Book Night on Union Station

by E. M. Foner

  “How can you talk about yourselves like that?” Blythe demanded.

  “I’m fourth in my family’s line of succession and my sisters already have daughters so it won’t come up in my marriage negotiations,” Affie replied with a shrug.

  “What would the family who paid a fortune to marry their son to a queen do when they find out they got the younger twin?” Tinka asked.

  “Assassination would the obvious first choice, but of course, the older twin is going to be ready for that. Like I said, it hasn’t happened in so long that it only creeps up in bad dramas.”

  “Okay. Other than teeth, school subjects and order-of-birth, are there any other tests?” Blythe asked.

  “Ballroom dancing, but nobody ever fails that one so it’s hardly worth mentioning.”

  “So what’s a common plot for a Vergallian romance, Affie?” Dorothy asked.

  “A lot of them start with a princess being kidnapped, but the bestsellers lately revolve around poor girls on tech ban worlds falling in love with fugitives hiding from the law. Personally, if I have to read one more book about a woodcutter’s daughter splinting broken bones for a handsome young royal who’s escaped from a dungeon, I’m going to switch to Human books.”

  “So they don’t go through all the tests and family meetings in those stories,” Blythe pressed.

  “They do if they want to get married,” Affie said. “The kidnappings and dungeon escapes are just plot devices to introduce mismatched characters who would never have been put together by their families. The negotiations start after the parties return to their respective places in society, and they’re really complicated if the man is being sought by the crown.”

  “Don’t they ever go to bed together first?”

  “Not listening,” Marilla sang, clamping her hands over her ears.

  “Come on, Mom, you’re embarrassing me,” Vivian protested.

  “But we’re talking about romance novels.”

  “Nobody ever goes to bed together in novels Samuel’s mom gives me.”

  “Those are romantic novels, not romance novels. There’s a difference. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  “I hate to admit it, but I actually read a pretty good Horten romance in translation,” Tinka said. “It was titled, All the Shades of the Rainbow, or something like that.”

  “Have you read that one?” Blythe asked the Horten girl.

  “My mom told me not to,” Marilla said, glancing around as if she expected the formidable customs agent’s daughter to appear in the restaurant. “But she didn’t make me promise, so I did. Like five times.”

  “Do you think it will work for us?”

  “Maybe, if you were willing to leave the main characters as Hortens and not change them into Humans. It would be too hard to deal with all of the color changes she goes through otherwise.”

  “I hadn’t really thought about that,” Blythe said. “The recent translations of our books to alien languages that I’m aware of all changed the species of the characters. Actually, it would solve a lot of problems if we could keep the original characters and settings. Rather than substituting for the untranslatable cultural stuff, we could use that space to explain some of the differences.”

  “Like an omniscient narrator,” the Sharf girl suggested.

  “Like Jeeves!” Dorothy exclaimed. “You could add a Stryx character to all of the books as a neutral observer who explains things.”

  “Did Jeeves put you up to this in return for something?” Blythe asked sternly.

  “I swear,” the ambassador’s daughter said. “We’ve never even discussed books.” Then her face darkened and her expression changed. “Except for when he was at our place yesterday and commented on Vanity Fair being missing from my mom’s bookshelf, like he has all the locations memorized. Jeeves claims that the omniscient narrator in that novel could have been copied from his backup.”

  “I have a question,” Flazint said. “Would Humans really be interested in reading romances with alien characters? For me, reading a novel about aliens doing, you know, would be like reading about a science experiment.”

  “Lots of humans already read alien romances,” Dorothy informed her. “That woman my mom brought home from Earth who eloped with my old boyfriend was a huge fan.”

  “Those were written by authors back on Earth,” Blythe pointed out. “And the female lead is usually a human who gets kidnapped by aliens or captured by pirates.”

  “You mean like Humans and Vergallians, right?” the Sharf girl asked. “Not like species with different parts.”

