Book 6: Chapter 7: I am a Human |
“Now we’ve been talking a lot today about the assistance programs we expect to provide to Earth when the annexation is complete.” Researcher Onkir polishes his anticomps and places them back over his face. The circle of Maekyonites are reflected in them, seated in an ersatz array of chairs, couches, beanbag seats, or cross-legged on the conversation room floor. “As always, you can discuss whatever you wish, but we’re especially interested in your reactions to that.”
A dark-haired British man whose name Grant still doesn’t know raises a heavy hand. “May I be excused?”
“You don’t have to participate,” Onkir says. “But we’d appreciate you sitting in if you’re able.”
“I’m not able.”
“You sick or something?” The Eqtoran guard at the exit is speaking Taiikari, but his reply displays on the translation pane on his chest, as well as the large cylindrical screen bank at the room’s center.
The man stands and straightens his shoulders. “Are you gonna handcuff me to my seat?”
The Eqtoran grunts bemusedly. “Do I have to?”
Onkir’s smile flags briefly. “All right. Randall, you can go back to your cabin. We’ll see you at lunch.”
The man does not reply. He attempts a shouldering-past of the Eqtoran, but he might as well have tried to shoulder past a minivan and it turns into a glowering shuffle out the door.
“What it says to me is that I’m not getting the whole truth.” Zuyin says this in Mandarin; its translation flashes in English, Spanish, Taiikari, and Eqt. “If you can just land on Earth and declare it’s yours, what reason do you have to bribe us with these social programs?”
“What it says to me is socialism.” That’s Rita, a bank teller from Glendale. “And my grandparents lived under that. And it always falls apart. They—”
A flurried response:
“Fucking Americans and fucking socialism. Mate, it’s monarchism.”
“Can we get back to—”
“They’ve got an empress, moron. How’s that socialism?”
“I don’t care about the name it’s given. It doesn’t matter. You people are always so obsessed with what to call it.”
“What’s you people?”
“You, them. Whoever can afford to fly planes above our heads. It’s spaceships or it’s planes. Sometimes they bring blankets, sometimes they bring bombs. Last time you brought bombs. These little weird things bring blankets. I know to accept a blanket.”
“A smallpox blanket, more like.”
“Don’t sit back like you’ve just said something profound. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Zhuyin had an interesting point, I thought—”
“How is that even an argument?”
“What do you mean, how? You think these things can actually be taken at their word? They even fucking look like demons. Look at them. Horns, tails. You know what they’re planning for us? Human experimentation. Sterility. You’ve all been eating their fuckin’ food, you’ve been letting them poke and prod you. Clueless.”
“You’ve been eating their food.”
“Well, I take it apart first.”
A middle-aged man, Gabriel Legrand, if Grant remembers right, pipes up at that. “If they want to poison or sterilize us, they will. If they want to blow our planet up they will. There’s no resistance to this.”
“So what, the only hope is collaboration?”
“No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying there is no hope. That’s not human nature. We are violent, we are suspicious, we are greedy.” Legrand emphasizes the words with the chop of his leathery hand into his palm. “How can we be expected to welcome the aliens? We can’t even do that for each other. If the options are bow down or blow up, then we’re done. This is game over. And maybe that’s for the best. Maybe the galaxy’s better off without humanity.”
The rest of the room breaks out in a unison that sends a flurry of text across the translation pane.
“Absolutely not. Idiot.”
“闭嘴，傻瓜.”
“Shut yer fuckin’ gob.”
“Que le jodan a este tipo.”
“Yeah, man, fuck outta here with that.”
In a dimmer part of the conversation circle, Dylan leans from his easy chair, close enough to Xamika that his whisper’s picked up on her lapel mic and piped into the observation room. “Were you selecting for at least one dipshit per group, or was this guy a coincidence?”
She giggles behind her palm and gives his hand a light slap. “I can’t comment on any guest like that.”
“But you laughed, though.”
She giggles again. “No, I didn’t. You didn’t hear that.”
In the dim observation room, surrounded by multiple camera angles, heart monitors, and live transcriptions, Grant watches the exchange and tries to excavate the brittle reaction in his stomach to it. How would it have been between him and Sykora if she’d known the whole time about his immunity? If they’d started as friends? How would it have turned out if they hadn’t kept his secret?
