Emma had never discussed the topic with the alien before. “Yes, Dowager.”
“It is the right way. You humans cluster together, with your stink and your gabble. We do not. We walk with the Divine. If there was always another with us, it would crowd out the light of Divinity. You understand?”
“I had heard something about that, Dowager.”
“It is right that civilized creatures live and die in the company of the Divine, not crawling over one another like maggots.”
“I don’t dispute it.”
“Good.” She preened for a moment. “I have much to take pride in.”
“Yes, Dowager.”
The Dowager, like all her species, had mated upon achieving maturity. She had known the excitement of going to the same pandith that her mother had once visited, and working with the pandith to find just the right male to fertilize her eggs. Their courtship fortnight was a decadent, erotic heaven; each sunrise, the mating song; each sunset, the dance of pleasure.
On the thirteenth night, they had struggled in the hot mud; on the fourteenth morning, she had left her eggs and crawled away, limp and exhausted, knowing that he would soon spread them over with the stuff of life. Then, as modern custom dictated, her attendants had collected the fertilized eggs and preserved them to hatch later, one per year, for a decade.
Naturally, all of The Dowager’s children had gone immediately to the very best stithaprashna, drawing upon their life-inheritances, and like their father, The Dowager never saw any of them again. It was the natural way of things.
It was true there had been a thousand indignities every day, all her life, thanks to the alien invaders, Emma could never deny that. Yet something inside her said there was more at stake in how she and all of humanity lived their lives now. Long ago, a Chinese writer had posted: Now, first contact is every day. Now, we all speak for the whole human race, every day.
Emma believed it. If history told her what humans had been, then she felt it was up to her—her life — to speak for what humans could still be.
Yet for all that, she still let the carping old creature draw her out sometimes.
She was on her hands and knees, scrazzing little bits of bacterial grit out from between the flooring tiles, while The Dowager declaimed at her in a cracking voice:
“If we had not claimed your planet,” said The Dowager, “you would have languished for many more generations in ignorance, savagery, and greed. We’ve civilized you.”
Emma was not in the mood. She looked up from her cleaning. “In some ways, yes,” she said in measured tones. “But we had some civilization of our own as well. I’ll never really know what it was like to live in world with nothing but humans. And you’ll never know what it’s like to live in a world without us.”
“It’s a dirty world,” grimaced The Dowager. “Full of human simians who would breed themselves to death without our wisdom.”
Emma almost replied: You’ve never seen any other planet in person, any more than I have, but she collected her thoughts. Then chose something much worse, as humans will often do.
Emma sat back on her heels, pausing in her work. “You like listening to our koto music and eating chicken” —Raw—“You go out to our hottest deserts and sun yourselves for weeks on end. You enjoy the smell of wood bark and the color of our rushing sunrise. You make the signs of cathartic sorrow at the sight of humans cuddling in their sleep.”
The last comment drew The Dowager up in her seat, expressing indignation and growing anger. “I do not!”
“All your kind do,” said Emma. “Because you all sleep the same way you eat … alone.” She met The Dowager’s gaze, as humans had feared to do, forty years earlier.
“And you don’t like it.”
The alien’s claws swept across a nearby shelf, scattering and smashing tiny memory-pieces of the homeworld she had never seen, inscribed in a desperately complex language that she—like all her kind on their colonies, including Earth—had never spoken with the correct accents or ever completely learned to read.
“All your kind are violent, stupid children!” roared The Dowager. “You sleep in your own disgusting skin fluids and you stink of your heated food. You needed us! We saved you from ignominy and death!”
The old alien’s claws trembled with emotion and exhaustion. She seemed to convulse in on herself, and her trilobed eyes flicked this way and that, seeking her ankusha. Her ankusha—which had been outlawed five years before Emma had even been born—the traditional means by which her species had kept rebellious humans in their place. The Dowager had never used the cruel device; she had only ever seen her parent use it a handful of times, and she had learned to wave it, threaten with it, but had strangely never acquired the taste for it.
In the midst of her harangue, The Dowager’s voice suddenly cut away to a faint gasp, as if she had been grafted to a malfunctioning amplifier. Her body language betrayed alarm, and her flesh emitted the scent of her pain. The Dowager fell, helpless to the floor.
The physician, who had already left, had been a human. The Dowager despised her, and cursed her weakly and endlessly, but her original medical aide—a creature like herself—had died years ago. The Dowager’s species did not like to take jobs in medicine, dentistry, or anything else that required them to be subservient to the bodily needs of another. Humans had no such bias, and had quietly stepped into all such posts as they emptied of their alien practitioners. It was one of the hundred thousand complaints that The Dowager had about modern life.
Emma pondered the bottle in her hand.
As the human doctor had departed, she had taken Emma aside and spoken with her in pidgin French-Hindi, as human servants had for generations.
“The old madame is terminally ill,” she said. “Her own people never found a cure for it. God damn us if we look for it on their behalf.”
Emma nodded, but she didn’t feel the same bitterness the physician did. The tide of conquest had been receding since her infancy; The Dowager symbolized something different to Emma than she did to the physician. Still, Emma had no desire to argue.
