Axel Munt glanced around at the interior of the public-house, trying to make out details through the dim lighting and smoke, but he couldn't see anything in the place to answer his question. He certainly wasn't there for the ambience; it was early evening, and the management had turned the lamps down, ostensibly to enhance the atmosphere and allow the customers to carry out their business with some degree of privacy. As a happy by-product, the darkness also helped to mask the tackiness of the decor; the interior, modelled after a native temple, was decorated almost entirely in chipped blue and gold paint, the walls and furnishings encrusted with the shells and fossils of tiny sea creatures. Holograms of living fish swam over the customers' heads to continue the marine theme and induce seasickness in any customer who looked up. The centerpiece was a towering, bejeweled statue of the goddess after whom the tavern, The Embrace of Neradi, was named. She was, like the planet's natives, humanoid, save for her piscine characteristics; gills, dorsal fin and scales. In addition, like the deities of most worlds, she was gifted with attributes that her worshippers didn’t possess. This included tentacles, which trailed across the floor and ceiling and wrapped around the pillars supporting the domed, transparent roof, giving a claustrophobic sense of entrapment to anyone who bothered to examine the decor. According to local legend, the goddess's embrace was fatal; none of her lovers saw another dawn once they had entered her bed-chamber.
No accounting for taste, Axel thought, unable to imagine why anyone would want to sleep with a sixteen-foot-tall woman-squid. He had to admit that of all Atruenus' gods, Neradi was the most representative of the planet; you could leave, but you never got very far before an invisible tendril curled around your ankle and yanked you back again.
That, at least, had been Axel's experience.
'What can I get for you... um... Sir?' trilled a voice next to his ear.
The human started. He had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he hadn't noticed the waitress gliding over to his table, and now she was standing uncomfortably close, notepad in hand. Despite himself, Axel glanced into her eyes. Quickly he looked away, but it was too late. Gods, what a sight! A Syreenii native with a figure to die for and a face that Neradi herself would have given up her divinity to possess, she had chosen this of all evenings to step out in a low-cut dress of shimmering scales that left little to the imagination.
Not looking at her didn’t help. She smelled of the evening tide. The scent filled Axel’s nostrils, reminding him of happy memories, of places he had never been save in his favourite dreams. He drifted away for a moment.
‘Sir?’ she said, jolting him out of his reverie.
‘Oh... I’ll have a glass of water, please child,’ he rasped. His voice was deep and hoarse and as unlike his real one as he could manage.
‘We don’t get many monks in here,’ she smiled, her deep turquoise eyes taking in his coarse brown robe. He had the hood pulled up over his head, concealing his face and his species.
‘Are you sure I can’t bring you anything stronger?’ she asked.
‘No thank you,’ Axel answered, willing her to go away. Coming in here had been a mistake. As she left, the human caught the eyes of the barman, who was scowling in his direction as he polished the glasses. Yes, definitely a mistake. The fellow, another native, had been glancing suspiciously in Axel’s direction since the human had entered, no doubt wondering what a man of faith was doing in a den of sin such as this and why he was paying so much attention to his female staff.
Anxious to avoid a confrontation, the human broke eye contact with the owner and turned his attention to the other tables.
The tavern’s clientele had not improved in Axel’s three-cycle absence. At the table closest to his crouched a solitary Virnoid, its mottled skin shifting from blue to an excited orange as it scooped its still-wriggling meal into its oversized maw. Virnoids usually ate alone, and with good reason. Not that this isolation ever seemed to bother them.
Stomach heaving, the human quickly shifted his gaze to another table, which was occupied by a crowd of Nimlings. They were less repulsive to look at, at least, loudly chattering as they drank and giving every appearance of enjoying one another's company. If you waited long enough, however, the drinks would effect a transformation in these creatures, from sweet little pixies to ravening monsters who profoundly and violently hated each other, and loud and bloody war would kick off. They were still allowed in despite this behaviour because of their entertainment value; the other customers loved watching the little imps kicking seven shades of plasma out of each other and hurling vile curses in those childlike voices. It gave the in-house entertainers a break, and it was never difficult to eject the Nimlings from the premises afterwards as they were too small to put up much resistance to the staff.
Beyond them, next to the fish tank, sat two Vulpins, each conversing through one mouth while drinking through the other. Their species, out of all those represented in the tavern, were equipped for talking and drinking simultaneously, an art most races had yet to master.
The tank next to them was occupied by three Giant Singing Eels, which were lying around in the silt at the bottom of their residence, dozing peacefully. It looked like this was their night off. Usually, those creatures provided the music, wailing in shrill voices that combined into a unique, almost-human sound that Axel had never acquired a taste for despite multiple visits.
