Odds Are Good (17 page)

It gets a little embarrassing sometimes.

I'll tell you this, though. Unlike some people, I'm not afraid of what happens after you die.

I know what I'll find waiting on the other side. . . .

Biscuits.

Biscuits of glory.

 

It's not easy being the only kid in your class who doesn't have six arms and an extra eye in the middle of your forehead. But that's the way it's been for me since my father dragged me here to Kwarkis.

It's all supposed to be a great honor, of course. Dad is a career diplomat, and being chosen as the first ambassador to another planet was (as he has told me more times than I can count) the crowning achievement of his career.

Me, I just want to go home—though to hear Dad tell it, Kwarkis
is
home. I'm afraid he's fallen in love with the place. I guess I can't blame him for that. What with the singing purple forests, the water and air being sparkling clean (which
really
makes me feel like I'm on another planet), and those famous nights with three full moons, this truly is a beautiful place.

But it's not home. The people aren't
my
people. Most of the time I just feel lonely and stupid.

According to Dad, the first feeling is reasonable, the second silly. “You've got cause to feel lonely, Jacob,” he'll say, standing over me. “And I'm sorry for that. But you have
no
reason to feel stupid.”

A fat lot he knows. He doesn't have to go to school with kids who can do things three times as fast as he can because they have three times as many hands. Even worse, they're just basically smarter than I am.
All
of them. I am the dumbest one in the class—which isn't easy to cope with, since I was always one of the smartest kids back home.

 

I'll never forget my first day at school here. My father led me in and stood me next to Darva Preet, the teacher. She smiled that strange Kwarkissian smile, reached down one of her six arms to take my hand, then turned to the room and cried: “Class! Class! Come to order! I want you to meet our new student—the alien you've all heard so much about!”

I began to blush. It was still hard to think of myself as an alien. But, of course, that's what I was: the only kid from Earth on a planet full of people that
I
had considered aliens until I got here. Now that I was on Kwarkis, the situation was reversed. Now
I
was the alien.

The kids all turned toward me and stared, blinking their middle eyes the way they do when they are really examining something. I stared back, which is what I had been taught to do on the trip here. After a moment one of them dug a finger into his nose, pulled out an enormous booger, then popped it into his mouth and began to chew. The sight made my stomach lurch, but I tried not to let my disgust show on my face. Fior Langis, the Kwarkissian diplomat who had been in charge of preparing me for this day, had taught me that Kwarkissians feel very differently about bodily functions than we do.

“Greetings,” I said in Kwarkissian, which I had learned through sleep-tapes on my way here. “I am glad to be part of the class. I hope we will have good times together.”

Everyone smiled in delight, surprised that I knew their language. Then they all farted in unison. The sound was incredible—a rumbling so massive that for a moment I thought a small bomb had gone off. I jumped, even though Fior Langis had warned me that this was the way Kwarkissians show their approval. What she
hadn't
told me about, prepared me for, was the tremendous odor.

My eyes began to water.

I had a hard time breathing.

I fell over in a dead faint.

When I woke, I was in the hospital.

Since then the kids have referred to me as
Kilu-gwan
, which means “The Delicate One.” I find this pretty embarrassing, since I was one of the toughest kids in class back on Earth. It doesn't really make that much difference here on Kwarkis, where no one fights. But I don't plan to live here forever, and I'll need to be tough when I get home to Earth. Back there you have to be tough to survive.

 

The only one who doesn't call me
Kilu-gwan
is Fifka Dworkis, who is the closest thing I have to a friend here. Fifka was the first one who talked to me after my embarrassing introduction to the class.

“Do not worry about it, Jay-cobe,” he said, pronouncing my Earth name as well as he could with his strange oval mouth and snakelike green tongue. “The others will not hold your oversensitive olfactory organ against you.”

He put his arm around my shoulder. Then he put another arm around my ribs, and another one around my waist!

I tried not to squirm, because I knew he was just being friendly. But it sure felt
weird.

