A Fog of Magic

 If you read in the older stories, the fictions handed down and recopied and retold and even embellished, the word they use is "magic." Making things happen that natural science cannot easily explain, reversing harms, undoing actions: "magic."

It appears I can do this "magic." It isn't like the fairy tales in the ancient libraries though, muttering nonsense words and waving sticks and invoking deities. It requires a significant investment of personal energy. It takes concentration and time. And like the oh-so-unreal Sorcerer's Apprentice and his wayward broomsticks, a practitioner can do it wrong, set in motion events that can turn bad or even disastrous. Magic is useful, yes...but like a spring rain that you need, you can have too much of a good thing.

But if you spend more time in the ancient libraries, you find other things too. Not just the fairy tales or lesson books but engineering texts. Operators' manuals. Dry, academic tomes dusty with disuse, describing a world far, far more sophisticated than the one we live in now, and yet it was the one we live in now.

And amongst these least fanciful books a whole section that seemed to delve into the metaphysical: meditation. Concentration of will, developing your spiritual confidence. Even a couple of extremely esoteric, nearly impenetrable books on psi powers, which I couldn't make much sense of...

...except I could.

The magic I was taught begins and ends with concentration. Proper concentration requires establishing a mental state not too dissimilar from that of dreaming, the drowsy, free-floating, nearly awake dreams of an afternoon nap on a warm, sunny day. You know you're dreaming and can observe the wanderings of your imagination like a spectator. But achieving this dreamy state while maintaining focus on goals is not something you pick up in an afternoon; it takes a few years of training and practice and, like I said, it can go horribly wrong. The spring rains can come and keep coming until every garden washes away.

My father taught me, he and my grandmother. Among their lessons in concentration of will, they also taught me that it will take two generations to teach the next magician, that it always takes at least two generations of magicians to initiate the next one. The talent is partly inborn but there are occasional sports, children of families with no magic who have the capacity despite their parentage. My own great-grandfather was one such.

So it was with something like recognition that I found myself in this section of the library, and struggling to decipher the foreign words of the books around the willpower section. Environmental manipulation? Repercussional forecasting?

Nanomachines? "Machines" I know well enough, but "nano" is a gibberish sound you coo at small babies.

The books are both a blinding light of revelation and an equally dazzling blackness of mystery. Some are so far out of my context that they are nearly a different language. Others, particularly the ones describing guidance of will, I could almost have written myself.

You prepare yourself, set the trance and focus on circumstances and goals. You envision the current state you want to change, and how the changes will look and feel and smell. You do this for quite a long time - sometimes it takes days. And sometimes you have to stay entranced in order to bring the spell to an end, too - spring rains, remember. Usually you don't want to completely upend the way things work. Simply tweaking things is generally sufficient, subtle nudges.

Magic is at its best when you don't realize it's working. There have been some who went in for grand effects, enormous, brash displays of power that rattled everything around them - not least of which, their neighbors. Those kind of magicians don't stay in business for long and sometimes meet a sudden, sharp end.

And there's another section of the library, quite small actually and leading into the peculiar section involving environmental manipulation: "terraforming." This section is the one that set my mind almost on fire.

It turns out that we are not from here. I am, of course, and dozens of generations before me have all been from here. But there was a generation, centuries or maybe even millennia ago, that wasn't. They were from somewhere else.

This book doesn't talk about that other place, not directly. It cites examples taken from the other place but doesn't talk about the place itself. It appears to have been a whole other world and we, humanity, are originally from there. We came to this world so long ago that nobody alive remembers anything else, and being from there, upon arriving here, set out to make here, now more like there, then. What happened along the way that made us forget our own past?

These books are very strange. They are nothing like modern books with their leather, wooden or cardboard covers, pages of sturdy, stiff paper. No. These most ancient of books, in addition to being constructed of materials I can barely even describe, have no dust on them whatsoever. A little raised dam of dust has formed around them on the shelves, but no dust lands on them directly.

