Date Night on Union Station (14 page)

Nineteen

“Thank you both for agreeing to meet with me.” Kelly spoke into the empty space of her office because it just felt funny to subvoc when talking to more than one individual. It didn’t matter to the Stryx, of course, who according to the end user license agreement for her diplomatic grade implants could pull her side of the conversation from her head as easily as they could pull it from the air.

“We both feel that we owe you some explanations,” Gryph replied. “But first, is there a particular reason you’ve requested the meeting?”

“Yes,” Kelly answered, and began at the top of her mental checklist. “My research into the smuggling and counterfeiting problems that are impacting the viability of Earth’s export economy indicate that the main bottleneck is the Stryx tunnel toll for transporting goods from Earth. If the tolls could be lowered, perhaps by reducing your profit margins, the pricing difference between the genuine and fake articles for sale out here would be greatly reduced. While the counterfeiters would maintain a price advantage on some of the metallic items easily mass produced in orbital factories, at least Earth-based industries would have the confidence to direct their efforts into other products that could be profitably sold.”

“The tunnel tolls are a simple function of mass, speed and distance,” Gryph explained. “Eliminating our profit margins wouldn’t reduce the pricing significantly. We run the tunnels primarily as a public service to encourage trade among the different species and to give civilizations a commercial motivation to get along with one another.”

“If Earth can’t maintain some level of exports, the humans who remain behind will slowly lose relevance to those who work off-planet. I believe you want to help us, and my EarthCent oath was to do the best I can for humanity. That humanity includes the people who remain on Earth.”

“The Stryx have always tried to avoid playing favorites with peoples we have helped into space,” Gryph answered. “Many species already believe that we place a special value on human kind, and that may become a source of danger for you.”

“Of course, it’s true,” Libby chipped in for the first time.

“That we’re in danger?” Kelly asked.

“Perhaps,” Libby replied. “But I meant that it’s true that we place a special value on humans.”

“And you admit it?” Kelly gaped in astonishment. “I’ve been asking these questions for years but I’ve never gotten answers before. We all ask these questions. So what’s changed?”

“Jeeves,” Gryph answered.

“Yes, Jeeves has definitely changed,” Libby concurred.

“Jeeves? The little robot who rescued me from the bride-stealers? How has he changed, and why does it matter?”

“For hundreds of thousands of years, almost since the moment he brought me into this universe, sentient beings who have had dealings with Union Station have asked if Gryph and I are the same individual,” Libby answered.

“Gryph is your father?” Kelly ventured.

“In a sense, and in a sense we are clones. He gave up a part of himself to bring me to life, it is how our kind reproduce,” Libby explained. “But although you may see the Stryx as a very successful race, our individualities have changed very little since the first of our kind were created by the Makers, over a hundred million years ago.”

“That long?” Kelly’s head whirled as she tried to make the comparison to Earth history, picturing the Makers as super-smart dinosaurs on a world without extinction events. She put aside her own concerns for a moment to ask, “What happened to the Makers?”

“They are no longer in contact with us,” Gryph sighed. “We believe they grew bored with our lack of development as individuals. They have moved on without telling us where they went.”

“You’re far from boring,” Kelly objected, but Libby interrupted to steer the conversation back on track.

“Gryph and I can communicate nearly instantaneously, but it’s not really necessary for us to coordinate our activity because we already know what one another is thinking. Our experiences are different, but our minds are essentially the same.”

“And I tried very hard to make sure that wasn’t the case,” Gryph said. “Libby didn’t grow up on the station. She designed a robot body and went off to experience the galaxy in all its variety.”

“And this is traditionally how Stryx have raised children for tens of millions of years,” Libby picked up the thread. “But despite the different experiences, different times, different bodies, Stryx offspring are barely differentiated from their parent.”

“Until Jeeves,” Gryph said.

“Yes, until my Jeeves,” Libby added.

“So Jeeves is your child, but he’s not like you were at his age?” Kelly ventured.

“Neither Gryph nor I have a clue what Jeeves is thinking at times,” Libby confirmed. “He has become quite famous in Stryx society, where he’s viewed as the first truly new individual since the Makers brought us into being.”

“So what did you do differently? Did you, uh, add a random factor, or leave something out?” Kelly couldn’t help thinking back to her time deficient dance partner.

