The Trans-Human
Murray Leinster
WHEN Johnny was five years old, he didn't know he was a human being. On his fifth birthday he was living in an eight-sided tower under a yellow sky, and he played and had his lessons in a most improbably-shaped walled enclosure, and he thought he was a very, very happy Khasr child. He didn't know that the Khasr had played a very dirty trick on him by not killing him when they massacred his parents and all the other colonists on Llandu II, and he didn't suspect that every act of kindness they showed him afterward was part of an even dirtier trick. His playmates were especially chosen Khasr, but he didn't know that, either. When he waked in the morning, his playmates waked too. Johnny slept on a soft cushion, but his playmates slept dangling from the bars of a cage-like contraption, hanging by the claws on each of their eight legs. When he'd had his bath they came crawling about him, saying "Good-morning Johnny," in human voices that they'd carefully learned to copy from human vision-records. Johnny beamed at them and zestfully asked what they'd play that day.
They had eight legs, those Khasr, and barrel-shaped bodies, and compared to their expressions an Earthian tarantula looks positively benevolent, but Johnny didn't know. He didn't remember when he'd had human parents. He'd been barely two when he was captured and carried away; the small colony his parents had lived in had been melted down to a lake of slag. There'd been elaborate conditioning work on Johnny, to make him able to stand the sight of Khasr. At first they used euphoric drugs to keep him from screaming with horror when they appeared. Then he associated euphoria with the sight of them. At three he believed implicitly that he was a Khasr. At five he thought he was a happy Khasr child.
On his fifth birthday they first showed him pictures of men. His tutors explained carefully that here were some new animals that he should learn about. Since he was going to grow up to be the bravest of all Khasr, he needed to learn about the creatures he would hunt and kill. So—and here his crawling Khasr playmates made a human-sounding chorus of agreement—so today Johnny would play at the killing of men.
And he did. He played according to Khasr traditions of the heroic. The Khasr were warlike and not nice people. When they discovered humans, and found that men were spreading all through the First Sector of the galaxy, they made war as a matter of course. But the Khasr tradition of a well-conducted war was one that their enemies didn't know anything about. Their idea of a glorious victory was a sneak-attack in which not a single one of the persons attacked had an instant's uneasiness before he was dead.
So when Johnny and his playmates played at killing humans, it wasn't hunting as human children would have played. It was strictly murder. But the slithering, clicking Khasr squealed gleefully (as they had learned to from vision-records of human children) —when Johnny turned a make-believe coagulator-beam on the foolish make-believe humans who had come out of a make-believe spaceship, and make-believe-killed every one before they knew there was a Khasr around.
It was a charming new game, this pastime that Johnny was taught on what happened to be his fifth birthday. Before the double suns set that afternoon, Johnny had slaughtered imaginary thousands of those monsters, men. He went to bed in happy exhaustion, beaming at the universe.
This was within a week or so of the Khasr massacre on the Mithran Worlds. At that time human colonies were still not using detectors. The official opinion was that the vanishing of spaceships without trace was due to pirates, and the small human colonies occasionally found burned down to slag were the victims of pirates too. There was an intensive hunt on for the people who supplied those imaginary pirates.
But the Mithran Worlds killings shattered that illusion. There were fifty thousand people on the inmost planet, nearly that many on the second, and a quarter million on the third. When every human being on all three planets was murdered and incinerated with no clue to the murderers, the size of the atrocity proved it wasn't pirates. Human official minds change slowly but it had to be admitted that somewhere there must be a race something like the Khasr, and that they must be found and exterminated. When this decision was arrived at, Johnny was not yet six.
At ten, he was not quite as happy as when he was younger. He'd noticed that he wasn't exactly like his playmates. They were as large as he was, but they had more legs, with claws on them, and stiff, furry hairs growing out of their exoskeletal shells. Johnny's two arms and two legs were smooth and hairless. He asked questions. His Khasr tutors told him sympathetically that his parents were traveling in a spaceship on which the monstrous creatures men had played a strange weapon. Because of that weapon he was not physically like other Khasr. But he was of a race of heroes, and when he grew up he would kill men by thousands and avenge the injury to himself and the insult to his race.
Johnny still believed he was a Khasr. But he had the psychology of a human boy. At ten years, a boy needs desperately to be exactly like everybody else. Denied this, Johnny acquired a personal blazing hatred for the race of men who had mutilated him. Ironically, while he hated mankind, he spoke only human speech. His companions and tutors spoke human speech to him. He didn't know there were different languages. But he proved there were different sorts of minds.
Somewhere around his tenth birthday he invented a new way of playing at murder. Zestfully he showed his crawling, stinking companions a new trick to kill men. He pretended that a make-believe spaceship was crippled, and left for the Khasr who pretended to be men to find. The make-believe men clustered around the imaginary ship. And Johnny exploded an imaginary bomb to destroy them all. It was an entirely new device, because the Khasr tradition was not even to let an enemy know that they existed. To leave a decoy ship violated that tradition. But it was a splendid trick to kill men!
Johnny's tutors praised him extravagantly. But inside they must have winced, because men had just played that exact trick on the Khasr. Near Llandu IV, a decoy-ship had exploded in the very center of an investigating Khasr fleet. Humans had acquired fragments of six Khasr ships to study, so they could learn something about Khasr weapons. Humans thought like Johnny. They invented the same kind of devices, which Khasr could not imagine because of their traditions. The Khasr encouraged Johnny to think of more ways to kill humans. They had a better use for him later, but even now he could contrive ways to kill his fellows.
When he was thirteen, Johnny came up with a scheme for capturing a human ship intact. He'd never seen himself in a mirror—he didn't know mirrors existed—and he thought he was a Khasr, but he had the ingenuity of a human boy. Also he believed he had more reason to hate humans than anybody else. So he schemed a robot signaling device to be placed on some empty, useless world. It was harmless. But under the rocks, all about for miles, there would be placed radiation-bombs. A human ship would detect the signal and trace it. It would land to investigate the robot transmitter. And the radiation-bombs would go off. They would not shift rock or destroy anything. They would simply emit unthinkable quantities of lethal radiation—subatomic particles—which would kill any living thing nearby.
Again Johnny's tutors praised him. But inside, they must have hated him with a poisonous fury. Because humans had just played that trick, too! On the barren outermost world of Knuth, they'd set up just such a booby-trap. It had worked. Humans had wiped out the crews of two first-class space-battleships and had the ships, intact, with all the newest and most perfect weapons and instruments of the Khasr.
They raged. The Khasr loved glory—of their own particular variety—and to be out-murdered, out-sneaked, out-tricked by any other race was intolerable! The ultimate of humiliation was that non-Khasr creatures had looked upon Khasr—dead, but still Khasr—and lived to tell about it. The Khasr nation was filled with a sort of screaming fury of shame and frustration of men who had beaten them at their own game.