Book Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassasor 13)

by E. M. Foner

  “So Flower has a thing about biologicals keeping in shape,” Clive said, trying to sound unconcerned. “I could see where that would be important for a colony mission.”

  “Yes, especially when you never know what challenges await at your mystery destination,” Trume said, and then broke out whistling again.

  “She doesn’t go where she’s supposed to?”

  “That’s a matter of semantics,” Jeeves muttered. “Flower’s primary objective is always the success of her mission.”

  “Her mission,” the Dollnick repeated. “Why not tell him the truth, Stryx?”

  “There’s nothing underhanded about it,” Jeeves said defensively. “Flower successfully completed more than twenty colony missions with full terraforming during her tenure, which means she has more experience in the matter than any living Dollnick. It’s only logical that she came to see herself as the one best qualified to make decisions about—”

  “What the crew should eat for breakfast,” the Grenouthian chief interrupted again.

  “Arranging marriages for the social cohesion of the crew,” Trume added.

  “Our records indicate that she composed a ship’s anthem to be sung every morning before mandatory calisthenics,” one of the Vergallian spies contributed.

  “Her last terraforming mission was a resounding success,” Jeeves protested. “I’m told that Flower’s World is a veritable garden planet, and Dollnicks from around the galaxy are willing to pay through the breathing hole to purchase a vacation home there.”

  “Except she was supposed to be terraforming Gabidis Four,” the Dollnick said. “And how did she convince the crew and colonists to terraform the wrong planet, you ask?”

  “I didn’t ask,” Jeeves mumbled.

  “She faked all of the external feeds so they believed they were traveling to Gabidis Four, and then she disabled her own jump drive so that the colonists were forced to choose between accepting her choice or waiting for another ship to become available to come and take them to their intended destination.”

  “Flower understands now that biologicals place a higher value on the freedom to choose than on arriving at correct choices. She has pledged not to overrule the decisions of the ship’s company as long as they don’t put her in unnecessary jeopardy, like jumping into unstable space, or using emergency power for the sake of shortcuts.”

  “Seeing is believing,” Trume said.

  “Just to clarify, Jeeves, you’re guaranteeing that she’ll go where we tell her and generally obey our instructions?” Clive asked. Most of the aliens burst out laughing anew.

  “I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly. You’ll discuss your goals, Flower will give her input, and I’m sure there will be no difficulty in coming to a mutual understanding. Don’t forget that she has been traveling space longer than your people have been practicing agriculture, so you’ll be dependent on her expertise in many areas.”

  “And if I ask the lift tube to take me to a restaurant?”

  “Then you’ll very likely end up at a restaurant,” Jeeves hedged. “Flower is an intelligent and powerful sentient being, not a voice-activated ship controller.”

  “A difficult intelligent and powerful sentient being,” the Dollnick chortled.

  Four

  “Donna, can you help me rearrange the furniture?” Kelly called over when her embassy manager appeared at the top of the ramp. “Samuel is working at the lost-and-found this evening and I didn’t want to ask Joe because it looked like his knee was really acting up.”

  “That’s strange,” Donna said, placing a tray of homemade cookies on the dining room table and heading over to help the ambassador slide the couch into a new position. “I would have sworn that Stanley said he was meeting Joe at the bowling alley.”

  “That’s where mine is,” Chastity added, entering the ice harvester with her Drazen friend who managed InstaSitter. “I asked Tinka to arrange for a sitter and she sent Vivian. Isn’t that funny? I’m paying myself overhead for my own niece to babysit.”

  “I’m glad you’re here, Tinka,” Kelly said. “Dring is coming, and he worried that he’d be the only alien.”

  “He’s male—they’re all aliens,” the Drazen woman replied, depositing a large tray of sweets on the table. “I brought a variety tray from the new chocolate shop all of those holo bots are wandering the corridors promoting. I hope you like it.”

  “Holo bots?”

