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"Tina!"
"Is that her name?"
"Yes! What about this Slych? You have to tell me." Kozue found herself running up to the male, planting her feet and folding her arms as though she would accept nothing other than exactly what she wanted. If these creatures were an exaggeration of human men, as she thought, this trick was sure to get the job done.
"About Slych?" the male asked, fingers now crawling almost nervously over the bedspread.
"About Slych," Kozue confirmed. "Is he a gentle man? Does he hurt females? Is he kind to them?"
"Slych has many concubines."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"He doesn't hurt them. He does what he wants to them. But he doesn't want to hurt them."
"Okay." Kozue nodded. "I can live with that. What about you?"
"About me?"
"Yes, about you. Are you like Slych? Do you have concubines?"
"No." He turned and started pressing on the pillow, as though testing its firmness, then stopped suddenly as though realizing something and looked back at her. "Your name?"
"You're asking for my name?"
"Yes."
"You first."
He smiled. "Amnay."
"Amnay," she repeated. "It's good to meet you. To stand before you as an equal entity and, perhaps, a new friend. My name is Kozue. Sometimes my friends call me Kozy."
"Kozy," he said. He seemed to like the name. "But I will call you Kozue, for now. Until we are friends."
Chapter Two
Over the next few days, the room grew fuller and fuller with belongings old and new. Everything from Kozue's room on the ship was brought in, and Amnay also brought her familiar items from the ship's mess hall. A tray, a coffee cup, a crateful of dehydrated rations. He brought her something of his own culture, too. She took to calling it her magic bucket, for obvious reasons. When she put water in it, it was heated to boiling in less than a minute, but the bucket itself was never hot to the touch.
Though Amnay never came right out and said it, Kozue got the feeling that she shouldn't leave her room. Whenever she mentioned exploring the ship on her own, Amnay became visibly nervous and made some excuse as to why she couldn't.
But in every other way, she was made to feel like a princess. Amnay gave her guided tours of various areas of the ship, doing his best to explain them. He constantly pestered her with questions and tended to her needs with the eagerness of a slave. Or someone who had never been loved.
But he was never overbearing in a creepy way. He never made a sexual advance. There were many times as she changed her clothes or bent down to grab something that he let his eyes wander over her. This didn't bother her; she had long since accepted that male eyes would always explore her body and that it didn't necessarily reflect the character of the male doing the exploring.
On the third day of her stay in the ship — she no longer felt quite right about calling it captivity, since she had come here willingly — Amnay brought her by a circuitous, confusing route to the hall of pillars. They walked for a time in silence. Every now and then, Amnay would stop to study a particular scene. When Kozue reached out to touch one of the pillars, he gently but firmly pushed her hand back to her side.
"They are old," he said. "Very old. We can't touch them. Even the oil from our skin would damage them in some way."
Kozue nodded. She looked around. The floor was one big, grated expanse. The ceiling, too. A flow of cool, dry air constantly flowed from floor to ceiling, carrying away all dust, moisture, or other particulate before it could settle on the ancient stone of the pillars.
"I won't touch, I promise," Kozue said. "Can you tell me about the scenes?"
"There are too many to memorize. I like to come here and pick out a few to research. But this one is special. It's important."
He crouched by the pillar, holding his breath as he leaned in to read a tag of paper or plastic or some other material that had been stuck to a flat spot on the stone. It held a series of alien characters.
"I take these numbers," Amnay said, "and I go to the library. There is a story for each pillar in our volumes there. Some of the stories are very long. Others take up a single sentence."
"It's like a museum," she said. "A three-dimensional history lesson."
Amnay nodded and looked up at her. She read in his expression, so transparent now that he trusted her, a look of sadness. She had only seen such a face once before. Her mother had worn it as they stood beside her father's coffin and watched it descend into the earth.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
Amnay didn't answer. She was able to hear her own words, translated and emitted in a deep male voice. She found that she was already learning the cadence of the language. She didn't know each individual word, or what order they came in, but she could now sense the separations between words. As miniscule as they were.
It was the first step in the task of learning the language. Kozue had learned Spanish, at least to a workable extent, in three weeks. French had taken her a month and a half. But this language that Amnay spoke was, in the purest sense, alien. It could be her fastest project yet, or it might take her a decade. There was no way to tell until she started building a real foundation with it.
They walked among the pillars for a time. Amnay took down a half dozen numbers. Finally satisfied, he turned to Kozue and said, "Now we research."
She followed him. Again, he took them by a route that seemed purposely planned to be as convoluted as possible. Some day she would ask him about that, but she didn't want to spoil the tiny bud of friendship that was growing between them. It was clear to her that Amnay was not quite like the other males of his race. She felt he was some sort of outcast, a lower-level figure whose existence was tolerated rather than celebrated and respected.
In that case, Kozue had to wonder why he had been chosen as emissary to the humans. Either he had a friend or family member in a high place in this society, or else the job of taking a human concubine wasn't considered at all prestigious.