At least our language hasn't changed much. I can read these titles well enough, even if the words are strange:

"Terraforming: Bending Circumstances."

"Terraforming: Finer Points and Enduring Changes."

"Human to Machine Interfaces."

"A Fog of Magic: Practical Application of Nanomachines."

That last one seemed especially pertinent, and I took it down from the shelf, opened it, and began to read.

Haute Couture

 Angela, Nakia, Angela (the other one) and Jules stepped out of their limo. The two Angelas tottered on their heels, cajoled into taller than usual platforms by their designers and now gamely trying to make the best of it. Nakia, at over six feet tall and with the broad shoulders of a WNBA power forward, wore sandals with hardly any heel and Jules, counter culture as always, wore sneakers. At only five feet tall, her height was perfect for Nakia to drape a casual, friendly arm around her shoulders, which she did.

Each young woman was wrapped in a shiny lame', not noteworthy in itself, not daringly cut or extravagantly accessorized. But the four women together presented a striking group, and they stayed together to make the most of it.

On the red carpet, flashes popped in staccato lightning as the women's massed style garnered more attention, and of course the cable entertainment channel reporters started asking the perennial question: "Who are you wearing?"

The women tried to slip the question, but one game presenter crowded in, practically holding the microphone at Nakia's breast and shouted the question over the clatter and roar of the onlookers. "Who is that, Nakia? I don't recognize them at all!"

What followed was bizarre. The strap over the tall woman's shoulder slipped off even though there was no breeze and...changed.

"We're discovered! Thompson, you said we would be safe!"

Nakia hissed at the strap, "Be cool! You'll be fine!" She tugged the strap back over her shoulder but it leapt back off.

"They are asking who we are! We are discovered! We must flee!" The strap continued to wrestle against her grip.

Jules' entire outfit parted right down the middle and immediately flapped straight up into the sky. The crowd cheered at the sudden, striking display of skin. This was what they were here for, a little live theater and some straight up attention-hungry exhibitionism. Jules' petite, muscular cheerleader body was now clad only in a modest pair of black panties. For her part, Jules looked more annoyed than embarrassed.

The Angelas were struggling with their clothes, and arguing with them too. "Calm down, you'll be fine! You're making a scene!" But each of them soon lost their battles and, like Jules, found themselves abruptly disrobed as their dresses fled straight up into the sky. Unlike Jules though, they were completely naked and again, the crowd cheered. Angela tried to hide - not easy on the red carpet where being seen is the whole idea - but Angela (the other one) put her hands on her hips and glowered. Despite being on the Hollywood scene for only a couple of years, self-confidence clothed her like armor.

Nakia's beautiful gold lame' outfit, which had draped over her like a lover's embrace mere minutes ago, shot away with the others. Now she stood on the red carpet in her sandals and a coral teddy, a striking coffee-colored athlete who appeared to have misplaced her volleyball - and her beach.

Jules stepped forward and indicated a young man on the other side of the velvet rope. "You. Give me your shirt." He didn't argue, just peeled it off and handed it over. Jules tugged it on efficiently. Nakia approached two more along the line.

"Gentlemen, please help my friends, here."

One of them leered, even as the other was quickly unbuttoning. "No way! This is the best show I've seen in a month."

Nakia smiled gently, a sadness in her eyes. But Jules stepped up, "Do you want to be kicked in the balls on national TV?"

"Never mind him." The buttoned-up guy had already gotten his shirt off, and also handed over a windbreaker he had tugged out of his backpack. "He's an ass. Here," he said. He even ducked under the velvet rope to bring the garments over to the Angelas. "I, uh, even have a pair of warmups in here, Miss." He was even taller than Nakia, and his T-shirt hung all the way down to Angela's (the other one's) knees. Meanwhile, Angela stepped into the warmup pants behind the massed front of her companions, her back turned and face blazing...but when she pulled the windbreaker on, she only zipped it halfway.

Jules held the reporter's mic hand. "We're wearing..." and she looked over to the people who had offered clothes to herself and her friends. They named themselves for the cameras, to general cheers from the onlookers. She smiled her best medals-podium smile. "We're wearing these guys."

