Imagine my surprise, then, when what came through the door was not Lamon, but an Onalbi claw. While one of the smaller manipulating arms gently moved the door aside, the claw deposited a few branches, neatly cut to the same length, on the fire, then withdrew. This was followed by more snicking sounds and another deposit of wood on the fire.
Then I heard soft scratching noises as a large, bulky body moved close to the door, settling itself across the opening, effectively adding its mass to the insulating effect of the thin shield of mud-slathered branches.
“Hresah?” I called.
No answer.
“Hresah?” I called again, louder this time. My side felt as though it was going to rip open.
“Hresah,” acknowledged the dry, whispery voice from outside. No translation, just his naked voice.
“Thanks,” I said, knowing that without the computer in the kiosk to translate, he probably wouldn’t understand.
“You are welcome,” came a stronger, more mechanical voice. Clearly, he had brought some kind of smaller computer down with him.
But… “How did you get down here?”
“Same way we put other Onalbi in. A sling used as you would use an elevator. Another now stands at the top. He lowered me to take care of you.”
“But why bother? You’ll probably just kill me anyway.”
At this, I heard scrabbling noises as the body at the door shifted. The door pushed aside and his large, blunt head appeared as his secondaries placed what I took to be his computer on the floor between us. “Why do you think you are to die?”
“I killed Grenabeloso.”
“Do you want to die?”
“No. Believe me, I don’t want to die. But I want the books to balance and if that’s what it will take, then I’ll have to face it. I don’t want the future of our two species to have a shadow hanging over it.”
“You are looking ahead.”
“I’m trying to.”
“That is what an anwabi does.”
In spite of, or perhaps because of all the rest I’d had, my mind was cloudy. Maybe it was a side effect of the drugs. I couldn’t follow what he was saying. “What is what an… anwabi does?” I did my best to approximate the way he pronounced it, with the accent on the middle syllable.
“It is the word we had trouble with yesterday before you fell. An anwabi looks ahead. It is his job, his specialization. Do you not have those whose job it is to look ahead?”
“I’m still not sure what you mean by look ahead. How could you have someone whose job is to look ahead?”
“Everything that we do has consequences, yes? Sometimes large actions have small consequences. Sometimes small actions have large consequences. It is the specialization of an anwabi to examine an action for possible consequences. Sometimes it is very difficult, as the consequences may be very far in the future and many things must be considered.”
“Then I wish I’d talked to an anwabi back when I was fooling around instead of hitting the books,” I muttered to myself.
Apparently, his computer’s hearing was sensitive enough to pick up on that. “You have mentioned before that you wish you had not spent your youth as you did. Was there no one to tell you what would follow?”
“Sort of. It’s pretty much accepted that you should do well in school, but it’s like washing your hands before you eat, everyone pretty much ignores the advice.”
“And there was no… person you could go to?”
“Person? You mean a person whose only thing to do is to tell you to study hard?”
“A person whose job is to study any question you bring and tell you what is likely to happen.”
“Sounds like a fortune-teller.”
“I’m sorry, the computer does not understand that.”
“Let’s pass on that, then. It would be a diversion. So how does an anwabi do whatever he does?”
“Let us use an example. Suppose we are to take present circumstances. We have a human. The human has killed an Onalbi. The humans and the Onalbi both wish to establish permanent communications. To be friends, perhaps. We are agreed on the conditions?”
I nodded. “That pretty well sums it up.”
“Then what we do is this. We need an anwabi. There are many, but due to the complexity and the importance of the question, we need a good one, the best we can find. We, you and I, go to talk to this anwabi. We tell him the conditions I have just described. He will think about the problem in general—decide what is relevant. Then he will ask us questions.”
“Questions? What kind of questions?”
“Did you kill the Onalbi as an act of war? Since it seems that humans are in competition for resources, did you kill the Onalbi for its resources? Were you defending yourself because it attacked you? Many questions.”
“Sounds like a trial.”
“In a way. An anwabi will want to look at the way the humans will react if one of their kind is killed. Also, how will the Onalbi feel?”
“That sounds like the kind of thing that you and I’ve been talking about.”
“Just so. Then there are the longterm things to look at. For this, the future of our two races, we must examine things with the greatest exactitude, as the future will be with us, our children, and their great-grandchildren. We must provide for them all the optimal solution.”
“Sounds impossible. You can’t always make everybody happy.”
“That is part of the anwabi job. Knowing that an anwabi has decided something makes it more palatable, even to those who must suffer.”
“So an anwabi is kind of like an arbitrator between two parties?”
“He can serve that function. But he can also assume the role of investigator, and judge, and lawyer, and jury—as I understand these terms. And sometimes… executioner.”
“That’s an awful lot of power for one person to have. How do you know they’ll be fair?”
“They are born to it.”
“Born to it? It’s a hereditary title?”
“No. They are born to it. Literally. Centuries of breeding. Long pedigrees. Records are kept of the decisions that anwabis make. Many years later, they are reviewed by others to determine if the anwabi’s decision worked out as he foresaw. If necessary, adjustments will be made to rebalance. If an anwabi is good and has few or no decisions reversed, then he is able to mate with other chosen anwabis. Their offspring are then better anwabis. Many centuries of this have produced anwabis who can reliably work into the third generation from the present, and less reliably out to the fifth generation.”
Considering the life span of an Onalbi, that was impressive. “But what about the anwabis whose decisions aren’t good enough?”
“There are always smaller decisions to be made. There is plenty of work for all, for we all need to make decisions, and though the breeding for anwabi has had trickle-down effects throughout the general population—even an ordinary Onalbi can see several years into the future—there are always things where wise counsel is needed. So even a lesser anwabi does well. And if his decisions are deemed wise, he begins to advance, and his bloodlines are elevated in the breeding plan, which is in itself something that others are bred for—to oversee the breeding.”
“Wait a minute, are you saying that all Onalbi are bred for their jobs?”
“Yes and no. They are bred for their jobs, but they are not required to take that job if they do not wish. If they choose another profession, they may do well, but they must be aware that they will be competing against those who have been bred to that job and they must do well indeed to prosper. Though we would never force an Onalbi to do a job they did not want to do, they usually will be most prosperous doing what they were born to do. Whether to follow the job one’s bloodlines were blended for is a frequent question for an anwabi to answer.”