by E. M. Foner
“Got it,” Thomas acknowledged, and pulling out a pen, wrote “In bed by 19:00,” on the palm of his rather inky left hand. Kelly emerged from the bedroom just as the exchange took place, and watched with approval as Thomas took note of the time.
“I guess we can get going a little early ourselves,” Kelly said to Joe. “Come on, Pumpkin. Give Mommy a kiss.”
“Up!” Dorothy commanded, and gave her mother a kiss on the nose once she was lifted into position. “Bye, bye.”
Ten minutes later, with navigational help from Libby, they arrived at the Grenouthian embassy in a section of the station that neither of them had ever visited. The atmosphere had enough nitrogen and oxygen to support their filter plugs function, but the noticeable hum in his nostrils told Joe that they were working pretty hard.
The Grenouthians were an old species, and Joe had spent some time on their home planet years before as a largely ceremonial guard for a minor royal house. They made it clear that while they had great respect for humans as potential cannon fodder, inter-species fraternization was strictly prohibited. Joe had only picked up a dozen words of the low frequency speech that made him think of an outsized goose honking, and all those words were drill-related. So it came as a surprise when they were greeted at the entry by the Grenouthian ambassador and his consort, who appeared to have been waiting especially for the humans.
“Ambassador,” the Grenouthian diplomat boomed in a low register that Kelly felt in her toes, even though her implant translated the speech properly and neutralized the sound waves at her ears. It was obvious that the overgrown bunny-like creature with floppy ears had studied up on Earth customs, since he extended a furry hand to shake. But it was equally clear he had missed out on the fact that the EarthCent ambassador was a woman, because he addressed his salutation and offered the handshake to Joe. Joe shook the creature’s paw diplomatically, while attempting to cue the ambassador in on his mistake by making head tilts towards Kelly. The Grenouthian’s consort lifted one of the ambassador’s furry earflaps and whispered something in a higher register, which Kelly felt in her teeth.
“I’m very sorry,” the ambassador continued. “My second consort informs me you may suffer from an injury that makes your head move spasmodically. Do you require medical attention?”
“Uh, I’m fine, Sir. But my wife, the EarthCent ambassador, is looking forward to being introduced,” Joe replied, hoping he wasn’t creating a diplomatic incident. But the bunny just turned smoothly to Kelly and repeated his original greeting as if no mistake had occurred. Which reminded Joe of what he had meant to tell his wife about the Grenouthians. They didn’t make mistakes, or rather, they never admitted to them.
“Ambassador,” Kelly responded to the greeting in kind, thinking it might be an official formula. But when the Grenouthian stood silently for a number of seconds, holding her hand in his warm paw and gazing at her with his bulging bunny eyes, Kelly decided she had better carry the conversation forward. “Thank you for the invitation to your embassy. It came as a bit of a surprise to me, since we’ve never established relations and I was unable to even get a response from your government about a human ship that went missing in your space. But it’s a lovely reception, and I hope we get the chance to see you and your consort again in the near future.”
“Are you leaving?” the ambassador boomed anxiously, tightening his grip on her hand. “But you are our guest of honor. I assure you that we are ready to establish full relations with your EarthCent at any time, and I extend my apologies about the human ship which was destroyed in our space, although I don’t have any information about that,” he added hastily. “Please, come in and mingle. There are many Grenouthian businessmen present who are waiting to meet you.”
Kelly was so taken aback by the Grenouthian’s offer of full relations and business ties that she literally didn’t know what to say. But her fingers were beginning to go numb from the giant bunny’s iron grip, and she was having a hard time looking dignified while he was tugging on her hand. She replied diplomatically, “Since you’ve offered full relations and help with the missing ship, of course we’ll be happy to stay and talk with your businessmen. If you just let go of my hand, I’ll head right in.”
