Humans Wanted

by Vivian Caethe (ed. )

  It’s always bothered me, that the woman who filtered the world through burial rituals and death rites wouldn’t get a burial appropriate to her culture. But the universe claimed Ginny as its own. Maybe she was too good and happy and exuberant. The universe took care of Ginny’s burial, and she’d spend her eternity excavating the stars. Or she’d learn the secrets of the universe from the bosom of a black hole. That’s what I chose to believe—Ginny on one last adventure.

  No matter how many people I meet, no matter what happiness I find in life, I always have and always will carry one regret. Despite all the baubles and trinkets I have lining the shelves of my home from humans my father met and knew, I never got one from Ginny. The vacuum of space took claim of her possessions as it took claim to her body and life.

  I wish I had a picture of Ginny. She came into my life with such an unexpected force. A photograph would be tangible proof she actually existed; that she wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. Maybe that’s why humans are so fond of them—proof they have lived and loved. But there was no photograph of Ginny; with her two missing fingers and scar on her neck, the black ink on her wrist no longer a symbol I could recall, except that it was thick and bold, and when the needles passed over the tendons, she squeezed my hand tight in hers. There was no picture, no trinket.

  There was only Chinatown and the tattoo parlor. The excavations and explorations of planets I never imagined I’d step foot on. I was left with borrowed memories of Egypt and Earth, and a face that would scrunch and stretch. She was there and then gone, filling a space in my life I never knew was empty until she filled it and then left.

  Ginny Adams showed me the universe through a lens of curiosity and exploration. And all I had left when she was gone, was a memory of her smile, and the desire to hear her laugh one more time.

  Because that laugh was music, and color, and vibrance.

  “What nice caves you’ve made for yourselves,” the Dowager said, looking at the apartment blocks whirring past. “Together and apart. Very contradictory. Very primitive.” The elderly alien waited to see if her human servant would make any response, and though it was subtle, it was still satisfying.

  Emma sighed.

  Their transport passed through the human part of Portland and back across the river to the Lordly Nests of The Dowager’s people. The simple-minded machine barreled along on reliable old wheels, threading its way through traffic as Emma listened to the running commentary from her employer. She wasn’t paid nearly enough for the task of caring for her scaly charge, but it was a living wage, and at least her generation were employees, not chattel.

  Despite knowing Polly would growl at her and The Dowager would be irritable for days if she noticed, Emma sometimes would secretly pet the warm, furry live creature—a chamerot, imported from her home planet—that coiled on The Dowager’s upper body to give her warmth. She avoided the painful little flicks of the creature’s curious barbed tongue, but she knew it loved to be petted, and she enjoyed petting it.

  As they had for a decade and a half, Emma and The Dowager sat in the transport as it rumbled into the heavy duty lift and they were all lifted to the imperial heights of The Dowager’s home.

  Emma had always somewhat admired The Dowager’s airy nest-residence, though its architecture and furniture were strange to human proportions and physiology. It reminded her of a combination of a high cat perch and a connected bunch of bird nests, though it had other qualities which made it much more unearthly than that. Or perhaps it was earthly to her, after all, since she had seen Lordly Nests on media and in person all her life, just as every human in living memory had.

  They walked in, past the security scans and the protection machines, and automated voices blessed and welcomed the mistress of the house, ignoring her servant entirely, of course. At one time, when her human’s name had been Kuma, The Dowager had swept into her residence each evening with regal weight and speed. Now her walk had slowed to a waddle, and her servant was obliged to slow her long-legged stride to a respectful dawdle.

  Emma lifted the sleepy chamerot from The Dowager’s shoulders and back. The animal was getting old, though it was nowhere near as long-lived as its mistress. Its broad, flexible, rubbery body was deliciously warm, and its thick, soft fur was extraordinarily comfortable. The two mated pairs of dastedgynes that the old alien kept wrapped around her lower legs were less luxurious but equally warm. All of the animals were heavy, soft and docile as Emma transferred them into their cages, then watered and fed them.

