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  “Yaem has scheduled the production for two public recording sessions during the con,” Flower said, as people started trooping down the aisles. She activated the public address system for the full theatre. “Come, sit up front. We don’t have the immersive cameras out today because it’s just a walk-through, but we’re planning tours of the studio where you can see the animation artists at work.”

  “I can’t believe she’s doing this to us,” Julie grumbled to Bill. “Flower knows I get nervous in front of crowds.”

  “There’s nothing to be nervous about,” Harry told them, giving his sword cane a jaunty twirl. “You’ve both been through a lot more harrowing experiences than reading a few lines in front of a crowd that’s predisposed to like you.”

  “If it makes you nervous, I can hide the audience with a hologram of empty seats,” Flower offered over Julie’s implant. “I can polarize the light so they won’t even know it’s there.”

  “Let’s just get this over with,” Julie said. “Where did the director go?”

  “I’m back,” the Grenouthian replied, hurrying onto the stage. He was now sporting a silk ‘Director’ sash that he had left off wearing at the start of the previous season. “It will help keep the audience from getting confused about who’s in charge here. And the first line is Jorb’s.”

  “I don’t think the audience will find you all standing around talking about the Orion sector that interesting,” Flower said before the Drazen could even begin. “Why not skip forward to an action scene?”

  The director groaned, but he flipped forward a few sheets in the script. “Will you throw up an audio suppression field and translate for the audience, Flower?” he requested. “I’m going to start by framing the action for everybody. The evil Farling mastermind,” he pointed at M793qK, “has kidnapped a group of orphans with the intention of using them as test subjects for unspeakable genetic experiments. One of his minions has hypnotized the children into believing that they’re all on a field trip to a natural history museum. The Thinker,” here the bunny gestured in Lume’s direction, “has determined that the children have been stashed on an ore carrier that’s scheduled to depart for Orion Prime through—a wormhole?”

  “What’s wrong with a wormhole?” the chief writer demanded.

  “Just that they’re inherently unstable and nobody has actually tried using one for interstellar travel in about a hundred million years. It stretches the suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point.”

  “As opposed to the Stryx allowing the evil Farling mastermind to take a ship full of kidnapped orphans into a tunnel?”

  “Why an ore carrier?” M793qK asked. “I would have brought a jump-capable ship, probably armed to the teeth.”

  “Fine!” Jeanie barked and made a notation on her plastic script with a thermal pen.

  “So the Farling’s ship is about to leave the elevator hub, but The Blacksmith uses his sledgehammer to jam the docking coupling, and the evil Farling mastermind emerges alone from the ship to face our Everyday Superheroes,” the Grenouthian director said. “Positions, please. I believe I have the first line.”

  M793qK moved to one side of the stage, and the other actors all gathered together, brandishing their makeshift weapons. Jorb stood a bit apart, juggling a glittering arc of knives. The director, who also played The Producer, drew an abacus out of his pouch and began calculating their odds of victory.

  “Fifty-fifty,” the Grenouthian proclaimed in his char’s thunderous voice. “Attack!”

  Jorb acted first, gathering in his juggled knives and tossing each in turn at the Farling, but M793qK either batted them away or let them bounce harmlessly off his hard carapace. Razood charged forward, swinging his hammer, but the Farling excreted a spray of light oil from a gland in his lower body, and the Frunge lost all traction and skidded by.

  “Surround him,” Lume ordered, standing up from his chair to better coach the team. Bill went left, brandishing his shovel, and Harry unsheathed his sword from the cane and carefully skirted the oil slick to the right. M793qK rubbed out the Farling equivalent of a maniacal cackle and spread his wings.

  “Now, Refill,” Thinker shouted. “Throw the acid!”

  Julie hesitated for a moment and then brought her glass coffeepot with the orange decaf handle forward in a practiced motion to slosh the imaginary contents over the evil beetle. M793qK retracted his wings to protect the delicate membranes, and Harry and Bill simultaneously closed in, leading with the business ends of their respective weapons. Just before they came within reach, they both appeared to be stuck in place, and Bill’s left foot came out of his sneaker.