Terribly, surely. But here they are, anyway. Orbiting the worst case scenario.
Tap tap ta-tap tap.
Sykora’s tail bops against his leg and pulls him out of his murk. The shave-and-a-haircut rhythm he taught her. Her face is still placidly on the feed, still the solemn monarch. But beneath the complex plaits in her night-dark hair, a blue sliver of horn is visible.
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Her bare shoulder is so smooth and sinuous where it joins the soft downward sliver of her chest visible below her tunic’s armhole. A pinkish tinge spreads from the ends of her ears as she realizes where he’s looking. She subtly tugs the hem of her uniform lower to show him more of herself.
Her collar is closed tight around her willowy neck.
“How much longer is this session, Jai?” Grant asks.
Researcher Jainema emerges for air from the ocean of paper notes she’s taking and pushes up the circular glasses on her nose. She looks up at him and there’s that little momentary catch he keeps seeing, or imagining he sees. The hesitation toward him he worked so hard to remove has come back, ever since they realized what he was, what all his people are.
“Thirty minutes, Majesty,” she says. “Then we break for lunch.”
“Has Edward said anything at this one yet?”
Jainema purses her lips. The turning of her tail swishes the silver sash hanging off her shoulder. “No, Majesty. Third session in a row he’s stayed quiet.”
“Okay.” Grant stands up. “When you’re done, I’d like to talk to him.”
He steps from the observation room. He pats his leg as he goes. Small and subtle. Here, girl. Sykora follows him.
When they turn down the hallway toward the spot they’ve been using, Grant picks his wife up and tucks her under his arm. The Princess’s tail wags rapidly.
Five minutes later, it’s wrapped around the crossbar of the shelf in the janitor’s closet, its sinuous muscle flexing, keeping its moaning owner anchored to the wall as he cums inside her.
Grant isn’t sure how the switch got flipped, but something’s happened with him and Sykora. Her horns are out so often she’s started wearing her hair up to keep them hidden. They’ve always had a healthy appetite for each other but it’s like their earliest days, when they’d only just discovered the joy of human/Taiikari sex and they were stealing into whatever empty chamber they could find aboard the Pike.
He notes as much to her as she wiggles her handprint-stamped ass back into her panties: “You’ve been frisky lately, huh?”
She looks over her shoulder, abashed. “It’s not too much, is it?”
“You kidding me?” He sits on the floor and kisses the back of her neck as he takes one of her braids, which is halfway unraveled from its use as a handlebar, and coaxes it the rest of the way straight. “Hold still while I do this back up for you.”
She lets out a little squeak as he pulls.
He chuckles. “We can’t do a round two yet, y’know. It’s lunch soon with the Maekyonites.”
She leans back against him. Her tail trails up his chest. “Back on the Pike, maybe?”
“Back on the pike.” He secures her braid back in place. “I’m not complaining. Not at all. I’m just curious.”
“I just—” Sykora sighs and shivers as he runs a knuckle up her spine. “I want to be there for you, I suppose. I want to help.” She turns around and shuffles into his arms. “I want to make sure you still love your life with me, the way you did before this began. I’ve gotten these stretch marks and I see how troubled you are about the compulsion thing and you have so much on your mind and we’re finally here at this moment of such consequence, and I…”
He loves her stretch marks, and she knows it, but he doesn’t interrupt. Just holds her.
“I just want to make sure that this is still what you want,” she whispers. “That I’m still what you want.”
He rests his head on her shoulder. “I’m fucking crazy about you, Batty,” he whispers, and cradles the back of her head. He rubs behind her ear and is rewarded by a vibrating purr out of his alien wife. “You’re the reason I’m ready to do this. You and Rory and Zee and Kiar.”
“I miss them,” she murmurs, and it’s barely been a day without them, but he nods his agreement.
“We’ll be back soon. Just had to check in.” Grant gets to his feet and cracks the closet door. “Every dad wishes he could give his kids the world. I’m gonna get out there and actually do it.”
“Edward Dominguez.” Grant reads the name off Jai’s notes and connects it with the genial, balding man sitting across from him in the administrator’s office. “Can I call you Ed?”
“I’d prefer Edward, actually. Annoying as it is, I’ve never had the wherewithal to think of myself as an Ed.” Edward crosses his tweed-encased legs, the better to fit into the one-size-too-small chair on the other side of Grant’s desk. “Too dour, I guess.”
