Earth was entering its fifth year of lockdown when the jumpship Seabeam arrived at Ricellus, a dismal, uninhabited planet whose brilliant blue-white star ignited storms in its weak atmosphere. Dark plumes of dust, some as wide as a continent, billowed nearly to space as they inched imperceptibly forward. Every so often, the bowels of a gargantuan tempest would flicker with a discharge powerful enough to destroy the Seabeam, if it descended. But from the silent majesty of orbit, the immense conflagrations on the surface were merely mesmerizing, and Sawyer Kelso watched them wide-eyed from the view port in sick bay.
“Have you never left your planet?” her machine attendant asked as it removed her prostheses from storage.
“Not many of us have.”
Since it was dangerous to keep artificial gravity on a jump vessel, there was none, and Sawyer was able to float closer to the view port simply by folding her arms back. She stared down at the first alien world she had ever seen with her own eyes. She’d been disappointed at first when she’d heard the human delegation would not be stopping at Langgat, as originally planned. The Sanhaalan security company the UN hired had received cryptic intelligence that there might be plans to intercept them there, and their route was quickly changed. It had only been 40 hours, in fact, since Sawyer was woken in the middle of the night and ordered to pack. Soldiers flew her directly from a small airport in Ohio to the Cosmodrome at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where the rest of the delegation was waiting. The ceremony at the UN, scheduled to take place underground, would proceed without the very people whose departure the rest of the world was gathering to honor.
Their original transfer point, Langgat, supported a ground colony of considerable size, and Sawyer had been especially excited to see it. There was even human food, she was told, which was not common. Being the closest entry point to Earth, enough rich people from Africa and Asia visited before the lockdown that the local merchants kept a small stock of Terran edibles. Staring at the massive, flickering storms of remote Ricellus, she had a change of heart. She was glad for the detour. She couldn’t imagine the colony being nearly as spectacular.
“Does anyone go to the surface?” she asked the medical robot.
“I’m afraid not. There is nothing interesting on Ricellus.”
“Looks interesting to me . . .” she breathed. It was certainly dynamic—and beautiful, in a menacing sort of way.
The dark heart of another enormous storm flickered brightly, as if warning her of things to come.
“You should get ready,” the robot urged. “We will soon be taking a shuttle to nightship 42-773.”
Not all sentient species used sound to communicate, and even among those that did, many did not have the appropriate organs to render each other’s words, just as a human cannot make whale song. As such, long-range interstellar ships were typically given numerical designations rather than names.
“I’ve never seen a nightship either,” Sawyer said. “Will we be able to watch it exit the Strand?”
“I’m afraid not, since it has already arrived.”
“Really? Where?”
“There.” The spherical robot, carrying Sawyer’s synthetic arm in zero gravity, produced a thin appendage and pointed out the long window.
Sawyer leaned in. She hadn’t noticed another ship.
“To the right,” the assistant said. “In that space where there are no stars.”
Only vessels that refracted no light could withstand travel through the Strand, the filamentous trans-spacial tubule network, like heavily frayed twine, that arced around the leeward side of the galaxy, linking civilizations that would take years to reach by jumpship.
“I can’t see it,” she said, pressing close to the view port.
She braced herself against it with the stub of her left arm, which had been raggedly severed just below the elbow and now sported a round prosthesis jack. The image in front of her distorted and glowed at her touch.
Sawyer floated back. “This is a screen.”
“Yes,” the robot said matter-of-factly as it reattached her arm. “It is not safe to put sick bay near the hull.”
She couldn’t tell it was a screen, not even now that she knew it. It was completely realistic. Still, it was disappointing—although she couldn’t say exactly why. She had no reason to expect a window would look any different.
“Are there any real windows on board?”
“There are seventeen. Six are available to you, but I don’t think you will have time. The shuttle is already on its way. I have been ordered to get you ready for night travel.”
Without a chance to object, and without even being touched, Sawyer felt herself passing out, as if from anesthetic.
“Humans,” Alafphallaggia began ceremoniously, “are the most surprisingly average species yet discovered. By weight, they are a mere 0.2 lagats from the mean. They are split into sexes, as most sentient species are, and are bilaterally symmetrical. They are rigid and use sound to communicate. Not counting the male sexual organ, they have four appendages, which is only one less than average, and are both social and hierarchical. In fact, they bear a striking resemblance to Agiaki Kar’s famous render ‘Typicum,’ wherein she created the image of the perfect statistical mean of all known sentient races.”
A holographic image appeared in the room. To the human delegation, it did not look very human. It looked more like a cross between a giraffe and squid: long-limbed and hairless with gray skin and compound eyes. But to Allafphallaggia, who was Gnictarian, it no doubt seemed close enough. The rendered creature had a wormlike prehensile tail protruding from its rear and only three digits per limb, but it was roughly the right size, had two eyes, one mouth, was bilaterally symmetrical, and—perhaps most important of all—bipedal.
“In fact,” Allafphallaggia continued, “the only remarkable feature of your species is your wonderful deliciousness!”
The Gnictarian tycoon paused, which suggested his comment was not a translation error, as most assumed, but a joke, and the ambassador forced a chuckle. The rest of the room stayed silent.
With her synthetic hand, Sawyer tore the seal on the packet she’d been given. It seemed even the advanced alien races of the universe used a kind of paper, which was often easier and cheaper for static communications than mediating innumerable networks, many of which were explicitly built to be insular and private or else used completely incompatible logics. The material in her hand was extremely thin and felt strange. It was much softer than paper made from wood pulp. It was also extremely tear-resistant and nearly impossible to burn.
