by E. M. Foner
“No, business class is fine,” Lynx amended herself hastily. Things were definitely looking up.
When A.P. and Lynx headed out for the convention center to make contact, Chance tagged along without any discussion. She was about the same size as Lynx, who loaned the artificial person a slinky dress that she’d bought on impulse and then never had the courage to wear. Chance made it look so good that Lynx decided on the spot not to ask for it back. Given the artificial person’s track record with loans, it was doubtful that Chance would think to return it of her own accord.
The auction was finished by the time they arrived, and Lynx worried that they had missed their contact opportunity, but a Horten girl ran up to them the moment they entered the hall. She pulled a Horten display cloth out of her sleeve, shook it out, and held it up to compare the image with Lynx’s face.
“I got Lynx!” the girl shouted, pointing as if she was identifying a bidder.
“Bring her down,” a human woman hollered back from the central stage, which was cluttered with merchandise that either hadn’t met the minimum or had been purchased by remote bidders and needed to be packaged for delivery.
“You just earned me a fifty-cred bonus,” the Horten girl informed them joyfully. When Lynx stared at her dumbfounded, the girl asked, “What’s the matter? Isn’t your translation implant working?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to ignore you,” Lynx replied. “I just didn’t expect such a public welcome.”
“I’ve been working as a spotter at the auction for the last week and they told us to expect you the first day,” the girl informed her. The new arrivals and their Horten guide walked down the aisle, avoiding the stragglers who were moaning to each other about how much they would have bid if the auctioneers had just given them a little more time to think. “After you didn’t show, they raised the bonus and pushed your picture out to all of the InstaSitters on the station. Did you run away from home or something?”
“I’m a grown-up!” Lynx replied indignantly, but that didn’t seem to impress the girl. “No, I didn’t run away from home, I’ve been, uh, resting.”
A small woman who looked about Lynx’s age met them at the edge of the stage and handed the Horten a fifty-cred coin. “Thanks, G’shell, we were beginning to worry,” she told the girl before addressing the newcomers. “I’m Shaina, and that’s my sister Brinda over there. Some friends of ours asked us to meet you and keep you here until they could arrive. Of course, you spent so long parked in orbit that we almost missed you.”
“You did the Kasilian auction!” Chance exclaimed, practically glowing with excitement. “All of that beautiful jewelry. I’m Chance and I need a job. Are you hiring?”
“Pleased to meet you, Chance,” Shaina replied. “We might be hiring, but as you can see from some of the leftover lots, the Kasilian auction was a once-in-a-lifetime event for a very long-lived species. We’ve been covering our expenses doing a circuit of the stations, but it’s still touch and go. This auction would have been a loss if my sister hadn’t recognized that some antique holo recordings included the earliest known performance of Grvat Haledy, which added nearly sixty thousand to the gross sales.”
“I like the idea of traveling on a circuit,” Chance replied, quickly getting over any disappointment that the auction business wasn’t all jewelry and more jewelry. “Do you have your own ship?”
“We’ve been renting,” Shaina admitted. “It’s just a small business, my sister and I, plus our partner, Jeeves. We use InstaSitters for auction spotters and presenters. Do you have any special talents?”
“I’m friendly,” Chance told her brightly. “I’ve earned drinks at bars all over the galaxy by bringing in customers.”
“A useful skill, no doubt,” Jeeves said, floating up to Shaina’s side. “But isn’t a certain artificial person we know approximately six years, one month, thirteen days, nine hours and fifty minutes behind on her first mortgage payment?”
“There’s nothing I hate more than a robot gossip,” Chance replied with a pout. “Besides, how am I ever going to start paying if being a little late on my mortgage means I can’t find a job?”
“Fortunately for you, the AI administration accepts payment through wage garnishment,” Jeeves informed her. “If you come to work for SBJ Auctioneers, fifty percent of your pay will be applied directly to your outstanding debt.”
“I’ll agree if you roll in the overhaul loan I just negotiated,” Chance counter-offered, showing an unexpected talent for bargaining. “I really need the new power cell. All of the humanoids think I’m a lush.”