“Allow me to introduce you around,” the ambassador offered, easing his grip on her hand, but guiding it to his forearm as he stepped closer. Kelly suddenly realized that the ambassador was naked, other than a blue sash running across his chest from one shoulder to the other hip, which was probably his badge of office. But his fur was so incredibly soft and fine that she had to fight the urge to start stroking his arm as she walked with him into the hall. She threw a helpless look over her shoulder at Joe, but he just shrugged and followed a few steps behind, scanning the room for something that looked drinkable.
As the crowd of big furry creatures resolved into individual shapes, some wearing various colored sashes, others in nothing but their fur, Kelly realized two things. First, she and Joe were the only non-Grenouthians present. Second, every last one of the Grenouthians was looking at her anxiously. She blushed.
“Allow me to introduce you to our economic minister,” the Grenouthian ambassador boomed as he guided her up to a dark-furred bunny with a gold sash.
“I’m Kelly Frank McAllister,” Kelly introduced herself, gingerly offering a hand. “And you are?”
“I am the Economic Minister,” the Grenouthian replied, and took a quick slap at her hand. “We would like very much to purchase the proper credentials to send an economic delegation to your Earth. Could you tell me the price please?” The whole room fell silent in anticipation of Kelly’s reply.
“We don’t charge visiting businessmen for credentials,” Kelly told the minister, puzzling over the fact that he had withheld his name, though come to think of it, the ambassador had done the same. “Just contact my office during working hours and we’ll set you up.”
The economic minister stared at her unblinking for a moment, shook his head, and muttered something under his breath to the ambassador. Thanks to the lack of interference from other conversations and the low frequency sound waves, her diplomatic grade implant picked up the whisper and translated it as: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Kelly tried to take comfort in the fact that idioms often translated inaccurately, but it was hard to think of how a positive comment could have been rendered that poorly.
The room came back alive with a bedlam of humming and honking, and Kelly found herself drowning in a sea of close-talking Grenouthians, all requesting credentials to visit Earth on business. She kept repeating the same instructions she had given the economic minister but they all seemed to want to hear it directly from her mouth. Just as she was beginning to get dizzy, she felt Joe pressing something cold into her overheated hand. It was an open bottle of chilled champagne.
“Go ahead and have a swallow,” he leaned in and spoke in her ear. “They only had the one bottle and it’s obviously intended for us, or for you.”
“I can’t take much more of this,” she complained, shaking an insistent paw off her shoulder and struggling to face her husband in the crush of warm bodies. Joe’s eyes were pink and runny, and his face looked a bit bloated as well. “What’s wrong? You look terrible.”
“Allergies,” Joe replied, wiping his runny eyes on the sleeve of his dress uniform. “It’s why I only lasted one tour on the Grenouthian home world, even loaded on antihistamines. It’s the pollen from their shrubbery that gets into their fur. They must have a warren here on one of their ag decks.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kelly sympathized, and struggled to stay close to Joe in the milling mass of fur. “Do you want to leave or wait outside?”
“I’ll be fine,” Joe replied. “I’ll bet you haven’t noticed, but every Grenouthian you talk to leaves immediately afterwards. Another fifteen minutes and you’ll have the place emptied out. Just hang in there and we’ll be on our way home before you know it.” Joe was elbowed out of the way by a particularly aggressive bunn
y as he concluded, and Kelly had to restrain herself from taking a swing at the rude creature’s prominent buck teeth with the champagne bottle. Instead, she took a long swallow directly from the bottle and turned back to the cuddly mob.
“Yes, you can all have credentials. Just contact my office in the morning. Yes, everybody includes you,” she told the next Grenouthian, but still they all insisted on addressing her one by one, and slapping or crushing her free hand with a paw in an imitation of the human custom. It wasn’t until a towering Grenouthian, who spoke to her over the shoulder of a shorter compatriot, kept reaching for her hand shouting “Contract!” that she realized that the bunnies believed a handshake was necessary to seal her commitment.
