Word Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 9)

by E. M. Foner

  “That would be ideal,” the president replied. “The old roads on our world are so broken up that wheeled vehicles are next to useless outside of the major routes. Once people start buying floaters, they’ll be even less willing to pay for road maintenance, and you’ll end up owning the whole transportation market.”

  “You will guarantee us a monopoly in any advanced manufacturing process we bring to Earth, of course,” Drume asserted.

  “Of course,” the president replied. “Our underlings can negotiate the exact time limit for the monopoly, but I have no problem with it extending beyond my own lifetime.”

  “Deal,” Drume said abruptly, and reached across the table as Kuerda had done to shake hands with the humans. As soon as he leaned back, Ambassador Crute whispered in the prince’s ear, who look startled and exclaimed out loud, “That short?” He turned back to the president of EarthCent and asked, “How old are you now?”

  “Fifty-one,” Stephen replied.

  Drume grimaced and let out something untranslatable that sounded a little like ‘tomatoes’ with a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard screech mixed in, causing all of the humans to cringe.

  “That’s fifty-one across!” Kelly exclaimed, her eyes lighting up. “Dover. It’s been driving me nuts all day.” Then she remembered where she was and tried to look suitably embarrassed, but she couldn’t stop grinning with satisfaction all the same.

  “I thought you promised to stop working the crosswords on your heads-up display,” Blythe reminded her.

  “I did stop, but one or two tricky clues still get imprinted on my brain, and the answers come to me at the oddest times,” Kelly said.

  “It’s a form of addiction pushed by our local news business to build a subscriber base,” the president explained to the Dollnicks. “Some people compulsively check spot prices for commodities, others try to figure out what word fits in a numbered space based on vague clues.”

  “The crossword puzzles aren’t a hide-in-plain-sight communications method?” the Dollnick ambassador asked. “Our intelligence people have been wasting valuable time trying to solve them, and I understand that several junior analysts assigned to the task have required medical attention.”

  “But they publish the solution the next week,” Blythe pointed out.

  “We assumed that was a disinformation ploy,” the ambassador admitted. “Do I have your word that you aren’t using this method to communicate with undercover agents in Dollnick space?”

  “We don’t have any undercover agents in your space,” Blythe protested. The three Dollnicks regarded her skeptically. “Ambassador McAllister. While we’re waiting for the Thark recorder, why don’t you explain the word you just solved so the Dollnicks will understand that it’s just a puzzle.”

  “Alright,” Kelly agreed readily. “The title of this week’s puzzle was ‘Alien Substitution,’ which is an obvious hint that sometimes the answers relate to aliens or are just stand-ins for the word that fits. When the president gave his age, I couldn’t help thinking about that clue in the puzzle. I was sure about the ‘v’ in the middle of fifty-one across and the ‘r’ at the end, but the clue was _ _ _ _ _hanger, which means the first five letters of the word were missing. At first I thought the fifth letter would be a ‘c’ which would make the rest of the clue into ‘changer’ or…”

  “Don’t chase the Dollnicks off before we get the contracts recorded,” the president whispered.

  “Oh, so when Prince Drume, uh, reacted to the president’s age, it reminded me of chalkboard scraping, and that’s when it hit me.”

  “When what hit you?” Hildy asked.

  “Cliffhanger. Isn’t it obvious?”

  “How do you get from ‘cliffhanger’ to ‘Dover?’” the president demanded.

  “You know, the white cliffs of Dover. It’s a substitution. And they’re white because they’re chalk, which squeaks on blackboards, though it’s not as bad as fingernails,” she concluded happily.

  “I think you can instruct your cultural attaché to stop wasting time trying to break the Human puzzle encryption,” Prince Kuerda advised Ambassador Crute openly. “Even if they are sending secret messages, it’s unlikely their agents can understand them.”

  “I hate substitutions,” President Beyer muttered darkly.

  The Thark recorder arrived, looking a little like royalty in his ceremonial robes, and took a seat at the table without being asked.