“Is there medicine for her? To make it easier?”
“We should euthanize the creature,” the physician said, “but since that’s against global regulations, give her this.” She handed Emma a bottle full of a transparent fluid. “The directions are on the side. If it were a human being we were talking about, I’d say ‘I’m sorry,’ but as it is, I’ll say good riddance to bad garbage.” The doctor nodded her farewell to Emma and began to depart.
At the door, she said, “Regulations wouldn’t permit me to refuse care to the monster, but you don’t have to do anything. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“Chemically, it’s almost identical to sodium benzoate—the food preservative. You can buy some of that down at the local co-op. It’s easy to mix up the bottles. You’d have to be careful. If you confused them, she would suffer—a lot. Before the end, that is.”
“I understand.”
Emma put the bottle down. She heard The Dowager calling for her, and she went to the alien, the daughter of many queens, and did as she was told. This time, however, she felt a curious mingling of power and guilt. The Dowager’s barbed words and occasional menacing posture were feeble. Emma thought about what the doctor had said, and there was a division and a dispute within herself.
At the thronged co-op the next day, Emma looked at a clear bottle of sodium benzoate in solution. The bottle was as cool and impersonal as the paperwork she’d had to fill out, putting herself on the list for another job assignment in six to eighteen months. But when Emma reached for it, her throat tightened and something in the pit of her stomach turned to hot lead. She turned deliberately away from the preservative. She knew she would not come back.
There were pustules now, swelling out agonizingly from all the tender places on The Dowager’s body. The sores stank, deep blue with alien blood, and looked as if they would burst at the slightest t
ouch. Once, when Emma accidentally brushed their surface, The Dowager had stiffened and given out a faint moan. The sound haunted her human servant more than a thousand harsh words had ever done.
Emma sprayed The Dowager’s eyes and ears with the clear fluid, letting the sensitive tissues there absorb the medicine into the elderly alien’s bloodstream. In minutes, The Dowager’s body relaxed, free of most of its pain, and Emma knew the creature’s posture well enough that she understood everything. The Dowager was grateful, embarrassed at herself, and afraid. After a moment’s reflection, Emma realized: She’s afraid I’ll leave her alone with her pain.
“I’ve got some things in my pack,” Emma said, moving away to preserve the alien’s dignity. “With your permission, I could stay in the vesting chamber. Just in case you wish my services.”
“… Yes, human girl. You have my permission. But do not be noisy, as you always are.”
“I won’t.”
Weeks had passed, and today The Dowager could not speak to Emma. She did not lack the strength in her body; she simply had no words. This morning The Dowager lay on her dais in a mess of her own bodily wastes
The conquerors had called it an act of war any time a human had dared to lay bare hands on their persons without permission to touch that sovereign flesh. Emma had not bothered to ask any permission. The division inside Emma was strong now; old resentment battling new pity. Power fed the one and starved the other, and each new day Emma hoped that The Dowager could not see her biting back the urge to hurt her a little in retaliation for years of scorn.
The Dowager had learned a great deal about human body language as well. She saw more than Emma hoped, but like Emma, she had begun to choose silence and to hope for silence in return.
And so Emma did not humiliate The Dowager with any words at all, but cleaned away the filth, bathing the alien’s failing skin, and wiping gently at The Dowager’s cloaca. She didn’t say the words she had thought a thousand times: At least my vagina, urethra, and anus are three different organs, superior creature.
Finally, Emma had no choice but to speak. The Dowager’s species did not diaper their young, who took care of themselves from spawning onward. She wanted the alien to understand what she was about to do.
“It will be better if I put something around you, to help you be more comfortable,” Emma began to say.
“Do it,” said The Dowager.
Please, Emma thought. Say please. She thought of the sodium benzoate, of the isolation. Of a thousand insults, but not one of them an ankusha’s agony. Not one of them a Scar on her mind or body. Not one of them a woman torturing another living creature with false medicine.
Disgusted at herself for even thinking of such things, Emma excused herself and took the mess away to dispose of it.
The news on the visuport had talked of far away things. Somewhere in the stars the invaders had met a more powerful culture and were fighting them, desperately. The information was still censored, even nowadays, but there were ominous implications that humanity might do well to think about helping the devil it knew. All of it washed over Emma without much effect. She had nothing to do with important things. She was just a xenocare specialist.
The Dowager had not been able to move from her dais in a long while. Breathing was an effort, even with fresh air gills implanted (as they had been since her spawning), and the third lobe of each of her pupils was lazy and mostly dilated. Emma could barely keep the alien fed now, and they had not argued in weeks. The bottle of medicine was almost empty.
“What is your death custom?” The Dowager asked.
“We … we don’t really have one,” Emma replied. “A lot of us aren’t actually awake for our deaths; not if we can help it. One of our doctors once said, ‘Humans die doped.’ I think he was right.”
“That cannot always have been true.”
“No. I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Then what did you do before you ‘died doped’?”