After that, the room emptied rapidly as Kelly gave up all attempts at actually speaking with the Grenouthians, beyond offering credentials and shaking hands. When the last bunny left without so much as a “Goodbye,” Kelly found herself alone with Joe in the embassy’s reception hall. An empty champagne bottle dangled from her hand, and she felt pretty woozy.
“What could all of that have been about?” she asked Joe, feeling like she had been run over by an Easter parade.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Joe replied with a shrug. “I need a shower, and I don’t want to get nose burn to go with my eyes. Haven’t you noticed that the filters are working pretty hard?”
“Oh, I thought the humming was from my translation implant. Yes, let’s get out of here before they send in another batch,” she said, recoiling at the mental image. The two humans rapidly made their way from the embassy to the nearest tube.
Kelly resisted pushing Joe for his thoughts about the weird reception because he looked so miserable and puffy, but he caught her look of pity and managed a smile.
“I look a lot worse than I feel,” he told her with a wry grin. “I should have taken a pill. It just didn’t occur to me that the room would be so full of fur. I thought it would be your typical Noah’s Ark type thing, with just a couple Grenouthians as hosts.”
“I don’t understand,” Kelly mused. “I’ve only met a few Grenouthians in the seven years I’ve been here, and none of them would even speak to me. Why would they all be in such a hurry to make nice and visit Earth? How will this affect their relations with the rest of the Naturals League?”
“They’re an old species, but they’re known for being quick on their feet,” Joe told her. “They aren’t aggressive in the military sense, but they operate a large merchant fleet which specializes in getting in and out of new places before the competition heats up. Maybe they’ve simply decided that Earth has something worth exploiting.”
“But why all of a sudden?” Kelly asked, as the tube capsule smoothly shifted to a different vector, which was only detectable by the change in acceleration. “Other than somebody throwing a giant asteroid at Earth, I can’t think of any radical changes since the Stryx restructured the tunnel fees five years ago to give our manufacturers a chance.”
“Then there must be something we’re missing,” Joe assured her. “We’re still the new kids on the block. All of these other species were kicking around the galaxy long before our ancestors mastered sailing ships. They may look funny, and sometimes they may act funny, but they’re all experts of a sort at inter-species relations or they wouldn’t be here.”
The champagne she had quaffed over the last twenty minutes had crept up on Kelly. She found herself holding Joe’s arm for balance as the capsule began a series of course changes that announced their arrival back in the human section of the station. Finally, the door slid open on the inner docking deck just a short walk from Mac’s Bones, and in another minute, they were home.
Thomas and Dorothy were out in front of the ice harvester playing fetch with Beowulf. Dorothy was changed out of her nightgown into her regular jumpsuit.
“What’s going on, Thomas?” Kelly demanded. “It’s almost an hour past her bedtime!”
“I put her to bed at 19:00, as instructed,” Thomas replied with a hurt expression.
“I woke up,” Dorothy declared. “Thomas dress’ded me and make breakfast.”
Joe started to say something, but Kelly interrupted before he could finish a word. “Thank you, Thomas. I hope she behaved well for you.”
“You’re welcome, Kelly. I enjoyed babysitting for your daughter. I hope I didn’t do anything wrong,” he added anxiously.
“No, no. We just didn’t give you very good instructions. Tell me, Thomas. Do alien children always sleep through the night?”
“They sleep as long as their parents tell them to,” Thomas replied. “They do everything their parents tell them to. Doesn’t it work that way with humans?”
Joe felt so bad about having to push the babysitter out the door that he stuffed a few extra creds into the artificial person’s hand. It was necessary because Kelly couldn’t stop herself from laughing hysterically every time she looked at Thomas, and Joe was beginning to worry that she would hurt herself.
Four
Paul and Blythe sat side by side on the bridge of his Raider/Trader mock-up, and Dring, after insisting that he didn’t require a chair, stood a little behind and between them. Paul would have preferred to take one of the maxed-out rentals into space to give Dring a show, but Blythe always became queasy in weightless conditions. Since they were on a straightforward trading mission with a virtual cargo, being in space wouldn’t have added anything other than misery to the experience.
