Book Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassasor 13)

by E. M. Foner

  “What are you here for tonight, Lynx?” the ambassador asked, and then realized how her question might be misinterpreted. “Book night or poker night?”

  “Poker,” the cultural attaché replied. “I couldn’t make it through Bleak House. It was too sad for Em.”

  “You read Dickens to your two-year-old?”

  “I read everything to her, except for EarthCent Intelligence reports, and that’s just because they’re so dry and I don’t want her sleeping all day. Woojin reads to her in Korean.”

  “Just to get her ear accustomed to the language for if she wants to pick it up later,” the doting father added. “Can I help bring up the beer, Joe?”

  Another twenty minutes passed with guests arriving and drinks being served. Finally, the two groups separated to their designated areas, with the poker players immediately getting down to business.

  “Where’s Herl?” Clive asked, accepting the deck back from the Farling doctor after the giant insect dexterously cut the cards. “I thought he was taking a vacation just to hang around here and work on those crazy Drazen rides you guys found.”

  “And that’s exactly what he was doing when I walked past him on the way here,” Dring replied, even though the question had likely been directed at Joe. “He sends his apologies, but he’s in the middle of reprogramming the safety parameters on one of those frightening contraptions to make it ‘more fun,’ as he put it. He said he’ll be along later.”

  “I almost lost our whole class of trainees when I told them Herl needed volunteers to check the synchronization of the cutting blades on his Terror Ride,” Thomas said. “Apparently they thought I was giving them an order and only calling it volunteering.”

  “Five card stud?” the Farling inquired when Clive dealt the second card face-up.

  “King bets,” the head of EarthCent Intelligence confirmed.

  “Two yellows,” Jeeves declared, pushing the chips into the pot. “I’m seeing a lot of activity on the programmable cred we issued Dorothy for work purchases,” he added in Joe’s direction. “Have you heard from her recently?”

  “Kelly did. Dorothy and Kevin are on the elevator as we speak. If my son-in-law let the hub stevedores load in the cargo he’s already sent up, they’ll be entering the tunnel tonight. It sounded like they’ve had a highly successful trip.” Joe paused to examine his cards before adding, “Stanley couldn’t make it tonight because he’s too busy evaluating business models for all of the proposals the Open University students have been submitting for Flower. Apparently the kids have come up with some fairly useful ideas.”

  Thomas mucked his cards, Joe called, and the Farling pushed in two yellows.

  “Watch me now,” Lynx instructed her husband, and deliberately folded her seven of spades. She scowled as Woojin called and raised with a three of hearts showing.

  “We must be paying you too much,” Clive grumbled, throwing in his hand.

  Dring followed suit, leaving the bet to Jeeves, who called, followed by Joe. The Farling peered closely at the Stryx, the only remaining player he took seriously, and then conceded his own weak hand.

  “Gryph has offered me a leave of absence from my contractual obligation to the station’s med bay if I wish to accompany Flower on her shakedown cruise,” the insectoid alien commented. “It would mean closing my medical shop on the concourse for the duration since I’m irreplaceable, but the opportunity to analyze blood samples from so many diverse populations of Humans is tempting.”

  “You can’t leave the station,” Lynx protested. “Em would be heartbroken without her Uncle Beetle.”

  “I could accept Eccentric’s offer to be the co-captain and we could go along for a year,” Woojin said, then grunted at his next card, the four of spades.

  “King still bets,” Clive announced as he completed the round.

  “Let’s try a red one,” Jeeves proposed, pushing the chip into the pot. “Personally, I think you’d get on well with Flower, Woojin. She’ll appreciate the fact that you’ve had formal military training. The Dollnicks thrive on a rigid chain of command.”

  “You’re taking advantage of the fact that I always stay in for the first hand,” Joe complained, adding a red chip to the pot.

  Woojin checked his hole card, shook his head, and slid in his own red chip.

  “King still bets,” Clive said after dealing each of the remaining players their fourth card. “One round to go.”

