by E. M. Foner
“We can’t even make a little border of stones or something?”
“Your father didn’t want that and neither do I,” Marge said. She took a small silver flask out of her purse and poured a liquid that smelled suspiciously like single malt Scotch onto the earth. “Don’t ask. Come on, Samuel. Help an old woman take a little walk and let your Mom spend some time with her father before we head back. Coming, Joe?”
Four
“Good morning, David,” Aisha said, looking up from the stove where she was preparing breakfast. “You’re here early today. I’m not even sure if Dorothy is up yet. But where are your shoes?”
“Uh,” David stuttered, looking suddenly embarrassed.
“Hey, you’re blocking the doorway,” Paul said, moving around the young man and going over to see what Aisha was cooking.
“I want yogurt,” Fenna announced, skipping into the kitchen and positioning herself in front of one of the high stools. She turned and looked at David, and then commanded, “Up.”
Dorothy’s boyfriend obligingly lifted the girl onto the stool, acutely conscious that Aisha’s eyes had never left him.
“Did you stay over?” Aisha asked suspiciously.
“Uh,” David replied, shuffling his bare feet and looking to Paul for help.
“Dorothy is twenty-one and they’ve been dating for nearly five years,” Paul reminded his wife, throwing in a little shoulder rub to ease her obvious tension. “You were only nineteen when we got married.”
“Married,” Aisha repeated. “Is it a coincidence, David, that I’m seeing you here in the morning for the first time when Dorothy’s parents are away?”
“That’s not…” David muttered, backing towards the door.
“Sit,” Paul instructed, and then gave his wife a kiss on the cheek. “You’re cute when you get all traditional,” he informed her.
Aisha’s nut-brown complexion darkened noticeably. “And what did Beowulf have to say about all of this?”
“He’s on a sleepover,” Dorothy answered, crowding into the kitchen and going over to lean against David. After registering the look of disapproval on Aisha’s face, the girl added by way of explanation, “Brinda invited Beowulf to keep company with their Cayl hound.”
“It looks like you’re making more than enough roti for everybody,” Paul said, pointing to the growing mound of flat breads that his wife had continued to prepare, even as she carried out the interrogation.
“I invited the Cohans for breakfast to talk about their son and his little Stryx friend appearing on my show.”
“That’s a great idea,” Dorothy said. “I’ll go set the table. Come on, David.”
“Mikey is coming?” Fenna asked.
“They’ll be here in around five minutes,” Aisha confirmed. “Do you want to go greet them since Beowulf is away?”
“Okay.” The girl carefully climbed down from the high stool, holding onto the counter with one hand, and then ran out of the kitchen.
The moment Fenna exited the room, Aisha asked, “Do you really think it’s okay for David to stay over with her parents away?”
“Sure, I’m surprised he hasn’t before. I guess he’s still scared of Joe.”
“Or Beowulf. Well, I suppose David can eat the dog’s share this morning. Will you start putting out the side dishes?”
A few minutes later, Fenna ran up the ice harvester’s ramp with Mike and Spinner in hot pursuit. Shaina and Daniel followed with the baby at a more sedate pace, and everybody sat down to a home-cooked Indian breakfast.
“It feels so weird being here without Kelly,” Shaina commented. “I still remember the first time she came to the Shuk shopping for counterfeits and my Dad asked me to take her around.”
“I’m just hoping that Joe talked to you about the poker game,” Daniel said, looking over at Paul. “I think I’m finally getting a feel for Dring’s tells. Toughest alien I ever played against.”
“I promised Dad I’d put out the tables and handle refreshments, but Stanley is going to take his seat,” Paul replied. “How are the preparations going for your conference this year?”
For the next ten minutes, the EarthCent consul monopolized the conversation with a detailed report on the evolution of the Sovereign Human Communities Conference, pausing only long enough to inhale a mouthful of food at occasional intervals. Shaina shrugged apologetically at the others, but everyone knew how important the conference had become to Daniel, and they enjoyed his enthusiasm. He wrapped up his report with a funny story about how the humans living on an open Dollnick world had taken to using alien idioms, such as “two arms short” for a half-baked business plan, and then headed off to the embassy in a rush, because he had a holo-conference scheduled.
Fenna, Mike, and Spinner all disappeared under the table to play a secret game, and David excused himself to leave for work. Dorothy and Shaina got into a discussion about shoe development for SBJ Fashions, and Jeeves floated in just as Aisha was working up her nerve to make a pitch to the little Stryx.
“Morning, Jeeves,” Paul said. “Are you going to help me with repairs today? We’re not taking in any new ships while Joe is gone, and I’d like to clean this lot out before the weekend.”
“I thought perhaps you could use an extra hand, or at least a pincer,” Jeeves responded. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“Did you know I was planning on asking Spinner to appear on my show?” Aisha inquired.
“Libby might have mentioned something. As long as I’m already here, I’d be honored to assist if I could.”
“Does that mean you think it’s a good idea?”
“I think all of your ideas are good ideas,” Jeeves replied, laying it on thick.
“I’m going out to make the morning rounds,” Paul announced, figuring that if he wasn’t in the room, there would be less chance of being blamed for anything Jeeves did or didn’t do. “Let me know if you need anything.”
