by E. M. Foner
“Not entirely unlike a tentacle,” Hert deadpanned, waving that member behind his head. “Due to which, we’re entirely dependent on informers and technological means for intelligence gathering in the Empire, since no Drazen would ever pass as a native. But thanks to the ability of your agents to mimic Vergallian commoners, you may be able to infiltrate the Fives. In the least, you’re in a better position to recruit moles than we are, since your agents could portray themselves as Imperials or Fleet.”
“Now that I understand exactly what we’re looking for I’ll have our analysts go through all of our Vergallian assets again to see if we already have somebody in place,” Clive said. “I take it you don’t assess any risk to the tunnel network, other than the direct impact on mercenaries and other humans working in the Empire of a Hundred Worlds, should any out-of-season wars of succession arise.”
“Well, there’s always the possibility that they’ll undertake some sort of publicity stunt to attempt to draw attention to their cause,” Hert cautioned them. “Your own report about the young Vergallian royals going underground indicates that they may be taking precautions to avoid being placed in preventive custody as the establishment attempts to defuse the situation.”
“If their purported goal is to bring us into the fold, attacking a human colony would be counter-productive,” Blythe pointed out.
“Unless they make it look like somebody else did it,” Thomas speculated. “What if they want to convince people that the Stryx can’t or won’t protect us when we move beyond Earth or the tunnel network? The Fives could pretend to be pirates and attack one of our off-network colonies.”
“They could just hire pirates,” Clive said. “Is this the same group that was behind Vergallian Intelligence’s attempt to stage phony human elections and convince us to withdraw from the tunnel network?”
“Ah, yes. Your Human Expatriates Election League debacle,” Hert mused. “It does seem highly likely, but we’ve never been able to infiltrate Vergallian Intelligence, so your guess is as good as mine.”
“If the bottom line comes down to upper caste families battling over fiefdoms, it doesn’t seem like there would be anything we could do to stop it,” Blythe said. “Why do you think it would help to get the two sides, or even the three sides, to sit down and talk at the ball?”
“Talking is always better than fighting, at least as long as you keep your eyes open,” the Drazen replied. “In my experience, sentients in positions of power tend to underestimate how much their subordinates resent not being the ones in charge. And in an Empire where the royal bloodlines reach back over two million years to the Vergallian homeworld, the opposing sides have far more in common with each other than they do with most of their subjects. It really is a family affair.”
Hert rose and stretched, balancing on one foot and pulling the other up behind his back with his tentacle before alternating sides.
“Thank you for making the time to see us,” Clive said, immediately understanding the cue that the head of Drazen Intelligence needed to get going. “You’ve helped put in context many of the stories that Keeto told me as a child. I never realized that the Vergallians took origin myths so seriously.”
“Pride is a powerful motivator,” the Drazen commented. “Keep me posted if you uncover anything new, and otherwise I’ll be back on the station for Dring’s party.”
“I’ll show you out,” Thomas said.
“I’ll do it,” Jeeves offered, popping up from behind a large shrub. “Oh, and here’s the catering,” he added, setting down a large insulated box. “I happened to be doing a safety inspection of the delivery bot stable in the Little Apple when Pub Haggis posted an order so I volunteered to take it myself. It didn’t seem polite to interrupt such an important meeting when I arrived.”
Eleven
“So what do the aliens want from us?” Kelly asked rhetorically. She paused to make eye contact with members of the audience in the Vermont room, the smallest of the conference venues at the hotel. The ambassador didn’t recognize any familiar faces among the three dozen or so session attendees with their hand-written nametags, and she decided to proceed cautiously in case the audience turned out to be hostile.
“Everything,” a man wearing rough homespun clothing called out before she could continue. “They want our land. Our resources. Our women.”
Kelly attempted to maintain a neutral expression, but raucous cheering from the other people in the room made the corners of her mouth turn down.
“And what exactly do you believe the aliens want human women for, uh, Hank?” she asked, reading off his nametag.
“Experiments,” he asserted.
“You tell us,” a red-faced woman dressed entirely in black and wearing some sort of bonnet over her hair shouted at the ambassador. Her printing was so sloppy that Kelly couldn’t make out the name, though it looked like three letters. “I heard this is your first time back on Earth in almost three decades, so I’m sure you know more about it than we do.”
“I wasn’t agreeing with Hank’s thesis, I just want to understand your fears,” Kelly replied, wishing she had the words back as soon as they left her mouth. She knew from prior negotiations that telling people they were afraid was a nonstarter for dialogue. “In my experience, the aliens don’t want our women at all.”
“So it’s like that, is it,” the woman drawled, her insinuation clear as crystal from her tone. Several of the younger men in the room began looking around uncomfortably, as if they expected aliens to come out of the walls and carry them away.
“I’m afraid we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” Kelly said, hoping to avoid the whole topic of the possibility of physical relations between various species. “Perhaps some of you could tell me where you’re getting your ideas about aliens?”
“Books,” a younger woman answered, holding something up in her hand. Kelly strained her eyes for a moment, before cheating and using her implant to zoom in on the tab, which turned out to be displaying a book cover. The title was, “My Drazen Master,” and the image showed a scantily-clad human female with a tentacle wrapped around her neck.
