Rebecca stared at her dad in surprise. He smiled at her and patted her hand.
“I suggest you send someone to take a look in Rebecca’s stateroom. You’ll find that she did not bring any animals, rat or otherwise, onto your ship.”
Oh no. Rebecca started to speak, but her father gestured for her to remain silent.
Rebecca cringed at the thought of the discovery of the rats trapped in her bathroom. She wished the floor would open up and swallow her before her parents were disgraced because of her.
The captain looked at the Laus suspiciously, but he ordered a steward to do as David suggested.
You have a plan for this? She mouthed silently at God.
“Plans are not as good as surprises,” God said.
“Now, while your man is gone, I’m going to address your ridiculous claim about the ‘exotic alien creature.’ That’s clearly just a figurine made of mud, no more alive than any of the plastic flowers that fill this ship.”
The captain sputtered indignantly, “I’ve got a whole room of witnesses—”
“Does this thing look alive to you?” David poked at the remains of the golem. “I made this with her. I know what it is.”
Helen got up to examine the mud. “This is from our facial at the spa.” She sniffed it and made a face. “And it’s gone bad. What did your people put in this?”
“But, but—” the captain sputtered.
“The mud is from your spa,” Helen said. “If anything was causing this to move, then you might want to check your spa for alien infestations before other customers complain.”
The captain sat down sullenly and kept his mouth shut. Helen put an arm around Rebecca, who was too stunned by the turn of events. Not only was her mother not mad at her, but she was actually defending Rebecca.
“Parents, they sometimes surprise you, eh?” God said.
Rebecca wished this moment would last forever. She wished the steward sent to her room never returned.
The door to the captain’s office banged open. The out-of-breath, sweaty steward rushed in, came to a halt by the captain, and bent down to whisper to him what he had found in Rebecca’s stateroom.
Rebecca closed her eyes and waited for her doom.
“What have you done to MY SHIP?” The captain roared at the family sitting across the desk. “Her bathroom is filled to the ceiling with rats!”
David stood up and leaned across the desk to stare the captain in the face. “That’s what I wanted you to see. The rats came from your ship, not Rebecca. You should be thanking her. She was smart enough to trap the rats in her bathroom.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“If you check your ventilation ducts, you’ll find months worth of rat droppings and hair. Rebecca didn’t bring the rats on the ship. She’s the victim of your poor pest control procedures! She told us that she was going to catch the rats on this ship, and you’re lucky she succeeded.”
The captain dispatched several men to go examine the ventilation ducts and confirm David’s statement. But his face was ashen. He remembered the reports about odd droppings.
“Now, just imagine if you actually docked at New Haifa and allowed the rats to escape. At a minimum, Blueshift Cruise would be fined, and the press would have a field day writing about the lack of sanitation on Blueshift Cruise ships. I’d wager that you’d be fired in a second. So, let’s discuss the matter of compensation.”
The captain considered this. After a moment, he smiled. “How would you like to have your cabins upgraded to first class for the return trip? We’ll refund your tickets. And we’d like you to stay as our guest on New Haifa. We’ll pay for everything.”
David and Helen smiled back. “And daily passes to the spa for me and my daughter,” Helen said. “The full treatment. With very healthy mud.”
“Of course.”
“And the rats,” Rebecca spoke up. All the adults turned to look at her. She blushed, swallowed, but continued, “What’s going to happen to them?”
“I’m going to throw them out the airlock,” the captain said, irritated.
Come on, God, You promised, Rebecca thought.
She could have sworn that she heard God sigh.
“That doesn’t feel right to me,” Helen suddenly said. “It wasn’t the rats’ fault that they were put where they didn’t belong. Besides, they are descended from rats kept as pets. Hey, I just got an idea. I think you should bring them back to Earth and find families to adopt them.”
“Or we can always describe our rat-infested cruise to Travel and Leisure,” David added.
“Fine,” the captain said, defeated.
Thank you, Rebecca mouthed to God.
