Jim Baen's Universe

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Unpronounceable

Written by Susan diRende

I wouldn't never have left New Jersey, let alone the planet Earth, if it wasn't for my sister, Alice, who you should know up front got all the genetic engineering bonus points my parents was assigned, leaving me with whatever they could come up with naturally, sperm-and-egg wise. Considering the DNA that showed up at a certain Christmas party exactly twenty-eight years and nine months before my last birthday, I consider myself lucky to have a full set of body parts and smarts enough not to get run over by a bus.

It all started when Alice made that crack about how Rose, that's me, wasn't going anywhere with her life. I get this on top of catching my boyfriend, Bob, sleeping with the landlady in my bed on my purple satin sheets that I had bought to seduce him with, which worked like a charm and hence him being my boyfriend. Excuse me, ex-boyfriend, because walking in on them reminded me that I do have some pride, even though Bob possesses the kind of washboard pecs that can make a girl forget sometimes, and I told him to remove his rubber ducky from the premises.

I knew I also had to prevent Bob from ever wanting me to take him back, because with his build and his flawless self-absorption, me, I'd probably do it, Landlady Moss and her circus skills notwithstanding. So, only to protect myself from myself, not for the pleasure of telling the truth about sex for once, I let him in on a few of his personal inadequacies, including those regarding the size and shape of his favorite toy.

I must have laid it on good, because he's so mad he goes and tells the landlord a thing or two, not about the basement Barnum-and-Bailey performances with the missus, oh no, but about Rose, me again, having an illegal sublet in his rent controlled apartment. Can you beat that? So there I am, admiring Bob's killer instinct enough to miss him, which shows you the wisdom of my earlier preemptive thermonuclear verbiage, and having no place to live right when my period is due.

Meanwhile, the government has been sending one embarrassment to humanity after another to be Earth's Ambassador to the planet of the Unpronounceables, don't ask me to say it, until the United Nations gives up and figures anybody will do. Anybody. Be honest, do I sound like a diplomat to you?

The French, they invented diplomacy, send the French, I say. But no. That French guy that went spends ten days on their world and it's back to the Eiffel Tower with him. The general, the one after Frenchie, four stars and he comes home with a nervous breakdown. The Japanese guy kills himself, so I guess that makes him the only diplomat that wasn't actually sent back in disgrace.

They figure maybe the Unpronounceable don't like diplomatic types. They try a businessman. Disaster. They try a poet. Didn't even know he was on another planet. They pick a whole Crayola assortment of doctors, scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, you know, bright but messy. The group lasts a whole month before they come back home with a note pinned to their collective collar asking us not to use their planet as an insane asylum. The Unpronounceable would welcome any sane person, but please to stop with the nut cases.

This poses a problem for the government. Should they just admit to our first interplanetary contacts that all of humanity was insane? Never.

So, the bureaucrats start thinking. Well, not really thinking, but they think they're thinking. They figure if all sensible criteria end up picking somebody the aliens think is crazy, then crazy criteria just might pick a winner. They go for the dumbest way to pick a representative of the human race and come up ace—a Lottery. I mean, think about it. Who wins lotteries?

A big announcement gets made all over the world. Anybody who wants to be humankind's envoy to the only extraterrestrial sentient race ever discovered could just put their name in a hat, no questions asked. The space program gets what they want. Crazies. Evangelists. People too dumb to see it's a setup so's there'll be some lunatic to blame for ruining interplanetary relations for the rest of us. Nobody in their right mind would go near the thing.

See, now you're wondering about me. The only reason I put my name in at all was because Alice made that crack the very day the announcement of the Lottery came out. I'm thinking anyplace still in the same solar system with Alice is not far enough to count as going anywhere, and this is why I never made the effort. Unpronounceable would put over a thousand light-years of interstellar void between me and my sister. I announced my decision to apply right after the minestrone.

I was reckless, but hey, the odds against me being chosen were more than Einstein could figure. Besides, I never win anything. Anything good, I should have remembered, because I did win that goldfish in fourth grade that died on the way home and had to listen to a lecture from Nonna about how I was going to Hell for murdering one of God's creatures. So I'm not exactly happy when the name that pops up out of the gazillion of nudniks who actually do want to go is mine: Rosalba Bellicosa Delancy, Italian/Irish, actress/waitress, three-semester community college dropout, two serious boyfriends, both history; just your ordinary American gal having a dry spell in romance, acting jobs, luck. It's not like I'd be leaving anything special.

Still, I try to get out of it. “I can’t go up in a rocket. I’m afraid of heights.”

“No, no—it’s not like that at all, Rose. More like being in an elevator,” they tell me. I should’ve said I was afraid of elevators. How was I to know?

Unpronounceable is even further out from the center of the galaxy you and I call the Milky Way than Hackensack is from Heaven. To get there, the ships do some funny folding stuff with space and time, so that instead of the trip taking thousands of years, in which case everybody you went to school with would be dead, which if you ask me would be an incentive to go, but no, you get there in a couple of days. Actually, it only seems like a couple of days, because time is all screwed up and apparently anywhere from a week to nine months passes on Earth. It depends on the fold, they say. I say I want to live my life the old-fashioned way, one day at a time, but nobody laughs.

You'd think this would be my shining hour. The problem is that when all the news hounds converge on our house, those cameras take one look at my sister and suddenly she's showing up in more interviews than me. It's no fun knowing the entire world agrees that, "Alice got the looks and brains, but Rose got more than her share of . . ."—and here you have to do Aunt Mizi's now-famous roll of the eyes—". . . personality."

