Space, Inc

by Julie E. Czerneda

  So agents started proliferating. And the government noticed. “Hey,” someone in the Hague said, “these literary agents are becoming as powerful as the lawyers used to be. Time for them to be licensed.” Vote-stamp-sign: Agents with licenses become government-sanctioned mediators. Unlicensed agents find other jobs. And the government starts getting a cut of the mediator’s third of the author’s earnings.

  “A third?” you ask. Of course they’re entitled to a third. They’re licensed mediators, so they must be worth it. After all, they perform the mysterious task of popping the book-text into NetMail. It wasn’t as if just anyone could do it for themselves—remember, only a recognized mediator could get a ’text through the system. Personally, I think if Shakespeare had an agent/mediator, that line about the lawyers would have read differently.

  Despite the absurdity of such procedures, I am still glad to have discovered this profession, of which few colonists are even aware. I owe it all to my unique family and education. The colonies only have a handful of small collegia, which just don’t rate with the big Earth universities. However, everyone in the colonies has a degree or two, since it’s easy to advance one’s education by completing coursework on EdNet. No need to even physically attend a collegium, though that gives a deeper experience to the education.

  My father always hated that the colonies are so far from Earth, making true interactive Net services almost impossible— time lag, you know. Despite the fact that we could get large transport ships jumped up faster-than-light, no one had managed to get the nets to clear that hurdle. Homers had the option of using EdNet in realtime, or actually attending one of their prestigious universities.

  Thankfully, Dad is a brilliant man. One day, while teaching his physics class at the collegium, and using a NetPedia reference on screen, he had a Eureka! moment. Well … it actually took him a few more years to make Packet-Comm a reality. But, when he’d finished, it was possible to communicate with Earth, or other far-flung locations, instantly. Okay, so there’s a three-second lag to Earth.

  Suddenly EdNet, BuyNet, and the other NetServs were practical for the colonists. And Dad was (and still is) collecting licensing and royalty chits nonstop; a good portion of which go back into public works, On the colonies, the name Randall Bradden is always spoken in admiring tones.

  When I came of age, he told me: “Del, you’re going to Earth to attend university in person. Let all those EdNet grads pay for a real education for you.”

  So off I went. I studied Literature as my Primary, with a Secondary in Business and Finance, and a Tertiary in the Sciences (Dad needed to get his chits’ worth.) But I have the best implants money can buy, so it wasn’t too difficult.

  While there, I took an internship at a venerable old publishing house. They actually maintained offices with staff. No telecommutes for them, except one executive editor.

  During my time at Holburn House, I learned a lot. And really fell in love with the business. I knew I’d be applying to one of the colonial publishers when I went home. There was no question of my staying on Earth—my student permit would expire, and they’d be sending me back to the colonies. Besides, Christea was home.

  So … how did that internship lead to K&T deciding to shrug at the system and become so writer-friendly?

  Well, I take full credit for it. There is even an archive recording of the moment I got the idea, though I wasn’t the center of the cams’ attention that day.

  During my internship, there was a retirement party for Mr. Malcolm Ramos. All 234 years’ worth of him. One of the most distinguished editors in the business. He could easily have become a mediator at any time in his career, but he just loved editing.

  At the party, he gave a talk about how the industry had changed during his career.

  “When I came to this house in 2047,” Mr. Ramos recounted, “we had an open-door policy on booktexts. The last year of it, mind you, but anyone could submit to us.

  “The Web, as SolNet was called then, led to so many would-be authors finding us and submitting, we just couldn’t keep on top of it.” He chuckled. “Eight billion people on Earth in those days, and most of them submitted to us that year.”

  My instincts told me he was exaggerating, but I had little personal experience with bicentenarians. We colonials shy away from age-defying treatments—a normal 125 always seemed a sufficiently lengthy life to most of us. But I was intrigued.

  As he sipped from his water glass, I called up to the dais, “Did you find anything worthwhile?”

  “Oh, yes. We developed two eTimes Bestsellers out of that batch. One of them only made it to number fifty on the list, but that was high enough for bragging rights.” Mr. Ramos raised his forefinger with a smile. “And we found a handful of midlist titles—the stuff you call ‘fill’ these days.

  “You know,” he continued, “there could have been more good stuff in there, but there were just too many submissions coming in. If only there had been fewer people in the pool, we could have read a lot more before we gave up.”

  He spoke quite a bit more—some interesting, some rambling, some downright incomprehensible—and you can view the archive recording for the rest, if you want. But that little bit had already hatched the idea in my head.

  I returned to Christea with my degrees, and sent employment queries to several publishers. Only K&T was hiring for an actual in-office job, as I’d had at Holburn, and was satisfyingly Christean, so I took the position. Del Bradden became the newest assistant editor (in-person degrees and internships actually do mean something on a resumé—no starting as an editorial assistant for me).

  I established myself and learned more about the company. Not wanting to seem too eager or eccentric, I waited through three personnel reviews (all stellar, I might add) before presenting my idea to Mr. Burke.

