The Quaatar race was convinced that humans should be eradicated, but they did not wish to be wiped out in their turn, so they conspired in secret, drawing upon the skills of their planetary kinsfolk, the Thongal, the Frossians, the K’Famir.
These races, long separated from Quaatar, were still similar to the Quaatar in many ways. None of them had an emotion equivalent to gratitude, but all of them had a mercantile respect for debits and credits. The Quaatar were credited for having given the Thongal, the K’famir, and the Frossians planets of their own. Winnowed by circumstance, these races were now far superior to the Quaatar, but they greeted their elders with well-feigned respect and rejoiced at joining in vendetta against Earthians. They wished to conduct this massacre without implicating themselves, so, in the Gathering, a similar alliance with similar concerns occurred among Whirling Cloud of Darkness-Eater of the Dead of the K’Famir, Flayed One-Drinker of Blood of the Frossians, and the head of the Quaatar pantheon: Dweller in Pain. As reinforcement of their intentions, the leaders of the four races met on Cantardene, where they sacrificed to their bloodthirsty gods and swore to create a weapon that would seek out and kill humans wherever they were. Cantardene is the home world of the K’Famir, but the Gardener learned of it, and she told me, Gretamara, while I shuddered and wished…almost wished I could return to childhood, back on Phobos again.
I Am Ongamar/on Cantardene
During the seemingly endless trip from Earth to Cantardene, young as I was, I served as translator between the cargo and the Mercan crew—an assorted bunch of them: vicious K’Famir, cringing Hrass, sleek and superior Elos, and boisterous K’Vasti. Because I was in a state I can describe only as continuous fury, I did not cringe, and I did not bow. I knew at the beginning of the trip that they had misread my number, that I had been put on a bondage ship rather than a colony one. I had had time to get over it, I thought I had gotten over it, only to feel rage boiling up again the moment we, the humans, arrived and were marched off across a plaza. We were not chained. We had been warned in advance (or, I had been warned and told to warn the others) that acting up by any one of us would result in removing the whole group from sale as light laborers for household use and selling all of us to the mines.
When this warning seemed to have little effect, I then regaled my fellow bondies with stories of the mines. I’d heard a good deal about them during the trip. A few of the bondies had rebelled during the trip. They’d been dealt with publicly and fatally, and I hadn’t been so stupid as to try to interfere. That memory and my description of the mines cowed the others into appropriate submission.
Trough-shaped fountains extended along the sides of the plaza, most of them occupied by naked young K’Famir halfway between gill and lung stages of development. The young were of various colors: black, green, ocher, a few of dull red; all of them sleek and shining, exuberantly noisy, all eight limbs in motion at once as they sprawled and splashed, shrieking at one another in shrill, sibilant voices, conversations that I understood very well, having translated similar ones for what had seemed to be months. The K’Famir had a language of their own, but they used it only during religious observances and on very formal occasions. For commerce and daily life, they spoke Low Mercan, as did most of the vocal populations in the Combine. Though it was an ugly language, I was getting very, very fluent at gargling Low Mercan.
Up ahead of us we could see the bondage-block, a broad, low dais around which each servant offered for sale would be paraded. In a low voice, I reminded the group that we wanted to survive, and survival depended upon being servile. This was the intention I had started with: survive at all costs, do whatever was needful to get through the next fifteen years. I’d passed this intention on to the others. I’d told them, and myself, that anger could not help and might hurt our chances. We arrived at the block, and I breathed deeply, retreating into myself as I’d often done on Phobos.
My fellow servants were sold off, one by one, managing to do it without getting themselves whipped or beaten. By the time I was displayed, I’d managed to detach myself from the procedure. I walked about the dais while the auctioneer began the spiel I’d been hearing all morning: Young. Healthy. Strong. Almost immediately a heavily ornamented female thrust her way through the crowd of onlookers.
“I’ll see her,” the K’Famira called. “She may be what I want!”
“K’Famira Adille,” murmured the pitchman. “You need a house servant?”
“I have house servants,” she replied, throat pouch turning slightly pink in annoyance as she rearranged her voluminous scarves. “My housekeeper sees to them. I do not waste my time buying house servants. I want a pet.”
“Most buyers prefer them younger.”
“I don’t want one I have to house-train. Humans look like a person cut in half, but they’re said to be trainable. Walk it around again for me.”
Obediently, I walked, impressions falling into place like coins into slots. When one studied language, one also studied its speakers. The skin around the K’Famira’s eye sockets was not wrinkled: She was therefore young. A young K’Famira buying a pet was either a pleasure-female incapable of reproduction or a wife who had been warned not to attempt it. Infertility was a problem among city-dwelling K’Famir, exacerbated by the cultural prohibition against adoption. Male K’Famir accepted none but their own. Returning to the swamps for