Like attracts like, the human thought. Creatures from literally worlds apart, all hanging around exclusively with their kind, raising the question of why they bothered leaving their planets at all. Out of this whole crowd (excepting the Virnoid) he was the odd one out, the solitary little human far from home. He always had to work that little bit harder to get people to listen to him and take him seriously, and nobody wanted to be his friend, no matter how politely they tolerated his company. He was a bad joke, an insignificant creature from a small, obscure planet.
But he was going to show them all.
The human reached down and felt for the reassuring presence of the object in his pocket. It was still there; a small, hard, round something that gently hummed as he squeezed it.
'Excuse me,' said a voice.
Axel nearly jumped out of his skin. This was indeed a night for being snuck up on. Somehow a small, green creature that had been seated at the bar - the customer he had so far paid least notice to - had managed to cross the room without the human noticing and now it was standing so close to his left knee that he could feel its breath on his skin. Axel shifted uncomfortably in his seat and moved his legs away; non-humans couldn’t always be relied on to remember where other species’ boundaries were. All two feet of this alien was covered from head to tail in thick, silky fur, its head all whiskers and twitching, pointy ears, and it was gazing up at him with a pleading expression in its huge, golden eyes. Its appearance reminded him of something that he vaguely recalled, a distant memory from the historical records on his parents' ship...
'Cat!' the word popped out before Axel could stop himself.
'Oh, why do you humans always do that?' the creature growled, his expression shifting to one of indignation. 'Comparing every sentient race to some stupid animal from your planet? It's quite rude, you know.'
'Sorry,' Axel said. And then, as what he had just heard sank in: '"You humans"?'
'You humans,' the cat repeated.
‘How did you know?’ Axel asked, understanding now that his robe wasn’t the disguise he'd thought it was.
‘I could smell you from over there,’ the creature pointed to the bar. ‘I’ve got a good nose for species.’
Great, Axel thought. Whenever one was travelling through the United Cluster of Planets incognito it was important to factor in the heightened senses of other sentients.
'And you've met others?' Axel asked.
A nod.
'Recently?'
'Recently,' the cat said. 'Worked for them. Lived with them. Had quite a lot of exposure to your kind of late, in fact.'
'Have a seat,' Axel said, gesturing to a stool. He had been about to shoo the creature away, but now it had him hooked; if there were others of his kind in the vicinity of this orb, he had to know.
The alien nodded and climbed up on to the stool where it sat awkwardly, its feet and tail dangling.
‘So what can I do for you?’ Axel asked.
‘I’ve lost someone,’ said the cat.
‘The police…’ Axel began.
‘A human someone,’ the creature interrupted. ‘So the police aren't going to be much help, as you can probably appreciate.’
Axel did appreciate. The Cluster Police only took on cases involving races within their jurisdiction, and humans didn’t qualify. Since their arrival in this system four decades earlier, the Terrans’ status had never progressed beyond ‘visitor’, which meant that in all legal matters they were on their own.
‘My name is Alvar,’ the creature went on. ‘I’m a Gelithran, and I work as a guardian.’
Guardians. The babysitters of the Cluster. Axel’s parents had never resorted to such help when he was a child, and it was one of the few things he was grateful to them for.
‘You don’t look like a guardian,’ Axel said.
‘What does a guardian look like?’ the creature asked stiffly.
‘Well, they’re usually bigger than the children they look after for a start.’
‘Physical size has nothing to do with it,’ Alvar sniffed. ‘I’ve witnessed some very big guardians who couldn’t fight their way out of a creche and some half my height who could inspire terror with a single word. Self-assertion is 90 per cent of the job.’
‘Oh, to be sure,’ Axel said quickly. ‘And all credit to you, it’s not a job I could do, looking after a clutch of screaming, farting, defecating brats all day. I'd rather join the army, and I hate fighting.’
The Gelithran appeared mollified.
‘So how did you manage to lose your child?’ Axel asked.
‘She ran away,’ Alvar replied miserably, his demeanour taking another plunge. ‘I just left her for a few minutes to go and get some sleep and when I woke up, she was gone. This has never happened to me before, not in fifteen cycles of child-care. I’m sorry to bother you like this, but I don’t know what else to do… it’s been a dreadful few days… Nnnnggghhhh!!!’
‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Axel cried. The creature had begun to gnaw the table.
'Stop!' Axel cried again. His new friend's teeth were making deep gouges in the table's marbled indigo surface, and the grinding noise was setting his own teeth on edge. The human glanced in the direction of the barman; fortunately, at that moment his attention was on another customer.
‘Sorry,’ Alvar said, regaining his composure and sitting back. ‘I tend to chew on things when I feel stressed. Terrible habit.’
