by E. M. Foner
“The blouse only cost thirty,” the Horten girl retorted.
“Five,” the mage counter-offered. “And I’ll throw in any single object from the bargain bin.”
“Deal,” Marilla said. “I’ll go take it off.”
“You don’t have to remove it. Just come closer.”
“Remember,” Jeeves said in warning.
“Resizing a few hundred noodle scales won’t require more than a couple gazillion electrons,” the mage said, placing her hands on the Horten’s shoulders. The black bracelet flared to life and the lights in the exhibition hall remained steady. “Five creds,” Baa demanded, holding out her hand.
Marilla swung her arms to rotate her shoulders through their full range of motion and even tried a move that looked like a baseball pitch. “Great. Do you take programmable creds?”
“I’ll get it,” Samuel said, moving in front of the Horten girl and handing the glowering mage a coin. “Are you going to pick something from the bin? I’ve got a magical curse deflector,” he added, displaying his dented pot lid.
“No, you take mine. It’s only fair since you paid for my fitting.”
“May I examine that?” Jeeves asked, extending his pincer towards Samuel. The ambassador’s son handed the Stryx the pot lid and returned to rummaging through the bin. “Interesting. May I inquire why you chose this particular probability density?” he inquired of the mage.
“For a thousand creds,” Baa said immediately.
“It’s not that interesting,” Jeeves told her, dropping the lid like a hot coal.
“What does this do?” Samuel asked, holding up an enormous pink rubber eraser.
“In my experience it creates gouges in paper even if I’m being gentle,” the mage replied.
“I mean the magic effect.”
“It removes curses from certain object classes.”
“Does that include circlets?”
“Not if they’re made from precious metals.”
“I think it’s pure iron.”
“Then the eraser will do the job,” Baa said. “It does, however, require a short recharge cycle between uses.”
“How long is short?” Samuel asked, recalling that the Teragram mage had spent almost six thousand years sleeping off a broken heart before being discovered in the wall of Paul’s newly acquired habitat.
“A century in your years, but consider the price.”
“She’s got a point,” Jorb said. “If you can clear the curse from the circlet of power you showed us, I’ll wear it if you won’t.”
“Here,” Vivian said to Baa, returning from the coffee cart with a handful of twenty-cred coins. “What are you doing with the giant eraser, Sam?”
“It’s Marilla’s freebie. I’m going to use it to de-curse the circlet, though after that it’s worthless for a hundred years.”
“When’s the last time it was used?” she asked, counting out two hundred creds for the mage.
“I don’t know.” Samuel turned back to Baa. “When was the last time it was used?”
“Give it here,” the Teragram said with a sigh. “I’ll just need a minute to reset the timer.”
“Is that Yvandi with Grude trying out those broadswords?” Vivian asked Jorb.
“Sure is,” the Drazen replied, and putting two fingers in his mouth, gave a piercing whistle. The Dollnick student immediately looked over, giving the tall Sharf girl the opportunity she needed to behead him, except the noodle weapon merely wrapped around his neck and drooped down his chest. Then the two aliens handed the swords to the next pair of students waiting to have a go, and made their way over to Baa’s booth.
“Hello, Sir Jeeves,” Grude greeted the Stryx, who he had met while serving on Samuel and Vivian’s student committee for Flower. “Hey, guys. Sorry I’ve been skipping the dojo lately, Jorb, but I signed up for a LARP with Yvandi and some friends of hers and I barely have time to get my homework done these days.”
“Medieval quest?” the Drazen asked enviously.
“Capture the Queen,” Yvandi told him. “It’s an old Horten table game based on raiding a Vergallian tech-ban world, but it’s recently been adopted for LARPing. What are you guys playing?”
“We’re not,” Jorb responded bitterly. “We signed up for the LARP elective and it’s just Jeeves—”
“Remember your non-disclosure agreement,” Vivian cautioned him, indicating the Stryx with a nod of her head.
“Well, I can say that it’s not fun, can’t I?”
“You get university credit?” Grude asked.
“It’s a regular course,” Vivian told him. “They’re starting new ones all the time. You guys can sign up too, but you need a group of four.”
