Review Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 11)

by E. M. Foner

  “That’s very wise of you, Spinner. And you, Clume?”

  “I learned how to get up in the middle of the night and miss meals.”

  “Oh, is it one of those days?” Aisha asked sympathetically.

  The Dollnick boy just yawned and scowled.

  “I learned that aliens have different rules for everything!” Mike complained.

  “Everything?”

  “Games and stuff. You know. And every time we play something new, Orsilla makes the rules tricky so she wins.”

  “But you can still be friends,” Aisha said.

  “I guess we are, but I wish she’d let somebody else win sometime.”

  “I’m ready now,” Orsilla said suddenly.

  “Good. What did you learn about making new friends from other species?”

  “Aliens don’t know how to do anything right, so you have to pretend not to notice if you want them to like you.”

  “Don’t you mean that the other children don’t know how to do things like Hortens?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “And we’ll be back with our final segment, right after this message from our sponsors,” Aisha announced, anticipating the assistant director’s signal.

  The light on the front immersive camera blinked off, and Clume collapsed dramatically to the floor where he feigned falling asleep.

  “You’re wasting your energy,” Orsilla informed the Dollnick child. “It’s the short break. We’ll be live in…”

  “Five, four, three, two, one,” the assistant director counted them back in as Clume scrambled to his feet.

  “And welcome back,” Aisha said when the front camera went live. “In honor of the end of our current cast rotation, I thought it would be fun for us to see the different ways our new friends think about growing up.” She paused for the applause that never materialized because she had forgotten to tell the Grenouthians her plans and nobody turned on the applause sign. “Come on. Everybody sit in a circle and tell us what you think about growing up.”

  “It’s a waste of time,” Orsilla said. “I can’t wait to be a grownup.”

  “I’m tired of being told what to do all the time,” Vzar chipped in.

  “Me too,” the other cast members all chorused, including Spinner.

  “Is that it? Since we all agree about growing up, can we play a game now?” Orsilla asked.

  “But that’s not—how about telling us what you want to be when you grow up.”

  “A pirate,” Orsilla responded. “But without the tattoos.”

  “Orsilla! What would your parents say?”

  “They won’t let me,” the little girl admitted. “That’s why I have to wait until I’m grown up. My parents say that pirates give Hortens a bad name, but I like that they don’t have to follow the rules.”

  “That’s what I want to be too,” Mike chimed in. “It’s not fair that the Hortens get to be all of the pirates.”

  “Mike! You can’t be serious. Do you know what pirates do?”

  “But Mom bought me a pirate uniform, and when I wore it to Fenna’s birthday party, you said I was handsome.”

  “You mean a costume,” Aisha said. “People dress up in costumes to play make-believe because it’s a different way of using our imaginations. It doesn’t mean you want to be a real pirate.”

  “But I do!”

  “Me too,” Pluck said, jumping up in excitement. “I don’t want to wait for my Name Day to get new toys. And if I was a pirate, I could carry a really big axe and nobody would say I looked funny.”

  Aisha glanced over at the assistant director, hoping against hope that he would insert an emergency commercial and give her a chance to regroup. The Grenouthian was staring at the real-time ratings monitor in rapt attention, and from his expression, Aisha knew that she could expect no help from that quarter.

  “My father told me that pirates are bad for business,” the Dollnick boy said, coming out of his lethargy.

  “You see?” Aisha told the other children. “Pirates take things without paying for them, so the hard working people lose.”

  “I don’t want to be a loser,” Clume said, squinting as he gave the matter his sleepy attention. “Maybe I should be a pirate too.”

  “Children, children. Piracy isn’t a game. They—” Aisha paused, unable to see a way to talk about the horrors of piracy to young children. “Spinner. I know that the Stryx elders have asked all of the tunnel network species to band together and defeat the pirates. Can you tell the children why?”

  “Clume already said,” the young Stryx replied. “Piracy is expensive for people who aren’t pirates. But if Mikey and all of my friends want to be pirates when they grow up, I guess I’ll have to become a pirate too.”

