Alien Tango

can’t imagine anyone not wanting to meet you.”
    “Oh, the superconsciousness hero worship,” Christopher said as he rolled his eyes. “Can you get through to him that some people don’t think Kitty walks on water?”
    “Not really. ACE, ah, doesn’t like that kind of discussion.” Gower looked uncomfortable.
    Reader laughed. “Be happy Kitty uses ACE’s powers for good. Remember, ACE thinks Kitty thinks right.”
    There was a lot of good-natured laughing and kidding about this, but I knew it to be true—when ACE had come to Earth, I was the only one who’d understood what was going on. So, I tried to think like ACE would, and figure out why anyone would be coming out from Alpha Centauri for this wedding. I came up with nothing, other than an idea of who might know.
    “Jeff, is it normal morning in Florida?”
    Martini sighed. “Yes, baby, it is.” He pulled out his cell phone and dialed. “Hi, Dad, good morning. No, not yet. Yes, glad you liked the invitations, it took us three weeks to choose them. No, no, I didn’t. Because I hate them. No, I’m not joking, I hate, no, make that despise them. You have got to be kidding. Mom has no right to invite anyone to our wedding, let alone them. Argh! Okay, fine! Look, that’s not why I’m calling.”
    He looked over at me and covered the phone. “Against all logic and common sense, my mother invited Barbara and her husband to our wedding.”
    “Is she high?” Barbara had tried to force Martini to marry her daughter, Doreen. In fact, it was this incident that had caused the younger generation’s revolt and mass exodus to Caliente Base.
    “Who knows?” Martini went back to the phone. “Thanks for the update. Glad to know everyone’s healthy, and could not have lived without the newest babies’ pooping, eating, crawling, and walking report. Now, can we get to the reason I called, since we’re about to go to a state of national emergency?”
    Apparently not. Martini leaned on the conference table, his head on his free hand, without speaking. He grunted occasionally.
    “Is every call to them like this?” Chuckie asked me quietly.
    “Pretty much.”
    “No wonder he’s always in a bad mood.”
    Lorraine was on her phone, undoubtedly warning Doreen that her parents were going to be coming to our wedding. She looked at me. “Doreen says she and Irving will be happy to physically prevent her parents from entering.”
    I managed a laugh. “Tell her thanks and I’ll keep it in mind.” Irving was a human science geek, meaning he was what every Dazzler under thirty was hoping to bag. Dazzlers really went for brains. If the packaging was decent to look at, that was a bonus, but not what mattered. Once we were all relocated to Caliente Base, I’d had to pass a law that they were not allowed to try to meet Stephen Hawking—they would have killed him with love, and I figured we still needed his brain.
    Martini was finally getting a word in edgewise. “Great, Mom. Thanks. Can I please talk to Dad again? National emergency and all that. Yes, I really do think it’s more important than the seating arrangements. Yes, more important than the two families meeting. Trust me, that’s going to seem like nothing shortly.”
    We were trying to figure out just how to have our families meet. My parents and my Uncle Mort, the career, high-ranking Marine, all knew the truth about Centaurion Division. And they were the only ones in my entire extended family who did. Since my mother was a former Catholic and my father was Jewish, we were already getting the whole mass versus temple questions coming. I hadn’t figured out how to explain that we were going to end up doing neither. I’d done a ton of research into Earth religions to find the one with the closest ceremony to what our A-Cs performed. So far, not a lot of luck.
    It appeared Martini had his father on the phone again. “Dad, cutting to the chase here. Do we still have relatives alive on the home world and would they actually think about coming to my wedding?”
    He sat up, then he sat back, then he stood up and stepped away from the table. This was never a good sign. I looked at Christopher. He pulled out his phone and dialed. “Dad? Sorry but we need you here, right now. Thanks.” He nodded to me. “He’ll be here shortly, just needs to dress and get to a gate.”
    Martini was still on the phone, and I could see his whole body was tensed. Chuckie could, too. “Okay,” he said quietly. “I’m