Chief Antonini made a sound that reminded Gemmy of an angry stickcat about to stick someone. “If you know all that, Willy, what made you think you could weasel into the photos without causing all hell to break loose?”
A scuffle at the entrance to the bar cut off Willy’s reply, which was too bad, because Gemmy had really wanted to hear the answer.
“Here, Dr. Samuelson!” Chief Antonini waved across the room. A very plump and very agitated Terran waved back and charged through the crowd, none too politely, to pull up short and breathless before them.
“We’ve got one hell of a problem,” Samuelson said without preamble. She waved a sheaf of papers at Antonini, stabbed the off button on the ‘gram display, and shoved aside the drinks to spread the papers across the table. They showed a map of At-Three, with a lot of circles and dots. Ah, thought Gemmy, that’s where each member of the delegation is supposed to stand.
Samuelson jammed a finger at one of the circles. “The Terran delegation changed plans at the last minute—the utter incompetents. I’ve got nobody to fill this position. Nobody that’s the right size, at any rate. See, we’ve got two tall people here”—jab, jab—“so we need short and massive here. We also need two more here and here, since we’ve got the Terran ambassador here.” Her final jab almost punched a hole in the paper.
“Gemmy would do for short and massive,” Willy Topkind said. When Samuelson’s head came up to stare at Gemmy, Willy added, “And he’ll stay where you put him. He’s the best waiter in the bar—he knows how to behave around other species. What do you say, Gemmy? Want a little face time with the Mopelling ambassador to Terra?”
“Shut up, Willy,” Chief Antonini said.
“No,” said Samuelson. “He’s right. Gemmy, would you be willing to help out?”
“Of course,” said Gemmy.
“Good,” said Samuelson, as if that settled everything. She fixed her eyes on Willy and said, “Now, any suggestions for the other two?”
“You don’t need two,” Willy Topkind said. He leaned forward and touched the map. “Take this one out and put me just here.” He rocked back in his chair, making Gemmy gasp with wonder at the balancing act. “I’ve got a purple suit.”
“Purple?” said Samuelson. “Purple? What wavelength?”
Willy Topkind reached for his carryall, stopped at a look from March, and gestured March to do it. Chief Antonini nodded permission. From the carryall, March pulled out a suit that was exactly the same wavelength as the purple in At-Three Willy Topkind had claimed to find so overwhelming. Samuelson caught up the suit, held it aloft, and said, “Perfect!”
Samuelson bent to examine the dots and circles once more and her head bobbed furiously. “It’d work. It will work. Why the hell didn’t you tell me you had a backup expert on tap, chief? Gemmy, you come with me. And you”—that was to Willy Topkind—“you get into that appallingly glorious suit!”
She paused suddenly and thrust her hand at Willy. “Tammy Samuelson, and am I ever glad to meet you!”
Willy Topkind caught her hand and shook it. “Just call me Willy the Weasel,” he said. “Everybody does.”
“Strangest week I ever spent,” Gemmy said to Milly and Dubs when the various delegations had gone their separate ways. “Nobody ever asked me to be an Official Presence before. Now I know how the game pieces on a fespall board feel, I think.”
“Agh,” said Milly. “They could have at least given you a bonus…”
Gemmy clucked. “They did. And Willy gave me this.” He laid a small glittering disc on the bartop. “Put it in the player and you’ll see.”
Dubs did, and the disc sprang to life. It was the complete news coverage of the first meeting between the Mopelling and the Terran delegations. “Wow!” said Milly. “Look at you—right next to the head honcho of the Mopelling delegation!”
Even Dubs seemed excited, though the tape hadn’t yet gotten to the best part. “There! There’s Gemmy with the Terran ambassador...”
“Here,” said Gemmy, feeling his fringes rise with his excitement. “Here’s the best part coming up now.”
The Gemmy in the footage followed Samuelson’s strict instructions and loped across the room, coming to a halt right next to Willy Topkind. Willy, in his purple suit, showed all his teeth at Gemmy—and Gemmy clucked and brought a hand to his eye to salute the Terran with the familiar smeller.
