Hotel Andromeda

by Edited by Jack L. Chalker

  He hesitated, wondering if he should simply turn around and let whatever was happening unfold without him, but curiosity got the better of him. Curiosity and the suspicion that it hadn’t been a cry of joy. Someone was probably in trouble.

  Rare as they were, another human collided with him as he turned the corner, knocking him off his feet to land with a thump against the wall. The other guy tripped as well, and the pistol he carried in his left hand skittered away down the corridor toward the restaurant.

  David had just enough time to wonder what Loren Larue, the vid star, was doing with a gun at an interspecies peace conference in the experimental multi-environment wing of the Hotel Andromeda before the actor jumped to his feet and took off running up the corridor David had just come down. He ran with a peculiar gait, bobbing up and down and stumbling as if on uneven ground, and as he receded David saw that he carried a small air tank strapped to his back. David couldn’t imagine why; the whole advantage to the hotel’s new wing was that force fields held a person’s own atmosphere in an invisible bubble around them no matter where they went. It also provided whatever gravity they were used to; Larue shouldn’t have been wobbling like that. Had he been wounded? Maybe that’s why he was running.

  Whoever screamed had stopped now; David looked up to see a petite, light blue-furred alien bending over what looked at first to be a colorful rug, but which proved on second glance to be another alien of different species lying flat on the floor. It was one of the floating-gas-bag variety, probably a Ranthanik, now deflated.

  The space around the furry one—a T’klar, David realized, and probably female by its size—glowed with a soft blue radiance; most likely something in her air fluorescing in the overhead lights. David pushed himself to his feet and took a step toward her, but when she looked up and saw him coming she yowled another earsplitting, warbling screech and backed away.

  “It’s all right,” he said, taking a few steps closer. “I Just got here.”

  The T’klar wasn’t reassured. Without another sound, she turned and bounded away on her long, slender legs, disappearing into the crowd that was gathering at the restaurant entrance. A faint trail of blue fluorescence glimmered in her wake.

  David saw no sense in chasing her. He bent down next to the Ranthanik to see if there was anything he could do for it, but the charred hole in its leathery hide was big enough to shove a fist through. All its methane had leaked out, and by the looks of it, all its life, too.

  He stood up and turned toward the gathering crowd. The hotel’s force-field life system was living up to its advertisements; among the less exotic species he saw a heavy-planet Nirulo standing next to a gangly ammonia-breathing Cheedon and a fuming, sulfurous Grota, and none of them seemed distressed at all by the others proximity.

  “Has anyone called Hotel Security?” he asked.

  No one replied. He knew they understood him; the same system that monitored each person’s position for their force cocoon of atmosphere also provided translation of any alien speech in the vicinity.

  “Someone, please call Security,” he said more forcefully. “And get somebody here who knows Ranthanik medicine. We might still be able to save him.” David had no idea whether that was true or not, but he figured it would be better to error the side of caution.

  One of the aliens further inside the restaurant—or maybe the T’klar—had evidently already made the call. David was still dying to think of anything else he could do when a gleaming silver robot slid out from a doorway partway down the corridor and glided up to him. Before David could react, one of its four sinuous arms reached out and wrapped around his neck.

  It hadn’t quite cut off his wind. “Hey, what are you doing?” he croaked. “Let me go!”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” it said in a synthesized human voice, “but you will have to come with me.”

  The robot put him in a seven- by ten-pace room with a single chair in it. David sat sullenly on the chair, wishing he’d given in to his first impulse and just left the T’klar and the Ranthanik to fend for themselves. He didn’t know what sort of trouble he was in just yet—the robot had only told him that he was needed for questioning—but he didn’t like the look of this room at all.

  He couldn’t help examining it with a professional eye, though. He was an assistant manager for a rival hotel, the Hightower, and he was on a tour of other hotels, looking for new ideas he could incorporate into his own. So far he hadn’t seen anything he liked better than what the Hightower already had to offer, but when he’d heard of the Andromeda’s new life-system design he’d come to check it out.