She tossed these questions out of her mind as they made their way to the library. Though the route was confusing, she made an effort to remember it. Some of the hallways and little rooms seemed familiar. But it was almost impossible to keep a bearing in her head with all the random left and right turns they made. She had no idea what direction she was facing now in relation to her new bedroom.
Before bringing her into the library, Amnay pressed Kozue to the wall outside and went in alone. He looked around for a bit then came and beckoned her in. She went, stepping into the silence of that ancient archive. They were alone.
"Who were you looking for?" she asked. She couldn't help it. It was the way she was wired. She had been born to seek knowledge, to soak in every piece of information she came across.
"Challengers," Amnay said. He strode on ahead, leaving her to ponder the meaning of his words.
When she caught up to him, he was sitting on a bench with one of the strange books open on his lap. She went to sit next to him, watching him read.
The pages were a sixteenth of an inch thick, made of transparent material. They were backlit by a source of illumination set in the back cover of the book. The words and symbols on the page were in sharp black. At a touch of Amnay's finger, the text on each page would scroll down to the next section. The source of these scrolling pages seemed to be the flat, rectangular device affixed to the back cover and arcing over the pages.
The book only held fifty or so physical pages, but each page was many in one. Perhaps hundreds. As such, each book could be an entire library's worth of information.
Now more than ever, Kozue wanted to learn this language. But learning to speak it would be easy compared to learning to read it. The script was like no human language, not even ones as unique as Russian or Mandarin.
On the page now was an image of one of the stone pillars. The passages below it must tell the story of its engravings.
Amnay read it aloud to her. The translati
on wasn't perfect, but Kozue's mind filled in the gaps.
"We came to this world nearly dead. Our numbers had been lost to space. A great crash and a failure of our ship. We were only a hundred. We came to this world because it was our only choice. We couldn't leave until we were able to fix our ship..."
The story went on, describing the near extinction of these people. They landed on a frigid world. Using their damaged ship as a base of operations, they slowly learned to live there. But the area where they had crashed didn't possess the natural resources they needed.
A hundred miles away, their scouts finally discovered a rich vein of metals. But of the ten scouts who left the ship, only three returned. Their clothing was in tatters, they were nearly dead from the cold, and they were covered in wounds.
They spoke of great beasts who lived on the mountain where they had discovered the metal. The beasts were huge, hairy, full of teeth and fury. They were carnivores who decorated their cave lairs with the bones and desiccated skins of the animals they hunted.
The hundred who had survived the crash landing, now numbering ninety-three, discussed their options. Over the next few days, the ninety-three split into two camps. One was in favor of seeking out a different vein of metals. Their argument was that they were surviving just fine in the relatively mild climate of the valley where they had crashed. They could theoretically survive here for as long as they needed to; there was no rush.
The other camp, the camp which won out and whose fighting spirit drove the species forever after, argued for retribution. Their plan was to go up the mountain prepared to fight, to kill every one of these beasts they could find. And then, when the beasts learned to fear their new rivals, the path to the metal veins would be safe.
Forty of them, male and female, marched to the mountains. The others remained behind, sending new scouts to search safer areas.
Of the forty fighters who set out, only sixteen survived the fighting. But they returned with three hundred bestial heads. The entire population of beasts on the mountain had been wiped out. The path to the resources they so sorely needed was now open.
The surviving fighters gained complete control over the society. The females which had previously belonged to the more timid males were given over as concubines to the stronger ones. The pre-existing children were branded as the offspring of cowards. They were determined to be genetically weak. They would not be allowed to reproduce later in life.
Amnay's race, which Kozue learned were called the Menin, was changed after their near extinction and their crash landing on that frozen, lost, unnamed planet so far in their past. In a sense, that world was the cradle of their infancy. They would never visit it again, much as Kozue would never again sleep in the crib she had used as an infant.
Rather than remain in that place for years or decades, slowly building themselves back up as though in the wake of apocalypse, they had taken brave and decisive action to secure their swift return to the stars.
It was one of the earliest stories in the hall of pillars. It taught Kozue a bit about the origin of the Menin's current culture. But it didn't come close to answering the deeper questions she had.
Amnay closed the book and leaned his head against the wall of the reading alcove. He closed his eyelids, but Kozue could see his eyes still moving side to side, as though remembering the words he had just read.
"How long have you been out here?" Kozue asked him. "In space, I mean? How long have the Menin roamed the stars?"
"Longer than any of us know," he replied.
"Do you have a homeworld? We, humans, have Earth. Do you—"
But he interrupted her. "You should leave."
"Leave Earth?"
He nodded. "You will die there. We see that humans have the potential to leave their home, but they don't. That means humans are weak. We were weak, once. Some of us were weak. But we made a choice."
He tapped the cover of the book.
"It was a great story," said Kozue. "I'm sure it's all true, in a sense. But it is a story, isn't it?"
"It's a historical record."
"Yes, but... well, on Earth we have mythology. That's what we call it. It speaks a lot of truth about what it means to be human, but none of the stories are actually true."
