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  Dave waddled out onto the stage in his beetle costume and accepted a tomato from the Verlock. He showed off how all of his limbs worked by waving to the audience and then waddled back off.

  “Impressive multi-faceted eyes,” Grynlan observed.

  “Yes, amazing what Humans can do with too much time and money. Next up is Best Drazen, and the winner is Vivian, from Union Station.

  An attractive Drazen walked onto the stage, waving to the audience with both of her six-fingered hands, and she accepted the tomato from the Verlock using her prosthetic tentacle. The audience gave her a big round of applause.

  “I can’t believe how good she’s gotten with that tentacle,” Jorb said. “We’ll have to meet up later.”

  “You know her?” Bill asked. “Is she really a Drazen pretending to be a human in disguise?”

  “No, she’s a friend from Union Station, and she’s the most connected Human I know. Her mother is a co-owner in InstaSitter and helped subsidize Flower. Vivian’s father runs EarthCent Intelligence, her aunt owns the Galactic Free Press, and her fiancé is the EarthCent ambassador’s son. A few of us always ate lunch together at the Open University, and if you ever need a ship rental while you’re here, my friend Marilla is part-owner in Tunnel Trips.”

  “Oh, I met her with Bianca,” Julie said. “She’s really pretty.”

  “Marilla?” Rinka glared at Jorb. “Isn’t that a Horten name? You were friends with a Horten woman at the Open University?”

  “Did I say ‘My friend?’” Jorb backtracked and began to stammer. “I meant ‘Our friend,’ and it wasn’t like that at all. I mean, she’s dating the Horten ambassador’s son, and…”

  “I’m just teasing, Jorb.” Rinka giggled and rolled her eyes. “Males.”

  “Incoming ping from Bianca,” Flower announced over Julie’s implant.

  “I’ll take it,” the girl subvoced, and pointed at her ear. “Bianca?”

  “Flower told me where you are, and I brought somebody I want you to meet, but it looks like you might be on a date.”

  “Oh, you mean Bill?” Julie asked as she stood. “We just came to see what it’s like—we aren’t even wearing costumes. When we go to the ball together later it will be a date.”

  “If you’re sure. We’re just inside the doors at the end of your aisle.”

  “I don’t see you.” Julie squinted in the dim light past a couple of cosplayers. “Are you behind the pair of jaguars—that’s you?”

  “We’ll be right outside.”

  “Bianca wants me to meet somebody,” Julie excused herself, while on the stage, the Verlock awarded a tomato for the Best Frunge to a woman with what looked like a sculpted shrubbery on her head. “I’ll ping you if it’s going to be a while.”

  “Don’t worry about us, but you’re not getting out of our date later,” Bill said. “Jorb has been teaching me how to dance.”

  “This I have to see,” Rinka commented under her breath.

  When Julie got out into the corridor, she was immediately struck by the family resemblance between the two cosplayers, or at least, their costumes. They looked as much like jaguars as people could look without being down on all fours, but one was definitely older than the other, almost like a mother and a daughter.

  “That’s an amazing makeup job,” Julie said. “I can’t even tell which of you is Bianca. Did you get it done in one of the workshops?”

  “We both have a lot of practice with Horten cosmetics from decades of going to cons,” the younger jaguar said, and Julie recognized Bianca’s voice. “This is Sixth,” she introduced the other woman.

  “You mean, Bianca the Sixth?”

  “Pleased to meet you,” the older jaguar said, pulling in her claws as she extended a paw to shake hands. “Seventh has told me so much about you.”

  “She has?”

  “And that you’ve been working with Geoffrey,” the younger Bianca said. “Do you have time to grab a coffee from one of the pushcarts? There won’t be any wait time with everybody in the theatres, and Sixth and I have been on our feet all day.”

  “Sure,” Julie said. “By the way, I didn’t know that everybody would be wearing costumes for the cosplay finals. I spent the day handing out prizes at the art show and taking down the unsold works to prepare them for shipping back to the artists who couldn’t attend.”

