Unseen Demons

by Adam-Troy Castro

  It hadn’t touched them at all.

  “What?” Whalekiller asked.

  “Did I say something?” Cort said.

  “No. But you’re smiling.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Believe me, you are,” Whalekiller said. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you do that since I ferried you down from orbit.”

  That surprised her. She so rarely smiled. But now that it had been pointed out to her, she could feel the telltale tension in her cheeks. She fought down the feeling, buried it, and drove a stake through its heart. “Come on. We still have a lot to do.”

  7

  They caught up with the Riirgaan witness, one Goodsir Vighinis Mukh’thav, at their own Embassy Compound on the edges of a Catarkhan temperate rainforest. Like most of the other embassies, it was a site far removed from the habitat of the indigenous sentient species; it was a standing policy instituted to avoid contaminating the culture of the locals with excessive exposure to offworld technology, but the truth was that the Riirgaans might have picked it anyway. They just enjoyed environments like that, for some reason beyond Cortís comprehension; though their own world wasn’t anything at all like that, and they seemed far too intelligent to enjoy nasty things like bugs and venomous plants and mud under their feet all the time, they considered the hothouse jungle a paradise. They even liked swimming, which had always struck Cort as, war excepted, the most insane habit that any sentient race had ever cultivated for itself; after all, people drowned in water. It’s a planet thing, she supposed. And as a species that seemed to enjoy ferreting out and establishing contact with the most unlikely alien sentients imaginable, they would have had to harbor a fair degree of tolerance for planet things.

  Mukh’thav was, according to Whalekiller, what the Riirgaans call a First Contact Prime, a position which should have kept him out in the field living as close to the natives as possible. But now they had him assigned to full-time vehicle maintenance, a job that kept him securely within their Embassy perimeter. He explained why as the three of them sat together at an outdoor table the Riirgaans had carved into one of the ornate historical friezes that decorated so much of their artifacts, Cort and Whalekiller drinking the hot coffee the Riirgaans had been kind enough to provide, Mukh’thav lowering his flat, masklike features to inhale the vapors from fermented mush that bubbled and roiled in a bowl set before him. “I am polluted,” Mukh’thav said, “with a sadness that broke through the infamous Riirgaan reserve. “I have seen an atrocity, and I still feel the filth on my skin. I am here, performing menial labor instead of the work I trained for, because I do not know if I will ever feel clean again.”

  “You were not responsible,” Whalekiller said.

  Mukhíthav cocked his head in the unreadable Riirgaan manner that could have been any emotion from annoyance to affection to distaste to warmth. “Do you expect me to take comfort in that? Is that the way you Hom.Saps think? That if a terrible crime occurs when you are not present to stop it, you are not at heart responsible? It is no wonder you have historically always been able to live in comfort and complacency when others of your people conducted genocides in other parts of your habitat. My people find such detachment profoundly alien. But I suppose that, given your tendencies, many of you cultivate the knack in order to remain sane.”

  Cortís voice was very tight and very controlled. “I’m not detached from this, Mr. Mukh’thav.”

  The Riirgaan made the kind of noise that seemed to concede the point while simultaneously establishing that nothing had been conceded at all. “Forgive me, andreaCort: I am sure you believe that. But you are also a bureaucrat, well-used to professing deep personal compassion as a matter of policy. It is still not real to you.”

  “Real enough to feel polluted; to still feel the filth on my skin; to know that I’ll never feel clean again. Think what you want of us in general, Goodsir, but I am not detached.”

  What followed was a noticeable pause, as Riirgaan and Human faced each other, like a pair of imperfect reflections recognizing the face on the other side of the glass.

  It was not telepathy; neither individual was wired for it. But some knowledge is so shattering that people who share it can recognize each other. In Cortís case it took the form of a night filled with screams. In Mukh’thav’s, it was the sight of Emil Sandburg plying his deadly hobby. They were different lessons, learned in different places — but while the particulars were different, the resonances were still great enough to fill the air between them.