  “You know, the advertising holograms that follow you around trying to sell you stuff,” Donna said. “I asked Libby if I could opt out, but she said that it’s just an experiment and she really wished I would give her a chance to tweak the algorithm. I let it go for now.”

  “Are you talking about the new advertising system the Stryx are trying out?” Brinda asked, entering the ice harvester with her older sister, Shaina. “I put in some bids for my dad’s shop just to see how they convert. Jeeves came up with the idea a few months ago, but it took him a while to talk Libby into trying it.”

  “So does the ad business belong to Libby or Jeeves?” Kelly asked. “I got solicited by one of those holograms last week and I thought it was a real person whose name I couldn’t remember.”

  “They’re partners,” Shaina said. “You should have heard Jeeves complaining about the percentage split, but corridor displays and internal imaging are Libby’s turf. I was coming home from shopping the other day and I saw the cutest puppy that looked like he was lost. I started following him to make sure he was all right, and he led me to the gourmet dog food store.”

  “Maybe he was following his nose.”

  “No, he vanished as soon as I walked in. Then I remembered that Daniel asked me to pick up treats for Queenie. It seems like we’re going through them awfully fast lately.”

  “We’re all in trouble if Libby starts hitting us with targeted advertising,” Donna observed. “She knows everything.”

  “That’s why I brought a store-bought cake shaped like a book,” Brinda said. “I was out shopping earlier when Walter popped up in front of me and said he’d seen the perfect gift in the Dew Drop In Bakery to bring for our first meeting.”

  “Libby used a hologram of your husband to sell you a cake?”

  “It was fun,” the younger Hadad sister said. “I knew it wasn’t really him because he was home watching Bethany, or at least, watching the dog watch Bethany, but Libby does a great hologram.”

  Blythe entered with Judith, who was carrying a cake that looked suspiciously similar to the one that Brinda brought. The younger woman had just finished describing the intelligence meeting at the Verlock embassy, and Blythe commented, “I’ll reserve judgment until I meet her to negotiate the contract details.”

  “Did Jeeves and Libby sell you that cake?” Kelly asked Judith, who had taken over Joe’s slot in the EarthCent Intelligence training camp that was still located in Mac’s Bones, just a stone’s throw from the ice harvester.

  “The Stryx opened a bakery?” the girl replied, obviously confused.

  “They came up with the holo bots that are floating around the corridors trying to sell stuff,” Kelly said, as if she had known about it all along.

  “No, Bob made it for me. He really likes to bake.”

  “I didn’t know you were dating somebody. Do I know him?”

  “Bob Steelforth, he’s a reporter. And we’re not dating, we’re just roommates.”

  All of the older women exchanged skeptical looks at this statement, and Judith added her cake to the table.

  “I brought wine because I knew everybody else would bring sweet stuff,” Blythe said, producing two bottles from her over-sized shoulder bag.

  A blunt-toothed cross between a walking crocodile and a dinosaur waddled into the room with a gigantic glass salad bowl packed with freshly picked carrots and celery. “I brought something healthy,” Dring announced cheerfully, surveying the table.

  “I told you males are aliens,” Tinka muttered.

  “I think that’s ever
ybody, so let’s all fix up some plates and drinks and we can get started,” Kelly said. “I haven’t been to a book club meeting in so long that I’m not sure I remember what to do.”

  “What about our Victorian book club?” Dring said.

  “I call it that, but it doesn’t really count with just the two of us.”

  “Did anybody else read the book on paper?” Blythe asked, brandishing what appeared to be a second-hand copy of the Hollinder romance. “I couldn’t even find a paperback on the station and I had to pull some strings to get this one.”

  “If you call asking your mother to have somebody smuggle one into the Stryx diplomatic bag for you pulling strings,” Donna said, taking her plate and glass of wine over to the couch she had recently helped move.

  “It sounds more mysterious if I don’t mention you by name,” Blythe replied over the general laughter. “I have a reputation to keep up.”