Sawyer flipped past the voluminous preamble, printed in six human languages, to the first figure: a star map marked with sixteen distinct agencies and organizations to which the people of Earth could appeal for aid. Some were clearly longshots. While the Sidereal Concordat certainly had the strength to enforce the SNAT, or Standard Non-Aggression Treaty, to which both it and Earth were signatories, it had no political or economic interests on Earth’s arm of the galaxy, which made a permanent military presence so far off the Strand a very remote possibility. There were also many on Earth, including the generals of various Asian nations who surrounded the ambassador at her table, who worried about such a large and powerful entity maintaining a permanent garrison in orbit.
“This matter would be decidedly easier,” Allafphallaggia went on from his perch at the front of the room, “if humans were an endangered species. If there were less then 50,000 of you, I guarantee we could put a stop to this immediately!”
Amid the ongoing loss of life, it was decided to put the most effort into the so-called Local Economic Supercluster, a trade organization covering 1,057 home planets and their innumerable colonies and outposts. Administration and enforcement of policy was ongoing, but the governing body, formed from a negotiated and unequal number of representatives from various interests—not just sovereign species, but also large guilds and commercial entities—only met “biannually,” or twice every galactic arcsecond (equal to approximately 173 human years). That put the next meeting 13 years away. But since the deadline for the submission of agenda items had already passed seven years before, an exemption had to be requested, and it was for that very purpose that Sawyer had been recruited. As the sole surviving victim, she bore visual testimony to the brutality of the attacks, and she was scheduled to stand before a special session of the Supercluster’s 417-member Unified Assembly Agenda Committee, which the packet explained was formed of ranking members from all Grade 1 subcommittees, as well as all 19 members of the Executive Committee. Everyone had stressed to her repeatedly that she was not expected to speak. Allafphallaggia’s lawyers—or the Gnictarian equivalent—would do all the talking. Sawyer simply had to stand there and look pitiful.
Across eight months of planing, no one had yet asked if she wanted to. In the midst of the crisis, it was just assumed that she would, for the sake of the planet. She looked around the dim room, through the holographic maps of trade routes and organizational diagrams, at all the important people: diplomats, generals, tech moguls, even a K-pop star. At the back, the faceless android warriors of the Sanhaalen stood fixed like multi-armed Hindu statues. Each was supposedly carrying enough firepower to decimate a small army. If so, they didn’t seem very menacing. In fact, their Sanhaalen guards were the only ones in the room who seemed genuinely at peace. Everyone else was worried about something.
The film crew documenting the events had caught her lack of attention, and with the camera squarely on her, Sawyer casually lowered her head and flipped through the packet, as if deeply interested in its contents.
“Since we began our journey,” Allafphallaggia continued, “another hundred or so of your kinsmen have likely been killed.” His entire mass seemed to slump. “We have to make the Committee care. That is our only job.”
They would only get one chance, he explained, so before the formal preparations there would be informal preparations, preparations for which were already underway. Their benefactor, it seemed, had thought of everything. But then, Gnictarians were supposed to be something like motile brains. Most of Allafphallaggia’s 64 appendages were small and hidden inside his Wealing Suit, which kept him from drying out in the ship’s temporary Earthlike atmosphere, but the 16 larger limbs of his body yet protruded. Several kept him upright. The rest gesticulated wildly as he spoke through the interpreter device. Gnictarian language was audio-visual. A simple array of grinding sounds indicated tense and action, while precise movement of the limbs relative to each other gave context and description. As such, Gnictarians made no distinction between poetry and dance, for to them, they were one and the same. Music was something closer to rhetoric and only rarely enjoyed as entertainment, but poetry—which is to say artistic movement—was taught almost immediately after sporulation.
Unlike the Keleuga, whose aquatic grace was interstellarly renowned, Gnictarian dance-poetry was complex and cerebral, and if Allafphallaggia’s race was famous for anything, it was not their art but their ability to regenerate—including most of their memories—from any limb of their body.
Sawyer looked down at her synthetic hand. She moved the fingers one at a time.
“—our ace in the hole,” Allafphallaggia said as all eyes in the room turned to her. “What do you say?” he asked her. “Would you be willing to stand naked before the committee?”
It was believed there were no survivors, that all of those taken had been killed. Sawyer’s experience seemed to confirm it. In order to preserve freshness during transport, processing was instantaneous, similar to how fish were often filleted and frozen on the same factory ship that caught them. But that belief was more dogma than fact. While no one had any direct evidence to the contrary, it could never be proved that some people hadn’t been left alive to seed one or more breeding farms. Although most experts agreed this was unlikely, especially given a nine-month gestation, the thought of it had provoked so many articles and stories—even a horrific TV miniseries in which a man living a near-pornographic virtual fantasy, every day impregnating as many beautiful women as he could, experiences a glitch that reveals the terrible truth—that eventually the repetition of “There are no human breeding farms” became something closer to a ritual chant, invoked as if to make it true. Was it possible that some captives were lobotomized and insemination was artificial? Or were semi-conscious human meat clones grown quickly in enormous vats, analogous to commercial fish farms? No one could say.
“How are you feeling today?” Allafphallaggia asked as he approached the shuttle that was to take them across the planet. As always, their silent android bodyguards were not far away.
