Swap Night on Union Station Read online

  “We were sharing our impressions,” Daniel said. “I have a tunneling conference call in a few minutes so I’ll be in my office if anybody needs me. Don’t forget to contact those painters, Donna.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” the Dollnick said. “Brule and Sons will take care of the painting as soon as the door is cut in. I told them to use the same color as the conference room even though it reminds me of the tusks of a sea creature that once tried to eat me. That’s a story for another day.”

  “I appreciate your help, Ambassador, but EarthCent has a budgeting process that—”

  “—won’t be necessary in this instance,” Crute cut him off. “I’m sure a little flexibility in contracting for a trivial renovation project doesn’t exceed my authority as the exchange ambassador, and if EarthCent has a problem with it, they can complain next week. Now,” he said, turning to Donna. “I want you to contact the director of EarthCent Intelligence and arrange for a briefing, today if possible. Tell Clive to bring along the chief of the Dollnick section.”

  After Crute disappeared into Kelly’s office, Daniel asked Aabina, “Do you know anything about this exchange business? I’m getting a little concerned.”

  “My mother mentioned once in passing that Vergallian ambassadors are instructed to avoid the honor if at all possible,” the alien girl replied. “I think that only applied to being designated the home ambassador. Going out as the visiting ambassador is seen as something of a lark.”

  “But other than the working hours, what’s really the difference?” Donna asked.

  “Frequency,” Aabina explained. “As a visiting exchange ambassador, Crute will be here for a week, and then everything will go back to normal at the Dollnick embassy. As the home ambassador, Ambassador McAllister will have to spend a week at each of the participating embassies, and we’ll have those ambassadors here for a week at a time. I imagine it could be quite disruptive.”

  “Are they all scheduled in a row without breaks?”

  “I believe it’s the one-on, one-off principle, so Ambassador McAllister will be back here for a week between every exchange.”

  “All right, I have to get on that conference call, but give me a shout if our feather-crested friend does anything that seems too out of line,” Daniel said, and then retreated to his office.

  “I better ping my son-in-law,” Donna said, meaning Clive Oxford, the director of EarthCent Intelligence who was married to her older daughter, Blythe. “I hope you aren’t planning any time off, Aabina. The next few months are suddenly looking a bit hectic.”

  “It will be my pleasure to serve as the special assistant to Ambassador McAllister’s temporary replacements. It’s a unique opportunity to see how the diplomats from the other species work.”

  Several hours went by with Crute popping out from time to time to make an inspection of the Dollnick contractor’s work. By the time the Ph.D. student from Earth arrived, the door to the now-shared conference room was installed, the new office had been painted, and the four-armed workers were just putting the finishing touches on a tiled floor.

  “I’ll meet him in my office,” Crute told Donna when she came through the conference room to announce the visitor. “Would you care to be present, Aabina?”

  “Yes, thank you,” the Vergallian said, wondering what the Dollnick had up his sleeve. They left Daniel deep in conversation with one of Brule’s sons who claimed to have a source that could procure human-sized office furniture below wholesale cost. Crute surprised Aabina by stopping in the kitchen adjoining the conference room and loading a tray with coffee and snacks. “Feeling hungry?” she asked him.

  “For my guest,” the Dollnick replied. “I’ve found over the years that the easiest way to control the agenda with academics is to feed them. Could I ask you to go ahead and explain the exchange situation lest he believe that EarthCent is run by scary aliens?”

  The Vergallian girl saw the logic in Crute’s suggestion and she went ahead to tell the researcher that the Dollnick would be replacing the EarthCent ambassador for the week. Donna had already warned the guest while seating him in Kelly’s office and he was waiting with a question.

  “Should I go to the Dollnick embassy to interview Ambassador McAllister?” the Ph.D. student asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Crute said as he entered on Aabina’s heels. He set the tray down on Kelly’s desk and offered the student a handshake. “Before we begin, I’d like to make sure that the ear cuff translator you’re using is getting my meaning correctly.” He held out all four fists. “There’s a twenty-cred coin in one of my hands, and if you guess it on the first try, it’s yours. I’ll give you one hint, which is upper left.”

