by E. M. Foner
“With crackers,” said a grey-haired woman who neither of them recognized. She took the silver cheese knife from the platter and cut herself a thick chunk of the Limburger, then smeared it on the whole-wheat cracker. “Are you sure you won’t try it?” she asked playfully, extending it to Bill.
“I don’t get paid enough for this,” he said, ducking away. “I should have run as soon as M793qK started explaining the stinky scale all the aliens use.”
“That’s a new one to me,” Harry said. “Where does the Limburger rate?”
“He said it’s a ninety-seven, but the scale goes from sixty-four to a hundred and twenty,” Bill said. “Why can’t the aliens start all of their scales at zero like normal people?”
“This is yummy,” the grey-haired woman said, loading another cracker. “What else do you have?”
Bill couldn’t help grimacing while removing a large piece of prickly fruit from a cooler. “It’s called durian, and it smells so bad that M793qK said even Drazen Foods won’t export it.”
“That doesn’t sound very likely,” Harry said. “The Drazens love strong tastes and odors.”
“They probably didn’t want it in their facility because they worry about the dogs,” Nancy said, coming up to watch the fruit-cutting operation. “I toured the main Drazen Foods factory on Earth, which is practically a city in itself, and they also have a perfume operation with dogs doing the quality control. One of their biggest exports is hot peppers, and the dogs won’t go near that building because their noses are so sensitive.”
“Watch what you’re doing or you’ll cut off a finger,” Harry barked at Bill when the young man attempted to avert his head while cutting open the fruit. “Oh, that is pungent.”
“This is my lucky day,” the grey-haired woman said. “How are you serving it?”
Bill reached back into the cooler and pulled out a large jar of tongue depressors. “I didn’t really know what it goes with, but Flower said that the pulp is creamy, and the Doc gave me these to use as one-time spoons.”
The woman took a tongue depressor, loaded it with the yellowish pulp, and closed her eyes after licking it clean. “It tastes like custard, with a hint of almonds and cream cheese.”
Nancy scooped out a sample with a tongue depressor, flinched at the smell, but took a small taste. “This is lovely,” she said. “I wonder if Flower could grow it?”
“I hope not,” Bill said. “When I asked her if it was really from Earth, she checked our historical records and found that there were news stories about countries banning this fruit from public transportation and hotels because the odor was so offensive.”
A mob of seniors attracted by the smell descended on the table, and five minutes later, the grey-haired woman was complaining, “There wasn’t enough actual fruit. The seeds are enormous, and there’s more rind than pulp.”
“Where would you put it on the stinky scale?” Bill asked, swiping his tab awake and navigating to the feedback form.
“Maybe a hundred and ten?”
“How about the Limburger?”
“Around a hundred.”
“You have Limburger too?” one of the newcomers asked. “I’m surprised I didn’t smell it.”
“That’s because the durian overpowers it unless you’re up close,” Harry said. “Do you have anything else in the cooler, Bill? I’m not a big fan of stinky cheese or fruit that smells like something died.”
“There are a couple tins of some fish that M793qK told me not to open until I got here.”
“Caviar?” somebody asked hopefully.
Bill pulled out the can and struggled to read the label. “Surströmming, but I don’t know if I’m pronouncing the two dots over the ‘O’ correctly.”
“It looks Swedish to me, and I’m not sure how they pronounce umlauts,” Nancy said.
“Bring it on,” the grey-haired woman said, arming herself with a cracker.
“Flower said that it’s fermented herring, and they add just enough salt to keep it from rotting,” Bill warned his audience. He peeled the foil off the top of the tin, and even with his nose plugs, he had to swallow back his bile.
“That’s foul,” Harry said, backing away from the table. “I think we have a new winner.”
“If that’s not a hundred and twenty on the stinky scale, I can’t imagine what is,” Nancy said.
“Let me try it,” the grey-haired woman said, and loading some herring onto her cracker, took a small bite. “Well, maybe it’s an acquired taste.”
Irene worked her way around the back of the tables, guiding the borrowed floating immersive camera ahead of her. “I’m sure this will make a really interesting tidbit for some future promo,” she said. “Do you have another one of those fruits, Bill?”
“Unfortunately,” he said, reaching back in the cooler chest. “I was hoping that nobody would ask.”
“Look on the bright side,” Harry told him. “At least there aren’t any Wanderers grabbing things and insisting you pay to get their opinions. I hope that M793qK reimbursed you for that time.”
“I didn’t ask him,” Bill said, steeling himself to cut open the second durian. “He was so impressed with me for the precise ratings I got from those three Wanderer women that I didn’t want to spoil it.”
“Maybe you can bring something home to Julie. Women have surprisingly strong stomachs.”
“I don’t think she would like any of this stuff,” Bill said as the seniors armed with tongue depressors descended on the two halves of the stinky fruit. “She eats pretty much the same foods as I do.”
“Maybe you should check with her,” Harry suggested. “If you had asked me five years ago whether Irene would ever be willing to live on a giant spaceship and eat meals in a cafeteria with a four-armed robot running the steam table, I don’t have to tell you what my answer would have been.”
