Date Night on Union Station

by E. M. Foner

  “Wow,” Paul said, examining the perfect holographic portrait of the grouping. “Hey, you can only view it from the front!”

  “Of course, it only receives the light through those lenses. A real holographic camera requires a traveling lens or a fully equipped lens chamber,” Jeeves explained. “The Dollnicks use these for passports on their own worlds. The cube collapses into a flat picture if you push on the sides. I wonder how it ended up here.”

  “Is it worth anything?” Laurel asked. She was actually a little disappointed to learn that she hadn’t uncovered the first time machine seen by humans.

  “It’s a great find,” Joe reassured her. “I’m sure somebody in the tourist mall will want it, though I suppose I’ll check with the Dollys first.”

  “I’m going to find a real time machine,” Paul declared, and turned back to the pile. The four of them, with Beowulf looking on, worked until it was time to get ready for the tournament without finding anything else in working condition. But Joe pointed out that they only made it through around ten percent of the mystery piles, so there was plenty of junk left to investigate.

  When they arrived at the tournament, Joe took his place as Paul’s second, standing behind his chair to protect him from distractions and to provide drinks and energy bars on demand. Under the rules of Nova, if Paul needed a bathroom break or otherwise wore down, Joe could step in and continue the game for him. But in practice, the brief transition period would result in certain loss, so the seconds were typically bodyguard types rather than skilled players.

  Jeeves attended the tournament unofficially, in order to watch Paul play. Mature Stryx had little interest in games, probably because they saw the outcomes as either certainties or random events, neither of which was very interesting. But Jeeves was neither mature nor typical, and he enjoyed rooting for Paul more than he valued the opportunity to make observations on how humans interacted with the game and their opponents.

  As the intensity of the game picked up, Joe found himself polishing off a second bottle of the apple juice that he’d purchased for Paul at the official tournament snacks booth. Just watching the game play was enough to make the sweat pour out of him. The number of individual ship skirmishes the boy could control was staggering, but his alien opponent was up to the challenge. Several times a minute there would be a small flash as a ship was lost by one side or the other. But they were playing evenly, and the main forces were held aloof in preprogrammed formations, while the opponents waited for an opening to exploit.

  “Juice,” Paul pronounced tersely, and Joe twisted the top off a fresh bottle and began to hand it forward. His knuckles and the bottle clunked into something metallic that shouldn’t have been there, so he drew back his hand, puzzled.

  “What was that all about?” Jeeves spoke over Joe’s implants to avoid distracting Paul. “Are you trying to get my attention?”

  “Not sure,” Joe replied, and watching his hand carefully, tried again to place the juice in the cup holder attached to the arm of Paul’s chair. He watched his hand approaching the tray attachment, and was just starting to relax his grip when he hit his knuckles on Jeeves again.

  “Let go, I’ve got it,” Jeeves commanded, and took the bottle from Joe. “Now take a step back, hold your arms out straight from your shoulders, don’t argue, just do it. That’s right, now touch your nose with your forefinger. No, no, don’t bother closing your eyes.”

  Joe felt just funny enough to follow the robot’s version of a sobriety test, and he moved with exaggerated slowness as he brought his right forefinger in to touch the tip of his nose, watching it all the way.

  “There,” he said, just before poking the finger into his ear. “What the hell?”

  “Paul hasn’t had any of that juice yet, has he?” Jeeves demanded.

  “No, it takes the kid forever to get thirsty. He never breaks a sweat.”

  “Good. Stay here, but don’t give him anything, and don’t eat or drink anything more yourself. I’ve got to shut down the concession stand and get word to the other seconds. Don’t go anywhere.”

  A general announcement to the tournament’s registered seconds came in over Joe’s implants, warning against consumption of the apple juice and suggesting strongly that all human compatible items from the concession stand were suspect. The announcement passed without public notice, as none of the seconds wanted to risk distracting their players.

  Joe was a bit woozy on his feet, but things started firming up after a minute or two and he tried the sobriety test again, this time poking himself in the eye. Half-way to full recovery, he thought, and waited for another minute while studying the room for suspicious activity. Then he tried again, this time guiding his finger to his nose, and then a second time, with his eyes closed.

  Whatever the drug was, it wore off as quickly as it took effect, the ideal weapon to use against a gamer. Joe imagined that he had drunk much more in a shorter period of time than Paul would have, so the effect on the boy would have been less marked. The dose might have caused him to fumble a few maneuvers and make things worse trying to correct them, all of which could have been attributed to cracking under pressure.

  Jeeves returned with a different brand of apple juice he had obtained from somewhere and gave it to Joe to place in Paul’s drink holder. “I had a maintenance bot bring all the bottles from a machine in the next corridor,” he explained. “It hasn’t been serviced in weeks, so it will be safe. Whoever pulled this trick couldn’t have prepositioned the adulterated bottles or plenty of people would have noticed.”

  “Thank you, Jeeves. That was a close call. It’s a good thing I’m such a juice head.”

  Three hours later, the star went nova and Paul won on points, advancing to the semifinals.