  Whalekiller, abandoned somewhere outside the loop, glanced from one impassive face to the other, saw the moment of clear understanding that passed between them — and seemed terribly frustrated by his own inability to partake of it. He hesitated only a second or two longer before breaking the silence: “None of us approve of what Sandburg did, Goodsir. We all want justice.”

  Mukh’thav turned toward him, as if reminded of his presence. “Yes. Justice.” He slumped. “As if that is even possible in this case.”

  “I intend to make it possible,” Cort said.

  “I did not expect to believe you, andreacort, but I suppose I do, now. Will you require me to describe what I saw?”

  Cort held off responding long enough to take another sip of coffee and set it down on the mat the Riirgaans had provided to protect their intricately carved wood. “No particular need for that; your testimony has been recorded, and the crime itself has already been established to our satisfaction. Sandburg himself admits it. What hasn’t been established, at least in my mind, is just what the crime was.”

  There was a moment of silence. The impassive, inexpressive Riirgaan face, locked as it was in one blank mask, nevertheless seemed to change aspect four times in the interval before Mukh’thav’s answer. “You know very well it was murder.”

  “I do. I am wondering whether you believe it was also torture.”

  Mukh’thav considered that for what seemed a small eternity before raising his face out of the thickest vapors, leaning back, and linking hands in a gesture so deliberate that the fingers seemed to knit in slow motion. “It is an interesting question, AndreaCort. Is it also an important one?”

  “I’m just collecting data,” said Cort.

  “Very well, then.” Mukh’thav’s head cocked again; this time, she experienced no difficulty interpreting the reaction as the expansiveness of an any expert enjoying the opportunity to show off his knowledge. “The victim was a Catarkhan. It wasn’t capable of being tortured. It wasn’t in pain. It wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t even aware. It was a creature being violated that had no sense of violation; a being ripped apart which wasn’t equipped with the senses it needed to understand what being ripped apart meant; a conscious, thinking creature that couldn’t hear its executioner’s laughter. Death, when it came, wasn’t a blessing or a surprise; if the Catarkhans have an afterlife, they may not even notice the passage.” He lowered his head to the vaporous bowl one more time; when he raised his head, bits of smoke roiled around his carapace, making him resemble a demon who had just emerged from one of the hotter pits in hell. “If it is your Hom.Sap intention to argue that this small mercy somehow diminishes the crime…”

  “Not at all, Goodsir.” She picked up the coffee cup again, emptied it to the dregs, and placed it down again, before rising and gesturing for Whalekiller to do the same. “I’m just establishing what the crime really is. And what it is not.”

  Whalekiller was about to suffer a hernia withholding his curiosity.

  Mukh’thav’s face roiled with vapors. “You are done?”

  “Not even close,” said Cort.

  8

  The Tchi Embassy was a snow-white pylon stabbing the sky from somewhere in the most inhospitable wastelands of the Catarkhan polar region; it was the very vessel which had brought them here, imbedded in ice, facing the sky as if thinking it might have been thinking it never expected to see the stars again. The minimal living space within the vessel itself was supplemented by about a dozen small
inflatable structures that sprouted from the surrounding glacier like mushrooms, and one big transparent dome that rested on the pylon’s flat summit. The dome, which turned out to be one of their bubblewall inflatables, was as warm as toast, comfortably furnished, perfumed with a fertilizer scent Cort assumed to be an import from the Tchi homeworld, and wholly insulated from its constant assault by the most hostile landscape Catarkhus had to offer. The Tchi did everything they could to see to the physical well-being of their guests Whalekiller and Cort, bringing refreshments, inquiring after their comfort, and even altering the humidity level on request — but Cort was still miserable there; every time a gust of wind lashed the bubblewalls with snow, she gripped her couch reflexively, certain that their precariously-balanced platform was about to break off and spiral away into the distance.

  Really, she didn’t understand anybody who liked planets one bit.

  They were there for about one hour, waiting, before Whalekiller, who had been pretending to be engrossed in the view, broke away with an explosion of hoarded breath. “Counselor…I know I’m supposed to give you room to work, here…but just what the hell was going on, there, between you and Mukh’thav?”

