Date Night on Union Station

by E. M. Foner

  “The lower-class woman was Eliza Doolittle and she was a poor flower girl,” Donna explained, as she pulled out a chair and sat down across from Kelly. “The girls liked the idea of being poor flower girls so much that they convinced one of the nursery owners from an ag deck to let them try selling flowers on consignment around the cafes in the evening.”

  “Except we aren’t poor,” Chastity said, holding out a handful of change. “Look!”

  “We made more in two nights than you pay mommy for a whole week,” Blythe added, half accusing, half proud.

  “You know that your mom doesn’t really work for me,” Kelly defended herself. “We both work for EarthCent, which really means the Stryx, and your mother is actually the one whose job it is to pay me!”

  “Oh, speaking of which, you got a raise to go with your new title,” Donna told her brightly.

  “They didn’t tell me,” Kelly spoke excitedly and held up her hands with fingers crossed. “How much can I expect next payday? I’m behind on the rent again, and the smart aleck landlord program has been fooling with the water temperature when I take a shower. It’s just a matter of time before it starts in with varying the room temperature and piping in nasty odors.”

  “Ah, I think it will come to a hundred and twenty creds,” Donna replied, sounding a little embarrassed.

  “But that’s less than I’m making now!” Kelly wailed, causing the girls to stop what they were doing and look on in interest. “It’s less than you make. It’s less than the poor flower girls are making!”

  “It will go up again eventually, but there was a garnishment order from EarthCent. Something about paying a contract cancellation fee to a junkyard called Mac’s Bones?”

  “Oh, no,” Kelly groused. “I thought I was authorized to negotiate a settlement. I guess the EarthCent version of negotiation doesn’t include hard cash.”

  “Anyway, I put you on a payment plan so you’ll still have some walking around money,” Donna added sympathetically. “Otherwise, you would have had no income for ten months.”

  “Barter is better,” piped up a begrimed Chastity, echoing one of the cheery mantras of the Stryx school system, which offered a full range of educational opportunities to anybody who was willing to exchange work. The labor the Stryx demanded from young children involved playing with small robots for a couple hours a day, but the children all seemed to take their duties seriously.

  “We could give you a loan, Aunty Kelly,” Blythe offered. When she saw the crestfallen expression on Kelly’s face, she added generously, “You don’t really have to pay it back.”

  “You’re just making it worse,” Donna chided the girls gently. “Aunty Kelly has a very important job, and someday she’ll make a living at it. Now run along to work or you’ll miss the dinner rush.” The girls immediately recovered their high spirits and flounced out of the apartment trading lines in imagined cockney accents.

  “Don’t look so glum, Kelly,” Donna continued. “You know the last thing the girls would want is for you to feel bad about earning less in a week than they make in a few hours on the weekend.” Kelly buried her face in her arms, and Donna had to add, “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way either. You’re really getting too sensitive lately. What do you know about tonight’s date?”

  “I know it has to be better than last week’s,” Kelly responded, perking up. “At least, it can’t turn out as expensive, can it?”

  “Well, the Stryx have an odd way of running a dating service, that’s for sure. But I’ll bet the children who grew up here would take it all in stride. I guess it’s their education system, too late for us, of course,” Donna concluded with a smile.

  “I love my job, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. I just wish I could get Libby or EarthCent to give me a little more guidance,” Kelly grumbled. “I mean, I’m happy they upgraded my status to full consul, at least I won’t have to keep explaining to aliens that ‘acting consul’ didn’t mean I was pretending. You’d think somebody would have fixed the translation algorithms by this time.”

  “You’re married to the job, and that’s your problem. You care more about getting in the middle of every problem that comes up than you do about finding a man. I think you’re actually embarrassed by the fact that the humans who come out here act just as badly as they did on Earth.”

  “I’m the one who gets stuck explaining it all to Gryph,” Kelly argued. “And I’m taking this dating business very seriously. Did I tell you I’m meeting him in the excursion ship section and we’re taking a core and cylinder tour? I’ve never been.”

