“Just stay out of traffic and you’ll be okay,” she said. The Moogles walked by twirling around on one giant foot, and if they had a way of seeing what was underneath them, she didn’t know what it was. The dossier on the Moogles suggested the arms, which seemed to be constantly in motion, might provide some kind of optical or motion-sensory input, but nobody really knew. All that the Signatory Systems knew was that Moog, the planet the Moogles lived on, was a commercial dead zone. And a heavy one, at that.
Xi Boötes A was a G-type star more similar in size, color, and age to Earth’s sun than any they had visited recently. Of course, it wasn’t the only star in its system, and its main inhabited planet was a dense iron ball twice the size of the Earth. Landing on Moog had caused Bridget’s weight to more than double instantly: they probably wouldn’t be putting in any spas for the weight-conscious here. And breast implants wouldn’t be too popular either. They would not be founding New California on Moog.
All the members of Surge Three wore their high-gravity HardSHEL armor units, with armatures specially designed to provide movement — and inside, exerting pressure to keep blood flowing back upward. Nonetheless, they couldn’t stay here long, on account of Jamie. The others were in peak physical condition, but Jamie was already nursing a sore leg from a fall on Leel, and she didn’t take him for a workout nut. He had also had the usual sea-legs difficulties getting around.
“I feel like I’m drunk,” Jamie said, staggering on the yellow stone surface.
“You were. Now you’re just heavy. Let the servos do their job,” she said. “When you fall down, you’re falling almost three times as fast.”
“Every day’s a thrill ride,” Jamie said, resigned.
“You’ll be an old hand soon,” she said. “Like me.”
“Dear God, don’t let that happen.”
Bridget grinned. After their conversation in the kitchen, she’d come to appreciate his situation a little better — if not to approve of his actions. Jamie wasn’t whining nearly as much after the sales coup on Leel — it really was a big deal — and it seemed to Bridget as if Jamie was finally beginning to understand just how diverse and exotic life in the galaxy was.
From a desktop, she thought, it was probably easy to imagine that the creatures of the universe were just like you. Dealing solely with names and numbers, you never imagined just how unfamiliar your trading partners really looked. The Sheoruk, the Baghu, the Leelites — these had to tell Jamie that the universe was a lot more complicated than he imagined.
That great variety, however, also made the bipedal Xylanx — who were shaped like humans — of definite interest. But they were of interest for different reasons than they would have been even half a century earlier.
Intelligent life was everywhere in the cosmos, humanity had found: that Big Question had been answered, but good. As the possible configurations that sentience took grew and grew, though, Earth’s travelers noted a disappointing lack of locations that humans could live in without space suits or mechanical assistance.
Earthlings could live and work, of course, quite comfortably in those other places: the revolutionary Supralight Hygienic Environment Layer, the innermost skin of a HardSHEL or SoftSHEL suit, made that possible. But many humans longed for a place where they could kick back outside, lounging beneath a tree in a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, protected by an ozone layer at twenty-four degrees Celsius. And while potential Earthlike planets had been catalogued by researchers since the late twentieth century, no actual Terra-twins had been found. Shafted by the final frontier, real estate brokers everywhere had gone into therapy.
So the Xylanx were of interest on their own, but also because of what their existence suggested. Weighing eighty kilos, having long limbs, and owning opposable thumbs made sense only on a certain kind of planet. The Xylanx seemed a little more massive than the baseline human, but their general shape was still close enough. Did they breathe air in those helmets? What was their sun like? Did they have more than one home?
Moog’s sun was nice and familiar, but no humans would be moving here. And it didn’t seem as if there was any trading to do, either. The Moogles were allegedly intelligent, and their stomping grounds had great mineral riches. But they protected the ground just by walking around.
“Porriman trader approaching,” Hiro Welligan said from his watch point. “Hold on to your wallet.”
Jamie and Bridget turned to see a tracked vehicle crawling slowly toward them, giving the herd of tromping Moogles a wide berth.
