Pandora’s Crew

by Gorg Huff

  The girl fetched the cook. “John, come see what we can do, will you?”

  The cook came out of the kitchen. “John Gabriel,” he said, extending his hand to shake. “What can I do for you?”

  After some discussion of the flavors that Checkgok liked and didn’t like, the cook returned to his kitchen and started preparing foods. Parthians had different taste buds that responded to different chemical signatures. Salt, sweet, sour, and bitter weren’t in their palate, at least not the same as they would be in a human. Starch was a flavor to them and so were several things that made no sense to a human palate. After a few dishes, John said that there was something in jalapeños that worked on them like sugar worked on people and, on the other hand, sugar tasted to them something like bitter flavor to humans. “A little is fine, but not much. Have you tried coffee?”

  “Yes. I like it best if it is brewed hot for a longer time than most humans like. But it doesn’t act as a stimulant. If anything, it tends to put me to sleep.”

  “So, what if we try adding the jalapeños to the coffee?” John asked.

  Danny shuddered at the thought, but looked over at Checkgok. “What do you think?”

  Checkgok’s mouth-hand scrunched up toward its body. “I do not think the two flavors would go well together,” it said. “I suspect the coffee would overwhelm the jalapeños.”

  The girl piped up with a question. “What does it mean when you scrunch up your, ah, mouth like that?”

  “Don’t interrupt, girl, and don’t ask impertinent questions,” John said. “Don’t take offense, folks. The girl’s space happy and it’s my fault. All the stories I’ve told her of traveling the spaceways.”

  “Are you a spacer?” Danny asked.

  “That I am, Skipper,” John said. “I have ratings in ship’s cook and hydroponics. And I’ve been teaching Jenny.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Nothing so official as that.” John shrugged. “She’s a stray from the station disaster a couple of years back.”

  “Station disaster?”

  “Someone got a bit frisky with an asteroid and an orbital station got trashed. They had some warning and got almost everyone off the station, but that just meant that they were thirty thousand people with no place to go. They put them up on the planet, but they aren’t citizens of planet Bonks and lack the protection of Bonks citizenship. Planetside work turned out to be a bit difficult to get. Between being used to an orbital habitat and the fact that most of the available work was already taken by planetary citizens, there are a lot of strays.

  “Anyway, Jenny’s folks didn’t get off the station and she was living in one of the camps. When she showed up at the restaurant I was cooking at then . . .” John’s voice trailed off.

  “You’re a spacer. What were you doing groundside?”

  “I was afraid I was going space happy. I started having nightmares about the enviro going. So I took a break on the planet and just never made it back past this station. Only reason I took this job was because Jenny wanted off Bonks.”

  John Gabriel was an older man with short black hair starting to show a little salt in the pepper, and lines around his eyes. There was a tattoo peeking out from below his short sleeve. It was a ship with the wings done in luminescent ink. But Danny couldn’t see enough of it to be sure what type of ship. Absent genetic engineering, Danny would have guessed his age at sixty, but he was probably twice that. Jenny seemed to be pretty devoted to the old guy.

  Checkgok looked, turned one eye to the cook and the other to the girl. “Is she old enough to breed?”

  “What?”

  “I assumed you adopted her into your clan so that you would have a female breeder. But from the tapes I’ve seen, she seems quite young. Wouldn’t you have been better off adopting an older female?”

  “I didn’t need a breeder of any sort. I took the girl in ‘cause she needed a place to stay.”

  “Now I must apologize, John,” Danny said. “Checkgok doesn’t understand the customs of humans. This is its first trip away from Parthia.

  “Humans make our clans in a different way than your people do,” Danny told Checkgok. “We often adopt children without concerning ourselves with the benefit to the clan.”

  “Why?”

  “For decency’s sake,” said John.

  “Monkeys have little concept of decency,” Checkgok said.

  “Why are you so mad?” Jenny asked.

