by E. M. Foner
“You know I don’t like scary things.”
“We could do Storytellers, just like on the show,” a brash young boy suggested. “You could start a nice story and then we could make it scary.”
“I don’t know if the other parents would like that,” Aisha said. “Besides, Mike’s mother Shaina was a Station Scout when she was small and she knows lots of ghost stories.”
“As long as they scare the aliens,” the same little boy said. “Just because they can build rope bridges and do math and stuff doesn’t mean they should have scarier stories.”
In the meantime, Paul had set up a small folding table outside of the first tent in the row and called to the children, “Who doesn’t have a translation implant?”
Around half of the children lined up, including Mike and Fenna, and one by one Paul equipped them with an ear-cuff translator. After each fitting, Daniel tested the child with an alien phrase he had picked up from members of his sovereign human communities, who were always borrowing words from the host species on open worlds.
“The lights are dimming,” Mike announced. He had hardly looked away from the high ceiling of the park deck since his father had explained dusk, and his words were accompanied by another blast on the horn.
“Any Frunge present?” a giant Grenouthian parent bellowed. Everybody stopped what they were doing to carefully examine their neighbors, making sure no little shrubs had snuck into the jamboree. “Everybody gather ‘round the bonfire.”
In preparation for the event, the bots had been instructed to set aside all of the deadwood from routine maintenance of the park deck, and the Verlock parent in charge of the fire had perhaps cheated and arranged for some heavy logs from one of the ag decks as well. Placing the wood for the fire had been the job of the young Verlock Scouts, who were too slow-footed to compete with the human and Grenouthian children in doing good deeds for strangers. A dozen children from each of the four species took their places just outside the perfect circle of rocks laid out by the Verlocks.
The largest bunny, who was the scoutmaster for the jamboree, gave an order to the shorter Grenouthian, who blew a different note on his alien horn.
“Light the bonfire,” the scoutmaster intoned, and a Verlock parent who was an amateur mage cast forward a cloud of dust and then blew out the air compressed in his mighty lungs. The powder ignited and created a ball of flame that immediately engulfed the kindling, causing the ventilation system to open a grille overhead and create a steady draft for the smoke.
“That was pretty impressive,” Shaina said to Paul as the fire roared to life. “I’m not shy about using my voice, you know, but how are the children on the other side of the fire supposed to hear anything over the noise?”
“See the silvery coil of wire just inside the stone ring?” Paul replied. “It must be for an audio suppression field. We usually work with the Dollnick systems that are designed for privacy or hearing protection, but I’m guessing that’s the Verlock version, and they’re way ahead of the Dollys. It will be interesting to see how it works.”
A pair of young Verlocks made their way around the circle from opposite directions, passing out long telescoping rods of some composite material for use in spearing and roasting whatever snacks the chaperones for each species provided. It didn’t take long before all of the human children were waving marshmallows before the flames, and the aliens did the same with their own treats.
The Grenouthian scoutmaster gave the Junior Scouts a few minutes to enjoy the noisy fire before giving a signal to the Verlock, who activated the audio suppression loop. A translucent silvery shield reminiscent of a giant soap bubble formed a cylindrical wall around the bonfire and the noise level fell to a pleasant background crackling. At the same instant, the conversations of nearly fifty children that had previously been drowned out by the bonfire suddenly sounded so loud that they all stopped talking at once. One of the Dollnick parents seized the opportunity.
“Once upon a time there were two princes,” he whistled quietly at the silvery Verlock barrier, which re-radiated the acoustic energy evenly around three hundred and sixty degrees, “who both sought the hand of the same fair maiden. Prince Gruy lived in a castle on an island reached by a long suspension bridge. He kidnapped the maiden from her seminary and brought her to his castle with the intention of making her his own on Marriage Day.”
“He got her from a cemetery?” Mike asked his father while the Dolly paused to let the story sink in. “This is really scary.”
“Seminary,” Daniel replied. “It’s a type of boarding school.”
“Boarding school? That’s even scarier.”
“Prince Koof was unwilling to concede the contest for the maiden’s hand just because his opponent had beaten him to the punch, so he called up his army and they began marching towards Prince Gruy’s castle. The first day they marched forty Jursts, the second day they marched fifty Jursts, and on the third day, they came in sight of the island and stopped to sharpen their weapons.”
“Is there going to be fighting?” Fenna asked her mother during the pause. “I don’t like fighting.”
“Neither do I,” Aisha told her daughter. “If it gets too scary, just take off your ear-cuff translator.”
“Chicken,” Mike muttered at his friend.
“On the morning of the fourth day,” the Dollnick continued, “the brave warriors began whistling their battle tune and marched onto the bridge. While Prince Gruy’s forces remained inside their castle preparing for the assault, the flower of Prince Koof’s army crowded the narrow road, the noise from their footfalls sounding like a giant drum.”
“Oh no!” cried one of the Dollnick children, drawing a sharp look from the storyteller, who then rushed ahead with the tale.
“The bridge began to sway with their steps and the roadbed started to rise and fall. Prince Koof whistled to his men to stop marching in unison, but it was too late, for the harmonics had already done their damage.”