  The student immediately reached up and tapped the hand on his upper left, which the Dollnick demonstrated was empty. “But you said—”

  “My upper left, not yours,” Crute said, showing the coin and then dropping it back in his belt pouch. “Please help yourself to coffee and snacks. I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable that I continue standing, but my knees don’t fit under the desk unless I lower the chair seat until I’m practically sitting on the floor.”

  The student looked befuddled for a moment before recovering and introducing himself. “My name is Tor Karlson and I’m a graduate student at the New University of Scandinavia. This exchange that you’re working with the EarthCent ambassador is fascinating, but it doesn’t fit with my dissertation, and I’m only on Union Station for the week.”

  “So if the facts don’t fit your thesis you ignore them?” Crute inquired dryly.

  “Not at all,” Tor protested. “My thesis involves how the different personalities of EarthCent’s tunnel network ambassadors affect their performance, but as an alien substituting for Ambassador McAllister, I won’t be able to use any information you provide me.”

  “I don’t see why not,” the Dollnick said. “In addition to my working relationship with the ambassador, I’ve read innumerable intelligence assessments about her from a variety of sources.”

  “The advanced species share their intelligence reports on humans?” Tor asked.

  “Not intentionally, though I understand that the spirit of cooperation on board Flower has gotten a bit out of hand.” Crute twiddled four thumbs while waiting for a reaction but quickly ran out of patience “Try me on something. Aabina has been Ambassador McAllister’s special assistant for years. She can referee.”

  “Well, if you insist.” The graduate student hesitated and stole a look at the beautiful Vergallian, who gave him an encouraging nod. “I began my research in EarthCent’s archives, and I was immediately struck by the number of diplomatic breakthroughs taking place on Union Station after Ambassador McAllister arrived. It can’t be a coincidence that EarthCent Intelligence, the Conference of Sovereign Human Communities, and the Galactic Free Press, the three most important institutions holding diaspora humanity together, were all founded here.”

  “Was there a question in there that I missed?” the Dollnick inquired.

  “How would you explain this confluence, if you were Ambassador McAllister?”

  “First, I would have you talk to my embassy manager, as the financing behind both EarthCent Intelligence and the Galactic Free Press came from her daughters. Next, I would point out that those daughters were educated in the experimental school run by the station’s librarian—a second-generation Stryx. As to CoSHC, you can ask the man in the office next door.”

  “But I wanted your, I mean, Ambassador McAllister’s explanation.”

  “She’s very good at giving credit where it’s due,” Crute said. “Ambassador McAllister was the original voice to suggest that EarthCent needed a spy agency, and I have a declassified recording of the secret meeting if that would help you.”

  “I also heard that she’s EarthCent’s Minister of Intelligence and that the training camp is in her back yard,” Tor said.

  “I can see that plugging leaks should be at the top of the agenda if I can get the intelligence committee on a conference call this week,” Crute said sadly. “I’m afraid I can’t discuss any issues related to Earth’s security in-depth unless you present a security clearance.”

  “But you’re an alien!”

  “Not in the present context,” the Dollnick replied, folding four arms across his chest and staring down at the graduate student. “Aabina, if you’ll see our guest out.”

  Four

  “So you don’t think that Crute is spying on us after all?” Kelly asked, pushing away the half-sour pickle that came with her deli sandwich.

  “I don’t think he needs to,” Donna said. “Blythe and Clive suggested that I test him on EarthCent knowledge, so I ask him something every time he walks past my desk. I swear Crute knows more about humanity than we do.”

  “It doesn’t annoy him that you keep asking?”

  “I always start by saying, ‘Normally I’d ask Ambassador McAllister,’ and then he’s all ears. I think he likes showing off because he’s given me a lot of helpful tips. He even took me this morning to meet the new Dollnick manager of the Empire Convention Center and put in a good word for us. How are things going in his embassy?”