  He’d snooped around in as many public areas as he could find, but he hadn’t seen anything like the room he was in now. It was obviously an undifferentiated guest unit, the bare cubicle upon which an individual species’ requirements could be built. The walls were a uniform dull gray, as was the ceiling. Presumably whatever coloring or decorations were needed could be extruded from it or hung there by the service staff when a guest checked in.

  The floor, like the floors everywhere, was dotted with tiny holes from which came the atmosphere that the personal force fields—also generated in the floor—held around each guest. David couldn’t see the variable gravity generators, but he knew they were there, too. He even knew a little about how they worked. The whole system—force fields and all—was really just an elaborate enhancement of technology that existed in every hotel, including the Hightower. It was the way they put it all together, the way it allowed mutually alien races to coexist within the same habitat, that was the breakthrough.

  He’d been considering buying the system from the Andromeda until their security robot had dragged him away and locked him in here, but the longer he waited in the single chair, the less inclined he felt to give them his business. They would have to apologize, and apologize with a big cut in price, if they expected to see any of his credit.

  The door slid open and a squat, cone-shaped Niruto waddled into the room, flanked by two of the silver security robots. The Niruto’s twin trunks were coiled around its hemispherical head, parked there for support in the three g’s or so that pulled on them.

  A buzzing sound came from within the coiled limbs, and an unseen translator said, “Your ID lists you as David Wikondu. Is this correct?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” David answered.

  “You are not a member of the interspecies peace conference delegation.”

  “No. I’m an assistant manager for the Hotel Hightower. I’m here to look at your multi-environment system.”

  “That is your stated purpose. However, you are charged with the assassination of Hranda Nefanu Dnanda, the Ranthanik delegate to the conference. Do you admit to the crime?”

  David leaped up from his chair. “No! I showed up—hey!” The robots advanced on him and shoved him gracelessly back onto the chair.

  “Please remain seated,” the Niruto said. “You were found at the scene of the murder. Witnesses said that the Ranthanik was killed by a human. You were the only human in evidence, therefore you are the murderer.”

  David shrugged off the robots’ arms, but stayed in the chair. “No, there was somebody else. He knocked me down making his escape.”

  “Another human?”

  “That’s right. He looked like Loren Larue. He dropped his gun when he ran into me.”

  The Niruto stepped closer to David. “We recovered the weapon, a microwave laser. It could just as easily have been yours.”

  “It was Loren Larue’s!” David shouted.

  The Niruto paused momentarily, no doubt consulting a database somewhere with its neural linkup. “Loren Larue is not a guest at this hotel,” it said.

  “Well of course not,” David said. “It was obviously someone else wearing a mask. They didn’t want to be recognized.”

  “Very few beings can tell humans apart,” the Niruto said. “A mask would be pointless.”

  That was probably true, David realized. He had a hard time telling most a
liens apart, too, at least within species lines.

  That would probably change if multi-species habitats like this one became more common, but for now the Niruto was right.

  “Maybe it wasn’t a human,” David said. “Maybe somebody else wanted to make it look like a human had done it. They probably just used Loren Larue as a model because he was easiest to get a holo of.”

  “This is wild speculation,” the Niruto said.

  David leaned forward on his chair. “No, it’s not. Whoever it was had an air tank on his back. I didn’t notice a breathing mask, so he probably had it piped into his Larue mask. I’ll bet he had a human ID card, so the life system was giving him human air and he needed the tank to provide what he really needed.”

  The Niruto uncoiled a limb and rubbed the tip of it across the top of its head. When it spoke, its buzz was louder, as was its translation. “A human ID would not have availed him anything. We don’t track our guests by their ID cards.”

  “Does the murderer know that?”

  “I suspect he just learned it”

  “I’m not the murderer! Look, there was a T’klar there with the Ranthanik. She must have seen me collide with whoever shot him. Ask her.”

