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Travel Tales
I took it that since there was a sign in English (well, using Terran letters - the sign itself was gibberish) that this establishment catered for humans. I entered (no door, but the space where the door would have been was about three metres tall) and thought about the cantina scene from Star Wars, and the stories by Larry Niven. This was nothing like any of them. The place smelled terrible, ammonia, sulphur dioxide, rotting metal and orange peel. Maybe Bill Burroughs would feel at home here. There was a central bar-area, like the one in 'Cheers', except circular. The bar was bronze-coloured, worn smooth by years of use, and when I got closer, I saw millions of tiny pits in the surface. I ran my finger over them; they were illusions, appearing to float a fraction of a millimetre above the surface of the bar. The place was empty; no tables, chairs, other patrons. the floor was bare something-like-concrete, light grey with flecks of red. I walked around the bar until I came to the ubiquitous Tertiary Interface, moire patterns sweeping over its sides. Knowing how clumsy these things were, I leaned close and said loudly, "I'd like a glass of water, please." The moire patterns slowed, changed, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Something that looked like several overcoats hanging on a rack popped up from behind the bar and the Interface said, in its usual flat tones, "Four." Four? Did this mean I had to buy four drinks? I was fourth in line? I took it to mean that the drink would cost four units of currency, the thick yellow plastic coins they'd given us at the port. I took a handful of them out of my pouch, fingered them. Smooth, featureless; the centres were noticeably colder than the edges. I tossed four of them onto the bar, and one of the accumulated coats' sleeves swept them off the top. It produced a chipped, shallow bowl from somewhere; a nozzle descended from the array of pipes over the bar and dribbled a clear fluid into the bowl. I picked it up and sipped; it was warm and slightly salty. Yech. Now, for the real reason I'd came in; I finished the water and said to the interface, "May I use your toilet, please?" The patterns slowed almost to a stop, there was that hair-raising feeling again (maybe the thing behind the bar communicated by ultrasonics) and the overcoat waved a sleeve in the general direction of the back of the room, another three-metre doorway that led into darkness. I walked over, peered inside. I could tell where the smell was coming from. I ventured inside, my eyes slowly growing accustomed to the lack of light. It was a short hallway; at the end was something about the size and shape of a barrel, sawn in half horizontally, made of thick black metal (judging from the finish). I crept closer and peered over the edge; it was encrusted with dark grey deposits, stalagmites pointing inward. There must have been centuries worth of use represented in those encrustations, dozens of different kingdoms, phylums, families, orders, families, genii (genuses?), species. I added a contribution from humanity and fled as quickly as possible.
So, this is the Suteriik. Everyone had heard of the Suteriik; it was like the Brown Derby, or McDonald's would have been if the food were edible. There was one every planet in the Dominion (I think; I can't remember if there was one on Tsifayos or not) - even one on Earth; I'd just never got around to visiting it. Why don't any of these places have CHAIRS? Another thing I'd never gotten around to was being comfortable while sitting cross-legged on the floor. At least this place has rugs. Or something like rugs, I don't know. Maybe they were customers, and I was committing some horrible faux pas by sitting on them. But others were sitting on them too, so I suppose it's okay. (I have to keep a rein on that - back at the embassy, they gave us a twenty minute speech about Being Careful Of The Natives. Someone piped up and asked, "Which ones are the natives?" The answer was that you couldn't always tell - there'd been a big fuss over one of the early delegations which failed to recognise a variety of alien known as Pthalklin Ervae, because they looked like Agapanths, and they thought they were giant pot-plants. The people at the embassy also warned us about going too far in the other direction - the point where you're afraid to walk down the street in case the street tiles are some form of alien life that just happen to be lying there and sunning themselves.) I decide to use the filter-mask they gave me, because there's a lot of smoke, or vapour, or something floating about in here, and it's making me dizzy. If I get ripped, I won't enjoy the food. Looking around, the place is decidedly bare. There's a large diamond- shaped panel set into the low ceiling which glows a bright, washed-out magenta, and there's the rugs, intricate patterns in thousands of shades of grey (I'm sitting on one that has rows of rectangles with random patterns on them, like dozens of monitors connected to snow-crashed computers), but the walls are lacking in the sort of decoration that you usually find in human eateries. There are a few other xenos in here, no other humans; let's see how many of them I know. The big grey one that looked like a stick insect the size of a horse; that was a Moridani. Very rare; it was said that there were only twenty-three of them left in existence. This was due to them being on the other (ie side other than the NoSaNoOs Dominion, ie losing) side