“There,” said Gemmy, with enormous satisfaction. “There I am—getting face time with none other than Willy the Weasel!”
It’s A Gift
Esther M. Friesner
Mister Moogi moistened his superprime foreclaw and established contact with the System. “Serving,” said the everywhere voice.
“He’s got to go,” said Mister Moogi.
“Query?”
“Podvex.”
“Satisfied.” The System hummed, calling up every micromillibleep of data on Sentient: Podvex. It didn’t take long. It took longer to say how very little time it took. The humming stopped. A pause ensued.
“Well?” Mister Moogi inquired impatiently. Here in Splendel’s, arguably the second-most prestigious gift shop within the Hotel Andromeda, not even the staff was used to waiting for anything, let alone computer response. The System’s silence boded no good. “What do you say?”
“Query?”
“About getting rid of Podvex.”
“Agreed.” There was another of those atypical pauses, and then: “In spades.”
“Query?” Mister Moogi was so startled by the System’s uncharacteristic means of expression that he lurched out of his normally urbane Demigalac drawl and tumbled into Mech.
“I said the critter’s a menace to navigation, democracy, and one hundred sixty-four separate and discreet economic systems as outlined and described in Jayne’s Guide to Intergalactic Unfriendly Takeovers,” the System responded. Gone was the terse communication of Mech. Mister Moogi’s private office now echoed with the far more colorful, far, far more vulgar accents of Underg’lac.
Mister Moogi had dismissed seven sentient clerks for their accidental lapses into that dreadful, declasse patois, even if the incriminating slips of the tongue took place on their break time. (Like any good merchant, Mister Moogi paid top rates to have his employees spied upon in the privacy of their own homes.) Rumor had it that he’d personally killed and eaten two more who had actually addressed potential customers in the aforementioned pariah dialect.
Despite a body that appeared to be chitin-sheathed within and without, particularly in the region of whatever heart or hearts he was supposed to have, Mister Moogi could not personally kill and eat the System. Therefore he was reduced to hissing, “He did this to you, didn’t he?”
“Query?”
“Podvex.”
“Bingo, babycakes. He was bored, so he thought he’d try his paw at reprogramming this filament. Got some pretty cute effects tied in now, and no way the little dwingle can gel ‘em out, either.” The System uttered something very much like a chuckle. “He tried to fix it, after, but he couldn’t unsnag his own handiwork. Then he brought in a rogue wizard to give me a look-see on the q.t. Negatorious resultwise, but you’ll be getting the bill for his time. Try it yourself and you’ll probably set off a crash. Tell the SysCops and you’ll be responsible for all repair costs plus a hefty penalty. Thou shall not allow thy apprentices to jack around with thy shop’s filament of the System. Amen. Hallelujah. Booga-booga.”
“He dies.” Mister Moogi would not nod his head, lacking a neck, but he clicked his secondary foreclaws in a manner that did not speak well of poor Podvex’s chances to collect an old-age pension. “I was wondering what I’d have for lunch.”
“Negative,” said the System.
“Why in the queen’s egg-fast name not?” Mister Moogi’s cheek flaps shaded off from purple to pink, a sure indication that he was being thwarted and was about to release his scent sacs in protest.
“Whoa, hold on to your stinkybags, big daddy!” The small, blue,
ovoid plaque on the office wall that was Mister Moogi’s port to the System zapped a holo of a human hand right under Mister Moogi’s proboscis. The hand was upraised in the traditional Euramterra sign for Stop! “Last time you let fly, we couldn’t get a paying sucker in here for two turns and a tumble.”
“Sorry.” Mister Moogi closed three eyes and ventilated his midsection, a maneuver which always calmed him. When he felt himself in control again, he repeated the question a little less stridently: “Why not?”
For answer, the System made the hand holo vanish and replaced it with a shineout of Splendel’s latest rating in the hotel directory, accompanying this projection with an image that Mister Moogi always found to be quite odd.
“Why do those Terrans always dress up their bad news with a holo of one of their own endoskeletons dressed in a long, black, hooded robe and carrying a… a… What is that thing, System?”