  “You can’t mean that, Spinner. You’d stop traders in space and, uh, be mean to them? Steal their cargo and hold them hostage for ransom?”

  “We get to do all of that?” Mikey interrupted. He bumped forearms with Pluck, the Drazen equivalent of a high five.

  “Maybe those pirates are bad pirates,” Spinner replied to Aisha’s question, his mechanical voice sounding a bit scratchy as he became confused. “We’d be good pirates, and we’d pay for the cargo and invite the passengers to play with us. We could all use our imaginations,” he concluded brightly.

  “But that’s not what pirates do,” Aisha objected. Then she realized she was blowing a golden opportunity to close the subject and reversed course. “I mean, if all of you want to grow up to be good pirates, that changes everything. What would you do if you were a good pirate, Krolyohne?”

  “Math,” the Verlock girl replied, and then she became excited. “But I wouldn’t have to write out the whole proof every time I learned something new. I could just prove the parts that aren’t obvious, and maybe,” she paused and lowered her voice, “sometimes I’d just come up with answers and not show my calculations.”

  “I think I understand now,” Aisha said. “You all see being pirates as a chance to make up your own rules.” She glanced at Vzar, wondering if she should gamble on soliciting his take on piracy before moving on, and to her surprise, she saw that he looked angry. “If nobody else…”

  “Pirates are nasty,” the Frunge boy said. “When my sister had her first budding party, my parents told me lock up Szroof during the ceremony so she wouldn’t jump on the table and eat the meat. Some older shrubs who came dressed as pirates snuck in and ate the best cuts, and Szroof got blamed.”

  “Szroof?”

  “My short-haired desert cat.”

  Aisha’s implant pinged with the one-minute warning, and she rushed to wrap things up. “Next show we’ll have a brand-new cast rotation waiting to make friends, including a trio of Fillinducks and our first Vergallian boy. And before we go, I want to thank Stryx Libby for letting my daughter’s class come and watch the show today. Ready?”

  Behind her, the children formed their traditional double chorus line and whispered amongst themselves, while the Grenouthian sound manager in the booth queued the music to the theme song.

  Don’t be a stranger because I look funny,

  You look weird to me, but let’s make friends.

  I’ll give you a tissue if your nose is runny,

  I’m as scared as you, so let’s become pirates!

  Aisha jerked her head around as the children all shouted their improvised closing, and she saw that Mike and Spinner were holding Vzar’s arms, while Pluck held his tentacle over the Frunge boy’s mouth.

  “That’s a wrap,” the assistant director called when the light on the front immersive camera blinked out. “Great show. Kids love pirates.”

  Aisha shook her head in remorse, but she supposed it wouldn’t change the galaxy that the children sang the wrong words on purpose this one time. As Fenna ran up and hugged her around the waist, Krolyohne’s mother grabbed the Verlock girl by the ear and dragged her away while delivering a ponderous lecture. “You - want - to - solve - math - problems - without – showing-
your – calculations - young - Miss? Not - in - my - lifetime, you - won’t.”

  Eleven

  “Just a sec,” Dorothy called out when she heard the door to the office of SBJ Fashions slide open. “Save it as, uh, work in progress,” she instructed the holographic rendering workstation. “And hide it,” the young designer added on second thought, just in case the visitor was a spy from a competing fashion business. “I’m in here.”

  Kevin appeared a moment later, halting in the doorway of the design room. “Are you the only one working?”

  “We don’t have a full-time receptionist, so unless Shaina and Brinda are hiding in their offices, I’m it at the moment. Now that I think about it, they were taking their kids and the dogs to a park deck today. We have flexible hours.”

  “How about your alien friends? I thought you said they work with you.”

  “Flazint and Affie? I’d have to check with Libby to be sure, but I think that Flazint won’t be up for another hour or two, and I know Affie went home a little while ago. The Frunge and Vergallians both have longer days than us, so I see a lot of them when we aren’t too far out of sync.”

