Judas Unchained

“Even better. Now listen carefully. There’s a very large alien sitting in a car in one of your delivery bays out back. I want it into the service elevator and up into the suite without any fuss and without anyone seeing. I do not want to look out of my window tomorrow morning and see Alessandra Baron or any other media dudes camping outside.” He shunted a very large gratuity to the Ledbetter staff general account. “We cool on that?”

The receptionist’s eyebrow rose a fraction. “I will make your request quite plain to the other members of staff.”

“Good man. Now, do you guys have a decent room service menu?”

“We do indeed, sir. Our restaurant has the finest menu in town. Would you like to see it now?”

“No, just send the food up to the suite.”

“Yes, sir. Er, which items?”

“All of it.”

“All of it?”

“Yeah, and just to play safe: twenty-five lettuce as well.”

“At once, sir.”

The en-suite bathroom to the master bedroom featured a circular sunken marble pool, large enough for several people. But not quite big enough for Tochee. The alien lay on a bed of towels beside it, and scooped the warm soapy water over itself. Its manipulator flesh gripped two of the largest combs to be found in Eansor and raked them through its colorful fronds, pulling out the flecks of dried leaves, and grit, and mud spots, and grass stalks, and all the other detritus it had picked up in the feathery appendages as they moved between worlds.

Orion, wearing just a huge canary-yellow towel around his waist, was working around Tochee with the shower hose, washing off the foam that Ozzie had rubbed into its fronds after they’d been combed.

“We do not have ‘shampoo conditioner’ on my world,” Tochee told them. Several of his cleaned fronds quivered at the slightest movement; they were becoming dramatically soft and vibrant as the water dried away. “I would become very important if I were to introduce such a thing.”

“It’s the little things in life that count, man,” Ozzie said. Like Orion, he was wearing a big towel and nothing else. He’d probably have another shower once they were done with Tochee’s beauty therapy. Three in one day! The water washing down the drain in the first one had been vile.

They’d eaten after their all-important first wash with real soap, the three of them moving along the line of trolleys laden with the restaurant’s finest cooking. Ozzie had wolfed down the perfectly cooked French-blue steak. Sampled the fish, the game, the risotto, the sweet and sour chicken, the Thai spice dishes, the pasta. Fries! A whole mountain of them. Beer, drunk as if it had been passed down from Mount Olympus.

Tochee had stuck to the vegetable dishes. How anybody, alien or not, could eat two bowls of raw carrot sticks intended for the dips was beyond Ozzie. The lettuce had been a good idea, too; Tochee ate half of them.

Orion and Tochee both tried ice cream for the first time ever. Finished every spoonful on the trolleys, and sent out for more. Ozzie munched his way through the other puddings, taking a couple of spoons from each.

After the bacchanal meal, they’d brought in clothing store staff from the city, with big cases of the latest fashions. It had taken an hour to choose a wardrobe for both of them. The hotel’s in-house salon sorted out Ozzie’s beard, and gave him a proper manicure. He wouldn’t let them cut much off his Afro; he kind of liked it so explosive. Orion got a similar treatment. It only ended when Ozzie politely rescued the poor girl who was styling the boy’s hair.

“You were drooling,” he told Orion when the flustered girl had left.

“She was beautiful,” Orion protested. “And really friendly.”

“Oh, man, she was sixty years older than you. Trust me on that, rejuvenation is easy to see if you know what you’re looking for; she wore that much makeup because she’s not actually very pretty; and she was being professionally courteous, not friendly.”

“You’re just jealous.”

Ozzie promptly canceled the massage he’d booked for both of them.

Sprucing up Tochee took a good ninety minutes. But Ozzie had to admit, it was time well spent. Once they’d finished blowing the hair dryers over its fronds, their friend looked magnificent. Fluffier than they’d ever seen it, but wonderfully colorful. “A whole Vegas chorus line worth of costumes in one package,” Ozzie declared.

“Are we going out now?” Orion asked. He’d put on a semiorganic black shirt, wearing a white and scarlet jacket over the top; the pants were green enough to hurt the naked eye. It was an ensemble fashionable with the under twenties, the store assistant had promised. Ozzie felt really old just looking at the boy; no way was he going to walk into a bar with anyone dressed like that.

“Sorry, not tonight. I told you I had some serious datawork to catch up with.” The hotel, indeed Bilma itself, was just an interlude before he got back to his asteroid and thought out what to do next.