Odds Are Good

  “Did you win?”

  She was busy working on her biscuits, so she didn’t answer right away. She had turned the dough out onto the counter and was kneading it lightly. After a few minutes she began to pat it out to an even thickness. When it was about half an inch thick, she turned to me and said in a bitter voice, “I lost. I lost, and that was the beginning of my downfall. I became obsessed with biscuits. I swore I would make a better biscuit than Dan McCarty or die trying.”

  Using the top of the baking powder can, she began to cut the dough into rounds, flipping them off the counter and onto a baking sheet as she spoke.

  “We began to have a weekly contest, Dan and I. Every Sunday morning we’d take our biscuits to church, and after the service Reverend Zephyr would try them out. He’d measure them. He’d weigh them. Finally he’d taste them, first plain, then with butter, then with honey. And every Sunday he’d turn to me and say, ‘I’m sorry, Elvira, but Dan’s biscuits are just lighter and fluffier than yours.’”

  She popped the tray into the oven. “I was like a madwoman. I worked day and night, night and day, trying every combination I could think of to make my biscuits lighter, fluffier, more wonderful than any that had ever been made. I wanted biscuits that would float out of the oven and melt in your mouth. I wanted biscuits that would make a kiss seem heavy. I wanted biscuits that would make the angels weep with envy. I tried adding whipped egg whites, baking soda and vinegar, even yeast. But do too much of that and you don’t really have a biscuit anymore. No, the key is in the baking powder.”

  Her eyes were getting wild now, and I was beginning to be frightened again. I wondered if she really was crazy—and if she was, just what a crazy ghost might do.

  “One Sunday I was sure I had it; I came to church with a basket of biscuits that were like a stack of tiny featherbeds. But after the judging, Reverend Zephyr shook his head sadly and said, ‘I’m sorry, Elvira, but Dan’s biscuits are just lighter and fluffier than yours.’

  “By the next Saturday night I was wild, desperate, half insane. In a fit of desperation, I dumped an entire can of baking powder into my dough.”

  “What happened?” I asked breathlessly.

  “The oven door blew off and killed me on the spot. And ever since, I’ve been doomed to bake a batch of biscuits every Saturday at midnight, as punishment for my pride. What’s worse, I finally know the secret. Learned it on the other side. These biscuits are the lightest, fluffiest ever made, Benjie. Just plain heavenly. But no one has ever tasted them, and I can’t rest until someone does.”

  “How come no one has ever tasted them?”

  “How can they? My biscuits of glory are so light and fluffy they float right out of the oven and disappear through the ceiling. If I could leave them on the counter overnight, someone might have tried them by now. But they’re always gone before anyone gets a chance.”

  She sounded like she was going to cry. “I’m so weary of biscuits,” she sighed, “so everlastingly weary of baking biscuits . . .”

  “These biscuits of yours—they wouldn’t hurt someone who ate them, would they?”

  “Of course not!” she cried, and I could tell that I had offended her. “These are biscuits of glory. One bite and you’ll never be the same.”

  “What if I grabbed one as it came out of the oven?”

  “You’d burn your hand.”

  “Wait here!” I said.

  Scooting out of the kitchen, I scurried up the stairs and rummaged through my room until I found what I was looking for—not easy when you’ve just moved. Finally I located it. I went down the stairs two at a time, hoping to make it to the kitchen before Elvira’s biscuits came out of the oven.

  She was standing by the big old oven as I slipped through the swinging door.

  “What’s that?” she asked as I came in.

  “My catcher’s mitt. Are the biscuits ready?”

  “They can’t wait any longer,” she replied. “They’re done to perfection.”

  As she spoke, she opened the oven door. Out floated a dozen of the most perfect biscuits I had ever seen—light, golden brown, high and fluffy, crusty around the edges. They escaped in sets of three, rising like the hot-air balloons at the state fair.

  Reaching out with the mitt, I snagged a biscuit from the third set.

  “Careful,” said Elvira. “They’re hot!”