  “Have you recorded a contract with us before?” the Thark addressed the humans.

  “Yes,” Kelly and Blythe replied together, but the president shook his head.

  “Very well,” the Thark said. “The process is quite simple. You will establish your identities, speak the terms of your agreement, and I will record them.” The recorder touched a pendant that hung around his neck and said, “Party one consists of Princes Kuerda and Drume, whose identities are known to all, and Dollnick Ambassador Crute as witness. Party two consists of…”

  “President Stephen Beyer of EarthCent, negotiating for Earth,” the president said.

  “Ambassador Kelly McAllister as witness,” Kelly added.

  “I positively identify Ambassador McAllister from the Carnival race,” the Thark continued. “Can somebody vouch for the EarthCent president?”

  “I can,” Kelly said.

  “I meant somebody with financial standing,” the Thark told her bluntly.

  “Blythe Oxford. I can vouch for him. I’ve recorded dozens of Thark contracts.”

  The recorder turned his attention to Blythe, and nodded in the affirmative after using an overlay image on his heads-up display to confirm her identity. “If any of you are acting under duress, this is the time to say something,” the Thark declared formally. “Very well. Should I assume that this will be a standard Princely contract of intent, with the details to be negotiated at a later date?”

  “Yes,” the Dollnick princes and the president replied together.

  A few minutes later, after the contracts guarantying the Dollnicks monopolies on reprocessing and exporting Earth’s nuclear waste and establishing privileged factories were spoken, the Thark stated, “Recorded.”

  Seventeen

  “So you’re on an alien planet and your external voice box fails. What do you do?” Thomas challenged the young reporter, identified as ‘Thad’ by the badge hanging around his neck.

  “Find another one?”

  “There isn’t another one. Members of most planet-based species go through their lives without encountering aliens unless it’s on vacation, so they don’t need translation devices.”

  “But how do they communicate with members of their own species who speak a different language?”

  “All of the advanced species have long since standardized on a single language, though in many cases there’s a more formal or expanded version used by a particular segment of society. Even if planet-based aliens have implants, they aren’t going to waste space storing human languages on the off chance you might show up on their doorstep to report a story.”

  “But we could still understand them, right?” asked a young woman with a pageboy cut.

  “Yes, but asking questions is an important part of the job for newspaper reporters,” Thomas pointed out.

  The second one-week kidnapping avoidance class was populated by recent Galactic Free Press hires with little or no experience, and Joe had warned the artificial person that it would be very different than training experienced correspondents. Thomas had hoped to move quickly through the basics, but he hadn’t expected all of the trainees to be youngsters who had just aged out of a labor contract or recently arrived from Earth. A dozen Drazen and Horten actors had clocked-in and were waiting in the practice area to engage the humans in loosely scripted scenarios.

  “Do we use sign language?” another youngster asked.

  “Give us an example,” Chance urged her, strolling up to the group.

  “Well, I could point at my mouth if I was hungry,” the trainee replied.<
br />
  “Or maybe at your belly,” another said.

  “I’d make cutting up food and eating motions,” Thad contributed, complete with a pantomime demonstration.

  “So depending on the species, they might think you are threatening to eat them, indicating that you’re carrying a child, or playing an imaginary stringed instrument that required you to keep wetting the bow with your tongue.”

  “She’s exaggerating,” Thomas reassured the youngsters, some of whom were looking around like they were thinking of bolting. “There’s a much simpler fallback solution when you’re dealing with biologicals whose vocal speech falls in the range that humans can reproduce.”

  “Are you saying we have to start learning alien languages?” the first young man asked hesitantly. “I grew up on a Dollnick ag world, and I can whistle at most a dozen words that a Dolly who didn’t know me might actually understand.”