  “What’s with the glitter gloves? You look like a pop star.”

  “These are Vergallian rendering controllers,” Dorothy explained. “I’m not very good with them yet, but they let you create and manipulate holographic images. They’re really useful for fashion design. Affie had something similar in her studio for sculpture work, but this system came with built-in dummies for all the species. Wanna see?”

  “Sure,” the young man said. Dorothy clicked her thumb and middle finger together, a shortcut that brought up a hologram of a gorgeous naked woman, causing Kevin’s radiation-tanned face to darken further.

  “Are you embarrassed by this?” she asked incredulously. “That’s so sweet. It’s just a holographic dummy, you know.”

  “Can’t you put something on her?”

  “Sure. It works like this.” The designer began moving her hands around the hologram, issuing rapid-fire commands as she went. “Straight dress, Drazen tight-weave, number eleven,” she instructed the workstation. “Venetian red with standard Horten shoulder puffs—no, down three on the puff, down one more, all right. Gather the waist—no, not in a bunch. Tailor it. Now plunge the neckline, lower, lower, come on, LOWER. That’s better. Raise the hem, higher, higher—stop it, you’re going to embarrass our guest again.”

  “It’s artificial intelligence?” Kevin asked.

  “No, just a good natural language interface. It doesn’t really understand half of what I say, but it ignores those parts and carries out the instructions that it knows how to implement.”

  “And that’s all it takes to design a dress?”

  “I’m just fooling around with the built-in configurations to learn how it works. This is only fashion designing in the sense that telling a Stryx ship controller to take you somewhere is navigating.”

  “I get it. So were there some boxes you needed moved around or something? There’s no way I can help you with designing clothes.”

  “What? Oh, right. I asked you to come in to help with something, didn’t I?” Dorothy looked around the office, trying to think of some make-work to cover her prior fib, but she came up empty. “My memory is going,” she said, furrowing her brow in an attempt to sell the story, but then an idea finally came to her. “I need you for a dummy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “All of the holographic dummies are women, even the ones with four arms, and the big bunny with the pouch. We design cross-species, you know.”

  “And I look like some sort of alien female?”

  “Silly,” she said, casting a coquettish glance over her shoulder as she rummaged in a cupboard. “Jeeves has been pushing me to design something for males since he says you’re half the potential market. Just goes to show how little he really knows about biologicals. Anyway, the girls and I want to come up with something unisex that we can sell to anybody.”

  “Doesn’t that just mean a jumpsuit or a shirt and pants?” Kevin asked. “Lots of the independent traders I’ve met were women, at least the humans, and they mainly dressed just like me.”

  “Skirts aren’t terribly practical in Zero G, if you hadn’t noticed. But if you think pants are shaped the same for men and women, you just aren’t looking in the right places,” she teased, bringing some of the blood back to his face.

  “So what exactly do you need me to do?”

  “Just take your clothes off so I can get some holo-measurements,” she deadpanned, and then laughed outright at his look of horror. “Oh, you’re so easy. Jeeves would have a field day with you.”

  “I’m beginning to suspect you don’t have any work for me at all,” Kevin said, trying not to sound like a bad sport.

  “I just wanted to see you,” Dorothy admitted. “You used to follow me everywhere, after all. You and Metoo, both.”

  “I don’t remember,” Kevin protested, feeling foolish. But on seeing her smile slip, he added, “I mean, I remember following you everywhere. I just don’t remember why.”

  “Ahem,” Jeeves said, floating into the room. “I couldn’t help catching the end of your conversation. Unlike some station librarians we know, I try to ignore all of the sound waves bouncing around, but I heard my name.”

  “I was just warning Kevin about your sense of humor,” Dorothy explained.

  “I’m sure that a young man intelligent enough to escape from pirates and activate a Verlock rescue device without English instructions can take care of himself.” Jeeves turned and directly addressed the embarrassed visitor. “I believe she was implying that you are gullible, a nonexistent condition that has no equivalent expression in any advanced cultures.”