Since neither Sawyer nor Allafphallaggia could breathe the planet’s atmosphere, both wore Wealing Suits that covered them in a barely visible film. It looked like fluid but was in fact an incredibly strong membrane. Sawyer had not been that close to Allafphallaggia before and noticed for the first time that his many appendages were studded in clusters of fine hairs, like cactus needles. Colored striations ran between them, like the irregular paths of burrowing beetles. She peered into the deep dark of his eyes, which floated free in the fluid of his body. They didn’t seem like eyes at all in fact, but black organs of mysterious purpose. She wondered if perhaps the tissue served multiple functions, as the liver did in humans.
“Don’t worry,” he said, sensing her apprehension. “With hope and luck, all will go well today.”
“Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Of course not.”
“Why do you care? I mean, you’re a very important person,” she added quickly. “Important enough to arrange a meeting like this. Why do you care what happens to some strange species on the far edge of the galaxy?”
“I have been asked that many times,” he said, gyrating wistfully. “You must understand that my species reproduces by fusing buds together. This produces a hybrid spore that is almost immediately conscious. Sex and birth are one. We can do it asexually—and there’s a certain large religious sect who believe that’s the only proper way. But then, they also believe that because there’s been so much mixing through the eons, we’re all degenerate and it hardly matters—except as an act of faith. Most of us do it together, happily. In fact, technology now allows us to reproduce with multiple parents. There are Gnictarians with three parents—even four or five, I’m told.
“The point is, although we’re predatory, we’ve always been much closer to each other than are the individuals of your kind. No offense, of course. But our biology has had a certain effect on our social development. We adopted wealth sharing very early, for example, and for the last thousand or so of your years, none of my people have had to work. This was not the catastrophe that some expected. In fact, most of us still choose to work and are all the more enthusiastic for it.
“I only bring it up to explain that something happens after a long period of living like that. Society itself changes. I won’t go so far as to say the struggle for sex and status goes away, but it does wane among a certain segment of the population, and other considerations come to the fore. We start to care less about waving our banners and more about our legacies.
“The ambassador explained to me on our flight that there were humans in Earth’s history who were not of the enslaved races but who advocated strongly for abolition of slavery. I suppose it is something like that. What is happening to your people is a terrible crime. I’m ashamed that these are the circumstances by which you all have entered the community of races. And since I am unlikely to die for several centuries yet, I’d like to see if there’s something I can do about it! So I suppose you might say it’s ego.” Allafphallaggia laughed.
Sawyer was close enough that she could hear both the translated, human-sounding laugh as well as the real one—a rhythmic gnashing of Allafphallaggia’s teeth plates very reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard—and she smiled as best she could while struggling to suppress an involuntary shudder.
Fortunately, the noise was soon drowned by the approach of a caravan. The ambassador arrived, and after exchanging pleasantries, everyone boarded the shuttle. From the air, the planet looked like one continuous hilly park punctuated irregularly by immense tower complexes that reached into low orbit. The surface was almost entirely covered in a continuous manicured lawn that stretched between the deep artificial canyons from which innumerable offices and dwellings hung. Absolutely none of it belonged to the Local Economic Supercluster. They merely rented space on Proebdus, along with half a million other treaty organizations, trade associations, nongovernmental agencies, intergovernmental agencies, think tanks, research institutes, and companies of all kinds, both public and private. It was a bureaucratic haven. There was a small population of natives, but they were not indigenous. There was no indigenous life, apparently, which was why the planet had been lightly terraformed at some point in its past and why nothing grazed on the endless miles of rolling green carpet.
Still, the natives had been so long ago settled that no one remembered where they came from. Genetic analysis suggested they were descended from a now-extinct race of cephalopods that had originated halfway across the galaxy, but if so, no one had any idea how they could’ve arrived on Proebdus so long before discovery of the Strand, nor why their technology was limited to what on Earth would be called early-20th century. It was a mystery, and one Sawyer would’ve liked to investigate—or at least to see—but the delegation’s schedule was set and it seemed the closest she would get was the detour they were taking to an open-air market in the old sector, some 800 kilometers to the northwest, where Allafphallaggia had arranged a photo opportunity to highlight the plight of the human race. It was his hope that a snippet of footage would run on the news ahead of any reports on their testimony from later that day.
The shuttle landed near one of the space towers. Looking up from the landing bay, Sawyer could almost see the docking ring, a massive hemispherical disc resting near-weightless at the top of the enormous column, but the violet Proebdan sky was too hazy to reveal much detail. She did, however, catch a glimpse of the dark, angular Sanhaalen gunship that had apparently been escorting them from high above.
Allafphallaggia led the delegation like a tour guide. They stretched in a chain behind him as they walked along a narrow canal and into the old market. Sawyer had been told to stay behind the generals, but since no one had specified how far, she let herself drift toward the back. Gravity on Proebdus was weaker than on Earth, and she felt certain she could leap over the canal without much effort. But then what? If Allafphallaggia was to be believed, every one of them was a potential target. He had definitely prepared for the worst. The security was unbelievable. It seemed as if every one of the Sanhaalen androids she had seen on the Seabeam had been cloned a dozen or more times, and they formed a biomechanical barrier around the rectangular market, which they were told had been thoroughly scanned for weapons.
Unlike the narrow artificial canyons that meandered across most of the planet’s surface, the squat natural canyon that held the old town was shallow and nearly a mile wide. The structures of the nearby town were visible from the market only as dark shapes poking over the spikes of the “trees,” which had been imported along with every other living thing. The market sat in a depression in the land and was dim. Its dark-metal stalls looked more like something out of colonial Spain than the lost culture of an alien planet. But then, Sawyer supposed, there were only so many ways to economically cast metal into a shelter.