  The Niruto waved its trunk toward the door. “We already did. She identified you as the killer.”

  “Oh, great.” David leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair. “I think I’d better get some legal help here.”

  The Niruto turned away and headed for the door the robots flanking him. “That would be an unprofitable use of your time,” it said. “We do not follow human law here. Your lawyer would not be able to counter the word of the T’klar ambassador.”

  “You’ll understand if I try anyway.”

  “You may try anything you wish,” the Niruto said. “You will have little success, however, from within a closed cell.” The door slid aside for him, then closed with a thump behind him and the robots, leaving David alone in his undifferentiated room.

  The human delegate to the peace conference showed up a few hours later. David had no idea what had brought him; he’d tried shouting for help, he’d banged the chair on the wall until he’d broken it, he’d even given in to biological pressure and urinated on the floor in the hopes that the room sensors would realize someone was there and create a bathroom for him—and maybe an intercom with it—but he’d given up long ago.

  He’d been trying to sleep and failing even at that when the door slid open to reveal a trim, gray-haired man in his early hundreds, dressed conservatively in a brown one-piece bodysuit.

  “I’m Trevor DeLange,” he said, stepping inside and extending a hand to help David to his feet.

  “David Wikondu. I’d offer you a chair, but it broke while I was rapping out an S.O.S. with it.” He waved at the broken pieces of plastic or alien wood or whatever they were scattered on the floor.

  DeLange smiled a thin smile. “I’m sorry to have left you here so long. I’ve been in contact with our embassy for the last few hours, trying to get you extradited to human space, but so far we haven’t had any luck. The Ranthanik want to try you here, during the peace conference.”

  “I’m not even responsible!” David said. “I was walking toward the restaurant when I heard a scream, so I ran up to see what was the matter and I got arrested for murder.”

  “They would have arrested whoever was closest,” DeLange said. “Niruto provide the security here, and Niruto law relies heavily on circumstantial evidence. They’re more interested in finding a scapegoat than finding the real culprit. So long as someone is punished for every crime, they figure the deterrent factor is the same.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were.” DeLange sounded sincere enough, but David figured he’d have sounded a great deal more concerned if he’d been the one arrested.

  “The killer is still loose,” David pointed out “He may not stop with one delegate.”

  “Hotel Security has begun recording everyone’s movements. If the assassin strikes again, they’ll know for sure who did it”

  David paced to the wall and back again. “That’s smart. Why weren’t they tracking everyone before?”

  DeLange shrugged. He seemed a little uncomfortable standing in an empty room with a broken chair scattered on the floor and a puddle of urine in one corner. He’d been folding and refolding his arms across his chest; now he tucked them into his suit’s side pockets as if to get them out of the way. He said, “They claim it’s not hotel policy to monitor their guests’ activities. It scares away business. The truth is, this whole multi-species life system is still in the testing stage, and they may simply not have thought of it before.”

  “Hmm.” David worked for a hotel; he suspected the real reason was liability. Data that didn’t exist couldn’t be stolen and used by someone else, say a journalist or politician looking for a little dirt on an opponent. He made another trip to the wall and back, then asked, “Why are you here if you know it’s still an experimental system? Why let them test it on some of the top officials from every species?”

  DeLange laughed. “We had no choice. After the Andromeda announced they’d built a new conference wing just for the peace talks, staying away for safety reasons would have been political suicide. We’ve all been saying how much we want to settle our differences peacefully; it was time to put up or shut up. So here we are.”

  “How are the talks going?” David asked. He was surprised he could feel any curiosity about anything other than his own predicament, but he knew that humanity was not necessarily a major player in galactic politics, and several other species—including the Ranthanik—were trying to edge in on human territory. The peace talks could help humanity’s chances of holding on to some of the disputed colonies. DeLange’s expression darkened. “We’re not accomplishing a whole lot. Mostly airing old arguments in public. Probably the only valuable thing to come of this whole process will be the precedent it sets for later talks. Of course, now that one of the delegates has been assassinated, there’s an entirely different message being presented. That’s why the Niruto are so eager to crucify you. They want the rumors stopped as soon as possible.”

