off with a rip, and stuffing spilled out on the grass. Xavier began to howl.
“No! No, Bekka. Wait! We can still make friends,” Kelly pleaded, looking back and forth between the two children. “Give him back the leg and tell him you’re sorry.”
“But you told me to take it!” Bekka wailed, and threw the lifeless leg at Kelly’s feet. Oddly enough, as Bekka rapidly worked herself up into a full-blown tantrum, Xavier began to calm down and stare at her curiously. At this point, the parents of the respective children stalked up to the front to retrieve their offspring. Bekka’s father picked her up to comfort her, and strode away from the group with a disgusted look at Kelly.
“Oh, I’m sorry. That didn’t go very well, did it, children.” Kelly hadn’t meant it as a question, but the children chorused, “No!”
“Well, maybe we can try another ambassador game with just one player so nobody can
get hurt. Shall we?” Kelly asked hopefully. This time she expected the children to answer “Yes,” but the room was silent.
“Can I have a volunteer?” she asked, trying not to sound too needy. One little girl in a white dress began to raise her hand, but her mother intercepted it on the way up and pulled it back down. Kelly was about to give up and beckon to Dorothy, who was sitting on her hands and looking nervous, when Metoo raised a tentative pincer.
“Metoo! Great, come up here. Everybody give Metoo a hand.” A few of the adults clapped once or twice, but the children sat and looked puzzled, obviously not understanding what Kelly was talking about. She gave herself another mental kick—watch the vocabulary!
Metoo bravely floated up to Kelly, though she thought he might be wobbling a little. “Hi, Metoo,” she greeted him, trying her best to sound enthusiastic. “We’re going to play a little game that teaches you about problems between people. All you have to do is make believe what I tell you is true. Do you understand? It’s just make believe.”
“Yes,” Metoo rasped nervously, sounding more artificial than usual.
“Good. Now I want you to pretend that I won’t let you be friends with Dorothy anymore. How do you...” Kelly was interrupted by the clatter of Metoo collapsing onto the grass in a metallic pile. Dorothy screamed and charged forward to dive on top of the fallen Stryx, and some of the children began to sob.
“It’s just make believe,” she shouted over the noise, trying to get Metoo’s attention, but the little Stryx wasn’t responsive and just lay there in a heap. “Libby! Help!” she subvoced urgently. “I think Metoo turned himself off or something.”
“He put himself to sleep,” Libby reported back almost instantly. “Young Stryx will do that if they learn something horrible. It’s why we don’t let them around humans for their first few years.”
“Tell me what I can do!” Kelly urged her, almost in tears herself.
“Take him home with you, and I’ll send Jeeves to meet you and wake him up. Make sure that Dorothy is there so he doesn’t just go to sleep again,” Libby instructed her. Kelly grimaced as she realized that Libby had watched the whole performance. “I’ll reactivate his suspension field so you can carry him easily, just make sure you don’t let go somewhere that he can float out of reach.”
“Dorothy, Dorothy,” Kelly tried to pry her daughter off the prone robot. “Metoo is just sleeping. Mommy talked to Libby and we’re taking him home to wake him up.”
Dorothy wouldn’t let go and Kelly wanted to get Metoo out of the room before she inflicted a permanent trauma on the whole class, so she scooped them up in one load, half of it squirming, half of it limp. Metoo weighed nothing, in fact his suspensor field may have been supporting some of Dorothy’s weight. Kelly headed for the door mumbling apologies.
Behind her, a quick-thinking mother rose to her feet and asked, “Who wants to play with a puppy?” The sobbing stopped immediately, and even the little Stryx perked up again in anticipation. The woman held her large purse near the floor, undid the clasp, and out popped a cute little spaniel, its bright red tongue licking in every direction. As the door slid shut behind her, Kelly admitted to herself that she should have taken Joe’s advice to bring Beowulf and let the giant dog give the children pony back rides.
Ten
A week after what had become known around the human section of the station as “The Kindergarten Incident,” Metoo was still proudly wearing a whole box worth of animal-themed band-aids that Dorothy had carefully applied wherever she found an open spot on his indestructible robot casing. In order to be forgiven, Kelly had solemnly functioned as nurse to her daughter’s role as surgeon, removing the band-aids from their pesky sleeves and peeling off the waxed portions that protected the sticky surfaces.
Dorothy and Metoo were playing with blocks in the corner of the living room when Jeeves pinged Joe to ask if he was available for a discussion. Since Joe was babysitting while Kelly attended a meeting of Earth merchants, he was happy to oblige. Jeeves arrived in less than a minute, which meant he must have been in the corridor when he called.
“I see Metoo is healing nicely,” Jeeves told Dorothy. “What a good doctor you are.” Dorothy responded with a happy smile and hugged Metoo, who basked in the attention. “And no more going to sleep when you’re upset,” Jeeves admonished the little Stryx sternly. “You’re getting too big for that kind of behavior.”
