Vacation on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 7) Page 5

  “He’s good,” Daniel murmured to Shaina, even as he raised a hand. “What? You aren’t in favor of everybody saying something?”

  “I’ve lived on this station my whole life,” Shaina replied. “If there’s a complaint I haven’t heard, it’s not worth hearing.”

  “That’s nine in favor,” Walter said. “All opposed?”

  Shaina held up both of her hands, one of them behind Daniel’s shoulder in an attempt to make it pass as his vote.

  “That’s two opposed, though the gentleman in the white shirt appears to have three arms,” the political organizer observed, raising an eyebrow. “I’m glad you’ve decided in favor because I anticipate this group becoming the core of a larger movement and it’s important we get to know each other. May I ask if your objection is to public speaking or to having to listen to the others?” he continued, looking directly at Shaina.

  “Both,” she replied. “I’ve been to a dozen stations on business this year and I never heard of HEEL, so I came to learn something about it. If I’m going to sit around listening to local people complaining, I’d rather do it at night, in a bar, with drinks.”

  “Well, I’m still glad you’re here since you make up ten percent of the audience,” Walter replied. “I realize I could have done a better job promoting this meeting, but I have to admit being a bit surprised by the light turnout. Could I get you to say something about yourself since we’ve already broken the ice?”

  “I’m Shaina Hadad,” she replied grudgingly. “I’m in business with a Stryx partner and I’m perfectly happy with the current state of affairs on the station. I’m here to see whether or not I should be worried that your HEEL is going to screw it all up.”

  “Well, that’s a refreshing viewpoint,” Walter said, not in the least taken aback. “Maybe your attendance today will prove to be your first step on the road to Damascus. As long as we’re starting with the naysayers, why don’t you go next, Daniel. In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that I met Daniel in the Little Apple soon after I arrived on Union Station. When I decided against visiting him at the EarthCent embassy where he works, he suggested this café for a public meeting. Daniel?”

  The junior consul rose from his seat and faced the little knot of station residents gathered in the café. Of the ten people at the meeting, five of them were there because Daniel had invited them. He was also surprised by the low attendance, given the number of corridor display ads HEEL had purchased. But Sunday morning was probably a bad time for political meetings since the rabble-rousers were home nursing hangovers.

  “I’m Daniel Cohan, and I started as junior consul on the station a month ago, so I haven’t really had time to fully assess the local conditions. Well, I could tell you a lot about the tables in the casino, but I don’t suppose you’re here for that. I’m in favor of democracy on general principle, though I’ve never actually voted, and I wouldn’t complain if the Stryx promoted me to president one day.”

  “Thank you, Daniel. I can see I have my work cut out for me with this crowd,” Walter said in his relaxed manner. “How about the young man with the skull tattooed on his face?”

  “I’m, like, this isn’t a new game?” the kid asked. “I thought it was, like, recruiting. Like FightOn did for their new Human Expatriates Piracy League game last year.”

  “Do you know what an election is?” Walter inquired.

  “I thought it was, like, fighting, like,” the young man replied. “There’s a campaign, yeah?”

  “You could view elections as a sort of a war, but our weapons are petitions and ballots.”

  “Excuse me,” the kid said. “I just remembered I have to be somewhere.” As he scraped back his chair and rose, another young man at a different table also stood up and followed.

  “It’s turning into quite a cozy meeting,” Walter observed, seemingly unperturbed by his shrinking audience. “Perhaps we can hold the next one in my apartment. How about the young lady with the unique hat?”

  “I’m Chance,” she said, smiling flirtatiously at the HEEL organizer. “I heard about your meeting from Daniel, and he said you’d be taking suggestions for a unified platform. As long as you plan to break with the Stryx and everything, I want to make sure that you put cancellation of body mortgages on the list of demands.”

  “Body mortgages?” Walter asked.

  “For artificial people, like me.”

