by Ken Pence
We had our own power and environmental system. The water hookup made us complete because we had used the Eridani disposal system to get rid of waste and produce hydrogen that we collected for the small kitchens in the place. There were two levels – the street levels with the fountains and displays and the conference rooms and small apartments downstairs. It was pretty slick if I do say so myself. The hardest part to make was the multi-species bathrooms. We hired a maintenance company and paid them a lordly sum to keep them fresh and clean. The air matched the room decor and it was lovely inside. Every wall displayed different scenes: snowboarding (in 3D) down the side of a mountain brought cold with winter blasts in warm Earthlike sunshine. The tropics room had different Earth tropical forest backgrounds with lots of moisture in the air. The mountain waterfall from a U.S. national park had the cool mist blowing near the 3D waterfall and birds flying around the cliffs on either side of the falls. The desert views changed to flying around the modern designs of Abu Dhabi architecture. There was a view of riding the bullet train into Shanghai and another down the winding streets of San Francisco on an early morning. We had hand railings for the ones with wildly changing views. There were scenes of surfers in the huge waves off of Hawaii and scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef. My personal favorite was sailing on the waters just off the Pacific Coast with the whales lunging out of the water. We made it so the audience got sprayed a little when the whale’s flukes hit the water. We also had a tour, in Trade, of the lunar trading facility accommodations. It looked antiquated compared to the 3D stuff. The fountains throughout were lovely too. The Ylee had an eye for beauty – we had to give them that. I would have loved to see one of their cities back in its day.
We hired locals – pretty females we were told and gave them extensive training on crowd behavior, manners, presentations, and offered them language training that would have cost them a fortune on their own. We tried to get several of the main species on planet but got training cylinders on the habits and languages on any we could find. The downstairs portion was used after we had given private tours for the big trading consortiums. We would invite them downstairs for the best food and drinks while females or males of their species served them and chatted.
We set up trade delegations for two weeks. We had all the trade delegations bringing by samples of their goods. We might buy them on the spot or order huge quantities and ask them to ship it to us on Earth. We had the means. One group brought us molecular machetes. I kid you not. Those blades were already sharp but when you pressed the button in the handle and it would cut through damn near anything...better than anything from Eridani. The soldiers wanted several gross of them.
A scientist from one of the technical universities came over with a prototype that he wanted to develop. It was a molecular disruptor with a twist he said. He put a bunch of stuff in the long box. It looked like a big microwave and a small one. You put a lot of material in one end and something came out the other. It had a complicated keyboard between. It could definitely use some Earth electronics to make the user interface more friendly. He put some bricks in the left side and closed it. It hummed for a few seconds and he said the bricks had been disintegrated and turned into free hydrogen that he collected underneath. He showed us the big tank underneath that had us thinking that we ought to screen people for bombs and wasn’t this a mite dangerous.
He asked us what we wanted and he said he would make it. We asked what he meant. He twiddled with the dials and it hummed again. He opened the door and there was a little bar of tungsten. He said you had to have the mass of what you wanted in hydrogen and it produced the same mass of other elements. He said he could make up elements as heavy as lead but couldn’t make it more massive yet because he didn’t have enough hydrogen storage capacity. It is impossible I know but I’ve had to eat that word a few times in the past. We asked him what he needed. He said he needed about twenty lamlee worth of materials plus two lamlee to adapt his device to produce things more complex then single elements. We asked him if it had to use hydrogen and he said no. Tod talked with him for hours and we assigned a credit pad to him for his research worth twenty-two lamlee.
We wanted plans and access to his research and would he mind making a educational recording for us before he left. He was so happy after being dismissed as a quack for so long I think he would have sung for us if we asked him to. LeiLei took him out and helped him into the recording booth we had designed. It would take five minutes normal but two hours or more for the locals. We used it a lot.
The fourth week we were there, we opened the pavilion to the public and they came in droves. We hired local vendors to make free hand fans and provide food and water for those in line. It was astonishing. There were oohs-and—ahs or equivalents every time of day. We had to extend hours and we gave out tens of thousands of brochures and catalogs. We trained locals to produce the colored Riz catalogs and they developed a huge industry making catalogs and selling new Riz – we called it NuRiz. They loved it. We made a ton of money from the NuRiz alone. We had to start charging to get in the Pavilion but that just made more come to see it. If you charge, then it must be better than something free. Phillips started buying some of the properties nearby. He set up restaurants and started selling local food with Earth techniques. They were huge hits but it took longer than we expected. He did the same with t-shirts that became the rage for a while with every species wearing a Buy Earth shirt. Some were ridiculous but LeiLei looked damn good in one...being virtuous again. That girl is something.