  “Stan took me for an anniversary date a couple of years ago. It would have been very romantic except the weightlessness made us both queasy. Then the excursion craft looped against the station rotation and all of that spinning made me throw up. Stan saw it coming and caught it all in his cap before it reached the bulkhead, and later I found out that he bribed the tour operator to give him the video of it from the cabin camera. Hey, do you want to watch it?” Donna asked cheerfully.

  “Thank you for the lovely memory and for offering me an instant replay of you sicking up just before I board,” Kelly replied sarcastically. “I think I’ll take a pass on coffee and dessert now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Donna apologized. “I guess I wasn’t thinking. But you have yourself a good time, and remember that behind every unopened door lurks a monster.”

  “What does that even mean?” Kelly asked, but then she decided not give Donna a chance for an explanation that would ruin the date before it even began. “Never mind. I’ll ask Libby about it if I’m too early. See you in the office.”

  “I expect you to let me know how it went the minute you get home,” Donna reminded Kelly, as she followed her to the door. “I’ll be up late helping the girls count their change in any case.”

  Donna’s comment reminded Kelly of something that had been bothering her since she entered the apartment, so she stopped just short of the proximity field that activated the door. “I noticed when I came in that your apartment lighting seems to be on a different schedule than the corridor areas on this deck. Don’t you worry about the girls being tired for school?”

  “You’re still thinking in Earth terms, with all those school buses and early schedules that had nothing to do with what suited the children’s natural rhythms. Here, the kids follow their own schedule since it makes no difference to the Stryx when children want their lessons or put in their service time. If you want to scare the station kids into behaving, just hint that they might be happier back on Earth or some other planet.”

  “Funny, I never really noticed,” Kelly admitted. “I guess it’s because my previous postings were on planets. This is my first extended stay on a station. Thanks, wish me luck.”

  “Luck,” Donna offered enthusiastically as the door slid closed.

  Kelly slowly worked her way down towards the excursion dock, thinking about her own childhood on Earth. Billions of people had voted with their feet before Kelly was born, making humans the latest wave of colonists and cheap labor migrants to compatible worlds circling thousands of stars. Wherever the Stryx had influence, intelligent robots enjoyed the same legal status as biologicals. So human labor only had to compete with non-thinking robots, and those “mechanicals” weren’t flexible enough to do many jobs. Intelligent robots had few needs and could always find better work than harvesting crops and doing manual labor, not to mention a strong preference for the clean environment of space.

  The excursion bay on the inner docking deck featured lower apparent gravity than Kelly was used to, so she had to walk gingerly to avoid bouncing off her feet. Any other time she would have worn deck shoes with their magnetic sticky cleats, but the black pumps practically belonged to the cocktail dress. She was on the lookout for “black suit, black tie, black hat,” which made her date sound like either a country western singer or an undertaker.

  Kelly’s date had arrived before her and was fidgeting about nervously next to the gangwa
y of an expensive looking cabin cruiser, which made her feel a little better after Donna’s uninspiring tourism tale. The ship appeared much more spaceworthy than she had expected for an excursion craft, and she was also glad that she wasn’t the only one who looked a little nervous.

  “Welcome, welcome. I’m Olaf Thorgudsun,” he greeted Kelly energetically as he extended his hand. “You’re the last one, come aboard, come aboard.”

  “I’m Kelly,” she said as she reached for his hand, and was surprised when her date held on and basically yanked her into the craft. Of course, he was wearing sensible boots with magnetic cleats, and maybe he had noticed she was a little hesitant on the ramp.

  Olaf led her to a luxurious reclining seat pod, the sort of first-class accommodation that was equipped with a glass privacy cover that the occupant could activate to shut off all sound from the outside world. “Please strap in until you adjust to zero gravity after launch. You wouldn’t want to kick somebody in the head by mistake.”