  “Uh, I’m not sure artificial people are humans,” Walter replied slowly. “I’ll have to check with headquarters and see.”

  “Not humans?” Chance asked incredulously. “You just lost my vote, mister. Come on, Thomas.”

  Chance flounced out of the café and Thomas reluctantly followed her, casting an apologetic look back at Daniel.

  “And then there were six,” Walter said. He tried his best to sound jovial, but the strain of his rapidly diminishing audience was beginning to show around the corners of his mouth. “Who’s next?”

  “I’ll go,” said an elderly woman, whose hair was done up in a grey bun. “I’m Sylvia Garcia, and I voted in every election in Texas before my husband and I emigrated in our thirties. I don’t remember much about it, other than the fact we would get a booklet from the League of Women Voters each year explaining what the ballot questions meant. I came because you’re also a league, and I thought you could tell me if they’re finally accepting men.”

  “Glad to have you, Sylvia,” Walter replied. “I’m not aware of any connection between HEEL and the group you mentioned, but I’ll make a note to check. As somebody who was an active participant in the democratic process, do you have any comments about the form of government here on the station?”

  “I once saw our ambassador sitting on a throne made of skulls during a parade and she looked very uncomfortable. I’ve never needed to go to the embassy for anything myself, so I can’t say I have any complaints.”

  “Thank you. Next?”

  “Henri Durand,” declared a middle-aged man who wore a red beret. He rose from his seat, placed his right hand in his vest, and gave the end of his mustache a twist with his left. “There comes a time in every man’s life that he is called upon to do great things. I believe that this is my time, our time, and we can do these great things together. I pledge my life and fortune to the cause!”

  “Splendid, splendid,” Walter said, but he seemed to be eyeing the man warily. “You haven’t gone and, uh, done anything already, have you?”

  “On the station?” Henri inquired in a suddenly subdued voice. “Are you crazy? The Stryx know everything that goes on here.”

  “That’s what I’d heard,” the HEEL organizer replied. “So, who’s left?”

  “Liza Brown,” said a sad-looking woman. She was dressed in a baggy garment that appeared to be a sack with holes cut out for the arms and head. “I’m here to represent the Free Corridor Commune.”

  “I haven’t heard of your group,” Daniel said, turning in his chair to face the woman. “But I know that our embassy sponsors a take-it-or-leave-it center on the Shuk deck if you’re down on your luck and you need something to wear.”

  “I’m a nudist,” Liza said, too lethargic to bristle at his implied criticism of her attire. “Sunday mornings we play volleyball, but I drew the short straw and got stuck coming here to show our support or whatever.”

  “Or whatever,” Walter repeated, sounding a little deflated. “That just leaves the scary gentleman in the back?”

  “Clive Oxford. I’m the director of EarthCent Intelligence and I thought I should stop by to make sure you aren’t planning on throwing any bombs. It’s a good thing I came since you already chased away two of my best agents by questioning their human credentials.”

  “Oh. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Oxford. I’m rather new at this, you see, and I just didn’t want to give the young, er, lady, an answer today that I’d have to reverse myself on tomorrow. I’m just a contract employee, really.”

  “Not a volunteer?” Daniel asked
.

  “Volunteer?” Walter looked surprised for the first time. “Who would do this sort of thing for free? I recently graduated with my PhD in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government, but I couldn’t find any work on Earth. I got this community organizer job by responding to an ad that came through our alumni board. HEEL was seeking candidates with a deep knowledge of government who were willing to travel and do grassroots organizing.”

  “Should we recognize the Kennedy thing?” Clive asked.

  “It’s part of Harvard,” Walter said.

  “I think I’ve heard of that,” Sylvia exclaimed, raising her hand. “It’s in New Haven, right?”

  “That’s Yale,” the public policy scholar replied with a sigh. “HEEL offered salary and expenses, so I thought I’d give it a try. Twenty straight years in school should qualify me for something, shouldn’t it? I don’t officially start until my materials arrive, but I thought, I’m here, so I may as well hit the ground running.”

