by E. M. Foner
“Wait a second,” Paul said, puzzled by the Zarent’s explanation. “Why do you keep referring to the Wanderers as if you aren’t a part of them?”
“Ah, I understand your confusion,” Giant replied, settling back onto the floor. “It is true we are as much a part of the Wanderers as any of the other species represented in the mob, perhaps even more so. You see, my people were genetically engineered to serve the original Wanderers some tens of millions of years ago. We Zarents were a parting gift to the first mob from the Farlings, and although we have long since exceeded our original design specifications, we still exist to serve. Without us, the Wanderer mobs would simply fall apart.”
“Are you, uh, free to leave if the work doesn’t suit you?” Joe asked. Twenty years ago he would have asked outright if the Zarents were slaves, but marriage to the EarthCent ambassador had taught him a degree of diplomacy.
“Where would we go?” Giant asked in response. “You’ll see that the core of the ship is given over to us entirely. We sleep in Zero-G along the axis of rotation, and we don’t work on the high-gravity decks for more than a few hours at a time. Our bodies were designed for space construction and ship maintenance, and although our origins are artificial in nature, we have evolved to fit our niche.”
“Speaking of gravity, I’d say it’s dropping fast.” Paul raised his arms and ventured a small bounce. It was a good thing he had his hands above his head because he was lighter than he expected, bouncing off the ceiling of the lift tube capsule, and again off the floor. On his second trip to the ceiling, he used his arms as shock absorbers, and gave the barest push back down, landing with his knees bent and straightening slowly.
“Be careful, boy,” Joe instructed Beowulf. “I know how you hate getting upside down.”
Beowulf, who had watched Paul’s display through one eye squinted half shut, turned his head away in disgust. If he had known where the lift tube was heading, he would have stayed on the outermost deck catching meat scraps. Now, the pieces that he had ingested were refusing to sit properly in his stomach, and he felt the need to keep swallowing.
Joe rooted around in his rucksack and passed Paul a set of four modified magnetic cleats. The younger man crouched down and began strapping them around the dog’s paws, pulling the friction belt tight on each. Beowulf remembered the utility of the cleats and endured the shoeing in stoic silence, but in his imagination, he was hatching a plot to weld the Nova to the deck in Mac’s Bones and put an end to this traveling foolishness.
“Here we are,” Giant announced, as the capsule came to a sudden halt and the door slid open. “You are welcome to use the webbing, but I’m afraid your four-legged friend would have difficulty navigating it.”
The Zarent leapt from the door to an overhead mesh of cables, his unicycle grasped in a trailing appendage. The arrangement of the taut wires reminded Joe of the blueprints he had once seen for a rigid lighter-than-air craft that was deemed acceptable on some of the tech-ban worlds. In fact, if somebody had sewn a skin around the webbing, they would have ended up with something that looked very much like a dirigible, stretched through the core of the Drazen colony ship.
Joe and Paul switched on the magnetic cleats of their work boots and stepped out onto the innermost deck. The ship was spinning fast enough that even this close to the axis of rotation, they experienced an effective weight of a few pounds, but it was much easier to walk with the drag of the cleats than to try to slide along without bouncing. Beowulf rose gingerly and followed, finding that his stomach felt better when he was on his feet.
Moving fluidly overhead, Giant led them to the humming heart of the Drazen-engineered vessel. The pile produced power for everything but the ship’s jump engines, which were unneeded in its current role as a habitat in a mob with tunneling escorts. The pile glowed a subdued red, and the hum warbled a little around the central frequency.
“I’m no expert on Drazen piles, and I’ve never seen one this big in person before, but it sounds a little off to me,” Joe said. “Do you have the recent telemetry for the lasers and the magnetic bottle?”
“Certainly,” Giant replied, removing the projector from his belt and bringing a bunch of wavy lines to life on the outer wall of the pile containment structure. “I haven’t passed my level eight exam yet, but I believe the problem is with either the windings or the cores. We’ve upgraded the original controllers with Sharf differential current correction, but the fields refuse to remain stable.”
