Carnival On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 5) Read online

  “You knew all along!” Kelly accused Gryph.

  “Neither Libby nor myself would read a sealed time-delay message from Jeeves without his permission,” the station manager replied.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Kelly subvoced in a hiss. “If Jeeves could predict what Metoo would do so accurately, surely you or Libby could do the same.”

  “It’s Dorothy that we couldn’t predict,” Gryph replied. “Jeeves is our human expert.”

  “Kel? Are you with us?” Joe asked, noticing that his wife had stopped eating and was staring skeptically at the ceiling.

  “Sorry,” Kelly said out loud. “Just doing my duty as Carnival Queen.” She added in a subvoc, “Since the queue is down to seven complaints, let’s just let it slide for now, and I’ll let you know when I have time to catch up.”

  “They’ll be waiting,” Gryph said ominously.

  Fourteen

  Kelly brought Samuel along for the morning meeting with the Free Gem at their work site, knowing that the clones were suckers for the baby boy. She wasn’t consciously hoping that a few good baby tricks would result in a chocolate hand-out, but she wasn’t going to look a gift bag in the mouth.

  The moment she emerged from the lift tube, pushing the pram before her, the sound of a thousand throats in full song overwhelmed her implant. She caught a few words, something about solidarity and never giving in, but even the best translation technology had trouble with song lyrics. Kelly switched off her implant for a moment, and though the mouths of the massed sisters appeared to be moving in perfect unison, the result sounded like a siren wailing.

  Gwendolyn ran to her out of the mob, looking back at her sisters and making vigorous “cut” signs under her chin. The wailing died out and the large banners held aloft by groups of clones were allowed to droop, but not before Kelly noticed that at least one of them included English characters.

  “Forgive us, Ambassador!” Gwendolyn apologized abjectly. “We’re practicing our demonstration and you’re here early.”

  “Are you going to protest on the Gem decks?” Kelly asked in surprise. “I thought you were avoiding direct confrontation.”

  “We would never march against the Empire with songs and signs, they would crush us,” the clone told her. Then Gwendolyn looked at Kelly shyly and asked, “Can I push the baby cart?”

  “Of course,” Kelly subvoced, letting the voice box do her speaking for her. “Where are we going?”

  “The others are waiting at the same place we met last time,” the clone replied, accidentally popping a wheelie with the pram as she pushed down too hard. “Oops.”

  Kelly wanted to ask about the demonstration, but she saw that the young Gem was actually nervous about pushing the baby carriage, as if she suspected the slightest inattention could result in the unfamiliar device overturning itself and dumping Samuel in the dirt. Instead, the ambassador walked quietly by her side, occasionally glancing down at Samuel, who was in his usual post-feeding coma. When they arrived at the picnic table, the hot chocolate was already simmering.

  “Welcome, Ambassador,” Matilda greeted Kelly officially. “Please sit, we have much to discuss.”

  The Gem quickly rearranged their places to give Kelly a seat at the end of one bench, so the pram could be parked next to her, but Gwendolyn remained standing behind it, her hands on the push bar.

  “What demonstration are you practicing for?” Kelly asked through the voice box. “I’ve never seen so many Gem in one place before.”

  “It’s a new thing some of our sisters learned about from human co-workers on other jobs,” the green-haired leader told her. “It’s called a strike.”

  “How will a strike help you defeat the Empire?” Kelly asked cautiously. “Are you hoping to pressure the other species into helping you?”

  “Can strikes be used that way?” Betsy asked. “My understanding from Mort, the human dishwasher I worked with when I first came to the station, was that a strike is the only way to get money from The Man.”

  “Who’s the man?” Kelly asked, wondering if her diplomatic-quality implant had missed a vocabulary update.

  “Well, actually our direct employer is a Dollnick female, but she’s a subcontractor for The Man,” Matilda insisted. “We found out that they aren’t even paying us a quarter as much as the workers who unload ships on the core, and all of their labor is actually done by mechanicals!”

  “So you’re on strike for higher wages,” Kelly subvoced with relief. “I didn’t understand. Is the pay really that bad? You seem to have enough for chocolate.” She regretted this last bit as soon as it came out of the voice box.

  “We all sleep here in the fields and wash up with the irrigation equipment,” Betsy replied. “You don’t want to know what we’ve been using for fertilizer.”

  “The construction management firm is supposed to come to inspect our work today, and since we finished everything in the current assignment ahead of schedule, we decided to surprise them with a strike,” Sue continued, as Kelly slipped her feet back into her sandals. Betsy’s revelation had taken the joy out of feeling the rich soil between her toes.

  “I don’t think you understood,” Matilda added, “The money isn’t for us to spend on comfort, it’s for the Farlings. They’ve agreed to start the pilot work of reviving our genetic lines through a credit arrangement, but we have to start making regular payments almost immediately. All of the Free Gem are saving up for it now.”

  “Do you have a time table?” Kelly asked.

  “It all depends on what kind of jobs we can get in the future and whether we live long enough,” Matilda replied. “The Farlings are very expensive and we don’t have any options.”

