Wanderers On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 6)

by E. M. Foner

  “What about love?” the girl followed up.

  “You’re not my type,” Jeeves responded, drawing a big laugh from the boys. “Seriously, though. You humans make a big deal out of love, like it’s some sort of magical gift of the gods, rather than something you choose to do for reasons you prefer not to acknowledge. I’ll bet you a hundred creds I can predict who you’re going to mar—what? Never mind.”

  “I’m sorry, students,” Libby said, addressing the class directly for the first time that day. “I’m afraid that Jeeves isn’t as mature as you’d expect for a twenty-six-year-old Stryx who has instant access to tens of millions of years of memories and who also doesn’t sleep.”

  “She’s implying I’ve lived thirty-eight years by staying up nights,” Jeeves explained, in case the kids didn’t get it. A new hologram appeared, this one of a giant hook, and it stayed right with Jeeves as he tried to bob and weave away from it.

  “Thank you for coming, Jeeves,” Metoo said, floating up from the grass. “Libby says it’s been ten minutes.”

  “Has not,” Jeeves muttered, giving in and moving off in the hook’s embrace. He drew a rousing round of applause from the boys, and nasty looks from those girls who didn’t choose to ignore him.

  “Chastity?” Dorothy called out, looking around. “Are you here yet?”

  Chastity approached from the back, along with Marcus, whom she had finally tempted into visiting Union Station with the promise of seeing the Stryx experimental school she attended as a girl. Dorothy had originally invited Blythe for career day, but when Chastity heard about it, she asked to switch.

  “Hi, kids,” Chastity said, making her way through the children to the front. “Wow, Career Day. It feels like just last year I was sitting where you are.”

  “You’re much older than that,” Bekka informed her.

  “This is Chastity, and you all know about her because she runs InstaSitter,” Dorothy said, popping up to give the introduction and then immediately sitting back down.

  “I thought you were inviting the spy sister,” Maximilian complained, drawing a chorus of support from the boys.

  “She’s taking care of her twins,” Chastity replied for Dorothy. “Do you want me to tell her to come and bring the Terrible Twos? Maybe you could take care of them while she talks?”

  “I’m fine with you,” the boy said hastily.

  “Alright, so that was the introduction, and I’m going to talk about business for those of you who are ambitious,” Chastity said.

  “Who’s he?” a girl asked, pointing at Marcus.

  “Probably her Eemas date,” Maximilian said in a stage whisper.

  “Marcus is my friend from the mob, and I brought him to see how…”

  “He’s a Wanderer?” Bekka interrupted.

  “Yes, I just said that,” Chastity replied impatiently. “Now we only have ten minutes so…”

  “I heard the Wanderers don’t have careers,” a boy interrupted from the back.

  “That’s crazy,” a girl next to him retorted. “Everybody has to work.”

  “I don’t work,” Marcus said, and launched into the same explanation he had given Blythe and Clive about the importance of leisure. Chastity stepped back, looking amused as he attempted to show how the Wanderers maintain the balance in galactic energy by offsetting the grim workaholic natures of the busy-beaver species.

  “Do you really believe that crap?” Maximilian asked.

  “Don’t say ‘crap,’” Bekka reprimanded him, throwing her lawn pillow at his back.

  “Of course I believe it,” Marcus declared, looking more shocked than offended. “I know you all have homes here, so you have to act like they tell you, but wouldn’t you really rather be playing all day?”

  “Like babies?” Dorothy suggested. Mist and several of the other kids who caught the implication snickered, but Marcus was so used to sharing his views with like-minded Wanderers that the insult went right over his head.

  “Who wouldn’t want to be a baby again?” he replied with a dreamy smile. “You get fed, clothed, you can sleep any time you want, and all you have to do if you want attention is cry.”

  “So we can change your diaper?” Bekka asked, at which point the whole class broke out laughing, including Chastity.

  “Oh, I think little Marcus is going to cry,” a boy called out.