Emma struggled with the question. Humans had reached the same levels of apparent unity in a lot of areas The Dowager’s species had attained: Monotheism, global government and economy, and much more. But their gut-level beliefs, the irrational ones, were still as divided as ever. Emma felt as billions of others did, considering herself “spiritual, but not religious.” Vague. Shapeless. What did that mean in the face of something real and immediate? Death didn’t call for “maybe” or “I think.” Death would decide matters for you, even if you had no opinion one way or another.
“I don’t know if I can speak for everyone.”
“Speak for yourself,” The Dowager snapped with sudden energy.
Anger flared in Emma. For a moment, she thought of telling The Dowager all the things that had settled in her stomach like sediment over these long years. Speak for myself! All right, monster, I’ll speak for myself and all my people. You’re a failure! A loathsome reptilian thing that thinks it still rules my planet, and you have no manners, no culture worth knowing, no love, no charity! You’re brutal and nasty and full of self-pity. You condescend to my species, when we have thousands of years of vibrant civilization! How dare you?! How dare you set foot on my planet, old monster!
Emma trembled with the anger that swept over her, and for a moment she could feel her pulse in her temples. But when she looked down at The Dowager, she saw the pitiful old alien clearly once again.
The Dowager’s plated skin, crumbling away in thin, sad layers. Her thick rings of fat sagged and dwindled, as if some invisible spirit had borne away handfuls of her life with every passing hour. The Dowager’s complex mouth desperately moistening and re-moistening, her large eyes dilating with an emotion that must have tortured her. The Dowager was afraid to die, especially to die alone, away from all her people. There was no one but Emma to comfort her, and though The Dowager was annoying, impossible, bigoted, thoughtless … within those eyes was another intelligence in the universe, strange and foreign, beginning to drift away from life.
The human woman took a breath.
“All right,” Emma said. “I will speak and act for myself.”
She reached down for The Dowager’s clawed extremity. At first the alien feebly tugged it away, momentarily resuming her normal stature. But after a moment, The Dowager let Emma reach for her, and the human woman laced her fingers between the clawed digits. She had served The Dowager for fifteen years. The old alien, proud descendant of the conquering horde, had never once permitted Emma to directly touch her bare skin. The Dowager felt faintly warm, very dry, and crinkled under Emma’s fingers, like dull, old wood shavings.
Emma knelt down by The Dowager’s bed and said, “This is a prayer my mother taught me. I don’t really believe in it, but it’s something.”
“Say your prayer.”
Emma said it. The words still meant nothing to her, just as the old pictures of steeples and resurrected men had never touched her, but the feeling behind the words spoke to her. She felt the sense, as she always had, that life was enfolded in something larger and wiser, a true meaning behind the existential void. It was probably an illusion, she knew. She saw no reason why truth was best if truth was only pain.
“These are silly words,” said The Dowager. “Your species … so absurd.” But she let her claws rest intertwined with Emma’s fingers.
Emma found herself smiling. “Yes. We are absurd. Very contradictory, as you always say.”
“I am always right,” The Dowager said, nodding to herself.
“Of course, Dowager,” said Emma.
A spasm of pain coiled through The Dowager for a moment, despite her medication. Her breath came in short hisses for several minutes, and her frail digits squeezed tight against Emma’s hand. The human made gentle, soothing noises at the alien, gazing upon her with a sad sympathy. When The Dowager focused again, she had the eyes of a swimmer floating above a great abyss.
“Human girl,” said The Dowager. “Will you remember me?”
“Yes.”
Al
ien ears receded into their spaces in The Dowager’s skull. A sign Emma had learned to read long ago: Apprehension. Fear. Uncertainty.
“Stay here with me.”
“I will.”
“Human girl … Emma. This world is ours by conquest. The Divine has given us your planet because we are best. I am the daughter of many queens.… Many queens.”
“Of course, Dowager.”
The old creature spoke in a small voice, slowly and carefully, conserving her breath. For long minutes, she seemed not to know where she was, and lapsed into her own language. Emma only understood a little bit of it. It seemed The Dowager was speaking to someone who was not there, someone she might have known a long time ago. Then the alien’s consciousness cleared, rising from dazed confusion to a clearer bewilderment.
“Why are you still here?”
Emma smiled very gently. “My death custom.”
“But I am …”
“Yes. The daughter of many queens.” She dabbed away some drool from the corner of the fading Dowager’s mouth. “You have much to take pride in.”
The Dowager hesitated, looking up at Emma—Emma, who held the power of life and death over her, as she had for many years. The human girl who had listened to her demeaning talk, sat through her tantrums, and put up with all her demands. The Dowager’s people had ruled everything there was, and Emma’s people, proud humanity, had felt the conquerors’ foot on their collective neck. How …?
As if sensing the question, Emma stayed steadily beside The Dowager and gave a soft squeeze of her hand. It took a very long time, but The Dowager gently pressed back on Emma’s fingers.
There were no more words.
“I’d like to submit an application for a bonded crew member premium.”
“Human option?”
Humans Wanted Page 7