“Agreed,” Jeeves answered. “Someday I’ll be interested in hearing how you managed to ruin your original power cell and back-up so quickly, but we have to be on our way as soon as possible. I just notified the AI administration you’ve accepted employment with us, so run along and have yourself maintained, and I’ll send you our departure details when they’re finalized.”
“Thanks for everything,” Chance replied happily, dropping a curtsy to A.P. and Lynx. Without further ado, she sashayed back up the aisle towards the exit, drawing admiring looks from the few humanoids left in the seating sections. Lynx watched her dress disappear with equal measures of regret and relief. She wasn’t sure how much more of Chance’s bubbly personality she could take when her own career was up in the air.
“What are we going to do with her?” Shaina asked Jeeves, somewhat surprised by the Stryx’s sudden offer of employment.
“If she doesn’t work out, we’ll pass her onto Blythe,” Jeeves replied.
“Are you kidding?” Shaina asked. “The last thing InstaSitter needs is a delinquent buy-me-drinkee girl as a babysitter, even if she is an artificial person.”
“Not for InstaSitter,” Jeeves said in a conspiratorial tone. “A twenty-four-hour bargirl would be an asset in Blythe’s new business.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to know about that,” Shaina replied in a stage whisper, glancing mischievously at the waiting EarthCent Intelligence agents as she spoke.
“We aren’t supposed to take sides,” Jeeves said. “That’s not the same thing as closing our eyes as if we didn’t know what’s going on. In fact, I’m told the Effterii just docked, so you’ll be hearing from the great spymaster herself shortly. And I’ll admit that I’m looking forward to the Union Station espionage show. Pays to keep a watch on the biologicals.”
“Excuse me,” Lynx interrupted, eying the auctioneers. “I wasn’t trying to, uh, spy on you, but between the Horten girl with my picture and what the two of you just said, I can’t help wondering if my cover is blown.”
“Only in intelligence circles,” Jeeves answered, which wasn’t as reassuring to Lynx as he might have intended. “Your employers suffered from certain operational problems at the time you were hired, nothing out of the ordinary for a brand new agency. Fortunately, there was a change of management, and we all have great confidence in the new team.”
“Are you really a spy?” Shaina asked with obvious interest. “I’ve never met a spy before, or at least, not one who admitted to it. I’m thinking of signing up myself. I have the perfect cover for making the rounds of the stations, meeting different people and handling all sorts of merchandise.”
“Should you be saying that out loud?” Lynx asked, flicking her eyes towards Jeeves.
“Because of Jeeves?” Shaina said, and burst out laughing. “You can’t keep anything from the Stryx, at least not on the stations, and probably not anywhere if you’re using their ship controllers, registers, or implants. They must be the nosiest sentients the galaxy has ever seen.”
“Well-informed sentients,” Jeeves corrected her.
“Hey, are you guys interested in eating something?” Brinda called from across the stage. “There’s a food court just above the reception hall that has a pizza place I’ve been meaning to try. I’ll pay if you’ll walk.”
“Deal,” Lynx hollered back. “I can use the exercise and the solid food. What do y
ou want on it?”
“We eat everything,” Shaina told her, casually catching the fifty-cred coin that Brinda threw to her like a missile, and handing it to Lynx. “Get the party size if they make one. Can’t have too much cold pizza on a tunnel trip. It sticks together in Zero-G.”
“Are you coming, A.P.?” Lynx asked her partner.
“You go ahead,” A.P. replied. “I’ll help them pack while I catch up with Jeeves.”
Lynx found the pizza place in the food court and ordered a party combination. She thought about walking a few laps around the corridors while the pizza baked, but in the end, she gave in to her loss of muscle tone and just sat in a booth to wait.