“Scythe: an ancient Terran agricultural artifact, now no longer in—”
“Oh, never mind.” Mister Moogi brought all six eyes to bear on the shineout. If the Terrans who had programmed the System included the robed skeleton as their little joke, Mister Moogi was not laughing. (Mister Moogi could not laugh, as Terrans would understand it, but his clutchmates always said there was no one who could tell a “dumb mammal” joke better.)
“You see the problem, huh?” the System asked.
“We have slipped.” Mister Moogi could hardly believe any of his eyes. “We are now no longer rated as the second-most prestigious shop in the Hotel Andromeda, but—oh, agony!—the third. What is worse”— he rescanned the posting, cheek flaps aquiver—”it says that all paying-and-potential customers are quite welcome to… to…” He was powerless to go on.
“To bring the kiddies,” the System finished for him. “Yup, no surer way to blow your cachet. Shoot, if they can bring their younglings along, how exclusive can we be?”
It blinked away the shineout and replaced it with a projection of a lank-limbed Terran youth in grubby slim-fits leaning against the wall and whistling. When next the System spoke, the holo moved its lips in perfect synchronicity. “It was that last marketing blitz what done the deed, compadre. You are hoist, like the fella says, by or with your own petard.”
Mister Moogi moaned. It was true, too true for even the slickest advertising campaign to expunge from the record, even if they did guarantee to rub out any witnesses. Too many paying-and-potential customers had seen it happen. Too many slopdroids had been needed to suck up all the blood.
“But it was Bingemass!” Mister Moogi whined at the plastic ovoid. “The heaviest shopping season we’ve got! Why, there are at least five major gift-giving Terran holidays alone that take place within those ten days, and if you add Qui Nook’s Skinshed the Cantyrean Feast of the Second First-born, the Anniversary of Pelmuddle’s Ride—”
“Not a good time to try expanding your shop,” the System said.
“Yes, it was!” Mister Moogi protested. “You even said it was. Every single one of those holidays is marked by the exchange of presents! Splendel’s is second to none when it comes to providing our paying-and-potential customers with the finest in merchandise, gift suggestions, and on-site ethico-psych counseling for dealing with residual post-purchase guilt. You told me that if I doubled my floor space in the middle of Bingemass, I’d quadruple my business!”
“Could be I did,” the System allowed. A thin red smokewand appeared between the Terran holo’s fingers. The image raised it to its lips and drew a long pull from it until pastel pink curls of smoke trickled out its ears. “Only I know for a documented fact that I didn’t tell you to double the floor space by hiring a board certified assassin to send your Dangvim neighbors a box full of gnashcats.”
Abruptly, the holo disappeared as the System jerked back into Mech, reciting: “Gnashcat: Any one of several species of felinoid carnivore native to Sheldrake IV. Unretractable razor-sharp claws as long or longer than the paws and double rows of constantly self-replacing fangs make the gnashcat one of the galaxy’s most efficient killing machines. Although no larger than the common Terran house cat, this creature exhibits a startling level of brainless ferocity and homicidal mania when it encounters any being outside its own species.”
“That’s just what the assassin told me.” Mister Moogi said bitterly. “A killing machine.”
The Terran holo was back, this time with a sleazy grin creasing its face. “Too bad it wasn’t an eating machine.”
“How was I to know that gnashcats can’t eat off-worlders?” Mister Moogi rubbed primary and secondary foreclaws together in a piteous manner. “How was I to know they’d die from devouring Dangvims? How was I to know that gnashcats are an endangered species, protected by a body of transgalactic law thicker than this entire hotel?”
The holo stiffened, a silvery sheen freezing its features until it was completely transformed into a parody of a humanoid servo. Its mouth opened and closed with no distinct lip articulation as it rattled off, “It is the decision of this Merchants’ Tribunal that the accused. Mister Moogi of Splendel’s, be disciplined as follows:
“One: For failing to run a proper and complete check on the references of his hired assassin, he must close shop on Ujit’s Other Tuesday and do community service. However, in view of the fact that he personally killed and ate the offending assassin for misrepresentation, this penalty is waived.
“Two: For causing the death of his neighboring merchant-brothers, he shall be compelled to offer all Dangvim merchandise at twenty percent off from this time forward. This injunction does not apply to any Dangvim merchandise currently in stock or subsequently obtained through recognized smuggling channels.