“That’s just fiction,” Kelly said dismissively, though given the well-known libidos of young Drazen males, it might actually have been an autobiography. “I can’t see your name tag.”
“Hannah,” the girl replied, swiping another book cover onto the tab. “How about this one?” The new title, “Tamed by the Queen,” showed a number of near-naked human males posed around an upper caste Vergallian woman’s boudoir, including one beaming Adonis who was serving as a living footstool.
“I’ll bet you twenty creds that the publishers are just recycling pre-Stryx adult romance novels by adding tunnel network aliens to the artwork,” Kelly countered. “I’ve been living on Union Station for over twenty years and I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Really?” The young woman displaying the book covers sounded disappointed. “What’s so great about aliens then?”
The ambassador was completely taken aback by the question. “I thought you were here to complain about a conspiracy to take over Earth.”
“I am,” Hank asserted, and several other attendees backed him up.
“I’m here as the local branch president of the ALA, the Alien Lovers Association,” Hannah said. “We have hundreds of thousands of members who are so waiting to be kidnapped.”
“And impregnated,” added an attractive woman, whose nametag identified her as Eve. Kelly would have taken the well-dressed ALA member to be a bank president or a physician had they met under different circumstances.
“This is, uh, unexpected,” the ambassador said, struggling to digest the diametrically opposed views of the members of her audience. “Could I ask you to separate into two groups according to your feelings about aliens so I’ll know who I’m addressing? Those of you who think the aliens are evil and a danger to Earth could move to the side near the entrance, and those who love aliens and want to, uh, could join Ha
nnah.”
There was some grumbling as people got up from the folding chairs and sorted themselves out, but a minute later, it was apparent that the two groups were evenly split. One woman wearing a pantsuit made out of some reflective material remained standing in the center aisle. She raised her hand tentatively.
“Yes?” Kelly asked.
“I don’t know where to sit,” the woman confessed. “I think the aliens are evil but I still want to get kidnapped.”
“Wherever you feel more comfortable,” the ambassador replied. “I’m afraid what I have to say is going to be equally disappointing to all of you, but what the aliens really want from humans is cheap labor, new markets, and a species less advanced than themselves to look down on. The special tolls the Stryx have established for Earth’s tunnel network connection make doing business here in partnership with humans a low-risk proposition, and EarthCent is working hard to attract more jobs and technology. But if you believe that the aliens are trying to take us over because we have something they want, I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Speaking of trees, what about those Frunge monsters buying up our forests?” a man in a flannel shirt cried angrily. “Everybody knows that they’re planting billions of seedlings to take over the planet.”
“Despite what you may think, Frunge children aren’t planted in forests,” Kelly replied patiently. “There’s no connection between the trees that grow on Earth and Frunge biology, other than a minor resemblance at the top and the bottom. They’ve been a spacefaring species for longer than the Drazens or the Hortens, if that helps put their development into context for you.”
“The Drazens are acquiring more and more of our agricultural production to starve us out,” another member of the anti-alien faction shouted. “They’re shipping food from all over the country to a secret factory upstate, and it’s all for export.”
“I visited that facility just last week, and there’s nothing secret about it,” Kelly responded. “The Drazens are providing jobs for over four thousand humans and will be expanding operations with EarthCent’s blessing. The agricultural capacity of Earth far exceeds the requirements of the remaining people.”
“It’s an alien conspiracy to depopulate Earth before they invade,” shouted Hank, who had previously posited that the aliens wanted women for experiments.
“No, the Stryx won’t let anybody invade Earth as long as we’re tunnel network members,” Kelly told them. “You may have been led to believe that there’s a profit for aliens in settling worlds with an existing population, but in order to attract settlers from their own established worlds, developers often need to do a complete makeover. I’m told that starting from scratch and terraforming a lifeless rock actually has cost advantages over reengineering a planet with an existing ecosystem, especially given Stryx rules about preserving native species.”
“What do you take us for?” an angry young man yelled. “Everybody knows that EarthCent sold Venus to those four-armed freaks, and that they’re using it to establish a foothold in our solar system.”
“Who is this everybody you all keep talking about?” Kelly demanded. “The Dollnicks are terraforming Venus for us, not for themselves. They’re one of the more adaptable oxygen-breathing species on the tunnel network, but they prefer lower gravity, so if they were choosing a planet in our solar system to occupy, it would be Mars, or maybe one of Jupiter’s moons.”
“So it’s Mars they’re after,” Hank yelled.
“Please stop interpreting my hypothetical examples as statements of fact,” the ambassador said in a tired voice. “The Dollnicks are terraforming Venus under contract to EarthCent, the same as they constructed the space elevators.”
“And who’s paying for that?” a man whose nametag identified him as “Truth,” shouted.
“The Stryx loaned us the money,” Kelly found herself shouting back. “Come on, none of this is a secret. Do you all intentionally avoid checking the facts lest they conflict with your preconceptions?