  The Stryx tapped the cards in front of him with his pincer, indicating that he was standing pat. Joe passed with a look of relief, but Woojin pushed a red chip of his own into the pot. Lynx exploded.

  “You’ve got a three, a four and a six, all different suits!” she gritted out. “Jeeves wouldn’t have stayed in if a little pair would beat him.”

  “And I’ll call,” Jeeves said, adding the equivalent of a half a cred to the pot.

  Joe did the same, though he clearly would have preferred to fold.

  “Pair of kings bets,” Clive announced after dealing the final card.

  Lynx shot her husband another disgusted look but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m afraid I have to do this,” the Stryx said apologetically, pushing in a pair of blue chips.

  “What you have showing beats me,” Joe said with relief, getting out of the expensive hand.

  “All in,” Woojin declared, pushing his pile into the pot.

  Lynx reached for her husband’s hole card, but he swatted her hand away. Jeeves bobbed forward a bit, as if re-inspecting the man’s up-cards, and then called.

  “Finally,” Woojin declared, grinning like the Cheshire cat when he flipped over the five of diamonds that completed his inside straight.

  “Three kings,” Jeeves complained, uncharacteristically giving away his own hole card. “What a terrible beat. I’ve never lost my whole stake before, much less on the first hand of the night.”

  “Buy yourself a new one,” Joe said, passing the robot the box of chips. “I guess I can trust you to the extent of twenty creds, assuming that Dorothy hasn’t spent you into the poor house.”

  “You still played the hand wrong,” Lynx said in frustration as her husband stacked his winnings. “In what universe does it make sense to hold on for a low inside straight playing five card stud?”

  Over in the living room area, the argument over the secondary characters in Bleak House was growing heated.

  “Parasites,” Judith growled for the second time. “I don’t care if they’re family. That woman spending all of her time on her charities while her children starve and her husband is going bankrupt. The fat old poser who kills his wife with hard work so he can pretend to be a gentleman, and then tries to ruin his son’s life in her place. Somebody should do something about it!”

  “Dickens does do something about it,” Kelly said. “He holds them up to ridicule. I don’t want to ruin the surprise for the people who haven’t finished yet, but I think you’ll feel better by the ending.”

  “I thought it was interesting that the daughter of the charity woman fell in love with the son of that old fraud,” Donna said. “Dickens may exaggerate situations to make his points, but I think he really had a keen understanding of human behavior. I’m glad Kelly made us read this book.”

  “I didn’t make you—” Kelly began to protest, but Chance cut her off.

  “Sure you did. It was in the Galactic Free Press as your choice for the book club. Did you think we could ignore it?”

  “Chastity is the one who made it a feature! And I’m happy to take suggestions for our next book.”

  “Artificial People for Humans,” Chance responded promptly.

  “But you’re the co-author.”

  “It would be a big help to sales,” Chastity explained. “I subscribed to the Stryx service that reports register data for the publishing sector. Bleak House has sold over a hundred thousand copies since we announced that you chose it, and the on-demand printers are having a field day. When you consider that anybody
can get the electronic version for free from a teacher bot, you may have influenced tens of millions of humans around the galaxy to give it a try.”

  “Not to mention alien intelligence agents,” Blythe pointed out. “Did anybody actually understand the Jarndyce vs Jarndyce case at the center of the plot?”

  “I sent the translation that the station librarian made for me to our family advocate to try to figure it out,” Flazint informed them. “He said he’d need to see the original documents to offer an opinion, but that the practice of one individual producing multiple wills is always highly problematic. He also said that there was another inheritance case in the book involving a small farmer that was much more straightforward. A couple of brothers went to the law over centees and the legal costs ended up eating the whole estate. It wouldn’t be allowed in Frunge court.”

  “They prejudge the conclusion?” Chastity asked.

  “Litigation costs are limited by law to fifteen percent of the amount at stake in civil suits. In practice, lawyers just refuse to take those little cases, and the plaintiffs are welcome to appear before a magistrate and argue it themselves if they want to look foolish.”

