by Robin Roseau
I nodded. “You said you would explain, Forever.”
“It was agreed everyone would be captured the same way.”
“This was to make an even event, even for the smaller species,” Makiko added. “I did not need any handicap.”
“But I imagine the Loris did,” I said. “Chervil.”
“He’s very sweet,” Forever said. “But yes. The Kitsune are very good hunters, but they would never go for such large, capable prey as a human.”
“I bet they don’t prefer to run down their prey.”
“No. They are very careful stalkers,” Makiko said.
“I understand,” I said. “Did you have a good time?”
They glanced at each other then back at me. “We did,” Makiko confirmed. She cupped my cheek. “Thank you.”
“What happens now?”
“We return to the Center,” Forever replied.
“How are you getting me there?”
“With me,” Makiko said. “Forever will help me.” She stood, and then the Niecor gently picked me up. Makiko returned to her machine. It rose into the air, and then she set me crosswise in front of Makiko. The Greygreen wrapped her arms around me, and then the Niecor adjusted me further, setting me firmly into Makiko’s lap.
“Can you operate the machine like this?”
“Not while ensuring you remain right here,” Makiko replied. “Forever will slave my machine to hers, and we’ll follow like a docile beast of burden.”
“Please promise not to drop me.”
“I won’t drop you,” she said solemnly. “Promise.”
“Thank you.” I laid my head on her shoulder, and that was how I remained for the journey.
Dinner
They brought me somewhere in the center, Forever Twilight choosing to carry me. I remained trussed and blinded until she set me down. Then my visor slightly brightened. I looked around, finding myself on a sofa in what appeared to be an apartment. I looked around, expecting their other prisoners, but it was just the three of us. “Shouldn’t there be more prisoners?”
“We caught one of the males last night, but we didn’t want to keep him,” Forever said.
I settled my gaze on the Niecor. “Now what happens?”
“We’d like to keep you for a while.”
“You say that as if it’s my choice.”
“Some of the humans are exhausted,” said Makiko. “And some have been… unpleasant.”
“I’m sorry for that.”
“We don’t know if we blame them,” Forever said.
“I am quite worn through, but I have no intention of being unpleasant,” I replied. “This is my choice?”
“Yes.”
“Do I have other choices?”
“Other than whether you will be ours?”
“No, I’ve already decided that. After that.”
“No, but we will listen to requests.”
“I am physically…” I wrinkled my face. “I would like to shower, or even better, have a good soak. But if you’re going to put me in skimpies afterwards, I’ll wait.”
“Skimpies? What are skimpies?”
“Underwear, like all of us wore to dinner.” They both glanced at each other. I sighed. “That was your plan.”
“There is a dinner,” Makiko said. “In another 75 minutes.”
“And the only clothing you have for me resembles what I wore last night.” I offered a smile. “I would like to know your plan.”
“We want to keep you,” Makiko said.
“I would like to know your entire plan.”
“Are you letting us keep you?”
“I want to know your entire plan,” I said a third time.
“You have to decide first.”
“And if I give you the choice of sharing the plan or releasing me, what will you say?”
The two glanced at each other, then Makiko began speaking, very slowly, in what I knew was an alien language. I looked back and forth then asked, “She either is speaking a language she knows poorly, or speaking slowly because it is a language you know poorly.”
“She is speaking Niecor,” said Forever. “Are those our two choices, Taisha?”
“I think they might be.”
“Then we’ll have to send you home.”
“What?” I said. “Seriously?” I looked back and forth between them, wondering if they were calling my bluff, or if they were serious. “I have to commit without knowing the entire plan?”
“Or ask to return to Beginnings,” Makiko said.
“I don’t like these rules,” I complained. “Whose stupid idea was this?”
“Violet Beamer’s,” Makiko replied. “All the captured prey are subject to the same rules.”
I sighed. “I’ll stay.”
“This is your last chance to change your mind, little human,” said Forever.
“I’ll stay.”
“Very good. You are ours until the evening concludes. Will you be offended if we were to bathe together?”
“No.”
* * * *
I sighed, this time happily. They had released me from the tethers and then shown me to the shower. We had each taken turns in the shower before climbing into a steaming tub full of bubbles. I had been first, and I was still there, letting the heat take away my aches.
“Could I ask a few questions?”
“You may ask.”
“This event… I can’t imagine it appealed to any primitive hunting instincts.”
“I haven’t had this much fun in a long time,” Forever commented. “We nearly caught two others, but we were late each time.”
“How long did you spend trying to catch Danette from the face of the cliff?”
“Three groups were after her for two hours,” Makiko replied.
“I wasn’t remotely that difficult for you.”
She cocked her head. “Are you suggesting we shouldn’t be pleased?”
“I am trying to understand.”
She nodded. “It was exciting,” she said. “Even just finding you… Violet only gave us one extra hint, to travel northwest. The distance meter was growing, and we didn’t understand.”