“Fair enough,” Grant says. “Tell me about yourself, Edward. What is it you do on Earth?”
“I write,” Edward says. “Or wrote, I guess. I worked in journalism for a while—local stuff, and then sports at the News-Gazette—and then I was an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. Then, about five years ago, that ended, and I’ve done a few different things. Apps, gigs, freelancing. The new economy, you know. I’d found a job at a warehouse when you picked me up; I imagine that’s probably over with. Now I’m told I’ll be rich, so that’s the whole resume, I imagine.”
“Not eager to go back to the pick-and-pack line?”
Edward chuckles and scratches his salt-and-pepper beard. “I think our hosts have maybe calibrated that wrong. You can’t exactly pay a guy 250 million and then expect them to badmouth you.”
“Tell Rita that.”
He chuckles again. “Fair point.”
“You don’t tend to share,” Grant says. “You were quiet in the session. I was always like that in big groups, but I always had a lot on the mind. I hope you’ll tell me what you think.”
“What do I think.” Edward steeples his fingers in front of his narrow, beaky nose. “I think enough people think like Rita and Gabriel think that it will present a challenge, certainly. But a civilization that can make the things I’ve seen, that can keep my feet on this floor in the middle of space in whatever miraculous way, surely has many ways to address those challenges. The degree to which the technology you’re introducing will change just about everyone’s lives, that’ll certainly cut down, too, on the number of Jonathans you’ll get in the mix. I think there will be many of us—billions of us—quite ready to accede to the Imperial demand. And I think it will be a terrible shame.”
Grant’s stomach sinks at that conclusion. “Is there a way I can convince you otherwise?”
“Well, I guess I have a question,” Edward says. “The Empress. Does she have her own planet? Is there a Taiikari home world?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been?”
Grant nods.
“What’s it like?”
Grant is quiet.
“I was expecting you’d say it’s beautiful, it’s opulent, it’s, uh, I don’t know. The silence is concerning.”
“It is beautiful and…” Grant rattles the cabinets on his limited English. “Opulent? What’s that mean?”
“Rich and fancy.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Edward says, carefully. “So… it’s an Empire, still. For all the high-minded stuff and for as cute as they are, it’s still Empire in the human mode. You are the smiling mouth of the Imperial hose, sucking the resources of its subjects up into the homeland. Homeworld, in this case. You’re conquering us, and then colonizing us. I’m not sure I’d call myself a student of history, but I know what that looks like and what it leads to.”
“I know it’s hard to trust this,” Grant says. “But our history is different from theirs. It’s not something we can look back at Maekyon to understand.” Earth. You meant to say Earth.
“I’m not denying that,” Edward says. “I’m just saying that’s what it is, right? A pyramid, and we are at the bottom. And I take your point that the Taiikari bottom looks a lot better.” He laughs quietly. “No pun intended. And for most of the people of Earth, it would be a better life. I can believe this. I can even believe that they believe they’re doing this out of kindness. And what are the resource they’re taking from Earth? In the main, it seems like they want to date us. Well, I’m sure many humans would be thrilled. I’d date a Taiikari.”
“I can highly recommend it.”
“And of course by ensuring a smooth transition you are saving many lives. Not only the lives that would be lost in resistance but the people who would otherwise die under the comparatively flawed rule of their fellow humans. Do I have your position right, more or less?”
Grant nods.
“But they are here to exploit us, Majesty.” Edward gives Grant a sad smile. “Dressed up as wonderfully as it can be, that’s what this is. Their great kindness, real as it might be, is contingent on total submission. And I just don’t know if that’s compatible with a human mind. And I don’t know whether it ought to be. Whatever arrangement we agree to, they can change that agreement whenever they wish, entirely unilaterally. And since there is one supreme leader, and even the Taiikari are mortal, there is no divining what the future would be. What do we do if they get a bit too bored with their handsome pet humans and look for other value to extract from us? What recourse do we have if the generous Empire decides that its charitable redistribution of its loot back to the looted is a bit too charitable?”
“You have me.” Grant rests a hand on his brocaded chest. “I’m a Maekyonite.”
“I know you are, Majesty,” Edward says. “But I am a human.”
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