Madame Olatana, Warbut Astrologer Read online

  Madame Olatana, Warbut Astrologer

  Madame Olatana, Warbut Astrologer

  By

  Mary Carmen

  This book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this story are purely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  © 2010 by Mary Carmen. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

  Contents

  Prologue 1

  1. Prucilla Weathers, Ph.D. 3

  2. Shasian Shepcover 59

  3 Evela Trodais 105

  4 Chef Glocy 142

  5 Isabella Witchen 159

  6 Piev Fallgan 188

  7 Frak Fallgan 206

  8 Lucilla Seaten 234

  9 Wizzent Gerbyal 239

  10 Carls Wunwak 270

  11 Lotgh Wilnaugh 293

  12 King Edsella 316

  In memory of GIZ

  Prologue

  By the Earthling year 2207 wealthy and well connected Earthlings were populating the less desirable islands of the planet of Warbut, happy to have escaped Earth, with its horrific class wars and its poisoned agricultural products.

  By 2220 entities from other planets around the Universe clamored to be allowed to immigrate to Warbut. They liked the clean water, the fresh air, and the ten-percent tax rate. As long as Warbut’s monarch kept the low-intellect Earthlings on separate islands, entities from planets such as Lillitzen, Farnoll, Drintde, Noowal, and Octula were anxious to buy Warbut property.

  Madame Olatana, a Warbut native who was only one hundred seventeen years of age in 2230, quickly revised her astrological consulting procedures to suit clientele from sixty-four different planets. Those planets revolved around fifty-seven different stars and included eighty-one types of intelligent entities. Whereas the Earthlings, the initial aliens on Warbut, were concerned about the influences on their lives of Earth’s great moon and the uninhabited planets of Saturn and Mercury, entities from other planets were worried about how their lives would be changed by the gravitational effects of the enormous planets in Warbut’s own star system.

  Madame Olatana was ready to discuss all matters with all Warbut’s residents and with any residents of other planets who could afford planet-to-planet calls over the Universal Message Service. Most of the Warbut immigrants had come from planets populated by the very early expeditions from Octula, undertaken when authorities on that planet recognized its star was dimming. The Octula descendants, including all Earthlings, were divided into entities of two sexes, male and female. Native Warbutians were some of these descendants, too, so Madame Olatana was used to discussing the roles of the sexes with clients.

  However, several planets, such as Lillitzen, had no such sexual division within the natives, and Madame Olatana, as of 2230, was still getting used to these androgynous entities and their concerns. Although Madame Olatana spoke through a translation cube, one that translated several Warbutian dialects into any of over one hundred languages, that cube was still not correctly programmed to know when to call an entity “it” instead of “he” or “she.” Madame Olatana and her many receptionists couldn’t keep it straight, either.

  1. Prucilla Weathers, Ph.D.

  I

  On the date the Earthlings on Warbut called February 17, 2230, Ralli poked his nose into the consultation room.

  “That Earthling woman with all those letters after her name is here,” he hissed. “Ready?”

  “Five minutes, please, then, send her in,” Madame Olatana replied.

  Earthlings always wanted a show, and Madame Olatana had to get into her costume. A pair of enormous earrings and a wildly colored scarf wrapped around her bald head had proved to be the right touch for Earthlings, so Madame Olatana pulled these accessories from her file cabinet. All the fancy computers with all their charts were never enough for the low-intellect Earthlings.

  A mousy young woman slipped noiselessly into the room and sat on the worst chair.

  “No, Doctor, sit here right next to me,” Madame Olatana insisted, pointing to the chair the Queen of Warbut always appropriated when that royal entity came with her tears and her incessant family worries.

  “That’s the best chair,” the young woman said. “Maybe you should save it for somebody larger than I.”

  “Yes, all Warbutians are large,” Madame Olatana agreed. “Large and very black and entirely bald, with no hair on any spot on their bodies. Let’s find a chair that might be more comfortable for you.”

  At last a straight-backed chair was located, one that Frank Lloyd Wright might have designed if he had been born on Warbut in the twenty-second century. Dr. Weathers helped Madame Olatana move the chair to the table that held the dozens of computers.

  “What can I help you with, Doctor?” Madame Olatana asked. “A career matter? The location of a house?”

  “I need a partner, Madame,” Doctor Weathers said. “Everybody else on the project has a partner, and, too, I am lonely, so far from home.”

  “Of course,” Madame Olatana nodded. “Tell me about the project.”

  “It’s a ten-year effort to find oil on three of Warbut’s outer islands. The King of Warbut, Hutarfe, has contracted with the University of Pittsburgh, and about twenty Earthling scientists are here. Everybody else brought at least a partner, and several scientists brought children, too,” Doctor Weathers explained.