  “Well, I came because I didn’t understand the book at all,” Tinka said. “Not the romance, the weird one.”

  “She saw An Incomplete Tragedy in my recycling bin and couldn’t believe I was throwing out a ten cred book without reading it.” Chastity explained. “I know we changed the selection, but I thought maybe somebody else had finished it and could clarify a few things for her.”

  “You read English, Tinka?” Lynx asked, settling into one of the easy chairs.

  “We made it a requirement for InstaSitter management,” the Drazen girl replied. “I would have learned it anyway to keep up with Chastity’s newspaper, but that book made me wonder if I’m missing a lot of subtext you have to be Human to understand.”

  “It was a very strange book, even for an author from Earth,” Dring remarked. “Did any of the rest of you finish it?”

  “I did,” Judith said, “but I went through EarthCent Intelligence analyst training, so I’m used to searching for meaning in piles of seemingly unconnected reports.”

  “Why did Edith think that Harold was going to propose to her in the first place?” Tinka demanded. “They never talked about their families and he didn’t show her his personal balance sheet. She didn’t even know what he did for a living until he sold her shares in that pyramid scheme.”

  “We don’t take courting as seriously as the advanced species,” Blythe told her. “You know that.”

  “Then what was all that business about her being afraid to show that she liked him because she thought that he thought that she thought—I had to make a spreadsheet to figure out what she was really thinking and it still didn’t make any sense!”

  “I drew a map myself,” Dring said, producing a large piece of parchment crisscrossed with lines and bubbles containing text. “I’m not positive about what the author had in mind, but according to my deconstruction, Edith wanted revenge on her younger sister for stealing her high school boyfriend, who appeared in the flashbacks.”

  “So she cut all of Harold’s clothes into shreds with pruning shears while he was out buying her an engagement ring?”

  “I think that part was a hallucination,” Dring said. “How did you read it, Judith?”

  “She carefully laid out each suit in the bathtub as if he was wearing it before she chopped them up, so I thought she was practicing.”

  “For what?” Kelly asked.

  “For dismembering the body. It was foreshadowed in the summer science camp flashback about dissecting a frog.”

  “I thought that was a day dream about lunch,” Tinka protested. “And how would killing the guy she wanted to marry be revenge on her sister?”

  “I think they had the same color hair, but I stopped reading when we changed books,” Lynx said.

  “She didn’t understand her own motivations to the point of self destruction,” Dring explained. “It’s a common theme in some genres of Earth literature.”

  “I’ve read better crossword puzzles,” the Drazen girl said dismissively. “And shopping lists.”

  “So why did you finish it?” Kelly couldn’t help asking.

  “You don’t just toss ten creds in a recycling bin, do you?”

  “I do,” Chastity said. “Can we talk about Her Only Choice now? I’m trying to decide whether or not to meet Bea Hollinder’s price for serializing the sequel in the paper.”

  “How can there be a sequel?” Shaina asked. “Everybody was perfectly happy at the end.”

  “I’ve only seen the synopsis, but she turns the whole plot on its head. The story picks up twenty years later with her son playing the role she does in the current book, and she turns out to be an even bigger roadblock to his happiness than her father was to hers.”

  “The family makes the same mistake two generations in a row?” Tinka asked. “That doesn’t seem very realistic. In a Drazen family, our elders would intervene.”

  “Did you think it was realistic when Byron appeared at Cathy’s court hearing with the bail money in cash because he just happened to have picked that time to pay off all of his parking fines and saw her crying in the docket?”

  “That was just a coincidence,” Donna said, and most of the others nodded their heads in agreement. “How else was he ever going to meet her? He was rich, but he suffered from social anxiety and pyrophobia, which is why he was always parking his floater next to fire hydrants and getting tickets.”

  “I read the book too, Mom,” Chastity said in exasperation. “I’m just saying that meeting a preordained match at a courthouse where he falls in love at first sight and bails you out after you’re falsely charged with embezzlement is a bit of a stretch.”

