by E. M. Foner
“No,” the little Horten girl replied with a giggle.
“Is it a math error?” Krolyohne asked, leading Orsilla to laugh outright.
“No. Are math errors funny for Verlocks?”
“The square root of negative one is imaginary,” the Verlock girl said slowly, and then her whole body began heaving with silent laughter.
“Can we see it?” Vzar asked.
“Yes,” Orsilla admitted, staring down at her feet lest she give her secret away by looking right at it, the way Aisha had with the picture frame on the mantel.
“Is it alive?” Mike asked.
Orsilla hesitated over her answer as if she weren’t sure. “I guess so, sort of.”
“Is it the immersive camera?” Aisha guessed, knowing that children were often confused by the broadcasting terminology.
“No,” Orsilla replied, giggling again.
“It’s me, isn’t it,” Jeeves said, sounding surprisingly unenthusiastic about his conclusion.
“Yes,” the little Horten girl said, pointing at the Stryx. “You ARE funny.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Aisha saw a bunny with a purple stain on his chin fur herding the two missing children back to the set. Clume and Pluck both looked guilty, but they made no attempt to hide their own purple lips, perhaps unaware of the characteristic evidence that consuming Bizzle juice popsicles bore against them.
“I’m thinking of a color,” Jeeves said.
“Purple,” Orsilla guessed immediately.
“And thank you for filling in, Jeeves,” Aisha said, giving the Stryx a gentle push. “Maybe we’ll have you back on the show sometime.”
“What did we miss?” Pluck asked.
“Spinner started spinning really fast and Jeeves had to stop him,” Mike said proudly. “Do you want to see?”
“NO!” Aisha exclaimed, shocking the production crew by raising her voice. “I mean, now that everybody is back, we should move on to our reader’s theatre presentation of ‘Three Little Shrubs,’ using a script created from the famous story book by the Frunge author and artist, Shzcair. We’ll return with reader’s theatre right after this product announcement.”
For once she was happy for the long commercial break which gave her time to regroup. Aisha had worked out the small reading parts for the children in advance and had them printed in the proper languages on plastic slips, which she now retrieved from the props manager. She quickly distributed the scripts, and the assistant director counted them back in.
“I want to thank all of our viewers for suggesting scripts and voting on your favorite choices for our new reader’s theatre segment. Because there are seven children in the cast and just four Frunge in the story, the part of each shrub will be shared by two cast members. Mike has volunteered to play the ancestor. Is everybody ready?”
“Creeeeeaaak,” the little human boy intoned, sounding not unlike a tree limb bent by the wind.
“This dirt is too dry,” Clume said, in the part of the first little shrub.
“This dirt is too wet,” Orsilla complained.
“This dirt is just right,” Pluck said, shuffling his feet for emphasis.
“Creeeeeaaak,” Mike added.
“I will move next to you,” Krolyohne pronounced slowly, and along with Clume, made her way to where Pluck and Vzar were standing.
“I will move also,” Spinner said, and floated alongside Orsilla to join the others.
“Now we’re all together,” Vzar read from the script.
“Creeeeeaaak,” Mike concluded.
“Wasn’t that fun?” Aisha asked. The Grenouthian stage crew all shook their heads in the negative, and the assistant director tapped a paw in front of his mouth, pantomiming a yawn. “Isn’t it nice to be part of a story with a happy ending?”
“If we’re all rooted in the same place, won’t the dirt dry out and lose its nutrients?” Orsilla asked.
“I—maybe there’s an underground stream,” Aisha suggested.
“It’s not the same without the pictures,” Vzar said. The little Frunge boy tossed aside the plastic script dismissively. “In the real story there are lots of colorful flowers and I know all of their names. We always play ‘Find the pollinator,’ in each picture.”
“You never made children read on the show before,” Clume complained. “I want to play Storytellers.”
“I practiced imagining,” the Verlock girl asserted.
“Is it my fault?” the little Stryx asked. “Did you make us read a story because my imagination is bad?”
“No, no, Spinner,” Aisha protested. “Reader’s theatre is just something we wanted to try out. It was on the schedule before you joined.”
“Can we play Storytellers?” the bright Horten girl asked.
“I don’t have a beginning prepared,” Aisha protested.
“I can do it,” Orsilla offered, rushing ahead on her own. “Once upon…”
“A TIME,” the other little children shouted happily.
“There was a giant space monster on Union Station,” the Horten girl continued, her eyes wide and shining. Aisha groaned to herself. She liked to start Storytellers on a happy note, though the children always found a way to introduce scary aliens and witches. A muted ping on her implant told her that a commercial break was pending, but when she glanced at the assistant director for a countdown, she was stunned to see him waving it off. Aisha sighed and pointed at Clume to take the next turn.
“It had long tentacles and giant teeth, and it was all yellow,” the Dollnick boy elaborated. “And it crawled through the station looking for little children to eat.”
“But the monster didn’t find any children because they were all hiding,” Aisha amended, before pointing at Krolyohne in the hope that the Verlock girl would exile the tentacled beast to outer space.