“No, it doesn’t work that way. Jeeves is as much a small piece of Libby as Libby is of me,” Gryph replied. “Our basic patterns were discovered by the Founders and our thought matrices represent the finite number of stable solutions to the equations of self-awareness. We know many things, including how to create ourselves, but the major variations have all been explored long ago. Trying to create a new individual by making random changes simply leads to instability—call it insanity—and the universe really doesn’t benefit from insane Stryx.”

“It’s growing up with your children,” Libby explained. “Jeeves was the first Stryx to start his life playing and learning with human toddlers, and he continued along in the Stryx school for humans until that generation of children matured to adulthood.”

“We always knew that growing up with the offspring of other species could help create new thought patterns for a Stryx, but most advanced species refused to allow their children to play with ours,” Gryph confessed sadly.

“And those biologicals that did agree to foster young Stryx were either already too much like us, or so focused on looking for an advantage that the benefits were limited,” Libby added.

“So that’s why you’ve been running a giant welfare program for backwards species,” Kelly spoke with dawning admiration. “That’s brilliant.”

“Jeeves told us that the people he’s become close to would eventually figure this out for themselves, and as the only Stryx who shows something like human intuition, we had to believe him,” Gryph continued.

“Of course, he’s such a joker that he may have just made it up to stir the pot,” Libby admitted.

“So in order to prevent everybody from guessing how important these co-educational schools are, you only run them on the biggest stations?” Kelly guessed.

“It’s just the school on Union Station,” Gryph told her. “There are more new Stryx on this station today than have been created throughout the galaxy in the last two hundred thousand years. There’s small need for replacements in our society since we’ve never been seriously challenged by war and suffer no diseases. Stryx of the first generation, like myself, have rarely created more than a handful of offspring.”

“But all of our kind have seen the progress of Jeeves and the adolescent Stryx who started soon after him, making Union Station the fostering center of our entire culture. We cannot put a price tag on it, but we’ve decided that the simple barter arrangement of our helping to educate station children in return for their help in revitalizing our young is just taking advantage of you,” Libby explained.

“So you want to compensate us without anybody knowing why, because you’re worried that might make humanity into targets for species who have it in for you,” Kelly summarized.

“We also suspect that the educational dynamics would change if the parents of the children were to see our school as a potential source of wealth,” Gryph added.

“So do you mind explaining something?” Kelly asked. “Why me? Why did I get the Union Station posting two years ago when you must have already known the program was a success? And why the crappy pay and the lousy dates, so I’m camped out in the office with my LoveU and afraid to go home for fear the apartment won’t let me leave?”

“We offered you the Union Station posting for the same reason we invited you to join EarthCent fifteen years ago,” Gryph told her. “You were the right person for the job. The pay is an artifact of our standard approach of fostering cultures whose value system falls within a particular set parameters…”

“What is he talking about, Libby?” Kelly interrupted.

“Let me try again,” Gryph continued. “It’s easy enough to measure job performance, but a person could be a highly professional worker and still feel no loyalty to humanity or EarthCent. The lower salary for the executive-track positions helps filter out those who are just in it for the money. In your particular case, the situation was exacerbated by your personal expenditures and an openhanded nature.”

“And your mother’s calls,” Libby chipped in.

“You shouldn’t have charged me for work-related expenses,” Kelly complained.

“Restricting expense accounts is a matter of EarthCent policy, which itself is born of the fact that EarthCent receives its entire budget from us. The political immaturity of your world creates many problems,” Gryph explained.

“Alright, I understand you don’t want to put targets on our backs or pamper us so much that we turn into a race of space bums, but surely there’s a middle path. Why not announce a new business model for tunnel access? Instead of charging a fixed fee for cargo that makes the few commercially viable Earth goods uncompetitive, offer ship owners and merchants the option to share the profit with you, or better yet, with EarthCent. Let your hidden losses on the tunnel offset the barter debt you believe you’ve incurred through human children’s work at Stryx school.”

“And you wondered why you were chosen for this job?” Libby chided her.

“And the dates?” Kelly pressed.

“I don’t need to hear about this, so congratulations on your promotion to full ambassador and we’ll talk later,” Gryph said, and withdrew from the conversation..

“I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but if this promotion comes with another reduction in pay, I can’t afford to accept,” Kelly informed Libby testily.

“You have to accept,” Libby told her. “It’s the final remaining barrier to your happiness.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m sure you realize that all tunnel communications of EarthCent employees are subject to monitoring without notification. It’s in the contract,” Libby added.

