by E. M. Foner
“I’ll have to check with my wife, of course, but I’m willing,” he told Jeeves.
“Good. I know you tend to sleep through flights whenever I’m along, so let’s take the time now to get our plans straight. Have you been to Zach’s World?”
“I always intended to go take a look, but with Paul and the business, and then Kelly and the girl, it just never happened,” Joe admitted. Most of the human expats living on Union Station had made at least one trip to Zach’s World, an icy ball with deep, slushy oceans and an oxygen-rich atmosphere that circled the star closest to the station. It offered a poor man’s skiing vacation for those who didn’t mind the too-gentle slopes, the weak red light from the distant parent star, and the cold, biting winds.
Nobody had ever tried engineering a heating cycle on Zach’s World for three reasons. First, the breathable atmosphere depended on the biological processes of the plant life in the oceans, and those wouldn’t have survived a higher temperature. Second, if the ice on the planet was melted, practically the entire surface would have ended up deep underwater. Third, the Stryx had declared the planet off limits for terraformers, rendering the first two reasons moot.
“There’s never been enough traffic to the planet’s surface to construct an elevator,” Jeeves explained. “It’s really not much different from living on a station, since the food is grown in greenhouses with artificial lighting. The staging base is on the high plains, where the dry air is easiest on the landing craft. Other than the proximity to the Stryx tunnel hub and the breathable atmosphere for humans, the main attraction is the gravity, which is just a few percent above Earth normal.”
“So I’ll wear warm socks,” Joe replied impatiently, wondering why Jeeves was wasting so much time on the obvious.
“Aside from cold-weather training and equipment maintenance, there’s not much to do on the high plains, other than snowboat sailing,” Jeeves hinted. “I expect they do a lot of sitting about, telling old war stories, eating and drinking.”
At the mention of drinking, Joe looked wistfully at his empty mug. At times he wished the dog had thumbs and could fetch a beer, though on second thought, if Beowulf had thumbs, their roles might be reversed entirely. Something clicked in Joe’s mind.
“Are you suggesting that I bring a few kegs of homebrew along?” he asked Jeeves.
“In vino veritas,” Jeeves responded, without explicitly answering in the affirmative.
“Is this another one of those self-imposed Stryx rules, like you aren’t supposed to encourage alcohol exports from the station or something?” Joe asked the question out of frustration that Jeeves hadn’t simply come out and told him to bring beer to the party.
“We try to avoid any actions that could be construed as helping humans at the expense of other species, especially in the economic realm,” Jeeves replied vaguely. “For example, knowledge of trade routes and local demand is as valuable to merchants as the goods themselves. Who would use our tunnel network to transport commercial cargos if we were to share the specifics with their competitors?”
“Seems to me you take it a little too far at times.”
“Hey, I’m new around here,” Jeeves snapped, reminding Joe that the seemingly all-powerful robot was actually Paul’s age. “I don’t make the rules. Speaking of which, let me know if you get permission from your better nine-tenths.”
Having successfully communicated the core of his strategy for the mission, that Joe bring along a load of beer to loosen up some lips, Jeeves took his leave from the children and floated out the exit. In doing so, he almost ran straight through Dring, who was visiting to return a book he had borrowed from Kelly’s collection. Dring hopped to the side to avoid being run down, and followed the retreating figure of the Stryx with his eyes, his blunt teeth exposed in a half-regretful smile.
“Surprising creatures, your Stryx,” he remarked to Joe conversationally, as if the robots were human pets and not the other way around. “It may be interesting to sit down and have a conversation with one someday.”
“I’m sure Metoo would be happy to oblige,” Joe responded jokingly. He pointed to the band-aid covered robot, whose delicately balanced wood-block constructions were gleefully demolished by Dorothy whenever they attained fourth-story height.
“Uncle Dring!” Dorothy proclaimed happily when she looked up, abandoning Metoo to rush at the cute alien. Metoo hesitated for a few seconds, as if he was considering flying after her, but then his Stryx building instincts took over. Moving as quickly as the eye could follow, he rapidly built a structure that looked like the central pier of a bridge or a vault, with cantilevered blocks extending in four directions.
