Paul stared at him. “Now this I have to hear,” he said. “How are they the same?”
“We think that the… rigidity of the legs depends largely on an act of will,” Jones said. “When tired, their legs get more… bendy and they tend to try to sleep. It could be a matter of endurance; the males here seem to keep their legs usable longer than the females, or… really, sir, this is pretty much a new field of science. It could be that half of what I have told you is completely wrong.”
Paul looked up at the alien female, sitting in a position that would have broken the legs of a Yoga master. “I see your point,” he said. “What have you been able to discover from talking to the females?”
“They generally agree with the documents that the ambassadors brought home,” Jones assured him. “Subject Female One is seemingly completely broken. She answers all of our questions and, otherwise, just sits there. I think she’s in shock, but without a baseline for what represents normal among them, it’s impossible to know for sure. The interesting part is what she thinks of Subject Female Two.”
Paul blinked. “What does she think of the other female?”
“That she’s worthless,” Jones said. A slight hint of disgust echoed through his words. “She is, apparently, sterile and therefore worthless. The female, according to her… friend, should have been thrown into space once it became clear that she wouldn’t be having any children. That’s… odd, because as far as we can tell, the sterile female is the brightest one of the pair.”
“Odd,” Paul agreed. “I suppose I’d better talk to them, right?”
“You should talk to her,” Jones agreed. He sounded tired, pushed beyond endurance. “If nothing else, you might realise just what sort of beings they are.”
“They’re tearing up Texas and killing thousands of humans,” Paul snapped. “I think I know exactly what kind of beings they are!”
* * *
Researcher Femala — who still clung to her title, despite having lost everything else — looked up as the door opened. She assumed that she was under constant observation — it was what she would have done to alien prisoners — but that didn’t bother her much; she’d been under more overt observation while on the Guiding Star. Her clan had watched her, as they had all of the younger children, until they’d realised how useless she was… and even when she’d won her freedom, she’d been watched by the Inquisitors. The humans, at least, weren’t going to jump on her for the slightest hint of disbelief or blasphemy. They had asked her hundreds of questions, some of which she had refused to answer, but they didn’t seem to have any real plan for the interrogation. Very few of the questions linked together into one whole.
The human who entered the room was slightly shorter than her, with short dark fur on his head and hints of darker hairs on his chin, something that still looked a little strange to her. It was odd, but the more signs of similarity between her people and the humans she saw, the more her mind focused on the differences. Her people had no hair, anywhere, and the human eyes…! They seemed so mobile, so constantly in motion, compared to her own. The dark-skinned human she’d encountered first, who had cleared all hairs off his scalp, had been the most like her she’d met while held captive.
“My name is Paul,” the human said. She had noticed that most of the humans tended to have wildly varying ways of pronouncing certain words, even in their own language, that puzzled her. Surely, they would have developed a unified language by now. “What is your name, if I may ask?”
Femala smiled. If this… Paul was some version of an inquisitor, he was surprisingly polite. Most Inquisitors tended towards the ‘hit first, ask questions later’ approach. “I am Researcher Femala, Researcher in Technology,” she said, supplying her full title. “What is your title?”
The human produced the sound they made when they found something amusing. “I suppose, madam, that I could be called a Researcher in Alien Life,” he said. “I used to consider meeting people like you, you see.”
Femala didn’t. The Takaina had never seriously considered the possibility of life on other planets, not until they’d actually started to send out generation starships and colonise as many worlds as they could, all in the name of God. They’d wondered, judging from some of the human broadcasts, if humanity had encountered other races somewhere, but most of them had been unbelievable. No engineer among the Takaina could see how a starship that was nothing more than a giant cube could even function… and that had been among the more realistic designs.
The human leaned back slightly. Femala was partly repulsed and partly impressed by his motions. He was much less flexible than a male of her race — it had taken cycles just to get used to the idea of males actually working as researchers — but he moved with an odd jerky motion that seemed to hint at considerable power. God had designed the universe for her to explore and a human body was merely another engineering puzzle.
“Tell me something,” he said, finally. “What do your people want here?”
Femala blinked. “To bring this world into the Truth,” she said, puzzled. They’d told the humans that, hadn’t they? “The settlers on the Guiding Star will settle here and bring you into the light.”
“And there I was hoping that it was all a con,” the human said. Femala didn’t understand. How could anyone doubt the word of the High Priest? If he was caught in a lie, his power and position would vanish in a flash. “Tell me something else, then; why doesn’t your friend like you much?”
Femala, despite herself, started to explain. She talked about the four sects that made up the Truth and the Truthfulness, and about the clans that made up each of the sects. She spoke about how the clans saw to it that each of the children was raised to know his or her place and how they wanted, more than anything else, to increase their own numbers. As a sterile women — not even a male who could be expended in war — she’d been sentenced to death by her clan, until the High Priest had saved her.