  “Seventh told me that you have a talent for organization,” the older jaguar said as they headed for the temporary food court. “I went through the art show just before you started breaking it down. I would have gotten here earlier, but I had some loose ends to tie up on Earth.”

  “It was my first con and Flower helped a lot,” Julie told her. “And when neither of us knew, I could always ask Geoffrey or Bianca. I mean, Seventh.”

  The two jaguars exchanged a look, and Sixth’s tail twitched. “He didn’t bite your head off?”

  “Geoffrey? He’s a little gruff if you catch him while he’s doing something, but he knows more about cons than Flower. He’s too old to work full-time according to Dollnick rules, but I think he put in as many hours as me during the con, and he really helped with the addicts.”

  “Addicts?” Sixth asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you about Flower buying the contact list for ConAnon?” the younger Bianca said to her senior. “It worked out really well in the end, but some of the hardcore panel warriors got a bit high on the whole thing and needed to be talked down.”

  “Geoffrey brought a whole group of them to the art show and I gave them a guided tour,” Julie said. “I couldn’t believe how much they all knew about science fiction and fantasy characters. I thought that most of the pieces in the show were straight from the imaginations of the artists, but it turned out that half of them were fan art. There was even a collection of paintings somebody did based on one of Geoffrey’s series, but he didn’t say anything about it himself until one of the ConAnon crowd pointed it out.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t make a big deal out of it to blow his own horn,” Seventh said. “Was he upset?”

  “The woman who recognized the characters said something about smelling a lawsuit in the works, but Geoffrey just laughed it off and said that if somebody wanted to portray his characters in oil paint, it was an honor.”

  The two jaguars exchanged another look. Then the three women arrived at the band of empty tables that extended in a narrow strip all along Flower’s circumference between the area that was now being cleared for the ball and the end section of the deck where the merchants and art show had been located. A young waitress in a cute bunny outfit arrived just after they sat. She hopped the final few steps to their table.

  “Is the contest over already?” the girl asked. “I thought we had another hour to get ready for the rush. If you want something hot I have teabags, but we haven’t even started brewing coffee yet.”

  “Do you have any juice?” Sixth asked.

  “Fresh squeezed. We have orange, apple, grapefruit, pear, grape, lemon—”

  “Apple for me.”

  “Regular tea,” Seventh requested.

  “I’ll have the same,” Julie said and tried not to giggle as the waitress hopped off. “I hope she doesn’t try that carrying our drinks.”

  “Not a fan of cosplay yourself?” Sixth asked.

  “I’m not sure I even knew what it was a couple of months ago. I can’t get over how realistic the two of you look. If I had seen you anywhere other than at the con, I would have taken you for a species that crossed humans with cats.”

  “I’m just glad that zombie cosplay went out of fashion. I went to a con around forty years ago where—now that I think about it, I’d rather not.”

  “I took the liberty of discussing the plot we talked about with Sixth and she thought it had real potential,” the younger Bianca said. “Then we got to reminiscing about how I became her understudy. I was about ten years older than you are now, but I wasn’t really that much further along as a writer.”

  “
No, what impressed me was your level-headedness and how you could be enthusiastic about the characters without getting them confused with reality,” Sixth said, and turned to Julie. “I’m the last person who would tell my readers how to live, but some of the most enthusiastic ones can be a little scary, if you know what I mean. Once at a con, a group of women who fancied themselves shifters actually asked me to move to their den and become the alpha female. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and didn’t look back until I was on the train home.”

  “I can see where that would be uncomfortable,” Julie said. “Geoffrey told me a story about some ex-mercenaries who returned to Earth and tried to talk him into traveling to one of those little countries where the population really crashed after the Stryx opened Earth. They wanted to stage a coup and start an empire with him at the head.”

  “We were still together when that happened,” Sixth said. “I can’t help thinking that if they had asked him six months later he might have taken them up on the proposition.”

  “I’ve never gotten that feel from him, maybe he’s just mellowed a lot as he aged,” Julie said. “Have you seen him since you got here?”