Dorothy was torn between trying to convince Dring to tell her a story and the temptation to knock down Metoo’s construction. Her four-year-old body quivered for a moment, like a runner waiting for a starter’s gun to begin the race. Then she abandoned Dring and ran back to swipe a protruding block from Metoo’s masterpiece, leading to a spectacular collapse. Metoo patiently gathered the blocks and began slowly building again.
“Interested in a beer?” Joe asked Dring, with the idea of getting his own empty mug filled without stirring from the couch. “You know where I keep the tapped keg downstairs. Plenty of clean mugs hanging right above it.”
“Thank you, Joe, but I’m just here to swap books. Please tell Kelly that I found “The Hobbit” to be a fascinating story, though the depiction of Smaug leads me to believe that this Tolkien fellow was biased against dragons,” Dring commented. “I think I’ll try another Dickens.”
“Help yourself,” Joe said, gesturing towards the book cases. “I remember reading “Bleak House” on my first deployment, when I was feeling pretty sorry for myself after losing my family and giving up my home. But Dickens wrote about this orphan boy named Jo, so poor that he couldn’t even afford a third letter for the name that was his only possession. And I thought, whatever problems I’m having, at least I’m big enough and healthy enough to look a man in the eye and spell my name with an ‘e.’ Ach, any more and I’ll ruin the story for you. It’s a good one.”
“Thank you for the recommendation. I’ll give it a read.” Dring hop-skipped his way up the bookshelf, then used his powerful tail as a sort of a living stilt that nearly doubled his reach.
Kelly’s indexing system for her library followed the unusual system of putting books in alphabetical order based on the author’s first name. She claimed it was a habit from her early days in EarthCent service when she was embarrassed by her inability to remember the first names of her colLeagues, and that ordering her books that way had cured the problem.
Dring returned “The Hobbit” to the Tolkien collection, next to Jane Austen’s books, and then he located the Dickens section between Beatrix Potter and Charlotte Bronte. Joe thought it was sad that the Bronte sisters, who had been inseparable in life, were scattered around the shelves by Kelly’s system. Kelly maintained that books had lives of their own, and that the sisters were probably enjoying a little breathing space after being stuck next to each other on the same shelf for a couple hundred years. “Bleak House” turned out to be a battered paperback reprint edition with tiny print, but Dring handled it with reverence.
“Paul tells me you’ve flown supercargo on a number of Raider runs, and even been out trading with Blythe. You’ve obviously been around the track a few times,” Joe prompted. “What’s so interesting about sitting in a mock-up of a ship, and flying around the gameverse shooting stuff or piling up Trader gold?”
“I’ve probably been around the track even more times than you can imagine,” Dring replied enigmatically. “But this game is something new, something complex. I believe it’s worth further study.”
“As long as it keeps you camping out in Mac’s,” Joe replied complacently. “Kelly will be sorry she missed you. She likes talking about books almost as much as reading them.”
“Please remind her that she has an open invitation to visit my ship as well,” Dring said.
He spent another minute watching Dorothy and Metoo locked in their symbiotic cycle of building and destruction, then he turned and trundled out the door.
Joe tapped Beowulf on the nose to try to get the dog to pick up his head, but wily canine hadn’t shown any signs of life since the pretzels ran out. Reluctantly, Joe shifted to bribery and whispered, “Split a beer, boy?”
The old war dog came off the couch like a rocket and headed straight down to the brew room, leaving Joe, whose leg was asleep from the weight of Beowulf’s head, to limp after him dangling his empty mug.
Eleven
Kelly was nervous about attending the dinner reception hosted by the Gems, and not because she was worried about the InstaSitter who was watching Dorothy. The Gems were widely reviled as cloners, a technology that most advanced species outlawed early in their development. It didn’t help that the Gems had pushed cloning to its logical conclusion, meaning that the whole race consisted of an indeterminately aged woman named Gem, although they did what they could to differentiate themselves in dress, hair style and accessories.