  “Dollnick is a particularly difficult language and much of it takes place at higher frequencies than humans can hear,” Thomas replied. “You’ll find that the more human a species looks, the more likely you can replicate their speech to some degree. Common Vergallian and Horten are easily transliterated into English, most of the Chert language can be managed if you stay away from numbers, and you can get by in Drazen if you talk to the males. The Drazen females speak a super-set of the language based on musical notes that humans would need a synthesizer to reproduce. It’s also possible for motivated humans to learn enough Verlock to communicate, but most of those who do so lose their facility to speak human languages at the normal pace.”

  “If I have to learn an alien language well enough to ask questions, I may as well leave now,” said the young woman with the pageboy cut.

  “Now who’s scaring the newbies?” Chance declared, shoving Thomas aside. “You all have in-eye recorders with heads-up display capability or you wouldn’t be here today. What we’re going to start with this morning is the transliteration mode your implant provides. It’s a fall-back for emergencies, like if your voice box batteries run down, or if it gets stepped on by a large amphibian.”

  “I just got my subvoc pickup and I haven’t learned how to use it yet,” a young man said. “How will the translation implant even know what I want to say?”

  “The transliteration mode can also work like an external voice box set to voice control. You’ll say what you want out loud in English, and a phonetic representation will appear on your heads-up display. But it won’t do much good unless you get into the habit of practicing with it. Today you’ll get the chance to try it out with native speakers, but in the future you can take advantage of the delay and practice by yourself.”

  “How does that work?” Thad asked.

  “A delay? The implant simply waits the delay interval you specify before translating, so you can speak a phrase in English, read the transliteration out loud, and then you’ll hear the implant translate what you said. In fact, you should all set your implants to transliteration and delay mode right now. All set? Good. The temporary venue contract we signed with the Horten Stage Actors Guild kicks into ‘Golden Time’ in three hours and eighteen minutes. After that we have to pay triple the rate, which of course means the Drazens will want the same or we’ll have a war on our hands, so hold on to the rest of your questions until after lunch and let’s get started. Thomas?”

  “If each of you will look at the back of your name badge, you’ll see a number which will correspond with the number on the badge of one of the alien trainers. In the first exercise, you’ll approach the alien assigned to you and ask for directions to the nearest spaceport. Understand?”

  A chorus of uncertain-sounding responses greeted the question, but the young reporter trainees allowed the two artificial people to herd them over to the practice area, where the aliens were awaiting them while drinking from a variety of take-out beverage containers. The nearest Drazen wore the numeral “one” around his neck, which happened to match the number on the back of Thad’s name tag. The young man approached the Drazen cautiously.

  “Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me the direction to the spaceport?” There was a short pause, and then the would-be reporter began sounding out phonetic transliteration on his heads-up display. “Hrrt Shigabit. D’she, uh, mechkrwynk gchuchh…” Thad broke off after beginning to choke on his own gutturals. Luckily, the spasm of coughing caused his head to duck just in time to evade a roundhouse punch thrown by the enraged Drazen, whose tentacle was sticking up like a flagpole behind his head.

  “Hey, no hitting,” Thomas shouted in Drazen, leaping towards the pair and catching the alien’s six-fingered fist before he could reload for a second try. “What’s the problem?”

  “He said I don’t have a sense of humor,” the angry Drazen shouted, struggling against the artificial person’s vise-like grip. “Nobody tells me I don’t have a sense of humor.”

  “Thad? What did you say to him?”

  “I just read what was on my heads-up display,” the young man protested. “Wait, I’m getting the delayed translation now.” Thad turned pale and backed away from the Drazen. “I guess I said he doesn’t have a sense of humor and he’s never known trouble, but I didn’t mean to.”

  “Drazens, Hortens, huddle up,” Thomas shouted in both alien languages, motioning the aliens to gather around him. “Change of plan. Turn your implants back on so you can understand what our people are saying and then correct their pronunciation as required.”

  “So we’re working as voice coaches now?” a Horten actor asked slyly.

  “No,” Chance interjected before Thomas could reply. “According to Subsection 724, paragraph 71 of the temporary agreement under which you are employed, you are all working at the impersonator pay scale, even if your roles require you to venture into other areas.”