  “He didn’t fall in love at first sight,” Brinda protested. “He just felt sorry for her because she reminded him of his cousin whose husband went bankrupt.”

  “I don’t know what you’re all talking about,” Tinka said, pulling out her tab. “I read the book in Drazen back when the translation first came out and there wasn’t anything about social phobias or embezzlement. His parents and her parents arranged the match through a broker, but the kids rebelled, so the families had to go to great lengths to keep throwing them together as if by accident.”

  “What? Let me see that,” Chastity said, taking her friend’s tab. “It’s the same cover art, alright. Do you think the Drazen publisher is cashing in on Hollinder’s name by passing off a different novel as hers?”

  “This is her only book to be translated so far,” Tinka said. “Nobody ever heard of Bea Hollinder before, so she doesn’t have any brand value with Drazens. I only heard about it because it was the first Earth novel to be bought by one of our major publishing consortiums.”

  “Does your version have the scene on the carousel with the hand-carved wooden ponies?” Dring inquired.

  “Oh yes, that was so beautiful. And the duet that they sang…”

  “I remember the merry-go-round but not a duet,” Kelly interrupted. “In fact, I’m positive that it was calliope music because it reminded me of the one for the Physics Ride that Joe is forever fixing.”

  “How about when she sneaks into his fencing club because she thinks it’s a house of ill repute, and when he sees her, he does the salute thing with the foil?” Judith asked.

  “Except it was a dueling club and an axe,” Tinka corrected her.

  “Mine had the fencing foil as well,” Blythe said. “I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on here. Did anybody else have an axe and a duet?”

  “Broadsword,” Dring offered. “And it was an arranged marriage, just like Tinka said, but the unfortunate couple’s color coordination turned out to be so bad that the families were going to call it off. There wasn’t a carousel, per se, but that might have been repurposed into the scene where they play a holographic racing game.”

  “What language did you read it in, Dring?” Kelly demanded.

  “Horten,” the Maker responded. “When I can’t get a book on paper or parchment, I prefer a display that simulates the experience as smoothly as possible, and the Horten technology is quite impressive. Also, it was thirty pe
rcent cheaper than the English version.”

  “Literary arbitrage,” Blythe said. “Watch out, Chas. I think I’ve got an idea for a publishing business that will give you a run for your money.”

  “Is there any way to figure out how much changed with each translation?” Kelly asked.

  “Libby,” Chastity suggested immediately.

  “I’ve been wondering if anybody was going to invite me to the party,” the station librarian responded. “Taking the English book as the baseline and adjusting for word count in a linguistically neutral manner, the Frunge version actually shares the highest proportion of content with the original, at ninety-two percent. The Drazen and Horten editions both come in at ninety percent, and the Vergallian text retains eight-six percent, a point at which a co-authorship credit should become a serious consideration.”

  “I would have guessed that the Vergallian version would be the closest,” Donna said.

  “Physical resemblance between the characters has little to do with adapting a plot for another species. Just transposing the action to a tech-ban world presents numerous challenges, and the queen-based imperial government is more foreign to the world described by Bea Hollinder than the ruling structures of the Drazens, Hortens or Frunge.”

  “It’s just the four languages then?” Blythe asked.

  “The plot, even with modifications for sensibility, would find little audience with the Dollnicks, Verlocks or Grenouthians,” the station librarian replied. “They can be very romantic in their own ways, but if the source material will inspire less than eighty percent of the ultimate text, there’s not much point in pursuing a translation.”

  “Inspire?” Kelly seized on the Stryx librarian’s word choice.

  “We’ve all been using the term ‘translation’ rather loosely. I’m sure you’re aware that even among Human languages, there isn’t a one-to-one equivalence for many words and concepts.”

  “I’ve often found that to be the case myself,” Dring said. “And just imagine translating a book full of natural descriptions or culinary scenes from one species to another, especially if word play is involved.”