Guest Night on Union Station Page 5

  “I have a question,” Thomas said suddenly. “Do the Cayl recognize the artificial people created by members of their empire as sentients, the way the Stryx do? If not, does that mean they can keep AI enslaved?”

  “The Cayl policy on AI is currently similar to ours, which is one of the reasons we’re sorry to see their empire winding down operations,” Libby replied. “Some of their member species would prefer a different approach, and it may be a sticking point if negotiations get that far.”

  “Who’s going on the exchange delegation you mentioned, Libby? Are any humans welcome?”

  “We’ll be sending a science ship to anchor the tunnel for the open house, and there’s room for a few humans to accompany the ship and visit the Cayl homeworld. Jeeves has been in touch with the Cayl at the highest levels, and he suggested sending Woojin and Lynx, providing Clive approves. And he said something about adding Brinda in case there’s an opportunity for a ‘going-out-of-empire’ auction.”

  “I think it’s a great idea,” Clive said. “Lynx has plenty of diplomatic experience from her cultural attaché work, and Wooj is our military expert, so he’ll appreciate what the Cayl have done.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Kelly said. “Are any Stryx going, Libby?”

  “Our science ships are all built around a resident second-generation Stryx,” the librarian replied. “Think of them as miniature versions of our stations that spend all of their time moving around and looking into things. The science ship that will be carrying Lynx and Woojin is run by Stryx Vrine.”

  “Banger’s parent? Small galaxy.”

  Five

  “I only need half of the Galaxy room, and only for the first morning,” Daniel reiterated.

  “Your reservation shows that you reserved the full amphitheatre for four human days,” the unemotional Dollnick administrator of the Empire Convention Center replied. “That’s twenty-six thousand creds, which includes the multi-day discount.

  “Then there’s been some kind of mistake,” the junior consul insisted. “I made a three-day reservation for the Nebulae room for the trade show, and I went back later and added a day to the front-end, to give the vendors a chance to set up before the event.”

  “The only reservation I’m showing for you is the Galaxy room. The Nebulae room is no longer available on the dates you’ve requested. The Hortens have it reserved through the end of the cycle for a religious revival.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Daniel practically shouted. “I made these reservations three cycles ago and I have confirmations!”

  “If you don’t believe me, let’s walk down to the Nebulae room right now and you can accept Gortunda as your savior,” the Dollnick responded dryly. “I understand that the Hortens have reduced the tithing obligation to seven percent for new converts.”

  “Look,” Daniel said, waving his tab under the towering Dollnick’s nose. “Three-day reservation for the Nebulae room, deposit accepted.”

  “You must have cancelled and transferred the deposit to the Galaxy room,” the Dollnick said. “I suggest you check with the station librarian, since she does our recordkeeping. If you want to change your reservation for the Galaxy room at this late date, there will be a six thousand cred cancellation fee, per day.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Daniel yelled, losing his cool completely. Then he turned on his heel and stalked out of the administrator’s office towards the nearest lift tube. “EarthCent Embassy,” he told it on entering.

  As the lift tube door slid closed and the capsule whisked him away towards the embassy, he tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Daniel remembered making the reservations and then later putting in the change request over the display desk in his small office next to Kelly’s. The only explanation he could come up with was that one of the advanced species had altered his reservations through some technological trickery, perhaps a Vergallian attempt to sabotage CoSHC. He thought about contacting Clive or talking to Libby, but when he exited the lift tube, he decided to start with Donna.

  “You look pretty unhappy,” the embassy’s office manager observed when Daniel slumped into the chair next to her desk. “Some last minute problems with the conference?”

  “The convention center messed up our reservations,” Daniel admitted. “I know perfectly well that I ordered the Nebulae room for three days, and half of the Galaxy amphitheatre for the first morning. At the last pre-conference holo-meeting, some of the attendees complained that they needed more time to set up, so I added a day to the beginning of the Nebulae room reservation. Now the convention center is saying that I reserved the whole Galaxy room for four days, and that the Nebulae room is booked solid by the Hortens to the end of the cycle. I showed the Dollnick the original confirmation on my tab, but he said I must have cancelled.”

  “Was it the same Dollnick who took your order?” Donna asked.

  “I made the reservations on my display desk. I didn’t talk to anybody.”

  “Hmm. Shall we ask Libby if she still has the records from your desk?”

  “Knock yourself out,” Daniel grunted. His mind was running a light-year a second as he tried to figure out what he was going to do with over two hundred vendors from CoSHC. The conference part of the event could take place almost anywhere with enough space, but the vendors could hardly set up booths on the steep coliseum seating of the amphitheatre.

  “Libby? Can you locate all transactions from Daniel’s display desk regarding the Empire Convention Center reservations for the upcoming event?”

  “Three transactions located,” Libby replied. “I’ll display them in order, starting with the initial reservation.”

  “You see!” Daniel exclaimed, pointing as a ghostly image of his own hand blocked out a three-day section on the human calendar interface for the convention center’s reservation system and hit the “Book it now” button.