The film crew was already waiting to record the tour, and as the delegation walked down the ramp, floating cameras moved over them, recording their reactions. There was much to take in. The diverse nature of the planet’s business meant that the market sold an unusual variety of foods from around the galaxy. Allafphallaggia stood back and let the delegation be filmed as they wandered in small groups. Samples of fruits and vegetables and things that were not fruits or vegetables were offered at many of the stalls, and some of the delegation were braver than others. Sawyer’s favorite were the betel nuts, which looked somewhat like walnut-sized coconuts but were much easier to peel. Under layers of fibrous husk was a hollow nut encasing a squirming grub. A lobster-sized species of soft-shelled crustacean used a stinger to implant their fertilized eggs inside the green buds of the betel plant, which it also defended. As the nuts ripened, the husks hardened, and the eggs hatched. The grubs ate the nutmeat from the inside, protected by the hard shell, until they were large enough to emerge and fly away. Betel nuts were an Ixct delicacy and popular holiday gift, and they were often boxed like chocolates. If chewed quickly, Sawyer discovered, the unpleasant sensation of a live grub in the mouth could be avoided, and it seemed more like the nuts contained a cream filling vaguely reminiscent of peanut butter. The nutmeat itself was fairly bland but contained a small amount of psychoactive stimulant, as did the leaves of the plant from which it grew, which had been chewed as an analgesic in the time before advanced medicine.
It was surprising, the ambassador explained to Sawyer, how similar clusters of molecules tended to have psychoactive effects on completely diverse species.
She was a prim, smartly dressed, uptight Indian woman, and Sawyer was surprised to note a slight flushing at her temples.
These effects were not identical, the ambassador was quick to note. Gnictarians, for example, had an extreme reaction to betel nuts, whereas she’d read that a few other species had no reaction at all. But for the most part, if a compound was psychoactive on one planet, it was highly likely to be elsewhere as well, which suggested that consciousness, despite its various manifestations across the universe, relied on some base physical characteristics.
“Don’t you think?” she asked Sawyer before peeling and chewing another nut.
The pair of them had had too many, Sawyer decided. The ambassador was getting gabby, and Sawyer was fighting the urge to giggle at the woman, who was getting high on an alien planet only hours before they were scheduled to testify in a last-ditch effort to save the species.
That urge to laugh faded quickly as Allafphallaggia revealed his big surprise. He pulled a tarp from a refrigerated box that displayed one half of a woman’s torso, single breast and all, along with several select cuts from her loins. A hush took the delegation as Sawyer’s Wealing Suit visually translated the sign over the box, which described the contents as “Fatty Human” and “98% Organic.” The sign also promised that any quantity of the meat could be ground for a small surcharge. Suddenly, she wanted to toss the bag of betel nuts she’d bought. She began to feel sick.
“The horror!” Allafphallaggia said. “We see it now as clear as starlight!”
He was laying it on a bit thick, she thought, especially since it was highly likely that to him the butchered corpse looked no different than the cormark meat did to her. (Cormark, she had learned four stalls back, was a kind of multi-armed flying grazer that tasted remarkably like chicken.)
All of the cameras were now focused on Allafphallaggia.
“Here goes any one of us,” he said gravely, pointing to the quartered corpse, “but for our lack of deliciousness.”
“KEELTHI FREEDOM NOW!” an alien shouted before exploding over the market.
Everyone ducked, but it was too late. All those nearby, including Sawyer and the ambassador, were splattered with red-violet Keelthi plasm, which stained both clothes and skin. Fearing an additional threat, a complement of Sanhaalen androids teleported into a circle around the delegation, rifles ready, as most of the market flickered and disappeared. Only the delegation, the androids, a handful of aliens, and a smattering of their wares remained. Everything else had been a hologram, including the human corpse and the three rows of stalls at the back, which apparently did not exist and had been added for effect—to make the market seem bigger and more bustling than it was. In truth, it was a damp, decrepit place and nothing like the vibrant photo opportunity Allafphallaggia and the delegation needed to make an impression on the cosmos.
A small crowd from the old town had gathered at the barrier, and jeers started immediately. A line of aliens of seemingly every possible color and shape pushed against the android wall, which didn’t budge. But they weren’t protesting. They were laughing. As the delegation was hurried back to the waiting shuttle, the angular gunship appeared overhead, as if anticipating trouble. The crowd quieted to a whisper as its shadow fell over them. From the look on her face, Sawyer guessed the ambassador had been in on the ruse. She seemed more disappointed than angry. She was also stumbling slightly, and Sawyer held her arm, which she quickly removed. The betel nuts were wearing off. Dizziness was a common side effect.
Sawyer wiped slime from her face and arms and was thankful her Wealing Suit had prevented her skin from permanently turning an awful shade of red. Responding to a verbal query, her suit explained in words and pictures that the Keelthi were a mostly harmless species of sentient kelp who evolved under conditions of extreme seasonal variability and who underwent an uncontrollable urge to self-immolate whenever their numbers reached a certain size, the same way lemmings will sometimes throw themselves over a cliff or cells in the body will undergo apoptosis for the good of the whole. In a modern context, the urge was maladaptive, and most Keelthi fought it. But just as some humans succumbed to the compunction to over-eat or engaged in risky behavior for sex, immolation was both part of the Keelthi genome and part of their culture. They didn’t even need explosives. They simply inflated an internal elastic sac by gulping air until it finally ruptured with heat and force. According to whatever public database the suit had accessed, the Keelthi were not oppressed, but it was true they did not have a representative government, for every such institution had failed at one time or another in a bout of imitative immolation, and so a council of stable alien races was appointed to oversee Keelthi affairs. Of course, that didn’t stop a handful of zealots from believing in conspiracy and detonating themselves in public places across the galaxy.
