I woke, standing up, in my new universe, and saw as I stumbled that I stood in a harvested cornfield. The shucks were already bundled up in little towers dotting the multi-acred field, and in the distance, I could see a line of trees serving as a windbreak, and that led the eye to a powerline with telephone poles.

I set out that way since the poles might well be on a road, and they would definitely lead to some sort of civilization.

A small road, of dusted brown tarvey, walked alongside the powerlines, and I followed it for nearly three miles until I saw a white farmhouse on the right.

Looking it over, I saw an internal combustion tractor, power lines (of course), a transformer to step the power level down, chickens running loose, hogs penned up, and a barn where chickens laid eggs in more factory-like conditions.

I checked my legs, and sure enough found small insects, I’m not sure what variety dotting my pants and even a few attached to my skin and bulging away. Chicken feed. The free-rangers were there to keep down the blood-suckers.

There was no satellite dish, and there was a huge antenna above the house. This all gave me a good idea of the tech level. Probably about 1970’s America, at a guess.

And the fact that the house was by itself with the nearest other house at least three miles away by straight travel over the fields led me to assume 1)Very harsh and effective law enforcement or 2)The homeowner had a gun.

See, if neither of these was true then this house was easy prey for bandits. And few people spend the effort to build a two-story white clapboarded house complete with three outbuildings so as to serve as a kind of Criminal Full Employment Act.

I walked up to the front screen door of the porch, and knocked.

“We don’t have any work.” A mature female voice laden with authority, either a chief cook or the housemistress, called from inside past the screened in porch, and the open front door.

“Not wanting any, ma’am.” I called back.

She flustered out, apologetic. Human, I was glad to see, since my assumptions only made sense with dealing with humans or something close to that.

“I’m so sorry. Won’t you come in. I thought you were one of them. And we already have three workers as it is. Can’t afford anymore.”

Her face was worn, but strong, and stil held some of the atractiveness that no doubt had made her the recipient of a couple of proposals of marriage. But now, she looked more capable than beautiful.

She took me into her kitchen, while offering me milk, coffee, a place to stay, and a chance to wash my dusty clothes, and this sudden burst of hospitality seemed odd compared to her usual off-putting attitude now that she thought I wasn’t one of Them.

And around her red-white checked tablecloth of her kitchen table as she got me a big glass of milk, sat Them as they ate lunch.

Three aliens, and I don’t mean pitiful human refugees from the avarice and misgovernment so common in Humanity’s leaders. No these three, of separate species, came from beyond the Solar System.

The Blikten was tall, willowy, and solid blue, and it looked the most human. Then it reached an arm around its glass, hung a left at the salt and pepper and bent up to snag a biscuit. My stomach turned over. There’s just something about the Blikten, they look so human, but actually the other two are closer genetically to human than they are.

The other two were a Parra, which I’d seen in multiple universes, and indeed met them in my first universe as a verser. They were short, furred with bold, bright colors, and shaped and sized rather like a penguin.

They were avians, like the other species at the table who looked like he really wanted to perch on the back of the chair rather than stand on it.

The Starflock, I’ve met less, but in each universe, they’ve been in space so long that they call themselves after space instead of their original species name, and they have only the vaguest sort of legends of their pre-space history. One academician I talked to (and they do strongly tend to be scholarly sorts) thought they had been in space for over ten thousand years.

He was two feet tall with long legs of bone,ligament, and scale, and a plump football shaped body with a modest neck, and bright, shiny eyes, and a black beak about four inches long. Some barbarian tribes of this species, I’d heard would sharpen their beaks to make daggers of them, but his was merely being used to crack nuts while a flickering tongue wormed the nutmeat out with speed and delicacy.

And then my hostess turned and saw the Blikten retreating its snaking arm through the obstacle course. And she lit into the alien demanding the food be returned, and “proper table manners be observed if you want to stay in my house.”

I frowned, and the housemistress drew me aside to the parlor so that I did not have to eat around the aliens. Her face was flushed, and her eyes wide.

And she patted her chest as she sank into a chair with her dishcloth in her left hand.

“I don’t know if I can take much more of this. Ever since Frank went into the hospital, they’ve gotten more and more disrespectful, especially that Blikten hussy with her vest and pants. Not decent, I tell you, not decent. And we need to keep working on the farm to pay the bills. Frank always used to handle the aliens. He had the touch for it.”

I pondered things, and decided that I might well have been sent here to help this lady out, and maybe the aliens as well. It bothered me that I should see three star-faring species serving as farmhands on a low-tech Earth. It made me wonder what was going on.