Here a four-armed boy shrieked and covered his ears, and the other Dollnicks appeared to be equally shaken. One of the Verlock scouts had taken out a tab and was trying to analyze the bridge’s structure based on scant information, and the Grenouthian children were suppressing yawns.
“A section of the bridge fell into the sea, and then another, and another. Many a brave Dollnick went to the bottom in his heavy armor, while the survivors clung to suspension cables and waited for the harmonics to settle.”
The storyteller settled back into his camp chair satisfied with the effect he had made on the young Dollys, most of whom looked like they wished they had never heard such a scary story.
“What happened next?” one of the puzzled human children asked. “Did their ghosts do something?”
“That wasn’t scary at all,” a Grenouthian scout added with a yawn.
The Dollnick parent appeared to be taken aback by the criticism of his terrifying tale. “You want to know what happened next? Prince Gruy was so ashamed of the bridge failure that he paid reparations to Prince Koof for his lost troops and gave up the fair maiden as well. And that’s what you can expect if any of you do such a bad job at engineering,” he added for the benefit of the young Dollys.
The Verlock scout with the tab raised his hand. “I think the soldiers would have had time to get off the bridge,” he said slowly. “Maybe a stone causeway would fail all at once.”
“Let’s not get overly analytical about this,” the scoutmaster said, and the young bunnies squeezed together to admit his large bulk into their midst. “Our Dollnick friends may lack a fine sense of what’s truly terrifying, but not everybody can have a Grenouthian upbringing.”
“That sounded odd,” Aisha muttered to Paul.
“I think he was talking about their theatrical schools,” her husband whispered back.
“Now,” the alpha bunny continued, “it happens I have a true story to tell. There was once a famous director who was so brave that he entered a cursed swamp to make a documentary
about a witch.”
“A witch!” Fenna repeated, moving her hand near the ear-cuff translator so she could pull it off quickly if the story became too scary.
“When the director went to the Immersive Production Guild, of which he was a member in good standing, they refused to underwrite the production due to the known hazards of working in a cursed swamp.”
“Oh, the risk,” a young bunny moaned.
“What’s he talking about?” Mike asked his father.
“I think business insurance,” the associate ambassador replied. “Ask your mother.”
“The production crew all demanded overtime pay from the first hour, and the narrator wouldn’t even come on the shoot, insisting he could add the voice-over in the studio,” the Grenouthian continued. “The director pushed ahead with the production in spite of the obstacles, and the witch agreed to cooperate since she wanted to be famous just like everybody else. But the schedule began to slip—”
“Not the schedule,” a little bunny interrupted, and several of the other Grenouthian scouts began rocking back and forth on their heels.
“The schedule began to slip, and then, before the director even knew what was happening, they were over budget.”
A collective moan came from the young bunnies.
“The director pledged his family assets and forged ahead as if he had been possessed, and finally he had enough raw content for the editing room.”
“The data cans were empty!” another little bunny blurted, desperate to bring the nightmarish tale to its logical conclusion, even at the cost of speaking the words herself.
“No, my dear. The cameras had functioned properly, and there was almost too much to work with. The director slaved away in the editing room, rejecting paying jobs to reach the end of his self-imposed mission, and at the end, at the very end, when the last audio track was laid and the final credit was superimposed…”
“This is too complicated to be scary,” Mike muttered darkly.
“The network gave him an early morning broadcast slot.”
“Oh, no!” a young Grenouthian scout cried, and unable to take it anymore, hopped away from the bonfire.
The scoutmaster paused and hunched over, his back to the fire, the dancing flames casting strange shadows over his face. “And when the documentary finally aired against a number of alien reruns, a shopping channel, and the station’s public access slot for Humans, it got a ONE SHARE,” he thundered.
The little bunnies all screeched, and one of them seemed to be trying to burrow into the ground, but the children from the other species remained unimpressed.
“Maybe he should have re-edited it,” a young Dollnick suggested.
“Bad business, witches,” a Verlock child stated flatly.
“What did the witch DO?” a human scout wanted to know. “Did she cook children in a giant pot?”
“Cultural mismatch,” the Verlock parent announced ponderously. “I believe I have a universally scary tale to tell.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” Daniel whispered to Aisha, who nodded her agreement.
The Verlock confirmed their suspicions immediately by starting with, “Once upon a time, a little girl found a book of math problems.”
“Not math,” the Grenouthian horn-blower complained.
“Don’t interrupt him or it will take forever,” the scoutmaster hissed.
“They were all in story form, from an alien species, with simple questions about two trains departing a station at the same time and other exercises fit for babes in the cradle. The last problem was about siblings who found a box of salted fish.”
Here the Verlock scouts all pulled out pads or rubbed a little smooth spot on the ground in front of them to be able to diagram the problem. Several of the Dollnick and Grenouthian scouts slumped in their places, apparently fast asleep.
“The siblings wanted to divide their prize evenly, and they decided the only fair way was to go by their respective body masses. The oldest of them was three times the mass of the youngest, and the masses of the two middle children added together were twenty percent higher than that of the oldest.”