Thrilled to have an intelligent and attentive audience, Blythe took her time explaining the mission to Dring in great detail.
“The first thing I noticed when Paul taught me the game was that the trading algorithm has some weak spots. While it does an incredibly realistic job on the value side, whether you barter or sell for hard currency, it doesn’t account for all of the factors that go into cargo storage.”
“Do you mean it ignores the mass or the dimensions of the cargo?” Dring asked.
“Nothing that obvious,” Blythe replied. “And they do a good job syncing gameverse time to real time. So you can’t, say, take on a load of horses and plan to deliver them alive a week later, unless you provide for food and water as well.”
“I see.” Dring appeared to be giving it serious consideration and stroked his chin in thought. “But perhaps these virtual horses don’t complain about the weightless conditions or refuse to load into the hold together?”
“Exactly,” Blythe spoke approvingly. “And nobody has to muck out the hold every day either.”
“So do you find interstellar horse-trading profitable?”
“Oh no!” Blythe choked down a laugh. “Horses are a money pit. Maybe Joe would find horse-trading interesting since he used to ride them, but there’s no profit in it. I was just using horses as an example.”
“Ah. When Paul told me we were on Earth approach, I thought animals might be your cargo, since large manufacturers would be unlikely to employ small independent traders.”
“That’s another weak point in the algorithms,” Paul said, drawing a hurt look from Blythe, who was inclined to treat their guest as her personal property. “They allow us to do virtual trades in the gameverse that the guilds or long-term contracts would keep us out of in the real world.”
“That’s just to make the game interesting,” Blythe said “The point I was trying to make is that there are loopholes where the idealized conditions let us make a bigger profit faster than if we were doing the same thing in the real world. Here, just listen,” she concluded. The main viewer showed them emerging from the Stryx tunnel back into regular space, practically in Earth’s orbit.
“EarthCent control to vessel with transponder code XRTGQ. Please identify yourselves. Over.”
“This is the independent trader Blythe,” Paul announced, with a self-conscious glance at his passenger to see if he reacted to the ship’s name. “We are scheduled to pick up a load of Strontium 90 at Elevator Two. We will not be entering Earth atmosphere. Over.”
“Ro
ger that, Blythe,” the virtual EarthCent controller responded. “You show on our schedule and ID checks positive. Proceed to Elevator Two for docking instructions.”
“Wilco and Out,” Paul replied, closing the channel and setting course to intercept Elevator Two. The docking point was a massive anchor satellite on a tether that stretched all the way to a cargo transfer station on Earth’s surface. A pair of elevators built under contract by an alien construction consortium had cut the cost of transferring cargo from Earth’s surface to orbit by a factor of a thousand.
“Strontium 90,” Dring repeated. “My knowledge of human biology is somewhat sketchy, but isn’t that a very dangerous substance for you to be transporting?”
“If it was real, I wouldn’t get anywhere near it,” Blythe responded with a happy grin. “But as virtual cargo, we can carry it in the hold for almost a week without even losing space to virtual shielding. Longer than that, the algorithm would declare us dead, but by that time we’ll have sold it to the Frunge, and the game doesn’t track long-term radiation exposure to crew. The profits are so good that we could eventually get rich doing this run for Trader gold and exchanging for Stryx creds through Bill’s.”
“But it would get pretty dull,” Paul added. “It only works when we put in the onboard mission time the full turn takes, three days out, five days to the Frunge outpost on Dalen, and another two days back to Union. The last turn took the two of us almost three months of real time to string the hours together.”
“But the two of you are a mating pair, so the time must pass quickly,” Dring observed.
Paul blushed bright red and mumbled something about just being friends. Blythe shot him a look, and then replied icily, “If this wasn’t a great place to catch up on work without distractions, you couldn’t get me to lock myself up in this tin can for ten minutes.”
“So how do you manage the loading of such dangerous cargo?” Dring asked, changing the subject when he realized he had made them uncomfortable.