“It was the cameras,” Allafphallaggia explained from the front. He had extended his appendages so that he was standing tall over everyone. “I must apologize. We should’ve known better. Publicity acts as a kind of trigger. We’re never the same when we’re watched!”
As she passed near the android barrier, Sawyer caught enough of an echo that her translator module could render some of the alien whispers.
“Humans?” one of them asked. “They eat humans, don’t they?”
The massive charcoal-colored spheres that held the central offices of the Local Economic Supercluster hung weightless over the planet’s surface, moving ever-so-slowly around each other like a giant armless orrery. From a distance, it was clear there was some significance to the dance. The paths of the spheres were not circular, for one. Some appeared to change direction as they drifted up or down. But to Sawyer, standing underneath and craning her head, the meaning was as impenetrable as the hazy sky above, through which one could never see the stars, even at night.
Simply earning the chance to argue their case before the Supercluster’s Unified Agenda Committee had been a major victory for the delegation, who were hampered significantly by events of the year before. A group of fundamentalists from Texas, fleeing the attacks they believed were orchestrated by Satan, established a religious colony on what they were told was an uninhabited planet. While struggling their first season to establish self-sufficiency, they had accidentally eaten a contingent of Noor, a species of neural sponges, who had been planted on the planet a generation earlier for exactly the same reason. The hive was a kind of monastery then entranced in a three-decade-long meditation. Stories spread among various indigenous social networks describing how the brutal “Xians,” as they were abbreviated, had meticulously dismembered each Noor one at a time, so as not to wake the entire colony, and then boiled and eaten them after their own insufficient food stores had run out. A handful of aliens, after perusing brief encyclopedia entries on Earth’s history, pointed out that Xian humans apparently had a long history of slaughtering their own race over such burning questions as the appropriate age to sprinkle their offspring with magic water, which was seen in some circles as de facto proof of their guilt.
A few more enlightened souls suggested the human colonists were more clueless than brutal and had no idea the sponges were sentient. Nor did they have any way of communicating since the Noor speak in inaudible electric pulses. The reason the Christians killed them one at a time, they argued, was not to cover their misdeeds but simply out of expediency. An individual Noor was roughly five meters around while humans a mere fraction of that. Furthermore, it was argued, a handful of individuals, acting out of ignorance, should not be allowed to damn an entire species—or if so, all species would be damned. The human race needed assistance rather than condemnation, especially if they were ever to be more than barbarians.
Whatever the truth, the damage was done. That a group of humans, ignorant or not, could prosecute the very same crime from which they now sought protection raised the specter of doubt: Perhaps they were “just as bad.” After reading the jokes and picture arguments that circulated the galaxy, which pointed out that humans yet ate intelligent creatures on their own planet, the relatively few sentient creatures aware of the issue either didn’t know what to think or simply didn’t care. It was a human problem. Let them solve it.
After waiting for several hours under the casually floating spheres, the delegation was told that the Unified Agenda Committee would not meet that day since key members had been called away on urgent business. No reschedule was proposed. Rather, the delegation was told to return the following day (equal to almost five on Earth) on the chance there might be an opening.
Sawyer used the time to see more of the planet and catch up on the news, which had arrived, somewhat late, in a data dump via transmission pod—large pyramidal devices that carried and passed encrypted packets back and forth through the Strand. It was not nearly as bad as she expected. There had been no new attacks, for one. Many observers on Earth were speculating the pirates were deliberately holding back so that it would appear their actions did not warrant retaliation by any agency large enough to thwart them. Meanwhile, the entire planet remained in lockdown. China reported progress on a missile defense, although critics suggested that while the new projectiles might at last be able to strike the swiftly-moving extraction pods—in fair weather conditions, at least—none had sufficient force to pierce a ten-meter-thick block of concrete, which was assumed to be kinetically equivalent to the pods’ alien hull.
There were still unconfirmed reports that the Gömböc, the alien anti-cruelty volunteers who occasionally patrolled the solar system, had shot down an extraction pod over the Sea of Japan, but all attempts to contact the Japanese still failed. Their entire archipelago was silent. After announcing their plan to retreat underground two years before, no one had heard a word. It was assumed that since so much of the megapolises of the Kansai and Kanto regions were already a maze of subway tunnels and passages—including GCANS, the largest cistern ever built—the Japanese had simply moved their declining population inside. How or what they ate or what they did with their waste, no one knew. The handful of ships and travelers who made it to the islands described a desolate paradise: quiet villages, temples left perfectly preserved, enormous sprawling cities eerily silent.
But then, most major cities on the Earth were quiet and had been so since the initial days of the Surge, as the sudden increase in attacks was called, when hundreds of people were taken over a course of several months. Critics still grumbled that twice as many people died from food poisoning as from aliens and that didn’t stop people from eating out. The difference, others suggested, was that everyone had some measure of control over what they ate, whereas the alien pirates and their extraction pods were lifting children from schoolyards and commuters from their cars.