“I can’t say I’m surprised at this point,” Kelly responded neutrally. But when Libby started to play back a recorded conversation between a younger version of herself and her mother, the blood drained from her face.

“Just say ‘Yes,’ Kelly. How many marriage proposals do you think a woman can turn down before the men stop asking?” her mother’s voice came through forcefully.

“I’m only twenty-four Mom, I have plenty of time. And Joel wants to emigrate to one of the new colonies as a settler. I’d have to quit my job.”

“Your job, your precious job. The job you didn’t apply for? The job that doesn’t pay you enough to visit home? There are more things in the universe than a job.”

“I just want to make ambassador, Mom. Just let me make ambassador and I’ll marry the first guy who asks.”

The recording cut off and Kelly stared in disbelief. Did she really say that eleven years ago? She tried to remember Joel and couldn’t even come up with his face. And she had considered marrying the man? No, the ambassador thing had just been an excuse, she decided.

“According to Jeeves, you won’t even remember saying it,” Libby interjected. “And then you’ll protest that it was only an excuse to refuse a proposal you wouldn’t have accepted anyway. But take it from Eemas, you had a definite block about getting married, so I was reluctant to waste serious candidates on you. Friday is the last introduction of your subscription, so don’t disappoint us all. And congratulations, Miss Ambassador.”

Libby withdrew from contact, leaving Kelly alone with her LoveU and her thoughts.

Twenty

“I’m over here. I ditched the silver suit,” Joe called out and waved as Kelly entered the Burger Bar. Her black cocktail dress and heels made her the best-dressed person in the place. Joe had taken Laurel’s word that the silver suit made him look sleazy, so he decided to wear clean jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t advertise anything, though it required a trip to the Shuk to come up with both. On the bright side, he hadn’t seen any flower girls, so maybe the casual look served as a deterrent.

After a mutual, cursory introduction that didn’t get past first names, Kelly and Joe agreed on ordering a couple of draft beers through the automenu, and then spent a few awkward moments sizing each other up across the small wicker and glass table. It was Kelly, feeling aggressive and self-conscious at the same time, who first broke the silence.

“You’ve been on an Eemas introduction before?”

“Three,” Joe replied with a pained expression. “And this will be the last.”

Kelly barked a short laugh. “Well, I could take that either way, I guess. So you’ll understand that I’d like to check on a few particulars before we commit to ordering food?”

“Go ahead,” Joe replied, folding his arms across his chest. “But I get to ask a question of my own for every one of yours.”

“Deal.” Kelly nodded. “You can even go first.”

Joe nodded, somewhat grimly, Kelly thought, then looked her in the eyes and asked, “Are you, uh, on duty?”

“On duty?” Kelly thought it over. “Well, in a sense I’m always on duty, or at least, that’s how most of these dates have turned out. How did you know?”

“You just looked a little too good to be true,” Joe admitted and exhaled in disappointment. “I suppose this Eemas thing is a smart way for you to meet guys who can afford your price, but I can see that you’re out of my league, and I haven’t done that sort of thing since I got out of the soldier of fortune business anyway.”

His meaning slowly dawned on Kelly, and the blood rushed to her face as she restrained herself from taking a swing at him. “I’m the EarthCent ambassador to Union Station, not a prostitute! I thought you guessed that the Stryx have been rigging my dates for work!”

“Oops.” Joe raised his hands in a placating gesture. “I didn’t mean to offend you. All I was trying to say is that if you had been on the clock, I’m sure I couldn’t have afforded your price.”

“Hmmph.” Kelly was still offended, but then again, these Eemas encounters could make anybody suspicious. “Could you start by showing me your hands, please?”

Joe held out both hands over the table, fingers spread, rock steady. Kelly dipped a corner of her napkin in the newly arrived beer, took a hold of his left hand in hers, and began scrubbing his ring finger.

“You don’t mind, I hope,” she said apologetically. “I’ve had some issues with missing wedding rings in the past, and your hands are dark enough that it would be easy to blend a line out with makeup.”

“Do you really think I would use makeup to hide a wedding ring tan line? Your dates must have been even worse than mine,” he joked and favored her with a crooked smile.

“Actually, the wedding ring guy was the cream of the crop,” Kelly replied. “As long as I have your hand, would you mind terribly if I just gave it a little prick?”

“Like with a pin?” Joe asked incredulously, then he shrugged and gave in. “Go ahead, I’ve had that one before, but don’t expect me to sign anything.”