  “Can we please talk about something else?” Marilla pleaded as the waiter arrived with a heavily laden cart. “I don’t think I’ll be able to eat if you guys go any further down that path.”

  “What kind of guy are you interested in?” Affie teased the student.

  “A musician,” the Horten girl replied seriously. “A few years older than me, but not like a father-figure or anything. My parents are talking about finding me somebody on the station so we can get to know each other for ten or twenty years, and my cousins back on the colony ship are pushing for somebody with diplomatic connections.”

  “Mornich!” Dorothy almost shouted. She whipped out her tab and started looking for a picture of the Horten ambassador’s son from when his band played the last fashion party in Mac’s Bones. “Have I got a boy for you.”

  Eleven

  “I promised the Grenouthians that I wouldn’t cry on camera today,” Aisha said with a sniff, after greeting Shaina and Daniel when they arrived on the set of ‘Let’s Make Friends’ with Mike and his little sister. “It’s going to be hard to see your son go.”

  “But I’m at your house all the time to play with Fenna,” Mike countered with his eight-year-old logic. “Who are all these little kids?”

  “I’m trying something new this year. The reason I asked the departing cast members to come early today is so you could meet your replacements and help them settle in. Don’t you think that would have made it easier for you when you started, Mike?”

  “Dunno. Who’s replacing me?”

  “Could you come over here, Beth?” Aisha beckoned to a nervous six-year-old who was standing near the edge of the stage, clutching her father’s hand.

  “But she’s a girl,” Mike objected. “How can a girl replace me?”

  “You took a girl’s spot when you came on the cast,” Shaina reminded her son. She turned to her husband for support and noticed that he was staring into space with his eyes tracking back and forth. “Turn off your heads-up display, Daniel. I won’t have you working while you’re watching your son’s final appearance on the show.”

  “But it hasn’t started yet,” the associate ambassador protested. The obvious resemblance between the father’s and son’s speech patterns caused both women to laugh.

  “You’re famous,” the little girl stated, coming up to Mike and staring at him with eyes as large as saucers. “I watch you every day.”

  “What’s your name again?” the boy asked in a long-suffering tone.

  “Beth. And you’re Mikey. Were you scared when you started on the show?”

  “Naw, I’m not afraid of anything. Besides, I had Spinner with me and he’s really tough.”

  “I’m scared,” Beth confessed. “Some of the aliens are so big. What if they don’t like me?”

  “You can always run away,” Mike suggested. “Aisha says that we’re all motionally the same age. That means they won’t be able to catch you.”

  “Emotionally the same age,” Aisha corrected him, with a stress on the ‘E’. “Libby helps me find alien children who are at the same stage of emotional development as the youngest human on the new cast.”

  “What does that mean? They aren’t all really the same age as me?”

  “The older the species, the longer the children take to mature. The Verlock girl on the show with you is probably twice your age in human years.”

  “I always though
t Krolyohne was just really smart,” Mike complained. “Now it turns out that she’s old.”

  “I don’t understand,” Beth chimed in nervously. “You said I’d be playing with other six-year-olds.”

  “The alien children are the same as a six-year-old where it matters,” Aisha reassured her. “It’s just that we all count differently.”

  “Rip-off,” Mike muttered under his breath, and then he pointed to some children on the other side of the stage. “Wow, what’s wrong with the little kid next to Orsilla?”

  Aisha looked over and saw that the Horten newcomer was continually strobing through the color spectrum as his emotions got the better of him. “Excuse me,” she said, and hurried over to calm the boy.

  “Yellow means that they’re nervous,” Mike informed Beth. “Brown is happy, and I forget the rest.”

  “Do any of the other children change color?” she asked.

  “Frunge hair vines change color sometimes but it’s just different greens,” the boy explained, warming to his role as a mentor. “Listen. You have to watch out for the Drazen’s tentacle because it can swing around if he gets excited. Hey, Spinner. Who’s that?”