The Verlock scouts all scratched away at their diagrams, working cooperatively with one another for the best solution. Mike pulled on his father’s pants leg and said, “I’m hungry now.”
“After the siblings made their final calculation,” the Verlock parent continued, his speaking rate dropping to a glacial speed, “they opened the box, and it was empty!”
“Trick question,” a stunned Verlock scout proclaimed. “Who would do such a horrible thing?”
“As long as it wasn’t a divide by zero error,” his neighbor said, and all of the young Verlocks shuddered in terror at the thought.
“All right, campers,” Shaina called out brightly as she moved to the front of the human group. “Who wants to hear a real ghost story from Earth?”
“We do!” the human contingent cried, waking up the snoozing Grenouthians and Dollnicks.
“Once upon a time, there were three men prospecting for gold, and although they lived in the same cabin, each of them dug his own mine.”
“Typical,” a Dollnick parent muttered.
“Inefficient,” commented the Verlock.
“One of the prospectors worked twice as hard as the other two, but he never found any gold. His cabin mates always laughed when they saw him fumbling his way home by lantern late at night because they knew he had dug his mine in a bad place. But one night, as the prospector labored away in his shaft, he saw a large nugget of gold gleaming in his lantern light.”
“Probably pyrite,” the scoutmaster couldn’t help commenting. “It’s much more common than actual gold.”
“He became so excited that just as he pried the nugget out with his pick, he knocked over his lantern and broke it. The prospector dropped to his hands and knees and found the nugget in the dark, and then he climbed out of his shaft and headed for the cabin.”
“I’ll bet he picked up a regular stone,” one of the other alien parents guessed, but Shaina just shook her head in irritation and continued.
“Without his lantern, he mistook the path to the cabin in the faint moonlight, and wandered for hours in the dark. Then he heard a nearby howling, and fearing hungry wolves, he began to run.”
Queenie growled impressively, showing her teeth and making clear that she would never flee from a mere wolf.
“The prospector saw a bright light in the distance and put on a final burst of speed,” Shaina said, talking faster and faster. “The light almost seemed to be coming to meet him, and then he tripped over a metal rail, hit his head and fell asleep.”
“So it was railroad tracks,” a young Dolly interrupted, proud to be the first to solve the mystery. “He saw the light from the train, and now the automatic safety system will halt the locomotive and the prospector will be saved.”
“This was long ago when trains were new on Earth and they didn’t have very good safety systems,” Shaina said apologetically.
“They still don’t have very good safety systems,” commented the scoutmaster, who had done the re-edit for a Grenouthian documentary on the subject pieced together from archival footage of spectacular train wrecks.
“Be that as it may, when the other two prospectors woke in the morning, they wondered what had happened to their cabin mate. They searched his mineshaft and found the broken lantern, but the prospector was nowhere to be found. All day they looked for him, but when it got dark, they went home to the cabin and decided he had been eaten by wolves.”
Again, Queenie growled, and Fenna gave the hound a comforting belly rub.
Shaina paused for a long moment, and dropping her voice to a loud whisper that was carried around the bonfire by the Verlock technology, continued, “Late that night, the two prospectors were awakened by a knocking at the door.”
All of the young scouts finally began paying attention now, and some who were on the other side of the fire actually crawled around to whe
re they could see the storyteller.
“One of the men called out, ‘Is that you, Tom?’ but the knocking just grew louder. Finally, they each took up a tool to use as a weapon, one of them a pick and the other a shovel, and the man with the pick used it to lift the bar from the door.” Shaina stopped here and inserted her own sound effect for a creaking hinge. Queenie closed her eyes and put her paws over her ears. “And who do you think was at the door?”
“The dead guy,” Mike guessed, holding tightly to Fenna’s hand.
“A train safety inspector,” the scoutmaster suggested.
“A mine safety inspector,” the Verlock storyteller rumbled.
“A wolf,” a Dollnick Junior Scout contributed.
“A detached human hand,” Shaina said in her spookiest voice, and Fenna shrieked and hid her face in the dog’s fur.
“Was the hand still holding the nugget?” the scoutmaster asked. “It would be a noble act to bring it to his roommates.”
“Did they find the miner and reattach his hand?” a Verlock child asked.
“Sleepy,” one of the small bunnies said, leading the rest of the Junior Scouts to realize that they were ready for bed as well.
Twelve
Samuel hoisted the intake bin onto the counter of the lost-and-found and began sorting through the collection of weapons and enchanted items brought in by maintenance bots on the prior shift. Ever since LARPing had become popular on the station, his part-time job had gotten a lot more interesting, though there was less time for study. He carefully examined each new item, in no hurry to begin his latest homework assignment. Then he returned the bin to its place, and after a moment of guilty hesitation, pulled out the next bin in line and repeated the process, even though he had seen the items on his previous shift.
An hour later the teenager ran out of ways to procrastinate and was calling up the first homework problem on his student tab when an athletic-looking woman in her early thirties entered the lost-and-found. Samuel turned off the screen with a relieved swipe and greeted her with his best customer-service smile.