  “No, he’s just cranky because he missed his nap,” Mist ventured.

  “I started working with Metoo when I was five,” Dorothy stated proudly. “You’re, like, old already, and you’ve never worked?”

  “I dance,” Marcus declared, but he was starting to look around like he was seeking an exit from a trap. “Without dancing, what joy would there be in life? And I cook pretty well, but only for friends.”

  “Have you ever earned even a single cred?” Bekka demanded.

  “I, this isn’t, Chastity, you explain it to them,” Marcus stuttered.

  “I’d have to understand it to explain it,” Chastity replied. She should have known better than to doubt Libby’s dating advice. If anything was going to bring Marcus around to reality, shock treatment at the hands of school kids was the best bet.

  “I’m a good guy,” Marcus defended himself desperately. “I always put my dirty utensils in the right bins so the dishwasher bot doesn’t have to sort them. I don’t sit around all day plugged into virtual reality like some people, I get out and mingle. I’ve been cleaning my own room since I was, uh, twenty. Once, when the woman on our corridor who has a child asked me for help, I even babysat for a couple hours.”

  “Wow, you’re practically an InstaSitter,” Maximilian said sarcastically.

  “Why did you make it sound like there’s only one woman on your corridor with a kid?” Mist asked. “Is the corridor that short?”

  “No, there are twenty units on my stub,” Marcus answered, seizing on the question that could be easily answered. “Wanderers don’t have many children, you know. That’s why we always have room for new people to join.”

  “We didn’t know,” Bekka said in her most sophisticated tone. “Please enlighten us.”

  “Well, children are a lot of work,” Marcus began to explain. He didn’t get any further before he was buried in a volley of pillows.

  Eleven

  “I’m sorry if I seem a bit out of it,” Kelly apologized to the hologram of EarthCent’s president, after the other members of the intelligence steering committee signed off of the holo-conference call. “I’ve been going nuts with preparations for the show, and I just lost track of time.”

  “The meeting went fine,” President Beyer told her. “It’s good to know that the Wanderers won’t be coming to Earth during my lifetime. I asked you to stay live to discuss three things the others don’t need to know about right now. Just hold on a minute so I can find my notes, I have them written down.”

  “Take your time, Mr. President,” Kelly replied. “And if I may say so without sounding rude, am I ever relieved that the Stryx promoted you after President Lin gave up trying to resign and ran away. If it was me in your shoes, I would have hired bounty hunters to track him down.”

  “You might be surprised to hear this, but I never really got used to living on a station,” the new EarthCent president responded. “I would have volunteered to come back to Earth and take this job if it wasn’t for the title.”

  “I can imagine,” Kelly said sympathetically. “It’s bad enough when I have to introduce myself to new aliens as the EarthCent ambassador, and they ask if we’re the Stryx tourist agency for Earth.”

  “The polite ones ask that.” The president sighed as he examined and discarded another scrap of paper. “The others have their preconceived notions about Stryx pets and leave it at that. Ah, here we are,” he declared, holding up a ketchup stained napkin with a few words scrawled on it in pen. “Helpers, trainee and questions.”

  “Was I supposed to understand that and answer?” Kelly asked.

  “That’s my personal s
horthand,” Stephen responded. “I wanted to discuss the Helper AI, getting you a new trainee, and your development efforts on this new show for the Grenouthians.”

  “I think I went over everything I’ve heard about the Helper AI in the meeting just now,” Kelly said. “EarthCent Intelligence has flagged the subject for further investigation, in part because their current information is based on what some old storyteller told our agents.”

  “It could turn out to be nothing, but I had a visit from one of the Helper AI representatives this week. A rather unnerving experience,” the president said. “I can’t be sure we’re talking about the same group, and of course, this was before I received the intelligence assessment, but the pitch sounded pretty similar.”

  “The Stryx cleared them through the tunnel?” Kelly asked in surprise. “I thought they had Earth under foreign AI ban so only our own artificial people are allowed through.”