“So the monster got really angry and it began tearing the station apart,” Krolyohne said, so excited by the idea that she spoke almost as quickly as the others.
“But the Stryx didn’t like having their station torn apart,” Aisha contributed, and pointed at Spinner for him to continue.
The little Stryx hesitated for a moment, turning rapidly in one direction and then the other, before saying, “So Gryph sent Jeeves to fight the monster.”
Aisha sagged. The last thing she wanted in Storytellers was a pitched battle, but the show was going out live, or at least, live with a delay, so she pointed resignedly at Pluck.
“But the monster was soooo big that it grabbed Jeeves in its tentacles,” the little Drazen boy said.
“And it tried to stretch Jeeves to help him grow,” Aisha suggested hopefully, before pointing at Vzar.
“But Jeeves didn’t stretch, so the monster ate him up in one gulp,” the little Frunge said, tickled by the idea of a monster eating an all-powerful Stryx.
“Oh, no,” Aisha cried, horrified by the direction of the story. “Can’t we have a happy ending, Mike?”
The boy could see that Aisha was upset, and he felt bad for the Stryx, so he completed the story with, “But the monster got so sick from eating Jeeves that it died. And we all lived happily ever after.”
Another ding over her implant informed Aisha that the Grenouthians were finally getting to the commercial. The assistant director gave her the thumbs up. Station-wrecking monsters were always ratings boosters on children’s shows. She caught something moving in her peripheral vision, and as Jeeves skirted the set on his way to the exit, she distinctly heard him mutter something about knowing where he wasn’t wanted.
“We’re back, but we’re almost out of time,” Aisha announced when the light on the front immersive camera went live. “Is everybody ready to sing our theme song?” The children all nodded, and the assistant director cued the music.
Don’t be a stranger because I look funny,
You look weird to me, but let’s make friends.
I’ll give you a tissue if your nose is runny,
I’m as scared as you, so let’s ma
ke friends.
“Some of you really do look funny,” Orsilla said with a giggle after the song ended.
“Having just two arms is weird,” Clume declared.
“I don’t think I’m scared anymore,” Spinner added, just before the light on the front immersive camera winked out.
“That’s a wrap,” the assistant director called. “Great chemistry with this cast. I see a bonus in my future.”
Thirteen
“Do any of the panel members want to offer an example of a Grenouthian documentary that makes fun of humans?” Kelly asked.
The room was large, but after the sound equipment failure at the keynote address, the presenters in the individual sessions had all decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and defaulted to speaking loudly. An unexpected benefit of the no-tech approach was that the audiences stayed as quiet as possible to increase their chances of hearing what the speakers were saying. It also saved two minutes at the start of every session during which presenters would normally have to beg the audience to take seats closer to the front.
“The one about Earth’s economy before the Stryx stepped in,” Ambassador Monaro offered from Kelly’s left at the panel table. “What was it called again?”
“Fool’s Gold,” Ambassador Enoksen answered from two seats away on Kelly’s other side. “My own favorite was the one about human democracy through the ages, though the title seems to have escaped me.”
“A Thousand Monkeys,” Ambassador Fu said.
“Our station librarian recommended that documentary to me,” Kelly admitted. “It wasn’t anywhere near as insulting as the one about the history of human hygiene.”
“The Well in the Cesspool,” Ambassador Enoksen contributed. “You have to admit that the bunnies have a talent for coming up with catchy titles.”
“So the question for our panel members, which I’ll open to the audience afterwards, is why do the Grenouthians make fun of us?” Kelly turned first to the colleague who she already knew from the intelligence steering committee. “Ambassador Fu?”
“Because they can,” he answered without hesitation. “Let’s face the facts. By the time the advanced species joined the tunnel network, they knew that bathing doesn’t kill you, that sacrificing children won’t make it rain, and that piling on debt is just robbing your own future.”
“So did we, except for the last one about the debt,” somebody in the audience objected.
“But the aliens figured these things out tens or hundreds of thousands of years before developing interstellar travel and being invited to join the tunnel network, so the source materials for a historical documentary no longer existed,” Ambassador Fu pointed out. “By bringing us onto the tunnel network through their remedial program, the Stryx short-circuited our natural development. What might have become forgotten episodes from our pre-history are instead our recent past.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Kelly said. “So even something like the Hortens creating a cosmetic product that accidentally altered the genome of their entire species isn’t as attractive to the Grenouthian producers as, say, humans in the last century building wider and wider roads that resulted in bigger and bigger traffic jams.”
“Highways to Hell,” Ambassador Fu informed her, showing that he had seen the recent horror documentary. “Not only were the bunnies able to obtain cheap or free imagery of road construction and the traffic jams in major cities, they were able to conduct interviews with elderly survivors who remembered abandoning cars and walking home.”
“I actually did see a rerun of an old Grenouthian documentary about the genetic change the Hortens accidentally inflicted on themselves, but it was all talking heads and recreations,” Ambassador Enoksen commented. “I don’t think it did much in the ratings.”
“So again, for the panel,” Kelly said. “Does anybody believe that the sole motivation for the Grenouthians in making these documentaries is the low-cost availability of content, or do you think they are killing two birds with one stone and intentionally embarrassing us?”
