Guest Night on Union Station (3 page)

“Uh, Libby?” the junior consul subvoced.

“Yes, Daniel,” the Stryx librarian replied.

“You wouldn’t know the rules of this game, would you?”

“Jeeves and Paul are still making them up, but I believe you’re just starting a warm-up round. The goal is to catch the incoming projectiles and to shoot them back at the appropriate color-coded targets. You have to pay attention to the color as you make the catch because you can’t see it once the ball is in the basket.”

“I didn’t get a basket.”

“Oh dear, that could be awkward. I suppose you could try catching with your hands, but it’s likely to be messy.”

A brightly colored sphere about the size of a marble zipped past Daniel’s face shield, and he turned his head to see Samuel catch it in his basket.

“Five points,” the boy mouthed, and then he pointed the open end of the basket at something over the junior consul’s shoulder and pressed the button on the handle. Daniel twisted his head to watch as the paintball shot the gap between two more flying bodies and splattered on a moving red target disc. “Ten points.”

Daniel saw a blue ball coming towards him in a lazy trajectory and tried to contort his body so it would miss, but it shattered on his chest. The paint stuck to the levitation suit rather than spraying all over the place, which he supposed was necessary to prevent the air space from turning into a cloud of colored droplets.

“What happens after the warm-ups?” he subvoced.

“In their beta-testing, the second round involved shooting at other flyers after the catch. They were talking about doing something with teams as well. I could play back the instructions Jeeves gave the people who arrived on time, but if you don’t pay more attention to what’s happening, you’ll be declared a casualty and your suit will put you down.”

“So each suit can be controlled remotely?” He tried a dolphin-style kick to work his way towards the center of the mob where he’d be out of the path of the paintballs, wherever they were coming from.

“Yes. All of the pieces you’re wearing include transceivers to track the scoring and to allow Jeeves to override bad maneuvering decisions. You wouldn’t want a child running head-on into a speeding adult.”

“How can anybody speed in this stuff? It’s sort of like being underwater, or maybe something a little less dense.”

“You’re not wearing the booties either?”

Daniel looked around again and saw that the other players all had plastic over their shoes. Then he noticed that some of them were moving pretty quickly without making swimming motions, as if something was thrusting them forward.

“I guess they were out of booties,” he subvoced. “I really didn’t know it was going to be this crowded. I thought there would be a ribbon cutting and maybe a local reporter.”

“Incoming,” Libby said.

“What?” Daniel looked to one side and then the other. It hadn’t occurred to him that the paintballs which the players on the edges of the crowd didn’t catch would keep on traveling until they hit something. He had foolishly looked for safety in the center of the play space, but now he was alone and projectiles were coming in from every direction. He squirmed and twisted like a fish on a hook, but before he could find a Dollnick to hide behind, a little red light began blinking on the helmet’s visor. The levitation suit stopped responding and lowered him to the floor.

Kelly was wandering around the deck below to watch Samuel, and she greeted her junior consul loudly as soon as he removed his helmet. “You look like a Jackson Pollock. Maybe you’re getting too old for this sort of thing.”

“I didn’t get a basket,” Daniel shouted back. “Or booties.”

Kelly shook her head to show she hadn’t understood and led the junior consul over to the calliope, where Joe had his upper body in the guts of the machine. She unclipped something from his belt and the canned carnival sounds faded into the distance. “At least now we won’t have to shout,” the ambassador said. “Anything new with your conference?”

“Nothing Donna and the girls can’t handle. Oh, wait. I thought it would be a good idea to have a keynote speaker this year, and the delegates who took the time to fill out my questionnaire agreed. The thing is, they all wanted to give the honor to the ambassador from their host species.”

“You mean the consortium world communities wanted the Drazen ambassador, the terraformed world communities wanted the Dollnick ambassador and the academies wanted a Verlock?”

“Yes. The back-and-forth was getting a bit contentious, so I suggested you as a compromise.”

“That’s sweet of you, Daniel, but I’m going to be very busy preparing for the Stryx open house.”

“Too late,” the junior consul informed his boss. “They already voted and you’re it.”

Three

“Wow! You’ve got so much cool stuff. I wish Metoo was here to see it all.” Dorothy gazed in awe at the ceiling-high row of deep shelves packed with a crazy array of every object imaginable. Most of it was obviously of alien manufacture, but beneath the counter, which ran the whole breadth of the gigantic room, she spotted some human-style luggage, sporting gear, and a pair of umbrellas, which was especially strange since it didn’t rain on Stryx stations.

“It’s not our stuff, or at least, we don’t think of it that way,” Libby replied. “The purpose of a lost-and-found is to return lost items to their rightful owners, although that isn’t always possible for temporal and spatial reasons. Your job is to help anybody who comes looking for something they’ve lost, and to catalog items the maintenance bots bring in if nobody claims them.”

“I understand, and I really appreciate that you hired me,” Dorothy replied, rummaging through the closest shelf. Unlike her mother, she never felt the urge to look at the ceiling while talking to the station librarian. “Just give me a little time and I bet I’ll get the whole place cleaned out.”