  “An odd request, Del,” Mr. Burke commented when I asked to be allowed to open things up to un-mediated ’texts. Thankfully, he was first-generation Christean, like my father, and still thought like a pioneer. To make the idea more appealing, I offered to do the reading on my own time (though I’d be compensated if I actually found anything publishable). It was agreed.

  A subroutine was written into our sorting algorithm. Un-mediated ’texts would be sent to my comp for review, rather than rejected outright. And we quietly started letting people know they could submit to us this way, though I still received my usual share of mediated works for reading at the office.

  The mediators weren’t thrilled by our new policy, and threatened to stop submitting, but as we were a small Christean house, it was a useless threat. A few mediators made a point of telling us that certain top titles would have come to K&T if not for our policy, but Mr. Burke knew better. He made a point of reading each one of those, and was convinced he wouldn’t have published them anyway.

  Luckily for me, Mr. Ramos had been correct about the pool size. Most Christeans are still pretty much your rugged pioneer types rather than would-be authors. So we weren’t inundated with Christean ’texts.

  Once we published Raschon’s Starseeker and my project was better publicized, submissions from the other colonies increased. Nothing from Earth, but what Homer would want to be published by a colonial?

  I opened the file attached to “Dr.” Aly’wanshus’ message, and settled back to listen to the good doc’s novel.

  The most amazing sound issued from my speakers. It wasn’t amazing in that it was sweet and melodic like no music could ever be. Nor could I say I’d never heard its like before, because I certainly had. I’d heard it while taking a history course at university; a course that covered the discovery of each of the colony worlds and included audio/ visual details of the few alien races we had encountered.

  This was the sound of the speaking voice of an Aaul’inah.

  The Aaul’inah are a secretive race. The exploration ship Chicago had discovered the planet Aaul’in, which lies not far from the mid-colonies. But they were turned away by the Aaul’inah when they tried to ent
er the atmosphere. No human has landed there since.

  We did manage to finally communicate with them, after a small Aaul’inah ship crashed on Hurst while scouting the colony. The one survivor had a translation device with which they were monitoring our communications. We managed to reverse-engineer it, and could finally speak with them—not perfectly, but sufficiently.

  Theirs is a flowing, tonal language, that sounds much like musical instruments. And it has a musical structure to it that goes beyond anything humans can produce. I’m told linguists believe that the language hides many layers of meaning in the subaudible bands that we cannot comprehend.

  Whatever else, it is exceedingly beautiful to the human ear.

  I stopped the playback, and looked back at the query. “Office of Alien Studies.” I recalled my father telling me a few years before that the collegium had been thinking about offering a position to an Aaul’inah, but didn’t recall him saying that it had happened.

  I clicked over to the collegium’s linguistics bank, and linked myself into the Aaul’inah translation matrix. Then, I opened the file again, experiencing a brief pause while the files connected.

  When the story began, I was initially distracted by how the translation matrix took what was essentially a grand operatic performance and turned it into a piece of prose. Wonderful prose that would still need some small editing to be publishable in English.

  That quickly became a secondary thought, because what I was hearing was the most fantastic story of interdimensional adventure I had ever come across in my short lifetime of reading and publishing science fiction.

  The next nine days were agony.

  I’d asked my father to check on “Dr.” Aly’wanshus for me. All he reported was that Alien Studies had offered to sponsor an exchange program with Aaul’in. When the reply came, this “Doctor” said that his people would never agree to permit a human on their world. However, he would come to Christea in a personal research effort to see if his people could coexist and intermingle with humans. He had apparently arrived two years ago.

  Finally, the second message arrived.

 

  Mr. Del Bradden

  Science Fiction Editor

  K&T Publishers

  16 Elray Circle

  Landfall CHRISTEA

  Dear Mr. Bradden:

  I hope you have had time to listen to my novel. I look forward to hearing your response. Please contact me within the next three days at vjin.pse.chr.ColNet.

  Sincerely,

  “Dr.” Aly’wanshus

  I was hitting the reply key before I’d even finished reading the first sentence.

 

  “Dr.” Aly’wanshus

  Dear “Dr.” Aly’wanshus:

  I am very pleased that you have contacted me again. I have, in fact, listened to your novel. It is quite unique in my experience, and I would very much like to meet with you to discuss it. Would you be free to meet with me at my office tomorrow?

  I greatly look forward to hearing from you.

  Sincerely,

  Del Bradden

  The reply came back just as swiftly.

  Dear Mr. Bradden:

  It would not be prudent for us to meet where others might easily observe us. Can we please meet tomorrow in the rooms where I am lodging? Perhaps about 1100 hours. The proprietor here is a discreet woman. Directions are attached.

  Sincerely,

  “Dr.” Aly’wanshus

 

  Ever mysterious. But not a meeting I wanted to decline.

  I arrived at the boarding house near the Landing Ground a few minutes early. It was the usual sort of place where travelers could settle in for a day or two before catching their ship. Quaint yet pleasant.

  The door was open, but I knocked and entered when a voice told me to do so.