Jorb shook his head vigorously in the negative.
The Dollnick student took the hint and said, “Uh, maybe next year. Why don’t you guys come on one of our raids? We’ve got a big enough group so that it’s down to twenty creds an hour each, and it only gets cheaper when more players sign up.”
“Twenty creds an hour?” Samuel asked in dismay. “That’s what I earn for a full shift at my work/study job, though tips are up because we’ve been getting more customers since the LARPing craze hit the station. The weapons dropped in the league studios are brought to the lost-and-found.”
“I seem to have misplaced a number of things myself recently,” Baa said innocently. “Can I just come in and browse through the inventory?”
“You have to be able to describe the item to whoever is working. Only employees are allowed behind the counter, and the Stryx security imaging for the station is available to confirm claims.”
“Never mind.”
“You’re a Teragram mage, I just paid you two hundred creds in cash, and you’ve probably been selling stuff all morning,” Vivian said in exasperation. “Why are you talking like some centee-less labor contract runaway?”
Yvandi and Grude both flinched at the girl’s words, and the Dollnick reached in a belt pouch and threw a pinch of a white crystalline substance that might have been salt over his shoulder.
“Keep it to yourselves,” Baa growled at the aliens. “And you,” she turned to Vivian, “are you trying to put me out of business? I just gave you a great deal on that pack.”
“Sorry, I forgot they were all scared of your kind. I just don’t get why somebody with your obvious abilities would be reduced to making false claims at the lost-and-found.”
“If you had lived as long as I have you’d know that multi-species lost-and-founds are a great place to refresh your wardrobe. Everything is always in fashion somewhere.”
“You sound like my sister,” Samuel said, and then he burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny,” Vivian asked him.
“I just had a thought,” the teen said. “Rather than avoiding Jeeves for the rest of your life, Baa, why don’t you make a deal to pay him back with work? I’m not into clothes myself, but SBJ Fashions has all sorts of stuff you could cast spells on. I’ll bet there are plenty of players with money who would rather wear a designer cloak that protects them from arrows than some stiff leather armor.”
“I almost bought a brand-name hat that offered a ten percent increase in intelligence for stats-based games, but it cost way too much, and I already have a game hat that I like,” Yvandi said, touching the brim of her headgear. “How much would you charge for an enchantment like that?”
“A hundred creds,” Baa replied promptly.
“Oh, I was hoping more like twenty.”
“Twenty,” the mage agreed. “Toss me the hat.”
“Wait a minute,” Jeeves said, intercepting the hat with his pincer and spinning to face the mage. “Let’s get a few things straight. If you’re going to work for SBJ Fashions, we require exclusivity.”
“We can discuss that right after I complete my contractual bargain with the young Sharf,” Baa said, holding out her hand for the hat. “I haven’t agreed to anything yet, and I need to earn some more ready money if I’m
going to be able to retain an attorney to review whatever ridiculous employment contract you ask me to sign.”
“She’s pretty sharp,” Jonah commented to his sister. “Mom would like her.”
Twelve
“Come in, come in,” Dorothy greeted the Frunge attorney. “You’ve got great timing.”
“Flazint appears to be busy,” Tzachan mumbled, tightening his grip on an ancient valise that looked like it had been passed down from his ancestors. “I could come back in—”
“Nonsense,” the ambassador’s daughter interrupted, and grabbing his free arm, dragged the shy alien into the design room. A rarely used 3D modeling machine languished in the corner, and Flazint had a small metallurgical laboratory set up against one wall. “She’s just experimenting with coatings for silver thread to keep it shiny or something.”
“I wouldn’t want to interfere with—”
“Flazint!” Dorothy called loudly, and followed up by throwing a pincushion at the back of her fellow designer’s lab coat. “Company’s here.”
The Frunge girl carefully set down the beaker of bubbling liquid she had been about to pour and pulled off the head-and-shoulders shroud that she wore for protection while working with chemicals. Her hair vines were wrapped in a tight bun to reduce the chance of accidental damage, and her hands and arms were covered with heavy gauntlets.
