Unseen Demons

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Maybe ten minutes passed before Whalekiller, who probably felt as oppressed by the silence as she did, cleared his throat. “Counselor?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got to ask you: that thing the Tchi said, about you favoring humans in so many jurisdiction disputes? Is that true?”

  Relieved to be distracted by business again, she brushed a strand of black hair away from her face, and said, “No. It’s a gross distortion.”

  “I figured as much. What precisely did he leave out?”

  “The fact that none of the cases I managed to flip to human courts were ever about crimes committed against native sentients. They may have been committed on alien soil, but they were all human-on-human crimes — disputes between Dip Corps personnel, ranging from petty theft to one particularly stupid murder. The indigenes were always entitled to jurisdiction if they wanted it, but I was usually able to persuade them that humanity was the injured party and therefore entitled to our own justice. If they agreed to extradition, it was because they were relieved they could.”

  “Wish you could manage that in this case,” said Whalekiller.

  “So do I,” Cort said. “It would make things a lot easier.”

  He hesitated. “You ever surrender somebody like Sandburg to the locals?”

  “Somebody like Sandburg? No. Not in this specific context. I had somebody worse, who had already willfully surrendered to alien justice; and the questions I faced then were well past what would have been right or wrong for him. But I had a case not too long ago: some indenture hiking cross-country got caught in a rainstorm, hid out in a cave, took a leak in there while he was at it. Some pilgrim saw him doing it and accused him of desecrating a holy tomb. The punishment was public flogging followed by banishment. We didn’t even fight that one: the guy was a real do-his-duty type, said he could take ten lashes if it meant honoring native law. We gave him something to deaden the pain, fixed him up afterward, then re-assigned him. It probably helped his career. I think he’s now an Ambassador somewhere.”

  “But he didn’t really deserve the punishment.”

  “We didn’t think he deserved any,” Cort said. “The site wasn’t marked and hadn’t been mentioned before. He just did what came naturally, and handing him over kept the indigenes happy without doing him any permanent damage. Sandburg, on the other hand…”

  She let the sentence trail off.

  He finished it for her. “—deserves anything they could possibly do to him.”

  She nodded. “Did you know him, Bondsman? I mean, before?”

  “Know him? I think it’s pretty clear that nobody knew him. If we’d known him, we would have shipped him off-world before the damage was done.”

  “But did you think you knew him?”

  Whalekiller considered that. “I think I tried talking to him three, four times. Casual conversation. He was polite enough. He tried to be friendly. But the man had nothing to say. Everything he said was just…empty. Like everything he said was being edited by a committee intent on making sure that nothing of any real content ever escaped his mouth.” He shivered. “I don’t know. Maybe that was as close as he could come to normal. Maybe the only alternative to being a nobody was revealing what a sick bastard he was every time he opened his mouth.”

  “Maybe,” she said, trying to reconcile that with the cocky Sandburg she’d interviewed.

  “One thing’s for sure, Counselor: whatever’s in this head of his is downright evil. The Riirgaans provided footage of what he did, and it’s enough to make you ashamed to be human.” He closed his eyes, shook his head, and said: “it’s too bad. About our problem, I mean. Too bad the Catarkhans don’t have laws.”

  “Yes. It certainly is.”

  She fell into silence as she watched the endless brown of the Catarkhan desert passing by far below. It would indeed be easier if Sandburg could only be extradited. The Dip Corps would have made damn sure he received the maximum punishment for his crimes — if not out of moral outrage, then at least out of concern for its own reputation.

  But Emil Sandburg’s offense had been a crime of violence against locals, a distinction that, under the First Contact Protocols supported by all the major spacefaring races, required trial under the local version of justice.

  It didn’t matter a whit that in this case, there was no local version of justice, or of crime, or of right and wrong. Nor did it matter at all that there was no way, short of warfare, that adherence to the policy could be practically enforced against any spacefaring race that decided in any given situation to ignore it. The policy was still seen, and treated, as an inviolate rule, one which all the major spacefaring races had instituted to minimize the kind of disasters that so frequently occur when one culture decides the run roughshod over another. Failing to honor it, even here, would seriously damage humanity’s prestige and moral capital and whatever right it had to claim that the worst of its sins was in the past.

  The locals had to provide judge and jury.

  Even if they had no such thing. Even if they had no even distant equivalent.

  Even if, as in this case, they might have been incapable of ever understanding that a crime had been committed.

  6

  One of the worlds Cort’s work had inflicted upon her in the past boasted an herbivore the local aboriginals had given a name that sounded like a slow air leak. The closest human analogue to the sound was a sibilant sssssss, pronounced in a barely audible whisper. The abos called it that because the beast moved at a rate that seemed about as fast as erosion, blinking maybe once an hour, breathing about twice that much, reacting to everything that happened in its vicinity half an hour after it had passed into the realm of history. The beast was fortunate to be as stupid as a brick, since any creature with greater intelligence would have been driven insane by the boredom of its own existence.

