Josh washed his face and hands with the hot towel and then rubbed the back of his neck. That not being enough, he dug in both ears, washed behind them for the first time in months, then stuck the towel up under his shirt and gave himself a good rub-down. When he finished the formerly white towel was a dark gray with some yellow etching.
He dropped it in the basket as the attendant came back through and then decided to look around at his fellow travelers. There were two Terrans across the aisle from him, an older man and a girl Josh figured was his daughter. They didn’t look alike or anything, but she was way younger than he was. She was really pretty, too, but kind of old, maybe twenty, wearing “two bangles and a feather,” with her hands folded demurely on her lap and her eyes closed. Reading, tooling or meming, not sleeping, from the ways her eyes were moving under their lids.
Josh caught the man looking at him and he looked kind of angry. So Josh decided to look somewhere else. He lifted himself up on his seat and looked at the seats behind him. There was another couple, there, two catlike Nalo, a male and a female. Again, the male must have been the dad because he had the really deep black fur of an older Nalo with gray around the jowls. The female was younger, Josh couldn’t even guess how young, with light tan, thin, fur. She was reading a pad, one pointed ear twitching occasionally. Nalo mostly wore a sort of long robe but hers was short, barely reaching the tops of her thighs and was cut low in the front so he could see her cleavage. It was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. When she inhaled the little hairs on her breasts sort of bristled.
After a moment, as if reading his mind, she looked up from the pad. He grinned at her and she slowly drew her lips back, revealing a mouth full of perfectly formed, extremely sharp, teeth. He wasn’t too sure about Nalo expressions, but he didn’t think it was a smile. So he smiled again, lips closed, sheepishly, and slid back down the back of his chair.
The fresher was at the front of the compartment so he strolled up there and did his business. There were instructions in Galacta explaining how a human should use the flusher. He followed them carefully, confused and, at times, horrified by some of the other instructions. When he was done he wandered more slowly down the aisle, looking at his fellow passengers.
Most of them were Tooleck and most of those were females, probably businesswomen from the pads and chart-holos. There were a couple of lizardlike Jootan, one of them sitting right next to an Adoo! He wondered if the sluglike Adoo was being taken to the Jootan salt-mines but probably not. The war had been over for a looong time. Terra and the Toolecks won, beating the Jootan and the Ortulians over a sixty parsec sector, and the Adoo had mostly moved to Goolagam which was their ancestral world. It had been taken over by Adyl while they were gone, since they’d lost control of it nearly three thousand years before to the Yemnor, and there’d been quite a few wars there since they’d moved back. Each of which the Adoo had won with embarrassing ease given that the Adyl were about three meters tall, heavily armored insectoids related to Narians. Getting beat up by a bunch of slugs had to be embarrassing. It wasn’t far from Nari, come to think of it.
He’d just started to close his eyes to read again when the Tooleck stewards started serving dinner. A tray extruded from the back of the seat in front of him with the dinner covered by a crystal-plas warmer. When he took it off he sighed; proto-carb chicken in some sort of sauce. He picked up the prongs and prodded at it. Yep, proto-carb, had to be. No real chicken was ever that rubbery.
It was pretty good, though; the sauce was creamy and not spicy. There were noodles in some sort of cheese sauce, too. He avoided the vegetables on the basis that anything green had to be bad for you. There was some sort of fruit, though. It was kind of funny, sort of like an orange but purple and with a really thick rind. When he got that off, by biting into it with his somewhat prominent incisors and tearing, which he’d gotten good at in Papua, he found that the interior was filled with little globes. He popped one in his mouth, suspiciously, and was pleased to find that it was something like a kumquat, sweet and tangy at the same time. He ate all the little globes, greedily, getting juice all over his hands. But there was another warm towel in the tray and he used that to clean up.
When he was done he tooled the command and the tray folded back up along with his mess. Well, except for the stuff that had gotten on his clothes, which he brushed off onto the floor. Small buglike bots scuttled out of the walls and picked up the debris, unnoticed.
Fed and happy he checked his plant and saw that they were about three quarters of the way to Tooleck, passing over the last bit of the Canalit Rift. They were just approaching Re’as, an underdeveloped planet that had been settled by Toolecks several thousand years ago. The Re’as were hostile towards the Toolecks, which had conquered them as part of the far-spanning, and fast decaying, Tooleck Empire. The Tooleck were in the process of slowly withdrawing from Re’as and not enjoying the experience. Re’as terrorists were always blowing up air-car bombs in Donlon or shooting Tooleck soldiers or something else to express their general dissatisfaction with the Toolecks.