Natives of Porrima were chubby lumps. About the same height as humans, Porrimans propelled themselves along, sluglike, on a sheen of internally generated ooze. With their four arms, minds for deal making, and home conveniently located near several other Signatory Systems worlds, the Porrimans had inveigled a position for themselves as the premier warehouse keepers for the stellar neighborhood. Granted, they seldom got shipments right, but that only attracted foreign advisers by the ’boxload there to work as observers — while spending money in Porriman establishments. Bridget thought it was a pretty good scheme.
The trader’s vehicle trundled up. Bridget could see clearly the Porriman’s pudgy body mechanically — and, she imagined, uncomfortably — suspended inside his vehicle. Robotic arms hung limply outside the carriage. The Porriman’s dark eyes stared at them. “More victims here, I see,” a jolly but sarcastic male voice said over the airwaves.
Jamie did a double take at the words.
“Victims?” Bridget asked.
“To try the impossible — selling to the Moogles.” The Porriman gestured back with one of his hands toward the milling field of giants. “Humans, aren’t you?” he said. “Well, Frocky of Porrima welcomes you. Even as he’s about to leave!”
“Now come on!” Jamie said, looking back at the team’s knowglobe. “That’s Phil Silvers!”
Bridget blinked. “Who?”
“Television comic from the twentieth century,” Jamie said.
“Oh, that again,” she said, dismissively. “You have a strange hobby.” She understood nostalgia: remembering things you were exposed to in your youth is good for your synapses. Nostalgia for things before you were born, on the other hand, made no sense to her.
Jamie shook his head. “I’m just imagining how much licensing money the knowglobe people must pay out. Personality rights are descendible, you know. That started with Elvis.”
“Who…?” Bridget shook her head. “Never mind. You’ll just tell me.”
Frocky wheeled toward Jamie. “What’s the matter, my friend? You sound troubled. As if trust is missing from our relationship. Tragic, given how long we’ve known each other. Why, it must be two minutes we’ve known each other. You’re breaking poor Frocky’s circulatory organs.”
“Well, it’s not you,” Jamie said. “Or maybe it is. Our knowglobe has selected for your voice a human who was famous for portraying a con artist.”
“Portraying?” Frocky said, sounding mildly interested. “Was he one?”
“I don’t think so. But listening to you, I can’t take you seriously.”
“Well, it’s a two-way street, young man — to use an expression which is completely meaningless to me. Because my knowglobe, back at the ship that you’ve so thoughtfully double-parked, has chosen a communications profile for you that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
Jamie’s interest was piqued. “Who is it?”
“Weren’t you listening? It’s my worst enemy. Supervisor Vangwoo. The mere sound of your voice makes me want to crawl back into the egg.”
Bridget smiled. “You were saying about the Moogles?”
Frocky waved his arms. “Hopeless! Completely hopeless. No one can sell to these things. Better people have tried. I just have. It’s useless to ask. They’re living on a field we know holds wealth beyond measure — and if you poke a stick into the ground, they stomp you to death! You can’t trade them anything, because there’s nothing they want!”
“Maybe it’s
all in your approach,” Jamie said. “Have you tried teddy bears?”
“A comedian! Funny, this kid is.” Frocky shook his head. “Well, you can do the floor show without me, because I give up. Good old Frocky is through!” With that, he started rolling toward his spacecraft.
Bridget looked back at the Moogles. There were hundreds of them, wandering aimlessly like cattle — only cows that gesticulated constantly with ten hands. “I think we’ll give it a try anyway, Frocky.”
“‘A try,’ she says!” Frocky waved with four arms to the brilliant blue sky. “Well, young lady, I’m sure you will do wonderfully well in my absence. Just don’t come to Frocky after you’ve been flattened. I can’t stand the sight of anything that’s been inside anyone else, regardless of species or creed!”