In fact, there had been almost no reaction at first. It was assumed there would be a military solution. Armies were deployed across the world, launching many of their commanders to a level of international notoriety not seen since the Napoleonic Age. Very quickly, however, people realized that the pods’ advanced technology made them almost impossible to defeat. They could move at supersonic speeds through the air without causing sonic booms and yet still change their course on a dime. The filamentous black tendrils, both sticky and contractile, that stretched from their undercarriages could pull half a dozen people at a time and store close to three dozen before having to return to the mothership to unload. Their attacks had been opportunistic and stretched across the globe. Almost no country had been spared. But over time, they gradually became centered on Europe and North America, and for a very specific reason. Just as humans particularly prized the roe of a certain kind of sturgeon, often paying more for it than an equivalent weight in gold, Homo sapiens of European descent were worth up to three times the average. They were softer, for one, having abandoned physical activity generations earlier than the other races on the planet. They were among the larger variants of their species—important when selling by the pound—and had a higher fat content than people in Asia and Africa. They were also more likely to be organically fed and to live alone or in small groups, which made them easier to procure. But more than anything, it was their skin. Pale skin browned nicely. A roasted European was simply more appetizing when turning on a spit.
That was meant to be Sawyer’s fate. She had been replacing an encryption node at the top of a tall communications tower. The box had been damaged in a thunderstorm, and attempts to fix it by drone had failed three times. Since most communities had retreated into bunkers or other dwellings stout enough to repel the black tendrils, which could squeeze through the smallest gaps, a failing coms tower put families and small towns at risk of being cut off, unable to ask for medicine or aid. It also inhibited remote control of any nearby robotic farm equipment, and since robots grew all of the food, that jeopardized supply. The tower had to be repaired. So Sawyer volunteered.
Truth was, she hadn’t wanted to. She wasn’t a hero, even though the press made her out to be. She was 19 and just as scared as anyone. But looking around the room at all the technicians capable of swapping an encryption node, she realized they all had families. Children. Sawyer had a brother, but they weren’t close. She had a few cousins in Pittsburgh, but they hadn’t spoken in years. So after a moment’s hesitation, she raised her hand.
The paradox of going outside was that it was significantly less dangerous if everyone did it. Statistically, the odds of being taken when the surface of the planet was largely empty were much, much higher than when people simply went about their lives as normal. But once the attacks were recognized for what they were and news agencies reported on the response, including the fear that kept many indoors, others soon followed, on and on like a bank run until almost no one went outside unless they absolutely had to. As her team began preparations, Sawyer expected to feel terrified, but as they settled on the practicalities, she was surprised to find she wasn’t very nervous after all. They weren’t opting for a repair. She would simply swap the modules and be done. The tower in question rose several hundred feet over the mostly flat landscape of western Ohio. From that vantage, she was sure she’d be able to see an extraction pod coming. If one did, her employer had a plan. A tarp would be stretched under an open hatch under the tower. If she felt herself to be in danger, she only had to let go and the crew below would catch her. They even did several practice falls ahead of the excursion.
But she hadn’t seen the pod coming. It had simply moved too fast, dropping out of the clear blue sky right over her head. She barely had time to detach her safety harness before the filamentous black web of black tendrils grabbed her in midair and the drone jetted away. Normally, those filaments were quite dexterous, but in her case they had somehow got tangled in her harness, and after she was sucked swiftly inside the pod, the automated saws that appeared to dissect her alive nicked a black filament and everything retracted suddenly, as if the drone pods were alive and could feel pain. Sawyer imagined it was a bit like biting your tongue. A failsafe was instantly triggered, and after catching a glimpse of the others, quartered and stored, she was dumped out a side hatch. But rather than falling to her death, she landed in Lake Michigan—alive. Her magnetic work boots, it was later suggested by an analyst on TV, had broken the surface tension of the water and probably saved her life.
Luckily, all pods in Earth proximity were closely tracked and monitored as part of an international effort to develop an early warning system. Her ejection was noticed by a technician at Strategic Air Command, and a rescue crew—volunteers from the Chicago Coast Guard—scrambled immediately. When they found her body floating just under the surface, her left arm had been severed below the elbow, except for a small flap of skin which kept it tethered as it bobbed in the waves. Her neck, torso, and right leg were badly mangled. (The latter was later amputated.) She was bleeding internally and had a severe brain hemorrhage from the sudden change in air pressure on the pod’s initial ascent. It took two years, 37 surgeries, and a small fortune to rebuild her. But she was the sole survivor of the terror that afflicted the species. The whole world was intent on bringing her back.
The headlines that ran over her picture in numerous publications simply said: The Volunteer. Out of thousands missing, no one else had been so lucky.
The Local Economic Supercluster’s Unified Assembly Agenda Committee met inside a giant spherical chamber, not unlike a concert hall. Allafphallaggia and select members of the human delegation stood on the floor at the bottom, visible to all—but only barely. While the representatives settled in their seats or joined the meeting remotely, a glasslike sphere lowered from the ceiling, and Sawyer was invited to step inside. She was completely naked. Both of her prosthetics had been removed, and in lieu of standing without half of one leg, she was propped up by some kind of energy field. She wasn’t constricted, but if she moved too much, a scaly-skinned technician warned her, she would fall. It was better if she relaxed. She tried, with little success, as the sphere rose to the center of the space, near the top, where a hologram appeared in the air next to her. It was supposed to represent what she looked like before the attack, for reference, but it didn’t look quite right. Whoever created it had apparently taken a few liberties. She had a baby’s clear skin that looked almost swollen, especially her face, as if she’d bathed in Botox. And her hair was longer than it ever had been. It was also blue, which was apparently a popular color.