  “He left me detailed written instructions,” Kelly said. “I’ll have to make sure to do that myself for the rest of these exchanges. His staff has kept to the regular schedule on their clock, so I’ve only been in the embassy at the same time as them for around twelve hours so far. This morning, Gruke, the embassy manager, walked me through the presentation I’ll be doing at the terraforming subcommittee meeting after lunch. You wouldn’t believe how much work goes into making a lifeless rock suitable for oxygen breathers. Sometimes they go as far as reheating an old planet’s iron core in order to get the eddy currents going again and establish a magn
etic field to protect against radiation. Those jobs can stretch tens of thousands of years.”

  “I guess it must be their passion because I can’t imagine they get much return on investment after all that,” Donna said. “Have you snooped around their holographic files at all?”

  “I meant to, but it just felt wrong. And when I’m there during embassy hours, there’s an endless stream of Dollnicks coming in to see Crute about business matters. I never knew how busy he was.”

  “What do the visitors say when they see that you’re substituting for him?” Donna asked, employing the side of her fork to scrape up the remaining potato salad on her plate.

  “That’s the funny part,” Kelly said. “You’d think they would just come back later, but instead they all treat me as if I was Crute. I only wish that the people who come to us with grant proposals to spend the All Species Cookbook money had half the business sense of these Dollnick entrepreneurs.” The ambassador covered the remains of her sandwich with her napkin, shot her friend a guilty look, and moved on to the dessert. “The last one was a prince’s representative for a new factory producing sub-sea habitats, and I hinted that he pitch his idea on Earth since it’s mainly ocean.”

  “Did you give him President Beyer’s contact information? Getting alien businesses to open on Earth is his passion.”

  “I think I ended up telling all of Crute’s visitors to contact EarthCent headquarters and to use my name,” Kelly said. She took a mouthful of Boston cream pie and sighed. “I hope I didn’t violate the exchange protocol by trying to steer their business to Earth.”

  “I wouldn’t worry. It only took Crute a matter of minutes to turn the new office into an employment project for his cronies on the station. At the rate things are going, Daniel will wind up with a Dollnick secretary.”

  Kelly savored the pie for a long moment while getting out the notebook she carried to supplement her memory and flipping to the last page. “There was something I meant to ask you and—do you know anything about that string game the Dollnicks play?” she interrupted herself.

  “You mean Cat’s Cradle?” Donna asked. “I’ve seen it, of course, but with eight hands involved it’s just too complex for me to figure out what’s going on.”

  “I’m supposed to judge a competition in a Dollnick school tomorrow,” Kelly said. “Crute left me a number of recordings from professional competitions to watch, but the hands are moving so fast that I don’t have a clue what I’m seeing. It almost looks to me like they’re boxing with string tangled up in their fingers, and then suddenly there’s a perfectly formed spaceship or a dragon. They’ve really turned it into a high art form.”

  “Maybe you can just go by the audience noise. Turn off your implant, and when you hear a lot of excited whistling, it must mean that the players are really good.”

  “Or really bad,” Kelly pointed out. “Maybe I can get Libby to tell me who deserves to win.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, Crute is on the hook to be my grandson’s celebrity guest on Stone Soup for the Friday afternoon show. Had you forgotten about that?”

  “Not at all,” Kelly lied, flipping back a few pages in her custom printed notebook with a cover from an alien romance novel. “Jonah is planning to make lobster tails with garlic butter.”

  “In addition to the fact that Crute has probably never been in a kitchen, Dollnicks are allergic to Earth shellfish,” Donna said sympathetically. “I tried to tell him that it would be easy for Jonah to rearrange the schedule or change the recipe since the celebrity guest feature is just getting started, but he told me not to worry.”

  “According to my notes, I agreed to be the guest celebrity every fourth Friday for the next three months,” Kelly said, and her face fell. “If this exchange I’m committed to continues every other week, I’ll miss all three shows.”