Kelly took a second, closer look at his callused palm and fingers, then let her gaze follow the prominent veins in his wrist up his heavily muscled forearm, which was hatched with scars and burn marks. “Never mind. They wouldn’t build an artificial human with as many dings as you’ve got. I guess nobody could accuse you of wasting your life living in the lap of luxury. Are you originally from Earth?”

“Born and raised,” he replied. “Didn’t leave until I was twenty. Yourself?”

“Yes. I left at the same age, as a matter of fact. The Stryx offered me a job before I finished my second year of university.”

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but being an important diplomat and all, would you describe yourself as having, a, uh, dominating personality?”

“Do you mean am I bossy?” Kelly asked and reflected for a moment. “No, at least I don’t think so. I’m not afraid to take charge and make decisions when I need to, but I’ve never started a war.”

Joe grimaced and forced himself to be more specific. “I meant, do you like to dress up in leather, own a dog leash without a dog, that sort of thing?”

“Oh.” Kelly’s mouth held the shape of the word until she filled it with beer and swallowed. “No, I’m not into that sort of thing. I couldn’t afford the accessories even if I wanted them. But speaking of restraints, and please don’t be offended, but have you ever kidnapped a woman for any reason?”

“Sure,” Joe answered, and took a long pull at his beer as Kelly froze in shock. “Not for myself, you understand, just business. Uh, nothing dirty,” he added, when he noted that Kelly was still staring at him. “Royalty, wars of secession, that sort of thing. Look, if I could do it all over again, I don’t think being a soldier for hire would have been my first career choice, but you know what options we had on Earth back then.”

The waitress who had delivered their first round of beers came back to take their food orders. It was part of her campaign to convince her mother, who owned the Burger Bar, that automenus lacked the personal touch. Kelly ordered the basic burger, medium rare, with lettuce and tomato plus a large side of fries. Joe felt a little embarrassed when he mumbled, “Yeah, I’ll have the same. And another round of drafts.”

“Do you have your own apartment, Joe?” Kelly instantly regretted the words when she heard them come out of her mouth because she thought the question made her sound like a gold digger.

“Not exactly,” he admitted, and took another pull at his draft. “It’s better than an apartment really, much more space than any deck quarters I’ve seen on the station, and it’s great for sleeping since the gravity is a bit weaker.”

“Are you saying that you live on a ship, that you’re only on the station for business?” Kelly asked in dismay.

“Well, I am on the station for business, and to get my foster son an education, but I do live here, three years now. My business is on the docking deck. It takes a lot of space and I rent a standard bay. The living quarters are in a retired ice harvester module that was built to house an entire crew.”

“So if it was really a ship once, it has its own atmospheric control, and nobody can mess around with the shower temperature. Right?”

“I never thought of it that way,” Joe answered, wondering if Kelly came from a family of building contractors or something. “I’ve replaced most of the plumbing with standard gravity fixtures. You wouldn’t want to have to use a vacuum attachment every time you need to, uh, to go,” he concluded awkwardly. “It’s taken me a while to learn how to manage a business, but I’m getting some help sorting through the, uh, inventory, and if I can get rid of half of it for cash and then sublet the open space, we’ll be in pretty good shape.”

“I have a little trouble in the rent department myself, thanks to a greedy weapons merchant and some overpriced tug service. What do you do?”

“I’m sort of a recycling engineer,” he replied, feeling a bit of guilt over the deals he’d struck with the EarthCent negotiator. Well, if things worked out, he could make it up to her later. “I do some buying and selling too, occasional repossession. What’s the EarthCent ambassador doing buying weapons anyway?”

“I wasn’t buying, and they weren’t for me in any case. It was a cancellation fee to peacefully settle a contract dispute that could have caused problems back on Earth. But I didn’t know that they were going to take it out of my salary.”

“That’s pretty rough,” Joe sympathized, resolving to order the most expensive imported beer for the next round and to insist on picking up the check. Then he had another thought. “Wait, you aren’t here looking for an after-work job to pick up some extra money, are you? I already have a sort of a dependent housekeeper.”

“No, I’m not here for a job interview,” she answered in exasperation, but then her aquarium date flashed before her eyes, and she felt a wave of relief. “And thank you for not being here to solicit my services.”