The reporter was still gaping skyward, in the direction the women's clothes had gone. "But what..."

Jules followed her gaze. "Fast fashion, what can I say."

The reporter clearly wanted to follow up with more questions, but Jules, Nakia, and the two Angelas made their way into the venue and out of sight.

Field Experiments in Communicating with Other Species

 Field Experiments in Communicating with Other Species*

"They are NOT telepathic. None of the samples exhibited any such capability, no matter what kind of test we put them through. Sexual arousal, somnolescent states, extreme fear - no circumstance enables interpersonal telepathy."

"There have been examples in their entertainments."

"Do I need to remind you that most of their entertainments are 'fiction?' Not representations of real things, past or present. They are pretend."

"Ah, right. The Galaxy Quest paradox."

"Precisely."

"So how did they detect me?"

"As the humans say, let's go to the tape." Tar'Van operated his console and the video display lit up. "Here's you, approaching the group."

"In retrospect, such a large crowd of humans was not a good choice for social insertion."

"Analysis strongly suggested that missteps would be missed by the individuals, against the greater noise of so many other humans' behavioral signals to confuse them. It was a good plan."

"That did not prove to be the case."

"Indeed. Humans have a consciousness we had not anticipated. But it is not telepathy."

Nel'Gor and Tar'Van watched as the video progressed. Nel'Gor tried, in the recording, to navigate a few inconsequential interactions, minutiae in the day-to-day interactions of humans. He met one person, talked to it briefly, spoke to another. He answered questions - correctly, he knew, with the right jargon and even accompanying gestures, very amusing according to their research. There was a brief pause...

And then suddenly both humans lunged at him. With his Ordan reflexes, Nel'Gor was able to evade them and, despite the encumbering human garments, ran like the wind. A few more humans joined the pursuit but only halfheartedly, not knowing what the chase was about. The video changed viewpoints a few times, as other secreted pickups about the facility were able to provide a record. Nel'Gor shot past one, then another. By the time it moved to the third camera, Nel'Gor had opened a gap and the humans were losing inclination to pursue him further. Once he gained the open space where the humans all left their vehicles, Nel'Gor was able to open his stride even further and the humans were left completely behind, and abandoned the chase.

The humans spoke to each other briefly. "I did not hear what they said. Can you increase the gain on that?"

Tar'Van twiddled a few more controls, and background noise faded as the humans' speech gained prominence. He backed up the recording a few seconds.

"...and you don't know that guy at all?"

"Hell, no!"

"Where the hell's he get off, making a crack about your mom like that? Guy's looking for trouble. Damn near found it but damn he's fast."

"Some people, man."

Nel'Gor said, "the joke about the man's mother is at timestamp," he showed his notes to Tar'Van, who backed the recording further. "Magnify this individual's face and let me observe."

At the crucial moment, the human's face froze. Nel'Gor had encountered the word "stony" in descriptions before, and had not appreciated its aptness until now. The expression on the face became blank in a way he had not understood in the moment, when he was stumbling through his Innocuous Conversation In A Social Setting repertoire, trying to remember all the rules and their myriad exceptions. The human's eyes clicked to the side.

Tar'Van expanded the view to take in the other human, and sure enough his eyes glanced toward the first's. This nonverbal contact lasted approximately one point two seconds, and both humans initiated pursuit. It was only the sudden, enormous surge of pheromones dumping out of both humans that alerted him sufficiently; one human nearly made contact.

"That was it? That? That's all? They just looked at each other!"

"I suspect that no matter how much time we spend studying human modes of communication, we may never fully comprehend everything they do to communicate. They have been evolving with each other for millions of years, they have a head start."

"Let's throw away the Innocuous Conversation Starter pack from the Discord subcategory. It appears to contain unacceptable cues for in-person conversations."

"Agreed. Let's try the Starbucks pack and start over. Those are all face-to-face."

"Agreed."