  There was a small desk in the corner of the parlor just off the entry hall, and the woman there appeared to be shopping BuyNet for towels. She looked up at me.

  “You must be here to meet the Doctor,” she stated.

  “How’d you know?” I asked with a smile.

  “No bags. Not dressed for travel.” She smiled, “And he left me a note that he was expecting a visitor about now. His room is the third on the left, top of the stairs.” She turned back to her comp.

  I started toward the stairs.

  “May I ask you something?”

  I stopped and turned. “Sure.”

  She looked uncertain. “Normally, I don’t concern myself with the affairs of my guests—they don’t stay long enough. I get all types, including some nonhumans. But … the Doctor’s a singer. I’d always thought they don’t like us much. But he’s been perfectly pleasant, polite, and quiet. He seems different than I’ve been led to believe. Do you know why?”

  She wouldn’t have been satisfied with the simple “No” that almost came from my lips. And being rather ignorant on the matter myself, all I could do was reassure her and hope I wasn’t wrong. “I can’t really say. This is our first meeting. I know he’s an academic, and I don’t think he’s up to anything nefarious.”

  She smiled again. “Thank you. I’ve always gone by my own experience—not judging things based on other folks’ say-so. If the other singers are like him, they’ll be welcome in my house.” And she turned back to the comp.

  I went up the stairs, found the door, and knocked.

  A voice called out, “Come in, please, Mr. Bradden.”

  I opened the door, and met my first Aaul’inah. I had learned somewhat about them at university and also done some refresher reading in the last week. So I wasn’t too surprised to find that “Dr.” Aly’wanshus was pretty much a textbook example of the Aaul’inah.

  He stood about five and a half feet tall and was covered from top to bottom by a tan-colored pelt that wasn’t quite fur or quite feathers. His eyes were set to the sides of a wide nasal passage, and appeared to operate independently of one another, much like Earth chameleons. His lips were fleshy, and the upper hung down over his mouth when he wasn’t speaking. His arms and legs appeared to be slightly shorter than ours, but I knew the joints were far more supple than my own.

  The Doctor held out a six-fingered hand and grasped my own in a hearty handshake. “Welcome to my rooms. I am so thrilled to have you here.” His voice was fluid and clear, and seemed to have little trouble with the English words. There remained an undertone of music, even when not speaking his own language.

  The handshake ended, long enough to express eagerness, short enough to prove he understood when to stop.

  “A pleasure to finally meet you, ‘Doctor’ Aly’wanshus.” I stated honestly.

  He, for lack of a better word, smiled. “I’ll not trouble you with the proper pronunciation, Mr. Bradden. Please have a seat.”

  Thanking him, I took the offered seat. I noticed as he took the one opposite that the motion seemed at once both graceful and awkward for him. No doubt the result of some time accustoming himself to human furniture.

  “I notice you hesitate when you say my title. One can almost hear the quotation marks from my message around it. You wonder, perhaps, why they appear there?” He appeared quite relaxed and comfortable with me.

  While I was nervous at meeting my first Aaul’inah, professional and personal curiosity overwhelmed that. I nodded. “I did wonder.”

  Again, that smile. “Quite understandable. Although I am not a medical doctor, nor do I have any advanced degrees from a human collegium, that is the nearest title your language has to express my position in my culture.” The smile seemed to dim.

  “The nearest, but not exact, yes?” I asked. “Should we be using some more prestigious title for you?”

  The smile faded. “No, ‘Doctor’ is fine. As you will learn, I hold two positions in my society. Being an educator is my chosen life’s work. But there is another more difficult task that I must undertake.”

  His voice and manner changed,
becoming more forceful. “Mr. Bradden, I have read or listened to a great deal of human literature. Of all I have read, the science fiction stories you published attracted me the most. Explorers going out beyond their own known universe, seeking whatever is out there for good or ill. Those stories spoke to me—made me realize that I was doing something similar. I felt this story, Beyond Here, waiting to come out. As one of my kind who desires contact with humans, the title is somewhat meaningful to me. And so I dictated it. As my time at the collegium drew to a close, I decided to submit my work to you.”

  I was puzzled. “I’m not so familiar with your people. Is your book somehow related to this ‘task’ you mentioned?”

  “No. And yes, I suppose,” he responded, suddenly revealing four small budlike ears that erupted from the pelt at the sides of his head. “But I will get to that. Your language is quite simple, compared to our own, and I learned the spoken and written forms quickly. But, for me, it was only natural to dictate my book in my own language. And I am quite happy to have your attention. It is my situation that constantly reasserts itself in my mind, distracting me from our literary discussion.”

  “Your situation?”

  He gave a quick birdlike nod. “I should like to explain. I assume you have the usual human familiarity with my people? Basic external physiology? General language sonotype?”

  “Yes.”

  His ears settled back a bit as he began to tap his cheek with one finger. In a human, I could have taken it for thoughtfulness or nervousness; in him, I had no idea.

  “Before we discuss my novel—and I am very interested to hear from you on that—I am going to tell you something about my people. I will hope that you are as trustworthy and discreet as Randall.”