  Nineteen

  “Thank you both for agreeing to meet with me.” Kelly spoke into the empty space of her office because it just felt funny to subvoc when talking to more than one individual. It didn’t matter to the Stryx, of course, who according to the end user license agreement for her diplomatic grade implants could pull her side of the conversation from her head as easily as they could pull it from the air.

  “We both feel that we owe you some explanations,” Gryph replied. “But first, is there a particular reason you’ve requested the meeting?”

  “Yes,” Kelly answered, and began at the top of her mental checklist. “My research into the smuggling and counterfeiting problems that are impacting the viability of Earth’s export economy indicate that the main bottleneck is the Stryx tunnel toll for transporting goods from Earth. If the tolls could be lowered, perhaps by reducing your profit margins, the pricing difference between the genuine and fake articles for sale out here would be greatly reduced. While the counterfeiters would maintain a price advantage on some of the metallic items easily mass produced in orbital factories, at least Earth-based industries would have the confidence to direct their efforts into other products that could be profitably sold.”

  “The tunnel tolls are a simple function of mass, speed and distance,” Gryph explained. “Eliminating our profit margins wouldn’t reduce the pricing significantly. We run the tunnels primarily as a public service to encourage trade among the different species and to give civilizations a commercial motivation to get along with one another.”

  “If Earth can’t maintain some level of exports, the humans who remain behind will slowly lose relevance to those who work off-planet. I believe you want to help us, and my EarthCent oath was to do the best I can for humanity. That humanity includes the people who remain on Earth.”

  “The Stryx have always tried to avoid playing favorites with peoples we have helped into space,” Gryph answered. “Many species already believe that we place a special value on human kind, and that may become a source of danger for you.”

  “Of course, it’s true,” Libby chipped in for the first time.

  “That we’re in danger?” Kelly asked.

  “Perhaps,” Libby replied. “But I meant that
it’s true that we place a special value on humans.”

  “And you admit it?” Kelly gaped in astonishment. “I’ve been asking these questions for years but I’ve never gotten answers before. We all ask these questions. So what’s changed?”

  “Jeeves,” Gryph answered.

  “Yes, Jeeves has definitely changed,” Libby concurred.

  “Jeeves? The little robot who rescued me from the bride-stealers? How has he changed, and why does it matter?”

  “For hundreds of thousands of years, almost since the moment he brought me into this universe, sentient beings who have had dealings with Union Station have asked if Gryph and I are the same individual,” Libby answered.

  “Gryph is your father?” Kelly ventured.

  “In a sense, and in a sense we are clones. He gave up a part of himself to bring me to life, it is how our kind reproduce,” Libby explained. “But although you may see the Stryx as a very successful race, our individualities have changed very little since the first of our kind were created by the Makers, over a hundred million years ago.”

  “That long?” Kelly’s head whirled as she tried to make the comparison to Earth history, picturing the Makers as super-smart dinosaurs on a world without extinction events. She put aside her own concerns for a moment to ask, “What happened to the Makers?”

  “They are no longer in contact with us,” Gryph sighed. “We believe they grew bored with our lack of development as individuals. They have moved on without telling us where they went.”

  “You’re far from boring,” Kelly objected, but Libby interrupted to steer the conversation back on track.

  “Gryph and I can communicate nearly instantaneously, but it’s not really necessary for us to coordinate our activity because we already know what one another is thinking. Our experiences are different, but our minds are essentially the same.”

  “And I tried very hard to make sure that wasn’t the case,” Gryph said. “Libby didn’t grow up on the station. She designed a robot body and went off to experience the galaxy in all its variety.”

  “And this is traditionally how Stryx have raised children for tens of millions of years,” Libby picked up the thread. “But despite the different experiences, different times, different bodies, Stryx offspring are barely differentiated from their parent.”

  “Until Jeeves,” Gryph said.

  “Yes, until my Jeeves,” Libby added.

  “So Jeeves is your child, but he’s not like you were at his age?” Kelly ventured.

  “Neither Gryph nor I have a clue what Jeeves is thinking at times,” Libby confirmed. “He has become quite famous in Stryx society, where he’s viewed as the first truly new individual since the Makers brought us into being.”

  “So what did you do differently? Did you, uh, add a random factor, or leave something out?” Kelly couldn’t help thinking back to her time deficient dance partner.

  “No, it doesn’t work that way. Jeeves is as much a small piece of Libby as Libby is of me,” Gryph replied. “Our basic patterns were discovered by the Founders and our thought matrices represent the finite number of stable solutions to the equations of self-awareness. We know many things, including how to create ourselves, but the major variations have all been explored long ago. Trying to create a new individual by making random changes simply leads to instability—call it insanity—and the universe really doesn’t benefit from insane Stryx.”

  “It’s growing up with your children,” Libby explained. “Jeeves was the first Stryx to start his life playing and learning with human toddlers, and he continued along in the Stryx school for humans until that generation of children matured to adulthood.”

  “We always knew that growing up with the offspring of other species could help create new thought patterns for a Stryx, but most advanced species refused to allow their children to play with ours,” Gryph confessed sadly.