“Hmm,” Joe grunted, studying the waveforms. “Paul?”
“It looks to me like physical degradation,” Paul said. “Maybe some of the elements still have life left in them, but by the time you tear the whole thing apart for rewinding, you’ve spent more than a new factory pile would cost. And the labor for a rebuild would run into weeks, which is a long time to run on backups.”
“Our backup capacity for maintaining life support and sufficient light to prevent crop failure is approximately a hundred and forty hours,” Giant interjected.
Beowulf ignored the conversation and concentrated on the hum from the pile, concluding that the excursions from the mean harmonic were growing. He barked once to get everybody’s attention, pointed at the pile with one massive paw, and shook his head in the negative. Then he turned and trotted back to the lift tube.
“Well, there you have it,” Joe declared. “I really don’t know whether it’s good for another year or another century, but it’s way beyond the design life for the series and it’s pretty far outside the safety specs. I suppose if it fails underway, you can always shut down and transfer to one of the other habitats, since you all seem to be crewed well below capacity. I sure wouldn’t send it off alone on a colony mission.”
“That is our assessment as well,” the Zarent said. “Please inform the Drazen ambassador and the Union Station administration that Koffern has been declared unsafe to travel until the new pile is installed.”
Thirteen
“Live, from the Grenouthian soundstage on Union Station. It’s Species Wars!”
The audience roared and stamped their feet. Kelly stood stunned at the sudden name change to her show, wondering for a second if all of the high-tech gear on the set had caused her implant to glitch. Then a hologram showing an axe crossed with a plasma weapon appeared floating over the set, and she knew something had gone badly wrong.
Mr. Clavitts ran out onto the stage, dressed in a getup that made him look like a deranged leprechaun with a glandular problem, and took a theatrical bow. The Grenouthian prop staff had fixed him up with scepter and instructed him to speak into it, even though all of the show’s audio was actually captured by microphone arrays that could follow a buzzing fly through the room without a fluctuation in volume. Kelly understood now why the Grenouthian producer had drawn her aside for an urgent conference about nothing that had dragged on for two hours before the start of the show. The bunnies had changed it all on her!
“Welcome to the first broadcast of Species Wars. I’m your host, Doug Clavitts, and we’re going to start right off selecting contestants from our studio audience.” He paused and swept an arc over the audience with the scepter, the end of which now glowed brightly and cast a wide beam of red light. Invisible makeup on the foreheads of several aliens in the audience fluoresced when the red light illuminated them. Spotters quickly approached the marked sentients and ushered them to the back of the stage, where they were met by an assistant director wielding a bonded legal tab.
“The mark of Cain,” Clavitts intoned into the scepter, employing an unnaturally low voice that sounded like it was emanating from a tomb. “Earth’s pre-history collides with the tunnel network. While our contestants are being briefed, I’ll explain the selection process. As our studio audience arrived today, they were asked to complete questionnaires in which we tested their knowledge of alien cultures and their feelings about interspecies cooperation.”
Kelly relaxed a little on hearing they hadn’t dispensed with the questionnaires. I
t had taken her weeks of working with Libby to come up with a customized list of questions for each species that would be relevant for their frame of reference. The idea was to select contestants who were naturally sympathetic to good interspecies relations, but who also held preconceptions about some of their traditional rivals that could be dispelled on the live holo-cast.
When the Grenouthian producer had received Kelly’s final proposal, he’d gone wild over it, and the network had rushed the show into production much faster than Kelly had ever thought possible. She could see now that she should have listened to Aisha’s advice about retaining an entertainment attorney, but maybe the name change and the weird emblem were just a come-on to attract viewers. After all, what did she know about show business? She heard the audience burst into wild cheers, and started paying attention again.
