by E. M. Foner
“Is that a baby that you grew inside your body?” the green-haired Gem asked her in awe.
“Yes,” Kelly replied proudly. “This is my baby boy, Samuel.”
“A boy?” the clone asked, her eyes going wide. She exchanged looks with her sisters, and they all crowded around Kelly, staring.
“Would you like to hold him?” Kelly asked reflexively, surprising even herself. The green-haired Gem looked even more frightened by this suggestion than she had at the mention of the Stryx, but a younger clone with a close-shaved head held out her hands.
“I will not drop him,” the young woman declared confidently. “I served you dinner at the embassy once, when Military Gem attacked Propaganda Gem with the cork projectile.”
“You must be Waitress Gem,” Kelly declared. The ambassador felt like she had discovered an old friend among the dissidents, even though they had barely exchanged a word on the prior occasion. She gingerly handed her son over to the clone, who cradled him like an expert.
“I worked in the cloning facility crèche when I was a girl,” Waitress Gem said, a faraway look coming over her face as she rocked Sammy in her arms. “But they said I was too attached to the babies and spoiled them, so they reassigned me to being a waitress.”
In the silence that followed, Kelly noticed that all of the Gem had closed their eyes and were swaying along with Waitress Gem, their arms cradling imaginary babies, as if they were sharing the experience telepathically. Samuel, who at eighteen months of age was already showing Dorothy’s love of being at the center of attention, gurgled happily. Kelly found herself unwilling to interrupt, and several long minutes ticked by before the young clone opened her eyes and returned the baby.
“We trust you,” Waitress Gem said simply. “Please tell us how we can live like the others.”
“I don’t understand,” Kelly said, deeply moved by the experience, but still fundamentally puzzled about what the Free Gem wanted from her. “You want me to teach you how to live like alien species?”
“We know that we have been bred in ignorance, educated to fill our role in the Gem Empire and nothing more,” the spokesclone told her. “We cannot trust the history we were taught, the media we were allowed, not even the stories passed down from who knows what source. But since fleeing the Empire, my sisters and I have watched the humans, we have worked for the humans, and we’ve decided that we can trust you.”
“Don’t be too quick to trust humans,” Kelly cautioned her. “We come in all types, just like the Gem.” Oops, she thought. That won’t make sense in translation to a clone, even if their leader was fluent, but apparently the clone understood the gist of her meaning.
“We don’t trust all humans,” the leader replied. “We trust you. We want your help.”
“That could be a problem,” Kelly replied honestly. “You know that I am the EarthCent ambassador and my job is to protect human interests. Besides, I’ve never led a revolution or anything like that.”
The Free Gem spokeswomen frowned in concentration, rerunning Kelly’s words in her head. Finally she recited, “Revolt, revolted, revolting, revolutionary, revolution. Ah. You believe we should make a revolution!”
Before the EarthCent ambassador could correct the green-haired clone, she had relayed the message to her sisters. The women burst into a very different song than the one they had been singing earlier, drowning out Kelly’s protest that she’d been misunderstood.
To arms, brave sisters
With sharp and pointy things
March always forward
All hearts beating as one
To victory or death!
“Please, don’t do anything hasty,” Kelly begged the clones when they completed the martial song. She later learned it was a version of the Gem anthem that dated back to their civil war, though the tune was the Free Gem’s take on La Marseillaise, borrowed from the popular Grenouthian documentary about human democracy. It immediately struck her that ‘hasty’ was unlikely to be in the Gem’s limited English vocabulary, so she tried again, forcing herself to speak slowly. “Please, don’t do anything now. You must take time to think about this.”
“I understand,” the spokesclone replied to Kelly’s relief. “We must make careful plans before we strike. One does not make a revolution by singing.”
“That’s not, I mean, you must think about the future,” Kelly insisted. The last thing she wanted was to be the trigger for a civil war, but how could she express it? She settled on quoting Camus. “There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.”