*Inspired by, and orignally published on r/WritingPrompts on Reddit

The Envoy's Message: Survey Team Eta

 Green lights flashed. Sirens howled discordantly. Renjo flailed impotently for several heartbeats as he floated aimlessly, nowhere close to a holdfast. A bit of junk, smoking, drifted by and he dazedly shoved at it; the reaction pushed him toward a bulkhead.

"Someone turn off the alarms!" An answering groan didn't acknowledge the order, but the silence a moment later did. "What in the gods' eyes happened?"

Turnnanan, a new rating on its first voyage and a treaty-mandated exchange just to complicate matters, scanned its readouts. "We've been holed! Venting on two decks, drive is offline, Navigation is completely scrambled...more reports coming in."

"Condense it!"

"We won't blow up just yet, Commander, but it's not out of the question!"

Renjo, Commander of the Flagship of the Second Fleet of The Dero Trading Partners Territory, growled. Their path had diverged from that of the Ollan Consortium fleet with whom they had been trading blows, years ago. They were much too distantly separated to be exchanging fire now and neither side had opened negotiations on when to resume hostilities yet. What had hit them?

He relayed this to the bridge crew in general. "So where did this come from?"

Turnnanan had gotten a bit more function restored to its displays and was clearly scrolling back through the hull monitors when its display flared white and it recoiled. "Screee! It was an energy bolt coming up from astern!"

Astern? Behind them? What could possibly be chasing them? What would dare?

Dero Trading Partners were one of the, if not the largest commercial enterprises in civilized space. To protect its business territory, the Partners Delivery Fleet consisted of heavy cargo vessels that, in addition to consisting of cargo stacks that could envelop entire asteroids if necessary, also bristled with sufficient firepower to reduce those same asteroids to gravel. Few entities, commercial or military, even considered engaging Dero on any level but trade. It was virtually unthinkable; Dero's reputation was such that the reputation alone was almost enough to fend off any blatant, frontal engagement.

For their own part, the Consortium's fleet was neither as powerful nor as capacious - but their ships were faster, nimbler and shielded to a degree that Dero weapons were not a sure thing. And the Ollans had been sending sales forces into Dero territory for a couple of lifetimes now, and the wretched creatures were proving difficult to rout out. Worse, their prices were good so their customers weren't keen to help Dero in their efforts.

"What is behind us, Nanan?"

"Nothing! Nothing for light-years, Commander. I mean - there is, but it's just that undeveloped world. Got hit in some crossfire a while back but there's nothing important there."

That sounded like it might have more meaning, if he picked at the statement, so he did. "How unimportant is it, Nanan?"

"Well..." Turnnanan read quickly, three eyes on the displays. It was able to assimilate a tremendous amount of information quickly since it could read separate passages simultaneously and compile them on the go. "It says here the dominant sentient species was only marginally space capable. Really primitive, interplanetary only. No significant weapons to speak of. They called themselves 'humans' but when their planet got grazed in our passage it looked like we had upset their climate so much that their evolution was doomed. They didn't communicate meaningfully and no envoys were dispatched. I don't think Corporate intended any kind of compensation since they're so unadvanced."

"So what is behind us? Is it them?"

"I can't see how. Ee?"

Ee had clambered to her pedestal and gotten Navigation back on line. Navs had better 'scopes than the Science station but the two could be interconnected. She had taken control of the telescopes again, however, because no one could disagree that her vision would surpass anyone else's on the bridge; her entire head was a light-gathering organ, lidless and beautiful. "Commander," she hummed, "I see a vessel gaining from astern."

"Ollan?"

"Nnnooo." She moved her head side to side, fixated on the display. "It is an unknown craft. It is vvvvvvverrrryyyy small. Ssssssoooo small. It is beeaauuuutiful." She hummed and wove, moving the image from the scopes around on her tremendous receiving surface, an optical caress. "It is firing. Oooooohhhh, it is firing. Firing. Ffffiiirrrriiinggg. Mmm. Firing. Firing. Mmm. Firing."

