Olga Godim's Blog, page 14

Happy New Year 2020

Hello, friends.

Happy New 2020, the year of the RAT. Such resourceful creatures, aren’t they?

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Christmas story on wattpad

[image error]My new urban fantasy novelette on Wattpad, Dancing Truth & Lies, is a Christmas story. You can read Dancing Truth & Lies here.

It is a fan fiction story based on Wen Spencer’s Elfhome universe. The action in this story starts a couple months after another of my Wen Spencer fan fiction stories, Magic Senegalese, and follows the same protagonist, a dancer and dancing instructor Naomi, on her new adventure: a Christmas recital for her students.

Summary: Naomi teaches dancing on the planet of Elfhome, and both humans and elves enjoy her lessons. When a Christmas dance recital she organizes is about to collapse, she deals with one calamity after another to make sure neither bad weather, nor broken sewer pipes, nor the criminal girl-smuggling ring would jeopardize her students’ upcoming performance.

To refresh your memory about Naomi’s previous exploits, you can read Magic Senegalese here.

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Covers:

The girls on both covers are by Caique Silva from Unsplash.

The background for Dancing Truth & Lies is by Jay Lee from Unsplash.

Both cover designs are by me, Olga Godim.

WEP Dec 2019 – Footprints

This story about Dinara and her pet shop, Rendezvous Pets, on the Rendezvous Space Station, is the last Rendezvous Pets story of 2019 and my entry for the December WEP Challenge. Dinara’s shop offers pet daycare, grooming, and advice for the citizens of Rendezvous and its many visitors, humans and aliens alike.

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“I don’t know who else to ask,” the man said. He just burst into Dinara’s pet shop, Rendezvous Pets, his eyes frantic. His fists clenched and unclenched spasmodically. “You’re my only hope. The station map shows your shop as the only one dealing with animals.”

“True.” Dinara acknowledged. “The only one on the Rendezvous Space Station. What’s your problem?” It was early morning, but for some reason, problems often arrived on her doorstep in the morning.

“I was transporting a shicksa for the Vergacians, and it… disappeared.”

Dinara frowned. “What’s a shicksa? Is it a pet?”

“I’m not sure. They might cook it as food.” The man shrugged. “It’s sort-of an invisible octopus, like a cross of an octopus with a jelly fish. The size of a large dog. Only they live on land, not in the water.”

“Invisible?”

“It’s transparent. They gave me a special container, with some toys and rocks and staff. I could see the creature through its walls.”

“How did it disappear? Did it climb out of the container?”

“Not really. The container has a lid, but it’s not sealed or anything. We lifted the lid every day when we fed it, and the shicksa never tried to escape before. No, we were unloading and put the container on the dock. A drone smashed into it – must’ve malfunctioned – and knocked the container on its side. The lid fell off. Everything inside scattered on the floor. Nothing got broken, but the shicksa legged it. And I don’t know how to find it again. The Vergacians…” He sighed. “In the best-case scenario, they would sue me to the end of the galaxy. They’ve already paid for delivery. The worst case – I don’t know. Start another war.” He grimaced.

“Surely not,” Dinara murmured without conviction. Who knew with the Vergacians? The last devastating war with them had lasted for five years. It had only ended a year ago. Dinara wouldn’t be the one to ignite another armed conflict if she could help it.

“What do the shicksas eat? Maybe we could trap it,” she prodded the customer.

“I brought a sample of its feed.” The man gave her a small bag.

Dinara poured the content, a bunch of small gray pellets, into her portable analyzer. The device buzzed quietly, and the composition popped up on her com-link screen, with comparisons to many common substances. She stared at it in confusion.

“It says,” she said slowly, “that chemically, it’s practically the same as synta-silk. Without a coloring agent.”

“Clothes?” He sounded baffled.

“Yep. Have you fed it today? Is it hungry now?”

“It might be. We haven’t fed it today.”