“Thank you,” the clone replied, causing Kelly to wonder how much of her message was understood. “We have sent messengers to the Farlings, who are known to hoard genetic samples from biologicals. For a price, they will help us reestablish the long dormant genetic lines of our species, even the males. But first we must vanquish the elites who have misguided the Gem Empire for a thousand lifetimes.”
“Wait,” Kelly pleaded, as she tried to formulate an unambiguous statement to salvage the situation. The EarthCent ambassador realized that she was growing afraid to say anything for fear of another defective translation, and decided that the best strategy was to buy time. “We must meet again, when I can bring the translation machine.”
The spokesclone of the Free Gem leadership group communed silently with her sisters for a moment before replying.
“Agreed. We will contact you with a time after conferring with our people. Our technical experts believe this deck to be fully shielded from Gem Internal Security, but the longer you are here, the greater the risk you might be discovered. Please accept a small token of our appreciation which we have prepared for you.”
Kelly grimaced as she tried to figure out how to explain that as the EarthCent ambassador, she would be endangering her neutrality if she accepted a gift from the revolutionaries. Before she could finish arranging an easy-to-understand version in her head, the youngest clone of the group stepped forward and presented the ambassador with a gift bag from the Chocolate Emporium. On second thought, Kelly decided that the risk of offending the Free Gem by rejecting a heart-felt present outweighed the other political and ethical considerations.
“Thank you,” she said, accepting the bag. It took all of her willpower not to look inside until she and Samuel were alone in the tube lift. Before returning to the embassy with its staff of chocoholics, she removed a bar of her favorite dark chocolate and stashed it under her son’s blanket.
Four
“Joe!” Kelly cried, pointing towards the open door of the ice harvester and simultaneously knocking Paul’s coffee into his lap. “I think somebody just threw a knife at us!”
Paul leapt to his feet and tried to pull off his pants even as he started for the door, resulting in a spectacular sprawl. Joe was slower out of his chair, but he was the closest one to the ramp when another knife arced by the opening and disappeared. This time it was followed by a second, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, until it seemed like there was a continuous arc of cutlery in the air. The ex-mercenary pulled up short and broke into a grin.
“Whatever they’re doing with those knives, they aren’t throwing them at us,” Joe said with a laugh. “I suspect we have an overeager contestant on our hands here.”
“But the tryouts aren’t supposed to start for another forty-five minutes,” Kelly pointed out. “Sorry about the coffee, Paul.”
The embarrassed young man was back on his feet by this point, though he had decided that discretion was the better part of valor and carefully stepped out of his pants, rather than risking a burn. There was a light red patch on his upper legs where the coffee had soaked through the fabric, so he wadded them up and stalked off in the direction of the laundry room.
“Hey, get those knives away from the ship. I’ve got kids up here,” Joe called out the door good-naturedly.
“My apologies,” a woman’s voice called back. “I haven’t been in a space with such a high ceiling in so long that I just got
carried away.”
“Tell her to keep her pants on for another forty-five minutes,” Kelly instructed Joe, and then both of them broke out laughing at the unintentional joke.
“I don’t think that’s funny at all,” Aisha objected stoutly, coming to the defense of her husband. She rose and approached the opening. “You’re early, the tryouts start at 8:00 AM,” she called from a safe distance.
“Sorry again,” the voice replied. “I’ll just be practicing.” The glittering pattern of knives moved slowly away from the door, and Joe and Aisha returned to the breakfast table.
“I wish Beowulf was still here,” Dorothy said. “He would have told us somebody was coming.”
“Beowulf has gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds,” Kelly comforted her daughter. “I’ll bet he’s looking down right now and laughing at us.”
“More likely he’s laughing at Paul,” Joe observed.
“Beowulf is probably a puppy back on whatever world Huravian hounds come from,” Aisha told her young sister-in-law, choosing to ignore the second quip at her husband’s expense.
“Is that true?” Dorothy asked, looking from Aisha to her mother. “I want him to come back, but I don’t want to make him leave the Happy Hunting Grounds.” Her brows furrowed in concentration and she declared, “It’s a real problem.”