The room fell silent for a moment, and the ambassador tried to catch her breath and calm herself down. She had been mentally prepared for some crackpot theories about alien domination, but she had assumed that they would at least be based on an honest misunderstanding that she could explain away. Instead, the lottery method EarthCent had employed to distribute a limited number of conference passes to anyone with an interest in attending seemed to have attracted some of the sloppiest thinkers she had ever met.
“How about the Hortens?” one of the women on the ALA side asked, while the anti-alien forces mentally regrouped. For some reason, Kelly found herself wondering if there was a relationship between the questioner’s name, Ava, and membership in the ALA, since both were palindromes. “Do they kidnap women?”
“The only people I’m aware of who are kidnapping human women in space are human men,” Kelly replied, almost relieved to move back to the alien-lovers topic. “Well, Horten pirates may take women hostage and hold them for ransom, but that’s strictly a business thing. I was once briefly kidnapped myself before I became an ambassador, and my understanding is that my abductors were financed by men working at a mining colony who were unable to attract mates otherwise.”
“Do you have their contact information?” Ava asked.
“I, er, no. But I’m sure there must be some sort of exchange on the Stryxnet for women who want to become mail-order brides,” Kelly suggested. “Does anybody have any serious, I mean, practical questions about alien relations?”
“Everybody knows that the Vergallians are behind the Galactic Free Press, and they’re endlessly pushing stories about how the aliens do everything better than humans,” the black-bonneted woman said. “It’s psychological warfare.”
“First of all, you’re reading something into the stories that the rest of us aren’t. Second of all, the Galactic Free Press is owned and operated by the daughter of my embassy manager. If you look for evil motivations behind every good intention, I’m sure you’ll come up with something, but the purpose of the newspaper is to provide humans with information they can use.”
“That’s not what the Manhattan Post says,” the woman retorted, waving a rolled-up paper in her hand.
“I’m afraid I’ve never read—wait a minute. Is that the printed newspaper I found outside of my hotel room door this morning?”
“Probably. They have the contract for all the big hotels,” somebody called out.
“I thought it was an EarthCent prank,” Kelly admitted, unable to suppress a smile. “I laughed so hard that I almost choked on the dry bagel this hotel passes off as a continental breakfast.”
“Are you denying that the Manhattan Post stories are true?” Hank asked incredulously.
“I saved it here in my purse because I want to bring it back to Union Station to show all of my friends.” Kelly struggled for a moment with the overly complicated metal clasp that Flazint had designed for the otherwise useful bag manufactured by SBJ Fashions, and drew out the paper. She read the headline out loud. “EarthCent Ambassadors Replaced By Clones.”
“So what’s your point?” one of the alien-haters cried.
“Do I look like a clone to you?” Kelly demanded.
“Everybody looks like their own clone,” the man retorted, and the others murmured their agreement. Encouraged by the support from his compatriots, he continued, “All of us could be clones and not even know it. I mean, except for me, of course.”
“Clones don’t look like us, they look like each other,” Kelly argued. “No, wait. Maybe I’m thinking about the Gem.”
“She does kind of look like a clone now that you mention it,” the man in the flannel shirt observed, and people on both sides of the aisle murmured their agreement. “Can you prove that you’re not a clone?”
“How can anybody prove a negative like that?” Kelly replied in exasperation. “Can you prove that you’re not a clone?”
The man turned to his side, scowled, and then squinte
d near-sightedly around the room until he located the professional-looking woman across the aisle. “Honey. Tell these people I’m not a clone.”
“He’s not a clone,” Eve replied. “I would know.”
“That’s not proof,” Kelly pointed out, playing the role of the devil’s advocate. “You could both be clones.”
“How about that ambassador who brought her own clones to the conference,” somebody else shouted out. “She even had one of those alien names, Zera-something.”
“Svetlana Zerakova, and her daughters are identical twins, not clones.”
“Are you going to deny the teacher bot conspiracy?” Hank demanded. “Everybody knows that the Stryx supply them below cost to get into our homes and make our own children spy on us. The damn things are never off until the power pack dies, and they refuse to answer questions about any of the good stuff.”
“You people really need to get lives,” Kelly retorted. “The teacher bots help provide a basic education to children who don’t have access to schools, and they save your local governments a huge amount of money on textbooks for kids who do go to school. Next you’re going to complain about the special deal the Stryx give us on the tunnel tolls.”
“What kind of customer service is this?” Eve’s husband demanded. “You’re supposed to agree with us and say you’ll look into it. Instead you’re insulting us, and you even libeled the Manhattan Post.”
“Slandered, except I didn’t,” Kelly informed him. “What that paper printed about the ambassadors is libel. When you lie about somebody while speaking, it’s slander. And I’m the EarthCent Ambassador to Union Station, not a customer relations manager.”
“This is a waste of time,” the man in the flannel shirt asserted loudly. “Let’s go disrupt the other sessions like we planned from the beginning.”
“No, wait!” Kelly cried, but it was too late. She watched helplessly as her audience streamed out the exit, and she heard shouting coming from the hall when they discovered that the doors to the other rooms were locked. The ambassador wondered for a moment why the president hadn’t explained to her that the job was to divert the nut cases into a harmless outlet for an hour, but she had to admit that she never would have accepted the assignment if he had.