I have to admit it was good to get away. There's a crew on the ship, but they just shake their heads at me all sad and sorry, and leave me alone. One guy, Maurice, he tries to explain their attitude has more to do with the aliens than me, so I shouldn't take it personal. Like I cared.

Actually, I think Maurice is kind of sweet on me, which makes him even less interesting. He wants to warn me, he says. Too late, I say, I'm stuck with going and making a fool of myself in front of the whole planet Earth, not to mention my Aunt Mizi whose idea of a good story is some humiliating experience her dearly-beloveds have brought on themselves, which she proceeds to tell every human she meets on the bus, in line at the grocery store, or panhandling on the street. Gotta love her, or she'd be dead.

Maurice says no, not warn me about Earth, but about the aliens, how the public don't know, but they are sadists who torture people for fun. Maurice puts his nubby fingertip on my shoulder and leans in close enough for me to smell his breath mint and write him off my dance card forever. "You must never go to a ::spitting-choking-word::."

"Gesundheit," I say back.

"No, no. A ::spitting-choking-word:: is some kind of torture chamber. Both of the guys who went to one had to have emergency medical care on the return ship because all their skin was gone. They looked like pulsing globs of bloody red meat."

I feel my neck and armpits get clammy as my stomach has second thoughts about the lunch I just ate. I know humans have blood inside, but I don't like to think about it. When I first started getting my period, I used to faint on the toilet until I learned how to use tampons with my eyes shut and the bathroom light off.

I try to put on a good face in front of Maurice. If I started crying, he'd want to kiss me, don't you know, and what with my heaving stomach already, that wouldn't turn out too good. So I say I'd grown up in New Jersey and am experienced in handling sadists. He laughs and feels better, I guess. At least he don't make a pass. Me, I go to my cabin and spend an hour trying not to throw up. I fail.

See, I am not brave. I am stupid, which sometimes makes me look brave, but there's a big difference. Not if things go bad: then brave or stupid is both dead and it don't matter. No, but when it turns out good, the brave person feels better about herself having done the right thing whereas the stupid person knows deep down not only does she deserve no credit, but that someday, somewhere, she's going to be just as stupid again.

I lay down and try to think of one good thing about all this. I fall asleep instead. I spend the next few days avoiding Maurice and trying to think of one good thing. It helps pass the time till we arrive at the planet nobody can pronounce so why don't they just call it something easy. Right now it sounds like a Bronx Cheer, and I refuse to begin diplomatic relations by sticking my tongue between my lips and blowing a raspberry at these aliens.

I've had pictures to look at to prepare me for the first meeting so I know they look like blobs of Silly Putty, shiny and gray-pink. Still it's weird when I see them for real because this Silly Putty is alive. They constantly stretch and wobble, looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost after he's gone through a cotton candy machine. Who can take them serious?

Now I am glad Maurice warned me, because on top of looking cute as cartoons they come across so polite and sensitive, it could fool you if you hadn't grown up with Alice and didn't know someone could be all soft and gooshy outside and still be a bitch of steel on the inside. This thought gives me an idea. I imagine I'm home and these Unpronounceables are my family. Oh, sure, they act like they love you, but let them find out you're happy about something and they have to ruin it for you.

Like Ma's cousin Carmella. She could've had her pick of the neighborhood boys, but she had to seduce the priest, which meant he's got to give up his church and marry her. Ruining his dreams wasn't enough for her. She proceeded to raise six Mafiosi sons. Make no mistake why nice Italian boys invented the Mob: their mothers.

You're probably thinking I'm too easy on men because I can always find an excuse for a guy and fall in love with him, no matter how low his IQ or how cruel he treats a person. You're right. This is why, not only will I imagine the Unpronounceables are my family, but I will remember they are the enemy by seeing them as female Bellicosa-Delancys. The aliens won't know the difference, seeing as how they got no sex of their own.

So, like Eve before me, I start naming. My main contact I talk to, I'm calling her Mizi, after my Aunt Mizi, both of them being blobby masses of gelatinous flesh without a clue of how disgusting they look.

This Mizi has anywhere from one to seven arm-things depending on her mood, and no face anyplace. The face thing bothers me 'cause I keep talking to where the mouth is and she keeps turning away and I am not in the mood to dance. After a couple of do-si-dos, I say, "Hey! This is making me crazy. I did not come here across the interstellar void to cha-cha. Where's your face, for Chrissake?"

Okay, not so diplomatic, you're thinking, but remember all your diplomats didn't do so well, neither. This Blob, she makes what sounded like a fart and tells me that her people talk with the mouth part facing away.

So I naturally point out it's genetic incompetence to put the mouth where you can't see it to talk to it and not to expect me to do that. Mizi gets this funny stillness and I think I'm gonna be invited to leave right then, a new record.

Then she says—get this—they don't use their mouth to talk to each other, they use gestures. The sound-talking is something they copied from us, don't you know, because they figured out it was how we humans communicate.

Score. Not one of those diplomat anthropologist military jerks found that out. Jersey Girl earns her ticket. Then I get to thinking, a mistake, but my blood sugar is low, and once I think something I have to say it. So I ask, if the mouth's not for talking but just for eating, how is it they can make sounds with it at all? Not to mention putting it on the back