11 An Art to Smiling
An Art to Smiling
“No, Ambassador Ialan, you can’t use vulgar language on a live broadcast.”
“No, Ambassador Ialan, you can’t chew your nails on a live broadcast.”
“No, Ambassador Ialan, you can’t look bored on a live broadcast.”
And then, of course, the fact that Temmi couldn’t manage to answer the practice questions with any degree of diplomacy. For example—
Blessing Stone, posing as a reporter, asked, “What are you hoping to do for your home planet, X72, if either the prince or princess offers to take your hand in marriage?”
Temmi, at the phrase take your hand in marriage , busted up laughing. Blessing Stone looked like she was considering batting her over the head with a lampshade.
The next question—
“Do you feel you’re the right person to represent X72?”
Temmi’s answer: “Fuck, no.”
That time, Blessing Stone really did bat her over the head.
But with a tablet, not a lampshade. Definitely smarted, though.
She snapped at Temmi to stop being a snarky adolescent, said her answers mattered, claimed producers would be monitoring the public’s reactions to all contestants and that if any were highly disliked, it’d be a red flag to the prince and princess.
Kalvin chimed in with a calm “It means you’ll be sent home early.
” Temmi decided to take her training more seriously.
The third question—
“By now, the whole empire has seen the clip of you and the imperial princess. Your behavior has been called aggressive. Could you elaborate as to the circumstances that led to the clip?”
This time, Temmi took a moment to think. Diplomacy was the art of saying shitty things in a way that kept a smile on others’ faces, right? She could do that. “I worked long hours as a trash collector, and that morning had been a difficult one for me. Our landlord put up a final eviction notice—”
“Stop.”
“What? I was being honest!”
Blessing Stone shook her garishly adorned head.
Today, her choice of extravagant headwear was a tricorne hat that looked liable to impale someone.
“Honesty that paints you in a bad light is the opposite of what you want. Be humble, but don’t openly admit to poor tenancy.
Otherwise, viewers will think you’re not reliable enough to maintain basic housing. ”
“You don’t know the first thing about my life or the shit I’ve been through.”
“And I don’t care to. Neither do our viewers. We’re selling a fairy tale, not reality. Go again.”
Once Temmi gave a passably decent answer to all the posed questions, Blessing Stone attacked her for her facial expressions.
There came a slew of “That smile is too wide. Too cringe. You look like you’re passing gas.
You look like you’re plotting someone’s death.
Less teeth. Be genuine but don’t show too much.
A diplomatic smile, Ambassador Ialan; what I’m asking for is simply not that hard! ”
Irritated, she barked at Kalvin, “This is precisely why we don’t cast such green contestants. I wanted a holovision villain, not a real-life one! Think of the message we’re broadcasting by saying a girl with a criminal record is good enough to marry the next emperor. It’s absurd!”
“Are you insinuating that Her Excellency has had a lapse in judgment?” Kalvin said, words measured.
“I was fifteen, for fuck’s sake,” Temmi muttered. Not that anyone was listening to her.
“Of course not! I would never—” Blessing Stone snapped her attention back to Temmi. “Smile again for me. Now.”
Who knew there was such an art to smiling ?
Temmi’s face smarted by the time it was over.
And that was before the arduous ordeal of learning how to bow properly.
Apparently, there were seventeen formal bows and twenty-two informal ones.
They ranged from essentially splaying oneself flat on the floor to a tiny inclination of the head.
The appropriate bow depended on one’s personal status, private relationship with the person being bowed to, and context of the situation wherein the bow was being undertaken. Excessive much?
The camerapeople stayed an extra four hours to grab footage of Temmi sitting on the sofa, Temmi pretending to wake up in her bed, Temmi taking bites of a morning biscuit (which was delicious but no longer morning by the time she was allowed to eat it), and then Temmi reading off some rehearsed speech about what her travel had been like, as though it had already happened.
After the cameras left, Manny returned with new trunks of clothing. “Her Highness thinks you’ll find these ensembles more suitable to your taste.” He hmph ed. “I’ll still be providing your onscreen outfits, though, so don’t get too excited.”
Temmi opened the first trunk. A note of flimsy lay on top.
It read You’re Welcome in fanciful, loopy lettering.
Temmi snorted her amusement. But as she dug through the neatly folded outfits, she was surprised to find things she might actually wear.
Loose sweatshirts and comfortable sweatpants, some tee shirts, what looked like actual jumpsuits but far more stylish.
She withdrew one, the color a rich gold threaded with a light blue that matched Temmi’s newly dyed hair.
There was even new underwear, the kind that actually covered her ass and half of her thighs.
How Spie had managed to guess Temmi’s preferred underwear wasn’t something she wanted to ponder upon—she would simply thank the universe for the gift.
She donned the jumpsuit, then broke her previous promise to herself to never look in the mirror.