  “Whether I’m guilty or not” David realized his only hope lay in the assassination of another delegate. If someone else were murdered while he was still locked up, then they would know he wasn’t the assassin. That didn’t seem likely, though. Presumably the assassin would know he was being traced now, too.

  “What’s humanity’s official stance on this?” he asked. “How far will you go to get me out of here?”

  DeLange reddened. “Well, naturally we’ll do everything we can to, um, delay any hasty actions on the Niruto’s part, but the situation is delicate. We have to consider—”

  “In other words, nothing. You’ll let them have me rather than start an interstellar incident over it, won’t you?”

  “Mr. Wikondu,” the ambassador said coldly, “we are trying to develop a plan of action. Your welfare will figure as high as possible in that plan, but we must consider the entire human race. We will do everything we can, short of open hostilities. We will not go to war over one individual.”

  “That’s what I thought” David paced toward the wall again, passing the broken pieces of chair. He swiveled around, took a step forward, and kicked one of the chair legs as if by accident, sending it sliding toward DeLange. “Oops, sorry,” he said, bending down to retrieve it He made as if to toss it out of the way, but halfway through the motion he swung around and brought it down on DeLange’s head with a sharp crack.

  The delegate dropped like a short-circuited robot. David caught him before he whacked his head again on the floor, and laid him out on his back. “They need a scapegoat, eh?” he muttered, bending down to feel for a pulse at DeLange’s neck. “Well, let ‘em have one. All humans look alike, after all.”

  The delegate’s heart still beat steadily. David quickly un-sealed his brown suit and peeled it off him, stripped off his own
clothing, and put DeLange’s clothing on himself. It was a little tight around the middle, but he sucked in his gut and got it closed. He put his own clothing on DeLange, making sure his ID card went with it, then dragged him over to the wall across from the door.

  Then, taking a deep breath to calm down, he walked to the door, prepared to knock on it to be let out, but it slid open before him and he stepped on through.

  The robots were standing just on the other side, but the Niruto was nowhere in evidence. David stalked past the robots without a sideways glance and headed up the corridor toward the lobby. Only after he’d turned the corner did he breathe.

  He had bought himself anywhere from ten minutes to a few hours, depending on how soon DeLange awakened and how long it would take him to attract the attention of his jailers and convince them he was the human ambassador. The way David saw it, he had two choices. He could either try to bluff his way through Hotel Security, catch the next ship out of the Andromeda, and disappear into deep space, or he could use his temporary freedom to clear his name. Running for it seemed the least complicated in the short term, but the idea of skipping out on his entire life and starting over again somewhere else didn’t exactly appeal to him, either. Not over a simple misunderstanding.

  No, he would at least try to exonerate himself first. Of course there would still be charges for assaulting DeLange, but he would probably be able to survive that if he exposed the real assassin.

  Where to start? Well, the most damning evidence against him had to be the T’klar’s testimony. If he could convince her she was mistaken about him, then that should take care of it right there.

  There was a Cheedon behind the front desk. David had never seen one up close before; they were ammonia breathers and normally required a separate habitat. They looked a little like a stack of seven or eight long-armed starfish scaled up to stand about three feet high; this one rested atop a pedestal behind the counter. As David approached it he smelted a faint hint of ammonia, like a cat’s litter box gone uncleaned a day too long. Evidently the force cocoons weren’t perfectly tight; when someone stayed in one place long enough, some of their air must leak across the barrier to permeate the surrounding atmosphere, and when someone else moved through it a little must get swept up in their own. It wouldn’t take much; a few molecules of ammonia is enough for a human nose to detect.