‘Well, the management in this place hate it when people mark the furniture,’ Axel said. He couldn't work out how Alvar managed to have a runny nose with such tiny nostrils, but they were streaming. Embarrassed, the human fumbled in his pocket before withdrawing a greasy rag. He handed it to the guardian, who took it gratefully and blew his nose with a loud 'parp'.
‘Let's just both relax,' Axel said. He tried to imagine what the Cluster Police would do in this situation. ''Where did you last see this lost child of yours?’
‘On her parents’ spaceship,’ the Gelithran replied. ‘Three days ago.’
Good, now they were getting somewhere. ‘And where was the spaceship?’ Axel asked.
‘Orbiting the second moon of Jutoon,’ Alvar answered. ‘Amber – that’s the cub’s name – took an exploration pod and blasted off from the ship while I was dozing. We’d just had an argument, I left her alone to cool off, and when I woke up, she was gone. She left behind a note to say she was never coming back.’
‘That must have been some disagreement,’ Axel said.
‘It was nothing we hadn’t been through a hundred times already,’ Alvar groaned. ‘And she’d threatened to leave the ship before as well, but I never took it seriously. I didn’t even think she knew how to fly one of those pods.’
‘I see,’ Axel said. He sat and pondered for a while. ‘Where were her parents while this was happening?’ he asked finally.
‘They were away,’ Alvar answered. ‘Looking for other humans.'
'Well, good luck to them with that,' Axel said with just a smidgeon of cynicism. 'They might want to try finding our home planet first of all because there's none left in this system.'
'Aside from you,' Alvar said. 'And I'm sure they'd be very interested in meeting you.'
'Aside from me,' Axel said, correcting himself.
‘And maybe others?’ Alvar asked hopefully.
The human shook his head.
'What about your parents?'
‘I have no idea where they are,’ Axel confessed. ‘They ran off and left me here when I was too little to have any say in the matter. They promised they’d come back for me. That was fifteen cycles ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Alvar said, sounding like he meant it. Sympathy for a human. This creature was a rare breed indeed; Axel had never before this evening heard of 'Gelithrans', but they were starting to grow on him.
'Your water Sir,' chirped the waitress, reappearing next to Axel's chair. She placed the glass on the table, bending very deliberately over the human and taking a sneaky peek inside his hood. There was a flash of recognition in her eyes as she straightened up.
'Would your friend like something?' she asked, fixing those luscious eyes on Alvar.
'It's been a while since I last ate,' Alvar said politely. 'Do you suppose I could have one of those eels in the tank over there?'
'Those are the entertainment,' the waitress said, blanching. 'They're not for eating.'
'He'll have water too,' Axel said. 'Thank you.'
He watched her posterior leave until he felt Alvar's eyes on him.
'What?' Axel asked.
'Nothing,' Alvar said. 'You know what they say about the dangers of inter-species relationships don't you?'
Planet-wide plagues whose origins were traced to sentients of different races meeting and falling in love. Those stories had been quite well-circulated by the religious and medical authorities, and Axel had heard them, but blast it, that didn't make alien women any less attractive. Especially to a drifting young hormone-plagued human far from home.
'Yes, I know what they say,' he muttered. 'Look, do you want to find this child of yours or not? This is a hazardous part of space for her to be wandering around in and do you even have any way of tracing her? Our species has many attributes but smelling each other across vast stellar distances isn't one of them.'
‘There’s a tracker on my pod,’ Alvar answered. ‘It’s in a workshop near here. All my employers’ exploration pods had trackers built in so they could locate each other and the Mothership. We should be able to find Amber provided that hers is still switched on and within this system.'
‘Simple!’ Axel exclaimed, taking a swig of his water. ‘See, that’s not so hard. I don’t know why you’re getting so stressed about it. I don’t even know what you need me for. Workshop?’
The Gelithran nodded. ‘I crashed my pod into another ship,’ he said. ‘She’s not in flyable condition at the moment and probably won’t be for a week.’
‘How did you manage to crash into another ship?’ Axel asked. Space was a big place, and the odds of hitting something by accident were practically zero, unless you were some kind of genius at pulling off random collisions.
‘I don’t have much experience of flying,’ Alvar protested. ‘I’ve been a guardian my whole professional life; ten cycles aboard the humans’ ship and five cycles doing temporary jobs before that, and none of those jobs required a pilot’s license. And those pods were designed to be flown by adult humans, not someone my size. You humans don’t build with cross-species use in mind, I’m afraid.’
Nobody does, Axel was going to say, but he bit his tongue. This creature was his only bridge to connecting with others of his kind, and it wouldn’t do well to start an interspecies argument with him.