“That’s very ambitious of you, Dorothy, but I should explain that most of the owners are long since deceased. And you are only looking at the first row of shelves. This storeroom is approximately the same size as Mac’s Bones.”

“Oh,” the sixteen-year-old said, her mouth gaping. “Then there must be a gazillion things in here.”

“I really wish that Jeeves had never introduced that term to my students. It’s very imprecise. This particular lost-and-found is for items abandoned on the nitrogen/oxygen decks of the station, and the bots bring in a few hundred items a day.”

“So you’re adding a little over a hundred thousand pieces a year,” Dorothy estimated. “That’s at least a million items a decade, or more than ten million a century. Since Gryph built the station over fifty million years ago, I’d say it’s got to be near a gazillion by now.”

“If your initial assumptions were correct, the number would be five trillion, but you made three mistakes. Can you tell me what they are?”

“But I graduated already,” Dorothy complained. “Do you still quiz Blythe and Chastity like they never left school?”

“Yes,” her former teacher replied.

“Oh. Then I guess I shouldn’t have started by assuming that a few hundred items a day was three hundred.”

“Correct.”

“And I forgot that some people might come looking for their lost stuff, so the number could actually be a little less.”

“I’ll give you partial credit.”

“Why partial credit?”

“We’re able to figure out from our station imaging who owns most of the items left behind by visitors, and in those cases, we contact them and arrange for delivery,” Libby explained. “For example, we get lots of luggage forgotten in restaurants or bathrooms by travelers who are waiting for connections between ships. By the time they realize they’ve left something behind they’re light-years away, but as long as we can identify the owner we’ll send their luggage after them.”

“Doesn’t that get expensive?”

“Most ships coming through the station will accept lost luggage deliveries for their destinations as a common courtesy, though many of the lost pieces are of such low value that the owners we contact tell us to dispose of them. There’s also the fact that the maintenance bots can have difficulty differentiating between lost objects and litter, and truthfully, some items may only have temporary value in the eyes of their owners.”

“Like what?”

“Take a look in the blue bin under the counter.”

Dorothy pulled out the blue bin and saw that it was full of silvery jewelry. On further examination, it became apparent that all of the rings and bracelets were made out of foil, probably from food wrappers or some other disposable packaging material. Some of it was pretty elaborate, including long, flexible chains.

“This is all throw-away stuff that people make while they’re waiting for a connection,” she declared confidently.

“Are you sure that the sentients who created those pieces would feel the same way?”

“They wouldn’t have left them behind otherwise.”

“Maybe so,” Libby replied with a sigh. “But the maintenance bots tend to assume that anything shiny is of value, and we don’t like to discourage their initiative just because they aren’t sentient. Have you figured out your third erroneous assumption?”

“Can I have a hint?”

“Ka-ching.”

“You don’t keep it all forever,” Dorothy exclaimed. “Of course, that would just be silly. So how often do you sell everything?”

“The shelving units you see run on a track system which snakes back and forth, leaving enough space between the rows to get in and retrieve items. From the end of the back row, the shelves travel up the side of the hold and enter the front row again. When all of the shelves in the back row are full, we open that side of the room and invite the second-hand dealers to come and bid on lots from the exposed row. The last sale was twenty-three years ago.”

“How many, uh, customers come into the lost-and-found each day looking for things on the shelves?”

“The vast majority of the lost items that come in are from travelers. You might see a dozen walk-ins during a busy shift, depending on the way the clocks used by the various species are overlapping that day. Other shifts, you might be here five hours and not see a soul.”

“That’ll be great once my course work for the Open University picks up,” Dorothy said enthusiastically. “Hey. Is that why Paul called this a ‘work-study’ job?”

“Yes. When Paul was an Open University student, he was employed by the lost-and-found until he started doing his own lab work.”

“So how do I catalog stuff the bots bring in?”

“Flazint will be staying late today to show you the system. When I asked her to work overtime, she requested a short break to get her hair misted. Ah, here she comes now.”

For a brief moment, Dorothy thought that a large bird of prey had entered the lost-and-found, but then she realized that it was an elaborate upswept hairdo of the sort favored by young Frunge women. She marveled that Flazint could walk through doors without damaging the trellis work that provided a template for her hair vines.

“Hi. I’m Flazint.”

“I’m Dorothy. I love your hair. How do you keep from breaking it?”

“Practice,” Flazint replied. “You start with a flexible training-trellis, so even if you run into stuff, the worst that can happen is a few split vines. I usually don’t come to work like this, but it’s the start of pollination season and it’s the first year that my ancestors are letting me date.”

“Cool. Libby was just telling me how most of the lost stuff gets found before we catalog it, but she said you’d show me what to do. I feel bad about making you stay late, though.”

“I’m happy to get the overtime. I’m saving to move out with friends, but don’t tell anybody,” Flazint added hastily. She eyed the human girl closely, wondering if her confidence might be misplaced.

“I won’t,” Dorothy promised, pressing a fist to her forehead. It was a gesture she’d seen the little Frunge children on Aisha’s show make when they were promising to be good, and it seemed to satisfy Flazint.