  “Wow, this is the nicest ship I’ve ever been on,” Kelly gushed, smoothing her black dress over her thighs as she settled onto the plush cushions. The dress wasn’t really meant for lying down, she reflected. The fashion designers expected you to take it off at that point of the evening. “Are all these pods taken by people going on the tour?”

  “Yes, yes. We’ll have time to chat after the launch. I have to take my place.” He sounded much more excited than somebody going on a two hour cruise around the station, which Kelly took as a compliment to her appearance. Olaf vaulted into the pod next to Kelly, and she heard him mumble in the manner of somebody who had never quite mastered subvocalization, “Let’s get out of here.”

  The ship lifted gently and passed soundlessly through the atmosphere retention field as the seat pods all pivoted in unison, orienting themselves against the direction of the thrust. Acceleration was just noticeable at first, and then Kelly felt herself slowly sinking into the cushions as her full weight returned and then continued to increase as they shot out the end of the station’s cylindrical core.

  “Aren’t we going a bit too fast for a tour, Olaf?” Kelly ventured to ask her date, though her voice came out weakly since her chest felt like it was wrapped in heavy bands.

  “Not now,” he grunted, followed by a subvoc that she missed. Then he practically yelled, “I just said I wasn’t talking to you, idiot. Yes, now, now, now!”

  Kelly didn’t have time to think before the glass isolation cover whooshed down over her seat and her body felt like all of its warmth was being sucked away by a giant pump.

  “Libby,” she cried through her implant. “Libby, I think I’m being kidnapped!”

  A faint crackle sounded in her ears as the cold sank into her bones, then the reassuring voice of the station’s Stryx librarian broke in with, “…jamming, but tracking. Please report status.”

  “I’m trapped in a seat pod, isolation cover down, freezing. I think I’m being put into stasis. It’s an Eemas date, check the records.” Kelly banged her hands on the glass to no avail, but she saw Olaf dragging himself forward towards the front of the ship on his magnetic traction cleats. “Scramble fighters or something. Stop them.”

  “Fighters?” Despite her rapidly dimming consciousness, Kelly thought she could hear Libby chuckling. That’s right, they don’t have any, she remembered. “Don’t worry, Kelly. We suspected there was a bride-stealing gang working the station, we just needed them to violate our regulations. I’ve already arranged for apprehension and retrieval. Help is on the way.”

  “You used me as date bait?” Kelly mumbled incredulously, lacking the energy to get angry about it as she felt herself drifting into sleep. “That wasn’t very nice. Please turn off the freezer.”

  “You’ll be safer in stasis, Kelly. We’ll have to disable the ship. Sleep well.” Libby closed the channel softly.

  As everything faded to black, Kelly reflected that this, surely, was the new low point of her dating life.

  Five

  “Somebody’s coming,” Paul yelled into the jagged opening in the lifeboat hull, from which emitted an unending stream of curses and oddly colored wisps of smoke. The volume of curses increased even as the smoke died out, and a helmeted head with a dark visor poked out of the hull.

  “Stupid auto-adjusting shield,” Joe complained as he rapped the side of the welding helmet a couple of times with his glove-encased knuckles. Finally he gave up and raised the visor manually. “Where’s Killer?”

  “Sleeping,” Paul replied and shrugged his shoulders at the pointless question. Beowulf, aka Killer, was a war dog, a genetically engineered cross between a mastiff and Huravian hound. The dog had chosen to stick with Joe when he left the mercenaries, and anybody who might have disagreed with the canine’s choice had more sense than to argue with him.

  Beowulf looked exactly like a war dog retired to junkyard duty. He weighed as much as a big man, drooled buckets, and mainly slept whenever Joe or Paul was around to keep watch. At the sound of his name, Beowulf’s ears twitched and he opened his eyes. After a quick sniff and glance at the approaching robot, he made an elaborate show of curling up and going back to sleep in a nest of scrapped insulation he had arranged as a bed away from bed.

  Joe left his cutting torches and gauntlets behind, pulled himself out of the lifeboat, and handed the helmet to Paul. Then he straightened out painfully and cast a critical eye over the strange amalgamation of parts that rolled up to him under its own power.

