Final Inquiries (22 page)

"The beverage container? There is proof that it was his?"

"Not proof, perhaps, but evidence. You do not read English characters. There is a faded inscription on the bottom of the container--four characters that correspond to the first portion of the name 'Milkowski.' There is at least one other possible interpretation of that inscription, but it is at least highly suggestive."

"Yes! It suggests--it shouts out--that the spy agent Milkowski is the killer."

"It shouts it at such deafening volume that I have trouble believing it. We are talking about a professional investigator leaving his name at the scene of the crime. Either he is, in some way, insane--perhaps in a way that is unique to humans and is not known to us--or the actual killer has manufactured evidence that points to him. I see no plausible third explanation."

"A trap by the humans, then. We accuse the wrong human, they prove his innocence--and do it in a manner that makes it impossible for us to make a second accusation without losing face."

"If that is the case--though it seems a wildly risky plan for the humans to try--then, moments ago, you were demanding with great violence that we fall for it."

"Well perhaps then the spy agent Milkowski did do it--though there is something in what you say."

"Quite right, My Superior," Brox said with sarcasm as thick as half-melted tar. "We can be absolutely certain that Special Agent Milkowski is either guilty--or innocent." He rose to stand in a position of respectful submission. "Give it time, My Superior. Give it just a little time, and we will plow our way clear of this field overgrown with muddle and uncertainty, and move forward to better-tended pasture."

"Time," said Diplomatic Xenologist Flexdal 2091, "is the item that is in shortest supply. Do your job then--but do not expend a single needless duration unit of that precious commodity."

Hannah's eyes snapped open, and she found herself staring up at a ceiling she had never before seen in daylight. Fear flickered through her mind, but she shoved it aside. She had been on too many assignments on too many planets, experienced the same sort of thing too many times before to be thrown off by it. It took her only a few seconds to go from
where am I/what am I doing here
and utter disorientation to getting herself fully grounded back in the facts of the case and her own situation.

They had bedded down in the main entry hallway of the embassy ship. They had chosen the spot for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it was also the main access hatch for the ship and the only hatch at ground level. Any of the people in confinement who decided to leave the ship for whatever reason would have found themselves unexpectedly stepping over two BSI agents, one on either side of the inner air-lock door.

She peeked through the locked door and into the lock chamber itself. There was Jamie, as dead to the world as she herself must have been little more than sixty seconds before. Hannah decided to play a little game with herself and started to count silently.

Before she got to thirty, Jamie's eyes came open, and it was plain from the look on his face that
he
knew exactly where he was and why. No frown of puzzlement for him.

"Good morning," she said to him through the open air-lock door. How he always managed to wake up within one minute of her when they were on a case was beyond Hannah, but he always did.

"Morning, anyway," he said. "We'll have to go and check before we find out how good it is."

She heard something of the fierce, innocent courage of a six-year-old out to chase the imaginary monsters in the backyard in his voice, and saw it on his face as well.
That's my boy,
Hannah told herself, not certain if she felt more motherly or big sisterish just then, but knowing for sure to keep her feelings to herself. Hannah was careful to hide her affectionate smile from Jamie as they both wordlessly got up and went through the routine of stowing their gear. It was a matter of reflex for both of them to step out of view of the other and turn their backs on each other as they got up and got ready for the day.

"Tell you what," said Jamie. "I'm just about ready to go. I'm going to wander outside and give you a little time and space for getting organized."

"Okay," Hannah said, being careful not to thank him. It might embarrass him to bring too much attention to his attempt to prevent her embarrassment.

Working in a split-gender partner setup with a partner who sometimes seemed almost young enough to be her son wasn't always easy. There were times when it required a certain amount of dancing around each other to keep embarrassing sights and emotions from being displayed. But it was a dance they had both gotten pretty good at.

Jamie shouldn't have been surprised to see Zhen Chi outside, working in the embassy garden. After all, she was formally released from confinement--and keeping Earth-based plants alive in this place had to be a job that required constant attention--especially with all the very reasonable and proper precautions that were imposed to keep the Earthside plant life from escaping and establishing itself in the wild.