  Ignoring her warning, I took the biscuit from the glove. “Ow!” I cried as it slipped through my fingers and headed for the ceiling.

  The last row of biscuits had already left the oven. I scrambled onto the counter and snagged one just as it was heading out of reach. I was more careful this time, cupping the glove over it and holding it tenderly while it cooled. I could feel the heat, but the leather protected me.

  Finally I thought it was safe to try a bite. Elvira Thistledown watched with wide eyes as I took her work from my glove and lifted it to my lips.

  It was astonishing, the most incredible biscuit I have ever tasted.

  Suddenly I realized something even more astonishing: I was floating! I had lifted right off the counter and was hovering in midair. I worried about getting down, but as I chewed and swallowed, I drifted gently to the floor.

  “What an amazing biscuit,” I cried. “I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven!”

  “So do I!” said Elvira Thistledown. Only the last word was dragged out into an eyeeeeeeee. . . , as if she were being snatched into the sky.

  That was the last I ever saw of Elvira Thistledown.

  Her biscuits, however, haunt me still. It’s not just the memory of their taste, though I have never again tasted anything so fine. It’s the effect of the darned things. See, whenever I get too happy, or too excited, or begin thinking about those biscuits too much, I start to float. If I dream of them—and I often do—I may wake to find myself drifting a foot or two above the bed.

  It gets a little embarrassing sometimes.

  I’ll tell you this, though. Unlike some people, I’m not afraid of what happens after you die.

  I know what I’ll find waiting on the other side. . . .

  Biscuits.

  Biscuits of glory.

  I, Earthling

  It’s not easy being the only kid in your class who doesn’t have six arms and an extra eye in the middle of your forehead. But that’s the way it’s been for me since my father dragged me here to Kwarkis.

  It’s all supposed to be a great honor, of course. Dad is a career diplomat, and being chosen as the first ambassador to another planet was (as he has told me more times than I can count) the crowning achievement of his career.

  Me, I just want to go home—though to hear Dad tell it, Kwarkis is home. I’m afraid he’s fallen in love with the place. I guess I can’t blame him for that. What with the singing purple forests, the water and air being sparkling clean (which really makes me feel like I’m on another planet), and those famous nights with three full moons, this truly is a beautiful place.

  But it’s not home. The people aren’t my people. Most of the time I just feel lonely and stupid.

  According to Dad, the first feeling is reasonable, the second silly. “You’ve got cause to feel lonely, Jacob,” he’ll say, standing over me. “And I’m sorry for that. But you have no reason to feel stupid.”

  A fat lot he knows. He doesn’t have to go to school with kids who can do things three times as fast as he can because they have three times as many hands. Even worse, they’re just basically smarter than I am. All of them. I am the dumbest one in the class—which isn’t easy to cope with, since I was always one of the smartest kids back home.

  I’ll never forget my first day at school here. My father led me in and stood me next to Darva Preet, the teacher. She smiled that strange Kwarkissian smile, reached down one of her six arms to take my hand, then turned to the room and cried: “Class! Class! Come to order! I want you to meet our new student—the alien you’ve all heard so much about!”

  I began to blush. It was s
till hard to think of myself as an alien. But, of course, that’s what I was: the only kid from Earth on a planet full of people that I had considered aliens until I got here. Now that I was on Kwarkis, the situation was reversed. Now I was the alien.

  The kids all turned toward me and stared, blinking their middle eyes the way they do when they are really examining something. I stared back, which is what I had been taught to do on the trip here. After a moment one of them dug a finger into his nose, pulled out an enormous booger, then popped it into his mouth and began to chew. The sight made my stomach lurch, but I tried not to let my disgust show on my face. Fior Langis, the Kwarkissian diplomat who had been in charge of preparing me for this day, had taught me that Kwarkissians feel very differently about bodily functions than we do.

  “Greetings,” I said in Kwarkissian, which I had learned through sleep-tapes on my way here. “I am glad to be part of the class. I hope we will have good times together.”