“I’m glad you all approve,” Doug concluded, making Kelly wonder what she had missed while lost in her thoughts. She’d have to ask Libby to play it back for her during the first commercial break.
The eight contestants, each from a different species, emerged onto the stage simultaneously and seated themselves in pre-assigned pairs. Somehow, the Grenouthians had gotten it all backwards, seating individuals from feuding species together. The Dollnick was paired with the Frunge, the Horten with the Drazen, and the Vergallian with the human. Only the Grenouthian and the Verlock were on nominally good terms, and that was mainly because they had both been around too long to hold a grudge when business was involved.
“Before we move on to the questions, how about a little exercise in team building?” Clavitts asked, winking at the studio audience. “Who wants to volunteer for a bonus point?”
Kelly had worked with Aisha to prepare team building exercises for all of the possible alien pairings, though she hadn’t planned to do any of them live. They just weren’t that interesting, like coloring in pictures together and sharing water from a pitcher. It was kid stuff, really, which was the reason Kelly had chosen them. She didn’t want the team building exercises to turn into a competition in their own right.
“I’ll do it, Doug,” the human contestant called out.
“It takes two to tango, Mr. uh, Scar,” Clavitts responded, approaching the pair of contestants. “Is the lovely lady on board with this?”
The human and the Vergallian were indeed an odd pairing. The young man, somewhere in his early twenties by Kelly’s estimate, looked like he had spent his youth running the corridors, probably involved in the low-level scams and questionable recreational activities that passed for crime on Union Station. The Vergallian was attractive, but she looked like a defective copy of the upper caste women who rotated rapidly through the ambassadorial posts and functioned as the royalty in the Empire of a Hundred Worlds.
“Tell me about the exercise and I’ll tell you if I’m on board, Human,” the Vergallian replied.
The host approached the pair and whispered rapidly to each one in turn before stepping to the side. The young man rolled up his sleeves to display his amateurish tattoos and stepped out from behind the little desk-like stand provided for each pair of contestants. The Vergallian woman followed and positioned herself behind him.
“For a point then,” Clavitts said, and snapped his fingers. A bunny in the wings began rapidly patting his belly, producing a bass version of a drum roll. “Three, two, one!”
The human leaned backwards, looked puzzled, and lost his balance. When he realized that his partner wouldn’t be catching him, he got his arms back, but it was too late to really soften the impact that much, and he hit with a thud.
The Vergallian stood aside with her hands spread, a wicked smile on her face, and said, “Oops.”
“Way to take one for the team,” Clavitts proclaimed, as the audience erupted in laughter. “I think we can give you a point for trying. Now, on to the first question, this one for the Grenouthian and the Verlock. If it weren’t for the Stryx rules, which species on the tunnel network would you attack first?”
Kelly actually yelled, “Hey!” out loud this time, but nobody heard over the roar of the studio audience. The question was supposed to be, “If the Stryx suddenly abandoned the tunnel network, what species would you turn to first to begin building an alliance to fill the gap?”
The Grenouthian and the Verlock looked at each other questioningly, and then the giant bunny nodded and said, “Each other?”
“Correct!” Clavitts yelled, reading rapidly from prompts appearing on his heads-up display “As two of the oldest and wealthiest species on the tunnel network, getting the jump on your main rival could make all of the difference. I’ll take that answer for both of you and award two points.” The host glanced at the Grenouthian director and saw him counting down. “We’re going to take a quick commercial break, and then we’ll be back with the rest of the first round.”
Kelly tried yelling at the director to get his attention, but he was around the other side of the stage, and the whole area was a mass of burly bunnies running this way and that. She recalled that the first break was only forty-six seconds or whatever the standard spot was on the Grenouthian network, so she forced herself to calm down and called for help.
“Libby? They’ve turned my show into a bad joke. Can you replay for me what Mr. Clavitts said while the assistant director was briefing the contestants backstage?”