“Then it might look for food.” She typed the words syntax-silk clothes on her com-link to see the locations of appropriate stores or warehouses, but the first result of her search was a station security report. Multiple robberies in the docks. A sinta-silk blouse. A turban. Pants. An invisible thief.

“Oh-oh,” she said.

“Oh, no!” the man wailed. He was also watching her screen. “The damn shicksa ate someone’s pants! Now the security will be after me too.”

Dinara grabbed her inflatable floating pallet – it should be just the right size for the thieving octopus – and jumped to her feet. “Let’s go trace it. The report gives all the locations. Docks five and six. Which one was yours?”

“Five,” he said gloomily.

In the last moment, she picked up a silk wrap – a gift from a former client. It was a garish orange color, and she didn’t like it. It sat unused in her drawer. Might as well serve as bait for the felonious shicksa.

The security officers were still canvassing the docks, when Dinara and her client got there. The security were searching for electronics though, and Dinara decided not to disabuse them of their preconceived notion. Her client would be safer, if the security didn’t find the shicksa.

She started at the dock number five and tugged her floating pallet with her wrap inside towards the increasing numbers. She scanned the floor and the walls for any anomalies. A shimmering of air might give the transparent creature away.

Instead of shimmering air, odd colorful marks littered the floor. Like footprints of a medium-size dog, only too many to belong to a dog, they pattered towards the dock number six. They started blue, almost invisible on the gray slate of the corridor. At the sixth dock, the color of the footprints changed to red.

[image error]As she followed the marks, with the man trudging silently after her, Dinara keyed up the security report for more details. The stolen blouse was blue. Check. The stolen turban was red. Check. The stolen pants, the last item reported, were dark green. When the red marks morphed into green, she knew she was close.

“It bleeds color after it eats the colored fabric,” she commented. “See the marks? Do they look like the shicksa’s footprints?”

“About the right size,” he grumbled.

They already outdistanced the security and turned into a narrow hallway between the docks eight and nine, when her pallet bobbed suddenly, as if a weight dropped into it. Dinara wheeled around and hastily keyed the door into the locked position.

“I think I’ve got it,” she said. She peered through the transparent side of the holding compartment but couldn’t see anything inside except her orange wrap … slowly disappearing. The pallet bumped, as the shicksa with the appetite for silk discovered it was locked in.

“Ha!” Dinara grinned at her client. “Gotcha!” She transferred the pallet’s handle into his hand. “Don’t lose it again.”

“Never!” he vowed with a grin of his own. “Thank you. You saved my life. My money, for certain. How much do I owe you? Should I buy you another wrap instead of the one my shicksa just gobbled up?”

“It would be nice.” Dinara said. “But not orange. I hate orange.”

Kindle or paper

[image error]It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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I recently re-read a novel Arabella by Georgette Heyer, a delightful historical romance by one of my favorite writers. The novel was published in 1949, but my paperback edition was printed in 1972, almost 50 years ago. The book is a bit yellow with age but still in a pretty good condition. If I want to re-read it in 10 or 20 years, I have no doubt I’ll be able to.

As I held it in my hands, I wondered: what would happen to my books on Kindle, to any Kindle file, 50 years from now? Would the files still exist? Would any device 50 years into the future be able to read the surviving files? For that matter, what about 20 years into the future? Or even five?

My old Kindle started to misbehave last year, and my son bought me a new Kindle last Christmas. I was happy until I wanted to re-read one of my old Kindle books and discovered that the new device didn’t recognize the old file. Mind you, only four years old. After further investigation, I learned to my horror that my new Kindle couldn’t read 80% of my old Kindle books. I had to call Amazon and ask them to replace all my books, but I haven’t checked whether they did it or not. For now, I’m sticking to paper books.

Same thing happened to music. In the last half-century, there were vinyl records, audio tapes, CDs, and what-nots. They’ve all become obsolete, together with the devices to read them. But the sheet music, written on paper, has persisted for centuries.

I shudder to think what might happen if the paper books are pushed out of circulation. It hasn’t happened yet, but the signs are here that my favorite format, mass-market paperback, is being driven to extinction. Too expensive to produce, they say.