“Well, I guess it’s not like anybody else is going to eat this stuff,” Bill said, transferring the remaining cans of Surströmming to his belt pouch. “If she reacts like I think she will, I can always bring them into the alien cafeteria and put them in the giveaway bin.”
Eighteen
“Some empire, that you can’t even get a couple of washed-up authors to come and meet us at your headquarters,” Ronald grumbled. “I was getting used to this office.”
“I thought that visiting their colony for semi-retired writers would make for a nice change of scenery, and it’s just a short trip in the lift tube,” Samuel said. “I didn’t know you would be bringing all of the other senior storytellers with you today. What happened to your assistant?”
“My assistant didn’t want to lose her place in line to get into a LARPing studio, and my colleagues insisted on coming when they found out I would be meeting with the author of the Galactic War College series.”
“They read science fiction from Earth?”
Ronald snorted in derision. “We’re storytellers, we don’t read unless we have to. But Mr. Harstang was the featured speaker at WandererCon last week and he showed some episodes from the immersive adaptation of Galactic War College. It was terrible, of course, and we all had a good laugh at the ridiculous space battles. But it got us thinking that if this hack can have his stories made into an immersive series, why not us?”
“If you want his help, you may want to phrase that a little differently when we meet him,” Samuel said. “Vivian and Julie are already at the writers colony to help with the catering setup. We can leave as soon as the other storytellers are finished with—what is it they’re doing?”
Ronald turned and looked out the open office door at the group of elderly aliens sitting on the floor in a circle. “Gambling,” he said in disgust. “Whoever taught those reprobates how to play Texas Hold’em should be drawn and quartered.”
“Not a fan of poker?” Samuel asked.
“I can’t read the Verlock or the Dollnick,” the old man complained. “They keep inventing fake tells, you know what I mean? They trick me into believing
that a twitchy eye means they’re bluffing and then they drop the hammer. I should know better than to play cards with aliens who have been at it since Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
“How about we let them play out this hand and then we’ll get going?”
“They can drag the bidding round for a single card out for five minutes with all their table talk so I’ll just speed things up.” The storyteller sauntered around the group and stopped behind the Frunge, who happened to be inspecting his hole cards. Ronald winked at Samuel, and then held up both hands, each showing three fingers. There was already a pair of threes showing in the community cards, and the rest of the players immediately folded. The disappointed Frunge carefully mixed his own pair of threes into the discards and then he swept up the antes.
“If you’re all ready, we’ll be heading down to the ag deck where the writers colony is located,” Samuel said.
“Makes sense they’d be living with the cows since that Galactic War College anime we saw was manure,” the Drazen cracked, and the other storytellers joined a short round of laughter. “I would have asked Yaem for my money back after the screening, but we didn’t pay to get in, so I was stuck.”
“We should be negotiating our return to the Miklat with Yaem,” the elderly Dollnick said. “We probably could have gotten a free lifetime supply of anime out of it.”
“These authors of yours better come across with the goods,” the Frunge grumbled at Samuel. “I’m getting tired of your crazy ship’s AI blasting me out of bed with that infernal Dollnick opera every morning. I don’t understand how anybody can live here.”
“The fresh fruit and produce are excellent,” the heavily tattooed Horten woman said. “But I have to admit that being around all of those industrious humans dressed up like aliens gets to be depressing after a while. It seems they’ve been brainwashed into believing that work is the path to enlightenment.”
“Humans enjoy working,” Samuel said as he led the group out of the Human Empire headquarters. “So did all of the aliens I grew up around on Union Station. In fact, most of them thought that we were the lazy ones.”
“Why did you turn right?” the Drazen storyteller demanded.
“Our headquarters is exactly opposite the lift tube doors on the other side of the spoke so the distance is the same either way.”
“That’s why I’m asking. Why didn’t you go left?”
Samuel shrugged. “We can return and head around the other way if it means that much to you. I just want to get this over with.”
Ronald stepped up close to Samuel while they waited for the capsule to arrive, and whispered in his ear, “That advice you gave me earlier about talking politely with Mr. Harstang? You may want to keep it in mind when addressing my colleagues.”
“I’m just getting worn out by all of this. I appreciate that it’s good practice for me—well, practice at any rate—but the Wanderers are not members of the Human Empire, nor do I believe any of the humans among you would join if invited. Maybe it’s because I started in space engineering at the Open University before transferring to the diplomatic track, but I like problems that I can solve. You people—”
“Welcome to the real galaxy, kid,” the Frunge storyteller interrupted as the whole group squeezed into the lift tube capsule. “If diplomacy was easy, everybody would be doing it, and then the arms manufacturers would all be out of business.”
“That reminds me of the time we were harvesting abandoned supplies from the rear lines of the Butterri Conflict,” Ronald said. “The captain refused to load any of the ammunition, but I checked the prices later and we could have made a killing.”
“Ammunition is dangerous,” the Verlock lectured ponderously. “You start by selling it, you end by needing it yourself.”
“Yeah, and those retreating Butterri forces would have eventually hunted us down if we took their ammo,” the Drazen said. “You have to know who you’re dealing with and act accordingly.”