  The Dowager rattled her way into the main room while Emma cared for the kitchen menagerie. Her own cat, Polly, ate her wet food like lightning, as always. Just to put The Dowager off for a few more minutes, Emma took the time to put a packet of Katpops treats in the convection oven. Within half a minute, the little red pellets of condensed meat had popped into kitty treats, and Emma placed the open packet before Polly. The cat devoured them in record time. Emma carried Polly with her, to and from The Dowager’s nest every day. It was good to have some terrestrial company, and Polly enjoyed hissing and spitting at the chamerots, which pretended Polly did not exist.

  The alien ate simply, due to her easily unsettled digestion. Emma ceremoniously set down the cup before her dais and The Dowager took it up. The Dowager sipped as much of the egg whites as she could; they were fresh and cold in her homeworld-styled cup. She had always enjoyed them with certain special meals; Emma had watched her do this for years. It was still a little grotesque to her, but she’d made a connection years earlier, which had taken most of the queasiness away.

  She tried, as she had every day now for almost a third of her life, to make idle conversation with The Dowager. Even now it was always a dicey proposition. There was never any certainty about which subjects the creature would consider harmless and which she would consider aggravating. Emma had long since given up on avoiding political matters, because The Dowager could, and did, make any discussion political. Because the alien’s politics were always focused on alien over human, offworld over colonial, it was also always a losing proposition for Emma.

  The Dowager had been spawned on Earth, as had nearly every member of her species still on the planet. Visits from her people had dwindled to a scattered rain of starships, as their collective interests had shifted in other directions. Humanity, like grass cut sharply against the soil, grew in all the empty places they had left behind. The Dowager felt about this as keenly as if she had ever lived in the glory days herself. She seemed to feel everything very keenly, as Emma saw it.

  Emma was in the midst of making a passing comment on the weather, which was warming up and would doubtless make her employer happy, when The Dowager finished her eggs.

  “Finished, human girl,” she said. “Clean and go. I do not need you any more tonight.”

  It was early, and Emma couldn’t really conceal her surprise. “Are you certain, Dowager? It’s only 8:30.”

  “I am the daughter of many queens. I know what time it is. Clean and leave me.”

  “Yes, Dowager.”

  Emma did as the creature commanded, and when she left she felt, somehow, that The Dowager was trying to conceal one of her many strong feelings. It was unlike the alien, but then there was public transportation to wrestle with, her own dinner to eat, and maybe an Experience to take in before bed.

  Every day, Emma walked past the local Scar. The aliens had made humanity leave the marks of their conquest intact in key places on the planet, as a kind of ongoing psychological warfare. But the same vast, gutted, glassy trenches that had ignited repeated revolts in her great-grandparents’ days, daily bouts of white-hot fury in her grandparents’ time, and heated rhetoric in her parents’ youth, were now being quietly eliminated one by one—in Emma’s adulthood. They didn’t mean anything but an ugly, stupid waste to her. She pitied a culture so ignorant that they would ruin good land just to spite those born on it.

  The whole Earth had once belonged to humanity, of course, or at least that had bee
n how humans had seen it. Since the coming of The Dowager’s species, people had divided themselves into two broad camps: Those who felt that ownership more fervently than ever, and those who accepted that a place was only a place, and everyone stood on a place far more than they really owned it.

  Then again, the urge to divide into opposing factions had been humanity’s downfall for many generations, until the aliens had seized upon it in their invasion. Only the invaders had truly united the tool-using sapient life of Earth, though it had been much too late to prevent conquest. Perhaps a united Earth would have failed against superior technology anyway. Humans would never know, though that would not prevent eternal debate on the topic. And there was the urge to divide and dispute once again.