  “I haven’t seen him in fifteen years,” Sixth replied. “I spent a number of years away from Earth, and when I returned, there was a long hand-written letter from him waiting for me. It detailed his plans to buy an old country estate and convert it into a retreat for authors and artists. He invited me to join him in setting it up, and I really didn’t know what to think, it was so unlike him. I, well, that’s all water over the dam, but I would like to ask him what happened.”

  “Geoffrey was pretty wrapped up in himself when I first met him,” the younger Bianca explained to Julie. “I can’t really believe the change myself, and I keep waiting for him to slip up and show his true colors.”

  “Like now?” a man’s voice inquired dryly, and the women all looked up to see Geoffrey standing there in a jacket with two extra sleeves sewn across the front in the style of humans living on open worlds who emulated their Dollnick landlords. “Flower sent me as a messenger, Julie. Your Drazen friends are two acts away from getting on stage to sing.”

  “I really don’t want to miss that,” Julie said. “Will you still be here in ten minutes?”

  “I think I’d like to see it too,” the current Bianca said, giving Julie a wink as she rose from her seat. “We have two teas coming, Geoffrey. You can drink them.”

  “We’ll be back,” Julie promised Sixth, and the two younger women headed for the theatre.

  “You’re supposed to put your arms in the top sleeves so you can still move them,” the older Bianca said to Geoffrey. She watched in amusement as he gingerly sat down, being careful not to push the chair away with the backs of his legs. “You’re wearing that thing like a straitjacket.”

  “It’s symbolic. You heard about my being committed?”

  “Seventh told me, though she didn’t know much about the details.” Bianca the Sixth examined his face and sighed. “You’ve finally aged, Geoffrey.”

  “You haven’t changed a whisker,” he said gallantly. “I’ll bet the male jaguars won’t leave you alone.”

  “What really happened? I got one letter from you, the best damn thing you ever wrote in your life, and then I spent years trying to hunt you down. It was as if you had vanished off the face of the Earth. In the end, I paid a very good law firm to look for you, but the best they managed was a confirmation that you were still alive and collecting your annuity. Every road of inquiry dead-ended on patient confidentiality laws and I couldn’t find anybody with legal standing to get through them.”

  “It was Sonya’s kids,” the old man said sadly. “I never met them before she died and I don’t know how they could have hated me so much. I guess seeing an old man talking about philanthropy when they didn’t have any money of their own pushed them over the edge. Maybe they even convinced themselves that I’d be better off locked up. I’ve stopped second-guessing them.”

  “And you’re not pursuing it?”

  “Not with a vengeance. Flower set me up with a lawyer who is trying to recover as many of my assets as possible, mainly the old book rights, and I’m part of a lawsuit against the so-called hospital where I was locked up. I’d like to think that with the kids, it was a crime of passion, but the owners of that facility knew exactly what they were doing. Now tell me, how have you been?”

  “You really have changed, Geoffrey. Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t even have asked.”

  “The thing I can’t figure out is why you were ever with me in the first place,” he said. “I hope you didn’t worry too much about my disappearance, but I—” he paused as the waitress in the Grenouthian costume returned and placed the juice and two teas on the table. If she was at all surprised at Julie and the younger jaguar being replaced by an old man in an improvised straitjacket, she didn’t show it. “I’ll get this,” Geoffrey told the waitress, struggling to free one of his arms.

  “You goof,” Sixth said, and gave the girl a five-cred coin. “Keep the change.”

  “Thank you.” The girl dropped the coin in her pouch and then helped Geoffrey out of his jacket, which wasn’t that difficult since the front wasn’t closed.

  Geoffrey laughed and slipped his arms into the regular sleeves of the Dollnick-inspired jacket. “I would have had it in another second,” he said. “I put it on by myself.”

  “Wherever did you get the idea?”

  “I asked Flower to help me out with a costume so I should have expected something with four arms. The idea of wearing it as a straitjacket just came to me. Maybe I’m getting better at laughing at myself.”

  “It’s about time.” Sixth took a sip of her juice. “This really tastes fresh-squeezed. I thought the waitress was trying to be funny.”

