“Possibly because then slaves don’t do it for them,” the President said dryly.

  * * *

  “It’s a matter of what your world calls realpolitik,” the Glatun representative said politely. The Glatun was a bit over a meter-and-a-half-tall biped with blue skin, red eyes, a vaguely piglike head and snout and a mane of white fur running down his back. He was dressed in an informal tunic for the discussion which was, in diplospeak, “non-binding and informal.” Which was where all the really serious binding resolutions were always hammered out.

  “We have called for the Horvath to remove themselves from your world’s orbitals and they have chosen to ignore our requests. Since Earth is, to them, a very good conquest, relatively rich in heavy metals compared to Horvath, they won’t leave absent either armed confrontation or, possibly, a trade embargo. Since Earth has, essentially, little or no value to the Glatun Federation, we have a sufficiency of strategic metals, and there are negative aspects to both choices on our part, we must unfortunately state that we remain neutral in this dispute.”

  “We have…an extensive asteroid belt,” the undersecretary of state for interstellar affairs said, throwing in her only bone. “We believe it to be rich in the platinum group.”

  “For which you should be grateful,” the Glatun replied. “Most inhabited systems are mined out. However, our laws, and long experience, prevent us from mining your asteroid belt as long as there is not a centralized, or at least effectively sovereign, system government. The Horvath meet the definition, not the United States of America. Certainly not the UN. The Horvath have, also, offered the asteroid belt. Be equally grateful that we declined that offer. There are enormous problems with asteroid mining. It requires quite large lasers and fabbers and is fuel and energy intensive. To make it worthwhile for a Glatun corporation to invest in this system would require long-term leases. In the current security and political situation the Glatun Federation would not permit such legally binding contracts.”

  “We’re on our own,” the USSIA finally said, becoming decidedly informal. “We have sixteen million dead, three major cities in ashes and you’re neutral?”

  “Since we are speaking frankly…” the Glatun said. “The decision of our policy makers is that Earth is simply sufficiently unknown and unnoticeable to take the chance of losing credibility in a minor dispute. The reality is that the Horvath, who are not much more advanced than Earth, would probably leave if so much as a single Glatun destroyer entered the system and ordered them to do so. However, if they didn’t and shots were fired, much less loss of Glatun life, there would be questions asked in Parliament, AI queries, and of course the press would simply go wild. It is easier and safer to do nothing. Absent Earth becoming more of a hot topic in the Glatun Federation or becoming in some way strategically important, yes, you are on your own.”

  ONE

  Tyler dropped his chainsaw and pulled out his cell phone. He’d barely felt the vibration and it was impossible to hear over the saw. He looked at the Caller ID and tried not to curse. Three missed calls from the same…Arrgh!

  “Tyler Vernon.”

  “Tyler, it’s Mrs. Cranshaw. How are you today?”

  “Just fine, ma’am,” Tyler said, squeezing his eyes shut and waiting for it. She always started nice. “And you?”

  “Fine, just fine,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “Fine weather we’re having. Getting cold. The frost should bring out the leaves a treat.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tyler replied. Here it comes.

  “Speaking of it getting cold, I think I asked you to bring by some firewood.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And I said I’d get it over there on Friday.”

  “Well, it’s gone Wednesday. Are you going to be here on Friday?”

  “When I say I’m going to be there, I’ll be there, ma’am.”

  “Well, I asked for it last week. Seems you could have got it here before Friday. You’re not doing much else.”

  Just working at the market, part-time, working in the bookstore, part-time, working at the mill, part-time, cutting wood, splitting wood, by hand, and answering your damned phone calls every damned day. Oh, and the rare consulting gig. But other than that I’ve got all the time in the world! I suppose I could point out that I could have delivered it Sunday night at 10 PM but she’d go and tell all her friends I’d been snippy with her and half my clientele would dry up rather than go up against her vicious tongue.

