The human ambassador was pale in the face, but had restrained herself from disgorging.
Two of her entirely ceremonial and useless guards had failed to do so. Not helpful behaviour.
“This concludes the examination,” I told them. “Do you have any further inquiries of We?”
“No,” said the ambassador. “Wait. Maybe. Yes.”
So indecisive. I’d gotten used to that.
“Are they…volunteers? All of them?”
“Please describe this word,” I asked.
“They requested this. Of their own will.”
I looked down into the recycling plant floor, where the vats ran slick and clear with hemolymph and the hoppers were piled high with flesh.
“Of course,” I said. “We would accept nothing less.”
I was assigned to reciprocate diplomacy after the fledgling human embassy of Ours was established. We reasoned that I had some small personal experience with their psychology that might prove useful.
Every little bit helped. If We could’ve afford another war, We would’ve had it.
They had been very shocked when We ceased fire. As if they had expected worse.
Earth bobbed beneath our feet. I was the first of We to see it with the naked eye, and so was immediately struck by the incongruity of it.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” inquired the human as the lift began to descend.
“Surprising, yes,” I acknowledged. “I was under the impression that we halted our advance before any bombardment was conducted, yet the surface appears heavily scarred.”
“Pardon?”
“There, there and there,” I said, pointing. “This appears to be recent defoliation married with heavy erosion, highly rapid and not yet concluded. Has your climate-shaping run awry, or did our war distract you from conducting an ecopurge? Your technology appears to be sufficient to accomplish global domestication.”
“Those are pre-contact damages,” he admitted. “The mistakes of youth. Work on repairing our planet’s ecosystem is ongoing. Ideally, as much of the original will be restored as is possible.”
I nodded. Sentimental, but also practical. Sometimes you could learn even more putting something back together than you could in taking it apart.
On exiting the elevator I was forced to deny both forms of learning; the former to the loud and aggressive crowds and the latter to the embassy doctors.
“It’s a mere scratch,” I explained. “Clotting will fix it within the hour.”
“Please, ambassador,” said the human. “Please. Earth micro-organisms could cause a fatal reaction.”
“Unlikely,” I replied. “I received a full autoimmune treatment before debarking, using banked earth samples.”
The human’s face did that little jump it did when he was upset. “May I ask where you obtained these…samples?”
“Probes, mostly” I said.
He laughed.
“I apologize, but I do not understand your humour.”
“Sorry, sorry. Old earth cultural touchstone. You’re serious?”
“Yes. And I find your lack of information odd. Several thousand probes were launched through this planet’s atmosphere to gather information, and you destroyed two hundred and sixteen of them. Three you even managed to capture intact.”
I almost said more, but was arrested most thoroughly by the expression of utter confusion in the human’s face.
“The crowds,” I mentioned. “They object to the peace?””
“Uh, yes.”
“Sentiment, I presume?”
“They believe we should have pushed for harsher terms.”
“Terms?”
“When you agreed to our demand for a cease fire.”
I could have corrected him.
I could have explained that we voluntarily ceased hostilities of our own accord, absent of any request from his species. That there was no worthwhile gain to be had from their eradication.
I could have pointed out that there had been no terms decided upon, and that these were only now being considered in scope and scale as we performed an embassy exchange.
But I didn’t do any of those things, because I knew that all of those facts were common, open, freely-available knowledge and for some reason he didn’t seem to understand any of them. This was worth exploring, but perhaps without his informed assistance.
I brushed aside the thought and the last specks of hemolymph from my skull. “Clotting will fix it within the hour,” I repeated, as if to reset our conversation to its beginning. “Nutrient would assist in this.”
“There will be lunch,” he said. And there was.
Lunch was a soup based in a beef broth, followed by sesame-encrusted tuna steak (with a small cranberry and walnut salad dressed with blue cheese) and finished with a berry sorbet.
It was the most sumptuous meal I’d ever tasted, the first that had not come from a rendering vat – beyond anything I’d ever imagined food could be.
And with every mouthful, I thought of the drying brown surface of the globe, and of the human’s earnest, entirely assured statement that they were doing their best to fix their mess.
I stared at the ambassador as I chewed, with my proximal eyes. He was busy chasing some dried cranberries with his fork, and his expression as he did this – faintly concentrating, slightly frowning, mind earnestly bent – was as frank and open as it had been since the beginning.
This was not a creature made for lying. I was beginning to suspect him of something far more dreadful.
“That was tremendously satisfying, and highly educational,” I said to him. And I meant every word. “Where to next?”
“Some people.”
They were some people, all right.
I was impressed despite myself. The human embassy I had overseen on Ours had largely been granted access to the most immediate and practical arms of government, the blunt, brutal executors of policy and the database attendants.
Here, I spoke with the makers and takers of policy. The minds that aimed the hands of billions of bodies.
In this corner, the overlord of energy. They still relied heavily upon fossil fuels, yet he swore they were already devoting too much time and energy to carbon trapping, that it was hokum.
In this other corner, a master of agriculture, who explained to me why it was biologically necessary to devote so much land to monocultured maize rather than mixed genetically-tailored crops to reduce soil wear.
Here, in the center of the chamber, I exchanged words with a mighty voice in social structuring, who explained to me the great problems his domain faced with ‘worthless’ humans that lived without housing. Curiously, when I suggested reprocessing them (if they were as functionless as he described) he insisted that their labour would be useful if they ever applied themselves and that the problem lay in their own hands.
“I thank you, sir,” I told the human. “I had not expected to be placed so quickly and so closely to the top ranks of your government.”
The human looked at me with as much shock as he had when the protester’s stone had cracked my face. “Ambassador, you are gravely mistaken, and I caution you to avoid speaking in such a manner – you could cause great offense with those words. These men and women are merely advisors and specialists, not rulers. They do not craft policy.”
I looked at the human again, this time not even trying to hide my strutiny. Primary, secondary, and tertiary eyes, across all spectrums. I looked at every muscle twitch, at every drop of perspiration, at the movements of his pupils, at the heat from his brow.
He was entirely, wholly, achingly, agonizingly sincere.
They all were.
None of them really were lying to me, not one bit, not to my face.
But they were lying much harder to someone else behind their own.
Afterwards, we had dinner. It was twice as enjoyable as lunch, and it was what gave me the last push towards the final decision of my life when I sat in my bedroom full of spyware and luxury, at the desk, clutching the very pretty and important and entirely decorative computer I had brought with me.
I placed all my hands and my tongue in the specific places they should go and hummed at the right pitch and the terminal disgorged itself, its battery splitting apart and vomiting out a very small and dangerous machine, simple in design and in purpose.
On use, it would produce a small, meaningless signal without coding or intent that would, on being received by the masters of We, produce immediate and full-scale war.
It would not be a beneficial war. It would not be a tidy war. There was a chance – a very slim chance, a very small chance, but an almost-unacceptable-on-its-face chance nonetheless – that it might be a war that We might lose.
But the odds were much better than anything, anything, anything at all that might happen from attempting to live alongside these lunatics.
The transmitter clicked, clucked, and melted into a puddle of ashes, which I threw out the window.
In forty minutes the war would start.
In forty-five minutes they would likely come for me.
If I was very good, I might string them along for hours and hours before they would begin irreparably damaging me out of frustration and spite.
They would never do so deliberately, of course. Never in a million years would they imagine themselves doing so.
But they would. They most assuredly would.