“The Grenouthians are not an aggressive species, although they can be quite intimidating in person because of their size,” Ambassador Monaro replied. “Even though it may seem that they are endlessly picking on us by exposing the mistakes and tragedies of our history, in recent years they have been providing Earth broadcasters with extensive archival coverage of all of the alien screw-ups for the last few million years.”
“Not to mention broadcasting ‘Let’s Make Friends,’” Ambassador Fu added.
“So it would appear that those of us on the panel don’t see the documentaries as an attack, but rather as a business model,” Kelly said. “What do people in the audience think? Yes, Mr. President?”
The EarthCent president rose to his feet in the front row, turned to face the audience, and began speaking in a loud voice. “Our public relations director, Hildy Greuen, has been running—what do you call it, Hildy?”
“Regression analysis. It’s a method of standard statistical modeling,” Hildy supplied the answer in her normal tone.
“Regression modeling,” the president continued loudly. “It turns out that alien tourism to Earth peaks after popular documentaries, even the ones about poor service in the hotels or xenophobic street gangs attacking aliens. In other words, it appears that all publicity is good publicity.”
“I never said that,” Hildy exclaimed, raising her voice, but the president shushed her and went on.
“A number of interesting proposals have recently come across my desk from expatriate humans looking for funding to improve humanity’s image in their own locales. I’m particularly attracted to an idea conceived by a woman who worked for years covering the human diaspora for a Grenouthian news service. She suggested piggybacking on the documentaries with humorous rebuttals.”
“So when they rebroadcast ‘Fool’s Gold,’ we would be ready with a sort of an infomercial about doing business with Earth today?” Ambassador Enoksen asked.
“Exactly, but keeping it light,” the president replied. “Nobody likes a species without a sense of humor. We have to show that we can take a joke.”
“Maybe the tagline could be, ‘Sure, it’s another pyramid scheme, but this is your opportunity to get in at the bottom,’” somebody in the audience called out.
After the laughter died down enough to allow her to be heard without really shouting, Kelly suggested, “That might be a little too light. Is there any way we can get advance notice of the documentaries before they come out?”
“Don’t you get a program guide on Union Station?” Ambassador Monaro asked in surprise.
“Oh, I forgot. I don’t really watch much of anything,” Kelly admitted. “I’m more of a reader.”
“So why are you chairing the panel on Grenouthian broadcast documentaries?” a woman called out from a seat near the side exit. She had an official press pass around her neck, though Kelly didn’t recognize the network.
The president turned to address the correspondent. “Ambassador McAllister conducted the most watched interview in the history of the Grenouthian network, and it’s not a coincidence that she shares the same family name as Aisha McAllister.”
“Oops,” the reporter said apologetically. “I just got roped into this gig this morning because nobody else wanted to do it, and I had to ask a question to get credit. I usually cover cage fighting and floater racing.”
“How far ahead of time do the Grenouthians announce new documentaries?” Kelly asked. She figured that she’d already exposed her ignorance, so she may as well get her money’s worth.
“It varies,” Ambassador Monaro explained. “Each season is announced in advance, so figuring the Grenouthian year at around five cycles, or a little less than ten months, there’s plenty of notice to prepare something.”
“And we would buy time during the documentary to run pro-Earth infomercials,” Ambassador Fu surmised, directing his words not at Kelly, but towards the audience.
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br /> “Exactly,” the president confirmed. “Hildy recommends getting enough of a jump on each documentary to be able to test our infomercials with target groups of aliens. What, Hil?”
The public relations director decided she’d had enough of playing puppeteer to a life-size president doll, and stood up to talk. “As long as we have a room full of ambassadors, I want to point out that the most cost-effective place to test our message with alien audiences is on Stryx stations, where the target groups are all present in large numbers. If anybody is interested in participating, please let me know. There’s no need for one embassy to carry the whole load. If everybody took responsibility for a single species, that would be great.”
Kelly waited a minute while the public relations director took the names of volunteers, and then continued. “Alright, then. Maybe the title of this session was misleading, since we all seem to be on the same page about the Grenouthians.”
“How about cost?” Ambassador Zerakova called out from the audience. “What does a spot on the Grenouthian network go for?”
“The Grenouthians broadcast everywhere the Stryxnet reaches, and they also sell content to off-network species through various arrangements, including delivery of physical media to distribution points by jump-ship,” Hildy explained. “You have to keep in mind that most alien audiences living on planets either don’t have implants or haven’t programmed them to translate any human languages. We would only advertise to a small segment of the watchers.”
“So a tourism infomercial could target aliens who can breathe Earth’s atmosphere,” somebody suggested.
“And what would that cost?” Ambassador Zerakova followed up on her earlier question.
“A lot,” Hildy hedged. “We’re actually hoping to convince some of the aliens now doing business on Earth to participate in the infomercials and share in the broadcast costs. I’ve broached the subject with a couple of the Drazen and Dollnick entrepreneurs who are doing well here, and as long as we can make a good business case for the advertising, I think they’ll come on board.”