* * *
No sooner had I limped off the Greyhound shuttle than a pair of suits snagged me. They escorted my weary bones through the corridors of the good ship Mead to a crowded foyer next to an airlock. One of the suits pushed me into a reception line. Had I known, I would have worn shoes.
A petite woman popped into line beside me. Her fingers fussed with the rumpled lay of my jacket. “I’m glad you’ve finally arrived. What timing! This will be the first time the aliens have left their ship.”
“First contact?” I asked, still groggy from a week of flying to this nowhere.
“Second contact. They ate the two anthropologists we sent into their ship.”
“I prefer sociologists myself, but I have a good recipe for anthros. It all depends on the sauce.”
It irritated me how she casually dumbed down her jargon for my benefit. Anthropologists studied people, xenopologists studied aliens. Sadder still, she did not even notice that she had insulted my intelligence.
“Don’t say anything,” she repeated twice. “Just follow my lead and your common sense.” She scurried to the front of the line, where she began conferring with a mob of suits and uniforms.
I grinned and did a few knee bends to loosen up after the cramped flight up to the Mead. They hadn’t told me why I was here, but their check was generous. Having wrestled the circuit through the Dyb’ worlds, I understood how to entertain aliens. Perhaps they wanted me to arrange an exhibition for this new species.
The airlock hissed open. The alien resembled a barrel with far too many limbs. A tailor would be driven to commit suicide trying to fit its four uneven arms. A tank on its back pumped a vile concoction through clear tubes stuck here and there into skin the consistency of bark. Its stench brought tears to my eyes. It shuffled by the uniforms, suits, and the petite woman without deigning to stop. It shambled directly to me, then paused, looking me over. It rocked back on four legs, its legion of kneecaps crackling like frying bacon.
I realized that the critter planned to slam that lump of a head into my chin. My instincts took over. I butted my forehead into that featureless lump first. We both staggered.
Whereupon, it turned and shambled back to the airlock.
I grinned. Having gotten through the ritual uneaten, I assumed the good guys had won.
* * *
“What breed of moron are you?” shouted the General.
“I may not be Aristotle, but I know who he was,” I replied as an MP shoved me into a chair at the conference table.
“What’s the moron prattling about?”
“It’s Greek to me.”
I straightened in my chair, craning to see who had made that last crack. It was the petite woman from the reception line, now wearing a badge declaring herself the Chief Xenopologist aboard the Mead. The simple fact that someone had a sense of humor in this tomb cheered me.
“Moron!” growled the General. His chest full of medals tinkled whenever he moved. General Windchime. He probably wore them to bed.
“Moron,” agreed the Senator in the same tone he deployed for the hostile media.
“Couldn’t you find anyone more appropriate?”
Clyde Keller, my sponsor, cringed from the General. A toupee slipped off his sweating brow to reveal an array of sensory implants. Maybe he saw something in the infrared that I missed. Poor Clyde took a trembling breath, his face aglow, verging on a blown fuse or a major clot.
“There was no time, sir. He was the only one I could locate who passed the immunological screening.” Clyde’s voice didn’t crack, it shattered.
“Why did you strike the Ambassador?” General Windchime waved a fist in my direction as he sputtered.
“It was not the Ambassador. It was the Messiah’s personal aide.” The Xeno waved a disk at the General.
“Lookit,” I said. “I may talk slow, but I’m not stupid. Everybody told me to follow my instincts—so I did.”
“Idiot!” Coffee mugs hopped when the General’s fist slammed against the table.
“I’m impressed with your mastery of synonyms. Look, it was the alien who initiated the head-butt. I reacted. If A, then B. His exoskeleton spooked me at first, but now I know my head is just as hard.” I touched the bandage a medico had sprayed on my gashed forehead. “What a great noise it made! Did anyone record it? I want a copy for my sounds-effects library.”
“Their brains aren’t located in the skull feature. He didn’t hurt the Pek.” The Xeno tossed her disk on the table. “Baxter and Sloane were experts, and they got butchered during the contact phase. We must try a different approach, or abandon this expedition.”