  Cort avoided his eyes. “Nothing unexpected, Bondsman. Just evidence-gathering, nothing more.”

  “I don’t mean your line of questioning. I’m sure you have something in mind. I mean that moment earlier on, when you took all his contempt for us and flung it back in his face. He saw something in you that I didn’t. What was it?”

  She gave him a look. “Empathy.”

  The muscles in his face twitched. “I’m going to figure you out sooner or later.”

  “Let me know when you manage it,” she said.

  After a moment, he nodded and returned to the edge of the bubblewall, where he could lose himself in the ice-fields of the Catarkhan north.

  Cort was grateful to be left alone, if only for a few minutes, but genuine peace eluded her; the second she permitted her mind to drift, it came across the image of Emil Sandburg, slicing away at a Catarkhan victim. Her mind refused to reconstruct what Emil had done — if only because she still didn’t know what a Catarkhan looked like beneath its skin — but it showed real enthusiasm imagining the face he’d worn during the act. Possibilities paraded themselves before her: the dispassionate killer, the gleeful killer, the leering killer, the orgasmic killer, the killer who didn’t seem to know what he was doing. None of them made any immediate sense. By the time she gave him a face filled with fear, she realized that the image in her mind was not Sandburg’s face at all…and that the Catarkhans she imagined were not the funnel-faced hive-creatures Whalekiller had shown her. No, these were more humanoid. They were mammalian, they were humanoid enough to possess human expressions, they had bright green eyes filled with humor and curiosity, and their screams were resonant baritone rumbles, backed by a chorus of more human cries.

  She opened her eyes and discovered that Whalekiller, still standing against a backdrop of frozen wasteland, was now staring at her with frank concern.

  She blanked her expression and stared back until he looked away.

  It was an eternity before Haat Vayl, the Tchi exolinguist they’d come to see, arrived for the interview. Thin even by the slight standard of his species, an attribute which might have been a measure of advanced age, Vayl was also marked by an air of deliberate gravity and a set of forlorn, droopy eyes that together made him resemble the most unctuous bureaucrat ever to take secret pleasure in giving bad news. He wore a long diaphanous robe so delicate that it seemed about to tear with every step he took.

  Unfortunately, Counsellor Rhaig, the Tchi who had accosted Cort earlier, was with him, and considering himself in charge. His pale skin reddened from wind-burn, his fringe of curly gray hair frizzed with moisture, he nevertheless bustled across the chamber with an easy grace that left his feebler colleague Vayl far behind. “Forgive us the delay, Counsellor — but I was out in the field, observing the indigenes.”

  “You didn’t have to cut your observations short for us,” Cort said. “We were here to see Dr. Vayl.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Rhaig said, as he claimed a seat opposite her, “but the doctor here thought it wise not to speak with you unless I was personally here to advise him on his answers.”

  Cort would have bet a considerable sum that the policy was not Haat Vaylís’s personal idea. “That isn’t necessary, Counselor. The Doctor isn’t a defendant in danger of incriminating himself.”

  “He most certainly is not, but since humans are universally recognized as masters at the art of the malleable misquote, he did consider it prudent to have an advisor at hand.”

  Overstepping his bounds, Whalekiller said: “You really do go out of your way to be unpleasant, don’t you? What kind of distortion could you possibly be afraid of, here?”

  Rhaig fixed him with a cool glare. “If I truly wanted to be unpleasant toward you, Mr. Whalekiller, I would make obvious remarks about the irony inherent in your having a name that so aptly commemorates one of your species’ most infamous past acts of xenocide. But my determination to treat you with basic civility will not prevent me from doing everything I can to counter the human tendency toward gross revisionism.”

  Whalekiller collapsed into the chair beside Cort. “You’ll notice he didn’t answer the question.”

  Cort, who had indeed noticed, addressed Krieg: “Do you have a personal problem with human beings, Counselor?”