  “Really?” Kevin asked.

  Dorothy laughed again, and slapped the Stryx’s casing. “Stop it. That joke was old when Dring was a kid, if Makers are ever young.”

  “I just thought I’d look in and see if you remembered how to work,” Jeeves continued, turning back to Dorothy. “It seems like it was only four months ago that you convinced me to purchase this expensive holographic rendering system, and I was beginning to wonder if you ever intended to use it.”

  “I’m back now, Jeeves. You don’t have to keep repeating yourself like a distress signal. And I was just discussing fashion design for men with Kevin, which I seem to recall was your idea. I’m thinking of doing a special line for traders, since the men and women dress the same in Zero G,” she improvised. “And they go everywhere and work in public markets, so it would mean maximum brand exposure, just like my InstaSitter idea.”

  “Interesting,” the Stryx said, looking Kevin up and down as if he was seeing the young man for the first time. “Is this your official trader garb?”

  “Uh, I probably wear the jumpsuit more, since so many species keep their space stations and orbitals on the cool side. Anywhere warm I go with jeans and a T-shirt.” He paused, feeling exceedingly awkward about being called upon to discuss fashion, but wanting to come through for Dorothy. “The jumpsuit is better for working because of the extra pockets up top, and, uh, T-shirts can pull out of your pants when you’re twisting around the cargo area in Zero G.”

  “I see,” Jeeves said, though something in his voice conveyed the sense that he was talking about more than fashion. “Well, this will come as welcome news to Joe and Paul since all they wear is jeans, T-shirts and jumpsuits. And I understand that you’ll be working with them for the time being.”

  “Really?” Dorothy interrupted, her eyes shining. “That’s great. I’ll have you around as a guinea pig for my designs.”

  “The ambassador said that the Verlocks are insisting on giving me a cash payment for the radiation exposure caused by their rescue device, even though it saved our lives,” Kevin explained. “It won’t be enough to buy a new trader to replace the one the pirates took from me, though. Paul offered to let me pick something I can make space-worthy from his lot in return for whateve
r the Verlocks pay and helping out until they get everything under control.”

  “You haven’t been to see me, I mean Union Station, in fifteen years, and now you plan on running off again as soon as you have a ship?” Dorothy asked in dismay.

  “That’s not accurate,” Jeeves corrected her. “Kevin visited the station several times after acquiring his two-man trader. Well, I need to be getting along,” the Stryx concluded after dropping this bombshell, and shot out of the room.

  “It’s not like that,” Kevin protested to the stricken girl. “I mean, I did come to Union Station, but the first time I went to Mac’s Bones, I saw you heading towards the lift tube holding hands with some guy, and you looked right past me. I asked the station librarian about you every time I came back after that, but she said you were still seeing him.”

  “Libby!” Dorothy practically shouted. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Kevin asked me not to and I respected his privacy,” the station librarian’s voice replied.

  “Now I feel guilty,” the girl complained. “I wish you had come to see me. You must have felt so lonely coming all the way here and not talking to anybody.”

  “Traveling from place to place without a partner in a two-man trader is always lonely,” Kevin replied matter-of-factly. “I picked up some profitable cargoes here which helped me pay off my ship mortgage a few years early, though the timing couldn’t have been worse,” he added with a grimace. “Trust me. The only thing I regret about my visits to Union Station was losing the Frunge pocket knife that my dad bought me after the Kasilian auction.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I kind of got drunk for the first and last time after I saw you with that guy, and I think it must have slipped out of my pocket when I was sleeping it off on the park deck. I didn’t even realize it was gone until I was in the tunnel on my way to Drazen space.”

  “So you never went by the station lost-and-found?” Dorothy seized Kevin’s hand and began dragging him towards the door. “Come on, I have an in there.”

  “But that was years ago. They wouldn’t keep stuff that long.”