The person staring back at her was like a Temmi from another world.
A Temmi that might’ve been if her father hadn’t abandoned her in the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
Like staring at a version of herself that existed in some parallel universe, a universe with privilege and opportunity and dads who stayed.
Unbidden tears pricked at her eyes, and she turned away from her reflection.
The woman in the mirror would never be her.
She was simply playing dress-up, pretending to be something and someone she wasn’t, her exterior as contrived as a clip of reality holovision.
Before long, she’d be back home amongst the smog where she belonged.
But, if all went well, by then she’d have enough cash to make herself into whoever she wanted to be.
· · ·
The days until their arrival on Expan Proper and, more terrifyingly, the official start of Love Galaxy dwindled rapidly.
The time passed in a predictable routine.
Temmi would meet with Nix in the library every morning, where they’d fall into a rhythm of easy but safe conversations, debating the merits and limitations of organic-matter energy harvesting, the exotic matter required to create a functioning jumpgate, what would theoretically be possible if one could prove Gygore’s theory of transmutation and convert their energy into a heavenly being.
Nix’s gentle eyes ignited with passion whenever he was discussing physics, theory, possibility.
In their talks of quantum mechanics and the untapped possibilities of the spacetime continuum, Temmi was able to forget she was light-years from home.
Able to forget about the impending reality holovision hellscape.
They debated, sometimes heatedly. He treated her as an intellectual equal.
And he challenged her thinking in a way few ever had.
Which was, initially, very frustrating. But she wasn’t one to shy from an intellectual challenge.
Their moments in the library felt precious and insulated.
Nix wasn’t a prince and Temmi wasn’t a trash collector.
They were simply like-minded individuals who, in another life, might’ve been friends.
The remainder of her time passed in camera interviews, Blessing Stone’s excruciating lessons, and watching past seasons of Love Galaxy .
Temmi hadn’t known the show had such a rich history.
According to a short documentary that Kalvin had included on the DC, the show originated two hundred and eleven imperial standard years earlier, in the empire’s 21st year, during the reign of Eduard Expani, the first official emperor.
Called Our Galaxy , it began as an outreach campaign, a way to bridge divides and bring together the fractured descendants of humanity scattered across the universe.
Following the Artificial Collapse, the empire’s earliest years were fraught with conflict, and Our Galaxy was Eduard Expani’s attempt to show his new subjects that they had more in common than they realized.
That they all belonged to the great race of humanity.
Over time, Our Galaxy turned into a diplomatic game show where contestants won an important position in government.
The evolution to full-on dating show didn’t happen until the year 112.
Marriage to a prominent Expanese societal figure wasn’t introduced for another ten seasons after that.
Somewhere in there, the show’s name was officially changed to Love Galaxy.
And, while Temmi would suffer death by incineration a hundred times over before admitting it to Ollie, the show was actually entertaining.
She found herself sucked into the drama (manufactured or not), wondering who the stars would choose.
The most recent season had been headlined by some third-cousin Expani with a distant claim to the throne who looked nothing at all like Nix or Spie.
He had long reddish hair and muddled brown skin, and dated exclusively men on his season.
She learned that the show’s structure remained largely the same: eight weeks of filming broken up into roughly twenty-four episodes (the exact number seemed to vary based on some arbitrary metric of unfolding drama).
There was always one suitor and twenty-four contestants.
New Terra, Old Terra, the Prop Moons, and most Outer Expanese territories were always represented.
Random, less-well-known territories changed from season to season.
Though, based on the last five seasons, contestants never came from fringe systems—Temmi was the first X-er to ever be invited on the show.
She took mental notes on things not to do: don’t fail the diplomacy challenges, don’t do anything to piss off the other contestants, and don’t ever do or say anything to imply the show’s headliner (or headliners plural, in her case) isn’t the single greatest catch in all the universe.
Temmi didn’t like her chances of performing well on the show.
The final night before their arrival on Expan, she couldn’t sleep.
She slipped from her bed and took to wandering the cruiser’s luminescent corridors.
On one of the lower tiers, the one above the fighter-pilot docking bays, she heard a loud whap ping sound.
Her curiosity led her to a gymnasium with a low net set up in the center.
On one side, a robot spat out little green ball after little green ball.
On the other, Spie sprinted alone, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum flooring.
Wielding a long-handled racquet, she hit each ball with loud, almost-angry grunts.
Temmi paused in the open doorway. Spie’s dark hair was secured in a high ponytail, a cloth band tied across her forehead.
She wore tiny white shorts made of some water-wicking material and an athletic bra.
Her long, lithe limbs glistened with sweat, the supple muscles of her abdomen shifting.
She moved with rhythm, grace, emotion. It was like watching a one-person dance.
Until one of Spie’s hits went awry. The little green ball shot sideways and, like a bullet released, slammed straight into Temmi’s gut.