To tell the truth, it wasn't just the weirdness that bothered me. It was also that I felt pretty inadequate having only one arm to offer back. Kwarkissian friends are always walking down the street arm in arm in arm in arm in arm in arm, and I wondered if Fifka felt cheated, only getting one arm back.

Whether or not he felt cheated, he doesn't spend a lot of time with me. He's always kind when he sees me, but he has never stayed overnight or anything like that. Sometimes I suspect that the reason Fifka is nice to me is that his mother has told him to be. She's part of the Kwarkissian diplomatic team that works with Dad.

The only
real
friend I have here is my double miniature panda, Ralph J. Bear, whom I brought with me from Earth. In case you've been living on another planet (ha-ha) the new double miniature breeds are only about six inches long. Ralph can easily fit right in my hand.

I like to watch him strolling around my desk while I do my homework. (Yes, I still have homework; I guess some things are the same no matter where you go!) And he's so neat and clean that Dad doesn't object to my letting him eat off my plate at the table. I love him so much I can hardly stand it.

The Chinese ambassador gave me Ralph at the big going-away party the United Nations threw for Dad and me. The gift was a surprise to everyone, since the Chinese are still pretty much holding on to the miniatures.

(Of course, between the fact that there are so few of them available, and the fact that they are so devastatingly cute, there is an enormous demand for them. People were wildly jealous of me for having Ralph, but I figure I ought to get
some
benefit from being a diplomat's son. I mean, none of those people who were so jealous about Ralph was being dragged off to live on another planet!)

As it turns out, Ralph is one reason that the Kwarkissians made contact with Earth in the first place. Well, not Ralph J. Bear himself. But the breeding program he came from was part of a major last-ditch effort to save the pandas. According to Dad, the Kwarkissians had been monitoring us for a long time. His contacts say that one thing that made them decide we were worth meeting was that we had started taking our biosphere seriously enough to really work at saving endangered species, such as pandas.

Anyway, Ralph is the only real friend I have here. So you can imagine how horrified I was when I was asked to give him away.

“What am I going to do, Ralph?” I said, trying not to cry.

The genetic engineers who created the miniatures have enhanced their intelligence, too. Ralph J. Bear is very bright, and he always knows when something is bothering me. Waddling across my desk, he stood on his hind legs and lifted his arms for me to pick him up.

I set him on my shoulder, and he nestled into my neck. Normally that would have made me feel a lot better. Now it had the reverse effect, because it only made me more aware of how much I would miss him if I had to give him away.

 

I've been avoiding talking about how I got into this mess because it is so embarrassing, but I suppose I had better explain it if any of the rest of this is going to make sense.

It started while we were having a diplomatic dinner here at the house.

According to my father, diplomatic dinners are very important. He says much of the major work in his profession happens around dinner tables, rather than at office desks.

The big thing he is working on right now is a treaty that has to do with who gets to deal with Earth. See, what most people back home don't know yet is the Kwarkissians aren't the only ones out here. But since they were the first to make contact with us, according to the rules of the OSFR (Organization of Space-Faring Races), they get to
control
contact with us for the next fifty years.

My father was not amused when he found this out. He thinks the Kwarkissians shouldn't be able to do that. He feels they're treating Earth like a colony, and that it should be
our
choice who has contact with us. But he doesn't want to make the Kwarkissians angry. For one thing, they've been very good to us. For another, we suspect they could probably turn us (by “us,” I mean the entire planet) into cosmic dust without much trouble.

So the situation is very touchy.

Dad had been dealing with this other planet, called—well, I can't actually write down what it's called because no one ever says the name; it's against their religion or something. Anyway, this planet that shall remain nameless was interested in making contact with us. But to do so they had to go through the Kwarkissians.

Dad was all in favor of it; he says the more trading partners Earth has, the better. So he was throwing this dinner, where we were going to get together with a bunch of Kwarkissians, including Fifka's mom, and a bunch of dudes from the nameless planet, including their head guy, whose name is Nnnnnn.