  “This ship is like the Garden of Eden without the snake,” Geoffrey said. “I plan to spend the rest of my life here.”

  “And the letter you sent me? Have you changed your mind?”

  “As soon as the lawyers finish their wrangling, I’m going to assign whatever royalty stream I have left to a foundation. Depending on how much there is, I’m thinking of splitting it between creating a colony for working writers and artists on board, and giving the rest to Flower to maintain some older authors less fortunate than ourselves at one of her independent living cooperatives. You wouldn’t believe how inexpensively you can live here.”

  “There’s a difference between cheap and free. And if you give up all of your royalties, how will you pay the bills?”

  “My annuity will let me live like a king on Flower.” He blew on one of the steaming teas, took a tiny sip, and set it down again. “If you didn’t come all the way from Earth just to go to a con, the colony has a position open for a jaguar queen.”

  “I write children’s books now, Geoffrey. The cosplay is just for old time’s sake.”

  “And I’m part of those old times.”

  “You’re definitely old,” she said with a sigh. “Of course, I’m old too, and after you walked out, I swore off living with mutts. But between the vision you laid out in that letter and what you said now about helping young writers, I suppose I’ll have to stick around and keep you to it.”

  Nineteen

  “Mac’s Bones,” Jorb instructed the lift tube and lowered his noodle-axe to the floor. “Sam and Vivian are going to loan us their LARPing gear so you guys don’t have to rent, but they’re both at work, so we’re picking it up from his brother-in-law, who runs a ship’s chandlery. If we’re lucky, Kevin will even have some enchanted bags-of-holding he can let us use because Sam’s sister brings them home from work.”

  “Enchanted bags-of-holding?” Julie asked.

  “So you can pick up all kinds of loot and not get weighed down. There’s a Terregram mage on board who does the magic stuff for SBJ Fashions.”

  “That’s the same business that sponsors Colonial Jeevesburg, where Razood has his blacksmith’s shop,” Bill said. “I met Je
eves the first time we stopped at Union Station. He came on board Flower to audit the craftspeople and make sure they weren’t just pocketing his subsidies.”

  The capsule door slid open and Jorb led the group out into the corridor. “Hold up,” he said. “This place looks familiar but it’s not the way to Mac’s Bones. Don’t tell me—”

  “Welcome to Union Station,” a voice announced from behind them, and they all turned to see a floating robot of the simplified form taken by Stryx AI during their youth. “I have a proposition for you.”

  “If it has anything to do with those experimental sensory deprivation pods you came up with for the educational LARPing course, forget it,” Jorb said.

  “You haven’t even heard the proposition yet,” Jeeves scolded mildly, winking the lights on his casing. “We were approached by a Drazen consortium about providing holographic services of a confidential nature. It’s all very hush-hush and I just got everything ready for a beta test.”

  “No,” Jorb said, and turned to his friends. “I took an Open University course with Sam, Vivian, and Marilla a couple of years ago. Jeeves kept putting us in these alternative realities that were more like tests than games. In the last one, we were able to keep adding abilities, like being able to fly, and without doing any work, I could suddenly understand musical notation for the first time in my life.”

  “You entered some sort of immersive alternative reality with that Horten girl?” Rinka demanded.

  “Yes. I mean, not with her, but the four of us.”

  “Except the two Humans are engaged to be married.”

  “They weren’t then,” Jorb said, unconsciously tightening his grip on the noodle-axe in case he needed to defend himself from Rinka, whose tentacle was now rigid. His shoulders sagged. “If you want to do this, I guess it could be fun.”

  “And it pays,” Jeeves informed them. “One hundred creds for a maximum of four hours of work.”

  “You mean we could finish quicker?” Julie asked.

  “Theoretically,” the young Stryx said, though he didn’t sound very convincing. “It’s just in here. I have sensory deprivation pods set up that will levitate your bodies so they won’t feel any external contact. This only works because the four of you already have high-quality implants to provide the neural interface for stimuli. As the pods interfere with external signals, I’ll let Flower know what’s going on so she doesn’t worry.”