Researcher Femala — who still clung to her title, despite having lost everything else — looked up as the door opened. She assumed that she was under constant observation — it was what she would have done to alien prisoners — but that didn’t bother her much; she’d been under more overt observation while on the Guiding Star. Her clan had watched her, as they had all of the younger children, until they’d realised how useless she was… and even when she’d won her freedom, she’d been watched by the Inquisitors. The humans, at least, weren’t going to jump on her for the slightest hint of disbelief or blasphemy. They had asked her hundreds of questions, some of which she had refused to answer, but they didn’t seem to have any real plan for the interrogation. Very few of the questions linked together into one whole.
The human who entered the room was slightly shorter than her, with short dark fur on his head and hints of darker hairs on his chin, something that still looked a little strange to her. It was odd, but the more signs of similarity between her people and the humans she saw, the more her mind focused on the differences. Her people had no hair, anywhere, and the human eyes…! They seemed so mobile, so constantly in motion, compared to her own. The dark-skinned human she’d encountered first, who had cleared all hairs off his scalp, had been the most like her she’d met while held captive.
“My name is Paul,” the human said. She had noticed that most of the humans tended to have wildly varying ways of pronouncing certain words, even in their own language, that puzzled her. Surely, they would have developed a unified language by now. “What is your name, if I may ask?”
Femala smiled. If this… Paul was some version of an inquisitor, he was surprisingly polite. Most Inquisitors tended towards the ‘hit first, ask questions later’ approach. “I am Researcher Femala, Researcher in Technology,” she said, supplying her full title. “What is your title?”
The human produced the sound they made when they found something amusing. “I suppose, madam, that I could be called a Researcher in Alien Life,” he said. “I used to consider meeting people like you, you see.”
Femala didn’t. The Takaina had never seriously considered the possibility of life on other planets, not until they’d actually started to send out generation starships and colonise as many worlds as they could, all in the name of God. They’d wondered, judging from some of the human broadcasts, if humanity had encountered other races somewhere, but most of them had been unbelievable. No engineer among the Takaina could see how a starship that was nothing more than a giant cube could even function… and that had been among the more realistic designs.
The human leaned back slightly. Femala was partly repulsed and partly impressed by his motions. He was much less flexible than a male of her race — it had taken cycles just to get used to the idea of males actually working as researchers — but he moved with an odd jerky motion that seemed to hint at considerable power. God had designed the universe for her to explore and a human body was merely another engineering puzzle.
“Tell me something,” he said, finally. “What do your people want here?”
Femala blinked. “To bring this world into the Truth,” she said, puzzled. They’d told the humans that, hadn’t they? “The settlers on the Guiding Star will settle here and bring you into the light.”
“And there I was hoping that it was all a con,” the human said. Femala didn’t understand. How could anyone doubt the word of the High Priest? If he was caught in a lie, his power and position would vanish in a flash. “Tell me something else, then; why doesn’t your friend like you much?”
Femala, despite herself, started to explain. She talked about the four sects that made up the Truth and the Truthfulness, and about the clans that made up each of the sects. She spoke about how the clans saw to it that each of the children was raised to know his or her place and how they wanted, more than anything else, to increase their own numbers. As a sterile women — not even a male who could be expended in war — she’d been sentenced to death by her clan, until the High Priest had saved her.
“Why?” Paul asked. The human really didn’t understand. How did humans handle such problems among their people? “Did he… want your body?”
It took several rounds of explanations before Femala understood what he meant. “No,” she admitted. The very thought showed how aliens the humans were. The idea of someone selling their sexual services was strange. “As a sterile woman, I don’t have the… scent to draw in the males and convince them to protect me and compete for my favours.”
The human seemed puzzled, but passed on the issue. “What do you think of this place?”
“Boring,” Femala said, truthfully. It was true that they’d brought her books to read — human books, sometimes interesting ones — but it was very confining when she could have been running through the fields of Earth, or examining more of their technology in the occupied zone. “What are you doing to do to me?”
The human ignored the question. “Why are your males just… waiting for something?”
Femala almost laughed. “They expect you to kill them, of course,” she said. It had been a trait of warfare since before the Unification Wars. Females could bear new children for the victors, but the males were useless. “They’re warriors who fell into enemy hands, so of course you’re going to kill them, or enslave them. What are you going to do with them?”
“I don’t know,” Paul admitted. It sounded as if he didn’t really care, although it was hard to read the human voice. If the other female had been able to share her insights… but that was air out the airlock now. “That’s a question for my superiors.”
“You should tell them to surrender and accept the Truth,” Femala said. She pushed as much earnestness into her tone as she could, although she suspected that the human wouldn’t recognise it as such. “It’s the only way to stop the fighting.”
Paul leaned closer. The eerie human eyes peered into her own eyes. “Is there nothing else we can offer you?”
Femala sighed. “The Truth has endured for thousands of cycles,” she said, almost sadly. It had been the Truth that had condemned her to death for being sterile. “It cannot be broken. Your world will break before the High Priest chooses to leave you to your unbelief.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
“And you may rise.”
Joshua Bourjaily rose to his feet, his joints creaking, as the alien priest blessed them and shoed them out of the converted warehouse. The alien religion, Joshua had discovered, required plenty of forward kneeling, a pose that the aliens could hold almost indefinitely, but humans couldn’t hold for long. It was worse for the women; when they knelt, their hands held behind their heads, they pushed their breasts forward into prominence. After a pair of incidents, the aliens had apparently broken one of their own taboos and segregated the sexes for prayer meetings, even though they seemed to worship together. It was hard to tell; they’d seen very few alien females on the streets and they’d never seen the aliens in solo prayer.
He glanced towards the alien priest, thinking dark thoughts that he was careful to keep to himself. A couple of people — an old woman and a young black man — had attempted to challenge the aliens, praying out loud in their own style, only to be mercilessly gunned down. The aliens had regarded it with the same level as horror as most Americans would regard taking a dump on the American flag… and similar incidents had been nipped in the bud. The aliens, it seemed, weren’t taking too many chances with their prayers and their flock.