Daughter of Time 1: Reader (11 page)

“How can you? How can you eat that? What have they done to you?” she screamed at me as green porridge leaked down the sides of my chin. “Look! Look at what they make it from!”

Slowly, I turned my head and stared at what she was pointing toward. Even more slowly, the blur of green food cleared, and there, in the midst of the awful glop, was a severed human finger. It had the same greenish hue, partially ground up, but it was a finger nonetheless, clear as it could be. Amazingly, I looked back at her, not yet able to process what my eyes had seen.

“Don’t you care?” she moaned. “Oh, God, you’re eating each other!”

Finally, understanding spread inside me. It was a terrible revelation. In all that had happened, in all the things that had been done to me or that I had seen, I had at least felt detached, a tortured innocent caught in the monstrosity of others. Now, tasting that food in my mouth, understanding what I was eating, it was suddenly me who became the monster. For the first time in my life, I felt tainted. I felt evil. I felt as if the devil had transfused my blood with that of a hundred murdered infants. I was eating my own kind.

I threw up. I vomited over the trough, and for the first time since I had come to this place, I wept. I felt my insides melt, felt my sense of myself as a person dissolve. I had become a disease. I spoke nonsense to the woman.

“I’m sorry,” I cried hysterically. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

But she only cursed at me more, and at everyone in the row. She condemned us to hell for our actions. I stopped crying. It was all so clear. The poor woman, she was so lost. Didn’t she know that we were in hell? And we were corrupted by it to the uttermost evil?

I stopped eating. I could not clean myself of this stain, but I could at least not continue to debase myself now that I knew. Let me tell you, though, it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. All that I went through, and all that I would go through—tortures, cruelties, sacrifices—none of them compared to the trial of simply not eating that inhuman, human sludge. If you have never starved, you cannot understand. I would lean toward that porridge, weeping, wanting to bring it to my mouth, my body screaming at me, my saliva dripping. Somehow, I stopped myself. Somehow,
a madness
, I forced myself to starve more and more, until my body became a thing almost separate from me, and my thoughts like some mind floating above it, guiding the actions.

But it was not a triumph. Don’t ever believe that it was. Because I
wanted
that food. I wanted that food more than anything I had wanted in my life or that I have wanted since. You don’t know what it is to starve. I only managed because of my own terrible, terrible need to find my humanity, whatever was left of it. Like some dishonored Samurai plunging a blade into his abdomen, I tortured myself for that. But even now I can feel the terrible hunger I had for that food, and it still dirties me to remember it.

My time was now very limited. Quickly, each hour, I grew much weaker. After three days of not eating, I could barely focus on the navigation and slept little at night for the pangs of hunger in my belly. I am sure that I would have failed the fourth day, been punished several times by the chair, and then been removed, to be sent and processed myself into the green slop.

But on the fourth day, the Xix came.

17

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. 
—attributed to Gandhi

If you were to cross a iridescent and elongated Smurf with a spindly-armed alien from early science fiction films, add sixfold radial body symmetry, and throw in a large dose of ballerina-like elegance of motion, you might get something close to the impression a typical Xixian specimen would give. But you would still be missing the heart of these noble aliens, something that I hope I can show you in my own words in the next few chapters.

When I first encountered the Xix, you must imagine me to be hardly human anymore. I was a dying and wasted thing, starving, skeletal, my gums bleeding, sores all over my body. I no longer cared to live and could barely process the reality around me.

The demon-ship that held us in torment had docked, and the usual sounds of unloading and loading could be heard. In the midst of this routine, an unusual racket erupted over the expected sounds. Perhaps I heard explosions, although my mind was not in the best state to process anything. As suddenly as it began, it was over, and a deep silence fell over the entire ship. Distant at first, and then growing louder, footsteps could be heard outside our entry port. Equipment was placed outside the door, and then with a loud crash, the seal was broken and the door pulled aside.

The long and tall Xixians walked in, carrying devices of some kind in one of their four arms. They were uniformed in unusual garb that resembled robes stitched together at several points along the often highly angular contours of their bodies. The clothes were dark blue, with alien insignia and characters I could not decipher, and their porcelain and faintly iridescent skin contrasted sharply with the dark hues.

Of all the aliens I was actually to observe before I returned to Earth orbit, the Xix were the most humanoid, even more so than the insectoidal Dram. To begin with, they were bipedal: two legs, even if strangely proportioned for the Earth-raised, with six-pointed feet harboring not toes exactly, but protrusions that would have to be compared with toes. The legs were multi-jointed, clearly supported by some kind of muscle and structural elements utterly foreign to Earth physiology. Were an Earth creature’s legs to bend in several directions simultaneously, attempting to support weight at those absurd and dangerous-looking angles, the bones would snap, the ligaments tear. Instead, the Xix tolerated those ridiculous bends and just danced to a strange rhythm in their gait. Two very long arms near the midsection of their bodies, as long as yet thinner than the legs, also adopted the multi-jointed angles of their lower body. These arms ended in six-toed “hands” very similar to the protrusions on the feet. Nearer their heads, pulled slightly inward, were another two arms, much shorter and thinner, consisting of only two joints and ending in a set of very different hands. These much finer and smaller hands were also radially symmetric but with twelve elongated fingers of six joints each, so bendable, yet strong, that when they moved they almost appeared as tentacles. These hands held the odd spherical devices, like a weapon.