  The Parthian swiveled both eyestalks to look at her and stopped. “I don’t know. There is no reason for it, but I feel nervous and threatened. I have been feeling that way since a few days after I left the Fly Catcher, but I . . . don’t understand why.”

  “Could be chemical,” John suggested. “Something missing from, or added to, your diet or the air?”

  “It’s possible, but what?”

  “I don’t know, but you folks better figure it out before you head back out into the big dark.”

  “Perhaps you could help us, Spacer. Gabriel, isn’t it?” Checkgok said.

  “Aye. Able Spacer John Gabriel, and Jenny Starchild, my apprentice. I never shipped with a Parthian, but I once shipped with a Cattan as a passenger.”

  Catta was a world of amphibious intelligent creatures who had developed interstellar travel on their own, though not the jump drive. They used slow ships and took upwards of fifty years to get between their home world and their colonies, all two of them. They were highly intelligent, but also highly individualistic. They were famous among humans as the most arrogant and disagreeable race yet discovered. They became friendly even with each other only about three months out of their year. The rest of the time they were solitary. It was said that a Catta could only stand even other Catta when they were in heat.

  “Turns out that if you feed a Catta a certain mix of foods, nuoc mam and chocolate, they get . . . well, not friendly exactly. Just a bit less insulting.”

  “What were you doing with a Catta on board in the first place?” Danny asked.

  “He was going to redesign a power plant on Diskay Station. He was some sort of expert on the production of antimatter.”

  Antimatter was known and used in some very concentrated power plants, though it was considered very dangerous. “That might be worth putting up with one,” Danny acknowledged. “How did you figure out what to feed it? I mean nuoc mam and chocolate don’t go together like peanut butter and jelly.”

  “A bit of trial and error and a bit of questioning. It seems that female Catta secrete a kind of mucus that smells a lot like nuoc mam at that time of the year and there is a plant on their world that has some similarities to chocolate. It’s actually a fair chocolate substitute, and they export it for that. Turns out, putting the two together makes the Catta feel like they are in the presence of a member of their race that is in its female cycle, so it’s on its best behavior. Not that Catta behavior is ever what you could call polite.”

  Danny used one of the features that his family built into him and contacted the Pan. “Can we afford a cook?”

  Pan sent back through station net, “Yes. Checkgok has informed me that Clan Zheck will undertake to pay for reasonable crew as part of its agreement to handle running expenses.”

  “I figured that. I was just wondering if we had the cash on hand.”

  “Yes, Captain, we do.”

  “Would you be interested in a berth, John?” Danny asked.

  “If you have one for Jenny, I would.”

  “We have room for a ship’s girl and the Pan is a good teacher.”

  “The Pan is a good teacher? Your ship has an artificial brain?”

  “Yes,” Danny said, waiting to see how spacer John Gabriel would react. Ship brains weren’t that common and not every spacer was willing to ship out on a vessel that was run by a ship brain.

  “What sort of a ship brain is she?”

  “Custom job, worked up by Congreve Shipping, with extensive mods.”

  John nodded agreement.

 
; And so it was done. There was more discussion and the owner of the station restaurant made noises like he was going to sue. But he had no grounds and knew it.

  “Stock up on anything you can think of, John,” Danny said. “We need to figure out if we can calm Checkgok down a bit.”

  Location: Pandora, in orbit off Station Kiva

  Bonks System, Drake Space

  Standard Date: 03 20 630

  Jenny Starchild’s hand reached for the grabrail automatically as she exited the shuttle into the Pandora proper. She pulled herself along the corridor with her kit floating behind her, following the directions given by the voice. With only a nervous glance back at John, she looked around.

  This was luxury. The lifestyle of a struggling spacer was frightening in the raw wealth it employed from the perspective of an orphaned refugee from the slums of Port Thidis on Bonks. Spacers never went hungry from lack of the money to buy food. They never lacked for a safe and comfortable place to sleep. They had access to holo dramas, games, and entertainment from across the spaceways. Even much of their work was managing robotic servants.