  “I don’t believe the Stryx did let them through, and perhaps I shouldn’t say I had a visit when it was more likely a hologram that was just too real for me to detect,” the President replied. “I checked with our security after the encounter, and they hadn’t recorded anybody entering or leaving my office, so it was either a projection or some sort of material transfer, either of which is beyond our technical capability to detect.”

  “What did the Stryx say?” Kelly inquired, realizing right after she said it that it was the second time in a row that she had invoked the Stryx.

  “Earth isn’t a station where you have a first generation Stryx and probably a few offspring around all the time,” the president reminded her. “The AI running the space elevators are just short-timers paying off body mortgages. I send a lot of questions to my former Stryx librarian on Void Station, sometimes I even make a tunneling call if I’m desperate, and he hasn’t let me down yet. But I get the feeling that the Stryx would prefer if I just muddle through with Earth’s resources or work through the ambassadors.”

  “Then I’m doubly glad you got stuck with the job because I couldn’t imagine going a day without talking to our librarian,” Kelly said. “In fact, I’ll discuss the whole situation with Libby later today and get back to you, since she’s no doubt listening in already. I’ll try to get Blythe and Clive here for it as well.”

  “You haven’t even heard the AI’s proposal yet,” Stephen reminded her.

  “Oh, right,” Kelly replied guiltily. “Whether your visitor was real or just a hologram, what did the manifestation have to say for itself?”

  “Quite an offer, really,” the president replied. “In exchange for material resources in the solar system, he promised to provide nearly unlimited free labor and technological support that would put us on par with some of the more backwards advanced species. A bit too good to be true, if you ask me.”

  “Did you get any clarification on what resources they were requesting?” Kelly asked.

  “That’s where it got a bit sticky,” the president confessed. “While my visitor proved difficult to pin down, I believe he was asking for exclusive rights to the asteroid belt and either an inner planet or one of the larger of Jupiter’s moons. I got the impression that he was really keen on Mercury, so perhaps they need a lot of heat or solar energy for their operations.”

  “They want a planet! What did you say?”

  “I told him that it was a very interesting offer and if he would provide his contact information, I’d get back to him after conferring with my colleagues.

  “And what did he say?” Kelly demanded.

  “He said that he was going to be out of the office for an extended period on a business trip, but he’d be happy to swing by on his way back through our space in a few months.”

  “I thought that the Wanderers would be unwelcome guests, but I’d take them any day over some AI that moves in, wants part of the solar system, and never leaves.”

  “My feelings exactly, but I’ll reserve judgment until all the facts are in,” the president concluded. “Now the next item was getting you a new trainee.”

  “I know I’ve been stretching a little to get the new show together, but once it’s running smoothly, it should only take a few hours a week of my time,” Kelly said. “The whole idea is to extend EarthCent’s brand of diplomacy in the public awareness. Some of the aliens may look down on us as Stryx pets, but if I’ve learned one thing in the last few years, it’s that everybody wants to be on holo-casts.”

  “I’m not worried about how you do your job,” the president chided her. “I’m perfectly aware that between your office manager and EarthCent Intelligence, you could sneak away from the embassy for a long vacation and nobody would be the wiser. Now, from what I can discover, your last intern was never really intended for the diplomatic service. The Stryx seem to have handpicked her for other reasons and rigged the assignment. The issue is that you are a valuable resource to us, and that resource is going to waste if you aren’t passing your skills on to the next generation of diplomats.

  “Oh, that’s kind of flattering, I guess,” Kelly replied. She really didn’t know what she would do with another diplomat in the embassy, but she wasn’t going to argue with the president’s assessment of her value as a mentor. “Will you be sending me somebody from the next training class?”

  “I thought it would make more sense to give you a seasoned assistant, one who shows every indication of becoming a career diplomat,” Stephen said. “His name is Daniel Cohan, and he was posted to Middle Station the last two years as an acting junior consul. We promoted him to full junior consul on accepting this assignment.”