  Everyone smiled in delight, surprised that I knew their language. Then they all farted in unison. The sound was incredible—a rumbling so massive that for a moment I thought a small bomb had gone off. I jumped, even though Fior Langis had warned me that this was the way Kwarkissians show their approval. What she hadn’t told me about, prepared me for, was the tremendous odor.

  My eyes began to water.

  I had a hard time breathing.

  I fell over in a dead faint.

  When I woke, I was in the hospital.

  Since then the kids have referred to me as Kilu-gwan, which means “The Delicate One.” I find this pretty embarrassing, since I was one of the toughest kids in class back on Earth. It doesn’t really make that much difference here on Kwarkis, where no one fights. But I don’t plan to live here forever, and I’ll need to be tough when I get home to Earth. Back there you have to be tough to survive.

  The only one who doesn’t call me Kilu-gwan is Fifka Dworkis, who is the closest thing I have to a friend here. Fifka was the first one who talked to me after my embarrassing introduction to the class.

  “Do not worry about it, Jay-cobe,” he said, pronouncing my Earth name as well as he could with his strange oval mouth and snakelike green tongue. “The others will not hold your oversensitive olfactory organ against you.”

  He put his arm around my shoulder. Then he put another arm around my ribs, and another one around my waist!

  I tried not to squirm, because I knew he was just being friendly. But it sure felt weird.

  To tell the truth, it wasn’t just the weirdness that bothered me. It was also that I felt pretty inadequate having only one arm to offer back. Kwarkissian friends are always walking down the street arm in arm in arm in arm in arm in arm, and I wondered if Fifka felt cheated, only getting one arm back.

  Whether or not he felt cheated, he doesn’t spend a lot of time with me. He’s always kind when he sees me, but he has never stayed overnight or anything like that. Sometimes I suspect that the reason Fifka is nice to me is that his mother has told him to be. She’s part of the Kwarkissian diplomatic team that works with Dad.

  The only real friend I have here is my double miniature panda, Ralph J. Bear, whom I brought with me from Earth. In case you’ve been living on another planet (ha-ha) the new double miniature breeds are only about six inches long. Ralph can easily fit right in my hand.

  I like to watch him strolling around my desk while I do my homework. (Yes, I still have homework; I guess some things are the same no matter where you go!) And he’s so neat and clean that Dad doesn’t object to my letting him eat off my plate at the table. I love him so much I can hardly stand it.

  The Chinese ambassador gave me Ralph at the big going-away party the United Nations threw for Dad and me. The gift was a surprise to everyone, since the Chinese are still pretty much holding on to the miniatures.

  (Of course, between the fact that there are so few of them available, and the fact that they are so devastatingly cute, there is an enormous demand for them. People were wildly jealous of me for having Ralph, but I figure I ought to get some benefit from being a diplomat’s son. I mean, none of those people who were so jealous about Ralph was being dragged off to live on another planet!)

  As it turns out, Ralph is one reason that the Kwarkissians made contact with Earth in the first place. Well, not Ralph J. Bear himself. But the breeding program he came from was part of a major last-ditch effort to save the pandas. According to Dad, the Kwarkissians had been monitoring us for a long time. His contacts say that one thing that made them decide we were worth meeting was that we had started taking our biosphere seriously enough to really work at saving endangered species, such as pandas.

  Anyway, Ralph is the only real friend I have here. So you can imagine how horrified I was when I was asked to give him away.

  “What am I going to do, Ralph?” I said, trying not to cry.

  The genetic engineers who created the miniatures have enhanced their intelligence, too. Ralph J. Bear is very bright, and he always knows when something is bothering me. Waddling across my desk, he stood on his hind legs and lifted his arms for me to pick him up.

  I set him on my shoulder, and he nestled into my neck. Normally that would have made me feel a lot better. Now it had the reverse effect, because it only made me more aware of how much I would miss him if I had to give him away.