“Let’s get started then. The first step is to separate the legitimate lost items from the litter,” the Frunge girl explained. “All of the new stuff goes in the marked bins under the counter at this end. The borderline cases, like the foil jewelry, we keep for a little less than nine days before recycling.”

“A little less than nine days?”

“A Verlock boy who worked here like a couple million years ago came up with the system, so it’s all based on their calendar period of a Klunk. Whenever you come to work, you should take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the new items in the bins under the counter at the intake end. The bins are sitting on a continuous belt that ages them towards the cold-storage end of the counter, a journey that takes one Klunk. The bots will then remove anything in blue bins for recycling, and whoever is working the counter is responsible for cataloging the unclaimed items in the white bins.”

“Is there anything in the white bins now?” Dorothy left the Frunge girl behind as she ran down the length of the counter, so enthusiastic was she to get to work. “Is this one ready?”

“Well, normally you wouldn’t pull it off until the bots take the blue one that’s ahead of it, but I guess we can make an exception for training purposes,” the girl called back. She was taking her time moving down the counter because she had to walk with her head turned sideways, so as not to catch one of her hairdo’s wings on the shelves.

“Great!” Dorothy slid out the heavy white bin and heaved it onto the counter. “Wow. Is that a real gun?”

“Don’t squeeze the—don’t fire it again. Just put it down on the counter. The maintenance bots are supposed to report abandoned weapons immediately, but the non-lethal varieties don’t count.”

“Did I break anything?” Dorothy asked, more embarrassed than frightened by the accidental discharge. Other than the “Vrrriiippth” sound it had made, there was no sign that the gun had fired.

“It’s alright. That’s a disposable Dollnick stun pistol. They’re popular with traders who want protection but don’t want to hurt anybody. We get them all the time because there’s no resale market for used ones, and traders who buy something better or decide they don’t need one anymore just leave them wherever. Press the little yellow stud on the side of the barrel. There, it’s on safety now.”

“So how do I catalog it? Are there tags to fill out or something?”

“First everything gets holo-imaged. See the easy-round at the end of the counter?”

“Easy-round? I don’t think my implant got that right,” Dorothy said.

“You know, for throwing round clay vessels,” the girl explained. “I thought all the biologicals had them.”

“You mean a potter’s wheel? That’s a big one.”

“Just put the stunner on there and give it a gentle spin.”

Dorothy gingerly placed the Dollnick weapon on the turntable and used her forefinger to impart a rotational force.

“Dollnick stun pistol, model 625 A, Rev L2,” an artificial voice intoned. “Ready for storage.”

“Now take it and find a place for it on the shelves directly behind you,” Flazint said. She carefully hopped up to sit on the counter, keeping the wings of her hairdo parallel to the shelves. “The metal plate on the floor in front of each shelving unit is a lift pad, so if there isn’t enough space on the shelves you can reach, just tell it to raise you up. It activates a three-sided restraining field so you can’t fall off.”

“No, I can fit it in here,” Dorothy said. She crouched and placed the Dollnick weapon in the hollow space of what was either a floatation device from an ocean-going vessel or some sort of giant Frisbee. “Is that it?”

“Now you read the shelf number out loud for the cataloging agent to record.”

“It’s in Frunge,” Dorothy complained.

“Just tell it you want Humanese.”

“English, please,” Dorothy said to the shelving unit. The active display markings on the edge of the shelf where she’d placed the gun changed into a series of letters and numbers. The closest designation to the lifesaver was JER 29/13, so she spoke the code out loud.

The cataloging system’s voice confirmed the location with a verbose recitation. “Dollnick stun pistol, model 625 A, Rev L2, stored at location JER 29/13.”

“So if somebody comes in looking for an item that was lost a long time ago, we get the description and the lost-and-found catalog tells us where to look?” Dorothy asked.

“Maybe once a cycle a visitor to the station comes by to check if they lost something here years ago, but for most transients, it’s just the stuff under the counter,” the Frunge girl told her. “But remember, the Stryx don’t notify station residents when they leave stuff lying around because they don’t want to turn the bots into a free maid service. So most of the walk-in traffic we get is the people who live here stopping in to see if something they lost has turned up.”

“I think I could fit more stuff on these shelves if I just rearranged things a bit.”

“You can’t start rearranging unless you want to clean off the whole shelf, re-holo all of the items to take them out of inventory, and then reenter them all again. If you ever get to start with an empty shelving unit, begin at the bottom and pack the shelves as tightly as you can without hiding stuff. So you can’t put small things behind big things, or pack items in an empty suitcase. You’ll get the hang of it.”

“So the shelving units are moving the opposite direction of the belt under the counter,” Dorothy surmised. “That way, the last few months of stuff is always right here at the front.”

“Yup, except it takes at least twenty years to fill each row of shelves. And that’s pretty much the whole job,” Flazint concluded. “Go ahead and try another one.”

Dorothy pulled out a surprisingly heavy object that resembled a rough file, with a handle made from two pieces of steel that were sprung apart at the end, forming a gap. The bent steel ends on either side of the gap featured a sharpened edge, one of which had a half-round cutout.

“Any idea what this is?” she asked the Frunge girl.