  Donna put down her fork, a strange look on her face. “Do you think…?”

  “That some of the ambassadors planned it this way so they could appear on Jonah’s show? I’ve learned to be skeptical of coincidences when it comes to diplomats. Libby?”

  “Yes, Ambassador,” the Stryx station librarian replied.

  “Did you determine the schedule for the exchange program?”

  “The participating ambassadors had a meeting to set the starting date and the order in which the exchanges would take place. It’s described in Appendix C of the package I sent to your implant.”

  “But you knew I wouldn’t read the whole thing,” Kelly complained. “Which ambassadors are going to end up taking my place on Jonah’s show?”

  “Crute, Aleeytis, and Czeros.”

  Kelly looked back at her notebook to see what Jonah had planned for the other two shows she had agreed to appear on. “Vergallian vegan for Aleeytis and wine tasting for Czeros.”

  “I think we’ve been had,” Donna said. “I don’t care how much influence Crute wields in the local Dollnick community. How else could that contractor have shown up to cut through the wall of our conference room faster than I can get take-out food from the Little Apple?”

  The EarthCent ambassador took the last forkful of Boston cream pie and was silent for almost a full minute. “I guess it can’t be helped.” She pulled the pencil out of its holder under her purse flap and turned to the last page of her notebook where she recorded thoughts that struck her as important. “Beware of alien diplomats bearing honors,” she said as she wrote the words.

  “And that means those businessmen who came to the Dollnick embassy must have been expecting you all along,” Donna said.

  Kelly put the pencil away. “Turn-around is fair play. Tell Clive and Blythe what’s going on and that I want to see them this weekend to talk EarthCent Intelligence strategy. Chastity too, for the fourth estate. We’ll go over the schedule for the ambassadors taking my place and—Libby?”

  “Yes, Ambassador.”

  “Can I find out which ambassadors will be swapping with me ahead of time?”

  “It’s in the package I sent you,” the Stryx librarian replied.

  “Could I ask you to send the same package to Donna and Aabina?” Kelly asked.

  “Got it,” Donna said a few seconds later. “We’ll all put our heads together and start thinking about what we can get out of the ambassadors while they’re filling your shoes. But don’t you have to hurry if you’re going to make the terraforming meeting?”

  “I should pull a no-show. That would serve Crute right for manipulating me like a chess piece.” Kelly returned her notebook to her purse and rose to go, but then she stopped and asked, “Why do you think Crute would want to go on Stone Soup if he’s allergic to shellfish?”

  “Good question. I’ll ping Jonah and he can check with his Grenouthian producer. Maybe they have something cooked up between them.”

  “Of course,” Kelly said. “I’ll bet that meeting the ambassadors had to determine the exchange order was a real swap-fest. I can almost see it in my mind’s eye.”

  “Don’t let it get you down, at least we know the score now,” Donna said. “Good luck with the presentation.”

  Kelly took the lift tube to the Verlock embassy and made her way through the lobby area with its decorative waterfall that featured red-hot lava in the place of water. She arrived in the conference room just as Srythlan gaveled the session open.

  “Welcome to the six-hundred and fourteenth meeting of the exploratory committee formed to consider updates to the tunnel network treaty’s guidelines for transferring ownership for terraformed planets,” the Verlock stated ponderously. “The topic of today’s session is proposed changes to Subsection Fourteen Point Five Point Seven, which specifies bid procedures for unfinished terraforming projects suitable for two or more species. Before I open the subject to discussion, I see that the Dollnick Ambassador has submitted a written request to make a small presentation. If there are no objections?”

  “I object,” Kelly said. “Crute has maneuvered me into the position of advocating for a policy that’s the exact opposite of what EarthCent desires.”

  “As the Dollnick ambassador you cannot withdraw your own prior written request,” Srythlan informed her. “Does the EarthCent Ambassador wish to object?”

  “I do not,” Crute replied.