been going through this charade if they’d been in any mood for providing answers. “Thank you. Anything else?”
They spoke a single sentence that yanked my world out from under me.
8. OZ
I’d expected to find all three of my guides waiting for me upon my ejection from the Interface, but instead found Oscin Porrinyard standing vigil alone.
The vestibule was a small chamber, similar to but quite distinct from the one I’d entered. The gravity was light, the air cold and marked with unfamiliar scents. The curved walls were alive with shifting lights, the ground spongy. The far end of the chamber narrowed, becoming a corridor that curved to the left. Though presumably built for AIsource use, its shape still seemed too conveniently scaled to human dimensions. I thought
Oscin immediately seized my arms and guided me as I sank to the soft plastiform floor. I almost protested Oscin’s hands on my person, the way I’d protested Gibb’s, but the shock made it a medical necessity. So I said nothing as he eased me back against the nearest solid wall, which adjusted at the moment it felt my weight, becoming a soft, supportive cushion. Its touch felt disturbingly intimate, almost invasive, but I was not up to protesting.
I must have spoken those words to myself ten thousand times in the year since they’d become my personal mission. They’d roused me from despair, from apathy, from the feeling that nothing I could do would ever redeem what I’d done.
They’d given me a reason for living.
But I’d only shared them with one other human being, and he was dead.
The diplomatic crisis on Catarkhus, one year earlier, had involved several alien governments in a wrangle over the proper venue to try a disturbed human being named Emil Sandburg, who had admitted to murdering a number of the indigenes.
All the established protocols of interspecies law had argued for Sandburg to be tried by the locals, but the Catarkhans, while sentient, were nevertheless so closed to the universe that the rest of us lived in that they were incapable of even understanding that crimes of any kind had been committed against them. Blind, deaf, and unable to sense us in any way, they weren’t even aware of our presence. To them, the visiting humans, Riirgaans, Tchi, and Bursteeni delegations were just invisible, intangible presences whose influence on their lives was neither felt nor suspected.
In short:
The phrase had come up more than once during my investigation. It was a convenient metaphor, an elegant description of what walking among the Catarkhans had felt like.
But even as I’d worked out the compromise that had allowed Sandburg to be remanded into human custody, the greater implications of the case had haunted me.
Following the celebrations, I’d stood before the broken Sandburg, in the cell where he’d been awaiting extradition, and faced him as an equal: one Monster to another. Why not? My opponents in the case had already sullied me with the crimes I’d committed on Bocai; he knew what I was, and understood that I was just as guilty as he.
It made him the only available audience for the conviction that had struck me, in the course of my investigation.
I’d stood before him and said,
I still hated saying the name of the world where I’d been born.
Bocai had been home to an unremarkable sentient race, too comfortable with themselves to compete with Riirgaans and Hom. Saps and the rest of that sick, motley crew in the game of who got to rule more squares of the vast, celestial chessboard. They had ventured into space, found it not to their liking, dismantled their space program, and moved back home, happy enough to play genial host when offworlders dropped by to enjoy the feel of soil beneath our shoes.
They were even happier to oblige when a small colony of human academics, including my parents, wanted to lease an island where they, and a group of equally curious Bocaians, could experiment with raising their children side by side. The point of this remains murky to me, despite years of poring through the papers and correspondence both sides left behind. As near as I can determine, it was just a shallow utopian gesture, designed to prove once and for all the oft-discredited truism that we’re all the same beneath the skin.
There was no reason the mere attempt should have done any harm. After all, while Hom. Saps and Bocaians were the end-products of two completely unconnected evolutionary processes, they still seemed to have more in common than not: both species were omnivorous, mammalian four-limbed bipeds, both had two sexes, both had binocular vision, both indulged in things like art and music and fiction, both tended toward tribal family structures, and both were capable of metabolizing the same foods, separated only by a few differences in ideal diet. It was even easy to mistake one species for the other, at least in the dark.
The differences, like the greater hairiness of human beings and the greater prominence of the Bocaian eye, were so minor that some of the diaries left behind, by the human adolescents of the colony, confessed sexual attraction to adolescents of the Bocai. Actual coitus was so impossible that the mere thought was ludicrous, as the evolutionary parallels had stopped short of providing compatible genitalia. But the attraction existed, and testified that by all surface criteria, human beings and Bocai were able to see each other as slightly more exotic versions of their own kind. That illusion was the whole reason it seemed so natural for the Hom. Saps and the Bocai to exist in the same community, to join each other’s families, to call each other cousins, and help raise each other’s children.
Which is why I’d had two sets of siblings, one human and one not. I’d had two names, one human and one not. I’d lived in two worlds, one human and one not.
I’d doted on my Vaafir, the Bocaian equivalent of a father. I’d slept in the home of my Bocaian family as much as I’d slept in the home of my biological parents.
I had been three years old before I fully understood why there were two completely different kinds of people, four before I was even sure which kind I belonged to.
I was eight on the night everybody became monsters and slaughtered each other.
I had never even come close to making sense of that night’s carnage until the day on Catarkhus when I stood before the murderer Emil Sandburg, who had tortured and murdered six sentients for no reason beyond sheer frustration at their inability to see or hear him.
The cell was monitored, but I’d activated a hiss screen to flood the listening devices with noise.
I said,
He looked past me, through me, through even the walls of his cell, seeing not the shape of his cage but the shape of the idea that was forming. His lips twitched, the look of a man fed an exotic treat who was trying to decide whether he liked it.
