The Coverture Incident
by Stephen L. Burns
Illustration by Randy Asplund-Faith
It was another warm and humid Marguy afternoon. Joe Swamp, the planet’s Bureau of Alien Affairs Station Chief, was whiling away the time in climate controlled comfort.
He was slouched back in his chair, sneakers parked on his desk and a cyberloupe worn like a headband, deep in a game of Bug Hunt. In the air before him a considerably more muscular and athletic version of himself glided soundlessly through an alien forest, the beaded leather strap of a quiver crossing his brown chest and a nanomic compound bow in his hands, an arrow already nocked. A faint rustling sound came from somewhere to his avatar’s right. He whirled smoothly toward it, his long braided black ponytail whipping through the air. That detail was one of the few where Joe and his simulacrum were exactly identical; some were idealized, others were quite the opposite. Joe would never be caught dead wearing a breechclout in real life.
His eyes narrowed in calculation. His avatar’s did the same. That sound had to be either a swordbeak or a hunny hiding there in the underbrush. He could call out. If it was a hunny it would answer, and he wouldn’t take the risk of shooting it. But the sound of his voice could make a swordbeak spring like a javelin. The real and virtual Joes remained tense and silent, waiting.
The leafy cover shivered. Something was about to—
“Joe! Bull is here to see you!”
At the very instant he was distracted by Mabel’s voice a blur of motion erupted from the greenery. Joe flinched, and his avatar swung his bow up, aimed, and loosed his bolt in one fluid, deadly motion.
“Aw hell,” Joe grumbled, staring at the hunny sprawled on the dirt, his arrow spiking it to the ground. The creature’s doelike brown eyes regarded Joe’s avatar with hurt surprise. “Why you shoot me, you?” it gasped breathlessly. “Why man why?”
There went a thousand points for hitting a harmless sentient. He shook his head and sighed. Some Indian he was. It was a damn good thing he didn’t have to depend on hunting for his survival the way his ancestors had; he would’ve ended up either starving or eating a lot of neighborburger.
“Joe?” Mabel’s voice blared again, its slightly freaked edge showing how nervous having Bull hanging around made her. Six months on Marguy and the Guys still unnerved her.
Joe snapped his fingers to make the game disappear. “Send him in,” he said, hauling his feet off the desk and sitting up straight. Bureaucrat on duty.
Bull ducked through the doorway a moment later. Joe watched the big alien approach his desk with his usual exaggerated caution, curved black toe-talons clicking against the permaplast tiles. Except for the pair of thick-framed spectacles hanging from a heavy chain around his neck, and bouncing against his massive chest with every ponderous footfall, he looked like some old time movie monster stalking lunch.
“Good to see you, Bull. What’s up?” Joe put a smile on his face with practiced ease. Losing all those points in the game still bugged him, even though he had just been wasting time with it. As for Bull’s appearance, which had no doubt sent Mabel, straight for the bottle of sherry she kept hidden in one drawer of her desk, that didn’t bother him at all.
The guymarguyimaranguyital—Guy for short—ducked its broad armored head, the fanged maw on the top front of its bony skull opening in his species’ somewhat unnerving approximation of a human smile. That mouth was big and toothy enough to eat something the size of a whole pig the way Joe would munch a hot dog, and its only function was eating.
When Bull spoke his voice issued from a narrow slit below the two big glassy black eyes protected by a horny crest at the center of his face. Below that, down where a human’s mouth and chin would have been, was the plated bulge of its braincase. Bull’s voice was soft and cultured, totally at odds with his fearsome appearance. Joe always thought of them as looking like tail-less velociraptors with a gorilla’s upper body shape and their heads on upside down, and sounding like a cross between a butler and a reference librarian.
“Good day to you, Mister Joe. As to what’s up, lamentably I must inform this is not a mere social call.” Although Bull was the Guy who conducted most of his kind’s diplomatic dealings with humans, they all talked that way. Their native language had been developed not so much as a means of communication—they were all moderately telepathic—but as an artform.
Humans had landed on their planet’s single small continent armed with heavy-duty translator progs and the wrongheaded expectation that a race which didn’t even use fire would be unsophisticated primitives with crude language skills and a simplistic approach to the creation of a treaty. Within two days of first contact the Guys were answering in perfect Anglish limited only by the number of words they had heard so far, and talking about codicils and mutually beneficial entente. The palm-sized cybotic dictionary Bull had been given led to their quite often using Anglish words the humans on Marguy had to look up.
“Please sit down. Take a load off.”
“Thank you.” Bull lowered his 250+ kilo body onto the sturdy hassock there to provide seating for his kind. “Regretfully I am again compelled to protest trespass by your machines on the Coverture.”
Joe wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t lessen his irritation at having to once again deal with this ongoing problem. In spite of himself he took some of it out on Bull. “They’re not my machines, Bull. You know that.”
“I do. Yet is it not your task, indeed your vocation, to see that the terms of our treaty with your kind are honored?”
“It is.” Joe knew he’d made a mistake taking that tack. Now Bull would go through the entire situation piece by piece.
“Was it not agreed by all signatory parties that no human machines were to be permitted inside the boundaries of the Coverture?”
“That was the agreement.”
Bull spread his sinewy, three-fingered, taloned hands in an entirely human gesture, the obsidian discs of his eyes unblinking and direct. “Then why do these infractions continue, Mister Joe?”
Joe knew it was because Frank Testa, BioCosmoTech’s site operations director, couldn’t resist trying to gather biologic materials from the huge protected area the Guys had named the Coverture. Because a KEEP OUT sign drew humans like road kill drew crows and flies.
“As I’ve told you before, the automated gathering machines have a hard time recognizing the border of the Coverture and make occasional accidental incursions.”
Bull toyed with the glasses hanging around his thick neck as if considering putting them on to better examine this lame excuse. “This happens too frequently to be an accident, Mister Joe. We are compelled to hypothesize that it is being perpetrated on purpose.”
“I’m sure it isn’t,” Joe replied, lying through his teeth. Testa kept saying it was one of those shithappens things, but he didn’t believe it any more than Bull did.
“I am sure I need not remind you that there is no honor in a willful breach of a sacred covenant. Nor can there be any real gain from such malfeasance, only loss.”
“I know, we’ve been over all this before.”
“Yet these incursions continue. No infraction can be considered inconsequential. These are not minor annoyances, but abrogations of the contract we have entered.”
Joe knew how Bull felt, and knew that there was no way to make him understand that these were minor annoyances compared to the raw deal some races got from dealing with BCT and their smaller ilk; that without a Bureau of Alien Affairs agent like him there to referee, Frank would be going wherever and taking whatever he wanted whether they liked it or not. Sure they deserved stricter compliance, but they could be getting one hell of a lot worse.