  Much of the aliens’ technology could not be reverse-engineered by humans because it was based on substances, and even spatial conditions, that did not exist anywhere on or near Earth. Without the interstellar culture to build the tools to build the factories, humans could only steal invader technology and use it until it failed. It smacked, to both humans and aliens, of cargo cults, hand-me-down culture and barbarity. Yet no barbarity was completely out of the question for either species, and so there had been failed rebellions again and again. Some called the dead combatants heroes, but they were still all dead, anyway.

  Emma had nothing to do with any of that, and despite The Dowager’s occasional implication about herself, she was confident that the old alien had never so much as seen a human/invader skirmish in person. On the rare occasion that an invader soldat had been seen in the streets of Portland, Emma had noted the telltale signs of excited fear in her employer. She could not tell if the creature was more reassured than alarmed by the military of her own species, but if she had been asked to wager, Emma would have put her money on fear.

  Sometimes she suspected fear was always first in The Dowager’s feelings. That, and an inhuman kind of loneliness that was completely at odds with The Dowager’s natural territorial inclinations. Sometimes she tried to draw her employer out, very carefully offering ideas.

  “There are still plenty of your people on Earth,” said Emma. “We could visit them.”

  “None of my friends are still alive,” snapped The Dowager. “There is no one to visit.”

  “There are plenty of younger people of both of our species,” said Emma. “You could make new friends.”

  “The younger people are idiots,” raged The Dowager. “Yes, even of my kind! They act so much like your species, they’re like beasts themselves! There is no one left who still knows the old ways. No one left who remembers how wonderful sspreeecchtt/cl was, or what to say when you m/hiii*, or even the gesture of the equinox. We’ve degenerated, and surely it is time for the final plague to claim us all. I see all the signs. It is time.”

  “How long have your people predicted the final plague would punish their degeneracy?” Emma smiled.

  “Long enough. It is almost here,” said The Dowager. “You probably look forward to it, twisted creature.”

  “No,” said Emma. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

  Emma was young by human standards. She was only in her forties now; in a human lifespan, that was barely past the end of the first third of her existence. Still, she had chosen to have a child when she was still in her prime years, not opting for the waiting list for a rejuvenated womb. Even though the aliens’ Minimal Human Breeding program was well out of date, Earth had retained the cultural imperative to population control. And so one baby had been enough for Emma and her husband.

  They had been fresh from college, cautiously optimistic about a world emerging from a great shadow. The two humans hadn’t had much money, so their studies were practical and job-oriented: The male had become an accountant, and his mate, Emma, had become a xenocare specialist. They had loved and quarreled in the usual primate ways, finding community in one another, their families, and their little child. Death separated Emma from her man, and time took her baby away, as her offspring grew up to become a technician in one of the sprawling orbital cities that were increasingly occupied by nothing but humans. “Dirty skins pushing out clean scales,” as The Dowager had put it. “Breeding like insects and destroying everything worthwhile.”

  Emma had a telecall from her child every Saturday, and there were family gatherings a few times a year. These were the times she loved best; even when they hadn’t seen one another in what felt like a lifetime, every small gesture and nuance spoke of connection, sharing, and warmth.

  Something had upset The Dowager’s digestion. She had vomited up her meal, which had been a passel of furry live grub creatures from the kitchen menagerie. The macerated corpses were splayed out in a glossy blob of viscous digestive fluid. Throwing up was miserable for a human, but excruciating for the invaders, whose metabolisms were always difficult. If it had been possible, Emma would have sworn that The Dowager appeared to be embarrassed and a little frightened.

  “Clean it up, lazy human girl,” said The Dowager. Emma earned her keep and then some, as she did the tedious chore without a word. “If only humans hadn’t been so lazy, you might have been worth something.”

  When Emma was done, she looked carefully at her employer. The creature was old, and clearly not in the best condition for her age, but was it worse than that?

  “Impertinent servant, stop staring at me,” The Dowager said, looking away. “Do your chores in the other chambers. Leave me.”