Ee could be like this. When she looked hard at something, she could become introspective and dreamy. Now wasn't the time for it, though. "Can you describe the ship any better than 'small and beautiful?'"

"It appearsssss to be constructed around the barrel of a damaged Director-class cannonononon. Oh, the cannononon is their primary drive. It is a reaction drrrrriiiivvvvvve look at it go. It is beautiful. Such colors. The drive plume is redredredredredshifted so far, so far. But the ship itself, it is blue. Blue. Blue unto blue.

"It is firing. Firing. Mmm, mmm. Firing."

"Turnnanan! Does that ship look like a human craft?"

Ee blew up the image and sent it to Turnnanan's display, where it compared the image rapidly to several others. "Can't say for sure, Commander. There are many elements in common. The scale is right. But..."

wham

Ee reported, "New damage reports, mmm. New. New. Mmm. We are holed again. Close to the first strike. One crewmate is dead. They are holed. Holed, like the ship."

"Ee! Focus!"

"...but nothing in any of the analyses indicated any human capability like this, Commander," Turnnanan finished.

"How the hell do you think they got hold of a Director?"

"Wreckage? We lost five ships on the way through that system. Maybe they found one with the generator still in order?"

"So what are they hitting us with?"

"I have no idea, Commander but it is hitting way harder than anything the Ollans ever shot at us. It even beats our own weapons, it's going through our own armor like,"

wham

A hole, not much wider than Renjo's own foot, appeared in the deck near his foot. At the same moment, Turnnanan's head disappeared in a cloud of gray mist, as another hole appeared in the same moment in a bulkhead beyond it. Air rumbled out through the punctures even as compact patch bots surged out of their cabinets, bearing meteor patches to stem the ship bleeding away all its air.

"...like thaaaaat," Ee said.

"Ee! When you say 'firing, firing' over and over like that, are you being emphatic?"

"Oooh, noooooo," she breathed. "Firing and firing. Mmm. Oooh, more. Firing. They are accurate. Their aim is good."  She observed her display, entranced.  "It is suuuuuch a good pattern.  We are trapped.  We cannot evaaaaaaaaade even at this distance maybe if we had seen them coming sooner.  They are fast.  Goooooood aiming.  Firing."

Renjo fumed. Even Ollan would never dare such ferocious attacks, not on Dero.

These humans must be really mad. Maybe it would be a good idea to advise Dero - and other Ollan ships, for that matter - to be more careful where their stray shots went, when passing through occupied systems. Even primitive ones.

"Firing. Firing. So blue. They are coming fast. Firing."

Clearly these humans had never heard of Dero Trading Partners...and neither did they seem inclined to listen, nor that Renjo would get the chance to tell them.

"Mmm. Firing."

Finders, Keepers: Survey Team Eta

 "So how does it work, Bob?"

"I'm not entirely certain. I can say this much: you can't see it."

"...okay?"

"No, I mean it's like it's unseeable. Not like something that isn't there or an effect that doesn't register in the visible part of the spectrum, it's more like it takes the visible part of the spectrum and cancels it out."

"How is that useful? Is that useful?" Amelie fought the urge to drum her fingers. Bob was on the surface of the planet, ranging in circles from his lander, while Amelie monitored him and conducted larger, grosser surveys from orbit. There were two other landers on the surface, and they were all linked to each other via a small constellation of relays they had established for the purpose. Bob had been the second to report in, after four hours on the surface.

"It appears to be a kind of stasis field."

"And now you're talking science fiction."

"I promise I'm not. It's weird enough that this thing even works, I think I've figured out the power source which, if the way its weight behaves is any indication, might be a microsingularity."

"A quantum black hole?"  She would have to dig into the phrase "the way its weight behaves" at some point, she was sure.

"Yup."

"Okay, that alone would win you some kind of physics prize. But tell me why you think it's powering a stasis field."

"Because I can't touch the unseeable place. I've done everything up to trying to whack it with a hammer and I can't make contact. It's a really thin region, like a nothingth of a millimeter, around what appears to be plain cast iron.