Twenty minutes later, she was on her way back to the auction hall, carefully carrying the over-sized pizza box in front of her. Fortunately, the pizza place used alien technology for the insulator at the bottom of the box, so it remained stiff, and she didn’t have to wrap her fingers in something to keep them from burning. Lynx had meant to spend the wait preparing to meet her new boss and report on their mission to Farling Seventy, but instead she had spaced out, watching a rebroadcast of a Zero-G cage-fighting tournament from years before. She seemed to remember losing money on the match, betting on a man who wore green tights. Never bet on a man wearing green tights, she reminded herself.
At the entrance to the hall where she’d been intercepted by the Horten girl a half an hour earlier, Lynx was met by a human couple. The man took the pizza box from her with a friendly nod and headed down towards the stage, while the young woman stopped her from following.
“You’re Lynx,” Blythe said, examining EarthCent Intelligence’s first human agent from head to toe. “I’m Control. Are you all right? The first thing we did when we took over the agency was to attempt to locate you. They never should have sent you on a mission outside of Stryx space without training.”
“You’re my new boss?” Lynx asked in surprise. “You’re younger than me!”
“My husband is the new agency director, if that makes you feel any better,” Blythe replied, not unsympathetically. “Come on. Let’s eat, and then we can talk shop.”
“I have a question about that,” Lynx muttered in an undertone as they headed down the aisle to the stage. “All of these people seem to be, well, in on it, if you know what I mean. The contact I had with the old director on Earth and the impression I got from the training materials seemed to indicate that spying should be, well, secret.”
“We’re all old friends, and with Jeeves around, it’s safer to talk here than anywhere other than on my husband’s ship,” Blythe replied in her normal tone of voice. “Did Thomas tell you that he worked with me for years?”
“Who’s Thomas?” Lynx asked as they reached the stage. The box was already open on the floor and three slices were missing. Clive and Blythe had agreed ahead of time to let her handle the introduction with Lynx, so he hadn’t wasted any time starting in on the pizza with the Hadads.
“Your partner,” Blythe replied, helping herself to a slice. “You’ve been working together for nearly a month and you didn’t tell her about me, Thomas?”
“First of all, she was unconscious half the time,” A.P. replied, holding up a hand and ticking off a finger. “Second of all, we barely talked on the tunnel trip out because I stayed in the hold, so she wouldn’t feel like I was trying to take over her ship. Third, my prior employment just didn’t come up.”
“You told me that most of your recent experience was in supervisory positions,” Lynx reminded him, after swallowing a bite of salty pizza.
“That’s absolutely accurate,” Blythe said, picking the onions off of her own slice and putting them on her husband’s. “Thomas was our top employee for almost four years. How many different species did you sit for, Thomas?”
“Eighty-two, if you count Gem as a species,” Thomas replied.
“Sit for?” Lynx repeated, something that was getting to be a habit with her when her partner was around. “And how did you get from A.P. to Thomas?”
“Thomas really is my name, but they got it wrong in the EarthCent file, just like you got listed as Hedgehouse,” he explained. “I filled out the application as Artificial Person Thomas Malloy, but the Old Man called me A.P., and when I peeked at my folder in the reflection from his watch, I saw that they had me down as A.P. Thomas Malloy. If I had known they were going to do that, it would have saved me the effort of making up a last name, and I would have been A.P. Thomas.”
“We fixed it already, for both of you,” Blythe said. “How did you come up with Malloy?”
“It’s a contraction for Mobile Alloy,” Thomas explained. “I’m mobile, and an alloy is at least two kinds of metal combined with at least one non-metal substance, so I thought it was descriptive and would be easy to remember.”
“You were a mobile alloy babysitter?” Lynx asked, unable to let go of the supervisory claim so easily.
“I was a mobile alloy InstaSitter,” Thomas replied proudly. “The best of the best of the best. I never lost a client, though I did let the first human girl I supervised stay up after her bedtime.”
“My sister and I started InstaSitter, and it’s paying the bills for EarthCent Intelligence for the time being,” Blythe explained to Lynx. “I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that we’re dropping the ‘Pay yourself and your partner out of your trading profits,’ idea. You’ll be on straight salary and we’ll pay any ship expenses for missions that we assign. Your trading profits are always your own.”