  “Yes, Dowager.”

  When The Dowager’s skin had been sleek and she had been full of youth, long before Emma had existed, her conquering breed had fairly thronged the streets. All the signs and visuports were still in the alien language, and the human tongues of Hindi, French, and English had yet to resurge. She thought back sometimes, to those beautiful times, and lifting her voice in the evening chorus under the weird blue skies of Earth.

  Now the evening chorus was only a ragged voice here and there, churring from a rooftop or a street corner. The younger conquerors resorted to infoplex connections, virtually chorusing together, but The Dowager found that too depressing to contemplate.

  The simple transparent globe that was the traditional invader religious symbol, their sign of the Divine, was missing from its place in The Dowager’s nest. Emma had not commented on its absence, but she knew she never moved it except to put it in the duster and then put it back. The spiritual sign was simply gone now, and Emma had known better than to ask about it.

  “Your food is disgusting,” said The Dowager, marveling at Emma’s sandwich as if she had never seen one before. “Did your ancestors take up layers of detritus from a swamp and eat that?”

  “No,” said Emma. “We just find it more convenient to sometimes eat food between two pieces of bread.”

  “Yes, your bread,” said The Dowager. “Ground plant matter made bulbous with fungus gas, then burned in a kiln.”

  “You make it sound so delicious,” Emma said, taking another bite.

  “Disgusting.”

  Emma had eaten her meals out of The Dowager’s sight for years. The alien had recently given her new instructions: She needed Emma close by, and she would accustom herself to watching Emma’s revoltingly articulate mouth chew and swallow her awful fodder. She passed the time while Emma’s mouth was full by sneering at the disgraceful decline of the invader government and the way humans were taking over all the administrative posts as if it all belonged to them.

  “It does belong to us,” Emma had said between bites one day. “We evolved here.”

  “Typical,” rasped The Dowager. “So stupid. If spawning someplace made it your home, no one would ever have left the Primal Spawning Place. Your place in the universe is wherever you take action. Not where your life begins and ends. Those are not actions you take. Those are things that happen to you. Slave thinking. Slave race.”

  “Slavery is over.”

  In Emma’s grandmother’s day, Earth had been a colony of The Dowager’s people. In her mother’s day, the E
arth been changed to a protectorate status. Now, in the years since Emma had graduated from Portland Human College, the aliens had revised their own status to “supervisors in residence” and there was a provisional government that was autonomous in everything but name.

  The Dowager muttered, “Gyooorr//hchhh *k!k* gyuuuuhuhuhuh,” under her breath.

  “You know I speak your language, Dowager,” Emma said, quietly. “I humbly request that you please don’t call me that name.”

  The Dowager feigned surprise for the ten-thousandth time. “‘Speak my language,’ it says. If it does speak the proud language of the victorious ones, it speaks it poorly. With a terrible accent.”

  “I’m sure I do,” said Emma. “All the same, I repeat my request.”

  The Dowager made the sign of noncommittal avoidance, but she did not repeat the insult.

  “We know that nothing is given,” said The Dowager. “Everything is taken. Some of the time, you humans know this, too. But you are always infected with the gifting stupidity.”

  Emma took a moment to compose her thoughts. “Giving is also a strength, Dowager,” she said. “I’m sorry to dispute you, but that is something we know to be true.”

  The Dowager made a sign of disgust. “You lost to us, you will always lose to us. When you die, you always beg your invisible ones for mercy. You expect something from everything, you think gifts will be given. We do not.”

  Emma was puzzled by the direction the conversation had taken. The Dowager was agitated, but her human servant couldn’t see why.

  “It’s probably just one of our many flaws,” Emma said. “We have to live and die with them.”

  “We are conquerors and rulers,” said The Dowager. “I am the daughter of many queens. Many queens.” She seemed to search for words, then: “For as long as we have had language, my people have always chosen to die in the proper way.”