The problem is: a digital file is ephemeral. We can still read some ancient writing on clay tablets thousands of years after the writers died. What will our descendants read, thousands of years from now, if many of our books now exist only in digital format? We might lose the entire generation of self-published writers, because they opted to publish their books in digital format only. After all, a digital book is often much cheaper than paper, to produce and to buy, much more affordable to our readers.

Addendum: There is an interesting article in LitHub on the deteriorating condition of all books printed on wood-sourced paper, but it is a slow process, much slower than digital files getting obsolete these days. We need to think about preserving our libraries, public and personal, but we still have time. Our paper books, even the ones published 100 years ago, are still readable. Fortunately.

What do you think?

Freddy Mamani Architect

[image error]I haven’t posted anything specifically about visual arts for a long time. Nothing really inspired me to write a new post on the theme, until, while surfing the net, I stumbled upon photographs of unusual buildings: Freddy Mamani’s colorful, almost garish, futuristic-looking houses in the Bolivian city of El Alto.

I fell in love instantly. The colors are almost blinding, and the sci-fi lines make me gaze at the images in wonder. I also admire the contrast between Mamani’s houses and their dull, flat neighbors. I think this Bolivian architect has put his city single-handedly on the tourist map of the world. He is definitely a pioneer of a unique style, and he already inspired several others to follow in his footsteps.

National Geographic published an article about him recently. So did an online magazine DeZeen. If you want to read those in-depth stories, click on the links. The purpose of my post is to introduce you to the name of this innovative architect and present you with the collage of his bright, toy-like visionary creations. Enjoy!

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Killers and what we think of them

[image error]It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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OPTIONAL QUESTION: What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever googled in researching a story?

MY ANSWER: A homemade bomb. In my short story collection Squirrel of Magic, there is one story where the heroine, a modern witch, has to disarm a bomb by magical means. I was scouring the internet for the materials that might be used, and all the while, I was afraid that some law enforcement agency might appear on my doorstep and demand an explanation. To my relief, they never did.

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I’ve been contemplating the different ways readers, as well as fictional characters, perceive killers in fiction. As far as I can determine, killers come in several categories.

1. Unquestionably bad guys, murderers. They kill for pleasure or for greed or for power. They kill anyone who stands in their ways. They are psychopaths and villains, and all of us revile them. No ambiguity there.

2. Soldiers of any variety. They kill indiscriminately, because they have been ordered, and the society approved of those orders. We don’t blame soldiers for their victims’ lives. We feel compassionate about soldiers. If anyone is to blame for all those corpses that litter the armies’ footsteps, it is politicians and high-ranking officers who keep their hands clean and send others to do their dirty jobs. No doubts occupy the readers’ minds (or the fictional characters’ minds) about the treatment of soldiers in fiction. Soldiers are our heroes, standing between us and harm. Hooray to them.

3. There is a sub-category of soldiers – the ones who kill on orders – killers for hire: mercenaries and assassins. There is a curious fascination with them in fiction, especially genre fiction. Personally, I hate these cold-blooded professionals, but in my opinion, they are little different from soldiers. Both get paid to kill. Both don’t know their victims and don’t care. Often, an assassin becomes a protagonist in a speculative fiction story, and it makes me angry. I don’t think assassins deserve the aura of heroic and noble suffering some authors imbue them with.

4. Vigilantes. These guys or girls kill multiple times as well, but unlike the previous three types of killers, these ones make moral judgement before they kill. They select their victims carefully: they only kill those they consider evil. Consequently, readers and fictional characters alike hero-worship vigilantes, put them on pedestals, equate them with super-heroes. But here lies a moral dilemma. Perhaps, for some, the vigilante’s victims are not so bad. They’re someone’s parents or children or friends, or they represent an opposite political faction. From some point of view, there is nothing different between a vigilante and a serial killer of the #1 category.