After a brief introduction, Allafphallaggia’s lawyers were given the floor, and they began a presentation, whose exhibits Sawyer could see in holographic relief inside each of the virtual chambers that lined the inside of the spherical hall. The committee was told that no one knew exactly how it started, but that humans had been taken at least since the 18th century. There were speculations that a pirate vessel stranded on Earth may have killed a human, accidentally or on purpose, and that a member of the crew ate of the flesh—perhaps because they were hungry, perhaps on a dare—and found it pleasant. But such stories, of which there were several, were impossible to verify. What is certain is that by the 20th century of the Earth calendar, reports of “flying saucers” were widespread on the planet, and odds bits of human meat could be found at specialty dispensaries around the galaxy, akin to a butcher keeping an occasional stock of elk or boar. It would be another 150 years before a chef on Ataxia Prime, looking to experiment, used human buttock in a kind of flambe. Gourmands took note, and from there began a slow, steady climb in popularity.
It was then that the lawyers were interrupted for the first time. They would never get a chance to finish their presentation. One of the committee members countered that under no possible definition of the word could human meat be called “popular.” Allafphallaggia’s own team had apparently estimated that the market accounted for less than one-hundred-thousandth of one percent of sentient life. That meant 99.99999 percent of all self-aware beings—basically, everyone!—had no interest in eating any sentient creature, human or otherwise. Turning to its fellow members, the representative asked why the committee was even bothering with the issue when there were so many more pressing matters to discuss.
Exactly! Allafphallaggia’s lawyers said. 99.99999 percent of all sentient beings would never eat a human. But with something like 7.8 quadrillion sentient beings in the galaxy, that still meant there were 780 million potential customers. If each only consumed half a kilogram of human meat “as a treat on special occasions,” the species would be extinct before the next legislative session. It was a genocide in the making!
“Balderdash!” another representative replied, noting that not all self-aware beings ate meat. Surely the human race had longer than that.
“Not all, but most,” a vegetarian representative countered.
“What would you have us do?” one minister cried in exasperation.
“Give us the ability to defend ourselves!” yelled an Earth general.
Allafphallaggia immediately rose to clarify what he knew would be an incendiary statement, but the room had already erupted in shouts.
“We’re not going to give a warlike species—”
“Warlike?” the ambassador exclaimed.
“Yes! Our records show that up to the present, there have been zero days in your recorded history where one group of your species was not warring with another. Zero! I’ll have you know there are several species in the galaxy where the exact opposite is true, which means that however you want to define the continuum, Homo sapiens definitely falls on the negative end.”
“I would like to add,” the mining guild representative blustered, “that many of us in this room were alive when your species was buying and selling each other as slaves. Suddenly you would have us believe that you—you’ve—” He started laughing so hard then that he couldn’t finish his thought.
“Is it not also true,” another member interjected, “that there was a publicity stunt before the scheduled session wherein holograms and other deceptions were used to make it look as though human meat were sold on this very planet?”
“The matter is irrelevant,” suggested still another. “I see here an extraction drone was recently shot down over Earth. Clearly, they are already capable of defending themselves and this is just—”
“Shot by the Gömböc!” Allafphallaggia yelled from his seemingly tiny podium on the floor, “not by the humans.”
“Even better. That keeps such weaponry out of the hands—”
“NO!” Sawyer yelled.
Her voice echoed, despite having no amplification. Her position near the top of the sphere apparently was enough to carry it throughout, and for a moment everyone stood silently shocked. She didn’t know if that was because she was human or a display piece.
“That’s not right,” she said, much softer.
It was the last thing she was allowed to utter as the platform that displayed her body to the assembly swiftly rose through a hole that had opened in the ceiling.
“Well . . . That was a disaster.”
The ambassador, peeling a betel nut, moped in the corner of the shuttle, which was ascending to the nightship that would take them to Elsarius, where they would board another for Langgat, where the Seabeam was waiting to jump them home. No one had said it. They had all been politely supportive, in fact. But Sawyer could tell they were angry at her over the outburst, which had effectively ended all deliberations. Allafphallaggia and his team had spent the next week trying to get another audience, but to no avail. Nor would any other agency on Proebdus agree to meet them after word of the session spread. The expedition was a bust.
“The attacks have resumed,” a Chinese general noted grimly. His glasses hung at the end of his nose as he read his portable screen.
“Where?” someone at the back asked.
“Did a data dump come through?” someone else added.
“Denmark,” the general said. “Apparently an entire family was pulled from their van.”
“Why were they even out?”
“They were on their way to a funeral,” an aide noted, looking at her own screen.
Sawyer stood. “Stop the ship.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
“Stop the ship,” she repeated.
“What for?” the general asked sarcastically. “We’re done. This is it.”
“I’m going back.”
“To do what?”
Sawyer paused. “I don’t know.”
“What is it you hope to accomplish?” the ambassador asked from the corner.
“I don’t know,” she insisted. “But I’m going back. Please ask the pilot to set us down.”
“Young lady, I can’t—”
“I know the risks,” she said. “They won’t take me here. There are defensive grids. And even if they did, it would be the worst for their cause. It’s one thing when all this happens out in a spiral arm of the galaxy. It’s another if it’s right in everyone’s back yard. So take me back. It’s my choice.”
“I don’t think you understand. This is not a tour group. This is an expeditionary force, a UN delegation. There are rules—”
Everyone felt the ship turning.
The ambassador touched the intercom and asked what was happening.
“We’re being recalled,” the pilot said.
“By whom?” the ambassador demanded.
“No idea. But I have orders to land.”
Everyone on the transport looked to Sawyer, who was still standing, as if somehow she had somehow willed it, but she was just as perplexed as the rest.
“I have great news!” Allafphallaggia declared from the landing pad. “We have reached a compromise!”