“Perhaps I can help, ma’am. I’m not all that familiar with farming, but I have met a few aliens in my day, ” My tone of voice let it be known that it was more than a few. “And I’m pretty handy. Give me a place to stay, and some food, and I’ll see what I can do for a while.”

“Well, of course, I will. You’re human. Twouldn’t be right to just cast you out on the road.”

She looked more relaxed, and less likely to have some sort of physical collapse now.

I gathered from her a list of projects that needed doing. A daily list and a more long-term list was what I got after politely forcing her to be logical, at least in a way that made sense to me.

Then I went to find the aliens who were waiting on the front porch steps. The Blikten guiltily started up from sunning in the grass.

“I’m the new foreman, for now. We’ve got a lot of work to do, so we’ll try to work together.”

They introduced themselves to me by their English names which were Bob, Lucy, and Jack for the Parra, the Blikten, and the Starflock.

They called me “Mr. T”.

We cleaned out the granary which had rotted corn kernels in a film over the base, and then poured the kernels from their temporary storage in a giant hopper truck. The Parra was their translator for difficult terms since the Parra are natural mimics.

And so we got the corn picker hooked up behind the tractor, and set out for the ’second field’ across the road which was getting toward over-ripe, and if we wanted to save it from being consigned to the cheaper grade of animal food, it needed to be harvested and shucked and stored soon.

We worked in the heat of the day, and I instantly found that the air conditioner on the picker was broken, and the same with the tractor. I’m not sure why the two weren’t combined into one; perhaps another decade of economic expansion and problem-solving and that would be commonplace.

But it got hot, and the three males wilted a bit, but the Blikten was enjoying herself. She went so far as to roll up the windows to “get properly baked between the bones.”

She had a lot of bones, mostly the same type, vertebrae. There was not a single long bone in her body. So she looked humanoid, but could move like a snake.

It got later, and we still had only a fourth of the field done, and I could tell by the glances cast my way that they were looking forward to quitting. At the same time, the housemistress had made it clear we needed to do all we could do of the field.

So I called them together, and laid it out for them.

“We need your help, but I’m pretty sure this is not what you signed on for. If you do keep on working today and hard tommorrow then that should do this field, and save it for the benefit of Corn Flake eaters everywhere. Otherwise its hog food. I do not know what I can offer you, but I will try to be fair.”

“Trust a human; help a human, after the way they treat us?” The Blikten was militantly opposed, and I could definitely see her point. They had already worked hard today, and that scene during the lunch must have grated on the Bliktens’ touchy nature.

“I won’t have you fired whatever you decide.”

That did it. The Parra and the Starflockian began to talk their cohort around suggesting that I was an honorable person, and they really should help. After all, the humans, offered them a waystation, and there was no right to demand such.

Still the Blikten refused until the Starflockian said something harsh and very quick to her.

We worked until nightfall, and I put tarps over the equipment to protect them from dew. This last did not make my host happy.

But as I stumbled through the late dinner, I told her that we would have to cut some corners, and I simply did not have time to creepy-crawl at one mile per hour the whole assembly back in to the barn tonight, and back out in the morning.

She was a bit of a perfectionist, to say the least, and she did not like it, but she accepted my logic, and worried about thieves. So we chained the local dog, Rover, to the tractor where he barked for nearly two hours as we tried to sleep.

Early the next morning, we were rousted out, and a large meal was scarfed down, and away we went. The Blikten and the Parra handled the tractor-picker combo which shocked them a bit since evidently they were used to a human being nearby, but I thought they had shown they knew more what they were doing than I did, yesterday, and they had gotten more skilled.

So I and the Starflock began running the shucker, and dumping the resulting golden kernels into the giant hopper.

I asked the Starflockian in Galactic Standard what was going on at the farm.

He was startled to hear me speak in something that sounded vaguely familiar, so I tried several other galactic languages without success. In the end, we went back to English, but he appreciated the effort.

“Mr. T, pardon my saying this, but you are an odd human. If I did not know better, I would say you had cyberware.”

I thought about it. Maybe Earth had low tech, but not necessarily this universe? So I mentally flipped on my cyberware, and it worked.

I just grinned, and grabbed a two hundred pound bag of grain since we had overfilled the hopper with the last, and were finishing up with large, plastic wire, woven bags, and I slung the bag up onto the hopper back which was above my head.

The Starflockian flinched a bit, and I asked him why.

“Your teeth display human. I know intellectually it is meant as a sign of good humor, but predators out of memory and into legend ate my people with such teeth.”

“Like the way, the Blikten freaked out the housemistress with her arm wiggles?”

“Indeed. I spoke most strongly to the Blikten about that. She is quite militant, and ungrateful, but I think she will not cause further problems.”

“What is her beef? I mean her problem?”

