“Hm…” I had a think. There was one very odd thing about the whole business, and it took a moment to put my finger on it. “She was speaking Interversal, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah…” said Veofol.
“So?” said Lomeva.
“So if this is a completely new personality, she shouldn’t know our language. She must have access to Katie’s memories. Or files, or whatever. Maybe Katie’s still in there as well…” And maybe she would come out again. “Okay. We play along to begin with. And then we break it to her. Very carefully. Veofol, you’ll need to debrief her.”
“Me…?”
“We need to keep the number of people involved to a minimum. She already knows you. And I’ve got the rest of the group to deal with.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “We need to know who she is. And I don’t mean just her name. We need to know how she relates to Katie.”
“Okay.”
“This might be Dissociative Personality Disorder, and it might not. It might be a persona coming out of the implants. Just find out as much as you can.”
He nodded. He was still unnerved, but I was confident he’d be up to the task.
3. Pew
It was painful for Pew to talk about the past, and I had to send a nurse to find him and bring him to his next session. He came in flustered, still wearing his boots from the garden and leaving mud everywhere, trying to apologise for his lateness and then for the dirt tracks on the carpet.
“It’s all right, Pew. Just leave the boots by the door and I’ll have someone clean them for you.”
“Okay, okay, I’m really sorry—”
“That’s fine, just take a seat.”
He put his boots outside as I sent a message to the housekeeping staff to deal with them. He’d been working hard in the garden, trying to forget he had a therapy session coming up. A quick review of video showed Olivia telling him to slow down before he did himself an injury. He expected questions he didn’t want to answer, so I decided to get them out of the way first.
“Can you tell me anything more about Ley’ang?”
He looked up at me, instantly distressed. “I— I—”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to…”
“No, no, I mean, that is, I…”
“Pew, I’m sorry. I know you don’t like talking about her. We’ll have to eventually, but if you’d rather talk about something else, we can do that today.”
“Okay.” He sighed, safe from the hard questions he feared. But we would have to get there somehow — if I could get him to talk about her, I might be able to get him to talk about the breeding programme, which he’d conspicuously avoided in every other conversation I’d had with him.
“So you said last time that you hated the Soo, and that’s quite understandable. But you seemed to get along quite well with Shan’oui. I was wondering if there were any other Soo you found tolerable?”
“Can I have some tea?”
“Of course. You carry on, I’ll pour.”
I filled a cup and he talked. “I, well, they weren’t all bad. I mean they were, but they didn’t all want to be.”
“I’m sorry?” I said as I poured milk.
“They were kind of… they grew up with everyone telling them Pu weren’t good for anything, but most of them never actually met any of us.”
“So they were just ignorant?” I handed him his tea.
“Yeah.”
“How do you know this?”
“Shan’oui told me.”
“And you believed her?”
“She tried to help. She didn’t do very well but she tried.”
“Were there any others who tried?”
“Oh, loads. There was a big group of Soo who’d been campaigning for the Pu for years, well, longer than that. Centuries.”
“Was Shan’oui one of those people?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this the SPCA? I think I read about them…” I pulled up my notes on a pad: IU Diplomatic research teams had identified a group called the SPCA as potential allies on the Soo world. “The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Aboriginals?”
“Yeah. That’s them.”
“Did they run the breeding programme?”
“No. That was the government. There were a lot of SPCA people involved, though.”
“Can you tell me more about them?”
“Um. Well, it started with Ang’zi…”
“He founded the SPCA?”
“No, no, he was Pu. Pu Ang’zi. He was a mechanic, he was one of the first ones who’d been captured in the Arctic, well, his parents were.”
“Ah. So, what did he do?”
“He wrote a book, um, On the Rights of the Pu as Compared with the Beasts of the Field and Engines of Steam.”
“Catchy.”
“That was how they wrote things back then. The government thought somebody in the SPCA had written it, some Soo pretending to be a Pu. So they banned it for being harmful to Pu interests, you know, giving us ideas above our station.
“And then they figured out the truth. His owner was an SPCA member and she tried to hide Ang’zi, but they found him and took him away. So she sued the government for stealing her property, but the court case was one of those things where they use it to talk about something else. Do you know what I mean?”
“They made the court case about the Pu as a whole?”
“Yeah. And they lost. Ang’zi was executed. They called it euthanasia because of a brain deformity, can you believe that? Because he wasn’t stupid. Like being intelligent was an illness. His owner was compensated, and she gave the money back to the SPCA to print more copies of the book. That was how it got going, really.”
“So there was something good about the Soo, after all?”
“Huh. Yeah. They started getting all the owners to give retired Pu to zoos instead of just killing them and turning the bodies into fertiliser.”
“Ah. So they didn’t go all that far…”
“They never wanted to set us free. They just wanted to make our lives easier.”
“Do you think Shan’oui would have set you free?”
“She didn’t think we were ready. Maybe she was right.”
“Don’t you think the Pu should have been free?”
“On our world? Where could we have gone?”
“And the SPCA never thought about letting us help you?”
“The IU? Hah! They didn’t trust you. They thought you wanted to take us off to be slaves somewhere else. They thought they were protecting us from you.”
“And outside the SPCA, was there anyone with any sympathy?”
“A lot of people thought they were on our side. They weren’t. I found that out before the breeding programme started.”
“Did something happen?”
He looked up and took a breath. “There was a girl.”
“A Soo girl?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“What did she do?”
“I was… no, it was her. Or maybe I… oh, shit, I was only fourteen.”
“What happened?”
He sighed. “I saw her behind the glass.”
“In the zoo?”
“She kept coming in every day at the same time. She must have had a season ticket. She was always there just after three, when the school groups were gone…”
“I thought it was one way glass?”
“Yeah, but you could see a bit of what was on the other side. And there was this girl. And she was… beautiful. Amazing. Every day at the same time. She’d come up as close to the glass as she could, and then wave at me. I mean, kids did that all the time, but this was…” He sighed. “So I waved back. Didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Next day, she jumped the barrier and came up to the glass. She put her hand up to it and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I did the same. She smiled again, I thought my heart was going to come out of my chest…”