  “The Stryx provide loans for newly recognized AI so they can purchase bodies and become mobile sentients,” Kelly commented. “Perhaps they would be willing to make a similar arrangement with you. The Farlings could string you along for a very long time, raising the price with each individual restored.”

  “We only need one healthy example from each genetic line,” Gwendolyn reminded the ambassador. “We’ll clone more until we have enough natural births to keep our population from collapsing.”

  “But the ambassador is correct,” Matilda said gravely. “The Farlings can keep raising the price. It would be much safer to make a one-time payment, however large, as long as we can get a loan. All of this is new to us,” she explained to Kelly apologetically.

  “So can I invite the Stryx into the conversation now?” Kelly asked hopefully. “I can’t promise you they’ll help, but they certainly won’t sell you out to the Empire.”

  “We haven’t reached a final decision yet, but in the interim, it’s been decided that we can hold exploratory talks with the Stryx when you are present,” Matilda informed her.

  “So, yes?” Kelly asked, just to make sure she understood.

  “Yes,” the green-haired leader replied.

  “Libby?” Kelly asked out loud. “The Gem have agreed to speak to you as long as I’m present. Do you have any speakers in the ceiling here?”

  “I can direct audio to any location on the station using interference patterns,” the station librarian asserted. “Are you going to introduce me to your friends?”

  The Gem all stirred uncomfortably in their places as Libby spoke, and Kelly realized that the Stryx was speaking in Gem. She considered switching off the external voice box and letting Libby translate for her, but she decided it might confuse the clones and stuck with subvocing.

  “Libby, this is Matilda, Gwendolyn, Sue, Sarah and Betsy,” Kelly went around the table, hoping that the Stryx wouldn’t comment on the likely source of the names. “Ladies, we’re talking with Stryx Libby, the Union Station librarian. She is the offspring of Stryx Gryph, who owns and manages the station.”

  “You just speak to the ceiling?” Matilda asked.

  “There’s no need to look up,” Libby replied. “As long as I’m welcome, I’ll just listen in over Kelly’s implant.�
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  “The Gem are about to go on strike for higher wages, so they can start saving money to pay the Farlings and recover their old genetic lines,” Kelly recapped, bringing the Stryx librarian up to date. “It might not have been appropriate, but I suggested they ask you about providing financing to help restore their species, the same as you do for new AI.”

  “I want to see a new Gem baby in my lifetime,” Gwendolyn spoke up suddenly. “I helped raise thousands of sisters in my first job, but I want to see a Gem baby boy.”

  “Perhaps I can help with that right now,” Libby replied, giving Kelly a case of instant goose bumps. Was her Stryx friend about to add omnipotence to her bag of tricks? The air a few steps away from the picnic table wavered for a moment, and then a hologram formed of a humanoid holding a baby. Neither looked the least bit Gem, but they didn’t look human either.

  “Are they really us?” Sue asked in awe.

  “This hologram is from the image library of your civilization in the days before cloning,” Libby confirmed. “You probably don’t remember it from the Kasilian auction, Kelly, but after the Gem didn’t bid on the archive, Jeeves paid the reserve amount and put it aside for me to add to the Union Station library.”

  Kelly looked around at the Free Gem leadership, who were staring raptly at the image with shining eyes. It took her a moment to realize that their eyes were shining because they were full of tears, which began running down their slanted cheekbones and dripping slowly below their ears. She was so used to the Gem by this point that she had come to think of them as clones of some lost offshoot of humanity, but in reality, the Gem didn’t resemble humans as much as the Vergallians or Drazen did.

  “Are there other images with children?” Kelly asked.

  “There are millions of images with children of all ages,” Libby replied. “My projection isn’t a true hologram, the original images are two-dimensional, but I’m running a filter that makes them appear three-dimensional from the front. You can access the originals on any active display just by requesting the Gem image collection from the library.”

  “Do you have any pictures with more than two generations?” Gwendolyn asked timidly.

  The air shimmered in answer, and a hologram showing a large family group, with an elderly couple seated on chairs in the foreground, babies on their laps, and more humanoids of every age standing in a group to their sides and behind, with the tallest at the back.

  “According to the indexing information, this picture was taken at a wedding,” Libby explained. “The couple manacled together at the wrist would be the bride and groom.”

  “They made the tall people stand in back?” Gwendolyn asked in wonder. “The Empire Gem would call that blasphemy.”

  “Humans do it all the time,” Kelly explained. “It’s so you can fit everybody in the picture. The children and the seated elders go in the front, then the older children and shorter adults, and primarily the tall men in the back row.”

  “Is there any way to find pictures of our people from the genetic lines the Farlings preserved?” Matilda asked.

  “I don’t know how old the genetic samples are,” Libby replied. “The Farlings are one of the border species and most of their empire isn’t connected to the tunnel network. This image library was created many years before your people began cloning, so any matches would be partial at best.”

  “Do you have more than two generations in your family?” Gwendolyn asked Kelly, looking down at Samuel.

  “Yes, both of my parents are still alive,” Kelly replied. “In fact, they’ll be visiting Union Station in a few months if you want to meet them.”