"When I hit it with the hammer, it makes no noise whatsoever. The hammer just stops. No sound."

"All...righty." She definitely wasn't drumming her fingers now, because she had started tapping notes into her station.

"I know how it sounds. But I found the end of this artifact, I swear to you it looks like a little ring of metal around a hole floating in the air. And I can tell it's iron because my magboots stick to it.

"But the field doesn't actually wrap all the way around it, see? I shine my light into the circle and it's just a black hole, I can't see the bottom. But I can see like a couple of millimeters back from the edge of the circle, the field seems to emerge out of the iron surface, inside and outside, and goes down inside the hole. And that does make a noise when you hit it. But it doesn't make a sound like a little circle of iron, it makes a noise like something a lot bigger."

"I've walked all the way around this thing and it's shaped like a really long pipe, or maybe a bottle. About ten meters long. It gets bigger as it goes toward the closed end. I can feel its shape because my hands run into something and don't go any further, but there's nothing to see, see?"

This sounded too amazing. They had found a cratered battleground above which hugely advanced races had fought a war and, aside from picking through blasted-apart junk that was mostly recognizable in human terms, they hadn't been finding a lot. Granted, the gold scavenged from the aliens' control systems was far from worthless but damn. Thirty-three tons of gold is thirty-three tons. Their acceleration had been cut by nearly a fourth.

Thirty-three tons of gold was valuable, no denying.  Its value as a precious metal was essentially zero anymore; precious metals weren't precious except for the fact that they were hard to come by.  Tons of gold were eminently useful on a practical scale, though it couldn't represent even the tiniest fraction of what those warring races had cost her own species.  Earth, rendered uninhabitable, was merely collateral damage.  Two opposing fleets of interstellar spacecraft hurling energies and projectiles back and forth at each other, losing ships all the while, never slowing down, and so much fire had rained down from Earth's skies that humanity's population had been reduced to just a hundredth of what it had been.  A population of billions, reduced to millions.

The following years - years of endless winter - had reduced them even further.  A few hundred million had become a few tens of millions.  Humanity had been bombed, population-wise, back to the Stone Age.

"So what do you reckon it is?"

"I couldn't say. If I had to hazard a guess right now with nothing else to go on, I'd say it was a gun barrel whose bursting pressure was artificially increased to infinity."

"Infinity?"

"That, or something close to it. I'm telling you, this little circle of metal floating in the air is only about a millimeter thick, if it were something I could grab hold of with my hands I'm pretty sure I could break a piece of iron this size. And hitting it with my hammer should just shatter it.

"But hitting it with everything I had, I got back nothing."

"Huh."

"If it's a gun, I can't imagine how you'd load it, or even if they were loading it with projectiles. Maybe it's a muzzleloader on a grand scale, I don't know. Maybe they pump energy into it from the muzzle and it somehow accumulates until it's time to fire and boom.  Maybe they could turn off the stasis and it's a breech loader. I don't know."

"Okay, that definitely sounds like something we should pick up, if only to try to figure out how it's powered. What would we do with a gun? We're not fighting anybody."

"Oh, I know. But I was wondering what we could do with an engine that had no upper limit on pressure or temperature."

Amelie thought. And thinking about it, thirty-three tons of gold became a small fraction of what her ship and crew would be able to move.

"Grab it." She tapped for general address. "Everybody, wrap it up. Bob found something good and we're taking it home, now."

A Light Snack: The Adventures of Human Gina

 "Oh, man! Something smells great." Gina stopped in her tracks and turned slowly, sniffing. "This way!"

 

Booj, a bulky resident of a moon of a Jovian primary, lumbered behind her. She couldn't pronounce what his species called itself. Alongside him was Erb, a Llobban she had met at something like this system's equivalent of the county courthouse. They had hit it off, she finding the Llobban interesting and kind of funny, and it - its gender still hadn't been determined - being starstruck at having met a celebrity. Gina had never had a hanger-on before, and was simply experiencing the experience for its own sake for the time being. She was famous, after all, and she was still enjoying it.

