The Bite Goes On

by Shawn Jacobson

“Try these,” the man to my left says when passing me a tray of what vaguely looks like finger sandwiches. “I’m not sure they’re fit for human consumption,” he continues, “but then, what around here is?”

“Thanks,” I say trying one of the greenish things. It tastes like spinach mixed with chocolate with a hint of lemon. I haven’t tasted anything this weird since I ate dormitory food back in college, but it isn’t that bad.

The quality of the snacks doesn’t surprise me. There really aren’t that many humans at this wedding. The only reason I’m here is that my literary agent, F’teima, is one of the brides. The fact that the other bride, whom I knew as Mrs. Yip, tried to torture me was beside the point. When your literary agent invites you to a wedding, you go.

This is especially true when your mom is one of the guests. She was invited by the other bride. The two are mutual dog lovers. Given that Mrs. Yip’s people are the closest thing the galaxy has to intelligent dogs — not real dogs, mind you, but they fill the same ecological niche — then this makes a sort of sense. In fact, Mom introduced me to Mrs. Yip. She doesn’t know what the bitch did to me; I’ve never had the heart to tell her.

“What brings you to the party?” I ask the man.

“I’m a religious consultant,” he replies. “My church does evangelism to the stars.”

“Okay,” I say. How he got an invitation to this shindig I am still not sure.

The galactic etiquette course I downloaded on the way here says that you should try as many types of food as you can eat. So, I start grazing off the various trays set forth for the guests. I’ve taken my universal gut translator pills, so, like dorm food, none of this stuff should kill me. However, also like dorm food, I don’t expect this stuff to go quietly through my digestive system.

“Try one of these,” a voice calls to me from my right. “This is the sort of thing you hairy bipeds would like.”

The owner of the voice gives me something shaped, sort of, like a dog bone; it is a terrifying shade of purple. The owner of the voice is not a hairy biped; it is a thing in a shell. It sits on a cart that I presume it uses to get around.

“You can call me Chris,” says the thing in the shell, which looks a bit like a crab.

“Sure, Chris,” I reply. Chris’s species is not familiar to me, so I’m not sure of the etiquette. I fall back on what seems the right thing to say at the time. “What brings you to the party?”

“Business,” Chris says. “I’ve been a business associate of both brides. How about you?”

“The F’ione bride is my literary agent,” I reply.

“You write, too?” Chris asks with excitement. “I’m also a writer. Let me show you my work.” Chris sends me a piece of writing from a handheld device.

“The Virtue of Shellfishness,” I read. “A philosophy to help you get your clams.”

“Clams?” I ask.

“Yes, I understand that ‘clams’ is a word that means ‘units of value’ in your language.”

I check my archaic English app and learn that the crablike thing is right. “Clams” was a slang term meaning “money” at some time in the pre-space past. How the translator came up with this word though, well, the ways of translation software can be passing strange.

While I’m pondering the strangeness of things, the evangelist guy storms toward us. “Did you realize that this marriage is an abomination?” he rages.

“Say what?” I ask, trying to parse his meaning.

“You have two females marrying,” he says as if I were stupid. “You can’t get children out of that perversion of the sacred.”

“They’re different species,” I say as if he were stupid. “Kids aren’t the point. Peace is the point. That should be a sufficiently pro-life reason—”

“Infidel,” he snarled.

The two species involved had been at war for a long time. The conflict went back to when they evolved on the same planet. To say that they’d shared the planet would be grievously wrong; neither species shared worth a damn.

Then I stumbled into the conflict. I was looking for material for my stories when I’d learned about the F’ione and their war. What I’d learned from F’Tima led me to assume that her ancient enemies were vanquished. Therefore, I thought that writing stories in which they were the bad guys would be safe. Let’s just say that the universe plays rough with people who make wrong assumptions.

After running into Mrs. Yip and others of her species, I decided to write an anti-war epic. Neither species had a history of anti-war writing, so this was a revelation to everyone involved. Folk from both sides read the book, which caused a peace movement that led to efforts to end the war. This wedding is one of these efforts.