We had commitments for shipments of metals, wines, minerals, jewels, food, learning cylinders, hand weapons, you name it. There were going to be freighters of the stuff headed for Earth. We had another team go to our dry lakebed and upgrade two other Ylee buildings that we planned to set up in other population centers. They were a little harder but we were getting anxious to head back. Phillips said he liked it here and planned to stay if we let him. He had a lot of Earth knowledge but we didn’t think he would hurt Earth with it. We would still be going from shop to shop if it hadn’t been for him. He had acquired two local humanoid girls that looked like Norse Valkyrie except for the high ridge down their spine and forehead. Every other way they were fine and those gals liked powerful males. Phillips looked content and was going to help run the Pavilion and make sure the trade agreements were completed on this end. He said this was more fun and he had too many enemies on Earth – I was one of them – so be it.
We also set up a consulate. That took weeks too because we had to buy land and negotiate with the locals before they comprehended the meaning. It was another month before the twenty-two soldiers that decided to stay were in formation on the Earth Embassy grounds. We also left ten civilians. It depleted the complement on both ships but gave us more room for cargo and new hires. We hired some skilled local craftsmen and a Marmut to take back to Earth with us. Fran was particularly pleased and the Marmut liked the art collection we had acquired on 68 Eridani.
Vicvic and LeiLei both announced that they wanted to stay with us. LeiLei and Joel were serious. The species couldn’t interbreed, currently, but they seemed happy. Rett announced he was ready to leave and said he would see us again. We all assembled to see him off and he just got in his little craft he’d been testing without saying a word. Surely, he knew better than that after living with humans for so long. The door opened and Rett got out and came out with a big crate. He gave each of us a little rectangular box and went up to Susan last. He stopped and smiled. God – it looked like a genuine smile but then he stopped and said, “I have been practicing that for a long time and it still makes my face hurt but you meant it as something nice. I understand it means something for you so I practice...Will see you again DoctorSusanKamaSiriluk. I do not wish intimate relations...just saying name...” at which point he went into his ship and we got out as he flew his ship through the field and out of the cargo bay. We opened the boxes a bit later and there was a little rectangular picture viewer that displayed diffe
rent views of Rett on the moon, in his Enclosure lab, drinking grape juice, and working on his ship. It was pretty cool.
We went over to the Queen and they were getting her squared away. Captain Miracle was there to meet us and he gave us a tour of the place. It was so much better. It was really slick. They had even taken an upper lounge and built displays into it like the ceiling and down part of the walls were simulated windows to the outside. We went in and he dimmed the lights slowly, theatrically. He then turned on the enhanced 3D sensor display. It showed the planets and stars around us, and the light glows of ships coming and going. Occasionally you’d see a satellite moving in orbit and ships entering atmosphere. He had the display zoom in until you could see all the ships around us in suborbital flight or in space. He could label them or change their color. It was impressive.
“I have spent hours here just looking at this. This will make us rich. I don’t know any being that would not want this view. We will have a bar here of course and we will get rich. The room improvements you suggested are inspiring. We never considered sleeping rooms more than for sleeping...instead of the luxurious changes Earth suggested. We never considered those improvements.”
Captain Miracle continued, “We have taken your suggestion and offered two, first class–round trip tickets in a sweepstakes. It caused many fights until we increased the available tickets. We have received almost one million entrants from across the planet. Everyone knows about Earth now and wants to go there. Your pavilion was magnificent and I have seen a lot. I think I SHOULD have been born a Marmut. We will leave for Earth in three weeks after we finish our shakedown trials to the fourth planet and back. We are taking a lot of important people and it will help find the inevitable flaws in our planning,” Captain Miracle said.
Andrew said he understood about flaws in planning.
The Captain gave him a small box. It contained a very old training cylinder. “It may not even work any more but it is very old from an ancient history professor at the University here.”
“What’s on it?” Andrew asked.
“I think it is on the Ylee or speculations about the lamlee. This researcher was supposed to have died over a thousand of your years ago and the cylinder was old then. Maybe it will be useful,” he said. “You have done so much for me and the poor beings that were caught up in this slave trade.”
“I just wish we were strong enough to stop all slavery. Maybe we will in the future. Lieutenant Commander Castellno at the embassy has orders to find a small ship and retrofit it to current standards. That will be a way to enforce some things here. Slavery should be against the Exploration Service code but it is still allowed,” Andrew said. “We still have not seen one ES ship near here and this area is supposed to be heavily patrolled.
The Return
The sweepstakes was a massive hit and the winners were like rock stars. They were a newly mated pair of tall humanoids that looked elfish. The Queen was booked for this trip and many wanted reservations for its next trip. Rett had disappeared off the sensors. We have no idea where he is going.
We know of twenty-three trade ships gearing up to come to Earth. We will luckily be able to beat them by weeks because of our more efficient drives. We haven’t heard any more from the scientist we gave the twenty-two lamlee to develop a machine to compose compound materials. We may have been scammed but I think it is just a delay longer than we are accustomed to. The Junior took on three medical personnel and their equipment. They are way ahead of us in most medical fields and we needed the experience instead of just knowledge. Brad is having his own issues with Fran.
