“Kinda beautiful in its own way, isn’t it?” a voice behind me said.
I nodded, still looking up into the indigo sky. A whirlpool of purple and blue light, throwing off sparks of white, filled the dome of stars. Rising up into its center from the soaring peak that dominated the western horizon was a kilometers-wide column of black-brown… What did they call it?
“Ejecta?” the voice asked, startling me. I turned around, almost tripped on one of the sample cases, and when I realized I must have been speaking aloud—at least that last part—I smiled as quickly and as sincerely as I could.
“Ejecta… from the volcano,” the little tellian woman said, still smiling. Her skin was a deep forest green with a subtle brown mottling. The single eye scanning me was at once sparkling and dull.
Still smiling, I said, “Ejecta, yes. From the volcano.”
“Kinda beautiful in its own way, isn’t it?” she said again, pointing briefly up into the silent disturbance in the sky.
I nodded but didn’t look back. “It is,” I said, and it was—a beautiful whirlpool of charged particles and burning ejecta and the shimmering remnants of the little planet’s atmosphere being drained away into…?
“Hell if I know,” the woman said, shrugging—and I know I hadn’t spoken that time.
Crap, I thought, and watched her react to it.
“A whole cargo container, eh?” she asked.
I nodded.
“All toys?” she asked.
I nodded again and clicked open the sample case on the folding table in front of her. A child laughed somewhere in the market and as I closed my mind off to the little tellian, I hoped it would help. I spun the case around and she blinked twice at me, which gave me the feeling she’d felt my mind close to her. She had to know I wouldn’t have made it a year in this business if any random tellian or psikey knew what I was thinking instead of hearing what I was saying. I was a little disappointed in myself that she’d read as much of me as she had—must be the distraction of the wormhole slowly sucking the planet dry.
“How many of each?” she asked, looking down her stubby nose at my product.
“I can let you have the whole container,” I said, still smiling. Sales 101: Make it sound like you’re doing them a favor by “allowing” them to buy more of your stuff.
The tellian shrugged and said, “I like the little… What are those little guys? The little animal kinda guys?”
“Teddy bears,” I said, reaching down to take the little teddy bear out of the sample case to hand it to her.
She took it in her top left hand and squeezed it a little. “Teddy bear… What does that mean?”
I shrugged and said, “No idea. But kids love them.”
She reached out to hand me the teddy bear back but I wasn’t going to take it from her.
Also Sales 101.
“You’ll own the teddy bear market on Ranna, Miss…?” I said.
“Flo,” she said, “and leave off the miss.”
“Of course. So what do you think? I can give you a price—and I mean a price.”
“Can’t do it,” she said, trying to hand the teddy bear back to me again. “Mister…?”
“Depner,” I said, “Jim Depner—call me Jimmy. And I know you can, Flo.”
Flo shook her head and replied, “Not as long as this keeps up, Jimmy.”
“Sorry?”
She tipped her chin up to the sky behind me and I didn’t bother turning around. I could feel the disaster in the sky behind me.
“Sure, sure,” I said—how could I pretend this wasn’t happening? “But you heard that kid laugh just now. I know you did.” I pointed with my thumb at the almost deserted market square behind me. This was the forty-third largest city on Ranna—out of forty-nine cities—but even then, the place was a goddamn graveyard. “There are still kids, even in these unprecedented times. And now more than ever they could use the distraction of… What have we got here?”
I started rummaging around in the sample case “at random,” picking up… “This is a puzzle. You slide the tiles around and it makes the picture of… some… other kind of animal. This one is like playing ping-pong by yourself—with the ball attached to the paddle by a thin elastic—”
“The hell is ping-pong?” she asked.
I just kept going. “Fill this up with water then you push these little buttons and try to get the little balls to fall into these little nets here… See that? Look at all the colors.”
“Look,” she said, crossing her bottom arms over her distended abdomen, “when everything goes back to normal, I’ll take a bunch of the teddy bears at least, but with everything going on—”
“I heard it’s closing already,” I said. It was a lie, and obvious enough that she didn’t need telepathy to spot it. “Okay, sorry, y’know, but, people are saying it’s not… that wormholes like that eventually just burn out, or whatever. Don’t you want to be prepared, nicely stocked up, when it does?”
She shook her head but said, “ The whole container, eh? How many of each of these things?”
“It’s, like, a thousand cases.”
“Of each toy?”
I shook my head, smiled all the wider, and spread my hands out over the gray plastic case, somewhere between a briefcase and suitcase, and said, “Sample cases. You get a thousand or so sample cases.”
“I’m not in the wholesale business,” she said, shaking her head. She took half a step back away from the table—a huge red flag.
“No, no, no, I know,” I covered, not letting my smile falter for a moment. “That’s the thing… Neither is Toyarama Toyco. Anymore.”
I tipped my head to the right, hands out to my sides, grinning.
“I have no idea what you mean.”
I sighed. Sometimes—almost never, but sometimes—a sigh can close somebody. “The company that makes these is gone, Flo. Out of business. Dried up, closed up, moved out, liquidated. You get the last of their line—sample cases for sales people they never even hired. You can sell them as is—a fun case o’ toys—or break them up and move the individual items. Or both. Whatever you want to do.”
She took that half step closer again, and looked down at the teddy bear in her hand. Then her eye drifted around the nearly empty market. “Yeah… that might be a swell thing, I guess, all things being equal. I mean, once everything goes back to normal.”
She looked back up at the sky behind me and her face sagged a little. She squeezed the teddy bear.
I couldn’t help it. I turned and looked back up at the wormhole and the ejecta column. The breeze from behind me tickled the back of my neck. The wind on Ranna always blew in one direction now: up the slopes of the massive super-volcano and out into space and into the infinite wherever.
“So look,” I said, my back still to her. “I gotta get rid of these things.” I turned back to face her and she looked at me and I said, “Name your price.”
“Sorry, Jimmy, I just—”
The ground started to quiver and we both stood there looking down at our feet, holding our breath for about thirty seconds, then it passed.
“If I don’t sell these here, I can’t get my ship out of quarantine,” I said.
Sales 201: If all else fails, tell the truth.
She seemed sad, if her eye visibly shrinking in the middle of her face meant “sad,” and said, “Well, the colonial authority won’t let ships on- or off-planet while this is going on anyway.”
My face registered “sad” in the traditional human way.
She held the teddy bear out to me again and I shook my head, closed the case, and said, “Keep it. For your kids.”
“Don’t have any,” she replied, “but thanks.”
I turned to leave, not bothering to take the second case on the dusty ground at my feet either. “Thanks for your time.”
“Hey,” she said as I walked away, “seriously, though, try me again when everything opens back up.”
Editor and author Philip Athans has been a driving force behind varied media including Alternative fiction & poetry magazine and Wizards of the Coast. He lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.
1 Comment