“YOU DONE GOOD,” God said. “Enjoy yourself on the beach down there.”
“You aren’t coming?”
“I could use a vacation,” God allowed. “Thinking about the effects of relativistic dilation on the timing of Shabbat gave me quite a headache. But there are too many things in the universe for me to worry about.”
“I’m glad I got to know You,” Rebecca said. “God, don’t be a stranger.”
She walked off the disembarking ramp with her family, into the bright sunlight and salty breeze of New Haifa.
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
SERVICE CHARGE
By Esther M. Friesner
“Yvitelli is such a charming little kingdom,” Naphtheena said, studying her nails as she enjoyed the spring morning at a table in the tavern courtyard. “What a shame I’m going to destroy it.” The dragon illustrated her plans for the kingdom in question by spearing a biscotto with the spike at the end of her long and graceful tail, and crisping the confection to ashes with a single gout of fire from her nostrils.
The waiter took in this spontaneous demonstration of un-spontaneous combustion with a jaundiced eye. Another man might have run away screaming, but M’sieu Bertrand hailed from the legendarily languid kingdom of Sesinaypazoonpeep, and thus was not easily roused from his carefully cultivated aura of ennui. He was also aware that dragons were good tippers. It came from their long-standing (and sometimes sprawling) tradition of slumbering on piles of treasure. For a dragon, bestowing largesse beyond the dreams of avarice was equivalent to a peasant giving you a couple of handfuls of straw from his miserable sleeping pallet.
“Perhaps in that case madame might consider making alternate plans for le tourisme?” M’sieu Bertrand inquired nonchalantly.
“Goodness, no, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Naphtheena replied, fluttering blue, scaly, lashless eyelids. “I’ve already filed the parchmentwork.” She sipped her tisane of spider blood and silently indicated that she wished another order of biscotti.
“And this time, don’t take so long,” she cautioned him. “I don’t know why you needed an hour to bring the first plate and I have even less of an idea why you then had to fetch the biscotti on an individual basis, but—”
“A thousand apologies, Madame.” If M’sieu Bertrand had been speaking his native tongue rather than Hucksterian (or the Extremely Common Lingo) he would have employed the First Person Indifferent, a verb form meant to convey insincerity and disdain like nobody’s business. “If I brought you the biscotti one by one, it was to prevent accidental crumbling, for to do otherwise were to insult the baker. Good things are worth the wait, is it not so? But perhaps madame does not know how to appreciate such a refined and sophisticated—”
The dragon’s eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to annoy me?”
The waiter’s brows lifted. “Is madame becoming irked? Peeved? Peradventure piqued? Dare I hazard… inf
uriated?”
Naphtheena took a deep, centering breath. “I am not. It would be quite unwise of me to permit a mere mortal to provoke me into losing my temper under the present circumstances. However, you might be interested to learn that among my kindred, anger is not a prerequisite to eating what irritates us, or even what attempts to do so. If I were to tell you the number of people I have devoured in cold blood—theirs—it would make your flawlessly coiffed head spin. But it would be much better for us both if it made your butt move into the kitchen and back here with my biscotti right about now.”
Her words had the desired effect. M’sieu Bertrand dashed off with alacrity and returned with biscotti. When he brought the tasty morsels, he found that another party had joined his customer at the small, round table. The creature that perched on the chair opposite the enormous dragon was much smaller, squatter, and covered in dirty taupe plumage from her garish yellow bird feet almost all the way up to her neck. The only portion of her body that was bare, besides her lovely woman’s face, was her equally attractive bosom. While Naphtheena eyed her askance, she cocked her head at the waiter in the manner of inquisitive pigeons everywhere.
“A friend of yours?” the waiter asked Naphtheena.
“Certainly not!” The dragon seemed appalled at the very thought. “Shoo her off at once!”