“She feels oppressed to be limited to human ways. But I reminded her of a bit of ancient history. Near two thousand years ago, some of my people were fleeing a supernova, and they came to the Blikten homeworld, and sought refuge. This was granted, but the Blikten forced my people to ‘be improved’ so we could be flexible like them. Most of those ‘improved’ died soon.
She has little ground to complain of mistreatment when her worst oppression is that she cannot twist her arms like she would like.”

“Still, we need to try to accomodate each other. However, I’ll have to admit that bothered me too, when I saw it.”

We went back to work, and dumped the grain in the grainery, and then headed back after a quick glass of warm water to work some more before lunch.

Lunch came and the Blikten was particularly annoying. She was being deliberately provocative, but I could deal with her oddities better than the hostess who excused herself.

I was not sure what to do. There was a genuine problem here of social incompatibility. And then I got an idea.

I woke up the Starflockian, and told it to him.

“Can you make a list of things which annoy each species, and another list of those that bother each other, and finally a third list of things that drive each other nuts, and then we can try to figure out what is reasonable to allow, and what we cannot.”

The Starflockian blinked.

“All right. I’ll get to it in the morning. I will say that being woken out of a sound sleep fits on my bother list.”

I blushed in the night, and mumbled a quick apology while he stepped off back to his cot.

We worked over it the next day, as my team caught up on the chores such as cleaning out the pigpen. That is me, and the Starflockian worked on it. Then we showed it to the Parra who had some good ideas.

Lastly, I waited to lunch to show it to the two ladies. They were not impressed. And they both started complaining.

“Look. The vest and the pants are needed. Blikten breathe through little holes in their chests. wearing a dress would cause her to suffocate.

And for you snaking biscuits or acting like you are about to is not neccessary. Quit trying to yank our chain just to be annoying.”

They did not like that either although the housemistress was a little more subdued since she did not really want to kill her Blikten farmhand.

So I laid it out for them.

“Look you two. Quit squabbling. You’re annoying the men of the this house. There’s your point of unity. You’re acting like clucking hens.”

That did not go over very well at all.

And they both started to get up from the table.

So I shouted. The crockery rattled.

“Sit down. Look here. You either accept my terms, or I and these two others are walking. You can take care of this farm on your own. And you, Miss Blue, whatever you are running from is still out there, and you need hospitality so get over yourself, both of you.” And then I paused. “Right now.” I added in a very soft voice.

Peace and tranquility did not exactly reign, but we got rid of most of the annoyances and time-wasting fights. The Blikten stopped snagging biscuits, and the humans stopped smiling with their teeth, and nobody complained if they saw the Blikten sunning herself on the road flattened like a thoroughly driven over roadkill, and the Starflockian got to perch on the top of a chair which brought great relief to him.

And then I talked to the houselady of the need for more workers, and she complained of lack of money, but I pointed to the money to be gained.

So we hired on more workers as they came. I eventually saw one arrive.

‘pop’, and a Drivnat with its eight legs, mobile fringe, and covering shell which was swaddled in dozens of layers of garments appeared in the front yard. The Drivnat were freaky even for me.

“How did you get here?”

“Interstellar teleportation. Is this planet always this cold?”

Seeing as it was ninety degrees Fahrenheit, I mentioned that it often got colder.

Later, I saw the Parra make his leave from behind a crowd of about a dozen workers. He appeared, and then a few minutes later reappeared in the same spot, and then two minutes later the same, and one minute, and then thirty seconds, and it worked down to where he was flickering in place.

Then he waved goodbye, and a chorus of nine different species bid him farewell. And he was gone.

As I got to understand it, their teleportation worked like this. They teleported to other planets in the same solar system behind a protective forcescreen, and in so doing they worked their way around the Sun, and each orbit built up “teleportive velocity” which could be transformed into “teleportive distance”.

So after building speed, the Parra was now arriving in another star system.

Finally, I asked them why?

They did not tell everyone being not entirely trusting, but their had been two great empires in space. One fell, and in the resulting chaos, bandits, pirates, and thugs flourished. Now the other empire was moving slowly, since it was an empire, and they are often slow, to correct the situation and restore law and order. But in the meantime, anyone with a bit of wealth was hopping a spaceship out of the area. The migrant workers, dependent upon the teleport net, were being forced to flee to avoid being robbed or beaten.

And Earth was a good waypost to some really nice solar systems about ten hundred lightyears away.

They did not think Earth was in danger. It was inside the boundaries of the stable empire after all.

I was curious, and asked if I could take a ride. So we did, and there was my problem. You needed to be attuned to the teleport net in order to use it, and I had never been so ‘attuned’.

So my atoms got blasted from here to Alpha Centauri.

Tadeusz