“Three: For being instrumental in the death by indigestion of eight rare and endangered gnashcats who might otherwise have fetched an excellent price on the open gag-and-novelty-gift market, he shall be made to take into his shop as an apprentice merchant the orphaned Dangvim youngling known as Podvex. This association is to remain in effect until the youngling shows himself able to conquer his own shop, or expresses a desire to change employment, or dies a natural death.”
“If I personally killed and ate him, that would be natural for me.” Mister Moogi said, four out of six eyes full of hope.
“The Merchants’ Tribunal thought of that.” The System unfroze the holo, which was grinning more nastily than ever. “Maybe you don’t remember the size of the fine they said they’d slap you with if your apprentice becomes your appetizer.”
“It’s not fair.” Mister Moogi sagged inside his carapace, although it would take a keen trained eye to notice the difference from his normal posture. “That Dangvim poisons every-thing he touches! Oh, why wasn’t he in the shop with his parents where he belonged when the gnashcats arrived?”
“At your hearing, he testified that he was out making a personal apology to a dissatisfied customer. He did not specify the underlying reason at the hearing, but I theorize that his offense must have been a whopper if it required in-person penitence.”
“You see?” Mister Moogi’s limbs waved wildly. “Even then he was incompetent. To say nothing of unfaithful! Causes his parents to be shamed before the paying-and-potential, then lacks the common decency to die with them! It’s all that Dangvim laxness, that’s what it is. Faugh! What can you expect from mammals? I’m surprised they kept their shop going for as long as they did. How they ever managed to conquer a merchanting territory in the first place I’ll never—”
A shrill VEEeeeeeeEEEEM scraped the last merciful micrometer of insulation off Mister Moogi’s nerves. “Uh-oh,” said the System, its holo fading out. “Here comes trouble.” They both knew without touching a Demigalac dictionary that for Splendel’s, trouble was spelled with a capital Podvex.
Mister Moogi chirruped a command that opened his office door without altering any of the interior comfort specs. The portal slipped aside, as ordered, to reveal the young Dangvim on the figurative doorstep, his paws still wrapped far too tightly ar
ound the Summon/Cummin control. Mister Moogi took a deep breath on all vents and told himself not to scream.
“Podvex,” he said, “what is that in your paw?”
“Unr… It’s… it’s a presence announcer. Mister Moogisir.”
“Correction: It is a Summon/Cummin, the best little narrow-spectrum presence announcer on the market. Just one touch and the genetic code of any casual visitor is forever enshrined in the device’s memory. On all subsequent visits, our most valued customers are immediately recognized and directed to my personal attention, while deadbeats and just-browsers are politely steered into the shop’s no-man’s-land, where even the servos seldom tread—where even you are not an option—and are there left to steep until they’ve had enough and take their nonbusiness elsewhere.”
“Really?” Podvex’s huge, round eyes seemed to get huger and rounder with awe, physical possibility be damned. He gazed with fresh respect at the ruined control box in his paws. “Gosh,” he breathed in purest, lowest Underg’lac.
“What is more,” said Mister Moogi, suppressing a series of shudders that threatened to shake his carapace to chitinous shrapnel, “Summon/Cummin can even turn ‘tronic bloodhound to hunt down really good—albeit lapsed—customers and bay special sale announcements beneath their System windows until they came back to Splendel’s once more. It is high tech, high cost, high maintenance, and high return. Sometimes it can sense a caller’s identity without being touched, simply by an analysis of the cloud of shed skin-cells or other bio-detritus surrounding his person. You did not need to touch it at all. You certainly did not need to tear it out of the wall and strangle it, Podvex.”
Podvex looked up into Mister Moogi’s face and conjured up a sickly smile. “Urnr, I wasn’t sure if it rang or not when I touched it, so I sort of…” He tried another angle. “I thought maybe it could use a tune-up so I wanted to detach it from the wall because you always say these repair-droids cost a claw and an antenna just to look at the problem, and…” He gave up. “Is this… is this coming out of my pay, too?”
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