Aisha examined Jeeves closely, and for a moment, she considered asking him to leave. Then the children emerged from their table-cave, and she decided to just proceed as planned.
“Mike, Spinner. Could you guys come over here for a minute?”
The boy and the little Stryx came and stood before Aisha, their body language suggesting that they had been caught red-handed in some crime. Spinner lived up to his name by rotating nervously in one direction and then the other as he floated in place, and Aisha had to suppress the urge to ask what they had been doing under the table.
“Spinner,” she began. “Did you know that Mike is going to start appearing on ‘Let’s Make Friends’ with our next cast change?”
The little Stryx bobbed and ventured a creaky, “Yes, Mrs. McAllister.”
“Aisha,” she corrected him gently. “Did you know that we’ve never had a little Stryx on the show?”
Spinner stopped spinning and began to vibrate alarmingly. “You haven’t?”
“I was thinking that if you’re interested, you could come on the cast with Mike.”
“I could?”
“It would be fun. We play games and tell stories. I’m sure you’ve seen the show.”
“Yes,” the little Stryx replied, sinking to the floor.
“Are you alright?” Aisha asked in alarm.
“Nobody floats on your show,” Spinner said, and began tipping from one side to the other like a wobbly toy figure.
“That’s because they don’t know how,” Aisha explained. “We don’t have a rule against floating. Of course, you would be welcome to move any way you like.”
Spinner popped back up into the air and immediately started doing three-quarter turns to the left and right. “Teacher says it’s okay,” he rasped.
“Do you mean Libby? I discussed it with her before asking.” Aisha relaxed a little, and continued with the question she asked all new cast members. “What do you like to do?”
“Go to school, and play with Mikey and Fenna.”
“Anything else?�
��
“Was that the wrong answer?” the little Stryx chirped nervously. “I’ve never been asked to be on a show before. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“There is no right or wrong response. I just want to get an idea of what you like to do.”
“How can there be no right or wrong?” Spinner’s constant motion came to a dead stop. “Did I just fail?”
“You’re doing fine,” Aisha reassured the little Stryx, but she glanced over at Jeeves for support.
“Think of it this way,” Jeeves suggested, seizing the chance to jump into the conversation. “Say you were in a boat with two humans and they both fell in. Which one would you save?”
“Jeeves!” Aisha said angrily.
“Fell in where?” Spinner asked.
“Wherever the boat was,” Jeeves replied. “Humans are always falling out of boats.”
“Is one of them Mikey?” the little Stryx wanted to know. The boy stopped teasing Fenna and stood a little straighter at the mention of his name.
“Maybe they’re both Mike.”
“So it’s a multi-dimensional math problem,” Spinner declared in relief. “Can I have time to work it out?”
“Never mind the boat,” Aisha said. “I just want to make sure that you’re comfortable using your imagination since we do a lot of that on the show.”
“You want me to lie? Libby teaches us to tell the truth whenever practical.”
“Imagination isn’t lying,” Dorothy interjected. “Shaina and I were talking about creating new shoes just now, so we have to use our imaginations.”
Spinner swung about in the direction of the fashion designer and the businesswoman and inspected their feet. “But your shoes don’t look broken,” he objected.
“Oh, I have lots of shoes. And we aren’t creating them just for us, but for everybody who likes new shoes. We want to produce a unique product that doesn’t already exist.”
The little Stryx paused to absorb this latest nugget of information. “You want to make new shoes that aren’t really shoes?”
“Well, they’ll still be shoes,” Dorothy explained awkwardly. “We aren’t designing new ones just for the sake of being different. They still have to fit our feet and make us look and feel good.”
“And they have to sell,” Jeeves reminded her.
“They’re going to be better than the old shoes,” Dorothy concluded energetically.
“Better how?”
“This is just like visiting Libby’s school on Parents Day,” Shaina commented with a laugh. “Spinner. I think you’ll enjoy being on the show, and you can practice your imagination with Mike and Fenna before it starts so you don’t make mistakes.”
“I’ll try it,” the little Stryx rasped, resuming his pattern of partial spins. “Can I go practice making things up now?”
“I think that would be a good idea,” Aisha replied, wondering if Spinner was going to put her through the third degree every time she asked a question on the show. She decided on the spot to develop a strategy for avoiding circular conversations, and made a mental note to warn the Grenouthian studio engineers about reflections coming off the young Stryx’s constantly moving metal body.
“I’m still curious to know which Mike he’s going to save from drowning,” Jeeves said, looking after the children as they fled from the ice harvester to get away from the grownups.
“I should have known what a big help you were going to be,” Aisha retorted, glaring at the Stryx. “Does his voice have to be that scratchy? Can you adjust it?”
“It’s his voice, not a translation device,” Jeeves replied. “Stryx don’t communicate with one another through spoken words unless we’re being polite to biologicals who happen to be present. Back when Libby started her experimental school for humans and used me as the guinea pig for the first Stryx student, she decided to let me develop my own audible voice, rather than simply mapping our communications onto English.”
“But surely even the youngest Stryx has a larger vocabulary then pretty much anybody.”