  I’ve been avoiding talking about how I got into this mess because it is so embarrassing, but I suppose I had better explain it if any of the rest of this is going to make sense.

  It started while we were having a diplomatic dinner here at the house.

  According to my father, diplomatic dinners are very important. He says much of the major work in his profession happens around dinner tables, rather than at office desks.

  The big thing he is working on right now is a treaty that has to do with who gets to deal with Earth. See, what most people back home don’t know yet is the Kwarkissians aren’t the only ones out here. But since they were the first to make contact with us, according to the rules of the OSFR (Organization of Space-Faring Races), they get to control contact with us for the next fifty years.

  My father was not amused when he found this out. He thinks the Kwarkissians shouldn’t be able to do that. He feels they’re treating Earth like a colony, and that it should be our choice who has contact with us. But he doesn’t want to make the Kwarkissians angry. For one thing, they’ve been very good to us. For another, we suspect they could probably turn us (by “us,” I mean the entire planet) into cosmic dust without much trouble.

  So the situation is very touchy.

  Dad had been dealing with this other planet, called—well, I can’t actually write down what it’s called because no one ever says the name; it’s against their religion or something. Anyway, this planet that shall remain nameless was interested in making contact with us. But to do so they had to go through the Kwarkissians.

  Dad was all in favor of it; he says the more trading partners Earth has, the better. So he was throwing this dinner, where we were going to get together with a bunch of Kwarkissians, including Fifka’s mom, and a bunch of dudes from the nameless planet, including their head guy, whose name is Nnnnnn.

  Dad asked me to be part of the dinner group because (a) people usually want to meet your kids, no matter what planet you come from, and (b) it’s good diplomacy, because it usually softens people up. I know Dad felt a little guilty about using me like that, but I told him not to, since I was glad to be of some help—especially here on Kwarkis, where I felt like such a doof.

  Diplomatic dinners are always a little tricky because you want to keep from offending anyone, which is not so easy when you have people from three different cultures sitting down to eat together. This is true even on Earth, so you can imagine what it was like for us to have representatives from not three countries, but three planets.

  “Look, this is going to be a delicate situation,” said Dad. “The Kwarkissians want to have you around tonight. They were quite insistent o
n it, in fact; they’re very fond of you, you know. But Nnnnnn and his group don’t like children—partly because in their culture childhood barely exists.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Childhood barely exists’?”

  Dad frowned. “On Nnnnnn’s planet, children are hatched. They come out of the egg looking much like two-year-olds do on Earth, and mature very rapidly thereafter. Even with that, they’re pretty much kept out of sight by their nurses and teachers until they’re ready to join adult society. On Nnnnnn’s world someone who looks as old as you do might well have gained adult status, which is a thing they take very seriously. They are going to consider you not as a child, but as an equal—so for heaven’s sake be careful.”

  He handed me a computer printout on their culture and told me to read it. “There’s a lot here you should know,” he. said. “Study it. The main thing to remember is, whatever else you do, don’t compliment them on anything they show you.”

  He got up to leave the room. Stopping at the door, he added, “You’d better keep Ralph locked up for the night, too.”

  Then he told me how he wanted me to dress and hurried off to tend to some details for the dinner.

  I don’t know about you, but when someone hands me something and tells me to read it, my mind immediately starts thinking of other things I need to do instead. It’s not that I didn’t want to learn about the new aliens; it’s just that my brain rebels at being told what to do. So I put the printout aside and started to do something else.

  A few minutes later my message receptor beeped. I pushed the receive button, and a holographic image of Fifka, about four inches tall, appeared in the center of my desk. Ralph skittled away in surprise—he still hadn’t gotten used to the Kwarkissian version of a phone call. I pushed the send button, so that Fifka could see me as well.

  We started to talk about the dinner. He was excited because his mom was coming. I almost got the feeling he was jealous of her. That surprised me. When I thought about it, I realized that I had never actually invited Fifka to come visit; I had only thought about it and waited for a good opportunity. Maybe he was more genuinely friendly than I had thought.