“Ah, Madame, would that I could.” M’sieu Bertrand flicked his fingers in an insouciant manner. “But this newcomer is a customer and our outdoor seating is limited.” He needlessly indicated the fact that there was only one table in the courtyard. “I am afraid that you will either have to share your place with her or pay your bill and depart at once.”
“All right, if I must. Wrap my biscotti to go and—”
The waiter whisked the plate behind his back. “This tavern is not licensed for takeaway service, alas. However, you are still responsible for paying for them.”
Naphtheena’s brow lowered. “You are trying to get my goat, aren’t you? If you were anything but a miserable fetch-and-carry, I would suspect you of dark motives against me.” She drew in another of those calming breaths and let it out in the waiter’s face. Coming from a dragon, such an exhalation bore the tang of sulfur and the charnel house, with a whisper of almond extract from her previous order of biscotti. It was no fragrant zephyr, as she well knew when she shot it at M’sieu Bertrand, who staggered at the sick-making pong. This mollified the dragon somewhat.
“Very well, I’ll share the table,” she said, and tapped the surface smartly with one claw. “My biscotti, if you don’t mind.”
M’sieu Bertrand looked a bit green, but nausea was not the chief emotion that his face revealed. For some as-yet-unknown reason, the waiter did not look so much queasy as thwarted. It took him a moment to recover his aplomb, whereupon he turned his attention to Naphtheena’s uninvited guest.
“Would madame care to see la carte du jour?” M’sieu Bertrand inquired suavely, all the while employing the famed Sesinaypazoonpeepian discretion to feast his eyes upon the feathered monster’s generous endowments.
“Don’t ask her that, you fool!” The azure dragon leaped to her feet in a panic, upsetting the table in her haste. “Don’t you know a harpy when you see one? They don’t talk to communicate, they—”
A stench of operatic grandeur engulfed the premises. The harpy flicked her tail feathers and fluttered to an unpolluted perch atop the thatched roof of the tavern. M’sieu Bertrand regarded the malodorous mound smothering on the abandoned chair, then turned to Naphtheena.
“Was that a oui or a non?”
She ate him.
It was at that very moment that a man clad in the robe of a wandering wizard chanced upon the small tavern where M’sieu Bertrand had once been employed. He observed the azure dragon with deep disfavor. “Hail, vile beast!” he called out. “Be thou apprised that by devouring yon mortal you stand in violation of the Basilisk Accords, as laid down by the Council of Wizards, Sorcerers, and Demon-masters and ratified in committee by the Ancient Union of Wyverns, Salamanders, and Dracos.”
“Apprise this,” said Naphtheena placidly, displaying one claw in a rude gesture. As she was a dragon of the four-clawed variety, the gesture in question did not look precisely the same as if it had been utilized by a human being, but the intent behind it got through. “I know that I violated nothing and I defy you to cite chapter and verse showing otherwise. I am painfully aware of all laws, statutes, governances, and plain old down-home rules that refer to dragons. You stinkin’ wizards managed to kill off enough of my relatives with your miserable rules to make the rest of us pay attention.”
The wizard got huffy. Folding plump arms across an equally plump chest, he beetled furiously at the dragon. “You make it sound as if the Basilisk Accords were laid down solely for the purpose of dragon-slaying.”
“Weren’t they?” Naphtheena’s lipless mouth turned up at one corner. (You have not been truly mocked by a smile until you have been mocked by a dragon’s smile.)
“No, they were not.” The wizard snorted at the very idea. “They were compiled by the highest of the high mages, in cooperation with the most revered of the monstrous reptilian elders, as a viable alternative to engaging in a war between mortals and all drake-kind, a devastating, all-out, take-no-prisoners slaughter that—”
“—that nobody really wanted and that nobody could ever hope to win, blah, blah, blah,” Naphtheena finished the wizard’s bombast for him, moving her claws so that it looked like she was manipulating a garrulous sock puppet. “I know all that, Pookie. I’m a revered elder; I was there. Which is something you’d know if you hadn’t napped your way through whatever passes for a history class at whichever miserable excuse for a toad-kissing wizards’ academy you attended. Or don’t they make you bunch of wand-wagging whelps view Moorbeevil’s masterpiece, The Accords Are Ratified, any more? That gorgeous blue dragon in the foreground? The one lolling on a pile of skulls? That’s me.”