"At least I don't have weeds to deal with," Zhen Chi said, when she saw Jamie. She was kneeling in one of the flower beds, doing something or other to the plants. Jamie wasn't remotely experienced enough to say what. "We didn't bring them along, so we don't have to pull them up. I could certainly do with bees, though."

"Aren't the Vixa close enough?" asked Jamie. "I thought they were supposed to be hive animals."

Zhen Chi stood up, peeled off her very petite gardening gloves, and carefully shook the dirt off them. "Come sit," she said, indicating a bench off to one side of the flower bed. Jamie followed her over and sat next to her and stared fixedly at the flowers.

"Nice to see some life-forms I'm sort of familiar with," he said. "Even if I don't know much about them."

"Let me guess," she said. "You had a pretty rough ritual of submission."

"I don't remember submitting to anything."

"Yeah, but they call it that. What happened?"

"We went in to see a Grand Vixan named Zeeraum. While we were standing there, she opened the, whatever you call it, her mouth sphincter." Jamie gestured toward the top of his own head to show where he meant. "There were some bones and things there. Some cute little helper Vixa scuttled up there to clean out the debris. Once it was done, Zeeraum picked up one of the helpers, cuddled it for a second, then tossed it into her mouth and swallowed it whole. We could hear it screaming from inside the mouth--and even saw it struggling."

"If it's any help, which it probably isn't, I very much doubt that's what you saw. When Zeeraum was finished cuddling the helper, she would have paralyzed it by using one of her manipulator-arm stings. The Vixan digestive acids and enzymes are very powerful and fast-acting. The flesh dissolves fast and produces a lot of gas, which can form bubbles and odd noises as it dissipates."

"I saw what I saw, and heard what I heard," said Jamie.

"Then, by the lights of her own culture, Zeeraum was guilty of deviant behavior. Forgive me for putting it in such flippant terms, but the Vixa view it as very poor form to play with their food. If she's caught doing that, she'll be punished."

"Oh, good. Now I feel much better about Zeeraum's swallowing her relative whole."

"I know these aren't the points you're worried about," said Zhen Chi, "but Vixa don't swallow. That mouth is really just the opening to a sort of predigestion chamber. The food goes in, and the digestive juices start flowing, and everything edible is dissolved off the food object. The liquefied food flows down into the main body for further digestion, leaving the solid remains behind to be spat out or cleaned up or whatever. The predigestion chamber is normally kept full and working at all times."

"And all that makes cannibalism all right?"

"No. But, by their lights--and as a piece of brutal logic--what you saw wasn't cannibalism, or any more or less wrong than your eating a hamburger. The only difference is the cow is killed and slaughtered and chopped into little pieces for you, off where no one has to see it."

"After yesterday, I'd have to say that's a pretty big difference," said Jamie. "But one Vixa ate another. How is that not cannibalism?"

"We don't even know how many Vixa biological castes there are," she answered. "We're reasonably certain that the smaller ones are maybe as smart as say, dogs or rats. Not smart enough to talk, or think--but smart enough to be programmed to perform simple tasks. Some of them don't have minds at all, in any sense we'd understand. They just have what amount to remote-control systems."

"And they didn't get those from Mother Nature," Jamie said. "It had to be that our escort Vixa were being operated by some sort of centralized system. Were they all lobotomized and equipped with two-way radios?"

"Possibly, but unlikely. They can function independently, so their brains haven't been altogether removed."

"Yeah, I saw behavior to confirm that. But my point is that not all of these castes and variants and so on evolved naturally. They've been bred, or genetically engineered. I take your point that there's not really any logical distinction between me eating a cow in pieces and a Vixan eating another critter in one bite--but taking my cousin, or my child, and genetically engineering him so his ancestors are not only mindless, but delicious--maybe even breeding them so they don't mind being eaten--
that's
different. That's wrong."