“Why?” Paul asked. The human really didn’t understand. How did humans handle such problems among their people? “Did he… want your body?”
It took several rounds of explanations before Femala understood what he meant. “No,” she admitted. The very thought showed how aliens the humans were. The idea of someone selling their sexual services was strange. “As a sterile woman, I don’t have the… scent to draw in the males and convince them to protect me and compete for my favours.”
The human seemed puzzled, but passed on the issue. “What do you think of this place?”
“Boring,” Femala said, truthfully. It was true that they’d brought her books to read — human books, sometimes interesting ones — but it was very confining when she could have been running through the fields of Earth, or examining more of their technology in the occupied zone. “What are you doing to do to me?”
The human ignored the question. “Why are your males just… waiting for something?”
Femala almost laughed. “They expect you to kill them, of course,” she said. It had been a trait of warfare since before the Unification Wars. Females could bear new children for the victors, but the males were useless. “They’re warriors who fell into enemy hands, so of course you’re going to kill them, or enslave them. What are you going to do with them?”
“I don’t know,” Paul admitted. It sounded as if he didn’t really care, although it was hard to read the human voice. If the other female had been able to share her insights… but that was air out the airlock now. “That’s a question for my superiors.”
“You should tell them to surrender and accept the Truth,” Femala said. She pushed as much earnestness into her tone as she could, although she suspected that the human wouldn’t recognise it as such. “It’s the only way to stop the fighting.”
Paul leaned closer. The eerie human eyes peered into her own eyes. “Is there nothing else we can offer you?”
Femala sighed. “The Truth has endured for thousands of cycles,” she said, almost sadly. It had been the Truth that
had condemned her to death for being sterile. “It cannot be broken. Your world will break before the High Priest chooses to leave you to your unbelief.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
— H. L. Mencken
“And you may rise.”
Joshua Bourjaily rose to his feet, his joints creaking, as the alien priest blessed them and shoed them out of the converted warehouse. The alien religion, Joshua had discovered, required plenty of forward kneeling, a pose that the aliens could hold almost indefinitely, but humans couldn’t hold for long. It was worse for the women; when they knelt, their hands held behind their heads, they pushed their breasts forward into prominence. After a pair of incidents, the aliens had apparently broken one of their own taboos and segregated the sexes for prayer meetings, even though they seemed to worship together. It was hard to tell; they’d seen very few alien females on the streets and they’d never seen the aliens in solo prayer.
He glanced towards the alien priest, thinking dark thoughts that he was careful to keep to himself. A couple of people — an old woman and a young black man — had attempted to challenge the aliens, praying out loud in their own style, only to be mercilessly gunned down. The aliens had regarded it with the same level as horror as most Americans would regard taking a dump on the American flag… and similar incidents had been nipped in the bud. The aliens, it seemed, weren’t taking too many chances with their prayers and their flock.
The priest, wearing a simple brown robe, nodded once to him as he left the warehouse. The alien religion was still a thing of mystery, despite the lessons; they were literally teaching him the prayers without bothering to explain the meaning. The only choice he’d had had been a question about which element — fire, water, air or earth — he favoured, a question he’d answered with ‘earth,’ trying to be clever. The aliens hadn’t even noticed; they’d merely ordered him and his fellow ‘earthers’ to report to a certain warehouse, every second day, or see their food supply cut off. Now that the aliens were feeding more of the population, somehow, it was a powerful incentive. A person without a valid feeding card, marked by one of the priest’s servants, simply wouldn’t be fed.
He looked at the card as he waited in line for the mark. It wasn’t alien technology, he was sure; they wouldn’t have bothered to bring that level of tech from their homeworld. It was human tech, a simple ID card with a picture, a brief level of detail… and a microchip mounted in the plastic that did whatever the aliens told it to do. He was pretty sure that what was really happening was that the aliens were building up a picture of who went where, and why, in their search for other insurgents. Austin might have been fairly quiet over the last couple of weeks, but there had been a handful of IEDs, several of which had killed alien collaborators. The insurgents were still out there, somewhere, but doing what? Joshua hoped that they were plotting new attacks on the aliens, but ever since the attack on Texas had failed, the population was starting to realise, in the cities at least, that insurgency was only going to get a few thousand more people killed.
It was a different story, he’d been told, out in the countryside; the Internet had been buzzing with stories of mounted Texans fighting the aliens. Joshua had dismissed at least half of that story as exaggeration, but Texas had literally tens of thousands of people who could handle guns and horses… and there might be a nugget of truth in there somewhere. The cities, however, were falling further and further under the alien control… and even those who hated the aliens had to eat, somehow.
“May God be with you,” the alien under-priest said, as he passed Joshua’s card through a scanner. To be fair to the aliens, they didn’t dally about like a drug-supplier lording it over a dependent flock, they just handed over the card with a benediction. “Eat well and give thanks.”