The top of the torso, fused together like a cone, erupted outward with three sets of six eyestalks. This was what I thought of as the “head.” Each set of eyes was also positioned with radial symmetry around an axis running through the middle of the body from top to bottom, so that the Xixians could see very well from all directions. Membranous fibers seemed to span the area between the thick and highly mobile eyestalks, but there was too little mass for any kind of a brain-like organ, which, I was to learn later, was positioned in the center of their large barrel chests.

These quasi-humanoid creatures stormed into the holding pen where I lay dying. After scanning the area carefully, they drew back their weapons and spoke into small communicators around their smaller upper hands. All of us drew back instinctively from these creatures, truly monsters for the human psyche. Within several moments, two Xixians in slightly different uniforms – lighter blue, with different insignias – entered through the door. They appeared to have a highly modified form of the “universal translator” worn by other aliens like the Dram or used by the Sortax from their tanks. It was much sleeker in appearance, also functioning as a kind of gas mask to alter the composition of the air brought into their bodies. Once words began to pour through the devices, it became clear that they were of a far superior and significantly more advanced design to those any other aliens used.

The first sounds from the device worn by the two new Xix sounded suspiciously like Chinese to me, and indeed, several Asian men and women in our room glanced up at the sounds as if they understood them. After an initial burst of Chinese, I heard other languages spoken, foreign, but clearly not alien. Even when unintelligible, they were sounds that touched my heart. Sounds of Earth. Finally, the words were spoken in English.

“Please be calm. We are here to help you, to remove you from the illegal confinement and abuse in this criminal vessel. We are representatives of the Xixian Federation, charged with Life Rights for creatures in this parsec. We will take you to better quarters and provide you with medical assistance. When you are healed, we will help you find appropriate and safe work within the Hegemony. Again, please do not be afraid. We are here to help you. We are a rescue party.”

No one moved. We were all beyond the ability to believe or process much intellectually. As we stared forward stupidly at our saviors, several teams of Xix in green uniforms—the medical crew, as I came to think of them—rushed in through the door and began to attend to the worst of us. Others were approached by more light-blue-uniformed nightmares, who spoke soothingly and tried to gather humans together and lead them through to the outside.
How gentle they were!
If there was anything to map between human empathy and the alien psychology, it seemed to me that the Xix
felt our pain
, and genuinely cared for us. My long association with them has taught me only how amazingly true this is.

At the time, however, I could no longer stand. I felt the many-fingered yet delicate hands of two Xixian medics lift me onto a hovering stretcher of some kind. Bobbing up and down in a crazed dream, I saw the snaking eyestalk head of one of them bend over and look at me, passing a strange glowing device over my body. A warmth spread through me, and my pain lessened, and slowly, but irresistibly, I fell down into a deep, deep well of darkness and into a peaceful sleep.

18

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. 
—Blaise Pascal

Again, I dreamed.

I floated through the black of space, a small point of light growing in the distance. Larger and larger, it took on the dimensions of a disk, a great pocketed disk of rock rushing toward my disembodied perspective.
The Moon
. I did not recognize the surface patterns. It was the moon, but not the Moon I knew; craters and lines of patterns were unknown. As the Moon rushed past me to the right, now covering most of my vision, the bright blue and white of the Earth peered over the edge of its satellite, and the Moon slowed to a stop to reveal nearly half of the glorious marble set in the black of space.

Home
. I felt myself weep, but there was no body to respond, no tears to fall. Slowly, I felt my perspective gain momentum, revolving around the Moon toward the right, the Earth dipping below the disk.
Earthset.
I longed to see it again, and as I spun around toward the other side of the moon, I felt myself straining to catch a glimpse of the edge of the blue disk breaking out over the lifeless surface of the moon.
Earthrise.

I traveled over the surface, the dark side of the Moon giving way to the patterns I knew. Continuing, flying in orbit across the surface, and still the Earth did not break over the horizon.
Where was it?
How far around did I have to go to see the Earth? I wanted to go home.

Around and around, peering, straining. A cold chill passed through me, and again I felt the presence of something terrible and wrong. The monster was near.
I had to find the Earth!
I cast my vision across space, straining for a glimpse of anything besides the Moon and this blackness.