“I’m getting bigger even faster,” Joe commented from the couch, where he sat with a mug of his latest brew and a bag of mini-pretzels. Beowulf lay supine on the couch next to him, his massive body taking up the rest of the cushion space and his heavy head resting on the man’s lap. The dog only showed signs of life if a pretzel was placed on his tongue, in which case he made it disappear as quickly as a frog ingests a fly, and then fanned the air once or twice with his tail.
Jeeves floated over and took his time giving the man and the dog a thorough examination. “As a field agent for Eemas on loan to InstaSitter, I can say with a certainty that neither of you would qualify to work for us. One is swilling beer on duty and the other can barely keep his eyes open. I’d be nervous about Metoo remaining here if I didn’t know that Dorothy would keep an eye on him.”
“Well, if it isn’t the InstaTraitor,” Joe replied, having become immune to the robot’s constant put-downs and giving as well as he received. “What’s this I hear about you hanging around a Frunge barn trying to sell our Raider/Trader secrets?”
“You heard wrong, though I suppose it’s a miracle you can hear anything at your advanced age,” Jeeves retorted. Beowulf opened his eyes and growled, leading Jeeves to add, “I was talking about Joe.” Mollified, the dog went back to his daydreams.
“So what were you doing with the Shrubs? Looking to get a good deal on counterfeit robot parts?” Joe drained the rest of his beer, feeling rather pleased with his own gibe. Strangely enough, Jeeves omitted a comeback, and began a serious explanation.
“There’s something funny about this new game. Gryph has been talking with the Stryx who run stations, and they all agree that it’s something more than entertainment. Gryph and Libby have put me in charge of investigating the human-related angle, since I’m supposed to understand your illogical culture better than the mature Stryx.”
“Everybody’s heard rumors,” Joe replied with a shrug and a longing look at his empty glass. But Kelly wouldn’t let him keep a keg in the living room, and he didn’t feel like going downstairs to his micro-brewery room. Or to be truthful, he didn’t have the energy to pry Beowulf’s head up off his lap when he would only have to fight with the dog a minute later to win back his end of the sofa.
“Thank you, Joe. That was very useful,” the Stryx replied sarcastically. “The reason I’m talking to you rather than Paul is that we’re seeing some interesting patterns developing in mercenary deployments.”
Joe sat up a little straighter when Jeeves mentioned the mercenaries. There was nothing glamorous about the fighting business, but for a poor twenty-year-old human with no family, it had seemed like a better option than signing a labor contract for an agricultural or mining colony. Joe had worked his way up from the bottom as a soldier of fortune, contracting to aliens for fighting in space and on planets across the galaxy. He had seventeen years of service, basically long stretches of waiting or traveling on troopships, punctuated by short periods of lethal violence. Then he had won Mac’s Bones in a card game and retired to the junkyard business, in part to give his war-orphan foster son a place to call home.
“What kind of patterns?” Joe asked, now that Jeeves had his attention.
“We’ve seen mercenary units which have always contracted independently, now concentrating together near transportation hubs which are anchored by a Stryx station. They report being offered longer term retainers with guaranteed leave time and a maximum number of combat hours per cycle. For the time being, the consortium that’s coordinating this activity appears to be acting as a middleman for the traditio
nal mercenary customers. Since the pay and hire rates are unchanged, the consortium is probably operating at a loss.”
“You’re crazy if you suspect they’re planning some move against the stations,” Joe told him derisively. “It doesn’t matter who is paying. There isn’t a human soldier in the galaxy dumb enough to go against the Stryx, even if you weren’t our patrons. I’ll bet with the right accessories you could take us all on single-handedly.”
“I might need both hands,” Jeeves replied modestly. “But the reason these forces are concentrating near the Stryx stations is simply to lower transportation costs and ensure rapid deployment options. We don’t see any sign of a change in the pattern of ongoing conflicts, or even in the diplomatic stand-offs that are often preludes to shooting wars. It’s strictly a question of the business model changing, and it’s not just human mercenaries who are signing on.”
“I haven’t really kept up with my old crowd,” Joe confessed. “Some of the men from the last unit I commanded will stop in for a beer when they pass through Union, but it wasn’t a life that encouraged long-term friendships. The only way I could get caught up would be to visit one of those staging worlds, and from what you’ve said, I’m not sure there’s anything to be learned.”
“I’d like you to come with me to visit the local mustering point which has been forming around Zach’s World in recent months. We can take the Nova, and with some help from Gryph, it’s only a few hours away. While most mercenaries are willing enough to talk with Stryx, it would add credibility if you came along. We might even ask Kelly to give you an official position.”
“Let me think about it for a minute,” Joe answered, looking over at his daughter playing with Metoo. Kelly would probably be nervous about him going, but being accompanied by Jeeves was like traveling with an invasion fleet, or two invasion fleets if the Stryx was willing to use both hands. And the truth was, Joe felt he was getting a little too fat and happy sitting around the station, attending diplomatic dinners with Kelly and counting the creds flowing in from the barn. It didn’t even take a full minute.