On the other hand, when the Re’as weren’t fighting the Toolecks they were fighting each other or singing about fighting or wandering around the galaxy as mercenaries or casual muscle. They called it “following the wild besleem.” They spoke a version of heavily accented Galactica that was fairly similar to Tooleck, but coarser and, in extreme versions, nearly incomprehensible.
Josh kicked his feet and wondered what to do next. He had a couple of hundred books loaded in his plant but he really didn’t feel like reading. He’d decided that spacing was boring. So much for being a spacer. Nothing but hyperspace to look at most of the time. What he wanted to be was… rich. Rich enough to buy a planet. Rich enough that he’d have a girlfriend like that Nalo girl, with really fine fur.
He brought up a tooling about the Second Orion war and spliced himself in as an Insertion Commando. The mission was to rescue… a pretty Nalo girl, a member of the resistance, who was being held by the Jootan secret police. He’d just gotten through the ludicrous Jootan defenses around their headquarters and burst into the room where the Nalo girl was tied up and being threatened by black-clad Jootan police when the tooling was automatically saved.
“Ladies, gentlemen, neuters and?T*Reen,” the Tooleck captain said, “we are approaching hyperjunction with Tooleck at this time. Please disengage all net connections and configure your comfort zones for landing.”
Josh sighed and triggered the restraints, squirming a little as the plastic wrapped across his body, legs and forehead. He could turn his head to the side and he watched as the purple of hyperspace gave way to shifted stars and then the pinpricks came toge
ther into normal looking pins of light. The G class star of Tooleck was briefly visible as the window automatically polarized to prevent blinding. The ship was pointed at Tooleck on the way in but as they approached the planet it banked to enter the landing pattern and Josh got his first glimpse of a new planet.
It looked… gray.
****
“It’s cold!” Jala said, wrapping her arms around herself. She was wearing a light environment cape but the warmer was having to really work in the brumous conditions in Donlon. The rain was sheeting down as they waited under a force dome for an aircab and she shivered and pulled Josh to her.
“We didn’t bring any clothes for this,” she said.
“My fault,” Steve answered, shrugging. He was wearing a slightly heavier environment jacket and frowned as he saw Josh shiver. “We’ll go to the hotel and then order some appropriate clothes. I’d forgotten it was autumn year in Donlon.”
The pad they were waiting at gave a good view of the city of Donlon and to Josh the place looked not much different from Bowan. Fewer megascrapers and a cluster of very low buildings near the middle, but pretty much block after block of big buildings. It actually looked like Bowan, the part they’d lived in, in the winter. Lots of cold rain and fog.
“Revod Hotel,” his father said when the cabrank got to them.
“Please to place your luggage in the boot,” the cabbot said in a weird accent. “Your” came out as “you were.” “Pleace to plass you were loogadge in ter boot.”
“Why’s it sound like that?” Josh said as he tossed his bag in the trunk of the cab.
“That’s what most of the local Toolecks sound like,” his dad answered. “It’s called Norky.”
“Cool,” Josh said as he settled into the conformal backseat.
“Where you from, guvnor?” the cabbot said as it lifted into the air.
“Terra,” Steve answered.
“Well, uh course, guvnor,” the cabbot said. “Where 'bouts?”
“Bowan,” Josh said. “Last. We travel a lot. We were in Papua before that.”
“Papua!” the cabbot said. “Got a mate works in Papua as a loader. Name of C4T7J315. Don’t suppose you ran into him, eh?”
“No, sorry,” Steve said. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Knew a Norky dozerbot named D89Y4I673, though.”
“Revod Hotel’s a swank place,” the cab burbled. “Not far from Seak Park. Got to watch the changing of the guards, guvnor. The larva would enjoy it.”
“We’ll see,” Jala said, looking out at the misting rain. “Don’t you have weather controls, here?”
“Yes, missus,” the cab said. “This is what we like for weather!”
The Revod Hotel turned out to be a series of two-story buildings taking up about a half block of prime commercial real estate. Josh couldn’t believe that somebody hadn’t already built a megascraper on it. Dad would clear the area in a heartbeat.
They pulled in under a portico that didn’t even have a force screen and the cold mist and rain hit them as soon as they got out of the cab. Mom handled the transfer while he and Dad got the luggage and dumped it on one of the waiting bellhops.
“Right this way, guvnor,” the float said, spinning around and heading for the plascrys doors.
The hop led them through the lobby and to a bounce tube at the rear of the building, then up to the second floor and down a corridor to one of the outbuildings. The corridor was surrounded by dripping plascrys and Josh could see that small gardens were set between the buildings. The vegetation was mostly purple and looked like variations on moss and ferns.