  “It is not a personal problem at all. I have dealt with several tolerable members of your species. The best of you seem to mean well, even if your inborn inadequacies prevent you from accomplishing it. Alas, the best of you constitute only a small percentage of your population — and the collected mass of you refuses all responsibility for the acts of the worst. I think that makes you dangerous. I think it makes you something that should be contained.”

  “Like a disease,” Whalekiller said.

  “Precisely,” said Rhaig. “There’s nothing wrong with human beings that a good military quarantine couldn’t cure.”

  Cort’s own dislike of the Tchi Counselor was so intense she almost wanted the argument to run its course, but her time here was limited, and she had another agenda to pursue. So she addressed her next words to the weary, silently-waiting exobiologist who had just taken a seat at Rhaig’s side. “Goodsir. Forgive us. You are a scientist caught in an argument between bureaucrats.”

  “I’ve noticed this,” Vayl said, in the craggy, desert-wind tones of any human old man. He was frail, all right; the very effort of speech seemed to diminish him.

  “My name is Andrea Cort; I’m here to help determine the issue of jurisdiction in the Emil Sandburg case. What I need from you, as the ranking researcher here, is your perspective on the Catarkhans. You do agree with the accepted judgement, that the Catarkhans are sentient?”

  Vayl’s voice was a rasp that barely travelled the short distance to Cortís ears. “I do.”

  “A very learned human once defined sentients as creatures capable of unpredictable behavior.”

  Rhaig cut in: “I will not allow you to use a human definition for the sake of human convenience.”

  Vayl lowered his head. “I will accept it for the sake of discussion, Counsellor. Continue.”

  Cort resisted the temptation to stick out her tongue at Rhaig. “Once, a long long time ago, I had a puppy who met that standard. Thetis a small domesticated animal some human beings have as pets; they’re pretty rambunctious and hard to control when they’re young. There is never any way to predict what they’re going to do, and they do show a fair degree of skill at problem-solving, in things that matter to them — issues such as, let’s say, getting into a cabinet filled with food, or evading capture when it’s time to put them back in their pens. Puppies pass the Turing test, but nobody would ever declare them sentient.”

  Rhaig, who had been rolling his eyes throughout, now heaved a heavy sigh. “Is this another example of the way human beings t
hink? Demeaning murder victims by comparing them to domestic animals?”

  “No,” Vayl said, silencing the Tchi counselor with a gesture. “I’ll answer that.” A tiny pink tongue emerged from his beaklike lips, performed a full circuit of his mouth, and then retreated. He addressed Cort: “I can see where you’re going with this, Counsellor, but this Turing of yours provided a very unreliable means of measurement. Certainly, there are high-ranking officials among both our peoples who would never pass it — hidebound personalities whose responses are fixed in stone by their prejudices but who yet remain sentient by every measurable standard.” He made a point of glancing at Rhaig, who blinked several times before Vayl continued: “The same is true for the Catarkhans, but only more so. Their regimented existence may provide them with a limited range of responses we can understand, but every single analysis done so far establishes that they have a wide range of responses when communicating with each other.”

  “You are absolutely certain of that?” Cort asked.

  “Yes, I am. But whether we will ever be able to establish any form of communication with them, or how you’re going to provide them the means to prosecute your murderer, remains to be seen.”

  “Thank you,” Cort said. She lowered her gaze to the floor, took a deep breath, and continued: “I have one more question.”

  “Perhaps a relevant one this time,” Rhaig suggested.

  She ignored him. “Assume for the sake of argument that your own people had never experienced any previous contact with human beings. Assume that we hadn’t agreed on a common diplomatic language, assume that you knew nothing of us except that we had been judged sentient by somebody whose expertise you trusted. Assume that we were now meeting for the first time. Assume I now marched in, crossed the room, and without any previous provocation punched Mr. Rhaig here in the mouth.” (Rhaig’s head rose a little higher on his neck at that one.) “Eliminating all interspecies chauvinism, would that gesture communicate to Mr. Rhaig the message that I don’t like him?”