“According to the mercenary who brought him into our group, Huravian hounds do reincarnate. But Beowulf was a genetically-engineered cross with an Earth mastiff, so I’m not sure which afterlife rule applies,” Joe mused.
“If he did come back as a puppy, how will he find us?” Dorothy asked urgently. “Do dogs have money to buy space tickets?”
“Dogs have a super sense of smell,” Joe reassured her. “And Beowulf is a galaxy-class mooch. I’m sure he could hitch a ride with somebody.”
“If Beowulf has come back from the Happy Hunting Grounds, he’s probably making some other little girl happy right now,” Kelly told her daughter. She was beginning to wish the adults had taken the time to get all of their stories straight when Beowulf had passed on.
“I’m going to ask Dring,” the ten-year-old decided. Since his return, the friendly shape-shifter and frequent guest had replaced Blythe as the ultimate authority on grown-up stuff in Dorothy’s world.
“Finish your breakfast first,” Joe instructed his daughter. He knew from experience that once her mind was made up to do something, she tended to drop everything else to pursue her goal.
“Where’s Metoo?” Paul asked, coming back into the room in a new pair of pants. “This is the first day all week he’s not here for breakfast.”
“It’s Saturday,” Dorothy explained, in a tone that let Paul know he was a very silly person for having to ask. “We don’t have school today. But I told him to come see the Carnival people. He’s never been to one before.”
“Neither have I,” Jeeves announced, floating through the door. “Are you people aware that there’s a young woman out there throwing knives at innocent Stryx as they float by?”
“Don’t let her hit Metoo!” Dorothy ordered the robot.
“I won’t,” Jeeves reassured her. “I suggested she move away from the direct path between the entrance to Mac’s Bones and your home.”
“When did you get back from the auction circuit?” Paul asked his friend.
“Late last night, I didn’t want to wake you,” Jeeves replied. “I have a message for Joe, actually. I ran into your old commander, Pyun Woojin, on Echo Station. We auctioned off some antique firearms for him at a very good price. He’s retired from the mercenaries and seemed to be at loose ends, so I suggested you might have work for him. It turned out he was heading this way already and he’ll be dropping by sometime in the next couple days.”
“What kind of job could you have for an ex-mercenary officer?” Aisha asked Joe.
Everybody at the table looked strangely at the acting junior consul, including her husband, before Dorothy took pity on her and explained. “You know. As a S - P - Y.”
“Oh, right,” Aisha mumbled. No matter how many times it had been spelled out for her, even with a camp full of trainees in Mac’s Bones three weeks out of four, she just couldn’t quite make the existence of EarthCent Intelligence part of her thought process. Her willful ignorance had gone from cute to embarrassing, especially since Blythe and Clive had rapidly grown the intelligence agency to the point that its office location was better known than the embassy’s.
“So, are the two of you going to be screening the contestants yourselves, or will the other committee members help you?” Kelly asked.
“All five of us are supposed to be here, that way we won’t have any ties if we have to vote,” Paul said. “I don’t have a clue how many candidates are going to show up, but we plastered the Shuk and the Little Apple with display ads, and then Stanley got InstaSitter to pay for some notification postings on the corridor displays. If any of the humans on the station haven’t heard about Carnival yet, they must be in stasis.”
“Which brings me to the second reason for my visit,” Jeeves said. “Gryph and Libby have explained that it wouldn’t be fair for me to interfere in the election on the ambassador’s behalf. I’m sorry, Kelly.”
“You’re forgiven,” Kelly declared, unable to hide her relief. Libby had been as good as her word and warned off her offspring from rigging the election in EarthCent’s favor.
“Was it because of the rent remission thing?” Paul asked. “Could you get Kelly elected queen and then have Gryph give the cycle of free rent to the runner up?”