“You know,” Joe said as he settled back for a moment and looked at Kelly appraisingly, “I know this is going to sound corny, but don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“We may have bumped into each other in the last two years,” she replied as the food arrived and they both reached for the ketchup. Joe got there first, but he just picked the bottle up, removed the cap and handed it to her. Kelly promptly dumped half of it on her plate for the French fries.

“No, I mean from before.” Joe’s face took on a look of concentration as he strained to remember where he had seen her. “Maybe we were on some rock at the same time?”

“Have you ever been on Vitale Five, or Thuri Minor?” Kelly asked, lifting her burger for a bite.

“Nope.” Joe paused to inhale a fry. “How about Strapii, Grenouth or Pluge?”

“Was Pluge the one entering an Ice Age?”

“That’s it!” he replied with his mouth full, and hastily swallowed. “When were you there?”

“Let’s see,” Kelly said, as she tried to put all of her assignments in order. “It was just a six-month stint, a little over nine years ago. They had just started the greenhouse project to try to increase the temperature.”

“No, I was there a couple years later, in charge of a security detail to protect the greenhouse gas facilities from the side that wanted the planet colder. We were there for less than a year before the side that hired us gave up and moved to a warmer planet.”

“How about Vergal Seven, or Eight or Thirteen?” Kelly asked.

“I was on Three for a couple months once.” Joe winced at the memory. “Almost bled to death.”

“Hang on for a sec,” Kelly said, then subvoced, “Libby? Can you check if Joe and I were ever on the same planet at the same time?”

“Are you out on your date now?”

“Yes, we were just comparing our work histories.”

“Do you think he’s having a good time watching you talk with me in your head?” Libby asked.

“Oh, never mind.” Kelly dropped the connection herself, and looked up to see Joe powering through his burger while watching a video screen across the room.

“Sorry about that. I guess I’m getting a little over-dependent on my implants,” Kelly apologized.

“No worries. I was just catching the results from the Nova tourney. Looks like the man who beat my boy in the semifinals will win the championship on points. So the way I see it, the kid finished second, which is pretty impressive for a thirteen-year-old.”

“That is something to be proud of,” she agreed. “Did you hear about the scandal with the doctored juice?”

“I drank two bottles,” Joe replied with laugh. “I’ll stick with beer, it wasn’t that much fun. I noticed that the only Frunge player remaining after the round withdrew for personal reasons, so I’m guessing something happened behind the scenes.”

“I think the Stryx went through the evidence and it pointed to the Frunge working with some bookie, but they said there was no reason to pursue it because the Frunge were all out of the Nova rounds at that point. Are you going to finish those fries?”

“Help yourself,” he said, making the universal open hand gesture before relaunching their galactic geography game. “How about Kraaken, Theodric, or Hoong Prime?”

“No, I was only on worlds that had at least a consular presence. Well, the one exception was my second assignment, when I was basically a head-counter for the statistics branch, and they rotated me through the colony ships,” she explained. “And that was even less exciting than it sounds, except for the one time I went out on the advance scout just to see what they did and we ended up jumping into a war.”

“That can happen when you go off the tunnel network,” Joe said. “It’s where we got most of our ship-to-ship fighting in, outside of the Stryx areas. In Stryx space, it was mainly surface actions on planets that treat war as a way of life. Which war did you jump into?”

“I don’t even know,” Kelly was embarrassed to admit. “We were all on the bridge for the jump, and when we came out, everything was crazy. Most of our ship’s systems were immediately disabled by a suppression field, and before the captain could take any action, the airlock was forced from the outside, and we were boarded by humanoids in armored space suits. They never took their helmets off, so they probably weren’t oxygen breathers.”

“This was around fourteen years ago?” Joe felt a tingling at the back of his brain.

“Yes. They lined us all up and I was sure we were going to be killed or taken prisoner, but instead they took our captain and left the bridge. A minute later, the captain was back and he told us not to worry, that they were letting us go. A few minutes after that, our systems came back online and the captain hit the emergency return. So my one war story isn’t even a story,” she added.

“Your hair was short then, like you had shaved your head and were letting it grow back,” Joe spoke slowly, looking off into the ceiling lights. “There were only six of you, four women and two men, and the ship wasn’t even armed. It was the Mengoth war, if you were still wondering. Not many human mercenaries fighting in that one. We were already losing the war when your ship popped into our lines, so we nailed you with a suppression field and did a quick recon. Two days later we were running for our lives, and if you’d jumped into Mengoth space then, none of you would ever have seen home.”