“I know about the distance meter,” I said. “It would have been directing you to Princeton.”
“Then it began to shrink,” said Forever. “And we realized she’d sent us to the further prey. We might not have found you in time if both the remaining teams had spent as much time hunting the male as we’d spent on Ms. Browning. We wouldn’t have known where to find you until he was caught, unless we did a very large circle. And our craft are fast, but a proper circle would have taken too long.”
“Finding you was a puzzle in itself,” Makiko said. “Especially as you kept moving, and you were under such a thick forest.”
“We knew we were under a time limit, and we were also afraid you would hide in the forest.”
“I think you could have found me.”
“We could not have caught you properly. Oh, under those circumstances, we could change the rules, but we wanted to catch you the way we did.”
“You mean standing beside your machine while Makiko caught me?”
She gave three little barks, but then said, “Maybe not that exactly.”
“That part was funny,” Makiko added. “How did you know how to disable the machine?”
“It was a big, red button,” I said. “Although in hindsight, I could have been hitting the fire mechanism for the gun. That might have been okay, too.”
“While a long chase across open savannah may have been exciting,” Makiko said, “I am well pleased, Taisha.”
“As am I,” Forever added. “And we won a top prize.”
“There were prizes?”
“You are the prize,” Makiko said.
I said nothing to that, but it felt good for them to say that. “You are both linguists?”
“Yes. We are coworkers. We are studying the languages of Earth now.”
“And making comparisons to extrate
rrestrial languages,” Forever added. “Most people find what we do quite dull, but to us, it is exciting.”
“This is my third career,” Makiko said. “I enjoy reinventing myself every few decades. I think I may attend a human medical school next.”
“Two months ago, she talked about becoming a politician and running for your Congress.”
“Or maybe the Australian parliament,” Makiko said. “But I do not think humans are ready to elect one of us.”
“Probably not, but that might change. The tone has shifted since Starlight came out. Well, and hearing Wookie voice on the talk shows. What else have you done, Makiko?”
“In my first career, I was our equivalent of an attorney. And then I spent four decades on another planet as an archaeologist.”
“Another Greygreen planet?”
“No. This planet’s society has been lost.”
“Oh,” I said. “How long ago?”
“About 50,000 years.”
“Did they destroy the planet?”
“No, only themselves. The signs are of a religious war.”
“Unless they destroyed life on the planet, even if they nuked each other, some people should have survived.”
“They used other types of weapons,” Makiko said. “And destroyed their cities and infrastructure. All their energy production was based on orbital solar collection, and without it, all social structures collapsed. Most people didn’t know how to raise food, and those who did, didn’t know how to do it without power. We believe it took three or four generations before the last died. They left a vibrant planet, or perhaps one that became vibrant.”
“I imagine it was fascinating and sad to work there.”
“It was,” she said. “The Federation has declared the entire planet a historical reserve. No one will settle there. It requires special permits to visit.”
“And you, Forever?”
“I am younger than Makiko,” she explained. “When we left our home, I was freshly graduated from our equivalent of your universities. I have an advanced degree in, well, we don’t put it this way, but extraterrestrial linguistics.”
“Even then, you studied languages that evolved on different planets from yours?”
“Yes. When I learned about this mission, I set my entire focus on being allowed to come.” But then she offered an odd gesture involving her facial expression, a tilt of her head, and a widening of her eyes.
“What is that gesture?” I asked.
“The equivalent of a human shrug,” Makiko said.
“Ah. Carry on.”
“There are three lifetimes of study to do here,” Forever said. “Our lifetimes, as long as they are. And we have one advantage almost none of the rest of us do.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re free to share anything we learn with humanity. Makiko has twice published papers in human periodicals.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s cool.”
“No one cares about what we do,” Makiko said, “Except other linguists. We pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Knowing that a particular grammatical structure that evolved in a remote region of China matches a similar structure used by a single caste of Ardents doesn’t solve anything. It’s interesting, and maybe tells us more about how languages evolve. But really, it’s nothing but a nearly worthless factoid.”
“Within a single world, the study of linguistics can offer clues to ancient migration and trading patterns,” Forever explained. “But no one believes that Chinese humans migrated to the Ardent home world, or anything of that nature.”
“It is possible we would discover a clue why our DNA is as similar as it is,” Makiko said.
“You believe the planets were farmed?”
“That is one theory. Perhaps the seeds of life in this region of space have a single birthplace. Or perhaps there is a God after all. Perhaps life evolved separately. Our ability to harvest expired DNA has limits. You cannot harvest DNA from fossils, after all.”
“I think people have taken DNA from frozen mammoths.”
“Yes,” Forever said. “But you’re talking things that died only ten or twenty thousand years ago. If our planets were farmed, or simply meddled with, it was a half billion years ago, or longer.”
“Linguistics isn’t going to discover that.”