“I suggested that myself,” Jeeves admitted. “From the point of view of the elder Stryx, the cycle of free rent is just something to get everybody involved in the elections. How’s your election campaign going otherwise?”
“You were the campaign,” Paul informed Jeeves sourly.
“I, for one, am glad you aren’t going to interfere, Jeeves,” Aisha told her husband’s friend. “I really worry that everybody is missing what’s important here.”
“Winning?” Jeeves asked.
Aisha moaned in exaggerated fashion and buried her head in her arms, getting milk from her breakfast cereal on her nose in the process.
“This is shaping up to be a good day,” Kelly said cheerfully. “After I feed Sammy, I intend to get a front row seat at the tryouts, right on my own patio.”
The murmur of voices and snatches of voice exercises and lip rolls was getting harder to ignore, as early arrivals to the trials greeted each other and launched into their pre-contest intimidation routines.
“I better head out and start taking down names so we don’t get jammed up,” Paul said. He filched Aisha’s personal tab from the table as he rose. “Are you going to hang out and watch the trials, Jeeves?”
“Perhaps later,” the Stryx replied. “I understand that Dring is back on the station and I want to discuss a few things with him.”
“I’ll be out in a second, Paul,” Joe said as the family breakfast began breaking up. “Are you coming, princess?”
“I’m going with Uncle Jeeves to see Uncle Dring,” Dorothy replied, hastily finishing off her juice. “When Metoo gets here, tell him where we are.”
“Right,” Joe answered. He went around the table to kiss Kelly on top of the head, and then trooped down the ramp after Paul.
“Just your name and the event you’re trying out for!” Paul was shouting to make himself heard over the background noise of the rapidly growing crowd. “You don’t have to push for a place in line. We’re not going to run off before everybody gets their chance.”
“That’s only because we live here,” Joe commented in an undertone, surveying the small mob. He didn’t want to interrupt Paul, who was repeating each registrant’s information to Aisha’s tab for recording, but the group didn’t look particularly promising. Maybe that’s why they showed up early, he thought to himself. It’s the only way they can hope to be noticed.
“Hey, Joe,” somebody called out from off to his
side. Joe turned to see Stanley approaching. “Not a bad turnout for starters. Are the other judges here yet?”
“Uh, that’s Hadad from the Shuk and somebody from the Little Apple?” Joe asked uncertainly.
“Never mind. Here’s Peter now,” Stanley said, as a gap suddenly appeared in the press of contestants and the senior Hadad walked through. “And the top of that ship’s mast bobbing in our direction must mean that Ian’s here.”
“Hello, Joe. Stanley,” the Shuk vendor greeted them. “Next time you’re stuck in a crowd, try saying, ‘I’m one of the judges.’ I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea.”
“Morning,” Joe replied, but his eyes were on the tall shaft of wood that swayed back and forth rather alarmingly as it approached. It was upside-down for a mast, with the wider circumference at the top. Suddenly, it leaned too far to one side for the bearer to bring it back to the vertical, and it fell to the deck with an audible crash. “I hope nobody was standing under that.”
A minute later, the mob gapped open again, and a red-faced, sweaty judge appeared.
“I forgot it was so heavy,” Ian said, still panting for breath. “I got it upright against the bulkhead and thought I’d carry it over for practice, but I’m beginning to regret the whole thing.”
“Was that a caber?” Joe asked in surprise. “How did you fit it in the lift tube capsule?”
“Corner-to-corner,” the Scotsman replied proudly. “Checked the measurements with the station librarian before I came, of course. I put it down away from the crowd there, sorry about the dent. I didn’t want to risk some fool getting too close while I was practicing my run-up.” He broke off suddenly. “Hey, you recognized a caber!”
“Clan MacAlister,” Joe replied with a crooked smile. “But we spell it like the English and I don’t wear skirts.”
“Maybe you can toss against me for the trial,” Ian suggested eagerly. “You’re a big man, and I wouldn’t want everybody thinking I put the event in for myself. Just takes a little practice to get accustomed to the balance.”