Go Tell the Phoenicians E-Book

Matthew Hughes

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 43

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The primitive aliens' advanced technology makes no sense—but if Kandler can't solve the mystery, job loss will be the least of his problems.

Das E-Book Go Tell the Phoenicians wird angeboten von Wildside Press und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
science fiction;aliens;planet;world;sci-fi;short story;future

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

GO TELL THE PHOENICIANS, by Matthew Hughes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2005 by Matthew Hughes.

Originally published in Interzone, May-June 2005.

Published by Wildside Press, LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

GO TELL THE PHOENICIANS,by Matthew Hughes

The K’fondi were driving Livesey and his BOOT team three stops past crazy, but that was not why the station chief hated me at first sight.

Mainly it was my record, which was laying itself out as Livesey tapped the panel of his desk display. I held myself at something like attention, set my lumpy features on bland, and looked over the chief’s regulation haircut to where the window framed the unknown hills of K’fond.

“If Sector Administrator Stavrogin wasn’t biting my backside, you’d never have set down on my planet,” Livesey said, “but I promise you, Kandler, while you’re attached to this establishment, you’ll go by the book. Or I’ll chase you all the way back to Earth and bury you in whatever stinking kelp farm you oozed out of.”

There was more, but I had heard the like from the ranking Bureau of Offworld Trade field agent at just about every assignment I could remember. I was a foreign body in the Bureau’s innards, a maverick among a tamer breed, tolerated only because I was also BOOT’s best exo-sociologist. But wherever I was sent in, it was a sign that the field agent in charge was out of his depth. If I turned out to be the reason a mission was successful, a corresponding black mark went into the file of the BOOT bureaucrat who had screwed up.

They sent me in because I got results. But the day I stopped getting results, the uneasy symbiosis between me and the Bureau would fall apart. With luck, I might land at a Bureau training depot, lecturing batches of budding Liveseys on the intricacies of the ancient alien cultures they’d be rehearsing how to loot.

Without luck, I’d be back on Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula, stacking slimy bales of wet kelp, just as my father had done until he wore out and died. So I kept my mouth shut through the chief’s opening rant, and watched a gaggle of K’fondi boost each other over the station’s perimeter fence. They frolicked across the clipped lawn like teenagers at the beach.

Livesey turned to follow the direction of my gaze, swore bitterly, and punched his desk com.

“Security,” he said, “they’re back! Get them herded off station! Move!”

The aliens wandered over and gawked through Livesey’s window, giving me my first look at K’fondi. They were the most humanoid race Earth had ever found. On the outside, a K’fond could pass for any fair-sized, bald human who happened to be thin-lipped, large-nosed, and shaded from pink to deep purple.

Closer examination revealed subtle differences in joints and musculature, but the K’fondi were a delight to those exo-biologists who argued that parallel evolution would produce intelligent species that roughly resembled each other. We could breathe what the K’fondi breathed, drink what they drank, eat what they ate.

No one knew what K’fondi were like on the inside, but there would be some major differences. For one thing, they were thought to lay eggs.

Security heavies arrived to coax the natives off the station. None of them seemed to mind. One departing visitor—even without breasts, she was slinkily female in an almost sheer gown slit on both sides from shoulder to knee—paused for a parting wave and a broad wink through the window.

Livesey leaned his forehead against the window’s plastic and swore with conviction. “Tell me how I’m supposed to negotiate a trade agreement when they treat this station like some kind of holiday camp?”

“Is it just the local kids come to look around?” I said.

Livesey turned with a glare of bewildered outrage. “As far as I can tell, that was their negotiating team. Go get briefed.”

Outside, the K’fond air was rich and unfiltered, the slightly less than Earth-normal gravity added a spring to my step, and I headed for my quarters in a tingle of excitement. I loved the beginning of every new assignment, ahead of me a whole alien culture to explore. It was almost enough to let me forget that the Bureau of Offworld Trade would use my work to help pick the K’fondi clean.

I hated BOOT, but the Bureau was the only path to field experience for an exo-sociologist. It was an arm of the Earth Corporate State, the final amalgamation of the Permanent Managerial Class of multinational corporations and authoritarian regimes that had coalesced just as humankind took its first steps toward the stars.

For a bright boy who ached to escape from Permanent Under Class status, who thirsted to meet and encompass the strange logics of alien cultures, BOOT was the only game in the galaxy—and I’d played it my whole career.

Brains and a willingness to outwork the competition had taken me from my parents’ shack through scholarships and graduate school, then out into the immensity on Bureau ships. Now, with a score of alien cultural topographies mapped to my credit, every new assignment was more precious than the last.