“Why has it not been used since?” demanded Xulai, in that voice they had heard only a few times before. “Why has it not rid us of this monster?”
“It was not designed as a weapon. It was meant to be used by scouts, by people moving in the wild. It helps in getting across steep canyons, up and down cliffs. It will carry equipment. It will kill prey, but it will not kill anything that looks human.”
“Unfortunately, our monster does seem to look human,” said Abasio almost angrily. “And we have no immediate need to be transported across a canyon. Was there something else?”
“Yes, a great deal else.” She sighed. “Be patient,” she said. “It is a long story. I will tell it not as we discovered it, in bits and pieces, but as a whole, as it happened.
“Late in the Before Time, humans everywhere had divided into tribes, clans, sects that were constantly at war with one another. Each group hated others because of the language they spoke or the god they worshipped or the color of their skin or the food they ate or their personal habits. Few of their hatreds were based on reality; many of them were brought into existence by people who used something called ‘media’ to whip people into frenzies of hatred. All these hatreds resulted in violence and death.
“One or two tribes among them, we’re not sure which ones or how many, put all their ingenuity to work and developed terrible weapons to kill their enemies. There was nothing new in the killing, only in the weapons themselves. Some of the brilliant technologists did a prideful, stupid thing. They invented killing machines that could . . . smell intelligence.”
“Smell?” cried Abasio.
“We call it that. The machines could sense intelligence. These men, whoever they were, sat down together and codified their own beliefs. They wrote them down precisely, defining the words they used, making them explicit. A set of beliefs might go something like, ‘We believe in Oog, the only true god. We believe women were made to be inferior to men and take orders from men. Oog rightfully directs some men, Oog’s high priests; only those men may rightfully direct other men; all men may rightfully direct women and children. Women’s task is to have children and obey men. Oog directs that all Oog-believing men convert or kill all other men who do not believe in Oog or the rightfulness which Oog asserts. Women and children who refuse to believe in Oog must be killed.’
“In order to belong to their faction, their group, their tribe, their clan, Oog people had to believe exactly what was written down, all of it, just as it was written. Then these inventors recorded the brain waves of those who believed these things. We think they averaged them in some way, and the resultant pattern was called the ‘pattern of acceptable belief about Oog.’ They put this pattern into their new machines.”
“So the machines would believe?” cried Xulai. “Machines?”
“No,” said Abasio, feeling sick. “So the machines would recognize what thoughts about Oog were allowed.”
“Exactly,” said Precious Wind. “The inventors then directed their machines to kill anyone whose thinking about Oog did not match the pattern.”
Justinian got up and went to lean over the rail, his face ashen. “What one man may devise, another may steal,” he said.
“Exactly, again,” said Precious Wind through her teeth. “What one may devise, another may steal or reinvent. The slaughterers were very hard to build. We know each one used the brain and body parts of a human volunteer. Only volunteers would have the basic mental pattern. Before long there were dozens of slaughterers going about the world killing people with differing ideas about Oog. Then a group decided that a different language should be banned and anyone thinking of a word in that language was killed. Then a group decided that certain foods should be banned, so anyone thinking about that food or raising that food was slaughtered. Then certain ideas about sex were held to be anathema, and those who thought about those things were slaughtered.
“When the slaughterers had killed off languages A through L and all who worshipped gods 2 through 100, and all who raised parligs, and all who thought about unusual sex practices, some of the zealots refined their objectives. Each in their own region had killed most of those who had different ideas, but there were many still alive who thought mostly about other things. They didn’t think about Oog or any other god, they had never raised parligs, they didn’t really think about sex that much, so the tinkerers decided that instead of killing people who held incorrect ideas, they would kill all those who did not hold the correct ideas. The devices were told to find all those who did not think P or Q and kill them.”
“All,” grated Abasio. “Not merely men.”
“In their pride, the original creators of the killing machines did not realize that intelligence permeates all living things to some extent. The machines were taught to smell intelligence; they smelled it in all living things that did not think P or Q, including animals, birds, bees, ants. The result is what we now call the Big Kill.”
“When it was over,” said Abasio, “ninety percent of all creatures living on land were dead. Only creatures on remote islands survived. Some of them.”
Silence gathered. Eventually, Precious Wind said, “As I said, each slaughterer was made from a volunteer. Back then they were called ‘terrorists.’ Each slaughterer began with a real human being, a real human brain, though very little of the human being was left when they were completed. Some of the personality survived. Each of the creatures had a name, for example. The tissues that were removed from the original human being were banked for their future use during maintenance. Human cells had to be renewed at intervals. The slaughterers mimicked humans in being able to reason, plan, move,