“Forget that you’re younger than me,” Lynx blurted. “I mean, you’re still younger than me, but I don’t care anymore. How about the initial cargo that EarthCent provided for us at the elevator anchor? The truth is, I was nearly broke at the time, and it seems like a mad scientist was responsible for loading the container. It wasn’t going to make us rich, but there was certainly something for every situation.”
“They took up a collection from the local EarthCent staff and added some unclaimed freight from the warehouse,” Blythe told her. “Apparently, some of the EarthCent employees took it as an opportunity to clean out their closets or their garages. By the way, somebody claims they gave away their family’s heirloom silver by mistake, so if you haven’t traded it yet, we should return it.”
“We still have it,” Lynx confessed. “Too bad, it was the nicest item, though there was some high-end liquor that’s worth good creds.”
“We hear there was a bit of a crisis back at headquarters over that as well,” Blythe told her with a laugh. “Apparently, some spouses saw your need for tradable goods as an opportunity to engage in behavioral modification. Good luck to them.”
“So you had a chance to go through my file and you’re still keeping me?” Lynx asked.
“There really wasn’t anything in your file when we took possession,” Blythe replied as she denuded another slice of offensive onion bits. “Just a note saying you owned your ship free and clear, and several images of you that looked like they were taken through somebody’s implant in a bar setting. I had the InstaSitter personnel department run a background check and you did fine. Come to think of it, we probably need to loosen our standards for hiring spies. The work isn’t as sensitive as supervising children and old people.”
“Would you be interested in another artificial person as an agent?” Thomas spoke up. “Jeeves hired her for the auction business because she needed a job to get a new loan, but I think she’d do better in a less structured environment.”
“Are you talking about Chance?” Blythe asked, her face breaking into a wide grin. “That girl is unique. Sure, we’ll hire her. I persuaded Stryx Farth to send me your passenger list when you entered parking orbit around his station, and we checked on her background as well. Unlike most human developed AI’s who come out of the Open University programs on the stations, Chance was conceived and coded on Earth. Apparently, the remaining fraternities and sororities thought that creating an artificial intelligence would be a good way to prove the
ir relevancy in the modern age, but it took them nearly sixty years to get her past the Turing/Ryskoff test.”
“Frat boys and sorority girls, that explains a lot,” Lynx said. “But I have to admit, she made our mission a success. Can I, uh, talk about that here?”
“Yes, and as somebody who has spent a lot of time traveling in deep space, I’m curious to hear about your enforced hibernation,” Clive said, after surreptitiously spitting something out into a napkin. Onions didn’t really agree with him either, but they were still working on that facet of the marriage.
“The Farlings are manufacturing and selling drugs that would be incredibly harmful to humans, way beyond the recreational stuff,” Lynx told them. “They had drugs to turn humans into permanent zombies and drugs that allow humans to be temporarily controlled. The drug that I got accidentally dosed with just from handling the sleeve was described as a time travel drug. And I swear, it didn’t feel like a second went by, but I was out for twelve days!”
“It really didn’t seem that long,” Thomas added mildly, drawing a glare from his partner.
“Don’t pay attention to him,” Blythe advised Lynx. “He has issues with times and dates.”
“Well, I felt fine afterwards, just hungry, thanks to, uh, Thomas fixing me up with emergency fluids,” Lynx continued. “According to the ship controller, my metabolism was slowed down so much that it was barely detectable. So I guess that was a pretty useful drug, but Thomas got rid of it all when we came out of the tunnel.”
“The drugs are being analyzed,” Jeeves informed them. “Farth saw the ejection, of course, and after clarifying the situation with Thomas, he sent a bot to retrieve some crystals, since the packages all froze and ruptured. We won’t divulge pharmaceutical trade secrets, but we keep track of the types of drugs we ban from our stations to make it easier to detect them.”
“I don’t know how you keep all your noninterference rules straight,” Blythe complained. “It seems to me like you make them up as you go along.”