But Kelly was determined to fulfill her mission for EarthCent, taking every opportunity to establish good relations with willing aliens. Joe wasn’t too happy when he heard he would be the only male of any kind at the meal, but Kelly assured him that the Gems weren’t so much anti-male as psychotically practical.
Libby had briefed Kelly on the history of the Gems, and the story was that they had long ago become so dependent on cloning that they had lost the ability to procreate naturally. At some point, the women who ran the cloning operations had decided to stop cloning men, who after all, were just a nuisance at that point. But eliminating the men turned out to be the beginning of a vicious spiral in which the cloners dropped one individual after the next from their gene pool until there were only two archetypal women left. They fought a raging war for a few thousand years, and then there was only one.
Gem met the human couple at the entrance to the Gem embassy and introduced herself.
“I’m Ambassador Gem,” the roughly humanoid woman told them. “Perhaps you had figured that out already. My sisters and I rarely communicate vocally, but we know from experience that species who are dependent on the spoken word find it easier to converse when everybody in the room doesn’t share the same name. So please just call me Ambassador, and I’ll introduce you to my sisters by their embassy duties.”
“Thank you, Ambassador,” Kelly replied. “That’s very thoughtful of you. I’m Kelly McAllister and this is my husband Joe.”
“You don’t need to state the obvious,” Ambassador Gem told her, and escorted them to an intimate dining room with a table set for six. “We will soon be joined by Trade, Military and Propaganda. Cook is preparing Earth foods for you, and if you want anything at all, just tell Waitress.”
“Thank you again,” Kelly said, hoping that Ambassador Gem wouldn’t insist on telling her that no thanks were necessary. She had the feeling that after tens of thousands of years of living with herself, Gem might have purchased an expertise in intrapersonal skills at the expense of being able to communicate with, well, not-Gem. “It’s always an honor for us newcomers to be received by elder species.”
“Of course,” Ambassador Gem agreed. “Now, before I invite the others in, I want to discuss some classified business. Is Joe just your husband, or does he have an official EarthCent position?”
“I’m the Military Attaché to Union Station,” Joe replied, using the position Kelly had invented for his upcoming expedition with Jeeves to the staging base on Zach’s World. He threw in a stiff bow, and since his evening wear was actually an old dress uniform, he looked quite believable in the role.
“Very good,” Ambassador Gem replied. “Trade, Military and Propaganda will be presenting you with their own proposals, but they do not know that I have been given the go-ahead from our highest level, from Premier Gem herself, to make you this offer. If Earth accepts all of our proposals, we will establish a clone line for each of you, as a bonus.”
“But I don’t want to be cloned!” Kelly exclaimed without thinking. Joe merely looked at the backs of his hands, already waiting for the evening to be over.
“That’s ridiculous,” Ambassador Gem replied. “Everybody wants to be cloned, at least, everybody that I know. The other species are just jealous of me, of us. I understand you may feel obligated to make this response, in case, for example, this meeting is being bugged by our generous landlords, but the offer stands.”
Waving off Kelly’s further protests with an exaggerated wink, Ambassador Gem clapped her hands and the doors flew open. Three Gems, each wearing a hand printed English name card identifying them as Trade, Military, and Media, entered the room. Ambassador Gem presented each of them to the humans, but apparently she couldn’t read English herself since she introduced Media as Propaganda. Propaganda Gem flinched, and after a brief round of silent communication with Ambassador Gem, through which the message was delivered either by telepathy or by making funny faces, Propaganda Gem spoke.
“Please take your seats. I’ve informed Ambassador that her choice of words may have been open to misinterpretation by your translation devices. We aren’t in the habit of using speech amongst ourselves, so please allow for such minor faux-pas.”