  “This is a first,” Joe said, as he untied the straps securing his leather welder’s apron. “I’ve never had a robot come to junk itself before.”

  “How very droll,” the robot responded with the pointed inflection peculiar to the Stryx. Its various articulated limbs undulated wildly about, like a blind octopus groping for the wheel on a submarine hatch. “About what I should have expected from a man who would take a second-hand dating subscription in barter.”

  “Oh, you’re the guy from Eemas. That’s a dirty trick you folks have, charging the full subscription price just to change the user profile!” Joe intended to work himself up for a tirade, but became hypnotized watching the apparently uncontrollable spasms of the robot’s extremities.

  “I’m sure it was explained to you that the cost of the service is the research that goes into finding potential matches.” The robot shifted to a tired monotone that suggested too much time spent doing customer service. “We offered you a very attractive alternative, and I understand you were quite enthusiastic about the terms.”

  “Yeah, well, my tug’s right there, as you can see.” Joe indicated the stubby salvage vessel that was built for the sole purpose of short-haul towing and orbital junk sifting. “Where’s the exterior propulsion unit you guys promised? I don’t mind doing repo work, but I’ll never catch a cabin cruiser, not even if you gave me the head start.”

  The robot ignored Joe, rolled up to the tug, and then right up its side onto the hull. “Let’s go,” it called.

  “You’re the propulsion system?” Joe asked in disbelief.

  “They aren’t getting any closer,” the robot pronounced languidly, and its various limbs seemed to wilt as they sought anchoring spots on the hull. “Come on now, hotshot. Get the lead out.” It snapped the commands with a momentary display of energy and knowledge of archaic human slang. “I didn’t load myself down with all these extras to stand around yapping with a glorified trash collector.”

  “Alright, alright. Mind the shop, Paul, and no cutting until I get back.” Joe gave the boy’s shoulder a squeeze and then followed the Stryx to the tug. He stopped and shook his head at the little robot perched on the hull, then hauled himself up the ladder and into the cockpit. There was barely enough room for a human operator in the tug, which had been built for smaller humanoids and converted for human use.

  The vessel was procured in a barter deal for a rather elaborate potbelly still which the former owner of the junkyard had employed to make pretty good moonshine. Joe had
long since decided that he’d gotten the short end of the stick on that trade. Strapping himself into the command chair, he began the launch sequence by calling to station control for clearance, but the controls abruptly locked out.

  “I’ll do the talking and the flying if you don’t mind.” The robot spoke through his implants, sounding positively exhausted at this point. “How many G’s can your body tolerate without permanent damage?”

  In Joe’s experience, nothing good ever came from responding to this type of question. However, his years in the mobile infantry had taught him the answer, and he decided to play it straight rather than leaving the robot to guess, especially since this particular Stryx didn’t sound like it would be upset by accidentally turning Joe into a gelatinous mass. “I can take 5 G’s for about thirty minutes, though I won’t be worth much for a while when it cuts out. Or I can take 15 G’s for around twenty seconds, but I’ll pass out without a pressure suit.”

  “Passing out won’t be necessary,” the robot practically yawned the words in his ear. “Launch initiated.”

  The tug took off like it had been kicked by a Thurillian riding beast, blowing through the ionized field that kept the air in the hold and out into the vacuum of the station core, without pausing to check for traffic. There was a brief high G turn, and then Joe felt himself pressed back into the pilot’s seat by a giant hand, though it was nowhere near as bad as some rapid assault landings he could recall, or strategic withdrawals for that matter.

  Joe was impressed so much thrust could be generated with the casually bolted-on attachments that made the little robot look like it had magnetized its casing and blundered through a scrap heap, but none of the biologicals fostered by the Stryx had a clue as to their patron’s true technological limits. The robots gifted or bartered their fosterlings just enough technology to reach the stars, but generally left the different life forms to work out their own solutions to the problems they encountered in space.