of a millennia-long war, which had recently stopped, for no apparent reason. Moridani were still regarded with fear; it used to be that whenever one showed up, everyone in the vicinity expected to get nuked. Over in the far corner, four Tsialo, large afghan hounds without eyes. Six legs; like the Moridani, they used their front set of paws to hold things. They looked like they were getting seriously into a bowl of spaghetti the size of a truck tyre, splashing sauce all over the place. They were jumping around excitedly, having a hell of a time. I hoped they didn't get drunk and come over here; I'd been followed around for days by a Tsialo that had somehow gotten interested in the work of Stewart Copeland, and insisted that since I'd come from the same system, I should know everything about this guy (a percussionist, apparently). There were a lot of Parkry running about, as usual. I hadn't realised it before, but they were six-legged too, more or less; they were shaped like those conical compost bins, light-brown-skin-toned, four thin legs below, and two tiny hands at the front. I recalled from the brief skimming of the notes I'd picked up at the embassy that they'd evolved from an insectoid hive civilisation type of thing, and that they were the mainstay of the bureaucracy, which spoke volumes about the way the NoSanNoOs ran things. The Parkry weren't here to eat; they ran about like this wherever they were, and I suppose when they weren't working, they stopped running about frantically in their offices, came down here and started running about frantically. There was a large, dark grey dome-shaped thing parked over in another corner, but it hadn't moved since I'd come in. I wasn't sure if it was a xeno, a decoration, someone's luggage or the house telephone system. Apart from that, not much. Posters? Plants (maybe Pthalklin Ervae didn't like them)? Waiters? I was starting to wonder what I should do about getting some service when another alien entered and came over to where I was sitting. Just about everything in the place seemed to stop and stare at it. It was a Bythian. It was a big Bythian. It had to stoop to get in; I'd say it was almost two and a half metres tall, and this one looked bulky, thick; a contrast to their usual skeletal frame. It was wearing a bandolier of cartridges, big chromed things the size of my big toe. I could see my reflection in each of them as it sat on the rugs directly in front of me. The people at the embassy had told us to avoid these things like the plague. They were the military arm of the NoSanNoOs; they had been designed from the cell up to be warriors. Fighting was all they knew. Hearing this, I had my doubts; they must have other dimensions to them; no race could survive just on bashing other races about, could they? Seeing this hulking grey-skinned thing sitting not more than a metre away from me, spicy scent of alien breath, I wondered if I had been anthropomorphising... these things weren't human. There was no point in giving them human characteristics or needs. It sat there silently, its flat, axe-shaped head turned to one side, regarding me from one of its fist-sized compound eyes. The vents at the front of its head flexed slightly; it uncrossed its legs and sat in a different posture, its right leg flat to the ground and bent to the left, curled around the other with its knee pointing up and booted foot flat to the floor. It folded its arms and rested them on its knee. Feeling my own feet going to sleep, I uncrossed my legs and leaned back against the wall, which was humming with a deep bass tone. Anyway. To cut a long story short, we got to chatting, the Bythian and me. It didn't seem to be a merciless fascistic killer, at least not from what it said; it wasn't fascinated by weapon systems or strategies or anything like that. At first, I didn't want to say anything, because I was sure it'd come over with the express purpose of interrogating me; turns out it was off-duty and had come looking for a xenoform to chat to. It was interested in aliens, and it'd heard a lot about humanity. Like most aliens, it was impressed with the things we'd done with magnetism, like static electric motors, information storage, that sort of thing. Personally, I didn't know dick about electronics; most aliens thought, he's a human, he must be an expert on magnetism and it was, usually, hard to dissuade them; this one wanted to talk about human sexuality, of all things. Apparently, all Bythians are male, and they don't have anything like love or lust or inter-species desire. It had shown me how to get served (a matter of waving your money around) and I was sipping black coffee while it inhaled steam from a flat, frisbee-shaped bowl through those vents, when another human came in, the Girl With Black Hair from the embassy. She was looking for me; she came over and told me that my currency button had arrived and was waiting for me back at the port. After she left, the Bythian asked me about her. "Do you find him attractive?" (it called all humans 'him'; gender was a distinction it understood, but couldn't get its translator to understand). "Well, yes. She's quite nice. Very attractive. Oh god yes. I want her so much, I think I'm going insane." I gnawed my knuckles for emphasis. "Why don't you mate with him?" "I don't think she likes me." It unfolded suddenly and stood, holding out a hand to me. "Come. I will ask him. then you can mate with him." I just sat there with my jaw hanging down for a few moments, and then accepted its hand. "Okay."