  “Gotta work at the market this evening, ma’am,” Tyler said politely. “Couldn’t get it by until late. Tomorrow I’m going to be working at the bookstore all day and then in the market that evening. I’ll be there at one Friday if the job I’ve got to do at the mill don’t take too long. No later than four.”

  “You’d better be here by one,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “I don’t want to be without wood this weekend.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tyler said.

  “You be with the Lord, Tyler Vernon,” Mrs. Cranshaw said and hung up.

  Tyler closed the phone and swung it back and forth in his fist, wanting to crush it and the whole damned world that seemed to be determined to do nothing but ruin the life of one Tyler Vernon.

  Tyler Alexander Vernon was five foot two, one hundred and thirty-five pounds and long over the problem of having three first names. He’d been born and raised in Mississippi, graduated from LSU with a master’s in computer science and, after applying five times at NASA, ended up working for an internet backbone center in Atlanta. That had led to various positions in the IT field and a pretty steady corporate advance culminating in a senior manager position at AT&T in Boston. Then came the real breakout: TradeHard.

  He’d had it made in the shade. He and his wife, okay, had some issues. But even if money couldn’t solve everything, it could solve a lot. He’d never thought that his webcomic was going to be anything other than something to fill the time and maybe make its nut. How was he to know it would take off like a Delta rocket? The awards, the adulation. He’d really not cared that much about the money. He really hadn’t. It was more about making a change in people’s lives. But as it turned out…

  No, that was unfair. Petra hadn’t cared about the money. She cared about the lifestyle the money brought in. She’d hitched her wagon to a rising star at AT&T back before he’d been doing much more than scribbling. Dug in there though the tough years, reveled in the good. Tyler hadn’t really wanted the cabin in New Hampshire but he was glad they’d bought it. And paid it off as the money got better and better and…

  A science fiction based webcomic about a free-trader ship. One of the few that had gotten national syndication. A small TV show. A movie deal in the works.

  And the gate opened. And science fiction, as an industry, died.

  Well, there was always IT. Five years was a lifetime in IT. Catching up was possible but hard. He’d been making it.

  And the Horvath came. And the inevitable depression that followed the orbital bombing of three major cities. Not to mention the stripping the world of all its heavy metals.

  And like one of those rocks tumbling towards the planet below, his life had gone into freefall. The fiery reentry culminating in the plasma explosion of the divorce.

  And now he lived in a cabin in the woods and saw his kids when he had any time between working five jobs.

  He put his phone away, picked up the saw, yanked it into life and applied it to the oak he was chunking. Hard.

  * * *

  “Tyler, Chuck needs you to work on Saturday.”

  Steve Moorman was the night manager of Mac’s Market in Franconia. Tall, stooped and prematurely balding, his life ambition seemed to be to retire as the night manager of the Mac’s Market in Franconia. Tyler considered him lacking in ambition. But despite his current downcycle, Tyler considered most people to be lacking in ambition.

  Since it was Chuck that needed help, that meant day-shift and there was an “issue.” He had a gig at a con in Reading on Saturday. The greater SF market may have suffered the fate of the dodo but fandom just would not let go. There was even some anime still going.

  He did some quick calculations.

  He wasn’t getting paid for the gig; the only reason he was invited as the Artist Guest of Honor was that he was somewhat famous, local and cheap. But he still could move some merc in the dealer’s room and people still bought his sketches of Gomez, Frank and Forella. The market was a little saturated but he’d still make more sitting on his butt in the dealer’s room than working it off in the store. And Saturday sucked. The ski-birds from Boston and NYC would be flooding in and asking “Why don’t you have arugula? Where’s the couscous?”

  The flip side being that if he said no, not only would one of the other stockers get asked the next time some extra time came up, but Steve, the passive-aggressive asshole, would probably start cutting back on his hours.

  Short-term money or long-term money? More like medium-term because he was not going to retire as the night manager of Mac’s Market.