5. Accidental killers. These people inspire the most controversy in fiction and life. They killed once, and they made a moral judgement too. Usually, they killed out of desperation, to protect or avenge themselves or someone else. Sometimes, it is a mercy killing, to help someone escape the endless suffering. Unfortunately, they are not protected by society-sanctioned orders, like soldiers, or by the honorable mystery aspect that surrounds vigilantes. Unlike all the other killers, one-time killers feel guilty for taking a life, and all of us, in real life and in fiction, blame them too. We are afraid of them. We shun them. We say: “They killed once. They can kill again.” But can they really? Why do we forgive a soldier for taking thousands of lives, but can’t forgive our neighbor for killing his daughter’s rapist?

I think of all the killers, in fiction and life, the last variety deserve the most respect and understanding. They deserve our deepest compassion. They’re, more often than not, true heroes, and they definitely deserve our forgiveness. And they deserve a different treatment by the law than the harsh one dished out to them.

Do you agree?

WEP Oct 2019 – Horrible Harvest

This story about Dinara and her pet shop, Rendezvous Pets, on the Rendezvous Space Station is my entry for the Oct 2019 WEP Challenge. Dinara’s shop is a trusted location for every pet owner on the station, human and alien alike. She guarantees the best care and absolute safety for your pets.

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Dinara looked up, as her cousin Manie entered Rendezvous Pets. “Look, Manie, I’ve got a harvest.” Dinara nodded proudly at her new potted plant in the corner. Only yesterday, it had been covered with small, off-white flowers. Now, the tiny shriveled petals littered the floor around the pot. In their places, the oval iridescent berries swayed on thin branches. The tiny fruits sparkled merrily. Her new boarder, a small gray cat, named incongruously Ginger, sat beside the pot, swatting at the berries with deep concentration.

Manie chuckled. “Are they edible?”

“No, purely ornamental. They smell nice.” Dinara sniffed appreciatively. “Ginger likes them too.”

“Someone had a wicked sense of humor naming that cat Ginger.”

“Yep. A Vergacian embassy clerk brought her in yesterday.”

“I didn’t know Vergacians kept pets. I mean, a human cat?”

“They don’t. I’m not sure Ginger is happy with her current master. She hissed at it.” Dinara picked up the cat and deposited her into the playpen at the back of the shop. “You stay here, kitty,” she said fondly and locked the pen’s fence. “Drink your milk and play, while I have lunch with Manie.”

Ginger stalked to the saucer of milk and began lapping. With the shop door locked as well, the cat wasn’t going anywhere. The animal was so well-behaved, Dinara let it roam the shop at will.

“Explain to me why a Vergacian would own an Earth cat?” Manie demanded.

“The owner said it wanted to understand humans better, so it got a human pet.”

[image error]“A cat?” Manie muttered something uncomplimentary, while Dinara contemplated the Vergacians. After several years of bloody war, the human Federation and the Vergacians had finally signed a peace treaty a year ago. Soon after, the Vergacians opened their embassy on the Rendezvous Space Station.

According to the scientists, Vergacians couldn’t see colors—their eyes were not equipped—so everything about them was gray: their skin, their clothing, their buildings. They were unisexual, propagated by budding, and preferred the pronoun ‘it.’ If a Vergacian decided to have a cat, gray would be the most appropriate color, but the name Ginger was definitely a joke.

An hour later, when they returned to the shop, she couldn’t see Ginger. Nor could she see her plant with its shining berries.

“Hey, where is my beautiful plant? Where is Ginger?” She rounded the desk, glanced down, and felt cold all over.

The pot lay on its side behind the desk, soil spilling out of it. The stem of the plant was broken, and the berries were all gone. Ginger’s inert body slumped beside the ruined plant, a leaf protruding from her mouth.

“No!” Dinara crouched to the cat, but Ginger wasn’t breathing.

“She got out of the playpen, ate the poisoned berries, and died,” Manie said softly.