  “And here’s the second transaction, which took place just a few minutes after the first,” Libby said. This time, they watched Daniel’s fingers squeezing a 3D representation of the Galaxy room until it transformed from a full amphitheatre to a half. Then the fingers moved to the calendar and tried shrinking a day down to a half a day, but it kept springing back. Eventually, he gave up and selected “Book it now.”

  “Maybe I did take it for a full day and forgot,” Daniel admitted. “I remember I intended to reserve just the morning.”

  “And here’s the third transaction, from right after your last pre-conference meeting,” Libby informed them. This time the ghostly hand seemed to wander through the reservation system menus, searching for the right option. The three-day reservation for the Nebulae room finally appeared, and the fingers tried stretching it to cover the previous day without success. Daniel’s other hand entered the hologram, and he appeared to be trying to hold the end date of the reservation pinched with the fingers of one hand, while pulling the start date with the fingers of the other. Instead, the reservation period lengthened in the wrong direction. Next the fingers pushed the two ends back together, squeezing the date range down to nothing as he prepared to start from scratch. The hologram seemed to glitch, and suddenly the calendar showed a one-day reservation.

  “Freeze,” Donna said. “Did you see that? I think you must have accidentally brought up the other reservation by gesturing with your left hand. It’s dangerous to use both hands at the same time in these holo-systems. Continue.”

  Daniel watched in horror as he stretched the Galaxy room reservation to cover four days, and then poked the “Confirm changes,” button, apparently not taking the time to read a block of small print that popped up.

  “Freeze,” Donna said again. “Libby? Can you zoom in on the small print?”

  “Reservations for one half of the Galaxy room may not be extended beyond three human days,” Daniel read out loud. “The date range you have selected will result in your order being changed to a reservation for the whole room.”

  “I’m afraid the Dollnick was right,” Donna said.


  Daniel pulled out his tab and scrolled rapidly through his correspondence until he saw the unopened change confirmation from the Empire Convention Center. He’d been so confident in his actions that he hadn’t bothered reading the later confirmation when it arrived. Opening it now, he saw that the reservation was exactly as the holo-record had shown.

  “I can’t believe I messed this up and it’s nobody’s fault but my own,” Daniel said angrily. “I remember now that you asked me if I had confirmations for the reservations and I told you I did. I should have just let you handle it from the start.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Donna told him. “It was your first time using their reservation system. I’ve been booking rooms at the Empire for over thirty years and I still ask Libby to double-check that I get it right. It could have turned out worse, you know. You’ll just have to do everything in the Galaxy room.”

  “The central stage isn’t big enough for all the booths, and half of the delegations to this thing only come for a chance to market their products. More than half.”

  “So you’ll have to use the floor space under the seating tiers where there’s plenty of room. The delegates will probably compliment you for keeping down costs and saving them some walking.”

  “There’s meeting space under the seating? I thought it would all be taken up by stone arches.”

  “The Verlocks are the only species that uses real stone for anything on the station. The Galaxy room seating is some kind of plastic stuff that looks like stone, and it’s all supported by carbon fiber webbing that’s hung off of the station spokes. I’ve been under there a number of times helping with props and scenery changes for the productions the girls were in when they were younger.”

  “You’re serious?” Daniel felt like the weight of a Verlock amphitheatre had been lifted from his shoulders. “How’s the access?”

  “There are four passages to get from the stage to the galleries under the seats,” Donna said, working from memory. “Visitors normally enter and exit the Galaxy room on the same deck as the convention center, which brings them into the seating area about two thirds of the way up. But half of the seats and all of the stage are really on the deck below, and you can tell the people who reserved booth space to have their stuff delivered to the lower level, so they don’t have to carry it down the stairs.”

  “It’s almost perfect, then. The only thing I have to worry about is salesmen fighting over the prime space on the stage.”

  “You haven’t talked to the vendors about their booth space yet?”

  “I figured I’d do it when they arrived,” Daniel said. “Isn’t that how these things always work?”

  Donna stared at the junior consul incredulously. “You don’t remember all of the planning we did for the last trade show?”

  “I remember you and the ambassador talking about moving around tables and which vendors to put next to each other,” Daniel said nonchalantly. “I thought all that rearranging furniture and telling people where to sit was just something women do for fun.”

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Kelly said, emerging from her office. “Are you finalizing the floor plan for the show?”

  “Daniel just reconfirmed the reservations and we were about to get started on the trade show booth assignments,” Donna replied. “He decided to hold the whole conference in the Galaxy room and to use the floor space under the seating for the show and the smaller conference sessions. We’ll probably go half and half, since the area under the seats is so large, and the convention center supplies all the temporary walls you want to create different-sized spaces.

  “Good idea,” Kelly said. “The Empire really whacks you for the first day of any rental, so doing it all in the one room should save a bundle. Am I still on the hook for the keynote?”

  “Well, they’re expecting you,” Daniel said, after a brief hesitation to marvel at how smoothly Donna had covered for his mistake. “If you don’t think you can do sixty minutes, we can…”

  “Sixty minutes?” Kelly interrupted, her voice rising an octave. “Do you know how many words that is? My weekly reports only average around five minutes, and besides, you’re the one who’s supposed to be the expert on these people and their communities. What can I possibly talk about for an hour?”