I was near the area I call the market (it looks like one, sort of; hundreds of rows of trestle tables underneath trees, their broad transparent leaves like green cellophane filtering the bronze light of Millimillenary's sun) when I saw it. At first, I thought it was a tall, thin human who had been burned to death; it had a vaguely human shape, charcoal black ridged surface, slumped up against a wall with its spindly legs stretched out in front of it. It was sitting on a folded Moridani blanket, tightly woven grey shaded grids, and it had what looked like a bright fluorescent sky-blue, uh, ziggurat? A truncated pyramid, whatever, sitting next to it, with tiny red fireflies crawling up and down the sides. I must have been staring, because its head turned towards me. I couldn't see any features, just a vaguely lumpy rounded shape, as if he was wearing a ski mask made of velvet, but I got a definite sense of it looking at me; the surface, its skin, looked like burned wood, cracks and cinders. I thought of a graphic story I'd read in the Archives a long time ago, about a guy who was built like a wooden puzzle, rows, columns of blocks. I imagined this character emerging from a crematorium, and he was sitting before me. A buzzing sound came from the general area of its chest, like a bottle full of blow-flies. It modulated, changed volume, then dropped to a hiss. it spoke, using the buzzing sound (this was the twentieth different translating device I'd seen; it seems that very few xenos trusted the NoSanNoOs): "Human person. Listen." I sat down on the path before it, crossed my legs and gave every appearance of paying close attention. "You survived the NoSanNoOs." I nodded. My parents had, at any rate; they had been onboard the freighters that the Moridani had stolen to ferry people off Earth, that time the NoSanNoOs had decided humanity was such a threat to the Dominion that we had to be eradicated. I was brought up on tales of how we'd been hunted halfway across the galaxy. "You are young, you were not there when they searched for you. You do not know when it changed." i nodded again; something had changed, but it was just before i was born. it was as if peace had been declared, the Bythians stopped hunting us. It was a very strange time; the mythical Moridani had walked out in the open, after thousands of years of hiding. I remember the first time I saw one; the old feelings were still there. The Moridani walked alone, and everything gave it as wide a berth as possible. I almost wanted to go up to it, take its hand and try to make it feel welcome, but my mother grabbed me and dragged me away. There was a palpable sense of, not so much hatred, but a definite air of separation, of maintaining a distance from this being. The Moridani just walked on, the crowd (this was on Syndaine, after the Separatists had left) parting smoothly before it, joining together again a discreet distance behind. "Do you know why?" "Why it changed? Not exactly... the general consensus is that the Moridani decided to stop fighting against the NoSanNoOs." A wracking spasm went through the xeno's upper body, like a dismissive laugh. "That does not explain why they stopped hunting you. Why they stopped hunting others. Why they stopped enforcing their Edicts." "True." It leaned forward, and the buzzing sound tightened somehow, became more direct and focused. "The Moridani altered the NoSanNoOs' god-machine, their NAPAI. they entered it illegally and re-wrote its inner thoughts, its basic being." "They hacked the NoSanNoOs' AI?" It waved a hand, like a bundle of blackened twigs, dismissively. "They altered it. It was done with subtlety. I helped them do it." This was said matter-of-factly, although this might have been due to inadequacies in the translator. I mean, defeat the race that ruled four-fifths of the galaxy for over thirty thousand years; no problem. "It was understood that no more races would be destroyed, that the war was over. Technological progress would no longer be restricted. It was understood that the transports would continue, that the, the framework, of the NoSanNoOs Dominion would remain in place and that the Moridani would control." I made a non-committal gesture with my chin. "So. I'm glad. It's not as if I hate the NoSanNoOs for what they did, although I would like to visit Earth one day..." The thing gestured angrily, its stick-forearm waving back and forth in agitation, buzzing loudly. "The restrictions are still in place! They are simply enforced with more care. With different emphasis. With less obvious methods. I am allowed to say this, because no-one will accept these facts." The whole thing sounded like a con, and I would have left thinking that, except at that point two Bythians came over and dragged the xeno off. They left behind the truncated pyramid. I still have it. |
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