“You have to stop throwing pincushions at me while I’m working,” she complained, while lowering a metal hood down over her experiment. “Just ping me.”
“Tzachan is here,” Dorothy repeated, maintaining a tight grip on the attorney’s wrist. “I’m going to go get the conference room ready and find Shaina and Brinda, so you show him what we do. Don’t forget to see me for a fitting before you go,” she instructed the alien, and then slipped past him into the reception area.
“I’m sorry for interrupting your work,” Tzachan apologized. He suddenly realized that his newly freed hand had nothing to do, and he vacillated between moving it behind his back and attempting to strike a casual pose like the models he had seen in corridor advertisements. After a moment’s hesitation, he tried to insert the hand into his suit jacket pocket, but it seemed to be sewed closed just below the flap. To the Frunge girl, it looked like he was scratching himself below the ribs.
“I wasn’t doing anything important,” she said, taking a small step in his direction and accidentally kicking the pincushion, which bounced off a stool and rolled to a stop between the attorney’s shoes. The hair vines of both of the Frunge turned dark green in embarrassment. Then Flazint’s eyes went wide with horror. “Dorothy closed the door on her way out?”
The attorney spun around and stared at the offending door. The ambassador’s daughter had waved it shut as she left, meaning that he was alone in an enclosed space with an unmarried woman who wasn’t a family member.
“I’m so sorry,” he apologized, frantically waving at the door, which didn’t respond since he was too far inside the room. “What’s wrong with the thing? Is it locked?”
“Even Dorothy wouldn’t do this intentionally,” Flazint said, unwilling to accept that her friend’s alien sense of humor might indeed stoop so low. “Try stepping closer. We keep the proximity fields tight so that the door doesn’t slide open every time somebody visits the business office.”
Tzachan practically leapt into the door, which responded by sliding open on an empty hallway. He stuck his head out and looked both ways. “I don’t think anybody saw,” he told the girl.
“Then it didn’t happen,” Flazint said. “Humans have a different sense of propriety than we do, but we’re friends, and she doesn’t mean anything by it.”
The Frunge attorney relaxed a little on hearing how sensibly the girl was behaving. He’d heard of cases where a male had entered a room unaware that a female was present and ended up in honor court over damages to her reputation, though of course, that could only happen if there were witnesses. “You’re dressed very differently than the last time I saw you,” he said in an attempt at small talk.
“That was my first time in a LARP, you know,” she replied, her hair vines coloring up again. “I didn’t know anybody would see me, other than my friends.”
Tzachan suddenly recalled that she had seen him with the seat torn out of his pants, and he cursed himself for having brought up the subject. The two Frunge stood silently for a minute, trying to figure out how they should act in the absence of a chaperone, and then Dorothy returned.
“Brinda is ready, and Shaina isn’t coming in because it’s Parents Day at Mikey’s school, so we can start the meeting as soon as Jeeves gets here.”
“Stryx Jeeves will be attending our meeting?” Tzachan asked, snapping out of his haze of social confusion.
“He’s the majority owner and we all find that life goes smoother if we pretend that he’s running everything. Did you give Zach the grand tour, Flazint?”
“I was just about to start, it took me a minute to clean up,” she said, gesturing at her work area. “Tzachan waited in the doorway,” she added for the sake of propriety.
“Don’t let her ignore you, Zach,” Dorothy said, giving the attorney a playful push in her friend’s direction. “I’ll just run out and—”
“NO!” both of the Frunge cried at the same time, and then tried to cover up with nervous laughter.
“I guess I can stay if you’re having trouble controlling yourselves,” the human girl teased the aliens, but immediately felt bad when she saw the expression of shocked disbelief on Flazint’s face. “I’m just kidding. Come over here, Zach, and I’ll get a start on your fitting while she changes. You’re still wearing a lab coat, Flazz.”
Flazint fled behind the changing partition to recover her wits while the alien attorney followed Dorothy to the fitting area. The corner of the room used for taking measurements was empty except for a grid painted on both walls and a device reminiscent of a periscope that came down from the ceiling. “Do I have to empty my pockets?” he asked nervously.