  “What is your role?” Madame Olatana asked. “I’m the project manager, working with the scientists to determine the tasks involved with the search and reporting to the contract agent at the University on the progress of those tasks,” Doctor Weathers answered.

  “Very important work, as I have read,” Madame Olatana said as she waived her hand. Buttering up the client was at least twenty percent of her work.

  “King Hutarfe’s estimates show the planet is about fifty years from running out of oil, although that source of energy is not used extensively on Warbut,” Doctor Weathers threw in. “Not like on Earth, anyway.”

  “Let’s take a look at aspects for love,” Madame Olatana said. “You don’t want just a partner, you want a lover, too.”

  “I’ve never had much luck with lovers,” Doctor Weathers replied. “After a couple of weeks, I get bored. Sex is very boring, you know.”

  Although Madame Olatana had never found sex boring, even at her current middle age, she nodded her head.

  “We need to find somebody who is as intellectually active as you, yourself, are,” Madame Olatana said. “Are you interested in an Earthling?”

  “Of course!” Doctor Weathers replied. “Who else would have an interest in me?”

  “The income records for our planet are entirely open for all to examine,” Madame Olatana said. “Your income puts you in the top quarter of all Warbutian entities. Many entities are anxious to come to Warbut, and your income might allow a poor scientist from Octula or Drintde to enter our planet.”

  “I see,” Doctor Weathers said. “But how could I find such a scientist?”

  “Ralli, my receptionist, will advertise on the Universal Message Service. We ought to have a list of candidates in a couple of weeks. Are you interested in both women and men?”

  “Just men,” Doctor Weathers said. “I have never taken an interest in women.”

  “I recommend we look for somebody about ten years younger than you,” Madame Olatana said. “Although Earthlings don’t live as long on Warbut as they live on Earth, the females still outlive the males by about ten years.”

  “And a younger scie
ntist would have fresh ideas,” Doctor Weathers added. “That would be more interesting to me.”

  II

  Three weeks after her initial consultation with Madame Olatana, Doctor Weathers met with Ralli.

  “I’ve got pictures and everything, honey!” the receptionist said. “Madame will want the birth dates, of course, to whirl them through the matchmaking software, but you and I can look at these pictures.”

  “How many men are interested?” Doctor Weathers asked.

  “About two hundred, counting the androgynous ones,” Ralli answered. “You may want to eliminate those.”

  “Can androgynous entities mate with Earthlings?” Doctor Weathers shyly wondered.

  “Not much history to go on there,” Ralli admitted. “Some offspring now and again, but mostly sterile, either in the first generation or the second. We have four very strong letters, though, from androgynous entities from Lillitzen. Crazy to get away from the place.”

  “Why is that? Bad atmosphere?”

  “The king is confiscatory, raising tax rates every couple of years,” Ralli told her. “Some say it is mad.”

  “These pictures of the Lillitzens look good,” Doctor Weathers said, showing two of them to Ralli. “You can’t tell they are androgynous.”

  “Honey, they have dressed up like Earthling males for the pictures, that’s for sure,” Ralli confessed. “They usually wear overalls or robes, except when they pose for pictures. Enormous creatures, most of the time. Look like Japanese wrestlers, except that they have both male and female fixtures.”

  “So there are breasts and vaginas under these clothes?” Doctor Weathers asked.

  “Absolutely. The breasts are strapped down, just for the pictures. You can count on it, honey,” Ralli insisted.

  III

  A week after Ralli and Doctor Weathers had examined the first responses to Ralli’s advertisement, Madame Olatana asked the receptionist for a status report on the Weathers case.

  “I have received nearly three hundred replies to that ad,” Ralli told his employer. “I gave over two hundred to that young woman when she came into the office, and I just wrote her that we have another bunch for her to review.”

  “Anything interesting?” Madame Olatana wanted to know.

  “The usual losers, of course. We always get those fellows with any ad we run, even if the client is too young or too old,” Ralli admitted. “About seventeen new fellows, including eight from Earth. Two with doctorates, and two with significant family to be included in any immigration deal.”

  “What’s the status of Doctor’s Weathers’s account?”

  “A credit balance, of about seventeen hundred in Universal Gold,” Ralli reported.

  “Good. That will tide us over until Queen Mastila pays her bill,” Madame Olatana sighed.

  “She’s coming again in two days, in case you want to cut her off,” Ralli said.

  “The Queen? We can’t cut her off, and you know it as well as I do. She sends half our business to us,” Madame Olatana replied.

  “Then we had better write off her account,” Ralli suggested. “Everybody in town is waiting for King Hutarfe to shake down the Earthlings for more money.”