  “You seem like a sharp enough guy to me,” Daniel said, sensing that the meeting had devolved into a casual discussion. “What was all that business about the tyranny of the unelected and the Stryx overlords you were spouting in the Little Apple?”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Walter countered. “I’ve never been off of Earth before, but everybody knows that the consolidated continental governments that arose after the Stryx invasion are the only true human democracies.”

  “Wait a minute,” Shaina interrupted, jumping to her feet in agitation. “The Stryx invasion?”

  “I don’t know what else you could call it,” the recently minted PhD countered. “Nobody invited them. They just took over our airwaves and networks, broadcast a bunch of propaganda about joining the galactic community, and then helped the other aliens introduce the largest labor exchange in history. How much of Earth’s population sold itself into virtual slavery before the Stryx even got around to providing space elevators—on credit, if I may add.”

  “Earth would have torn itself apart if the Stryx hadn’t stepped in,” Shaina protested.

  “That’s their story,” Walter retorted. “According to the textbooks, the world economy was on the brink of a recovery when the Stryx intervened. Our governments were nearing an agreement to introduce a new international currency backed by positive thinking, or maybe it was a tax on thinking, I don’t recall the details. We didn’t spend that much time on recent history, and my own research was on the successful adoption of a Marxism variant by semi-tropical citrus growers in the early years of the twentieth century.”

  “So you think the Stryx were just waiting for an excuse to swoop in and take over Earth because humans make such good unskilled labor?” Shaina asked sarcastically.

  “My HEEL recruiter warned me that the station humans would be completely brainwashed by this point, but that’s what you expect with asymmetric power relationships. It’s the old Stockholm Syndrome in action.”

  “Now you look, Mister Citrus Growers,” Shaina responded angrily. “I might not have spent half as much time in school as you, and I don’t know anything about your syndromes and whatnot, but I know that I’m nobody’s slave. How dare you come in here and talk down to us? I’ll bet everybody in attendance has contributed more to humanity than you with your fancy education, and that includes the kid with the skull on his face who came by mistake.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” Walter said, sounding truly apologetic. “It appears that my experience with student teaching and speaking in symposiums isn’t translating to the public square as well as I’d hoped. I’m sure I have much more to learn from all of you than you have to learn from me. Can we start again from the beginning?”

  Shaina was so surprised by the man’s rapid retreat that she sat back down and nodded.

  “I’m primarily interested in hearing about your HEEL organization,” Clive said. “EarthCent is looking into helping humans who are setting up governments on some of the open worlds where we’re beginning to see requests for policing. Perhaps we could work together.”

  “Didn’t you say you’re an EarthCent spy?”

  “Head spy and bottle washer.”

  “And you don’t see a problem in working with a movement whose ultimate goal is to replace EarthCent?”

  “I think that’s the ultimate goal for all of us, though we don’t expect it to happen for a few hundred years,” Clive replied calmly.

  “So you think we should wait for the Stryx to tell us that we’re ready to cast off their yoke?”

  “Maybe they’re waiting for us to tell them that we’re ready,” Clive replied. “We’re not, if you were going to ask. Living as part of the tunnel network is a bit like living in a zoo, but in place of cages, the Stryx enforce some rules about interspecies relations. To extend the zoo analogy, we’re one of the grazers, the kind without horns or anything.”

  “Zebras,” Daniel suggested. “We’re good at keeping our predators confused.”

  “I’m trying to understand you, but your concept of liberty clashes with everything I studied back on Earth.” Walter sat down heavily in one of the chairs, looking physically drained. “I realize that the academic environment may have turned me into something of a hothouse flower, but surely the concepts of freedom and liberty are universal.”