“No,” she said. “But linguistics might find clues if there was contact more recently.”
“We don’t believe that,” Makiko said. “Humanity might not know if you were visited fairly recently, and neither would Greygreens, but the BPs have a much longer memory, as do some of the other species.”
“I do not know how much longer I will study linguistics,” Forever said. “I may decide to pursue something else, perhaps Earth history.”
“Knowledge for the sake of knowledge.”
“We are quite opposite from you,” Makiko said. “Engineers are so practical.” She made a face, and Forever offered a Niecor laugh. “I may choose to try it, although I don’t believe I would be very good. But being able to make things… I think I might like that.”
“I would like to study at a human university,” Forever added. “If it were to become safe to do so.”
“We can study from the station,” Makiko explained. “Many of your best universities are happy to let us do so, but it isn’t the same as attending in person.”
“I imagine not. Do you have your own university on the station?”
“Not the way you might envision. No one needs a physical school for learning. We can engage in self-study, guided by computers. Even our children can do this. But schools offer valuable social interactions. We have schools for our youth, and in many ways, they resemble the learning structure of human schools. But we have advantages.”
“I imagine. Are there any you care to share?”
“We do not have discipline problems. Oh, a child may not choose to study as diligently as her parents might prefer, but we do not have some of the problems human schools can experience.”
“We’re very socially liberal in some ways,” Forever explained. “But when it comes to misbehavior, we can be very strict, and we do not have the same attitudes regarding privacy as humans may have.”
I laughed. “Constant surveillance?”
“Yes. Our children know if they do anything they shouldn’t, they’ll get caught. They’re all encouraged to think creatively, but most can’t even envision engaging in socially unacceptable behavior. They have no examples suggesting they should, but when poor judgement is executed, there is swift correction, usually before it can devolve very far.”
“I wish we’d had that in my school,” I said. “I was there to learn, but a lot of kids weren’t.”
“Humans have attitudes regarding privacy that many of us find quaint,” Makiko said.
I closed my eyes, thinking about the things they had said, thinking about the evolving conversation. “Thank you for hunting me,” I said with a smile. I opened my eyes. “Thank you for capturing me, and for letting me stay with you for a while.”
“I believe there is mutual appreciation,” Forever said. “The original suggestion was for some of us to hunt the others.”
“Chervil was especially offended by the idea,” Makiko said. “But I believe Forever hoped to hunt me.”
“I never said any such thing.”
“Are the two of you particularly good friends?”
“Do you mean to ask if we’re lovers?” Forever prompted.
“I was being less specific.”
“I’d call us work friends,” Makiko said. “In that way, I am as close to Forever as I am to any of the other linguists. We have fascinating conversations.”
“Fascinating to us. Others listening in are less intrigued, shall we say.”
“What language do you use to speak to each other?”
“English, actually,” Makiko replied. “It is not our only shared language, but is the only language we share in which we are equally fluent.”
“You spoke Niecor earlier.”
“Yes, but poorly. Forever lets me practice.”
“And do you practice Greygreen?”
“Like there is no single human language, there is no single Greygreen language,” Makiko replied. “Although we are not as fractured as humanity is in our languages. There are twelve distinct languages, and most of those have dialects.”
“We believe over time that humans will lose many of their languages,” Forever added. “Culturalism is the main reason some languages will linger.”
“I think I can see why you find it fascinating,” I admitted. “But I think I’m happy to remain an engineer.”
Makiko made a face, but I thought it was in fun. “Have you soaked your aches away?”
“I believe I have.”
“We know humans have taboos allowing others to see their bodies.”
“You want to check me out.”
“That is not how I would put it,” Makiko said. “Consider it… scientific enquiry.”
“Right,” I said.
“Tell us you’re not curious,” Forever challenged. “Go ahead. See if we believe you.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Close your eyes and let us see to your most immediate needs,” Makiko suggested.
“You want to dry and dress me.”
“Yes, I do.”
“We don’t ask casually,” Forever said. “And you may decline. We know we are asking if we may be intrusive.”
“Are you offering as intimate an examination as you’re requesting?”
“Yes,” Makiko said. “But for practical reasons, I believe we should dry ourselves, then help you from the tub and see to you.”
“This is just curiosity and not some strange mating custom.”
“You interest me as a friend, but not for mating rituals,” Makiko said. “The needs of my species are somewhat specific.”
“By that she means you need to be a martial arts black belt to intrigue her,” Forever explained.
“Seriously?”
“Yes. It is through personal combat that our passions are raised,” Makiko confirmed.
“Is your lovemaking violent?”
“No, but the prelude is.”
“Is this why you carry Japanese names?”
“That was perhaps a mistake of our species when we arrived,” Makiko said. “Reliance on a cultural stereotype, but it was built from watching the most famous of Japanese films. We reached an affinity with a Japan that does not really exist anymore.”