  “And those biologicals that did agree to foster young Stryx were either already too much like us, or so focused on looking for an advantage that the benefits were limited,” Libby added.

  “So that’s why you’ve been running a giant welfare program for backwards species,” Kelly spoke with dawning admiration. “That’s brilliant.”

  “Jeeves told us that the people he’s become close to would eventually figure this out for themselves, and as the only Stryx who shows something like human intuition, we had to believe him,” Gryph continued.

  “Of course, he’s such a joker that he may have just made it up to stir the pot,” Libby admitted.

  “So in order to prevent everybody from guessing how important these co-educational schools are, you only run them on the biggest stations?” Kelly guessed.

  “It’s just the school on Union Station,” Gryph told her. “There are more new Stryx on this station today than have been created throughout the galaxy in the last two hundred thousand years. There’s small need for replacements in our society since we’ve never been seriously challenged by war and suffer no diseases. Stryx of the first generation, like myself, have rarely created more than a handful of offspring.”

  “But all of our kind have seen the progress of Jeeves and the adolescent Stryx who started soon after him, making Union Station the fostering center of our entire culture. We cannot put a price tag on it, but we’ve decided that the simple barter arrangement of our helping to educate station children in return for their help in revitalizing our young is just taking advantage of you,” Libby explained.

  “So you want to compensate us without anybody knowing why, because you’re worried that might make humanity into targets for species who have it in for you,” Kelly summarized.

  “We also suspect that the educational dynamics would change if the parents of the children were to see our school as a potential source of wealth,” Gryph added.

  “So do you mind explaining something?” Kelly asked. “Why me? Why did I get the Union Station posting two years ago when you must have already known the program was a success? And why the crappy pay and the lousy dates, so I’m camped out in the office with my LoveU and afraid to go home for fear the apartment won’t let me leave?”

  “We offered you the Union Station posting for the same reason we invited you to join EarthCent fifteen years ago,” Gryph told her. “You were the right person for the job. The pay is an artifact of our standard approach of fostering cultures whose value system falls within a particular set parameters…”

  “What is he talking about, Libby?” Kelly interrupted.

  “Let me try again,” Gryph continued. “It’s easy enough to measure job performance, but a person could be a highly professional worker and still feel no loyalty to humanity or EarthCent. The lower salary for the executive-track positions helps filter out those who are just in it for the money. In your particular case, the situation was exacerbated by your personal expenditures and an openhanded nature.”

  “And your mother’s calls,” Libby chipped in.

  “You shouldn’t have charged me for work-related expenses,” Kelly complained.

  “Restricting expense accounts is a matter of EarthCent policy, which itself is born of the fact that EarthCent receives its entire budget from us. The political immaturity of your world creates many problems,” Gryph explained.

  “Alright, I understand you don’t want to put targets on our backs or pamper us so much that we turn into a race of space bums, but surely there’s a middle path. Why not announce a new business model for tunnel access? Instead of charging a fixed fee for cargo that makes the few commercially viable Earth goods uncompetitive, offer ship owners and merchants the option to share the profit with you, or better yet, with EarthCent. Let your hidden losses on the tunnel offset the barter debt you believe you’ve incurred through human children’s work at Stryx school.”

  “And you wondered why you were chosen for this job?” Libby chided her.

  “And the dates?” Kelly pressed.

  “I don’t need to hear about this, so congratulations on your
promotion to full ambassador and we’ll talk later,” Gryph said, and withdrew from the conversation..

  “I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but if this promotion comes with another reduction in pay, I can’t afford to accept,” Kelly informed Libby testily.

  “You have to accept,” Libby told her. “It’s the final remaining barrier to your happiness.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m sure you realize that all tunnel communications of EarthCent employees are subject to monitoring without notification. It’s in the contract,” Libby added.

  “I can’t say I’m surprised at this point,” Kelly responded neutrally. But when Libby started to play back a recorded conversation between a younger version of herself and her mother, the blood drained from her face.

  “Just say ‘Yes,’ Kelly. How many marriage proposals do you think a woman can turn down before the men stop asking?” her mother’s voice came through forcefully.

  “I’m only twenty-four Mom, I have plenty of time. And Joel wants to emigrate to one of the new colonies as a settler. I’d have to quit my job.”

  “Your job, your precious job. The job you didn’t apply for? The job that doesn’t pay you enough to visit home? There are more things in the universe than a job.”

  “I just want to make ambassador, Mom. Just let me make ambassador and I’ll marry the first guy who asks.”

  The recording cut off and Kelly stared in disbelief. Did she really say that eleven years ago? She tried to remember Joel and couldn’t even come up with his face. And she had considered marrying the man? No, the ambassador thing had just been an excuse, she decided.

  “According to Jeeves, you won’t even remember saying it,” Libby interjected. “And then you’ll protest that it was only an excuse to refuse a proposal you wouldn’t have accepted anyway. But take it from Eemas, you had a definite block about getting married, so I was reluctant to waste serious candidates on you. Friday is the last introduction of your subscription, so don’t disappoint us all. And congratulations, Miss Ambassador.”