‘Alright,’ the human said. ‘Why don’t we get out of this dive? I’ve got somewhere we can crash for tonight.’
‘So you’ll help me?’ Alvar asked, brightening.
‘Got nothing better to do,’ Axel answered, shrugging. Actually, he was desperate to meet other Terrans, and this creature had aroused his long-buried hope. The human had to work very hard not to let his excitement show. ‘Ah, here’s your drink...’
He stopped there. The arm placing Alvar’s water on the table was not the waitress’s; it was thick and generously-muscled and was connected to the body of Aenon, the tavern’s owner. It appeared that he wasn’t so busy tonight after all. Aenon possessed the same fishy attributes as his sister, as well as the same glittering blue skin, but the resemblance stopped there; he was built like a brickhouse and was – in Axel’s opinion – less than comely to look at. The permanent scowl on his face probably had a lot to do with this; it was the look of someone who had stubbed one of his webbed toes just as the wind had changed.
As withering as his glare was from twenty feet away, close up it was intense enough to induce a seizure. Just to make things more intimidating, Aenon was accompanied by one of his bigger employees, a surly Greel with gold-plated tusks and apocalyptic-looking tattoos across his arms and chest.
The next detail Axel noticed was a breeze around his ears. This brought with it the horrible realisation that he had lost his hood; at some point in the conversation, the human had allowed it to drop - although he didn't know when – exposing his identity and species to everyone present.
‘I know you,’ Aenon said, in a voice that was hardly less caustic than his face. ‘You’re the human who keeps coming in here and eyeing up the female staff, including my sister. The human I barred from this establishment because you were making them all so uncomfortable, in fact.’
A hot flush ran through Axel as he recalled his previous visits and the hotties of many species he had spent hours ogling from inside what he thought was the safety of his hood. He wasn't proud of his behaviour, but he had so far imagined -wrongly - that nobody had noticed.
Around them, the conversations ground to a halt as all the patrons – even the Nimlings – turned to witness the little drama playing out in their midst.
‘Oh, hello Aenon,’ Axel said, his voice suddenly having risen an octave. ‘I was just passing through, that’s all. I didn’t want any trouble.’
‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t feed you to them,’ Aenon said, nodding towards the eel tank. ‘One reason why an unwanted immigrant from some muddy little world nobody's ever neard of should be allowed to hang around here freeloading and inerfering with the lives of decent working folk. Or maybe we should take you into the kitchen and do something about that libido of yours. I hear human parts are a delicacy on some worlds.’
‘I’m reasonably sure that’s not true,’ Axel said, fighting to force the words out. Gods, why was it so easy to be courageous when one wasn't in danger?
‘We’ll see,’ Aenon said, his eyes glinting. 'Drooj, bring me the sharp knives.'
Axel was so busy trying not to soil himself at that moment that he failed to notice the creature sitting to his right dropping off his stool.
He did, however, notice a sharp cough that drew the attention of everyone else present.
‘Axel,’ Alvar said, addressing the human in the stern, assertive voice of a true guardian. ‘You told me this was a suitable establishment for a cub of your age and species, and I can see now that I have been fibbed to, yet again. First, you drag me to the casino, then to the strip bar, and now this, all under the pretext of “good clean fun”.'
'What?' Axel stammered. He wondered if Alvar had lost his mind.
'Your parents will be hearing all about your antics of this evening when I get you home,' Alvar continued. 'Which is where we are going. Right now.’
He took hold of a sleeve and pulled an astonished Axel to his feet. The human didn't resist, but allowed the much smaller creature to pull him in the direction of the door.
Meanwhile, Aenon, as thrown as Axel, stood and gawped.
‘I must apologise for this boy's behaviour,' Alvar told the barman as they passed. ‘I only took over as his guardian last week, and so far it's been the worst experience of my career. No accountability, his hygiene is nonexistent, and don't get me started on his diet. I don't know what kind of conduct they've been encouraging at home, but don't worry; there will be sanctions aplenty when I get him back to his parents.'
Axel, still bewildered as to what was going on, shot a look of helpless bewilderment at Aenon as he was pulled towards the exit.
‘Now hold on just a second…’ the Syreenii said, recovering slightly.
‘BLAAAEEEUUUGH!’ shouted the Virnoid.
The creature, oblivious to what was going on, had regurgitated his dinner all over the floor. This done, he crouched down and began scooping it into his mouth again.
‘Hey, you can’t do that in here!’ Aenon yelled as he and his staff descended on the Virnoid’s table. ‘This is a four-star establishment…’
With their enemies thus distracted, Alvar dragged Axel through the double doors and out into Atruenus’ damp air.
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