Date:         Wed, 21 Aug 1996 13:03:15 -0700
From: Clive Warner <cwarner@INTERCABLE.NET>
Subject:      Re: INTERACTIVE: The Bar "Ten Forward"

Reserved: Moi Fakel; Vik Sperran; Gell (the android)

        Vik Sperran's fingers twitched, causing him to slop some of his
violet-orange 'Arcturan Sunrise' over the arm of his colleague,
Moi Fakel.
        "Snok yer twitcher, ya groomby slobbo," Fakel complained loudly.
        "Sorry. It's so noisy in here, I set the wristfone to
a grade two electric shock. I'd never have heard it speaking,"
Verran shouted back.
        Jubes, but where the snok did Fakel buy that
neon dreamzoot, he wondered. Human tailors had been known to faint at
sight of Fakel walking into their emporiums. Who would relish the task
of fitting a terran whose measurement around the middle, roughly equated
to his height? Not that Fakel was a short person. At two metres and
ten centimetres, he made the average in the vertical direction. But that
dreamzoot, it pulsed and glowed like a second skin, constantly
changing its glowing metallic colours like joom oil sliding down the back
of a reptilth weoman.
        The two men sat at the horseshoe counter in "Ten Forward", a bar
named after some historical space soap opera that had long since been
forgotten in other respects.
        Verran was a short pillar of a man with legs like granite columns,
arms carved from ironwood trees. His bullet head dovetailed into his
barrel chest almost without benefit of a neck to join the two. Large,
widely spaced, piercing gray eyes looked out from a face that even his
friends called 'plug ugly'. It was a friendly face, open and honest, but
not the kind of face that one took lightly. Verran was just one metre
sixty in height, but made up for it with muscle. He had been born on a world
with a gravity of 1.5 old-earth norm.

        The room behind them appeared to be crammed with organisms of
every shape and size.   Many of them, however, were no
more than holograms; their physical counterparts enjoying the sights
and sounds vicariously, from the comfort of their private suites.
        A sting band was in full swing at the far end. Invisible cones
of microwave energy reached down from the ceiling above the stage. Anyone
could join in, though it was wise to ascertain the energy setting beforehand.
        The performers swayed back and forth, gyrating their ovipositors
so as to change the resonances of the beams. The combinations produced
a discordant series of snaps, glissands, glides, and percussives,
leavened by the short screams of the players. Those who failed to keep
the beat going were rewarded automatically by localised pulses of intense
heat in the genital areas.
        "So, what's so important that you set the fone for level two?"
Fakel said into Sperran's ear.
        "I set it to tell me if any Terran vessels arrived," Sperran
shouted, unfortunately just as there was a pause in the music. Dozens
of faces, antennae, aud receptors, and eyestalks turned in the direction
of the two men.
        "Oh shit," Fakel groaned. "Clap yer yabber, willya. Now the
whole place is into our biz. Anyway, what's the vizzy?"
        Sperran pressed the fone to the side of his well-thatched skull
and moved it around until the field coils embedded in his visual cortex
auto-linked with the device. It replayed a series of a-v images straight
into his brain.
        "It's a Terran ship, all right," he mouthed into Fakel's ear.
"Some kind of antique piece of shit calling itself the Sea Dog. As if
there are any seas out here, for bloob's sake! Well, at least it's some
new company."



- and I pass the baton ..

--
The way that can be spoken of
     Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
     Is not the constant name.

- Lao Tzu. (Tao Te Ching, I.1)