“What am I going to tell the Vergacian?” Dinara wailed. “Horrible berries! Rendezvous Pets guarantees the safety of every pet, and I let Ginger die. I should’ve kept her locked up while I was gone.”

“I’m sorry, Dinara.”

“Yeah.” Dinara winced. “I need to get a new cat. The Vergacian comes back in a week. If I don’t get a replacement by then, I might lose my license. Or worse, they might start another war.”

“Won’t it notice, if you return a different cat?” Manie asked.

“I hope not. If they don’t see colors… Gosh, Manie. A living creature died on my watch, because of my carelessness.” She put her hands over her face. She wanted to cry. “Ginger was such a nice kitty,” she mumbled into her palms.

She scoured the station net for days, placed an add in the Rendezvous news sheet, but nothing bit, until one day before the Vergacian was due back.

“You need a cat, lady?” The scruffy old man on the com-link screen wore stained brown coveralls. “I have one for sale.” He cackled and named the price that had Dinara’s head spinning. But she didn’t have a choice. She agreed to meet him at the bottom of the station, where transient workers lived.

He waited for her alone in his dorm, his breath reeking of alcohol and drugs. The cat, a large carroty tom, was weaving his way around the mattresses of the dorm, ignoring the humans.

“I’m leaving for a new work contract in a few days, so you can have the cat,” the man said, “but you pay up first.” He sounded menacing.

“Of course. What is your cat’s name?” Dinara fingered a tranq gun in her pocket. If this man threatened her in any way, she would shoot a tranquillizer dart at him.

He shrugged and leered. “Cat.”

Dinara sighed, put her cat carrier on the floor, and opened it. She had come prepared. A strong aroma of fish and herbs wafted out from the fish cubes in the carrier feeder.

“Ginger, come here,” she called.

The tom turned, regarded her disdainfully, but came anyway. He stalked into the carrier as if he was doing her a favor. Dinara locked the carrier door and gave the man his credit chip. “The exact price,” she said coldly, picked up the carrier, and left. She hoped she exhibited as much dignity as the new Ginger, but probably not. The new cat was awfully heavy. The man’s guffaw followed her to the lifts. The cat mewed contentedly inside the carrier as he gobbled his fish.

Two days later, after the Vergacian had come and gone with its new cat, Dinara met Manie for lunch again and told her the entire story.

“But this Ginger is male and big,” Manie exclaimed. And ginger. And not nearly as nice as the other Ginger was. Didn’t the owner see the difference?”

“Obviously not.” Dinara smiled. “I was quaking inside, but it just commented on the size. It didn’t notice the color, of course, nor the gender discrepancy. I guess, all alien cats look the same to a Vergacian. I explained that the cat liked the food in my shop so much, it grew bigger. It was satisfied. It even asked me what brand of cat food I used.”

“Did this Ginger like his new owner?”

“No,” Dinara said. “He hissed, but so did the old one.”

The size of your gift

[image error]It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s 1987 novel Bluebeard for the first time. The book is powerful, and it touched on a variety of topics. One of those topics came very close to my heart. If you’re an artist, if creativity bubbles inside you, do you have the rights to express yourself publicly, to call yourself an artist, even if you’re not as good as the giants like Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci?

Kurt Vonnegut obviously contemplated the same loaded question when he wrote the following words:

…moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.”

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”   

Perhaps, in 1987, this sad statement was true for any writer, except a small lucky selection picked out by major publishers. Hopefully, it’s not true anymore, because according to Vonnegut, most of self-published writers nowadays, people like myself and many others in the IWSG community, would be considered “exhibitionists” in 1987.

Thank the universe for the internet. Now, we don’t have to bottle-up our “moderate giftedness” anymore. We can “tap-dance” our books online and find our own readers, and the gate-keepers of the past be damned. And if anybody jeers, we don’t have to read their tweets either. We become an online community, and the need to compare with geniuses like Vonnegut dissolves. I hope…

I’d say: Hip-hip-hooray! What do you say?

Good is good, isn’t it?