Dad asked me to be part of the dinner group because (a) people usually want to meet your kids, no matter what planet you come from, and (b) it's good diplomacy, because it usually softens people up. I know Dad felt a little guilty about using me like that, but I told him not to, since I was glad to be of some help—especially here on Kwarkis, where I felt like such a doof.

Diplomatic dinners are always a little tricky because you want to keep from offending anyone, which is not so easy when you have people from three different cultures sitting down to eat together. This is true even on Earth, so you can imagine what it was like for us to have representatives from not three countries, but three
planets.

“Look, this is going to be a delicate situation,” said Dad. “The Kwarkissians want to have you around tonight. They were quite insistent on it, in fact; they're very fond of you, you know. But Nnnnnn and his group don't like children—partly because in their culture childhood barely exists.”

“What do you mean, ‘Childhood barely exists'?”

Dad frowned. “On Nnnnnn's planet, children are hatched. They come out of the egg looking much like two-year-olds do on Earth, and mature very rapidly thereafter. Even with that, they're pretty much kept out of sight by their nurses and teachers until they're ready to join adult society. On Nnnnnn's world someone who looks as old as you do might well have gained adult status, which is a thing they take very seriously. They are going to consider you not as a child, but as an equal—so for heaven's sake be careful.”

He handed me a computer printout on their culture and told me to read it. “There's a lot here you should know,” he. said. “Study it. The main thing to remember is, whatever else you do, don't compliment them on anything they show you.”

He got up to leave the room. Stopping at the door, he added, “You'd better keep Ralph locked up for the night, too.”

Then he told me how he wanted me to dress and hurried off to tend to some details for the dinner.

 

I don't know about you, but when someone hands me something and tells me to read it, my mind immediately starts thinking of other things I need to do instead. It's not that I didn't want to learn about the new aliens; it's just that my brain rebels at being told what to do. So I put the printout aside and started to do something else.

A few minutes later my message receptor beeped. I pushed the receive button, and a holographic image of Fifka, about four inches tall, appeared in the center of my desk. Ralph skittled away in surprise—he still hadn't gotten used to the Kwarkissian version of a phone call. I pushed the send button, so that Fifka could see me as well.

We started to talk about the dinner. He was excited because his mom was coming. I almost got the feeling he was jealous of her. That surprised me. When I thought about it, I realized that I had never actually invited Fifka to come visit; I had only thought about it and waited for a good opportunity. Maybe he was more genuinely friendly than I had thought.

We got talking about something that had happened at school, and then about a game we were both working on, and by the time we were done I had pretty much forgotten about the printout Dad had given me. Next I did a little homework. Then I spent some time fooling around with Ralph J. Bear.

Before I knew it, it was time to get dressed.

That was when I noticed the printout lying on my bed.

I sighed. The thing had to be twenty pages long. No time to read that much before dinner. I would just have to be on my best behavior.

The flaw in that plan, of course, was that what one culture considers good behavior can get you in a lot of trouble somewhere else. . . .

 

The dinner party consisted of Dad, me, three Kwarkissians (including Fifka's mother), and three beings from the planet that shall remain nameless. These guys only had two arms, which was sort of a relief, but they were bright green and seven feet tall.

The first part of the dinner went pretty well, I thought, if you set aside the fact that eating dinner with a bunch of Kwarkissians is like going to a symphony in gas-minor.

I had had a long talk about this with Fifka one day.

“Biology is biology,” he'd said. “What is it that you people find so bad about it, anyway? Good heavens, think what life would be like if your bodies
didn't
process all the stuff you take in, if your bodies
didn't
do their jobs! I hope this won't offend you, Jay-cobe, but most of us feel that if your people paid more attention to ideas and less to biological by-products, you would all be better off. The important choices have to do with the mind and the heart, not the stomach and the intestines.”