Chapter One
Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.
Moeller nodded absentmindedly at his assistant, who placed the schedule of today’s negotiations in front of him, and shifted again in his chair. The tissue surrounding the apparatus itched, but there’s no getting around the fact that a ten-centimeter tube of metal and electronics positioned inside your colon, a mere inch or two inside your rectum, is going to cause some discomfort.
This much was made clear to Moeller when he was presented with the apparatus by Fixer. “The principle is simple,” Fixer said, handing the slightly curved thing to Moeller. “You pass gas like you normally do, but instead of leaving your body, the gas enters into that forward compartment. The compartment closes off, passes the gas into second department, where additional chemical components are added, depending on the message you’re trying to send. Then it’s shunted into the third compartment, where the whole mess waits for your signal. Pop the cork, off it goes. You interact with it through a wireless interface. Everything’s there. All you have to do is install it.”
“Does it hurt?” Moeller asked. “The installation, I mean.”
Fixer rolled his eyes. “You’re shoving a miniature chemistry lab up your ass, Mr. Moeller,” Fixer said. “Of course it’s going to hurt.” And it did.
Despite that fact, it was an impressive piece of technology. Fixer had created it by adapting it from blueprints he found in the National Archives, dating to when the Nidu and humans made first contact, decades back. The original inventor was a chemical engineer with ideas of bringing the two races together in a concert that featured humans, with the original versions of the apparatus placed near their tracheas, belching out scented messages of friendship.
The plan fell apart because no reputable human chorus wanted to be associated with the concert; something about the combination of sustained vocal outgassing and the throat surgery required to install the apparatuses made it rather less than appealing. Shortly thereafter the chemical engineer found himself occupied with a federal investigation into the nonprofit he had created to organize the concert, and then with a term in minimum security prison for fraud and tax evasion. The apparatus got lost in the shuffle and slid into obscurity, awaiting someone with a clear purpose for its use.
“You okay, sir?” said Moeller’s aide, Alan. “You look a little preoccupied. Are you feeling better?” Alan knew his boss had been out yesterday with a stomach flu; he’d taken his briefings for the today’s slate of negotiations by conference call.
“I’m fine, Alan,” Moeller said. “A little stomach pain, that’s all. Maybe something I had for breakfast.”
“I can see if anyone has got some Tums,” Alan said.
“That’s the last thing I need right now,” Moeller said.
“Maybe some water, then,” Alan said.
“No water,” Moeller said. “I wouldn’t mind a small glass of milk, though. I think that might settle my stomach.”
“I’ll see if they have anything at the commissary,” Alan said. “We’ve still got a few minutes before everything begins.” Moeller nodded to Alan, who set off. Nice kid, Moeller thought. Not especially bright, and new to the trade delegation, but those were two of the reasons he had him as his aide for these negotiations. An aide who was more observant and had been around Moeller longer might have remembered that he was lactose intolerant. Even a small amount of milk would inevitably lead to a gastric event.
“Lactose intolerant? Swell,” Fixer had said, after the installation. “Have a glass of milk, wait for an hour or so. You’ll be good to go. You can also try the usual gas-producing foods: beans, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, raw onions, potatoes. Apples and apricots also do the trick. Prunes too, but that’s probably more firepower than you’ll really want. Have a good vegetable medley for breakfast and then stand back.”
“Any meats?” Moeller had asked. He was still a little breathless from the pain of having the apparatus sent up his tailpipe and grafted to his intestine wall.
“Sure, anything fatty will work,” Fixer said. “Bacon, some well-marbled red meat. Corned beef and cabbage will give you a little bit of everything. What, you don’t like vegetables?”
“My dad was a butcher,” Moeller said. “I ate a lot of meat as a kid. Still like it.”
