In short: Unseen Demons.
The phrase had come up more than once during my investigation. It was a convenient metaphor, an elegant description of what walking among the Catarkhans had felt like.
But even as I’d worked out the compromise that had allowed Sandburg to be remanded into human custody, the greater implications of the case had haunted me.
Following the celebrations, I’d stood before the broken Sandburg, in the cell where he’d been awaiting extradition, and faced him as an equaclass="underline" one Monster to another. Why not? My opponents in the case had already sullied me with the crimes I’d committed on Bocai; he knew what I was, and understood that I was just as guilty as he.
It made him the only available audience for the conviction that had struck me, in the course of my investigation.
I’d stood before him and said, There’s one other thing I want to share with you, Bondsman. It has to do with what happened at Bocai.
I still hated saying the name of the world where I’d been born.
Bocai had been home to an unremarkable sentient race, too comfortable with themselves to compete with Riirgaans and Hom. Saps and the rest of that sick, motley crew in the game of who got to rule more squares of the vast, celestial chessboard. They had ventured into space, found it not to their liking, dismantled their space program, and moved back home, happy enough to play genial host when offworlders dropped by to enjoy the feel of soil beneath our shoes.
They were even happier to oblige when a small colony of human academics, including my parents, wanted to lease an island where they, and a group of equally curious Bocaians, could experiment with raising their children side by side. The point of this remains murky to me, despite years of poring through the papers and correspondence both sides left behind. As near as I can determine, it was just a shallow utopian gesture, designed to prove once and for all the oft-discredited truism that we’re all the same beneath the skin.
There was no reason the mere attempt should have done any harm. After all, while Hom. Saps and Bocaians were the end-products of two completely unconnected evolutionary processes, they still seemed to have more in common than not: both species were omnivorous, mammalian four-limbed bipeds, both had two sexes, both had binocular vision, both indulged in things like art and music and fiction, both tended toward tribal family structures, and both were capable of metabolizing the same foods, separated only by a few differences in ideal diet. It was even easy to mistake one species for the other, at least in the dark.
The differences, like the greater hairiness of human beings and the greater prominence of the Bocaian eye, were so minor that some of the diaries left behind, by the human adolescents of the colony, confessed sexual attraction to adolescents of the Bocai. Actual coitus was so impossible that the mere thought was ludicrous, as the evolutionary parallels had stopped short of providing compatible genitalia. But the attraction existed, and testified that by all surface criteria, human beings and Bocai were able to see each other as slightly more exotic versions of their own kind. That illusion was the whole reason it seemed so natural for the Hom. Saps and the Bocai to exist in the same community, to join each other’s families, to call each other cousins, and help raise each other’s children.
Which is why I’d had two sets of siblings, one human and one not. I’d had two names, one human and one not. I’d lived in two worlds, one human and one not.
I’d doted on my Vaafir, the Bocaian equivalent of a father. I’d slept in the home of my Bocaian family as much as I’d slept in the home of my biological parents.
I had been three years old before I fully understood why there were two completely different kinds of people, four before I was even sure which kind I belonged to.
I was eight on the night everybody became monsters and slaughtered each other.
I had never even come close to making sense of that night’s carnage until the day on Catarkhus when I stood before the murderer Emil Sandburg, who had tortured and murdered six sentients for no reason beyond sheer frustration at their inability to see or hear him.
The cell was monitored, but I’d activated a hiss screen to flood the listening devices with noise.
I said, What makes us think we’re better off?
He looked past me, through me, through even the walls of his cell, seeing not the shape of his cage but the shape of the idea that was forming. His lips twitched, the look of a man fed an exotic treat who was trying to decide whether he liked it.
Maybe, I said, it’s the kind of idea you have to be crazy to imagine. Maybe it’s the kind of idea you can only believe if you’re desperate for some kind of absolution. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, just an old one we thought we could safely outgrow. Maybe the Unseen Demons who we used to believe influenced all our worst impulses really do exist, and we were only wrong about what they were and where they came from. Maybe they come from all around us, and we’re just not equipped to notice them. Maybe that frustrates them so much they get even by pulling our strings. I took such a deep breath that the rest of my words emerged in a semi-hysterical shudder: Maybe one was with me on Bocai. Maybe one was with you, here.
From this moment on, I said, my life’s about finding out, one way or the other.
And if I do find them, I’m going to make damn sure they’re properly judged.
I’d never shared my theory with anybody else.
Sandburg could not have done much with the knowledge, as he’d lasted less than four weeks in his penal colony before being murdered by another inmate.
In that time, the mantra Unseen Demons had become a reminder to myself. Something I’d muttered aloud, whenever I’d needed reminding that I couldn’t allow myself to be beaten.
As far as I knew, nobody had overheard me. The hiss screen I’d used during that last meeting was state-of-the-art tech, which shouldn’t have been beatable by anybody.
But the AIsource had been listening.
By the time this is done, you will meet your Unseen Demons.
What was that? A threat? A warning?
Or worse?
A confession?
Without Skye beside him, Oscin looked like any other man. The only indication of a consciousness larger than his own was a certain distracted quality, as if he was splitting attention between me and another equally pressing problem. But his lips had curled into a smile other people might have found reassuring.
I murmured, “Where’s your other half?”
“Why, Counselor? Would you be more comfortable with her?”
“I don’t need to be comfortable. I’m just surprised to see the two of you apart.”
His next smile came complete with closed eyes. “My components are never apart, Counselor, but we don’t necessarily have to be physically next to each other in order to be together. We can undertake separate conversations with separate people, or act in concert a million kilometers apart. Right now, Skye is being quite charming with Mr. Lastogne. I promise, they’ll be back soon.”
“Where are they?”
Oscin saw my suspicion. “It’s just a routine break, Counselor. We didn’t know how long the AIsource would keep you. For all we knew, you might not have come out of there until after the suns turned off, tonight. In the meantime, Mr. Lastogne needed to stretch his legs, and Skye, being my usual delightful self, offered to go with him. That body has much more luck exercising charisma, I’m afraid.” He unclipped a canteen from his belt, curled his lips around a gentle sip, then offered it to me. “Would you like some water? A buzzpatch?”