“Compromise?” the ambassador asked.
“Yes! I told you I would keep working, and I did. I was able to meet with a few of the senior committee members in private this morning. I used your departure as an excuse to create some urgency. I hope you don’t mind. But it was a success!”
“We’re on the docket?”
“No word yet, but our paperwork is in order and it will be considered. No, this is much better. The Supercluster has agreed to enforce a thousand-human annual cull!”
Everyone seemed confused, which stymied Allafphallaggia, who expected them to be ecstatic.
“Is that not great news?” he asked.
“You’re saying they’ve made the trade legal,” the ambassador clarified.
“Yes! Isn’t that fantastic? Now it is a matter that can be regulated. With some effort, we should be able to lower that number in a few years.”
“Years?” Sawyer yelled.
“Yes. I know how that might seem, but we’re playing the long game here. The worst result was for them to turn us away on standing. The only way we could get them involved was by making it a commercial issue. Don’t you see? This is a success! The chaos of the committee convinced the ranking members that they had to take direct action. Our next priority will be to reduce the cull and get ourselves on the docket for the next general assembly.”
“In thirteenyears!” Sawyer exclaimed. “You’re talking about hunting quotas on people.”
“You have to understand how much easier it will be because of this to get them to ban it all later. Before today, it was not a matter they had any interest in at all.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Allafphallaggia seemed hurt by the unanimous lack of excitement.
“Perhaps Allafphallaggia is right,” the ambassador said, clearly working through the implications in her head. “We may be able to turn this to our advantage.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Sawyer demanded.
“I’m sorry you are disappointed,” Allafphallaggia added. “But this way there will be far fewer deaths than—”
“By sacrificing the few to save the many!”
“That may be the best we can do,” the ambassador said.
Sawyer wasn’t sure anyone believed that. She expected the ambassador was more worried about her career. No result was the worst kind. Compared to most planets, Earth did not have a large economy. The delegation had been organized at great cost. To return with absolutely nothing would question the wisdom, certainly the efficacy, of sending the ambassador and her people in the first place. There were no shortage of critics, and it was simply not possible to spin an absence of a result into a success. On the other hand, while the people of Earth would probably not react well to a cull, it was also possible the mechanisms of government could convince them to accept it as a necessary evil, especially if it allowed the planet to end the lockdown. For the important men and women staring blankly at Sawyer on the landing pad, that chance was better than no chance at all.
“Maybe more will die the other way,” she said. “But at least we’d be standing together, not tossing people to the wolves so that the rest of us can feel safe! Tell me, Ambassador, how much are you and your family at risk? Or any of you?”
“If you’re suggesting racist motivations simply because we’re not European—”
“Only someone who sees people as—as chess pieces would even contemplate this! You should be ashamed. All of you. You should be ashamed.”
Sawyer Kelso did not return to Earth. She never heard what excuse was given. Perhaps they told everyone she was dead. After some struggles that saw her serve time in a Kaelish prison for vagrancy, she was able to connect with the Gömböc, which was not what they called themselves. Rather, the translator program used the English name for their symbol: a three-dimensional geometric shape capable of righting itself no matter how perturbed. She had only one condition for enlisting. She would not be assigned to Earth. That was no problem, she was told, since visits to Earth were now restricted. Almost overnight, it had become one of the safest planets in the galaxy.
The following year, Sawyer quit in protest when the Gömböc refused to defend a group of Sanhaalen forcibly disarmed by a mob after they were accused (but not charged or convicted) of war crimes. She settled in a remote farming colony on the far side of the Strand, and while traveling off-world for medicines and supplies, she had a moment of weakness and searched for “Earth” at the starport news kiosk.
According to several sources, a thousand people had just been approved to sacrifice themselves in the 2nd Annual Human Cull. A consortium of commercial interests had been established to execute the sole grant of legal rights to wholesale human meat, which was then trading at over eight thousand qudits per lagat—five hundred times its already exorbitant pre-cull high. Now that it was legal, it seemed many more beings wanted a taste, and the ability to afford human became something of a status symbol. Since the consortium paid the families of each human volunteer a small fortune for their sacrifice, the deluded, the desperate, and the dying used the cull as a kind of life insurance, or simply as a way to be remembered, and very quickly there were more volunteers than space. An alien selection committee was created, which introduced a grading scale. Flesh was scored on nine factors and given a composite rating from AAA to C. Once the scheme was published, organic food sales surged, and parents demanded it for their children. The leaders of several poor nations, who took at least half of each paid fortune in taxes, suggested increasing the cull to as many as 5,000 per year, although the Local Economic Supercluster, fearing market instability, was not ready to comment on the possibility.
The lockdown had not only ended, Sawyer saw images of a vibrant Earth. The well-to-do were shopping in Brunei and sunning themselves on the Fiji islands and jetting to work in expensive imported alien aircars. A record number of shuttles were once again flying between the major cities of Africa and Asia. A Human Zoo had been opened in Shanghai, which had taken the lead catering to the small but increasing number of alien tourists who came to marvel at the sentient race that let its own kind be eaten. The Hall of Human Misery, a 40,000 square-meter interactive exhibit catering to alien tourists of all sizes, was expected to open in Macau the following year, next to a casino. The Unified Agenda Committee, meanwhile, had found an error in the delegation’s paperwork, and the question of the cull was removed from the upcoming general assembly, pending an appeal.
The news segment ended with the chairman of the consortium declaring the cull “a momentous step toward ending cruelty everywhere.”
It was Allafphallaggia.