[image error]It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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I don’t remember why, but I recently visited the Goodreads page of one of my all-time favorite books, Tinker by Wen Spencer. I’ve read this sci-fi book several times already, and I’ll probably re-read it again next year. I love the world the author has created so much that I’ve written 3 fan-fiction stories set in her world. Two of them are already published on wattpad. But that’s beside the point of this post. The point is: to my surprise, many reviewers didn’t like the book and gave it a very low rating. They explained the reason for their disdain: the heroine was too good. Several reviewers even compared her to a Mary Sue. But why is it a stigma?

I agree with their assessment. Tinker, the titular heroine of the novel, is a surprisingly good girl, cheerful, compassionate, and utterly honest. Plus, she is very clever, a mechanical genius. She helps everyone in need, and that’s why everybody in the book loves her. That’s why I love her. And because I love and admire her so much, this book and its sequels are among my favorite novels in all speculative fiction.

In general, I love good persons as protagonists in fictional stories. Their goodness doesn’t make a story boring. Positive and smart persons encounter their share of problems just as often as flawed persons. But the common perception among readers is that an all-around wonderful person is boring to read about. Why? It baffles me.

When you have a kind and moral person as a friend or a neighbor or a family member, you treasure them, probably much more than your perpetually lying druggie neighbor or your unreliable alcoholic co-worker. Why wouldn’t you love a fictional honorable guy? I’m sure you all adore your ‘Mary Sue’ aunt who helps everyone in the family. Why is ‘Mary Sue’ an insult, when applied to fiction?

I know that recently, making a story revolve around a flawed protagonist has been all the rage, but I don’t understand this approach. As a reader, I don’t like reading about problematic characters, like drug addicts or drunkards. I’m not interested in their stories. As a person, I try to avoid them in my life too.

What is even stranger is that this conundrum seems to be genre specific. Readers of speculative fiction frequently demand faults in their fictional heroes, but I have never read a romance review, where the readers would complain of a heroine being ‘too good’. It seems OK for a romantic heroine to be nice and faultless, but not for a sci-fi heroine. Why?

Tell me what you think in the comments.

 

WEP August 2019 – Red Wheelbarrow

This story about Dinara and her pet shop, Rendezvous Pets, on the Rendezvous Space Station is my entry for the Aug 2019 WEP Challenge. Dinara’s shop provides pet daycare and grooming for the citizens of Rendezvous and its many visitors, humans and aliens.

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A plump woman in a business suit entered Dinara’s pet daycare shop, Rendezvous Pets.

“What can I do for you?” Dinara asked.

“My pet, an Aelurian dragon.” The woman’s lips crimped in distress, but she composed herself. “Peke. His name is Peke. I can’t find him. He has never run away before. If anyone catches him, they might kill him. By mistake. I need to find him.”

“Yes,” Dinara said. “Unescorted pets could be hazardous on a space station. Especially Aelurian dragons. They eat metal. People usually call pest control if they find a dragon in their tech ducts. How did he escape? How old is your dragon?”

“Fifty.” The woman’s voice hitched.

“A big one.” Dinara winced. A fifty-year-old Aelurian dragon would be at least a meter long, probably longer. He wouldn’t escape the place through the ducts, wouldn’t fit into their narrow apertures.

“I had a party,” the woman continued. “I got a box of Red Wheelbarrow chocolates for my guests. We had some for dessert and then left the dining room for a few minutes. When we returned, the box was on the floor, empty, all the chocolates gone, and so was Peke. I think he ate the chocolates. Will they damage him? I know they are not supposed to ingest organics.”

“Oh, dear,” Dinara said. “Could he open the door of your apartment?”

“Yes. He is very intelligent. What would happen to him if he ate the chocolates?”

[image error]“I’ve never tried any Red Wheelbarrow chocolates,” Dinara murmured. As far as she knew, they  were the most expensive candies this side of the Milky Way. Produced on Earth, they contained gold dust and were considered an exclusive treat. Her visitor must be very rich to be able to afford them. She also owned one super-lucky dragon.