Shaking his head, a lanky bloke cleared his throat. Given his rail-thin, crushed posture, I pegged him as a Spacer. “If we abandon them, they die. Their vessel is falling apart. It was designed for a useful life of three, maybe four centuries. If Intelligence is correct, it has been flying for more than eight hundred years.”
“What exactly are you doing for them?” I asked the Spacer to annoy General Windchime. I promised myself I would annoy these yerps at every opportunity.
The Spacer flashed a dazzling smile. “We’ve attached work blisters to their hull. I modify our hardware to replace equipment they’ve allowed to deteriorate. I scrounge parts off every ship that stops here. We’re becoming a regular tourist attraction, you know. Their life support is a monster—they require eleven arsenic compounds in their atmosphere.”
The General’s thousand-watt glower shut him up. The Spacer stared at his feet, which drew my attention to them. Despite their high shine, his boots were disintegrating. Hairy feet protruded from holes. His jumpsuit was threadbare and patched.
“Why have we brought Citizen Muscle here on board?” asked a burly man wearing a GE corporate uniform. “I could have used the money to buy a new compressor assembly. You must increase my department’s budget! I—”
“Another Tech heard from,” observed the Senator. Acolytes laughed in unison.
“Why is he here?” bellowed Windchime, bayoneting in my direction with a gnarled forefinger.
I responded with a more eloquent digit.
The Xeno stood. She spoke slowly, as if weighing each word. “We believe Citizen Scorpio can provide us with insights from his vocation, which has evolved into a religious aspect of Pek life. I wanted—”
“Moron,” chorused a cast of dozens. The General launched into sound bites worthy of a championship grudge match.
I pulled out my chip plate and caught Clyde’s eye. He produced his.
I CAN DO A FUNDRAISER FOR THE PEK, I typed, my pinkie on the broadcast button. LAST YEAR, I PUT TOGETHER A CARD FOR MARS FOREST, INC., AND FILLED STANTON ARENA. WE RAISED $700K FOR THEM. TALK TO ME LATER.
Clyde nodded as my message appeared on his chipper. He smiled like he was going to cry before he slipped into the corridor.
“This is a waste of my time. Carver, see that—” the General waved in my direction, shooing me “—our new moron gets the standard briefing in his cabin. Ito, have you finished your analysis of the radiation emission? Is it a leak or an exhaust by-product? Matrice, I expect a full report within the hour.”
“Matarice,” screamed the Xeno with a whisper. “My name is Matarice.”
* * *
Clyde had promised me “comparable” quarters. Comparable to what? A jail cell? Most jails I had experienced were far larger, far more homey. I felt blessed to have a toilet, doubly blessed to have a ventilation slot. Between thumps, an occasional whiff of putative fresh air graced my cabin.
I plugged into the comm port and dumped messages for my various enterprises into the ship’s computer for later broadcast. My paper factory on Nok was of particular concern, since the union was suing me for “unfair labor practices” after I gave 80 percent of my stock to the workers.
“You can’t win, boyo. Next time, bribe the union prez and be done with it!”
It was fortunate that the Mead expedition had approached me in October. Over-the-hill
for steady wrestling, I made a point of vacationing and healing during my birth month. However, I was responsible for assembling a Thanksgiving card for the Liu Arena on Nok. The Barbarian continued to hang tough, insisting on points of the gate before he would sign a contract to wrestle.
“Yeah, like I make money giving away points,” I grumbled while typing my fingers raw. “You get a few shots on prime time and you think you’re a superstar!”
Stretching atop my spartan cot, I opened an MRE carton. I couldn’t tell whether dinner was chocolate cake or steak. The Mead’s galley had incinerated after a tech stripped its sensors for the alien ship. The crew now dined on surplus military field rations.
Did General Windchime dine on this muck? Sure, sell me a Martian ice cap, too!
The screen on my wall beeped, announcing the start of my briefing. They spared no expense, showing me the Monitor episode about the Pek and their odyssey. Nothing like being educated by a children’s news program—fortunately, it was my favorite show.