  “Cut!” the director shouted, and stuck his abacus back in his pouch. “What’s going on, M793qK? The script called for your slippery goo, not the glue.”

  “I’ve improved the goo so it turns into glue after a thirty-second delay,” the Farling said modestly.

  “How come I’m not attacking?” Yaem asked.

  “You’re offstage with Battle Royale, freeing the orphans,” Zick told him. “You can’t break the hypnosis, but the children think you’re an interactive anatomy exhibit in the museum collection and they’re following you to safety as the Vergallian deals with the minions.”

  “There’s no glue in the script,” Jeanie said, scowling at the Farling.

  “As the only winner of an individual Interspecies Anime Academy award on the stage, I thought you’d appreciate my improvisation,” M793qK said. “Now I have to get back to my clinic and check on those irradiated Hortens, but do what you want with the script, and I’ll be here for the scaffolding shoot. The glue should have lost its strength by now. Dave?”

  The retired salesman in his beetle costume waddled forward and exchanged places with the alien doctor, who exited backstage without another word.

  “Alright,” the director said. “Let’s take it from, ‘Throw the acid!’”

  Thirteen

  “Attention all hands, this is the captain,” Woojin announced over the public address system. “We have arrived at Union Station’s large-ship parking area. Thanks to Flower’s decision to use her elective stop to extend our stay, we’ll be remaining within a fifteen-minute taxi hop of the station for the next twelve days. Flower has also asked me to remind you all that unpaid work at either MultiCon or ElderCon will count against your volunteering requirement, but contrary to a rumor going around, morning calisthenics are NOT waived for the duration of the cons.”

  Julie stopped typing for long enough to listen to the announcement, and then realizing that she had lost her train of thought, went back to the start of her reply and read it out loud.

  “While your performance piece titled ‘Long-distance runner fleeing from alien invaders’ struck a chord with our staff, we regret to inform you that your request for a marathon-length course without any turns is beyond the scope of our facilities. Perhaps you could display a hologram of yourself running a course on Earth, or provide a series of still images? We have a limited number of tables and pegboards still available, and—” she started typing again where she’d left off, “we will be accepting reservations for the next five days.”

  “Why don’t you just let her perform live?” Flower asked.

  “Because you aren’t twenty-six miles long,” Julie replied, chiding herself for having spoken out loud and giving the Dollnick AI a chance to horn in. “She explained in her request that it’s important to flee in a straight line because any turns would give her alien pursuers a chance to make up the distance.”

  “Does a circle have an endpoint?”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “She can run around my circumference a few times without turning.”

  “But running from imaginary aliens isn’t really art,” Julie protested. “Anybody can do that.”

  “Anybody can do it, but not everybody can think of it,” Flower said. “You should be more open-minded about art. Just because it looks silly to you doesn’t mean nobody else wil
l appreciate it.”

  “So how much do I charge her? Do we need to cordon off an area all along her route? That would be expensive.”

  “She can choose a route when she arrives, and if there happen to be people in the way, that will just make it more realistic. Charge her for one table so that after the run she’ll have somewhere to sit and answer questions.”

  “Knock, knock,” Bianca said, leaning into Julie’s cubicle. “I’m heading over to Union Station to meet with the publisher who’s interested in licensing alien translation rights to my new series. Any interest in coming along and posing as my assistant?”

  “Would that really help you?” Julie asked.

  “One of the first business strategies Sixth taught me is that the more people you bring to a negotiation, the more seriously the other side takes you.”

  “Go,” Flower told Julie over her implant. “It will be a good learning experience.”

  Bianca glanced down at Julie’s feet and bobbed her head in approval. “Good. You’re wearing your magnetic cleats.”