“Those chocolates have gold among their ingredients,” she continued. “Organics won’t damage your dragon, but gold is a powerful aphrodisiac for them. When you got your dragon, did they warn you not to wear gold jewelry?”

“Yes,” the woman whispered.

“That’s why. Your Peke is probably out looking for a mate, horny as hell. Maybe rampaging.”

“He is very gentle.”

Dinara shook her head. “Not now. Not while blind with lust. You really need to find him.”

“How?”

“I have something that might help, but it is not legal outside Aeluria. A dragon mating call. If Aelurians catch me with it, I’ll be in a lot of trouble. And we have an Aelurian delegation on the station right now. Drat!”

“Why is it illegal?”

“Because it works as a mating call for any Aelurian male, no matter the species. It’ll call your dragon to us, but it’ll also call all the males of the delegation. And they won’t be happy campers.”

“I’ll pay anything,” the woman breathed, her eyes huge. “You have to help me find Peke.”

Dinara typed in a code, and a holographic form rose above her com-link plate. “Sign this form. It says you assume full responsibility, financial and legal, for anything I do to assist you in finding your pet.”

The woman read the text on the form, hesitated a moment, then authorized it with her palm print. The net instantly filled out her name: Martha Carter. Occupation: Simel representative.

An ambassador, no less. Of course, she could afford Red Wheelbarrow chocolates.

“Thank you, Mrs. Carter. Let’s go.” Dinara grabbed the call, a small electronic gadget striped in green and black, from the middle drawer of her desk. “I’ll also need to sedate your dragon, when we find him.” She loaded a sedative ampule into her tranq gun and got an extra-sized inflatable floating pallet to serve as the dragon’s temporary cage.

“Where are we going? Why don’t you use it here?”

“I don’t want the Aelurian delegation converging on my shop.”

“Oh,” Martha said.

Dinara led her client down to the level of warehouses and freight docks, as far from the ambassadorial sector as possible, before she activated the call. She kept it on for five minutes.

“I don’t hear anything,” Martha said.

“No, but the dragon does. He’ll be here soon. So will all the Aelurians. I hope your Peke comes first.”

He did. Zooming in on Dinara’s call, he galloped towards them along the long utilitarian corridor, as if no obstruction existed. Rare human workers scrambled out of his way. Curses echoed off the ceiling. Loading drones buzzed erratically to evade the sixty-kilo stampeding lizard, filled with mating hormones. Martha squealed and flattened herself to the wall.

Dinara switched off the call, pulled out the gun, turned on the automatic targeting, and squeezed the trigger. The ampule hit the dragon when he was only a few meters from her position.

Peke staggered, screamed defiantly, and toppled.

“I love this sedative. Works instantly,” Dinara said. “Mrs. Carter, I need your help to get the dragon on board the pallet.”

It took both of them to heave the inert body, its scales shining iridescent yellows and reds, into its temporary enclosed bed on the pallet.

“Beautiful,” Dinara said.

“Yes,” Martha agreed.

They encountered a horde of Aelurian males, all seven of the delegation contingent, at the lifts. Elongated and willowy, the males in their flowing red robes pushed and shoved at each other. Their heads rotated searchingly. Clearly agitated, they yelled in their native tongue. A unit of the station security was closing in on them. Neither the security nor the Aelurians paid any heed to a couple of human women towing an enclosed floating pallet into one of the lifts.

Only when the doors shut and the lift started its ascent, Dinara relaxed. “Good thing my pallet is opaque, and they couldn’t see your dragon inside, or they would’ve realized we were the ones calling them.”

Martha paled. “What would they have done to us?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Probably not. How long would this condition last with Peke?”

“Until tomorrow. When the sedative wears off in the morning, he should be alright. If he is not, call me.”

“Thank you,” Martha murmured.

Her payment arrived the next morning, together with a large box of Red Wheelbarrow chocolates.

Dinara bit into one small round confection, sprinkled with golden dust, and moaned in bliss. It was truly yummy.