The Peks’ generation ship swept into Sol System at .6 lightspeed; a pitted, gray cylinder twenty klicks in length. Probes were dispatched from the Pek ship. The atmosphere of Mars was too tenuous, Earth was too wet, and Venus fitted even an alien’s definition of hell. Before using the sun as a slingshot, however, their sensory matrix captured three hours of 1957 television—a soap opera, the local news from Cincinnati, the CBS evening news, and a wrestling fest from Texas.
Their third Messiah spent the rest of his/her (Don’t you hate omnisexual aliens? Would impregnating yourself be incest?) life studying those programs. The Peks had fled their sin-choked world for a paradise promised by their original Messiah. They’d scoured twenty-one stellar systems without discovering Eden—then they tuned into championship wrestling.
Poor critters.
A few years shy of two centuries later, the Mead stumbled onto the Pek gen ship while flying to study primitives on Quince III. The ailing generation ship was snailing along at a third of lightspeed, gradually slowing and falling apart in the largest void in this end of the galaxy. The Mead followed it cautiously until they confirmed that the Pek vessel no longer possessed external sensors. They attached surveillance modules to its hull and began collecting data.
This process was aided by the fact that the Peks were broadcasting TV programming of their own creation. Around the clock, a cornucopia of Pek history, religion, and culture filled the airwaves, formatted as news, soaps, and wrestling. Performance offerings to their supreme deity.
I nodded out during the cultural stuff. My eyes cracked open during a static-filled Pek soap opera. The aliens added snow to their pristine pictures in order to imitate those holy signals of yore—from back in 1957. Barrel-shaped, quad-limbed actors lumbered across the screen. Eight joints per limb made their arms more expressive than their whistling voices. Tall gray ones waved and whistled about infidelity. Short blue ones pushed thin orange ones who whined about their drinking problems. What the plot lacked in sense, the actors compensated for with boundless energy.
I resumed my slumber.
* * *
My day began with the usual aches, not unusual for someone who had broken 106 bones in his career. My contract specified room service. The personnel on the other end of the phone line pretended not to understand. Clyde Keller refused to accept my call; his secretary claimed he had flown back to Mars.
Checking my e-mail, I found that the Barbarian had caved, but wanted a five-grand signing bonus. The check from the Sol Trade Commission to pay for my transportation to the middle of nowhere had cleared. However, my paycheck from Mead University Research, Inc., had bounced.
Typical! Folks always tried to take advantage of me.
The Xeno arrived with a bucket of Cajun kelp sticks. “I am Citizen Tiffany Matarice. Citizen Scorpio, may I call you Romney?”
“Sure thing, Tiff,” I replied, scarfing the kelp. “Your check bounced.”
“That is not important. You passed muster. Romney, the Peks have requested that you wrestle for them!”
“Unless every one of the eighteen clauses in my contract is fulfilled, I’m not moving from this cabin. This isn’t professional.”
“There, uh”—she paused to stare at the scars around my neck where Bubba Brochoski cut my throat with a broken bottle during a Texas brawl match—“there must be a mix-up at the bank.”
I looked at her for a long moment. “Folks assume I’m stupid because I’m big. Folks enjoy taking advantage of stupid people. It makes them feel better about their own miserable lives. I want my money, Tiff. But, before you snacker off, tell me how to score a decent breakfast on this scow.”
Matarice was a gray gamine—skin and hair dyed to match her gunfighter’s eyes. She moved with too much spring under the ship’s half-standard grav, reinforcing the gamine illusion. Silence was her game. She stood and stared holes through me.
Gray lady, stormy glare. I forgot the rest of the poem.
Sitting on my cot, I prepared for a long game. I blanked my mind, no mean task considering the dearth of breakfast aboard the Mead. Eventually, I nodded off.
Shortly after I woke, an orderly delivered a small box. It was filled with Martian bucks and Taylor dollars, Nok hundred-dollar coins and finger-sized Dyb’ cash ingots, a sealed plasticard of antique rubles, and credit-card vouchers. Took me half an hour with a currency exchange chart to tally my pelf.
I decided not to charge my usual bad-check fee. My generous nature has ever been my bane.