  The Catarkhans were downright manic by comparison, in that when excited they moved at roughly half the rate of human beings assaying a relaxed walk. They were sluggish, but just enough to seem more deliberate than decrepit. Had they shown any awareness of anything happening anywhere around them, the trait might have been endearing. But they were easily as oblivious as the sibilant-s herbivores Cort remembered; the world around them was simply not part of their equation.

  “They have no justice system,” Whalekiller explained, soon after they landed. “They have no laws, no societal structure, no philosophy, no religion, no rituals, no real sense of the individual, and no behaviors that seem independent of whatever’s hardwired into their genes.”

  Cort’s thumb was starting to ache from all the nibbling. “Have we ever been able to conduct any kind of communication with them at all?”

  “Are you kidding? We haven’t even been able to alert them we’re here.”

  The Catarkhans were gray, but not elephant-gray; elephants have character, and Catarkhans had nothing of the kind. Imagine a gray that was not just the absence but the thoroughgoing rejection of color. Imagine a gently-curved kidney of a torso about .75 of a meter in length; an inverted cone of a head that would have been entirely featureless if it didn’t provide space for a brain and didn’t have a thicket of perpetually-writhing cilia around the perpetually-open mouth. Imagine no teeth and no tongue and no fixed jaw, just a solid funnel leading right down the gullet. There were six limbs, each articulated with two knees apiece, the lower set lined with a layer of cilia somewhat finer than that which bracketed the mouth. There were clumsy grasping appendages, a compromise between hands and feet, at the bottom of those limbs; they were just strong enough to pick up and manipulate small objects, which usually meant the globby mash Catarkhans directed toward that cavernous mouth.

  Catarkhans could dig, and in fact they lived in hives. But the excavation took forever and required the constant effort of hundreds in order for any real progress to be made. Individuals were very weak in relation to their size, and weighed about as much as a bubbles of hollow flesh — one of the main reasons Emil Sandburg
would have had no problem overpowering one. A small human child probably could. But that wasn’t the least of their shortcomings.

  The greatest of those was that they were practically insensate. They were islands unto themselves. They perceived almost nothing. They were blind and deaf because they had no accommodation for eyes and ears; they had an at-best rudimentary sense of smell thanks to the chemical receptors in their cilia, but that was just enough to recognize food, and perhaps smell it, certainly not enough to distinguish tastes. Nor was there any pain center in their brains; shoot them, cripple them, shatter their limbs, set fire to their skins, and they just blundered on, dragging the nonfunctional parts of themselves out of sheer inability to recognize their injuries. The only sense they had in functional quantities was tactile, and that on only a relatively small part of their body — the cilia that lined the limbs below each second knee. If they were removed or incapacitated, the Catarkhans were cut off from the rest of the universe, reduced to bubbles of empty consciousness unaware even that there was anything around them subject to awareness. It was no wonder their life-support behaviors needed to be hardwired; otherwise, they would have survived as a species for only as long as it took the entire population to starve.

  Cort found standing in the midst of thousands of them, who inched along the ground in multiple files as they headed toward the cultivated farms that surrounded their hive in concentric circles, a lot like not existing at all.

  It was her first encounter with the creatures the law had so perversely designated her jury pool.

  After about ten minutes of silent observation, she said, “Shit.”

  “You’re beginning to see the size of your problem.”

  “I saw it before, Whalekiller; I’m just now beginning to feel it. There’s no way to interact with them at all?”

  “Try it, why don’t you.”

  Hesitating only a moment, Cort reached out and pulled one of the deaf-and-blind marchers from its parade. The hardest thing about that was figuring out where it was safe to touch one; they had no real offensive capabilities, so there was no possibility of it being able to hurt her, but she had no intention of hurting it and therefore ending up another diplomatic nightmare occupying the cell next to Emil Sandburg. She settled on placing her palms on either side of its bean-shaped torso to gently steer its progress away from its parade and toward her. The degree of pressure she needed to influence its course was so negligible she might have been manipulating a balloon, or a toy boat. The Catarkhan meekly turned away from its fellows, moved toward Cort, then stopped, either paralyzed by its unexpected detour, or confident that she would soon provide it additional guidance.

  The Catarkhans who had been marching along behind the one she’d captured did not follow. They ignored the disruption and continued their march without interruption. As far as Cort could tell, there was no way of telling whether this was obliviousness, deliberate judgement, or robotlike devotion to their previous programming.

  The one she had pulled from its place on line just stood there, waiting. It didn’t see her at all. She wasn’t there. She may have been an incomprehensible natural force capable of producing changes in its daily routine, but she was still as invisible as a spirit.

  “Or a Demon,” she said, thinking of Emil Sandburg.

  Whalekiller said, “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  The cilia around the Catarkhan’s wide-open mouth writhed like anemones. The only indication that it was trying to perceive anything other than itself, engaged in perceiving anything other than itself, they too looked deaf and blind — aware that something was happening, but forever unable to determine exactly what. Cort tried and failed discern patterns in the way they danced. “Can I touch those?”