  “I was planning on spending some time in the docking bay later today. We gave artists who can’t attend the con the option to ship us their work for display. It made more sense for everybody to direct their packages to a temporary holding area on Union Station rather than trying to time deliveries to meet us at our stops along the way here. Dewey is going to bring it all over in the bookmobile.”

  “Flower certainly seems willing to draft all hands on board to help with the cons,” the author said. “She’s not like any other artificial intelligence that I’ve ever encountered.”

  “I’ve heard that before, but Flower was the first I’d met, so I guess she always seemed normal to me,” Julie said, following Bianca into the lift tube. “How are we going to get from here to Union Station? Should I see if Dewey is ready to leave so we can hitch a ride?”

  “The publisher is sending a ship to fetch us. Have you ever read anything from Abs House?”

  “Abs House?” Julie tried not to laugh, but in the end, she couldn’t help herself. “As in six-pack abs?”

  “Dollnicks have twelve-packs and A. B. S. officially stands for Amor Besotted Species. Up until now, they’ve translated alien romances into English, but they’re ready to start going the other way. The publisher said that they’ve actually been getting requests for my first Gryphon shifter book from Huktra and Vergallian distributors.”

  “I don’t think I ever saw your Gryphon series. Did it come out in the last year or so? I’ve mainly been reading old library books since I joined Flower.”

  Both women activated their magnetic cleats and shuffled out of the lift tube capsule into Flower’s core. Julie couldn’t help flinching when she looked up and saw tiny people loading packages into a shuttle on the opposite side of the cylinder’s interior surface. They looked upside-down in her frame of reference, and the primitive part of her brain expected them to rain down on her head.

  “The first book in the series came out just two months ago, and it’s been my best launch since I took over from Sixth,” Bianca said. “I was beginning to worry that I wouldn’t have a hit of my own while writing as Bianca D’Arc, but maybe it’s better this way. If I had struck gold with my first new series, I might have felt bitter about not publishing it under my own name. But I’ve made a good living as a line author thanks to all of the Biancas who came before me.”

  “So there are other species with gryphons in their mythology?”

  The author smiled. “Art imitates life,” she said. “I never would have had the idea if I hadn’t met a couple traveling with a Tyrellian gryphon that treated the two of them as if they were her pets. We spent a week together at a Horten con, and Semmi, that’s the gryphon’s name, tried to click-train me.”

  “Gryphons are real? As in winged lions with beaks? Who would bring one to a con, and what’s click-training?”

  Bianca pointed at her ear, nodded, then said, “The taxi will be here in a minute. Yes, gryphons are real, a winged lioness in this case. The people traveling with her were posing as merch vendors, but the woman was really a freelance journalist working for the Galactic Free Press, and her husband was wearing a standard-issue poison detection ring, the kind EarthCent Intelligence gets from the Drazens. What was the last part of your question?”

  “Click-training?”

  “My parents had a parrot when I was growing up and he was very intelligent. My mother used a clicker to teach him tricks. I noticed that Semmi was watching me like, well, like a gryphon, and she would click her beak when I started doing something she approved of, and again when I completed the action. By the end of the day, I realized I was giving her treats and she was rewarding me with clicks.”

  “How did that work exactly?” Julie asked.

  “It was one of those outdoor cons the aliens love, with lots of medieval role-playing. John and Ellen camped next to me and we shared a lot of meals together. Every other time I stuck my fork in something Semmi liked, she would click her beak and look at me expectantly. If I gave it to her, she would click again, and if I didn’t, she gave me this sad-eyed gryphon look that made me feel like I was starving her. I learned pretty quickly to just share.”

  “That’s really cool. Did you use it in your book?”

  “Let’s just say there was a different type of positive reinforcement training going on. Oh, will you look at that!”

  A small craft with a full-ship advertising wrap printed with “Bianca D’Arc” in what must have been a hundred different fonts, sizes, and languages, settled to the deck about fifty steps away from them. Before they were halfway there, a Horten girl popped out and came to greet them.

  “Hi, I’m Marilla,” the alien introduced herself. “Blythe hired me to pick you up and show you how this ship operates. It will be at your disposal for the length of Flower’s stay at Union Station.”