Admiral-General Bradley Kyger was sitting back, sipping some Black Jack. The Odin was at 70% strength and everything as going okay but it was going to get a lot more risky when we start making regular runs. We still don’t know how the lamlee work or why they work at all. He was having the shipboard MemDexs on the Odin and Junior compile summaries of what happened. It was going to take all of 11 weeks to get back the 245 lights years to Earth.
Tod and Steve were riding on the Junior for this leg of the trip between waypoints. Andrew was having no luck getting his ancient cylinder to work. They decided to try the duplicator and making a cleaner copy. They tried the copy and it worked after a fashion. Andrew could make sense of some of it. The main thing he got was the fact the lamlee were shaped by thought and would evolve to the optimum for whatever device where they were added. Tod suggested they ought to try adding a lamlee filter/amplifier to their duplicator. They opened their duplicator and put a lamlee into place while concentrating on some way to filter or enhance old cylinder recordings. They then made a copy of the old cylinder again. They then tried it in the teaching machine.
Andrew sat bolt straight. It had worked and it was really surprising. “Okay folks...that worked.” He started to give them a summary, “The Ylee used the lamlee as a generic repair tool or building block to build almost anything they wanted. They could carry a block of lamlee and turn it into anything they wanted with a thought. When they wanted something else, they just had to think about it. They were not machinists. They evolved in water and were copper blooded – like our own, eight legged Earth cephalopods – not iron based blood like mammals. The Ylee had had trouble when they started to run into more and more land based life forms. They had robots that could do work for them and very efficient interstellar travel. They had colonized much of the galaxy before the emergence of many of the land based creatures,” Andrew said.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I just had a thought. The Ylee had robots that worked for them. The robots were built in their image. They were water based. We recovered our lamlee near the edge of dried up bodies of water. Maybe our lamlee are the remains of these robots. They could be anything if we had the ability to make them ourselves. We got our lamlee in piles of about 60 kilograms each. Maybe those lamlee could turn into one of their robots if we added water.”
Tod looked at Steve. “You might have something there. We have access to the tanks where Fran grows algae. Shall we try?”
“Let’s do it,” Steve said.
They collected 60 kg of lamlee that had been recovered at one spot and separated. This batch had come from 68 Eridani. They had a 60 kg bucket of lamlee. They went to a tank and let the bucket sink and fill with water. They waited a minute and nothing happened. They waited a few minutes and filtered off the water. Tod put a bare arm and hand into the lamlee and lowered his hand and bucket as it filled with water. Tod pictured a cephalopod as the water enclosed the lamlee. Nothing happened again. Andrew was stumped. He guessed he had it wrong. Fran walked in about then.
“Is this a wake?” she asked.
“We have a poser,” Tod said. “We can’t figure out why the lamlee don’t activate in water. We have information that says they work well in water,” Tod said.
“What type of water are you using?” Fran asked.
“Huh,“ Tod said elegantly.
“That is pure water. That is an insulator. You need water with impurities. Sea water with salt content?” she said.
“Sea water,” Tod and Andrew said together. “All those bodies of water had a high salt content.”
They had another tank that contained a lot of shellfish for food production on their trip. They drained the lamlee in the bucket, dried them and returned them to the bucket. Andrew lifted the heavy bucket of lamlee to the edge of the tank. He put his hand into the lamlee and concentrated on a cephalopod wearing a translator. He lowered it into the briny solution. There was an immediate reaction. The interior of the bucket turned murky and there was movement under Andrew’s hand. He pulled his hand out and we waited as patiently as we could. The lamlee were doing something. It took several minutes and then we noticed a tentacle coming out of the bucket. Then there were two and then a third arm and mantle appeared next. Eight tentacles and a large red mantle appeared with two large eyes looking up from the pool.
Andrew motioned that he wanted the cephalopod to come to the shallow en
d of the tank and it did so. It turned the same color of the tank and looked exactly like any cephalopod on Earth. He stayed in the shallow end of the tank and I motioned him or her up onto the low platform at the edge of the water. The cephalopod moved onto the low shelf. Its tentacles were still mostly in the water. I took off and handed it my MemDex. It extended a tentacle toward it and took it. Suddenly the tentacle began to dissolve into the back of the MemDex and the shape of the cephalopod began to change into a small humanoid that developed clothing. It looked like it was about 150 centimeters tall – very short for a human but it had a few moments of disorientation and it stabilized as it noticed Tod, Steve, and me.
The humanoid stumbled a bit and then stabilized and moved its arms and head about. The eyes focused and it made some awkward sounds. The childhood was amazingly short. It straightened, looked about and handed the MemDex awkwardly back to Andrew. Andrew put on his MemDex. The small figure turned toward him. “Welcome to our ship. I have many questions I want to ask.” Andrew said.
The humanoid made some sounds, tilted his head and then said, ”What can I do for you? How did you reconstruct me?” It said this in English.
“We recovered your components from another world near a ancient body of water. We are land based creatures and do not know many water based life forms. We learned that our minds can help shape you and I shaped you like creatures on my planet that exist in the water.”