  “For all the good it will do,” Whalekiller said.

  Cort was wearing the gloves she usually wore for planet work; the risk of getting dirt, real planetary dirt, on her fingers was just one of the many things she didn’t appreciate about worlds. She doffed the right one and touched those undulating little worms with the tip of her index finger. They weren’t slimy, as expected; they had a sandpapery, feverish warmth that didn’t feel organic at all, but more like some kind of fabric that had been stored under hot conditions. They didn’t react to her touch at all, and neither did their host.

  She glanced at Whalekiller. “Nothing?”

  “It doesn’t have taste receptors for anything you’re made of,” Whalekiller said.

  “So I’m still invisible to it.”

  “That’s right. It can’t sense you at all.”

  “Doesn’t it have any idea what’s happening?”

  “To know how much it understands, we first have to get into its head, and to date, nobody, not even the Riirgaans, has ever succeeded in doing that.”

  Cortís grimace grew broader. “Then how the hell do we know it’s sentient?”

  “The same way we know the Vlhani or the Thlane or the Farsh are sentient.”

  They were three pre-technological species who had presented particularly tough first-contact problems. They were all clearly sentient, but they were all so alien, not only by the standards of human beings but also by the standards of all the other known spacefaring species, that the task of establishing some form of substantive communication with them had been dragging on for years. But the comparison was not perfect, because while little communication with the Vlhani and the Thlane and the Farsh had progressed beyond the equivalent of baby talk, all three species had at least noticed that somebody was trying to talk to them. The Vlhani had even progressed to the point of allowing human beings to participate in their most sacred rituals — and in raising holy hell when the idiot human Ambassador tried to interfere. But seven earth-standard years of constant study had left the Catarkhans still cut off, disconnected, oblivious.

  She said, “How do we know? Wishful thinking?”

  If Whalekiller was offended by her sarcasm, he did not show it; instead, he launched into a speech so polished that he must have honed it during many previous briefings. “By measuring the data content of their interpersonal communication.”

  “There is some?”

  “It all takes place in the hive. There’s an incredibly complex language that has to do with how many cilia they touch or refrain from touching at any one time — I don’t get most of it myself, but the Riirgaans, who made the breakthrough, mapped the informational traffic, and found grammatical structure, consistent themes, individuality, complex repeated sequences, and even regional accents. It’s as dense as an AI stream. It’s sentient communication. But nothing in it seems affected by anything they do in their daily lives — it feels as abstract as philosophy or religion or poetry, and it’s totally inaccessible to us without some kind of clear way in.”

  “I don’t know, Whalekiller. Sentience implies a certain minimal level of free will, and I don’t see any of that in their behavior.”

  “They have plenty of free will — as far as talking to each other is concerned. They just don’t need any to handle their behavior. Their behavior is hardwired.”

  “Instinct,” she said. “Or reflex.”

  “Something like that. See, Counsellor, Catarkhus has such a stable ecosystem it’s ridiculous. They don’t have any predators. They don’t have any enemies. They don’t have any seismic activity. They don’t have any heavy weather. They only have a limited number of contagious diseases. They never needed the capability to react to unforeseen circumstances. They never needed a wide array of senses to provide constant data about an unstable and potentially dangerous environment. They never needed pain to teach them which things were bad to do. And they never needed individual variation to provide their population with a complementary and competitive skills. They just needed food gathering and reproductive instincts, and primitive tactile and olfactory senses to help them out on those rare occasions where that wouldn’t be enough. They didn’t need brains this evolved, or a communication system this complex. That’s all devoted
to higher thinking. —In fact,” he added, “as if just remembering it at right that very moment, there’s a school of thought, among many of the exolinguists here, that says the Catarkhan mind isn’t aware of what the body does at all — that the intelligence they possess is totally disconnected from a daily life run by their involuntary nervous system. It would explain a lot. But either way, their adaptations made them totally helpless when something genuinely alien did enter their environment.”

  “Us.”

  “Well,” Whalekiller shrugged, “the Bursteeni first. They discovered the species and named the planet. Then the Riirgaans, who established Catarkhan sentience. Then a couple of others, and then us. We were the last to join this particular Contact mission. But we’re all alien here…and we’re all new concepts to a creature biologically incapable of perceiving new concepts.”

  Nodding, dazzled by the size of it, Cort murmured: “We’re non-happenings. Rumors.”

  “Not even rumors,” Whalekiller said. “Invisible demons.”

  There was that word again. It applied uncannily well to Emil Sandburg. The Catarkhans he’d torn apart hadn’t known that anything was happening to them; they hadn’t suffered in pain, or in terror, or in sheer rage that the universe would select them for such torments. The ones he’d left behind, the ones he hadn’t had time to touch, probably didn’t even know that any of their number were missing. For them, the crimes of Emil Sandburg had been non-events in an existence so unchanging that even ten thousand generations would not provide one sentence of actual history.