* * *
Despite my nose filters, the alien’s smell reminded me of the Avondale riots of my youth. Burning tires, summer sweat, and charred flesh—the stench followed the Pek like a smog bank. I sidled, then dropped for a knee-walk, spooking my barrel-shaped opponent to the other side of the ring. I winked at the camera, strutting mime I’d mastered from Charlie Chaplin films.
During my study of Pek wrestling technique, I’d noticed that they didn’t play to the camera and the future revenue the home audience represented. Daresay they never suffered nightmares about ratings.
The yerp threw one of its triangular feet at me. I had been waiting for that move. Ducking beneath the blow, I balanced its second thigh atop my shoulder and commenced circle dancing. The sucker had three other feet and would kick my teeth in the instant it regained its balance.
A nifty thing about an opponent with eight joints per limb was the opportunity to grab the captive foot and beat the Pek with it. Gorgeous George and Goshawk Geoffrey could only have dreamt of such sterling schtick. After the audience grew bored of me flailing that lump with its own foot, I backstepped and drop-kicked the sucker over the top rope.
Time for a bow and a kiss toward the camera.
I prayed that my VCR aboard the Mead was recording true. There wasn’t a vid promoter in Sol System who wouldn’t fork over $100K for a copy of this match. The word “auction” echoed through my brain’s greed center.
I grinned at the ref until it turned away from me. Whereupon, I drop-kicked the ref over the ropes, too. The crowd’s uproar made the racket in Deimos Square Gardens sound like a kitten’s fart. My victory prance kept them whistling. As my opponent came to its feet, I threw myself through the ropes and splattered the yerp to the metal deck.
Mass times velocity equaled ratings cubed.
Rolling off my foe, I “accidentally” swept the ref’s legs from beneath it. The aliens shared their joy by throwing green, squishy fruit at me. Stealing the Masked Manchurian’s trademark, I backflipped from the apron into the center of the ring.
I loved low grav!
In lieu of the tobacco smoke the aliens had seen filling the wrestling arena in their intercepted vid, the Pek burnt compost for their sacred ambiance. It was perfume compared to the aliens’ reek. Using the reduced grav, I sprang into the overhead lights, hung, then made a double flip down to the ring. My staggering impact was less than perfect, but the Peks went wild.
Performance offerings. I danced for the camer
a. Yeah, I could double my appearance fee after this vid hit the networks. Triple!
I made the mistake of allowing the Pek back into the ring. It came at me like a missile, bayoneting its non-head into my belly. My spleen leapt into my sinus cavity. Its mitts raked my face, trying to rip the filters from my nose.
Trying to kill me!
Breaking free, I collapsed into a corner. Rocketing in again, the Pek bounced off my size-sixteen boot. Scooping the yerp up, I staggered to lift it as my vertebrae compressed. The throw was sheer luck. I couldn’t have aimed the squirming lump for a direct hit on the referee. The deck rang like a bell.
“Give me some real competition!” I screamed at camera three in my stilted Pek. Xeno Tiff had rehearsed me a hundred times, getting the phrase whistle-perfect. My throat filter felt funny. Had it dislodged? I began hacking worse than an escapee from a TB colony.
The taste of arsenic reminded me of the eighth grade when the Freemont Razors tried to drown me in a rusty toilet before home room.
The ref rolled under the ropes. My foe followed. It rolled, I rocked. I hopped up and down on the alien until its shell cracked, the yerp screaming like a puppy in a garbage crusher. (Another trick the Razors taught me. Poor Rover. I could never bear to own another pet.)
The bell rang. Pulling me off my opponent, the ref wrapped a belt around my waist. It was silver, the same color as Pek blood.
The ex-champ’s tag-team partner raced down the aisle and hopped into the ring. Pure stereotype. I swept its legs out from under it and kicked it until my toes ached. Backing off, I waited for the Pek to rise before scoop-slamming the fool over the top and onto the unforgiving metal deck.
The studio audience went ape, showering me with something ooshy that resembled fish guts. My next cough sprayed blood.
* * *
They ambushed me as soon as I boarded the Mead. The General and his staff got in my face. Dizzy and puny, I slumped against the bulkhead, hacking and cursing. They stayed in my face. I blew out my nasal filters. Green snot earned me some breathing space.
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