  “I’m only about halfway through the novel but I do plan on finishing,” Affie said. “It’s just so foreign and sad. So many victims and not enough people who cared.”

  “You have to remember that most of the characters had very hard lives of their own,” Kelly told the Vergallian woman. “If I recall, the British government had only recently passed laws prohibiting child labor, and that only applied to children younger than nine.”

  “But even if we prorate your ages for lifespan, the children still wouldn’t be big enough to do much useful labor!”

  “That was the curse of the industrial revolution. The mechanical looms did the heavy work, but children could change spools of thread and gather the lint.”

  “Well, I finished the book and you couldn’t call it a romance,” Tinka said. “Everybody just blushed a lot and the babies seemed to appear out of nowhere. It reminded me more of the sorts of books males read.”

  “I thought you said Drazen men are too lazy to read,” Chastity tweaked her friend.

  “I said most of them are too lazy to learn musical notation so they can’t get the full meaning from true literature. They mainly read about wars and history before we joined the tunnel network. Come to think of it, wars and history were pretty much the same thing back then.”

  “Those sound like the sort of books that our people might understand if I have them translated,” Blythe said. “Can you suggest any?”

  “I can ask my dad or my brother,” Tinka replied with a sigh. “I just hope they don’t mistake it for interest on my part. Men do tend to go on about books they’ve read if you give them an opening.”

  “Speaking of the men, what are they shouting about over there?”

  “Straight flush,” Woojin crowed, raking in his second big pot of the night. “At first I thought it was just a bunch of small red cards, but when I arranged them, they turned out to be all hearts, all in a row.”

  “Do Humans have an expression about the sun eventually shining on a dog’s behind?” the Farling doctor asked grudgingly as he turned to the bank for a new supply of chips.

  “You’re complaining?” Jeeves demanded. “I had four aces this time!” The Stryx flipped over his cards, and sure enough, the only hand that could have beaten him was a straight flush.

  “New deck,” Clive called. “We’ve got to do something to cool him off.”

  “New player,” Lynx said, rising from her seat. “I can’t watch this. I’m going to go listen to Kelly talk about books.”

  “What’s she mad about?” Thomas inquired after his former spy partner left the table.

  “She can’t stand that I’m winning even though I play all wrong,” Woojin explained. “You know that her father was a professional gambler. My poker playing is an embarrassment to her.”

  “And well it should be,” the beetle rasped out on his talking legs. “Good timing, Herl. The seat is open.”

  “Thanks,” the Drazen spymaster said, settling in between Woojin and the Farling, who didn’t so much sit as lean forward over a chair to rest on the belly of his carapace. “No Daniel tonight? I see his wife over there.”

  “From what Kelly tells me, he’s working around the clock on this colony ship thing,” Joe replied as he began to send the cards around the table. “I guess my son and his student committee are creating a lot of extra work for Daniel since it’s another group to coordinate with.”

  “Funny, the Stryx involving the Open University in the deal,” Herl mused as he exchanged twenty creds for chips and put in his ante. “It’s not clear to me whether they’re doing it for your benefit or for Flower’s.”

  “I am sitting right here,” Jeeves said, peeking at his two down cards as Joe dealt a hand of seven card stud. “It has always been the policy of our Open University campuses to encourage students to tackle real-world projects.”

  “Let’s move the bet in the opposite direction in honor of our Drazen friend,” Joe said after dealing the third card, this last one being face-up. “Ace has control.”

  The Farling doctor turned his head to look past Herl and see what Woojin’s hand was showing before he tapped his ace with a foreleg. Joe also passed, followed by Thomas, Jeeves, Dring and Clive in close order. Woojin slid aside the four of diamonds to check his hole cards again, then pushed in a blue chip.

  “Fold,” Herl said, flipping over his king. “Since when do we bet big on the first card?”