Joshua walked onto the streets and around the building. The women — which basically seemed to mean every woman over ten years old — were emerging from the other side of the massive building. The warehouse was nowhere near large enough to hold all of the citizens of Austin — although everyone knew someone who’d been killed in one of the bouts of fighting — and he’d heard that there were dozens of such places, all around the city. The aliens didn’t mess around… and he’d heard rumours that children — defined as anyone under ten years old — were being taken for special instruction. The Adair children, thankfully, were too old… but there were hundreds of others. No one seemed quite sure what the aliens were teaching them, but Joshua had determined to get to the bottom of it. Blogging from an occupied city was rapidly starting to lose its shine.
“Joshua,” a voice called. He looked up to see Loretta running towards him. He’d met her by sheer accident, a girl who actually had better computer skills than he had — which wouldn’t have been difficult — and was willing to assist him in navigating the remains of the internet. “How was your day?”
In Joshua’s admittedly sexist view, Loretta looked very good when she was at prayer, alien-style, but he knew better than to say that out loud. “Painful,” he said, rubbing his knees. Muslims, he’d decided, had it easy. They got to sit back. The thought reminded him of a group of Baptists whom the aliens had discovered holding prayer meetings… and executed them publicly for heresy. “And how was yours?”
“You old fogy, you,” Loretta said, slipping her arm through his. “I swear — a single twinge of pain and you men just curl up and die.”
The thought wasn’t as amusing as it seemed. The alien religion was complicated — as were most human religions — but one thing was clear; the alien females chose their mates. There were details that seemed to be beyond human understanding, at least as the aliens had explained them — and he’d gotten the impression that the aliens hadn’t wanted to discuss them with their human pupils — but it was clear that the women ran the alien families. The men might have been the breadwinners, insofar as alien society had that term, but they didn’t call the shots at home. They might be divorced at any moment if they didn’t behave themselves.
It had led to a whole series of new understandings. The alien society was full of Mrs Grundy-types. They would watch everyone from the cradle to the grave and they wouldn’t hesitate to report any misbehaviour. It reminded him of how Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia had encouraged their children to report their parents for anything remotely criminal — as defined by the state — and the horrors of 1984. If that was what they were teaching the children, they would have made progress on completely changing human society.
“Bitch,” he said, trying to avoid thinking about the future. They were just two lovebirds out for a stroll, as far as anyone knew. The aliens continued to snatch people off the streets if they were armed, or carry out the occasional random search, but otherwise they tended to leave the human civilians alone. They were trapped by their dependency on food and water from the aliens, now that the aliens had taken control of the latter. The entire supply of food left in the apartment, he’d calculated, would last them barely more than a week. “What do you want to do now?”
“Well, I thought we’d go for a big expensive lunch and then an afternoon at a swanky hotel,” Loretta announced, mischievously. “I suppose we’ll have to settle for a walk, a feed at the kitchen, and then perhaps an afternoon at the computer.”
“No arguments,” Joshua decided. If nothing else, having Loretta on his arm lead to a lot of envious glances. She was blonde, bubbly, and looked around nineteen years old, a tall girl with great legs. He wasn’t sure what she saw in him when she could have had hundreds of boyfriends, but maybe it was the shared danger, the sense that they were getting back at the aliens, even in a small manner. Accurate information from inside the occupied zone would be vitally important to the entire human race. “Come on then, let’s go eat.”
The aliens had, if nothing else, cut down on crime in the city. Between the
rapid destruction of most of the street gangs, the curfew and their patrols, criminals found it harder to operate without being caught and either shot or dumped into a work gang. The aliens punished every misdemeanour, no matter how small, and the net result was that people could walk the streets in safety — apart from the risk of an IED, of course. They reached the soup kitchen in perfect safety, showed their card to the handful of aliens guarding the cooks — all human — and took bowls of soup and curried meat from the table. It was a far cry from the hamburgers and freedom fries his stomach was crying out for, but it was the best that they could do. He really didn’t want to think about what sort of meat was in the curry, but he was damn sure it wasn’t beef, chicken or pork. There hadn’t been a lot of cats about lately, he’d noticed.
Loretta chatted happily about nothing throughout the meal, almost monopolising the conversation on her own. Joshua had learned that she could switch from ‘girl genius’ to ‘dumb blonde’ in seconds, comparing notes on computing and reporting one moment, the next chattering away about pop stars and films. It was one hell of a disguise, he’d realised; men would tend to talk more to someone who looked attractive on their arms, but had nothing in their heads. As a reporter, Loretta would be a terror.
“I wonder what they did?” She asked, in a moment of distraction. Joshua turned and saw a bunch of chained humans being marched through the streets. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he recognised a priest — a human priest — among them. The aliens could have whisked them out of the city without having to make them walk, but he suspected that they were actually trying to make a point, rubbing the human race’s nose in its defeat. “Hey, boss, you wanna interview them?”
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