  Somehow the con co-chair had gotten a Glatun to attend. That decided it. The chance to talk to a real-live alien wasn’t one to pass up.

  “Steve, I’m really sorry but I’m already scheduled for something on Saturday,” Tyler replied, diplomatically. “I’d love to work but I’ve got a gig in Boston.”

  “Uh, huh,” Steve said, slowly. “Isn’t that one of those…convention things?”

  “Yes,” Tyler said, just as slowly. “It’s one of those convention things. I can work the evening shift—”

  “No, that would be too much juggling in the schedule,” Steve said, puffing out his cheeks. “I’ll just ask Marsha.”

  “Sorry about that,” Tyler said. “Anything else?”

  “There’s a spill in produce,” Steve said. “Help Tom clean the oranges.”

  “Right away.”

  * * *

  Tyler took the two crisp twenties from Mrs. Cranshaw and nodded.

  “Thank you,” he said politely.

  “Forty dollars seems an awful lot of money for a cord of wood,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “Not like I don’t already own plenty.”

  Owner of five maple sugar distilleries and over four thousand acres of maple forest and white pine, one of Mrs. Cranshaw’s noted peculiarities was that she was so tight with money she made the buffalo squeal.

  “Going rate, ma’am,” Tyler said. He’d wondered when he started delivering wood to her why he’d been chosen rather than one of the local lumberjacks. You know, people who worked for the old witch.

  The answer being, nobody else would put up with her.

  “Forty dollars is just robbery for firewood,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “When I was a girl, Cokes were a nickel. A nickel, I tell you!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tyler said. If you tried to stop her she got mean. Best to just ride it out.

  “And the winters is getting worse. It’s these damned aliens.”

  At best the orbital bombardment of Shanghai, Cairo and Mexico City had dropped global temperatures by .0001% according to Glatun-backed studies. It took a lot more than a few megatons of rock and, okay, some really major secondary fires, to disturb Earth’s climate.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m thinking about selling this place,” she said. “My old bones can’t take these winters.”

  She’d apparently been saying that since before her fourth husband died. They’d all been wealthy, they’d all left her all their fortune and they’d all died of natural causes. Anyone who suggested anything different had better move out of the county. Besides, after husband three there’d been a pretty thorough investigation and the final result was “dead of stress.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Everything seems to go up but maple sugar land,” she said angrily. “Wood isn’t bringing what it used to, not at all. Nor maple sugar. Damn aliens. Hate those damned aliens.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tyler said. He bit his tongue to keep from adding: “And so do the Chinese, Egyptians and Mexicans.”

  “They’re listening to everything we say,” she said, looking at the sky nervously. “They’re up there right now, listening to us.”

  While the Horvath information systems did seem to be able to track just about any conversation made around an electronic device, Tyler rather doubted that they were personally listening in on this one. He had a moment’s empathetic thought for any Horvath who was and quashed it rather automatically.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well,” she said, relenting a bit. “You did stack it neat. I like a good neat stack of wood.”

  With most people when you delivered a cord it was “Here you go” and get it off the pickup as fast as possible. All done, that’ll be forty bucks.

  Not with Mrs. Cranshaw. That firewood had better be stacked in a neat and tidy cord on her back porch. Which took about five times as long as just dumping it in the yard.

  Speaking of time.

  “Ma’am, I’d love to stay and chat. But I’ve got an event in Boston where I’m the speaker and I need to be going.”

  “Speaker?” she asked, incredulously. “About what?”

  “The webcomic I used to do,” Tyler said evenly.

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Cranshaw said, with the most perfect note of neutrality that descended past condescension and straight to contempt. “You used to do that comic thing.”

  “Yes, I used to do that comic thing,” Tyler said. “And now I’m going to go talk to people about doing comic things.”

  “Used to run in the paper,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “Never did get what was so funny about it. And I didn’t like all them alien names. Couldn’t figure them out.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tyler said.