  “Let me tell you about that since I’m here,” Liza spoke up unexpectedly, coming out of her torpor. “The Free Corridor Commune didn’t start off as a segregated group. Our goal was to bring freedom from clothing to all of the humans on the station. Given the advanced climate control on the human decks, clothing is no longer needed for warmth or protection from the sun and the weather. Some of the advanced species haven’t worn clothing in millions of years.”

  “Like the Grenouthians,” Daniel interjected.

  “So around twenty years ago, a group of us decided to stop wearing our clothes, and we were sure the rest of the humans on the station would follow our lead. It didn’t work that way. Some people stared at our bodies, some people wouldn’t look at us at all, and then there was the groping in crowds.” Liza stopped for a moment and shuddered. “But the worst part was the parents getting angry with us. They said we were infringing on their right to bring up their children without having to look at a bunch of—well, we learned that we don’t all have the same ideas of freedom.”

  “So eventually you reached a compromise by creating a section exclusively for nudists,” Walter summarized. “That’s the classic solution, and a fine example of democracy in action.”

  “Actually, the Stryx station manager told us that the tenants were demanding action, and if we didn’t want to put our clothes back on, we would either have to move or to pay for everybody else to move. It turned out that the small print in the Stryx leases includes a whole section about communal norms.”

  “I hadn’t thought about the nudist thing in years,” Shaina exclaimed. “I was only a girl, but I remember my father loaning a towel to a naked woman who came to the Shuk during the rush, when the crowds are so thick that we still get the occasional pickpocket.”

  “Thank you for sharing,” Walter said, nodding to both women. “I’m beginning to see that life on a Stryx station follows a different pattern than I’ve been led to believe.

  “So what can you tell us about HEEL?” Clive asked, persisting with his original inquiry. “What was the training course like? Did you meet any other new hires?”

  “We didn’t exactly have a training course and I haven’t met any other organizers,” Walter admitted. “I haven’t even met my direct superior, except by holo-conference, of course. I’ll know more about it when my materials get here. I’ve just been trying to make good use of my time until then.”

  “So all you really know about HEEL is that they placed an ad on your alumni board and have promised you a salary and materials that are due any day?”

  “I did get a travel allowance and an advertising budget,” Walter said. “You don’t think I’d come all
the way out here on my own creds?”

  “Well, I hope you’ll stop by our offices when your materials show up,” Clive told Walter. “Even if we can’t work together, I see no reason we should find ourselves on opposite sides.

  “I’m curious too,” Daniel said. “Hey, where did Henri go?”

  “He snuck off after making his little speech about shared sacrifice,” Sylvia told them.

  Six

  “Hurry up, they’re expecting us for dinner,” Lynx called up to Woojin, who hadn’t followed her down the Prudence’s ramp. “We’re supposed to present an image of good governance to these people and I don’t want to start by being late. You’re just as bad as Thomas.”

  “You try shaving during reentry on a two-man trader sometime,” Woojin called back. “I almost cut my own throat. If you didn’t have that tube of Farling skin-knit in the first-aid kit, you might have been a widow before I had the chance to place a life expectancy bet with the Thark bookmakers.”

  “Some mercenary hero you are,” she yelled irritably. “Just put on a clean shirt and hurry up. We hit the ground running in this outfit.”

  “Yes, Ma’am!” Woojin responded, as if they were on a parade ground. A minute later he emerged from the hold tucking his shirt into matching black pants. “But if you’re going to bring up your old boyfriends every time I shave, it’s going to be a long marriage.”

  “Are those the best clothes you brought?” she asked, eyeing the mercenary dress uniform critically.

  “I’ve got two more sets in black.”

  “But those are—never mind.” She issued a silent instruction over her implant to the ship’s controller to raise the ramp which doubled as the main hatch for the Prudence’s hold.

  “Here comes our transportation,” Woojin said, pointing with his smoothly shaven chin to indicate an approaching dust trail. “That’s a Dolly floater they’re driving, and I’ll be glad of the ride after a week in Zero-G. Did you really spend ten years in that tin can?”