The wizard’s eyes narrowed. “I know the painting. My grandfather was one of the skulls in question.”
“Isn’t it a treat to have a familial link to history?” Naphtheena said, lightly. “I know I’ve got one. I have lost five uncles, a brace of aunts, one sister-in-law, Grandma Gridelin, and two score of my innocent hatchlings to your people for violating those accursed Accords.”
The wizard looked down his nose at the dragon—no mean feat given the fact that she was twice his height and there were bulldogs with more protuberant snouts than his stubby sniffer. “They broke the rules and paid the price, which is as it should be.”
“The rules are a big pile of nitpick stew with a side order of clause slaw!” the dragon roared. This time fire spouted from her nostrils, mouth, and ears. The overwhelming power of her emotions turned her flanks from the delicate blue of a summer sky to the sinister, empurpled hue of thunderheads. The wizard observed this with a gloating, anticipatory grin.
Naphtheena caught sight of his expression and cut off the fireworks at once. “Oh no you don’t,” she said, taking a deep breath and reasserting self-control. “You’d like me to lose my temper, wouldn’t you? You’re practically drooling at the thought of me whipping myself into a frenzy of rage with no bureaucratically justifiable target in sight. If I blast you, your spells will simply deflect my flame. If I destroy anyone or anything else, I’ve violated the Accords. And if I don’t calm myself down before it’s too late—”
“You explode,” said the wizard nastily. “Pop!” He wore a smug look that was absolutely begging for a complimentary butt-kicking.
Naphtheena lowered her eyelids. “I am a dragon. Dragons do not go ‘Pop!’ Unlike your head when compressed between two of my talons. Much as that impossible prospect delights me, I must be going. You are a highly irritating two-legged fungus and I will give you no further opportunity to goad me into a self-destructive fury.”
“Hold!” The wizard raised one hand, meanwhile drawing his wand with the other. He looked like he was preparing to
conduct the village orchestra, but Naphtheena knew that the alternating spurts of green, purple, and silver brilliance fountaining from that “baton” marked its wielder for an Eleventh Level Magister Mysticorrrrr—er, um, something or other threatening in Latin.
It was just such wizards who had compelled Naphtheena and her peers to submit to the Basilisk Accords. She didn’t want to get into any needless confrontations with this chubby little itch, especially when the deck was not stacked in her favor. She hadn’t survived over three thousand years of stupid but tasty mortals by taking dumb chances.
“All right, Pumpkin-pants, I’m holding. But make it snappy. I have a date with the Grand Gateway and all of the legal documents covering my departure have been properly filed with your imbecilic Council. That means if anyone detains me without just cause, I have the right to bring them before said Council and, unless he can provide hard evidence justifying his illicit actions, I get to eat him.” She cast a connoisseur’s eye over the wizard’s generous proportions and added, “On second thought, do please make me miss my departure. You look delicious.”
The wizard lowered his arms slightly. “You can go as soon as you cough up M’sieu Bertrand,” he said.
“What for? He won’t be of any use to anyone in his present state.”
“Unholy lizard, know that my arcane studies included a full immersion course on the physiology of your abominable race. And by ‘full immersion’ I mean that the first thing our professor did was have a dragon eat us, one by one. It was most illuminating. I mean that literally, for when it was my turn to be ingested, I saw a great light blazing before my eyes. It was the flare from the dragon’s fire pouch, and by its brilliance I saw that I was in a large, somewhat fusty sac, in damp but undigested condition. I had no sooner observed this than there came a rumbling, a great shifting, and a yo-heave-ho that propelled me out of my prison and back into the world.”
Naphtheena glowered at the wizard. “How dare you violate a dragon’s personal space in that obnoxious manner?”
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