  “They’re all better looking than us,” Sarah remarked suddenly, the first time Kelly recalled the white-haired clone saying anything in her presence. “Could we see a few more images, Stryx Librarian?”

  “Certainly,” Libby replied. “I’ll start a random shuffle. Just tell me when to stop.”

  Image after image of the pre-cloning Gem appeared as synthesized holograms, each remaining for around five seconds before being replaced by the next. Samuel, who had woken up and could see the colorful display, made grabbing motions with his hands when a particularly bright bit of clothing flashed by.

  “They are more attractive than us,” Gwendolyn agreed. “And it’s not just the clothing and the hair. I wonder how we ended up being the genetic line chosen for cloning.”

  “You don’t know?” Kelly asked in amazement.

  “All of the other history we were taught is false,” Matilda replied. “Why would that part be different?”

  “Well, what’s the official story?” Kelly was genuinely curious now. All she really knew about Gem history was what Libby had told her years ago. The Gem forerunners had gradually replaced natural birth with laboratory clones, stopped cloning men, and then reduced the number of genetic lines until there were only two left. The last two promptly began a war, leaving Gem as the sole survivor.

  “After the great sickness, the leaders of our people gathered together on Morningstar for a council,” Matilda recited in a sing-song, obviously repeating something she had learned by rote as a child. “Ten thousand shaved their heads and passed below the Joombley rod, and behold, Gem was the tallest. The people all declared their love and devotion to Gem and begged her to become their future. But there was an Evil One, may her name be forever forgotten, who insisted that her own inferior genetic line be perpetuated.”

  “Gem was straight and pure, but the Evil One was twisted and filthy,” Sue picked up the story in the same cadence. “For thousands of years, the noble Gem did everything to help and nurture the replicas of the Evil One, may her name be erased from history. But the replicas had no gratitude for Gem, and tried to subjugate our sisters with tricks and alien alliances.”

  “When our suffering grew too great, Gem cried out to the Creator of the universe, asking her to punish the Evil One,” Matilda resumed the story. “In an instant, all of the unholy replicas were dissolved into vapor, and only Gem remained as the inheritor of the true people.”

  “I guess it does sound a little suspicious,” Kelly ventured, when it became clear that the recital had drawn to an abrupt end.

  “Even as children we didn’t believe it,” Matilda assured her. “And looking at these images, I don’t believe we were the tallest, either. Is it possible to know, Librarian?”

  “Comparing individuals with artifacts of known size shown in the same images, it appears that you are of average height for the female of your predecessor species, although it’s possible that had changed by the time cloning on a large scale began,” Libby reported.

  “Do you know the true history of the Gem?” Sue asked.

  “I preserve whatever histories come my way, but I can’t vouch for the veracity of the authors,” Libby replied. “Your people were already cloning when you developed interstellar travel, and we weren’t monitoring you closely since yours was a peaceful and well-ordered civilization. The evidence indicates that the driving force behind your cloning movement was to allow space exploration with pre-jump technology. Small robotic ships with cloning facilities are much more economically feasible than giant colony ships carrying self-contained ecosystems.”

  “You mean, the Gem started cloning to explore space?” Kelly interrupted.

  “Many species began their space explorations in similar fashion,” Libby replied. “Of course, most of them attempt to create biologically viable populations for natural breeding to resume. Some of the historical accounts claim that a programming error led the initial wave of robotic exploration ships to produce colonies of clones from a single individual, and that this led to a genetically simplified population of expatriates who were ostracized by the home world as freaks. Gem didn’t join the tunnel network until after the wars took place, so my history of the prior period isn’t complete.”

  “Why didn’t you do something to stop them?” Kelly demanded.

  “The drive by the Gem to limit their species to
a single individual was not unique in our experience. It’s a fairly common evolutionary path among sentients who achieve the technical ability to replicate themselves, though it usually results in instability and decay. Also, the events played out over tens of thousands of years, and none of the parties in the various wars wanted outside interference,” the Stryx librarian replied.

  “Will the Stryx help us with the Farlings?” Matilda asked, getting back to the main point.

  “Since the Farlings hold the only known archive of genetic samples from your people, there may only be one opportunity to recreate a viable population without resorting to biological synthesis,” Libby replied. “We are willing to help, but the older Stryx believe that we, and you, should wait until the Gem achieve a stable solution for the current political situation.”

  Kelly was about to protest this seemingly insensitive reply, but Matilda spoke first.

  “That makes sense,” the clone said. “It would be criminal for us to waste what may be the only chance to revive our genetic diversity just because we’re in a hurry. After we defeat the Empire, there will be plenty of time to negotiate with the Farlings.”

  Samuel was fully awake at this point and passing loud judgment on every new hologram that appeared. Libby had never stopped the shuffle play.

  “Can I pick him up?” Gwendolyn asked.

  “Go ahead,” Kelly replied, wondering if Libby’s answer meant that the Gem would never get the chance to hold a baby boy of her own species.

  From out of sight beyond the curvature of the deck, the Gem started singing again. Matilda looked up, her eyes fierce.

  “The strike is starting,” she proclaimed. “We only have three hours to convince them to raise our wages before we have to get back to work.”