  “I was going to suggest that you find some people to act as an economic development panel, and then you could do a little introduction and moderate the discussion. The one thing I’m sure of is that the attendees are more interested in business than politics.”

  “How am I supposed to find a panel of human economic and business experts on one week’s notice?” Kelly demanded disingenuously, watching Donna out of the corner of her eye.

  “Was that a rhetorical question, or were you requesting a favor?” Donna inquired sweetly.

  “If you get me Stanley and the girls, I’ll owe you big.”

  “Isn’t three from one family being a little greedy?”

  “They all have different last names now so it won’t be obvious,” Kelly replied. “Maybe I can get Blythe to wear a disguise so people won’t notice that she and Chastity are sisters. She is a spy after all.”

  “I guess I can get you my father-in-law and either Shaina or Brinda,” Daniel offered. “That covers retail and the auction business.”

  “Then we have a deal, but it will have to be your wife,” Kelly said. “Brinda is going along with Lynx and Woojin to the Cayl homeworld to check on business opportunities. I’ll try to find one more person to get the panel up to six. Keep up the good work on the conference and let me know if you have any problems.”

  The ambassador ducked back into her office and smiled as the door slid shut behind her. After racking her brain all morning trying to come up with ideas for a speech, she had given up and decided to talk Daniel into going with a panel presentation instead. It was much better with the idea coming from him.

  Immediately after she sat down, “Collect call from mother,” appeared floating before her eyes. Collect? “Accept charges,” Kelly said out loud, wondering if her mother had lost her wealth by over-leveraging her real-estate investments.

  “Is everything all right?” Kelly asked before her mother could even speak.

  “If you’re wondering why I’m calling collect after we talked just yesterday, it’s because Dorothy’s job cost me a pair of direct tunnel tickets to come see you. We’re on the elevator to orbit now and we should be there by Friday.”

  “You’re coming to see us? That’s great. Samuel is always talking about grandma and grandpa, even though he hasn’t seen you in years. But what did Dorothy’s job have to do with it?”

  “You know how your father loves to fish. Dorothy told him a story about some alien fishing rod that came into their lost-and-found. This morning he woke up and insisted we visit Union Station immediately to buy one. I tried to convince him to let Joe do the shopping and send it in the diplomatic pouch, but he wasn’t having any of it.”

  “And that’s it? You agreed?”

  “Kelly, I’ve been putting off telling you this, but your father has been going through some changes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The doctors have some fancy name for it, but I think it’s just old age. His long-term memory is fine, but he has trouble remembering whether he ate breakfast. He also makes impulsive decisions about going places, and if I try to talk him out of it, he gets terribly upset and depressed. A couple of months ago he insisted we visit your sister during their family ski trip in Switzerland, and of course, he spent the whole week sitting in the lodge watching sports because the cold took him by surprise. He’s almost ninety you know, and it’s a miracle he can still pull on hip waders and walk into a stream with your brother.”

  “Is he, uh, still all there?” Kelly asked quietly.

  “Some days, yes. Other days, well, I just wait for tomorrow.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re coming here, then. Some of the aliens
and AI are getting pretty good at human biology, and their technology and pharmacology are way in advance of anything on Earth.”

  “Have you forgotten that your father and I both have NAT orders?”

  “Yeah, but I thought that ‘No Alien Technology’ just applied to artificial organs and limb replacements, the heavy stuff. If they can do something…”

  “Kelly. Your father and I were both born before the Stryx opened Earth, and we decided years ago that we’re comfortable drawing the line at human-only medical assistance. Would you want your father choosing to go into stasis for a thousand years in hopes of a cure, or having his mind transferred to a robot made to look human, like those crazy people with too much money and not enough sense?”

  “None of us would want that, Mom,” Kelly replied, recalling her experiences with dead-end species in Libbyland. “So is there anything special we can plan for while you’re here?”

  “Well, I’m afraid your father read something into Dorothy’s story that wasn’t there. When he broods on things, he tends to invent details to make his decisions more attractive.”

  “Should I talk to the shop owners and make sure they sell him one of those rods cheap?” Kelly guessed. “We can go back and pay the difference afterwards.”

  “No, it’s not the price. He’s convinced himself that Union Station is a fisherman’s paradise.”

  “But it’s a space station! I know it’s so big that you can forget that once you’re here, but—hang on. Now that I think of it, we did see some fish on our Libbyland vacation.”

  “He’s strictly catch-and-release at this point, so as long as the fish aren’t alien diplomats, anything that lives in the water and swallows artificial flies will be fine,” Kelly’s mother said hopefully.

  “I’ll see what I can do, Mom. How about for you? Just because the trip was his idea doesn’t mean you should spend the whole time babysitting. Besides, Samuel is nine years old now, and he’s pretty good at keeping himself and his Stryx friend busy.”

  “Well, you know I’ve been running a club for investors in our retirement city. Everybody is always talking about the opportunities on new worlds, getting in on the ground floor. It’s exciting be part of something like that, even if we won’t be around to see the results.”