“Wait,” Bridget said. “You said you talked with them. We don’t have a language file—”
“You wouldn’t.” Frocky stopped and looked them over. “Sure,” he said. “Why not. I’ve got nothing to lose. It’s a sign language. They’re always moving their arms, right? Astonishingly, it means something. I’ve spent a month learning it. Here.” He touched a control inside his compartment. “I’m transmitting it to you now. I hope you enjoy all the time it’ll take for you to learn it!”
At that, he rumbled off to his ship.
“It takes all kinds,” Bridget said.
“Then we’re in luck, because it looks like the universe has them all,” Jamie replied. “And it keeps sending them all to me.”
* * *
Simply walking out onto the yellow plain had been a challenge for Jamie. He’d fallen twice and would have broken his arms if it weren’t for the power-assist his outfit was providing. This time, he’d been given a high-grav HardSHEL suit like the other troops had, although without the armament. Stupid regulation.
But the internal armature had come in handy on another front. As always, Jamie marveled at what Trovatelli was able to accomplish. She hadn’t wanted to come along, as she was still absorbed in her studies of the data on the Xylanx. But even from Indispensable, she’d been able to help Jamie accomplish something in hours that had taken Frocky a month.
Under the watchful eyes of Bridget and her companions, Jamie stood before a single Moogle that had wandered away from its herd.
“Hello,” the trader said. As he did so, the servos caused his arms to flap up and down.
“You’re a seagull,” Welligan said, laughing.
“I’m talking here,” Jamie replied — and that statement, too, caused his arms to gesticulate wildly.
It got the Moogle’s attention. It twirled backward on one leg and then returned to its original position.
Jamie read the readout projected inside his helmet. His cameras, interfacing with the language database Frocky had provided, interpreted the response as an acknowledgment. Nothing more.
I feel like a marionette playing charades, Jamie thought.
“I have much to sell,” Jamie said. He started to point back to the ship, where the fabricator had been rolled out, but his arms began moving in a wild sequence of gestures that sent the briefcase tumbling from his hand.
He felt like a football referee on a bender. Now all his bodyguards were chuckling. Bridget picked up the briefcase and held it for him. “Try again,” she said, smiling.
“I will trade for mining rights,” Jamie said, trying to use as few words as possible so as to protect his poor arms. “We will not damage your land. You must tell me what you want.”
As soon as Jamie’s arms finished their sequence of moves, the Moogle raised its hands in the air and thundered off to the west, running away from him and toward the herd, far away.
“What the hell?” Jamie asked. He regretted he’d opened his mouth. “Interface off,” he snarled.
Bridget stared into the distance. “Something rattled that guy,” she said. It had reached its companions in an amazingly short time for something so massive.
Jamie heard a chime in his ear. It was Trovatelli calling in. “You guys had better wait,” she said, her voice sounding urgent.
“What is it?” Jamie asked. He stared at the Moogles. Something was going on out there, half a kilometer away.
“We forgot something with the sign language,” she said. “The Porrimans’ language required four arms.”
“Yeah,” Bridget said. “But we allotted for that. We built a vocab using just the words that required his, er, top arms.”
“That’s what I thought,” Trovatelli said. “But I was just rechecking — and I think we misread ‘dominant arm’ for ‘top arm.’”
Bridget’s eyes narrowed. “You mean Frocky was left-handed?”
“Bottom-handed,” the Q/A said.
Jamie saw the huge herd beginning to move. “So what did I just tell them? I asked what they wanted!”
“No,” Trovatelli said. “You told them you wanted to eat their young!”
Bridget took a step back. “That’s…no good.” The herd was moving now, stampeding on all threes toward them.
The entire team turned, struggling to run in the high gravity.
“Well, I think we know what they want now,” Jamie yelled, huffing. “They want to stomp us to death!”
To be continued in the next episode. Your book will be automatically updated with Episode 5 and you can continue reading from this page.
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