  “Well, I’m looking forward to meeting him, though I don’t know what he’s going to do for work,” Kelly said. “Maybe we can send him on diplomatic missions to some of the aliens in this sector who aren’t on the tunnel network. When can I expect him?”

  “I’m not sure about the exact date,” the president said. “He had several months of accumulated vacation time and unpaid educational leave saved up, and he said something about living the life of the mind until his money ran out. I think you’ll like him.”

  “Alright, that’s two things. What was the third?”

  “As you know, I am in full agreement with the ambassadors on our Intelligence committee that any publicity for EarthCent diplomatic efforts is good publicity. Humans lack the commercial presence to gain visibility on any of the alien worlds where we don’t have expatriates working as cheap labor. The first thing I did when I accepted this job was to add an outreach office, for which I hired a former marketing executive from Bill’s Exchange. She doesn’t need the money, of course. She’s doing it for the challenge.”

  “Doing what, exactly?” Kelly asked.

  “Well, her first task was to measure the level of human species recognition among the aliens on the tunnel network. She put some of her own money into hiring subcontractors on a sampling of representative worlds and outposts to do surveys, since the only way to measure success in a promotional campaign is to establish a baseline.”

  “Well, I guess that sounds smart, though I’m not sure what it is we’re supposed to be promoting,” Kelly said. “Are there any results yet?”

  “Oh yes. The data started coming in almost as soon as she made the payments,” President Beyer replied. “It turns out that most species have marketing firms measuring this sort of thing on a continual basis, and if Hildy can convince them that humans have enough disposable income to be of interest, we’ll be able to establish reciprocal arrangements in the future.”

  “Hildy?”

  “Hildy Greuen, our new outreach executive,” Stephen said. “The data confirmed what several of us had already guessed. The best known human business is InstaSitter, even though they’ve limited their operations to the stations. The most widely recognized human face is your daughter-in-law’s, thanks to her show, and the most significant event people associate with the human race is still the Kasilian auction that you conducted on Union Station.”

  “With any lu
ck, we’ll have a hit with Sentients Match Wits, and the numbers will start moving up,” Kelly said. She tried to channel the can-do attitude of the Grenouthian producer responsible for her project.

  “Yes, there’s that.” The president sounded a little hesitant, and then he spoke in a rush. “Hildy thinks it would be highly beneficial if you could make the EarthCent brand a little more prominent on the show. She says that the subtle approach doesn’t work with marketing.”

  “What did she have in mind, specifically?” Kelly asked. She didn’t want to sound thin-skinned, but she worried about somebody she had never met making new demands on her as-of-yet unproven creative ability.

  “One idea was to go with a title like, ‘EarthCent Quiz Show.’ Another was to have a segment where the questions every week pertain to humans. She thought we might supply Earth products as gift items for the correct answers, like Vermont maple syrup or genuine Swiss watches. Maybe the questions could be tied to a different export item for each show.”

  “She’s not shy about trying to do her job, I’ll give her that,” Kelly said. “We were already planning to include a sort of human trivia question in the show each week, and the gift idea for participants isn’t bad. I asked a few of my alien colleagues about what shows they and their families watch, and most of it is pretty corny. There’s even a Dollnick show where the contestants basically chase around a maze collecting giant bugs, and the only prize is they get to eat what they catch.”

  “People need to relax,” the president observed. “I suspect it’s the same with most sentients, except perhaps the Wanderers, who seem to be in a permanent state of relaxation.”

  “I’ll try to get the product placements past the Grenouthians,” Kelly said. “Remember, they’re the ones financing the production. I’ll ask about putting EarthCent in the show title, but I don’t know. I’m sure the only reason they’ve tolerated my lack of professionalism to this point is because Aisha’s show is such a huge hit. Since they don’t really understand why, they’re inclined to give me extra elbow room.”