Trang (18 page)

Even with their legs and ridges,
when standing, the Snake Boys only came up to about Philippe’s knee. When the
door opened, it had revealed a wall of reddish material, with a small tunnel in
the base. The Snake Boy passed through the tunnel easily, but Philippe and especially
the larger SFers had a rough time of it, squirming through on their bellies.

This is the level of hell
reserved for evil claustrophobics,
Philippe thought.

Fortunately they didn’t have to go
far before they reached a chamber, which had several tunnels leading into it.
Before they could enter, the Snake Boy asked them to wait, explaining that he
had to “remove the livestock.” For security reasons, Philippe was not in front,
so he had to lie in the tunnel and listen to Patch’s excited description of how
the Snake Boy was chasing out some “hopping maggoty grub things!”

The chamber itself was not big
either—Philippe could just sit upright by clasping his knees to his chest.
Patch and Gingko had to lie down to fit, while Ofay and Sucre couldn’t come in
at all and were eventually sent back out into the common area. Periodically
during their discussion some of the livestock would try to hop back into the
chamber. The Snake Boy would chase them out with his tail end while carrying on
an uninterrupted conversation with his head. Eventually Philippe realized that
the creature had clusters of eyes on each end of its body.

“I’m sorry there is not more room
here,” said the Snake Boy. “We have increased in numbers since we first came to
this station and are experiencing overcrowding.”

“Being able to meet you in your
home more than makes up for any physical discomfort,” Philippe replied.

The Snake Boy looked at the three
humans crouched and crowded into the room. “I am afraid that your people are not
built like our people. I am curious—do your people climb?”

“Climb what?” asked Gingko.

“Vegetation, or geological
formations. I have not heard of you climbing since you came here, and I was
curious to know if you typically climbed at home.”

“We are physically capable of
climbing, and some climb as a sport,” said Philippe. “But usually we just walk
on the ground.”

“I was told that the bipeds on my
planet are arboreal,” said the Snake Boy. “You are the first bipeds I have
encountered in my own experience, so I thought you might be arboreal, like the
White Spiders. But that is what I was told bipeds are like on my planet; I am
not surprised that things are different on your planet.”

“Not that different,” said Gingko,
trying to nod. “We evolved from an arboreal species.”

“I’m a little confused, and I’m
afraid your comment may not have translated correctly” said Philippe. “Why
would you need to be told what things are like on your planet?”

The Snake Boy’s answer turned out
to be a quick history of their arrival at the station—which had been undertaken
in rather a different spirit than the arrival of the Swimmers or the
construction of the station by the Hosts.

Like the Swimmers, the Snake Boys
had been contacted by the Hosts immediately after a portal opened up near their
planet. Unlike the Swimmers, however, the Snake Boys had reacted to the
communication with such intense panic that the Hosts had resolved never to make
the first move again.

The Hosts had told the Snake Boys
that they wanted visitors, so the Snake Boys sent them sacrifices—a shipload of
convicts and troublemakers, sent on a one-way journey to what every last Snake
Boy, both on and off the ship, believed would be their certain destruction.

Of course, the visitors hadn’t been
slaughtered, but rather greeted with much rejoicing. The celebration became
somewhat muted, however, when the home planet stopped responding to messages
sent through the portal. It became obvious that the Snake Boys’ home world had
no intention of taking the visitors back—and had made no plans to provision
them, either.

Fortunately, the family of one of
the condemned, fearing that death, while certain, might come slowly for their
beloved, had arranged for a small herd of livestock to be on board the ship.
Eventually the Hosts were able to process food from their planet so that it did
not make the Snake Boys violently ill, and between that and the livestock the
Snake Boys were able to make a life for themselves on the station.

“We have done well here, and we
have been quite successful in our reproduction,” the Snake Boy told the humans.
“This is why our living space has become overcrowded.”

“Why can’t you move into an
unoccupied living area?” asked Philippe. “Is it too complicated to outfit
another one so that it is comfortable for you?”

The Snake Boy paused for a moment.
“The problem is not a technical problem. The problem is that the Hosts will not
permit it, because they worry that they will run out of space for new species
that may arrive later.”

“But I thought there were only nine
species here, and the two Swimmer species share quarters, so that’s only eight
living quarters being used. There’s a lot of empty space.” Philippe thought a
moment, and an explanation occurred to him. “Are there more aliens here that I
don’t know about?”

“There are currently only nine
different people on the station, and only seven living areas are occupied,
because both Swimmer species live in a single area, and the White Spiders
typically avoid their own living area,” the Snake Boy said. “More than 20
portals have opened, however, so the Hosts fear that suddenly many different
people will agree to come to the station, and there will be no place for them.

“I do not personally believe that
is a realistic concern, however. With some of the portals, the Hosts have been
in contact with the species on the other side for a long time. Therefore, I
think if they were going to agree to come to the station, they would have done
so before now. In other cases, the Hosts have not managed to establish
communication at all. But as the Hosts say, other people are inscrutable, and
it is not always easy to predict what they will do.”