  “Well, if you’ve got a commitment you best be to it,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “Can’t hardly figure out what you’re going to talk on seeing as there’s real aliens now. But you do go on and talk about comic things.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tyler said. “See you in a couple of months, then?”

  * * *

  “Sorry I’m late, Mr. Du Vall,” Tyler said, shaking the con-chair’s hand. “Got hung up doing some server work.”

  “Not a problem,” the convention co-chairman said. James Du Vall was 5’11”, AmerAsian and shaped something like a large bear. He had black hair, a white and black beard, and it was patterned in a very familiar way. Tyler had never met him but could just about guess his nickname…“Call me Panda. Everybody does. You’re just in time for opening ceremonies, which was your first panel.”

  Tyler had gotten a peek into the ballroom as he was walking in and shook his head.

  “I thought you said this was a small con. There must be a thousand people in the ballroom.”

  “I’d say they’re all here to see you,” Panda said with a shrug. “Truth is they’re mostly here to see—”

  “A real-live Glatun,” Tyler finished, gesturing with his chin at the alien standing in a corner and watching the “pros” straggling into the small, walled-off area. “I won’t ask how you got him to attend.”

  “Simple,” Panda said, smiling thinly. “I paid him. More than I’m going to get out of the con but that wasn’t the point. Science fiction isn’t dead, it’s just become reality. And fandom is still where people who want to work for the future gather. I could go on but we’ve got to get going.”

  “Lead on,” Tyler said.

  Panda headed up the steps to the stage and the other “Special Guests” sort of straggled after him.

  There was the usual series of tables flanking a podium and the usual milling as people tried to figure out where to sit. And Tyler had his usual flash of annoyance at it. They’re chairs. You sit in ’em. Sit. Heel.

  Since the Glatun looked particularly puzzled, he caught its eye and waved to a chair, pulling it out. Fortunately Glatun and human design were similar enough a human chair worked just fine. The Glatun sat down and Tyler snagged the chair next to it by right of conquest. Worked for the Horvath.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen and honored extraterrestrials…” Panda said to some cheers at the last part. “Welcome to MiraCon…”

  “You are Tyler Vernon,” the Glatun whispered as Panda started into what sounded like it was going to be a very long speech.

  Tyler noted that the voice, which was fairly human normal, was coming from a small pod on a collar and the Glatun had not, in fact, opened his mouth. He’d heard that they mostly communicated through their implants but it was still a bit of shock.

  “Yes, I am,” Tyler whispered back.

  “I am Fallalor Wathaet, captain of the Spinward Crossing. A pleasure to meet you. You used to write TradeHard, did you not?”

  “Yes,” Tyler said, shocked again. “How did you…? Why do you know that?”

  “The security situation on Terra for traders is good,” Wathaet said. “But if I was going to be dealing with people, I wished to know who I might be near.”

  “We are, after all, potentially dangerous locals with bizarre and disgusting customs,” Tyler said.

  “‘Who will do anything to screw us out of our credits. Our job is to be better screws.’”

  “You read the comic?” Tyler was still recovering from the earlier shocks. This was water on a duck.

  “It is one of the few times when I have understood human humor,” the Glatun said. “Perhaps in part because it struck so close to home and was so true. Although banks do not routinely send mercenaries to collect your ship. There are people in our government who do that quite well, thank you.”

  “It was a rare situation,” Tyler pointed out. “But…thanks for the compliment.”

  “I almost stopped reading in the first few panels,” Wathaet said, “because I did not understand the cultural conditions of stealing the infant’s candy. When I was able to grasp it fully, though, I very nearly had an accident. Rule Nine: If the other guy doesn’t feel screwed we’re not doing our jobs. I printed that out and put it up in the mess. We all got it. But I personally feel it’s more of a guideline.”

  “Same here,” Tyler said. “If I’d really been a backstabber I would have been a VP.”

  “Why did you stop writing?” Wathaet asked. “I was only able to find the comic on an archive server and there were no notices to explain your cessation.”