Lost Luggage

Uncle Larin's shuttle touched down on the landing platform without incident. His luggage went off exploring on its own. I do not deny that Uncle Larin is a bit dim. When he learned that he could not pick up his luggage at the baggage claim tube, he threw a fit that got him hauled off into the custody of two rather large, heavily freckled gentlemen in bright blue uniforms. It was not the dazzling confrontation that got Uncle Larin a stiff talking too.

Sweet Uncle Larin, who is not exactly swift in intellectual terms, complained that Aunt Alaska had been lost in his luggage. You cannot exactly go around the universe transporting people in your suitcase. Such things simply are not done in polite societies. Somehow, it must have been common enough to get those men of sour disposition to take Uncle Larin at his word. He spent much of the day having impolite conversations with official looking enforcers until they looked over his boarding pass.

Counter to the distasteful idea that Uncle Larin had spent the day repeating, Uncle Larin had not taken more than a shoe box on his trip. Aunt Alaska was not bulky in any way that I could measure, yet she was larger than Uncle Larin's feet. The story was not original enough to get Uncle Larin a cozy trip to the padded rooms down the hall and out of our of sight. Instead, Uncle Larin spent the night in a less comfortable cell for the trouble that he had caused. Mom and Dad were tempted to let him spend his whole trip in the landing pad lock up but the guards would not have it.

The Atin who built Gadugi colony considered it an offense to God to build on fertile farmland. Therefore, the whole colony had been built 300 meters below the surface with access hatches only in rocky soil where nothing important would grow. Landing pads had only been built in lakes to avoid clearing land. It was an ingenious, strange design. Both sides in the deal liked the end result.

After giving Uncle Larin the spare toothbrush for his needs, I took him up on the surface for a little stargazing. A world with no moons and no surface lights has nothing in the way of seeing the nighttime sky. Uncle Larin just sat there, looking up at the sky and continuing his little joke. He asked me, not less than four times but not more than seven times, which star I thought Aunt Alaska was visiting. His humor was not that good.

He kept the joke up for the two days that it took to find his luggage at the terminal. There may have been a beauty in his immense heart that was beyond change; however, the joke was wearing a bit thin by then. We were sorely tempted to put him on the shuttle that had ferried his shoe box to the landing pad. If Uncle Larin had been a little less slippery, bless him, then we would have succeeded. Uncle Larin had his luggage back in our transport before we arrived.

All the way home, he was talking to his luggage. Nobody else would talk to him by then. His luggage did not seem interested either, although it had little choice in the matter. We fully understood why it had gone on holiday in Uncle Larin's absence. I suppose that everybody has an Uncle Larin.

When he got home, we found him at the main terminal looking at a picture of a suitcase on the main display. He had taken a memory cube out of his shoe box and was viewing an extremely high resolution image of a suitcase as though it made sense to anybody but him. Even as I knew that I would regret it, I asked him what he was up to. I almost failed to listen to his answer.

"Well, we knew that they might check my luggage, don't you know."

At the appropriate time, I waved for him to go on with his stalled story. Dad was busy checking shuttle schedules and Mom was playing witness protection program at that time. Only my ears were assaulted as he fathered forth with his answer.

"There is a steganographic file stored inside this suitcase image. Didn't I tell you that I brought Aunt Alaska with me? Boy will she be upset with me."

"I cannot imagine why."

True to his word, the file that he pulled out of the suitcase image did materialize into Aunt Alaska, whom we were still happy to see. I do not suppose that Uncle Larin figured out how he ended up encrypted into the suitcase that night. He never came back for another visit, if you were planning to ask. Aunt Alaska had a wonderful time staying with us.