“We understand, Media,” Kelly replied generously, though she was sure that Ambassador Gem was being more truthful than the name card. The four Gems took their places with weirdly synchronized precision, followed by Kelly, for whom her husband, on his best behavior, had reflexively pulled out a chair. This led all of the Gems to bare their teeth, though whether they were communicating with each other or just expressing their views on chivalry wasn’t clear.
Waitress Gem brought in a tray with four tall glasses and two pre-packaged meals, with labels from one of the deep space passenger liners that plied the Stryx routes. Joe surreptitiously examined the date code on his meal before peeling back the foil. The Gems each accepted a tall glass full of a viscous, chalky fluid from Waitress Gem, and began to ladle it into their mouths with long handled spoons.
Kelly tried to look pleased as she peeled back the foil from her own chicken dinner with rice, baby carrots, and an unidentifiable spongy thing that was probably somebody’s idea of cake. At least Cook Gem had heated it to the proper temperature, and compared to the meal-in-a-glass option, it looked downright gourmet.
“It appears that due to some clerical error on your part, we weren’t invited to the recent EarthCent Exposition, at which you granted trade credentials to all attendees,” Trade Gem said, after carefully licking off her spoon between swallows. “Will it be necessary to pay you a large bribe to correct this situation?”
Kelly choked on the dry rice and looked around for a glass of water or anything else to wash it down. Joe helpfully thumped her on the back a couple of times, and a few stray grains of rice flew out of her mouth, one of which landed in Military Gem’s impeccable black hair.
“Could you get her something to drink?” Joe asked Waitress Gem, who hovered behind them with her empty tray. Waitress Gem fled from the room like she had forgotten to turn off the gas.
Kelly managed a few deep breaths and waved Joe off. “I’m OK, I’m fine. Just went down the wrong way.” Then she fished around in her purse and drew out a manila envelope. “I’m glad you understand we didn’t mean anything by omitting to send you an invitation for the Exposition. The list was drawn up after we received an unusual volume of requests to attend functions, so we were really just trying to clear the decks.”
“And the bribe?” Trade Gem prompted.
“No bribe is necessary,” Kelly replied, and extended the envelope. “I brought eight, um, certificates with me. They’re identical to the ones I was handing out at the Exposition.”
“One would have been sufficient,” Trade Gem replied ungraciously. The other Gems cast suspicious looks at Kelly, as if she had offered an intentional insult to their cloning technology by bringing her own copies. Who
would have expected the newcomers to be so clever at diplomacy?
Waitress Gem returned in a rush, with a bottle of chilled champagne balanced on her tray, alongside two champagne flutes that kept clinking off each other due to her trembling. She looked visibly upset, and all five Gems fell silent for a moment as if they were working something out among themselves. Then she brought the tray to Military Gem, who removed the bottle and began examining the foil around the neck.
“I can open that,” Joe offered, reaching across the table, but Military Gem just gave him a cold stare and returned to probing the foil with her sharpened fingernails.
“I have set aside a prime segment on Gem Today to feature the new cooperation between our civilizations,” Propaganda Gem announced importantly, as she polished off her drink meal. “Since you are newcomers on the galactic stage, I will explain the basic production so that there will be no misunderstandings when you come to our studios tomorrow for the shoot.”
“That’s very considerate of you, Prop, uh, Media Gem,” Kelly replied, wondering if she had missed some small print on the invitation. “However, I’m afraid I wasn’t aware of this planned, er, media event, and I don’t know if I’ll have the time tomorrow.”
“You’ll make the time when you hear what we’re planning,” Propaganda Gem asserted. “Gem Today is the one required broadcast for our sisters, guaranteeing you an audience of over thirty billion viewers. I’ve prepared a list of the protocols for aliens appearing on Gem Today, so before I give it to you to memorize, I’ll just read through and test your comprehension.”
As Propaganda Gem removed a display sheet from her tunic, Kelly noticed that Joe was holding up both of his hands around shoulder height, palms-out, as if thinking halfheartedly about surrendering. Then she realized that his left hand was just in front of his chin and his right was shaded over to cover her lower face.