  “I’m Julie, the assistant. She’s Bianca,” Julie said.

  “So you’re not a taxi driver?” Bianca asked.

  “I’m a part-owner in Tunnel Trips, the only Human ship rental agency on the tunnel network,” Marilla replied proudly. “You don’t have any baggage?”

  “We’re only coming for a meeting today,” Bianca told the Horten. They followed the alien back to the ship and in through the hatch. “You know the owner of Abs House?”

  “Is that what Blythe decided to call the new imprint?” the Horten asked, and politely covered her mouth so they wouldn’t see her teeth as she suppressed a laugh. “I went to the Open University with her daughter, Vivian, and Tunnel Trips was started by Vivian’s fiancé’s father and step-brother. It’s been a real eye-opener for me how rapidly entrepreneurial Humans can do things. Hortens like to study a business for fifty or a hundred years before we put any money at risk, but Humans want to be first-movers, kind of like the Grenouthians.”

  “Are you looking forward to reading romances translated into Horten?” Julie asked out of curiosity.

  Marilla’s skin began to change to a very strange color, but she seemed to be able to battle it back with an effort of will. “My mother made me promise not to read any of Blythe’s books until I get married, especially the ones translated from Dollnick,” she said. “Have you seen the covers?”

  “If they’re anything like regular alien romance covers, I know what you mean. Hey, how come it feels like we still weigh something?”

  “This close to Union Station, Gryph, the Stryx who owns everything, handles all of the small ships traveling in the area with manipulator fields. It’s safer for everybody this way, and he’ll keep accelerating the ship until we’re halfway there, and then flip it around and decelerate. The weightlessness will be so brief that you’ll barely notice. That reminds me. I was going to show you how to operate the rental.”

  “It doesn’t sound like we need to learn if this Gryph actually does all the work,” Bianca said. “Do you know Mrs. Oxford well?”

  “Not that well, though I’ve been a member of h
er focus group from the start. She buys lunch in an expensive restaurant for a bunch of us girls from advanced species once a cycle to get our input on books she’s interested in translating to Humanese.” The Horten paused for a moment as she replayed Bianca’s question in her head, and then she brightened. “I get it. You’re curious because I keep referring to Blythe by her first name. I haven’t really noticed what she does around Humans, but when she’s with the rest of us, she only uses the one name.”

  “I should start doing that myself,” Julie said.

  “When you come back from your meeting, I’ll give you both the standard orientation as if you were renting,” Marilla said. “You might want to pop through a tunnel to somewhere since Flower is here for almost two weeks. Did you like the ad wrap?”

  “It’s very distinctive, and it certainly made clear that you were there to pick us up,” Bianca said.

  “We usually use the wraps to advertise Tunnel Trips, but Blythe thought you would enjoy it. You can keep it after the rental and use part of it for a tablecloth the next time you do a book signing. It’s a nanoweave that the Sharfs use to protect new ships from interstellar dust when they’re parked at orbital dealerships. If you ball it up it will fit in your fist, but the wrinkles come out with a shake.”

  “That might actually work out well,” Bianca mused. “The shows I go to usually supply a plain tablecloth for the folding tables and fans are always coming up and asking me to sign books that are written by one of the other line authors.”

  “Are you an author too, Julie?” Marilla asked.

  “Not really. I’ve started on a few books but I’ve never actually finished anything.”

  “I tried writing a novel before I went to the Open University, but my friends all teased me until I gave up.”

  “I never knew that Hortens looked down on authors,” Bianca said. “I actually had the opposite impression.”

  “It’s complicated,” Marilla said. “Famous authors are some of the most respected members of high society. But my friends were always asking, ‘Who are you to write a novel? What have you ever done?’ And that made me think about all of the books I’d ever read. The authors had obviously lived much more exciting lives than I have, with the wisdom of hundreds of years behind them. It made me feel like I was some kind of fraud.”