"We have such a thing. But those are in a different book."
"So, the story of the cold planet is true."
"Yes. Lying is not tolerated among the Menin. If one of us is caught telling a lie, they are killed."
Kozue swallowed. "But the stories you just spoke of, the other books, the mythology..."
"No one thinks they are true. They're only stories. They make the young ones smile."
He set the book aside and took her hand.
A few days ago, this gesture would have made her jump in fear. But now it made her feel safe and warm. He stroked the palm of her hand with his huge thumb, exploring the lines and crevices there. He played with her fingers, gentling curling and uncurling them.
"So small," he said. "You're not a young one, are you?"
"No. I'm an adult. Fully grown. I'm just little."
"All humans are little."
"Well, it's all relative, isn't it? We're small compared to you. But on Earth we're bigger than most other animals."
"Because you've killed the bigger ones."
"I suppose so. In the ancient past, before recorded history, there were many more large animals. We call them megafauna. But a lot of them are gone, now. Some of it has to do with the changing climate. Some of it has to do with the spread and gradual dominance of humans."
"You will kill the whole world," he said, now running his finger along her wrist to the inside of her elbow.
She shivered in pleasure. She had always loved having her arms and hands touched. "We will," Kozue said, staring forward soberly. "It's only a matter of time. I travel all over Earth, meeting people from every place. The natural world is dying. Species are going extinct at a rate never seen outside of a major cataclysmic event, such as the impact of an asteroid. The Great Barrier Reef is pretty much dead. We already went past the point of no return on saving it, and all it received was a few magazine articles and ten minutes on the evening news. Humans are dumb. We're not weak, and we're not lazy. And we're not even evil, really. We're just plain dumb."
Amnay listened to all this, running his fingers up and down her arm. Then he said, in a tone that was meant to be reassuring, "We have looked at you and decided you are worth a chance. Otherwise, we would just put you out of your misery and take whatever resources you had left."
"Gee, thanks," said Kozue.
"You're welcome."
She reached over with her free hand and rested it on the hand he was using to tickle her arm. "I guess maybe this is the wakeup call we need," she said. "We've seen that we're not the dominant race anymore. We can't just live off the ghosts of everything we destroy. Now we have to survive. Saving the planet and advancing scientific knowledge is nice and all, but it's not enough to drive humanity to greater heights. Our brains aren't wired that way, unfortunately. What we need is a kick in the ass and a falling guillotine. That's when we do our best work."
She could hear, in the translation, that some of her words weren't making it through. But Amnay nodded along to her speech. He was more than smart enough to figure out what she meant. She got the feeling he was closer to learning English than she was to learning his language.
"Honest question, honest answer," he said quietly. "Do you believe you have a future?"
Kozue had seen humanity at its worst. She had seen people dying of disease and famine while private jets streamed overhead, as though the people flying in them belonged to an entirely different species. She had seen toxic waste dumped in areas that once gleamed with great natural beauty. She had seen the desperate things a human does when all other options are exhausted.
She didn't hesitate to answer. "Yes," she said. "I think we do."
Chapter Three
In the middle of the n
ight, she was lifted from the cot and set on the floor. Amnay had made another bed there. A mattress of many stacked blankets, a long pillow of many soft, random things stuffed into a sack. He lay there with her, propped on his elbow and watching as she drifted through the fog that stands at the edge of dreams.
"I never answered your question," said the voice of the translator, whispering beyond the deep rumble of Amnay's natural voice.
"Which one?" she whispered back, eyes cracked open. She was on her side, staring at the shadows under the cot.
"Our home-world. You asked if we have one."
That made her come fully awake. She turned onto her other side, facing him. All she saw was his broad chest, a purple shadow in the darkness of the bedroom. She craned her neck, searching for his eyes. They glinted as though wet with tears; he seemed to be staring at the ceiling.
"Do you?" she asked.
"We must have, once. But no one remembers. We must have left it a long time ago. I wonder if we have ever come back to it, or simply drifted past, not knowing what it was." He looked down at her. "In a way, we envy humans. It is a feeling you can't escape from, knowing you are forever apart from your origin."
"You shouldn't envy us," she said. Without thinking, she reached out to touch his chest. She splayed her fingers on the warm, firm flesh. Faintly, she felt his heartbeat. "You see what we've done to our home. There's an old saying; you don't know what you have until it's gone."
"I understand. Your saying is true. But in this case, it doesn't apply. We do know what we had, because we see that you have it. In some ways, our conquest of the stars has always been a simple pursuit. It may seem grand and full of universal purpose, but it's only a search. A search for ourselves. To know ourselves. If we found our home, if we knew it, we would preserve it just as well as we've preserved our memories..."
Kozue thought of the hall of pillars. The stories of millennia, preserved perfectly in stone. And then she thought of Earth, of extremist groups and stupid tourists carelessly and often accidentally ruining ancient artifacts. Pieces of history, treated as garbage.