  Mike’s young Stryx friend floated to a halt in front of the children, another little robot teetering unsteadily in the air at his side.

  “I call her ‘Tippy’ because she’s a little unbalanced when she’s nervous,” Spinner explained. “She hasn’t been around biologicals much because her parent just sent her to the station. She’s going to join the experimental school when we go back after our vacation.”

  “You’re starting at Libby’s school?” Beth asked the robot.

  “Yes,” squeaked the little Stryx, and then continued in a rush of words. “Are you a student too? Will you be my friend? Libby promised to find me a Human friend, but I like you.”

  Shaina gave Daniel a push in the direction of Beth’s father. “You should explain to him what to expect when your child has a Stryx friend,” she told him.

  “I seem to remember Libby doing all of that when we signed Mike up for her school,” Daniel replied, but he went over and introduced himself to the man, who looked even more nervous than his daughter.

  “Hey, Mikey,” a Drazen boy called out as he approached, dragging a smaller alien along with his tentacle. “I’m Pluck, and this is Kork,” he introduced himself and his captive to Beth. Then he released the younger Drazen and instructed him, “Stick with the Human. They’re pretty cool and they never make you feel dumb.”

  “Pluck, Mikey,” a Frunge boy greeted them, escorting his own charge over to meet the group, and then addressing himself to the new cast members. “I’m Vzar and this is Tazos. She’s really shy.”

  “Hi, Tazos,” Tippy chirped. “Will you be my friend too?”

  “You’re all going to be friends, that’s the whole point,” Pluck said impatiently. “Come on guys, we’ve got to get ready for the show. Orsilla said that Aisha is going to let us do Storytellers without her.”

  “Where’s Clume?” Mike asked, looking around the set for the towering Dollnick child.

  “He told me yesterday that for once he’s going to stay in bed to the last minute,” Vzar said. “And I saw a Vergallian kid wandering around looking lost, so I think the next cast rotation is going without a Dollnick.”

  The small throng on set sorted itself out, with the current cast members and the host heading backstage to prepare. Daniel and Aisha took their daughter to sit next to Fenna, who was in the front row of the seating section with her baby brother on her lap.

  “Who are you saving the empty seat for?” Shaina asked Aisha’s daughter.

  “Mommy. She said she was going to do something different today with Storytellers.”

  The public doors opened and the rest of the studio audience began filing in, taking all of the spaces that weren’t already filled by family and friends of the new and outgoing cast members. A Dollnick teenager dressed in bright clothes began warming up the audience with a juggling act. He started with four pins in each hand, rapidly launching them towards the high ceiling one after another until he had two interwoven cascades totaling sixteen pins flying through the air.

  “It’s kind of scary, isn’t it,” Fenna said, hunching protectively over her baby brother, but not taking her eyes off of the performer.

  “When did Aisha add warm-up entertainment?” Daniel asked his wife.

  “A few months ago,” Shaina said. “You’ve been too busy to notice. The Grenouthians are getting ready to launch an all-species variety show with a human host, and they’re testing acts on the ‘Let’s Make Friends’ audience since it’s almost the same demographic. If it wasn’t for the fact that Aisha keeps the show on human time, they’d probably schedule it right after her to piggyback on the ratings.”

  A bell chimed and the juggler caught all of his pins, spinning around and collecting the last one behind his back. The audience gave him an enthusiastic round of applause, and the Grenouthian assistant director hopped up on the stage.

  “Okay, everybody. You all know that it’s the last day for the kids in this cast, so try to pay attention to the ‘applause’ sign for a change. I mean it,” he added, after the audience erupted in derisive sounds from a dozen different species. “And Aisha is going to do something different after the commercial break, so don’t make a lot of noise when she joins the audience or you’ll mess up our timing.”

  “You mean your commercial timing,” somebody called out.

  “Hey!” the bunny said, scanning the audience for the heckler. “You think your ticket price pays for this show? The money we collect at the door barely covers the catering.”