  This was what she’d wanted, and more than she’d thought she’d ever get. Even at ten Jenny knew full well that the universe was a dangerous place, and as she turned the corner into the lounge her busy mind was looking for the catch, the hidden flaw that would snatch it all away again. By the time they went around the corner to the corridor that led to her room, the voice was asking her questions. “I’ll work hard. You won’t be sorry,” Jenny assured Pandora a little desperately.

  “Tell me about your background and education.”

  “After the accident, I went to the school in the refugee camp just north of the port.”

  “And what did you learn there?”

  Jenny explained that Old Earth was a place of great sin and debauchery, and that the true followers of the thirty-seven billion aspects of God had emigrated from there to Bonks and had been rewarded for their hard work and faith by great wealth and higher caste. And Jenny too, in a later life, might find higher caste if she was hardworking and faithful in this one.

  She and Pandora continued to talk, and Jenny told Pandora about the Bonks system.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jenny’s education level was, in Pandora’s opinion, atrocious. Pan wasn’t expecting another Danny Gold, who had been designed to be a superman. In some ways, Danny was that superman. He could learn and comprehend at a tremendous rate. He would put the average Olympic gymnast to shame, if he could be bothered to compete, and could lift upwards of four times his weight without straining. But he rarely bothered to use any of his gifts.

  Jenny Starchild, Pandora learned over the space of a few days, was just the opposite. She wasn’t stupid. Actually, she was on the bright side of average. But Jenny worked. She worked hard at everything and started to worry anytime she didn’t have work to do. Pandora tried to alleviate that nervousness through intensive education, and quickly learned that Jenny was quite interested in the history of spaceflight.

  Meanwhile, after three days, they still hadn’t figured out what to do about Checkgok. They had already offloaded what they planned on selling here, made a partial payment on the loan, and onloaded most of what they had bought. Station fees were eating into their profits.

  Location: Pandora, in orbit off Station Kiva

  Bonks System Drake Space

  Standard Date: 03 22 630

  Checkgok squatted in its usual spot in the ship’s lounge with its mouth-hand switching between the keyboard and a salad of eggs and chopped kesle plants with a garnish of jalapenos when the little female breeder wandered in. It was focused on its work and so ignored her until she spoke.

  “How did you get hired on to Pandora, Checkgok?” Jenny asked.

  Checkgok started to snap at the irritating little monkey but restrained itself with difficulty. It knew intellectually that this was an immature human, and as such was supposed to ask questions of her elders, but it still felt like an intrusion.

  Everything felt like an intrusion, the next thing to an attack, and it had no clan members to support it.

  Checkgok took a breath, centered itself and answered. “I was . . .” It stopped, unsure of how to proceed. It had been . . . ah . . . “I was under the influence of pheromones that were being produced by Captain Gold.”

  “Captain Gold produces pheromones?” Jenny wasn’t sure what pheromones were, but she knew the teachers at the refugee school disapproved of them, along with perfume and strong drink and a host of other things.

  “Well, he did that day,” Checkgok said. “He drank a Parthian Banger. I was never clear why a human would drink such a thing, but the authorities at Concordia Station felt it had intoxicated me.”

  “You were drunk?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  “John says that every once in awhile everyone needs to get a little drunk and blow off a little steam. Maybe you should get drunk again.”

  Again Checkgok felt like snapping at the child, but at its core it was dedicated to its notion of honor. Checkgok had a duty to this ship, and that meant it had a duty to this child, so it tried to explain gently why that was a stupid idea. But it couldn’t. It didn’t have enough information.

  “Wait a moment, Jenny. Pandora, would you connect me to John Gabriel?”

  “Connected.”

  “Spacer Gabriel, Jenny says that you have informed her that everyone needs to get drunk once in awhile to blow off steam. Is that an accurate assessment of your comments and do you think it might apply in my situation?”