“No, it’s a completely passive scan, but don’t ask me how it works. Flazint could probably explain it. Just hold your arms out from your sides—it would be better if you put down your briefcase—that’s it, and turn around slowly.”
“You caught me by surprise earlier with your offer of a suit of clothes. As much as I appreciate the gesture, I don’t think it’s appropriate, especially since I haven’t been officially retained yet. I hope you aren’t offended.”
“That’s fine, I just like getting everybody’s measurements,” Dorothy said brightly. “So what kind of dancing do you prefer?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a hypothetical question. Say you were at an alien wedding and there was a Horten band playing Vergallian ballroom instrumentals. Would you be freaked out if you had to dance?”
“My parents made me attend Astria’s Academy of Dance on the station when I was a shrub,” Tzachan admitted. “I was the only Frunge in the class.”
“Ahhh,” Dorothy breathed, rapidly formulating a psychoanalytic profile for the shy lawyer. “You must have been traumatized trying to keep up with the steps while wearing those boots with the dirt in them.”
“It wasn’t much fun,” the alien acknowledged. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Yes, you can put your arms down. Flazint? Are you coming out or do I have to send this brave man in to fetch you?”
“Stop being a brat,” the Frunge girl called back, “I’ll just be another minute.”
“Actually, I have a question for you,” Tzachan said, trying to buy time for the Frunge girl so that Dorothy wouldn’t say something else inappropriate. “I noticed earlier today that there’s something wrong with my suit pocket. I suppose I never had a reason to use it before.”
“Let me see,” the ambassador’s daughter said, and before the attorney could remove the jacket and hand it over, she was examining the garment as if he were a mannequin. “Oh, this is hilarious. The pocket doesn’t work
because there isn’t one. The maker just sewed a flap to the front of your jacket. Is this a Frunge style?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Tzachan said. “My parents buy my clothes.”
“Stop torturing him,” Flazint said, stepping out from behind the changing screen. Her lab coat was gone and she had freed her hair vines from the tight bun and somehow woven them through a modest trellis in record time. “Don’t let her upset you, Tzachan. She’s like that with everybody.”
“Is Dorothy giving our prospective legal representative a hard time?” Jeeves demanded as he floated through the door.
“They’re ganging up on me,” the ambassador’s daughter said innocently. “You know how clubby the Frunge are.”
“Brinda is waiting in the conference room so let’s get started.” Jeeves put his words into action by leading the way out of the design room. “Dorothy and Affie tell me that you’re a genius with intellectual property, Tzachan.”
“I don’t know where they got that idea, sir. We’ve only met once and—”
“His philosophy on brand value is inspiring,” Dorothy interrupted. “Tell him, Zach.”
“It’s just that I believe creators should be rewarded for their investment,” the attorney said. “I’ve represented clients whose businesses were on the brink of failing due to brand piracy even as their innovations were coming to dominate the markets. My firm recently hired an artificial private detective on Chintoo to look into the less reputable manufacturing operations, but I find it difficult to imagine that they would attempt to cheat you, sir.”
Jeeves acknowledged this observation with a little bobbing motion and floated to his place at the head of the conference room table as the others filed in behind him. Tzachan took the seat Dorothy indicated, and Flazint brought him a cup of Frunge tea from the sideboard. The attorney accepted the drink and even smacked his lips politely with the first sip, despite the fact he never drank the stuff because it bothered his digestion. Then he set the cup aside and drew a bonded tab and stylus from his valise, enabling the confidential note-taking mode.
“My partners in SBJ Fashions, Shaina and Brinda, handle our marketing and sales,” Jeeves began. “Our contracted manufacturing facility is on Chintoo, though our bespoke lines are hand-finished here on the station. As you correctly observed, my involvement in the business keeps our contractors from manufacturing goods for the piracy markets. Unfortunately, my elders made it clear to me when I entered this business that it would be inappropriate for me to take an active role in any type of enforcement activity, whether collecting unpaid bills or protecting our intellectual property.”