  “I didn’t know the audience paid to get in,” Shaina whispered to Daniel.

  “Well, if you like coming so much, we’ll just have to put Princess here on the show when she’s old enough so you can keep getting in for free,” Daniel said, tickling his little daughter under the chin.

  Another chime sounded and the lighting in the seating sections dimmed, while Aisha and the cast appeared on stage and quickly found their marks. The assistant director hurriedly hopped down and started counting them in. When he reached zero, the status lights on all of the immersive cameras flashed on.

  “Final shows are always a mix of joy and sorrow,” Aisha began, and a tear escaped her right eye to roll down her cheek. She turned gracefully towards the children while surreptitiously wiping the tear away and smiled sadly. “Tonight we say goodbye to Orsilla, Spinner, Pluck, Vzar, Krolyohne, Mike and—”

  There was the sound of heavy-footed running and a Dollnick boy with his shirt buttons done wrong thundered onto the stage.

  “—and Clume,” Aisha concluded. “I want to take a moment to tell everybody out there watching how much we appreciate you voting on what activities to include in the final show, and that we’ve worked up a little surprise for you as well. But first, I’m sure you all want to know what the children are planning to do next, so let’s hear from them in their own words. Krolyohne?”

  “School,” the Verlock girl replied.

  “And after school?” Aisha prompted.

  “I don’t think school ever stops. Does it?”

  “I’m not sure how the Verlock system works,” the host admitted. “As long as it makes you happy.”

  “It’s school,” Krolyohne repeated.

  “How about you, Pluck?”

  “I’m going to be a drummer, and a ship captain, and a stakeholder in a really big consortium,” the Drazen boy replied eagerly.

  “It sounds like you have very ambitious plans. Orsilla?”

  “School. Then the Open University. Then marriage, I guess.”

  “That sounds nice. Are you looking forward to having your own family?”

  “In forty or fifty years, maybe.”

  “What about you, Vzar?”

  “I’ve already been chosen for a new Frunge show about young metallurgists in training.”

  “So you’re planning on a car
eer in show business,” Aisha said with a smile.

  “Or smelting.”

  “Clume?” Aisha queried the Dollnick, who had finally recovered his breath.

  “School, but I’m going to start as an apprentice shipwright after class,” he replied.

  “What does that mean?” Mike asked.

  “You do what the master tells you so you don’t get hit,” the large boy explained.

  “And what are you doing after the show, Mike?” Aisha followed up quickly, unsure of whether or not Clume was joking about the master/apprentice relationship and not wanting to risk probing for details.

  “We’re all going for ice cream. You know that.”

  “I meant, what are your plans for the future?”

  “Ice cream,” Mike replied stubbornly.

  “Spinner?” Aisha asked, turning to the little Stryx.

  “I can’t eat ice cream, but I’ll go to keep you company.”

  “Your future. What plans do you have when you stop coming to the studio next week?”

  “I’m not stopping. I promised Tippy to come with her until she gets comfortable. Will I have to buy tickets?”

  “No, I’m sure we can arrange something,” Aisha said, ignoring the shaking head of the assistant director. “But what do you plan to do after that?”

  “I can stay in Libby’s school and be friends with Mike and Fenna for a few more years, but then I have to start traveling,” the young Stryx said seriously. “My parent expects me to build a science ship or a station one day.”

  “You better not leave,” Mike muttered in a threatening tone.

  “We’re going to take a quick commercial break, and then we’ll be back for Storytellers. Viewers have less than a minute to suggest an opening line or vote on the current choices.”

  The moment the light on the front immersive camera blinked out, a distraught Dollnick rushed onto the stage and began redoing the buttons on Clume’s shirt.

  “What’s the opening line for Storytellers going to be?” Aisha called over to the assistant director.

  “Once upon a time,” the bunny shot back facetiously.

  “I know that. I meant the next part.”