“It’s not a vocabulary issue, it’s about learning to communicate. Spinner’s lack of vocal control just reflects the uncertainty he feels about what he’s saying. Language conveys much more than simple facts, and it took me months just to understand how much of my feelings I should reveal in my voice. You should ask Libby to play back my introductory speech to the class. I sounded like a metallic rat being fed into a meat grinder.”
“I remember a little from when I helped teach Metoo to speak,” Dorothy volunteered. “I was only four, and I didn’t understand that Metoo was really better than me at everything except for socializing with humans. It’s the one built-in skill we have that Stryx don’t.”
“That’s why Libby has been slowly raising the age of the school children she pairs with the young Stryx,” Jeeves explained. “Your brother was five when he got Banger as his work/play assignment, and Mike was nearly six when he started with Spinner. It’s really cut down on the number of little Stryx getting emotionally overloaded and shutting themselves off, which saves me a lot of running around to wake them.”
“Is there any chance that Spinner will shut himself off on my show?” Aisha asked. “I wouldn’t want to traumatize hundreds of billions of children.”
“There’s always a chance, but Spinner strikes me as quite stable, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
“What pun?”
“He means gyroscopically,” Shaina explained. “After working with Jeeves for ten years, I’ve gotten used to his humor. You can take Stryx out of the physics, but you can’t take the physics out of the Stryx.”
“But what if something happened and he did shut himself off?” Aisha asked. “I’ve had cast members fall asleep on set, but the other children wake them up. It’s almost a rite of passage with young Fillinducks because the lighting makes them drowsy.”
“I could come to the studio while you’re shooting, just to be on hand,” Jeeves offered.
Dorothy and Shaina both made faces and shook their heads at Aisha, but the host of ‘Let’s Make Friends,’ either didn’t see, or she was so worried about Spinner becoming catatonic on her show that she didn’t care.
“Thank you, Jeeves. That’s a relief. But if he really has access to all of the Stryx knowledge and doesn’t always understand what he’s saying, what if he lets out some technical secret on the show? It’s a live broadcast, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for everybody learning how to create black holes at home using common kitchen cleaners.”
“You’d need gazillions of tons of kitchen cleaners to create a black hole,” Jeeves replied, sketching a circle in the air with his pincer, as if to mentally encompass the project. “And there aren’t any two-word answers to the secrets of the multiverse.”
“But what if, say, the Stryx know that the disappearance of that Horten colony ship a few cycles back was actually due to an alien attack, and not a technical failure,” Aisha persisted, trying to come up with a worst case scenario. “If a little Horten asked a question about it on the show and Spinner answered truthfully, it could start a war!”
“There’s always a transmission delay,” Jeeves replied, and then clicked his pincer a few times. “Oops, Libby says the delay was a secret, so don’t tell the Grenouthians.”
“But I thought the show was broadcast in real-time over the Stryxnet,” Aisha protested. “It’s instantaneous.”
“Paul and his friends couldn’t have played Raider/Trader using ship controllers if there was a lag,” Dorothy pointed out.
“It’s not a technical limitation. It’s an introduced delay, just for network broadcasts. I believe that on Earth they used to call it a ‘tape delay,’ and it gave the censors time to bleep bad language.”
“You’re censoring my show?”
“Not your show, everybody’s shows,” Jeeves reassured her, and then continued to talk out loud, even though it was obvious he was addressing one of the older Stryx. “Alright, I shouldn’t have
said anything, but now that they know, the least I can do is to clarify the situation. What do you mean this should be a private conversation? Oh, sorry. I do it now without even noticing. Yes, seriously. No, I do not have my pincer manipulators crossed. I do? Well, I’m still right.”
“Are you really talking to somebody, or are you practicing a stand-up act?” Dorothy asked suspiciously.
“Do you think I have potential?” Receiving no reply, Jeeves let out an exaggeratedly mechanical sigh and continued. “There’s no delay on game data or direct communications since they utilize point-to-point addressing. Our concern is strictly with broadcasts. Not long after the first-generation Stryx began selling real-time communications bandwidth, one of the probationary species on the original version of our tunnel network used a popular sitcom to broadcast instructions to their expatriates to instantly launch attacks against various host species. You’re talking tens of millions of years before my time, but it was quite an embarrassment.”
“The Grenouthians assured me that they pay top cred for real-time,” Aisha insisted.
“It is real-time,” Jeeves replied. “Just with a delay.”
“I’ll bet your elders think you’re the one who needs a tape delay,” Shaina commented.
“Don’t give them any ideas,” the Stryx replied, sounding suddenly nervous. “You know that Libby is a terrible eavesdropper.”
“So you’re saying that Spinner probably won’t put himself into a coma, and that if he blurts out anything that he shouldn’t, Libby or Gryph will just censor it,” Aisha summarized. “But what could they use to fill in the gap?”
“Public service announcements,” Jeeves said, and lowered his speech register to that of a professional announcer. “This is a reminder to keep your personal belongings with you at all times while transiting stations on the tunnel network. Help keep space clean and give our lost-and-found employees a break.”
Dorothy giggled and slapped the Stryx on his casing. “Stop it.”