“I’m sorry to hear about the show, Kelly,” Libby answered immediately. “It doesn’t look like something you would be involved in at all. Here’s the replay you requested, starting thirty seconds back.”
“As our studio audience arrived today, they were asked to complete questionnaires in which we tested their knowledge level of alien cultures and their feelings about interspecies cooperation. From those questionnaires, we selected the individuals who scored the worst on both factual knowledge and empathy. After all, if it’s warm fuzzy feelings you want, you can watch Let’s Make Friends every day on this network. And now, to war!”
Kelly gnashed her teeth and looked for the Grenouthian director, who was counting back in from the commercial break. She began working her way around the set, muttering under her breath as Clavitts started in again with the banter. It was only her sense of propriety as the EarthCent Ambassador that held her back from running onto the stage and declaring that her show had been hijacked.
“It’s just the Grenouthian approach to entertainment,” Libby said through Kelly’s implant, trying to calm her friend. “I know you don’t watch many holo-casts yourself, but other than the documentaries and sports, confrontational-type live shows are very popular. Think of it as a harmless outlet for the bottled-up aggression that we don’t allow on the tunnel network.”
“But they’re joking about war like it’s some kind of game!” Kelly subvoced back. “And they’re doing it under the EarthCent brand.” She came to a halt, blocked by the broad backsides of a row of large bunnies she couldn’t push past. “What time is it on Earth? Can you put me through to the President? I have to warn him.”
“Secure channel to EarthCent headquarters opened,” Libby reported. “The president isn’t available, but a Hildy Greuen would like to speak with you.”
“Put her on,” Kelly groaned, recognizing the name of EarthCent’s new branding consultant. She wondered if being an ambassador gave her diplomatic immunity against lawsuits initiated by her own employers.
“Great show!” Hildy exclaimed. “I know you must be busy with a million things, but try to make sure Mr. Clavitts has our script for the product placement, and I look forward to meeting you in person sometime. Can I give the president a message for you?”
“Uh, no, that’s alright,” Kelly subvoced. “The, er, show isn’t exactly what I planned. You’re not worried about EarthCent’s brand suffering?”
“First viewers, then content,” the marketing expert replied. “We can’t sell them on peace and cooperation if we can’t get them to watch. Oh, did you see that? The guy with the four arms looks like he’s going to kill somebody.
I’m going to let you go because I know how much these calls cost.”
“Nice talking to you,” Kelly subvoced to dead air. Now she knew that at least one of the Earth networks had picked up the tunneling feed from the Stryx and were broadcasting live, so even if she’d reached the president, there was no way to stop people from seeing it. A small gap appeared in the crowd of Grenouthians in front of her, and she squeezed between a couple of soft bellies, emerging in the clear.
“I always heard that the Drazens and the Hortens had it in for each other, but I never thought I’d see mature sentients let a vendetta get in the way of a great deal,” Clavitts remarked, scratching his head in his folksy way. “Each of you had half of the answer on your heads-up display, so all you had to do was put it together and you would have won the first round. Weren’t you paying attention when we assigned the teams?”
“Better the station should fall into a black hole than I should help a Drazen,” the Horten remarked scornfully.
“The day a Horten can do anything to help a Drazen is the day I choke myself with my own tentacle,” the Drazen responded, not even looking in his assigned partner’s direction.
Clavitts caught Kelly’s eye where she stood in the wings and shook his head. His own suggestion had been to rehearse the whole show using a script and actors, rather than going live with volunteers from the studio audience. Fortunately, he’d negotiated his own contract, and the Grenouthians were on the hook to pay him for a season even if the show closed on the first night.
“So the first round goes to our senior citizens, the Verlock and the Grenouthian,” Clavitts continued, trying to sound upbeat. “When we come back after the commercial break, we’ll be showing you some of the great Earth products the winners will be taking home, and then we’ll move on to the direct questioning round. Don’t touch that hologram!”