"Yes," said Zhen Chi. "It is wrong, horribly wrong and evil--for us. It's decadent, degenerate--for us. I certainly don't approve of their culture. I find it as repellent as you do. But we come from a species where we really
are
all the same--and a species that just recently stopped treating people who looked slightly different from them like animals. It's still a wound, a raw wound, with us. And seeing a species where all the lies told about human slaves are
true
--the lower-end castes
are
happy, they
aren't
capable of taking care of themselves, they
love
taking care of us, we
are
better than they, and we
were
born to rule them--just saying those words makes me feel a little bit sick. And yet, here,
they are all true.
" She shuddered. "Brrr. It makes us all twitchy. But I'll tell you what might be the deeper truth--the thing that makes us wonder if the Vixa really are decadent, maybe even degenerate, as a culture. It's the
waste.
"

"The waste of what? And what does it matter what they waste? They're infinitely richer than us."

"The waste of their own potential, if you come right down to it. There were some xenoanthropologists through here a while ago, doing some very basic observations on the Vixa. They estimated that the majority--that's more than fifty percent--of their economic activity revolves around demonstrating and establishing status. The specially bred escorts. The huge, uselessly redundant space elevators. The whole Stationary Ring. The massive cities that have to be built to hold all the escorts and aides and assistants and what have you, billions of them, to dance attendance on, at most, a few million Grand Vixa and other fully sentient castes.
Think
what they could accomplish with the energy and skills and resources that are burned up by status display."

"Could they do that?" Jamie asked. "Could they break free? Would they want to, or need to?"

"You mean, so they could start acting sensible, like us?" Zhen Chi smiled sadly, and shook her head. "I doubt it," she said. "I know you've heard it a million times, but biology is destiny. I don't care
how
Elder the Race is--
every
species is shaped by the way it evolved, what its nonsentient ancestors did for a living. There is no strong link between the complexity of the physical, biological organism and the sophistication or level of advancement of the culture. There are some sentient species that are way beyond humans in terms of bio-complexity and sophistication--but insofar as their culture--to use the technical term, they're a bunch of slobs. What they've got, those races inherited from other races. On their own, they really don't have that much to offer.

"The Vixa are somewhere between highly evolved trilobites and the first chordates, with much larger brains, of course. We're
much
more biologically complex--but simple designs can be very advanced and efficient. And there is nothing second-class at all about their minds. Take a look at their technology and you can see that.

"The Vixa have made simplicity work for them in lots of ways, made it into a huge advantage. It's easier to make changes to a simpler machine. That right there explains a lot of their ability to modify themselves into so many variants with so little apparent effort. Their stingers and toxins, for example. There's a stinger at the end of each arm, and the Vixa have engineered themselves so that each stinger injects a different toxin. Their med-specialist castes don't have toxins in their stingers--they've got various injectable medicines.

"But it's not even about evolution or biological complexity. It's about how they reproduce. Think ants, think termites, think naked mole rats. Have you ever read
Brave New World
? Aldous Huxley? Early twentieth century--pre just about everything. Precloning. Pre-behavioral science. Pre discovery of DNA, for that matter. All the science, all the technology wrong--but the basic idea of a society that mass-produces people--that part Huxley got right. If I were the ambassador, I don't know if I'd make that book required reading for everyone at the embassy--or else ban it from the embassy library as too disturbing and a threat to morale."

"You've gotten ahead of me," Jamie said.

"Okay. Sorry. I do that. I get involved, and I just take off with it, whatever it is. Okay. Lemme back up. Hive species. Like ants and termites and bees. One thing they have in common is that they limit reproduction. The queen bee is the only one who lays eggs.
All
the bees in the hive are her children. Nearly all of them are sterile females. Worker bees. Naked mole rats are mammals, but they have a lot of behaviors in common with ants and termites. They have a queen that does all the reproducing. They build an underground burrow and pretty much never leave it. They create, control--and are confined by, controlled by, the limits of the burrow."