The sight was not one I expected to see and, frankly, horrified me.
The three emissaries and the crew were tearing at the poor slave, ripping off patches of his shell, pinching off gobbets of the white flesh inside, and stuffing them into their maws. These creatures we had thought to be civilized were no more than cannibals!
Quickly I backed away from the ship and raced to the dome, anxious to tell the others about these barbarians and their hideous practices.
Ed remarked matter-of-factly when I related what I had seen. “I can think of some earthly analogues even though such behavior by an intelligent species intrigues me. We already knew that the homaroids were omnivores so it shouldn’t be any surprise that these feast on their kin as readily as anything.”
“But they are intelligent and civilized,” I shot back. “We humans certainly don’t do that sort of thing.”
“Maybe we don’t do it now, but I’m not sure whether that is a social artifact or some more basic survival mechanism at play,” Ed replied. “Besides, humans have had lots of alternative sources of protein throughout our history. From what we know of this planet, the easy-to-find sources might be limited to the homaroid family. I guess feeding on their galley slaves is natural to them. Hey, didn’t our ancestors eat their pack horses when they ran out of other sources of meat?” He laughed at my expression of dismay.
How could he equate eating dumb animals with consuming your own kind? The brutality of creatures who preyed upon their own horrified me. I could not consider them civilized if they followed such practices, no matter what the state of their technology.
And I despaired for their souls, for surely they possessed sufficient intelligence to understand their guilt.
At the end of each day one of the emissaries would approach our language student with a pail of scraps and speak to it for a few moments as it ate its meal. Afterwards, the emissary would take the empty pail and return to the ship.
I made it a practice to speak with the captive immediately after these visits, hoping to glean some information of substance about the intentions of our visitors and to probe the depths of the creature’s understanding of its own environment.
Ttch*lok, the captive’s own name, I learned, proved quite willing to converse with me, as anxious to learn about our ways as we of theirs. Ttch*lok told me a few things about his place in their society.
For one thing I learned that he was not a member of the ship’s crew but was merely a tool—a translating animal that had been trained for one and only one purpose.
“And what,” I asked, “is your destiny when that purpose is fulfilled? Will you then be permitted to be a citizen and recognized as an individual?”
Ttch*lok seemed horrified at my question. “Animals have no destiny,” he responded calmly, without a trace of fatalism. “I will die when my work is done.”
I wondered at his answer the rest of that day. Isn’t it reasonable that when a being achieves enough intelligence to understand its own death then it can also understand the concept of its own immortal soul?
I decided to discover the truth.
“We have been traveling for three crews,” the emissaries explained once Ttch*lok had mastered the rudiments of Italian enough to act as translator. Three crews would be nearly one hundred individual deaths. I shuddered at the thought of so many sacrificed merely to propel this ship to us and the casual way they used these losses to measure their voyage.
They’d started our way soon after hearing of our landing from their scouts, within a month of the arrival at least. “Quick reaction,” Al said in a worried aside.
“The Great Ones send their greetings to you,” the gold and black one continued. “They wish to know more of you and your ways. We few are their representatives and have been sent to grow in knowledge.”
The Great Ones, we learned through painful dialogue rife with misunderstandings on both sides, were apparently a group of ancient homaroids who had managed to survive long enough to amass great intellect and a large storehouse of knowledge. If only 20 percent was retained with each of their sheddings I wondered at the precious cultural knowledge that must be lost whenever they shed.
These intellectuals were, of necessity, highly reclusive. This characteristic would limit the amount of new things they would be exposed to, and reduce the need for frequent sloughing that would result from additional knowledge.
Another probable reason for their secretive ways was, I suspected, to protect themselves from becoming a feast of knowledge for some ambitious competitor.
The horrid prospect of knowing that others could gain a portion of your hard-won knowledge by eating your flesh as you slumbered awakened every horror story of wraiths and vampires that I had ever heard. How pitiable and constricted their lives, I thought, to always live in fear of those around you, afraid to challenge your mind or grow in knowledge because it would make you even more vulnerable. The thoughts of homaroid intellectuals gathering on the Via di Vita to discuss philosophy vanished like soap bubbles in the sunlight.
Because of their intellect the Great Ones also commanded vast resources and a coterie of lesser beings who provided protection and brought information to them. It would be the envoys’ purpose, I suddenly realized, to reduce this journey and knowledge of ourselves to digestible portions for their masters. I shuddered at the thought.
After a short debate when learning of our arrival, the Great Ones decided that contacting these strangers who had appeared on their world was worth the cost of growth.
Their ship had been dispatched within the week.
We watched with some curiosity as the crew of the ship rounded up a few of the smaller corsonni and herded them into a pen they had erected beside their trireme. We suspected that these would most probably become the replacements for their slaves.
The other units had been unleashed from the ship and tossed into the enclosure with the new victims. Whether as trainers for the others or as a food supply I could not imagine. Time would tell, I supposed with some sorrow, and said a blessing for their souls.
Each of the young homaroids had a line tied to one of their feelers and was led into the water. The crew would tug on the line as soon as the tail started to wiggle. Another tug and the other crew member would grab the tail to hold it still. This went on day after day, fifteen minutes per individual.
The mutilated ones meantime were searching the pen, learning their way about with their one feeler until they knew the boundaries of their enclosure. In time each began seeking a quiet place of refuge, usually one of the corners, to begin the process of softening and renewal.
I watched with gorge rising as each was quickly eaten by the others no sooner than the shell had softened.
“Fascinating adaptation,” Ed remarked as he leaned forward to observe the process better. “Not only are the originals a good source of food, but the ones eating them also gain some of the training as they eat, which makes their own training go faster. I would wager that the crew doubles the speed of teaching the new ones this way.”
“But why do they leave the new ones alone otherwise? They have not mutilated their sensory apparatus as yet.”
“ ‘Edited’ is the word to use, padre. And to answer your question—No, they probably won’t edit them until they’re the right size. I would guess that they do that during the hibernation of the softening so that the newly awakened ones know only the reins.” Ed thought for a moment, scratching his chin absently “Pretty clever, eh?”
Clever? I could think of other words to be used; words such as barbaric, gruesome, despicable, odious, atrocious, and unthinkable! Not to mention predatory and abominable. Yet none of these could adequately define the depth of the emotional reaction that I had for these hateful creatures and their vile practices.