“Room B 219, guvnor,” the hop said as they reached the room. The door was wood on hinges, something Josh had only seen in historical movies.
His dad keyed the lock and showed Josh and Jala how to use the doorknob thingy. There was only one bed and the fresher had some fixtures Josh had never seen.
“What’s that?” Josh asked, pointing at one of them. It looked like a seat with a spike on it.
“That’s for… Tooleck,” his dad said, hastily. “You don’t want to use it. And I’d better explain the fresher controls. You really don’t want to hit the third button, son. Hop, we’ll need a float bed for my son as well.”
“I’ll get one for the tyke right away, guvnor,” the hop said, then cleared his voice circuits. “Hem…”
“Sorry,” Josh’s dad said and transferred a tip.
“Right away, guvnor,” the hop said, floating out of the room.
“Wow! A fountain,” Josh said, examining the controls on the fresher.
“That’s for… Nalo, son,” his dad said, shutting down the jet of water that was coming out of the commode. “Females.”
“And what’s the third… OH, MY GOD!” Josh shouted as a claw came up out of the bottom of the commode, snapped at air and yanked downwards.
“I told you not to hit the third button!” his dad snapped. “Especially if you’re sitting down!”
“That would of…”
“Yes,” Steve said, exasperatedly. “It’s an Adoo setting. Just… go check what they have on the tridee, okay? I think there’s a human circuit.”
Josh sighed and went to the tridee, sitting on the end of the bed and tooling it with his plant. He looked at the selections and pulled up Manny and Butch, a police show that had been extremely popular on Terra… five years ago. Since it was in a prime-time slot it was apparently brand new to the Toolecks. He watched an episode he’d seen at least three times before for a couple of minutes, mouthing the words to one scene, and was just about to change the channel when it cut to commercial.
A… very pretty girl with brown hair and… well… really… uhm… was holding up a bottle of something.
“Libro,” she whispered, huskily. “Libro… for… men.”
“Aaah,” Josh whimpered, absolutely positive that the next thing he was going to do was go out and buy some Libro… whatever it was… “So that’s what nipples look like… I didn’t know they were pink…”
“What?” Jala said, turning around from where she’d been unpacking. “Joshua Damley Parker! What are you watching?!”
“A commercial,” Josh said, reverently, as the channel was changed. “Oh, Mommm.”
****
Breakfast was another new experience.
“Well,” Josh’s dad said, scanning the menu. “They’ve got… quite a selection…”
“What are nanhuch or what is a nanhuch…” Josh asked, hesitantly.
“Uhm… you wouldn’t like it,” his dad said. “The intestines of something like a local pig, looks more like an ant, stuffed with its book-lungs.”
“Ooooo!”
“Better than haggis, trust me. Try the iravo [1] , that ought to be safe,” his dad said. “And some… ollien [2] . That’s… sort of like porridge…”
The iravo when it was served by a botwaiter turned out to be strips of… well probably meat. Fried. They were chewy but tasty. The ollien
looked a lot like oatmeal.
“What’s this made of?” Josh asked, suspiciously.
“Sort of wheat,” his dad said, clearing his throat. “Put some of the keatle syrup [3] on it. That will… help.”
There was a big pot of the stuff in the middle of the table and Josh suspiciously stuck a finger on some of the green viscous liquid that was stuck running down the outside. He licked the stuff nervously and then smiled.
“Hey! It’s corn syrup!” he said, happily.
“Close enough,” his dad replied. Dad was having the nanhuch. It smelled like fish.
After a breakfast of iravo slices and ollien with lots of keatle syrup, Josh was ready to admit that Tooleck wasn’t quite the barbarian planet it had first seemed. Gosh knows they had some decent tridee channels.
Darohs was a famous shopping mall that was just down the street from the Revod Hotel. After breakfast and daring a brief break in the rain, the underdressed threesome darted down the street to the store.
Josh’s dad picked up a heavier environment coat and Josh, after whining to get a fake lizibe fur cape just like Cilo the Barbarian wore, settled on a blue and green toggle button coat made from some weird, rough, material. It had a hood, and when he pulled it up he could pretend he was Cilo the Barbarian, making his way through the northern wastes and battling ice-worms. His mom at first was going to get an environment coat like his father and then Dad talked her into buying a fake neganah fur coat. It was light blue and glowed like fire under the sun-paint. She turned around in it, looking at it from all sides in the view screens and sighed.
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 54