Rajnar Vajra: Doctor Alien’s Five Empty Boxes

At the polished door to Gara’s office, I faced my reflection and a decision. Should I follow shop practice and knock before entering, or obey Tsf protocol and walk in cold? Among Traders, only those who questioned their welcome would knock. So after glancing at the environment readout to make sure the office’s present atmosphere wouldn’t poison me, I touched the open-sesame plate and the door slid aside.

This room, like every room in the building, was expansive with a sky-high ceiling; after all, some clients might be gigantic. Alien equipment edged the space with oddly curved surfaces in unexpected hues, all gleaming in the morning light through the tall windows that Gara needed, but not for seeing. Her spooky computer must’ve been put away in whatever en-suite pocket dimension Gara used for storage.

It seemed Deal was the weirdest personage in the room, although I suppose Deal might’ve said the same about me. He was— she was—average size for a Tsf, a bit shorter than me while hogging more floor space, and that hadn’t changed. Yet she looked so different just from the altered sexual coloration that without L’s heads-up I might not have recognized him— damn it! —her. I gazed around more carefully and still couldn’t spot my physical therapist, which didn’t prove Gara was absent. The room had shadows and she could be doing her version of fly-on-the-wall.

Deal stood in place, spinning fast enough to let most of her limbs extend straight out through centrifugal force. This gave me a splendid and unwanted peek at her gondola.

What’s a gondola? Sorry, of course you wouldn’t know. It’s this massive, corrugated structure where Tsf keep their brains, digestive organs, and a heap of fangs. No, you don’t see them on DM-TV, or on the newswebs because Traders don’t care to reveal that much of themselves, and the World Media Administration plays along. That’s why the only parts of Tsf anatomy shown in broadcasts are the ten outer limbs with those seaweedlike fronds halfway down the curves. Just between us, the fronds are bundles of cilia; the longest cilia act as fingers, the medium-size ones are sensory organs, and the short hairs flip like switches, making the clickety-clicks of Tsf speech. Traders also have three thick central legs to protect and support their gondolas.

If you ever actually met any Tsf, Pastor, I bet two things would surprise you: they smell just like curry, and their tiny clicking hairs can make one hell of a racket. I imagine the noise could bring a twinge of nostalgia to any retiree who’d once worked in a typist pool back in the days of manual typewriters.

Deal stopped spinning and a few dozen of her optical cilia pointed at me. Wide bands of some elastic material encircled four of her limbs: Trader pockets. One pocket held a Tsf translator device. Deal started clicking and the translator spoke up.

“Doc Morganson? That you?” The English came out in a parody of a western drawl, a new variation on a consistently bizarre theme.

I smiled. “Tricky to tell humans apart, Deal-of-ten-lifetimes?”

“No way. But I reckon your mug don’t look the same.”

“Probably all the new worry lines.” L, I thought, would love this conversation. How long has it been since “mug” was slang for face?

Deal’s optics stretched out a bit further and a score of additional eyes joined in to peer at me. “Matter o’ fact, you appear more buoyant than I recall. Of course, back at the corral, mostly I saw you lyin’ down on the job.”

I nodded with sudden understanding. “Right. On your Parent Ship you mostly saw me on my self-propelled couch and in much heavier gravity.” Tsf evolved on a world with almost five times Earth’s gravity and kept some of the extra squeeze on in their space station fulltime. “I must’ve looked more… saggy then. If you don’t mind interrupting our reunion, where’s the new patient?”

After months of experiences with various Traders, I’d come to interpret Deal’s minimalist twitch either as a sign of surprise or a gesture indicating contempt for my stupidity.

“In the reception area,” Deal said. “You didn’t notice them there crates?”

I stared at her and not because of the fake-cowboy dialect. “You mean my patient is still packed in one of those boxes?”

“In every dang one, you’d best believe.”

Time out, I told myself.

Ever run your Data Manager’s CPU non-stop for a year or so? The whole system gets logy and little errors start popping up. In this case, my brain was the device needing a reboot. I’d forgotten my own number one rule for dealing with ETs: never make assumptions. That explosion hadn’t taken me out, but apparently it had shorted my circuits.

Maybe I swayed a little. The Trader placed limbs gently on both sides of my shoulders to add support. “What’s the dealio, partner? You ain’t ridin’ so steady in the saddle.”

Distracted and irked with my own foolishness, I blurted out the question I hadn’t dared ask for over a year. “Why the hell are Tsf translators programmed to make you Traders sound so hokey? It’s annoying, not to mention frustrating. Do you know that some of the slang you throw around is so obsolete that I’d need my great-grandfather to tell me what it means?” Of course, I was instantly ashamed of myself, and I hadn’t even been honest. Usually, I enjoy the varied quirkiness of Trader speech.

Deal stopped clicking. When she resumed, the voice from the translator sounded entirely different. “My dear Doctor, the programming is precisely calibrated, I assure you. We are Traders and our goal is profit, mutual profit whenever possible. We calculated that by configuring our speech patterns to make us sound colorful we would ease human reactions to our obvious physical, mental, and technological superiorities.”

“I see. Smart.” And how very cynical.

“We have learned that ease between species lubricates the friction of trade. With particularly frail species, we do our utmost to project harmlessness.”

I tried to keep my face from expressing disappointment that Trader zaniness was all for show. Perhaps Deal couldn’t read human non-verbal cues, but considering what I’d just learned about Trader shrewdness, I wasn’t betting on it. “As to the patient, shouldn’t we do some, um, unpacking?”

“Indeed, but first I suggest you examine this item.”

She pulled what appeared to be a small cylinder from one of her elastic bands and gave it a tap. The cylinder unfolded and unrolled into a wide, stiff sheet of thin plastic. Deal passed the sheet over to me. It weighed almost nothing and for a moment was entirely blank. Then embossed patterns developed on its surface and the patterns darkened into elaborate illustrations that resembled, more than anything, those horrid pictorial assembly instructions included in kits from, say, Ikea.

“Touch an illustration,” Deal suggested.

“Okay.” It was distinctly warmer than the surrounding plastic, and the embossing felt taller than it looked. Also, it vibrated slightly under my finger. “Interesting. So this is a… one-size-fits-all-senses instruction sheet?”

“Our conclusion exactly, Doctor. The beings who sent us this document were clearly unsure about the nature of our sensory organs so they allowed for an assortment of possibilities. Even the color contains self-illuminated wavelengths well beyond my perceptions.”

“Huh. I just see an intense brown.” I squinted at the drawings. “When this machine is put together, is it supposed to be a life-support unit for my patient?”

“We believe the machine is your patient although it appears to be what you refer to as a ‘robot.’ If we obey these diagrams, you will learn why I have brought this problem to you.”