  There was a pause, then Spacer Gabriel said, “It certainly sounds like something I’d say, especially if I was a couple of wings to the solar wind.”

  Then another short pause. Monkeys thought slowly.

  “You know, it just might be. When was the last time you got drunk?”

  “It was drunk when it signed on, John,” Jenny said. “On pheromones.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Danny and John were called to the galley, and after a bit more conversation and the inclusion of Pandora in the discussion, Pandora, John and Checkgok decided that a Banger needed to be tried. Jenny was all for it, because it was partly her idea.

  Danny took more convincing.

  “Do you know what those things do to my stomach?” he asked. “There’s enough pepper in them to light your breath on fire.”

  “That is not the issue and you know it,” Pandora said.

  Danny looked, at that moment, like a little boy who had just been told he had to kiss his Aunt Hattie, Jenny thought, and found herself smiling.

  “It isn’t a truly sexual act, Danny,” Pandora pointed out.

  “Actually, it is fairly close to a sexual act if I understand human sexuality correctly,” Checkgok said, not sounding happy.

  “See? Even Checkgok knows this is creepy.”

  “That is not what I said,” Checkgok pointed out. “You feel that way simply because in your species, sex and general support have gotten very confused. Naturally enough. For a species that is made up entirely of breeders, it is perfectly natural that you are all sex obsessed. But this would be analogous to grooming among your primates.”

  Jenny was watching the whole thing, curious and a little confused, until John insisted she go study and leave the adults to talk.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Danny looked around after Jenny was gone. “Okay,” he said, not liking the way this was going but knowing they had to do something about Checkgok’s mood. “Let’s get down to it.”

  “For my people, the need to be around breeders is important,” Checkgok admitted, with all the willingness that a maiden aunt might have when admitting that she had the hots for a teenage heart throb.

  “So what I would be doing is faking that role. And there is no way you can say that’s not twisted as all get out.”

  Danny’s designers had, as much as anything else, designed him to breed productively. The genetic and prenatal triggers for male homose
xuality were well known. Danny’s whole line’s chemistry had been adjusted to prevent it. Danny liked girls, and had endurance and a high sperm count, but was uncomfortable around males in sexual situations. In the process of tweaking and socialization, they had left him rather narrow in his tastes. He knew it was a problem, but both his genetics and his environment had left him, if not a prude, at least a little squeamish. He honestly didn’t care what others did, but he really, really, didn’t want to be involved.

  “It is no more sexual than wearing cologne,” Pandora insisted.

  “Sure, but . . .” Danny stopped. He didn’t want to tell Checkgok that he didn’t want to turn it on. But he didn’t want to reject the Parthian, not in the state it was in. “Do we even have the makings of a Parthian Banger?”

  “Yes, most of them. And the rest can be acquired on station,” Pandora told him.

  “Oh, all right. But it still seems weird.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  After a quick shuttle trip to the station, John arrived with the makings of a Parthian Banger. And, following the recipe in Pandora’s memory, he prepared the drink and a milk chaser.

  Danny, ostentatiously holding his nose, lifted the wide mouthed glass to his lips and threw the drink back, then quickly downed the milk.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Checkgok wasn’t sure what was going to happen and didn’t like needing this, but that Captain Gold didn’t like it either made Checkgok feel a little better about it. The captain wasn’t being a pervert, as had been the case on the Fly Catcher. Here, on Pandora, it was just the captain taking care of crew. As was his duty.

  The aroma relaxed Checkgok almost immediately. Everyone seemed of his clan, everyone safe and trustworthy.

  The pheromone scent wore off slowly. For the next several days there was an aroma of a Parthian clan in the Pandora. Danny only exuded it for a day or so, but it lingered in the ship’s environment. There was enough data for Pan to tie down the levels needed for optimum function, but it wasn’t something the ship could create.

  Location: Pandora, in orbit off Station Kiva