 

"Human Gina..." Erb said.

 

"Jeez, just 'Gina' is fine, you know."

 

"Yes, of course. Human Gina, these places are pretty popular. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet. Have you heard their advertisements?"

 

"Dang. You have ads?" She shook her head. "I had hoped being in a completely different star system might get me away from that."

 

"Oh, but the ads are why they're so popular. In fact this one is one of many. The advertisement song goes like this," and he raised his mouthparts and sang an eerie, ululating harmony all by himself, what sounded like three individual parts, as his many tentacles slapped a complex rhythm on the ground.

 

A couple of passersby took up the chant, adding what sounded like a full chorus to Erb's trio, and kept singing along until Erb had finished. That surprised Gina, who had never heard an ad jingle she wanted to hear again, let alone sing on its own merits, and especially not sing along extemporaneously on the street. Booj had been humming in his own basso rumble, too. Her translator made no attempt to parse meaning from the song. To her, it sounded like a traditional joik from her native Sweden on Earth, a sung musical style that didn't rely on words, just vocal sounds.

 

"Great, isn't it?"

 

"I reckon." Gina wasn't a fan of joiking. She looked around but the other singers had immediately lost interest as soon as the song had ended. "Is this really the place? Let's go in. It smells terrific and I'm starved."

 

- later –

 

Erb's four eyes all goggled at her. Booj looked uncomfortable.

 

"This is delicious." Gina tore into the cut of meat, sliced it along the right axis to puncture all the gas cells, wadded it up and stuffed the wad into her mouth. "What did you call it again? Wait," she added. "Translator record. Okay, tell me again." She burped.

 

Booj boomed something that the translator still hadn't worked out. "It is a kind of animal from the primary of my moon. They grow very large, a fully grown adult is about four kilometers long," the translator provided unit conversions automatically. "Fortunately the meat keeps a long time, it takes a couple of years to eat one entirely." He observed her plate. "This one might be gone sooner, though."

 

"Really? How so?"

 

"You have eaten enough food to sustain me for approximately twenty days."

 

"Serious?" Slice, wad, bite, chew, swallow. "I'm only just now starting to feel like I can stop eating. This stuff is not filling at all, you guys. Twenty days, really?" She burped richly. She had been burping almost continually throughout the meal.

 

Beyond Booj, Gina could see something that resembled a handsome Persian rug advancing toward them.

 

"Oi! You!" Ah, a language the translator already knew. "You've been here four hours."

 

"Yes, I have. The food is delicious!"

 

The rug wasn't mollified in the slightest. "You've been here four hours! You have been eating non-stop! You go home now!" It rippled angrily. She couldn't tell exactly where its speech was coming from, or even exactly where its mouth was. If it had a mouth.

 

"Hey, I thought this place was all you can eat. Erb said it was all you can eat."

 

"All it can eat, yes! All he can eat, yes!" The rug indicated Erb and Booj in turn. "Not all you can eat! You eat more than I can afford! You eat the entire undecipherable all by yourself! You go home now!"

 

Gina exchanged looks with Erb and Booj who, despite having evolved a few stars away from Gina and her forebears, nevertheless understood each other without having to say each other. Somehow shrugging its tentacles in a very human way, Erb got up first. "Okay, we're going." She burped.

 

"Thank God," the rug said. Gina wondered if the translator had gotten that right. It didn't sound quite like a unit conversion.

 

"Hey," she said. She grinned slyly at Booj, whose eyes widened. He had come to recognize that grin. "Do you think I could take some of this to go?"

 

The rug flapped. "No! Hell no! You go home now!" It devolved into untranslatable ranting until Booj had also risen to his feet, and all three were headed for the exit. "Wait!"

 

She turned back. "Yes?"

 

"You're famous, right?"

 

She looked at Booj, who shrugged. "I guess."

 

"Would you take a picture with me so we can put it on the wall?"

 

She was still enjoying it. "Sure."

 

And she burped again.