I’d like to think that my later writing has allowed me to atone for my previous work. If the preacher wants to call me an infidel, I’ll live with that. At least Mrs. Yip no longer wants to stick me into one of her empathy-developing contraptions.

“It’s so much easier with us,” Chris muses. “We’re hermaphrodites; we can marry whomever we choose. We can even marry ourselves, if we want.”

“And now,” the preacher sputtered, “I have to deal with a whole race of perverts.”

“Welcome to space,” I say, “where the weird is normal and the normal is weird.”

“Some of your kind really aren’t galaxy-ready,” Chris muses.

I have to agree. The thing about space is that it is chock-full of aliens, meaning they do things differently than we do. If you add in the fact that most aliens who travel the stars don’t even fit into their own, alien, society, then, well, you get a space culture that is just flat-out weird. regardless of where you’re from. Every space station should have a sign over the entrance that reads: “Abandon Normalcy, All Ye Who Enter Here.”

The warm-up to the ceremony continues. I do my best to fulfill my duties by trying everything that looks remotely edible. I thank my five years of eating dormitory food in college for the intestinal fortitude I’ve acquired. It’s amazing how college can prepare you for the real universe.

“;Check out the floral arrangement,” Chris says. The crab whatever has never left my side. “It’s the bomb.”

As I check my archaic English app for Chris’s secret meaning, the stage explodes, sending fireballs around the room like a 4th of July celebration gone wrong. Galactic citizens bolt for the doors in a grand profusion of bodily forms.

“I shall finish God’s work in destroying this abomination,” the pastor shouts, “but first,” he continues, pointing a weapon at Chris, “I will dispense with this pervert.”

Fire shoots from his weapon permanently separating Chris from its clams.

“And now,” the reverend says, pointing his weapon towards the stage, “I’ll—”

But then, a plasma bolt opens him up like a can of corn.

“No righteous deed goes unpunished,” Mom proclaims as she heads towards us, carrying a honking big gun. “Let’s get the devil out of here,” she continues. I notice that she has both brides in tow.

“Do you know how to use that thing?” I ask her as we fight to escape the carnage.

“I’m sure preacher boy would think so,” she says, “if he still had a brain to think with.”

If anyone there is using their brains I can’t tell. One of Mrs. Yip’s people howls, “Let’s take a bite out of crime,” as they storm F’tima’s family, who yowl something my translator can’t process, and the battle is joined. Meanwhile, a Zorn who is trying to escape behind us gets incinerated, thus joining the galactic barbecue. My general impression is that the guests are much better armed than seems reasonable for a wedding. Just as we reach our ship, the world lights up, and the wedding venue explodes in a mushroom cloud and fire.

* * *

It is never fun to be confined to ship’s sick bay, especially if you are recovering from burns over most of your body. By dint of a lot of sucking it up, I’ve managed to make it through with my wits intact, and the cyber-doc has finally pronounced me well.

This evening, Mom, F’tima, Mrs. Yip, and I are having supper in the ship’s mess. “How did you get so proficient with that gun you had?” I ask Mom. “You never struck me as a gun fancier.”

“That nice crustacean you were talking to led a self-defense class for the wedding,” Mom says. “They gave us all appropriate arms as a wedding favor. They said that helping people defend themselves was part of their business philosophy.”

“Yes, Chris told me that they were at the wedding because they’d done business with both parties.”

It strikes me at that moment that not everyone will find peace between warring species a good thing. Peace might be very bad for business if you deal in weapons.

I am a great believer that, for writers, there are no bad experiences, just grist for good stories. Given that, I guess I must thank Chris and its ilk for helping me with my writing. I have a whole new class of antagonists for future work: villains who feed off of war. These villains have sneaky ways to scuttle peace, ways that can cause even more war through collateral damage. I can explore whole new pits of evil in the moral sub-basement of the universe.

I just hope that they’re too busy sowing war to pay attention to my stories. And I hope that the itching from my burns heals soon.