  “I know you’re bluffing,” the beetle addressed Woojin, but after a moment’s hesitation, he threw in his own hand.

  “Too rich for my blood,” Joe said.

  “It’s times like these that I wish I’d kept my gambler enhancement from Quick-U,” Thomas commented, giving up his own cards.

  Jeeves said nothing but flipped over his queen.

  Dring munched thoughtfully on a stalk of celery for a moment. “On one hand, I concur with our Farling friend that you are most likely bluffing. On the other hand, with everybody else folding, the rationale for my staying in with such a poor starting hand is weak. I choose discretion,” he concluded, and pushed his cards in the direction of Thomas, who was next in line to deal.

  “Come on, boss,” Woojin addressed Clive. “Baby needs new shoes.”

  “Then you should be talking to Jeeves,” the director of EarthCent Intelligence said sourly. “He’s the one with the fashion business. Take it.”

  As Woojin sent his cards towards Thomas and swept in the antes, Blythe’s voice cut through the momentary silence, saying, “But I married a man who’s older than me by almost ten years, and that’s more than ten percent of my projected lifespan.”

  “Compared to Woojin and me, you’re a cradle robber,” Lynx informed her.

  “Joe’s a good deal older than me,” Kelly said, and over at the poker table, her husband snorted.

  “Shaina and I married young ones,” Brinda boasted. “Men are like Cayl hounds. You want to get them early while you can still train them.”

  “That’s not my point,” Tinka said. “Jarndyce, the one that Esther kept referring to as ‘Guardian,’ never should have aspired to her in the first place. He was already a grown man when she was a little girl, and he paid to have her trained as a housekeeper. It’s icky.”

  “I don’t see the problem,” Affie said. “We often marry men with more than a hundred years of age difference in either direction. I have an aunt who married a guy who was almost two hundred years younger than her and it’s a very happy marriage.”

  “She probably keeps him in line with pheromones,” Tinka said.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” the Vergallian replied patiently. “They wear off too quickly. We aren’t chemical factories.”

  “But Jarndyce realizes that himself and retracts the offer so she can marry the young doctor,” Kelly explained. “He even buys them a house.�
�

  “Thanks for ruining the ending,” Affie said.

  Several of the other women who hadn’t yet finished the long novel shook their heads as well.

  “I expect to see all of you on our setup day for Flower’s book fair benefit,” Donna announced during the lull. “It’s next Saturday on the park deck. As a bonus, anybody who helps gets first dibs on buying books before we let in the early-bird browsers.”

  Seventeen

  “Sharf Industries demo,” Samuel instructed the lift tube capsule. “It’s funny, but I don’t have a clue where we’re actually going,” he added for Vivian’s benefit. “Do the Sharf even have their own deck?”

  “I don’t think so,” the girl replied. “They aren’t tunnel network members and I think that’s the main criteria for getting the Stryx to grant a dedicated section of deck. Are you sure the others all know where to meet?”

  “Lizant said she notified everybody and she’s been a hundred percent reliable. We were lucky to get her as secretary.”

  “Does Yvandi have any relations in this factory that we’re visiting?”

  “I hope so, they’ll treat us better. Libby. How long until we get there?”

  “Three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. The factory is located in the heavy industries area where Gryph relegates the manufacturing facilities of some of the less cautious species. The Sharf are excellent engineers, but they are perhaps a little too comfortable with learning from their mistakes.”

  “Here,” Vivian said, producing a small box from her purse. “Put this on.”

  “Are you proposing?” Samuel joked as he popped open the lid. His smile froze when he saw the ring. “Uh, is this like an EarthCent Intelligence spy ring that does something?”

  “Yes. It protects you from Vergallian vamps,” the girl replied, and held up her left hand. “See? I have the same thing.”

  “Come on, really. What is it?”

  “It’s a couples ring. We’re scheduled for the Vergallian deck after the Sharf factory visit, and if you think I’m letting you go unprotected with your perfect high-caste accent and your dancer’s grace, you’ve got another thing coming.”