I die. My footprints are cursed. I walk around the village not knowing that all who cross where I have been will stay in estrous zero, and bear no young. Eventually, all die. O the embarrassment.
"A !Tangled Web" is a short story by Joe Haldeman, originally published in Analog.
Dick Navarro, an interpreter for Hartford, is doing a freelance job to negotiate a land deal with an alien race called the !tang. He meets Peter Lafitte, another interpreter, who is there to outbid him for another organization, and who doesn't feel the need to play fair. The !tang have some interesting quirks that make the bidding more than a bit dangerous as well.
Tropes in this work include:
- Alien Catnip: Sugar hits the !tang like alcohol hits humans, and alcohol is a psychedelic. On the flip side, "one bite of !tang bread contain[s] enough mescaline to make you see interesting things for hours"; Lafitte, after eating some, spends time "amusing them with impersonations of various Earth vegetables."
- Apologizes a Lot: A key element of !tang psychology. Even a minor slight such as being unable to answer a question is followed by an extreme apology beginning with "I die", progressing through some way this causes a mass extinction, and ending with "All die. O the embarrassment."Navarro: What were the terms of his offer?
Uncle: I die. I breathe in and breathe in and cannot exhale. I explode all over my friends. They forget my name and pretend it is dung. They wash off in the square and the well becomes polluted. All die. O the embarrassment.
Navarro: He said not to tell me?
Uncle: That's right. - Auction: The negotiation ends up in a !tang auction between Navarro and Lafitte, taken in pairs of offers. If the second offer is "the first offer plus some", then a new pair of offers follows.
- Bizarre Alien Psychology: The !tang think generally similarly to humans, but there are a lot of odd quirks, even beyond Apologizes a Lot. A significant argument is whether it is in fact possible to sell land at all, because it is unclear if it is something that can be given value.
- Casual Interstellar Travel: Casual enough that Starlodge is willing to spend a large amount of money building a resort on an alien world.
- Hideous Hangover Cure: Hangaway tablets, which hit "like a pile driver."...the adrenaline shock came. Tunnel vision and millions of tiny needles being pushed out through your skin. Rivers of sweat. Cathedral bells tolling, your head the clapper. Then the dry heaves and it was over.
- Human Popsicle: !Tang popsicle, actually. Part of Navarro's offer is to buy cryofreeze for dying !tang from Immortality Unlimited.
- Humans Are Smelly: Navarro overhears two !tang talking, with one telling the other never to make any reference to human body odor, no matter how vile it may be.
- Literal Metaphor: During the negotiations, the !tang make several comments like "Is he standing on feet?", implied to be pure metaphor. After Lafitte's Oh, Crap! moment, when the !tang pull out knives, Navarro informs him that it's not actually metaphor and he's about to lose his feet if he doesn't apologize.
- Neural Implanting: Hartford interpreters get vast numbers of languages, among other things, implanted via a hypnotic-induction learning process.
- N.G.O. Superpower: Hartford keeps an absolute lock on the tachyon drive, and Hartford shares are the universal currency, equal to $10,000 each.
- No OSHA Compliance: There's no handrail on the !tang stairs, as it would have spoiled the harmony.
- Oh, Crap!: Lafitte tries to introduce the concept of "negative value" by threatening the !tang, only to discover that they are aware of the concept, they just consider it an obscenity to be dealt with with knives.
- Ostentatious Secret: Part of Navarro's final offer - a secret thing that the !tang will only find out about if they accept his offer.
- Punctuation Shaker: The !tang, and thus the story's title. Most of the !tang names that we see qualify as well, including their attempt at pronouncing the protagonist's name ("!ica'o *va!o").
- Riddle Me This: Navarro teases his final offer with a riddle, that his secret offer simultaneously belongs to all three mercantile classes: no worth, measurable worth, and infinite worth.
- Rule of Three: There are three mercantile classes: things and services can be of no worth, measurable worth, or infinite worth. Navarro's Ostentatious Secret offer is of all three at the same time.
- Slipping a Mickey: Lafitte drugs Navarro in an attempt to gain an advantage in the negotiations.
- Starfish Aliens: The !tang. They look like a perambulating haystack with an elephant's trunk protruding; they have two arms that they keep hidden. They have multiple genders, and tell each other apart by sonar.
- The Syndicate: Navarro is fairly sure that Lafitte's client is a criminal syndicate called "The Syndicate".
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The reader doesn't find out Navarro's final deal until the !tang do.
- Water Source Tampering: Lafitte's threat after he loses the deal. Leads to an Oh, Crap! when the !tang start pulling out knives.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: A short one. Navarro retires from the Guild and becomes the manager of the new Starlodge resort that he had negotiated for. He hangs out fishing with Uncle, and the two of them are writing a book together. Lafitte vanishes, possibly because he failed the Syndicate.