More than liked it, really. Dirk Moeller came from a long line of carnivores and proudly ate animal flesh at every meal. Most people didn’t do that anymore. And when they did eat meat, they picked out a tube of vatted meat product, made from cultivated tissue that never required the butchering of an animal, or even the participation of any sort of animal outside of the purely mythical. The best-selling vatted meat product on the market was something called Kingston’s Bison Boar™, some godforsaken agglomeration of bovine and pig genes stretched across a cartilaginous scaffolding and immersed in a nutrient broth until it grew into something that was meatlike without being meaty, paler than veal, lean as a lizard, and so animal friendly that even strict vegetarians didn’t mind tucking in a Bison Boar Burger™ or two when the mood struck them. Kingston’s corporate mascot was a pig with a bison shag and horns, frying up burgers on a hibachi, winking at the customer in third-quarter profile, licking its lips in anticipation of devouring its own fictional flesh. The thing was damned creepy.
Moeller would have rather roasted his own tongue on a skewer than eat vatted meat. Good butchers were hard to come by these days, but Moeller found one outside of Washington, in the suburb of Leesburg. Ted was a boutique entrepreneur, like all butchers these days. His day job was as a mechanic. But he knew his way around a carving chart, which is more than most people in his line of work could say. Once a year in October, Ted damn near filled up a walk-in freezer in Moeller’s basement with beef, pork, venison, and four kinds of bird: chicken, turkey, ostrich, and goose.
Because Moeller was his best customer, occasionally Ted would throw in something more exotic, usually a reptile of some kind—he got a lot of alligator now that Florida had declared a year-round hunting season on that fast-breeding hybrid species that the EPA introduced to repopulate the Everglades—but also an occasional mammal or two whose provenance was often left prudently unattributed. There was that one year when Ted provided ten pounds of steaks and a note scrawled on the butcher paper: “Don’t ask.” Moeller served those at a barbecue with former associates from the American Institute for Colonization. Everyone loved them. Several months later, another butcher—not Ted—had been arrested for trafficking in meat taken from Zhang-Zhang, a panda on loan to the National Zoo. The panda had disappeared roughly the time Ted made his yearly meat drop. The next year, Ted was back to alligator. It was probably better that way for everyone, except possibly the alligator.
“It all starts with meat,” Moeller’s father told him often, and as Alan returned with a coffee mug filled with 2%, Moeller reflected on the truth of that simple statement. His current course of action, the one that had him accumulating gas in his intestinal tract, indeed began with meat. Specifically, the meat in Moeller’s Meats, the third-generation butcher shop Dirk’s father owned. It was into this shop, nearly 40 years ago now, that Faj-win-Getag, the Nidu ambassador, came bursting through the door, trailing an entourage of Nidu and human diplomats behind him. “Something smells really good,” the Nidu ambassador said.
The ambassador’s pronouncement was notable in itself. The Nidu, among their many physical qualities, were possessed of a sense of smell several orders of magnitude more fine than the poor human nose. For this reason, and for reasons relating to the Nidu caste structure, which is rigid enough to make 16th-century Japan appear the very model of let-it-all-hang-out egalitarianism, the higher diplomatic and political Nidu castes had developed a “language” of scents not at all unlike the way the European nobles of Earth developed a “language” of flowers.
Like the noble language of flowers, the Nidu diplomatic scent language was not true speech, in that one couldn’t actually carry on a conversation through smells. Also, humans couldn’t take much advantage of this language; the human sense of smell was so crude that Nidu trying to send a scent signal would get the same reaction from their intended recipient as they would get by singing an aria to a turtle. But among the Nidu themselves, one could make a compelling opening statement, sent in a subtle way (inasmuch as smells are subtle) and presenting an underpinning for all discourse to follow.
When a Nidu ambassador bursts through one’s shop door proclaiming something smells good, that’s a statement that works on several different levels. One, something probably just smells good. But two, something in the shop has a smell that carries with it certain positive scent identifications for the Nidu. James Moeller, proprietor of Moeller’s Meats, Dirk’s father, was not an especially worldly man, but he knew enough to know that getting on the Nidu ambassador’s good side could ...