“So it wasn’t really abandoned?” Samuel asked.
“The only universal truth about war is that it’s full of waste,” the elderly Horten woman said. “Whether the particular supplies we harvested would ever have been utilized by the Butterri is open to debate. It’s entirely possible that they bought everything back from us on the war surplus market.”
“I guess I just don’t understand business,” Samuel said as the doors slid open on a pastoral scene. “We’re meeting everybody at the dining pavilion.”
“The apple and peach trees are blossoming,” the Drazen said, sniffing the air. “I’ll have to take a walk in the orchards after this is over. I miss the fruit trees we had on the Miklat when I first joined.”
“What happened to them?” Samuel asked.
“It’s trickier than you might think to maintain orchards on a spaceship. Somebody has to take care of the pollinating insects, start seedlings to replace aging trees, and simulate seasons through changes in lighting and temperature or the trees will never flower. The Zarents did their best, but they were stretched too thin trying to hold the Miklat together, and something had to give.”
“Like both the primary and secondary piles,” the Verlock put in.
“There he is,” Ronald said, spotting Geoffrey talking to Julie as the girl laid out place settings on a picnic table. “Everybody remember not to tell him what we really thought of his pathetic stories. We should probably find something to compliment.”
“If I had to choose between reading him or the old broad who wrote the sexy paranormal books, I’d take her every time,” the Dollnick said. “At least her stories were believable.”
“You find werewolves and bear-shifters more realistic than military science fiction?” Samuel couldn’t help asking.
“Not military science fiction per se,” the Dollnick storyteller replied. “Just military science fiction in which a rag-tag bunch of Humans in an obsolete warship out-think and out-fight superior aliens. Our own military science fiction is excellent, and both the Drazens and Hortens do a reasonable job.”
“Sam,” Vivian called from where she was struggling with the panel on a floating catering cart. “Come and help me with this.”
He gestured for the delegation of Wanderer storytellers to seat themselves at the picnic tables and went to his wife. “Is the latch stuck?”
“No, I faked it to talk to you so that I wouldn’t have to ping your implant while you were with the Wanderers. Geoffrey explained to me that his old publishers weren’t very happy with him after his attorney got through with recovering his rights because they’d paid cash for them when his so-called family had him committed. Bianca the Sixth is only writing children’s books these days, and she said her publisher asked her years ago to please stop submitting works from other authors she knew.”
“How about the next Bianca, the one Julie is apprenticed to?”
“She’s headlining a writers retreat at a nature preserve on Earth and we couldn’t reach her over the Stryxnet. Besides, I finally heard back from EarthCent Intelligence this morning and their Wanderers analyst said that the storytellers don’t perform romances, at least not in the sense of romance books.”
“So this is all going to be another waste of time,” Samuel said in exasperation.
“Not necessarily. Geoffrey and Bianca said that several of the storytellers approached them secretly at WandererCon when none of the others were watching. It turns out they’re only interested in publishing books because they think it’s the easiest way to break into immersives and anime. So Flower is holding the Grenouthian director in reserve, and if we don’t make any progress, she’s willing to produce a series pilot about storytellers if that will get the Wanderers off the ship.”
“I’m not sure they’ll want to be in business with Flower. They all hate how she tries to get them to abide by the ship’s rules.”
“From what Geoffrey has told me about the entertainment industry, Flower is a pushover compared to the average executive producer. I’ll b
et you the Wanderers have figured that out already or they wouldn’t still be here.”
“All right, we’ll play it by ear. I better get over there before they take out the cards again or we’ll be here all day.”
“—not even millions?” the Dollnick storyteller was asking Geoffrey when Samuel took the end seat on the picnic table bench.
“My biggest advance was two hundred and fifty thousand eBucks, call it fifty thousand creds, and that was for a trilogy,” Geoffrey said. “What’s more, if those books had been picked up by a studio, the publisher would have gotten fifty percent.”
“What a rip-off,” Ronald said. “If that’s the kind of deal we can expect, we’d be better off doing that self-publishing you talked about. It sounded dead easy.”
“Easy to publish, hard to find readers,” Geoffrey told him. “You’ll all be new names to the English-speaking market, and the immersive studios aren’t going to be impressed just because you can point to an eBook in some catalog that nobody is downloading. This idea you have of quickly becoming famous as authors and then getting deluged in offers from immersive or anime studios just isn’t realistic.”
“Then where do all the new shows come from?”
“Studios want scripts from writers who know about immersive production methods and tailor their stories to the media. On the rare occasion that they buy a bestselling book to turn it into an immersive, they get a team of screenwriters to do the adaptation. Even if the original author is a part of that, he rarely has any control.”
“You mean the other writers can make alterations to the story without the author’s approval?” the Frunge storyteller demanded.
“Alterations? They can even change the ending or include new material wholesale,” Geoffrey said. “Did any of you stay awake long enough to see the battle scene from my Galactic War College series where the heroine escapes by diving her ship into a black hole? That whole sequence was made up by the producer’s eight-year-old son. I didn’t even know it was included until the final version came out.”