  “When it is six months in arrears, I’ll write it off,” Madame Olatana promised. “Meanwhile, let’s try to earn some of that deposit from Doctor Weathers. What’s the next step?”

  “She has to select candidates for your review.”

  “Let’s try to nudge her along, then.”

  Ralli nodded. “I’ve got a list of seven she would like to consider further. She needs to pick up this last bunch, the ones who did not make the deadline, but we could review the seven.”

  “Get me the information immediately,” Madame Olatana said. “We need to earn another three hundred in Universal Gold today to pay the grocer.”

  “That’s your grocer. The escrow agency has a year of my salary on deposit, and I’m better off than you most of the time,” Ralli reminded her.

  “All of the time, Ralli. When times are tight, I’m the first to get cut from everybody’s budget,” Madame Olatana moaned.

  “Do you have the details on that Earthling’s birth date? She promised to send them,” Ralli wondered.

  “Yes, she was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the United States of North America, on Earth, on January 10, 2193. That makes her thirty-seven in Earth years, really a fine age for finding a partner.”

  “Don’t they get married at thirty on Earth?”

  “The lower classes marry earlier. Somebody with a doctorate, such as our client, would wait until just a few years before the end of her reproductive days,” Madame Olatana told him. “The educated Earthlings don’t reproduce very much, just one or two offspring for each female.”

  “No wonder the wealthy are tripping over each other to get to Warbut,” Ralli concluded. “If Earth is overrun with the poor and the dumb, Warbut must be a welcome change.”

  “That’s exactly what King Hutarfe is counting on, Ralli,” Madame Olatana said. “He is making money to feed the Wiklvings by keeping rich Earthlings from having to rub elbows with the hoi polloi. Of course, all Earthlings are dumb, so Hutarfe can’t be too choosy. Every Earthling who comes to Warbut reduces the average intelligence both on Earth and on Warbut.”

  “As for this Earthling doctor, does her birth date look good for snagging a mate?”

  “Not really. I can understand why she is single. Five planets, including the moon, in the fire signs indicate a strong personality. She has her star in an Earth sign, Capricorn, and that probably gives her that administrative ability. But with both Mercury and Venus in Aquarius and both nearly retrograde, she is aloof. And a bit crazy.”

  “And the ascendant?”

  “Guess.”

  “She’s skinny and tall. Maybe Gemini?”

  “Yes, dead in the middle of Gemini. A nervous type, and this ascendant in Gemini causes the star, called the Sun on Earth, to be very near the midheaven. You can’t get a better aspect for career success, but love is hard to find,” Madame Olatana told Ralli.

  “Nothing encouraging?”

  “Just that Venus is in the eleventh house of friends,” Madame Olatana said. “We need to find somebody who would be a friend and a lover. Those grasping Lillitzen fellows probably would not be my first choice.”

  “She’s picked one of them for you to look at,” Ralli said.

  “Very well, I’ll get to work, and maybe we can release some of that deposit by the end of the day.”

  IV

  Three days later, Ralli gave Madame Olatana the rest of Doctor Weathers’s selections, making a total of eleven males from around the Universe. Six males from Earth, one androgynous entity from Lillitzen, one male from Octula, one male from Clarkl, and two males from Drintde.

  “I’ve got to sell these Earthlings, Ralli,” Madame Olatana said. “We’ve no agent on Clarkl to check these facts, and the others have sisters and cousins and aunts to bring along.”

  “Those Earthlings, as I remember, are a sorry bunch,” Ralli said. “Only a couple of them with anything like our client’s educational background.”

  “That’s always a problem with Earthlings, indeed,” Madame Olatana agreed. “The women are now the better educated, and the men are essentially artists. Every time somebody invents a new work-saving device, more men are out of work and more women are paid to manage that device. Doctor Weathers is surely aware of this since she selected so many Earthlings for us to evaluate.”

  “And so ugly!” Ralli said. “Our client is skinny and pale, and these men are just the same. Some of them have hair on their heads!”

  “There is no accounting for what Earthlings consider as comely, Ralli,” Madame Olatana agreed. “I have a list of birth-chart aspects that will tell me how long these Earthly attributes will last, and my task will be to identify those men who will not age well. Some of these photographs may be enhanced, too, although all of them were certified by the Universal Supreme
Court’s clerk.”

  “Should I call our New Washington agent on the Universal Message Service to have her start the evaluations?”

  “Not yet. I’ll talk to Doctor Weathers about each man and try to narrow this list down to two or three.”

  V

  On Lillitzen, an enormous planet far, far away from Warbut, the elephantine androgynous entities were continually discussing with each other what to do to get out from under the influence of their monarch, the crazy Edsella.