  “Who am I supposed to be impersonating?” the Horten demanded.

  “A Horten voice coach,” Chance replied sweetly. “I was in the room when our management went over all of this with your union rep, so don’t try to renegotiate a contract that’s already been signed. Who’s the steward here?”

  A short Horten with blue-tinted skin reluctantly set aside the drink he’d been sucking at through a squiggly transparent straw and addressed the malcontent. “Leave it, Thunta. We’re getting paid scale and the Humans agreed to fractional pension points, even though we aren’t working a full Grether. If you want to go home, I have fifty-seven actors on the bench waiting for a chance.”

  Thunta turned yellow, streaked with red and grey, but clamped his jaw shut and backed down.

  “Did everybody see that?” Thomas asked the trainees. “When you’re talking to Hortens, the color of their skin is as important as what they say. While there’s no universal guide, you can assume that angry Hortens will turn some shade of red and happy Hortens will appear brown. Now find your counterpart and let’s start over.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said earlier,” Thad told his Drazen trainer under the watchful eyes of Thomas. Then he repeated it from the transliteration, managing not to choke this time.

  Even though the Drazen now had his implant turned on and understood what the young man was trying to say, his tentacle stiffened at the human’s botched pronunciation.

  “First of all, you’re saying ‘hoo’ when you mean to say ‘kchoo,’” the Drazen informed Thad. “Just say ‘kch’ for me.”

  “Chi,” the young man said hopefully. The Drazen shook his head and sighed. Thomas patted the alien on the back, carefully avoiding his tentacle, and moved on to the next human-Drazen pair.

  As the morning wore on, it became clear that the trainees were much better at pronouncing Horten than Drazen. All of them mastered the idiosyncrasies of the English-to-Horten transliterations for speaking simple phrases, and one of the girls who had a knack for it was already able to sustain a sort of conversation.

  “So, how did you end up here?” Gail asked her partner in stilted Horten sounded out from the transliteration.


  “I heard through the grapevine that the Stryx were hiring actors, but it turned out they only wanted war reenactors for some sort of theme park attraction.”

  “And you can’t afford a ticket home?”

  “You just asked if I couldn’t afford mud-brick home,” the Horten corrected her. “You have an excellent ear, but I suspect you are running up against the limitations of the simple transliteration system you described. I believe you have the aptitude to master the Horten character set, which I strongly suggest.”

  Gail blushed at the compliment from the alien. “You mean, I could learn how to pronounce the letter combinations in your language without knowing what they mean?”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve made you angry,” the Horten apologized, his skin tone shifting from dark brown to something shading towards yellow. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “What? Oh, I get it. You’re asking because I turned red. I’m just not used to compliments. Normally men only say something nice to me if they want—never mind. Do you really think I could learn to read Horten script? I’ve seen it in corridor ads and it looks pretty difficult.”

  “It can’t be any more difficult than the bizarre system your own people use. And learning to sound out the words without understanding them is actually quite common among Hortens, since worship of Gortunda is performed in the Old Tongue, which uses the same alphabet.”

  Chance nodded in approval at the Horten trainer’s explanation and made a note on her tab before moving on to the next pair. As soon as she was out of earshot, the Horten who had brought up the coaching pay issue leaned over and whispered angrily to Gail’s trainer, “Slow up. You’re going to kill the job. If she nails it down today, they won’t call you back tomorrow and then maybe she’ll put ME out of work.”

  “What did he say?” Gail asked her partner.

  “That if I play my part too well I’m going to put us out of work prematurely,” the Horten replied. “There’s one like him on every job, but I don’t bite the hand that feeds me. Besides, I’m here on a one-week trial engagement, and unlike that Grubnick, I actually studied the scripts. I’m looking forward to moving past emergency language training and on to the encounter scenarios. They leave us plenty of room for improvisation, which is my specialty.”