Philippe was not eager to discuss
Host policies with a Snake Boy—that seemed politically injudicious at best.
Quite a bit of time had passed already, and he certainly knew more about the
Snake Boys than he had when he arrived, so he politely took his leave.

Philippe crawled out with Gingko
and Patch, coming outside to the fresh-smelling air to see Ofay entertaining a
group of Snake Boys by walking on his hands.

“Let’s see if you can do it!”
exclaimed Sucre, stepping up to a Snake Boy, but Philippe stopped him before
the soldier was able to put his suggestion into action.

In the process of averting that
incident, Philippe discovered something more troubling—Ofay had felt obligated
to entertain the Snake Boys because he and Sucre had told them that they
couldn’t enter while Philippe was there.

“They know the human diplomat’s a
VIP—I think they understand the security issues,” said Ofay. “And they really
thought I couldn’t walk on my hands.”

The humans returned to their living
area, and Philippe went into his office, where the White Spider sat, unmoving.
There were three memory widgets on his desk. He sighed and turned on his
workstation. Checking his office folder first, he saw that Shanti had forwarded
another excerpt from Baby’s report. “I’m thinking of assigning her to wander
the common area and yak at people full-time,” Shanti wrote.

Philippe intended to talk to Shanti
about the SFers’ gaffe, but Baby’s last report had been interesting, and he
figured it would only take a moment to read this one.

It said:

“I was in the common area two
floors up from our floor, and this Pincushion said hello to me. And I noticed
that he was wearing blue-and-gray clothing. And a lot of the Pincushions are
wearing those colors now, so I complimented him on his outfit. He told me that
the Pincushions wore those colors because of Trang, because he wears a blue
suit and gray lonjons together. So we talked about clothing a bit. He wanted to
know what color Shanti’s scales are, and I told him, so we may see that soon.

“He also told me something really
interesting—their clothing is stuck on the ends of poisonous spines! He said
that the Pincushions lived in a really dangerous environment, so they have
spines that contain a really super-deadly poison. But then they became
civilized, so they didn’t need no poisonous spines, so they started to wear
clothes. He said that now most people get their poison taken out when they’re
kids, but they still wear the clothes. And they have an expression, ‘uncover
your spines,’ and that means to be, you know, just rude.

“I asked him how he put on his
clothing, since he ain’t got no arms or hands, and he said that he did too,
they just don’t put them out none when they’re walking. So I asked to see them.
The big, fat spikes they have are really tubes with arms in them. You know how
a snail has eye stalks, and if you touch one, the snail pulls it back in? The
Pincushions do the same sort of thing. And the arms split off into a bunch of
fingers that can grab. He grabbed my foot to show me. He ain’t got no bones in
there, but he can still grab pretty good.”

Philippe smiled. Baby definitely
could join the UI. Speaking of which. . . . His eyes traveled over to the
widgets. He picked them up and loaded them.

His office folder was just
ridiculous, so he looked into his personal folder. There were ten new messages,
seven of which were from Kathy.

Philippe took a deep breath.

He selected all 19 of Kathy’s
messages, and set the display so that they would be text-only, with one tiled
on top of the other. He could scan the first lines and see if maybe there was
some kind of emergency happening, some reason why Kathy was sending so many
messages.

He was stunned. He had
known
she was crazy. He had broken up with her
because
she was crazy. But
seeing her rage in all its lunatic glory was still a shock. The vividness of it,
the living insanity, had been dulled in his memory.

He had wanted to punish himself,
and he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
What the hell is wrong with
me?
he wondered.

“Do you know why?” Philippe
suddenly interrupted. “Do you know
why
she is able to get the aliens to
open up to her? Because
she
doesn’t have to cope with an armed entourage
that won’t let people enter their own home because their diplomat is such a
very important person.”

Guilt flashed across her face.
“Yeah, Ofay and Sucre told me—it sounds like they got a little heavy-handed.”

“Heavy-handed!? Heavy—oh, that’s
just the understatement of the year,” said Philippe, working just the right
amount of mockery into his tone. “Considering the policies and attitudes toward
territory here—what you so memorably described as the concept of
your
space
and
our
space—I think one alien species actually barring entry of
another species to
their own home
might be considered a tad, oh,
disrespectful, maybe? Hostile, perhaps?”

He felt good. He felt like pent-up
steam was just blasting out of him. He went on.

“Look, I think you and I can both
agree that none of the aliens are actually hostile, right? So why do I need this
massive, intimidating entourage every time I stick my head out the door? You
know, having the thug brigade about makes it so that I can’t do my job. And in
case you missed the memo,
my job
is
our mission!
”

“Well, we can discuss—” Shanti
began.

“Discuss?” Philippe interrupted.
“Oh, no. I don’t think you’re really clear on this:
I don’t have to take
orders from you.
My job
is paramount here—
we
are a diplomatic
mission, and
I
am the diplomat. We’re not discussing anything; we’re not
going to have a debate; we’re not going to call in all your little goons and
have a town meeting, chock full of threats and swearing. What is going to
happen is that
I am not going to
have
an entourage any more. I am
going to go out on my own so that
I can do my job
.
That
is what
is going to
happen.
”