He tweaked the tip of it. “To business, son. Get your mind off female twitches, and onto work.”
“Yes, sir.”
Work was sitting in front of a computer. I appreciated that the chairs were designed to accommodate tails in any position, because it took quite a while for mine to relax back into limpness. And the itch was fierce.
But I was soon immersed in what I was doing. It was… a long discussion on war, not just the moral aspects of using force to take what someone else may have, but the economic cost, the biological destruction, the effect on the world itself, the—
Fascinating. I had thousands of selected wonderful works in my memory, and while I would never go so far to rate this the best, it belonged in the top ranks of moral philosophy.
For now, I was just going through it, correcting grammar and punctuation and spelling. Easy enough, since I had prepared myself by implanting all the data I needed on the local language, along with a lot of other subjects.
Incredible. Absolutely incredible.
I have absorbed a number of philosophies, or ethical systems, or what have you. This wasn’t just a treatise on the morality of war, it was a summary of morality, period.
I quit fixing what needed fixing, and just kept on, totally enmeshed in what I was seeing, screen after screen. (Won’t comment on the idiocy of using eyes to scan a screen instead of direct brain input.)
I don’t know how long I’d been there, when a hand landed on my shoulder and startled me almost out of the chair.
“Lunch time, son.”
I had forgotten that flesh bodies needed stoking at frequent intervals. An odd vertigo when I tried to stand up reminded me. But soon I was putting my flesh body around nutrient. I didn’t know what it was, but my mouth seemed to like it OK, and it filled the sudden ache (now that I was aware of it) in my insides.
I was cogitating so hard about what I had been absorbing that his voice startled me into spilling the liquid I was conveying to my mouth.
“What do you think of it, son?”
“Why haven’t I seen it before?” I asked before I thought. After all, I hadn’t put in everything extant in the culture.
Again, a smile that wasn’t visible. “Did you think it was Remaldorixal?” (That was the Main “other” culture, where Tango was. The hatred in this culture for Remaldor was incredible—blind, voracious, unending.)
“No, sir!”
“Think nobody as evil as the Remaldorixi could produce work like that?” he asked softly.
“Sir,” I replied almost without thinking, “nobody who could produce That could possibly be evil.”
His ears twitched. “I… see.”
“Sir?” Again I couldn’t help myself. “Why can’t everybody see it? Sir? It would make… life so much better for all of us.”
“All of us,” he asked softly. “Including the Remaldorixi?”
From my imprinting: “The Remaldorixi are scum!” Then I took a deep breath. Trying to integrate what I had had Implanted, and what I had just absorbed. “The Remaldorixi…” He was watching me closely, as I seemed to struggle with these “new” concepts. “Sir? Do the Remaldorixi… count?”
“Son, suppose you had a Remaldorix right here, now. Suppose you stuck a knife into him or her right up to the hilt. What would happen?”
That had to be the stupidest question in the Universe. When you cut a flesh body—
“Go on. Tell me. What would happen.”
“Well, I’d make a big hole, and life fluid would burst out.”
“Would it hurt? The Remaldorix, I mean?”
“It would probably kill, if I thrust hard enough, and deep enough.”
“Kill. But would it hurt first? Would the Remaldorix scream, or writhe in agony, or plead for its life?”
I made the ear gesture that means, Who cares. “All three, probably. They’re not just scum, they’re cowardly scum.”
“How many Remaldorixi have you known? Personally?”
I dug through the bio we’d made up for my fake identity. My persona had fought in a couple of very big battles. Oddly, the few survivors of his group had all died in a flyer crash after the second. (The flyer crash was real, that’s why we’d picked the squad we did for the fake background.) My persona had survived because he had stayed behind; we’d whomped up a good reason. But no, except in battle, he hadn’t met any Remaldorixi. “Not any, unless you mean in battle.”
“Did you think they fought like cowards, in battle?”
“No. But—” I knew the propaganda. “My battles must have been exceptions.”
“No, son. No. Except that their ears are much rounder, and their noses broader, and they tend toward light colors in their stripes, Remaldorixi are just like us.”
I made myself gasp. “Isn’t that treason, sir?”
“It’s a physical fact, son.”
“Oh.” He was the leader, and I was doing my best to project myself as young, naive. Not that hard, since none of this was more than a recent implant. But an old cyb like me has seen most of the Universe, and there’s very little new.
He breathed out, an odd sad, hopeless sound. “Never mind, son.”
We finished eating in silence, and I went back to working on this strange computer file.
I got in touch with Tango the first sleep period I had. (That’s another idiocy of natural bodies. Why can’t they just take a flush to get rid of accumulated poisons? Noooo, they have to spend a third of their lives semi-conscious, letting their organisms get rid of what could be taken care of in a flash, with proper systems.)
What are you doing, Tango?
Translating a sort of morality discussion into Maldorit.
I was so surprised, I had trouble looking like I was sleeping. Tango! I’m working on a similar treatise. Is yours mostly about war, with lots of sidebars into how to treat other people, singly and in groups?
You mean you’re translating something out of Maldorit?
No. I’m just doing some small editing on my file. Spelling and the like. It’s in Javenesk. Do you think it’s the same file, Tango?
Be a funny coincidence if it was. Yet… if I have more fuel than I need to get around and keep me warm, and you have more food than you can eat, and we war, and you win, you have more fuel and more food than you need, and I have nothing. If we trade, we both end up with what we need. So why is war a solution to a scarcity?
That’s it! That one idea is the heart of the war section, the rest is just, well, explaining and extending.
Ahh, Jolly? I think we’d better not even think of meddling any more until we dig a lot deeper. Something very Odd is happening here.
Yes. Though I didn’t say so to Tango, I had a strong suspicion who the originator was.
My suspicion grew to almost certainty a couple of days later, when he kicked me off the computer to make a few additions to the file.
I knew this was It. The way to turn these warbabies into civilized folk. Only… how was he going to make the rest of them accept it?
Tango still wanted to kill him off, and solve the problem that way. Remove the linchpin, and the “world order” would collapse back into splinter fragments.
I said No. Wait and see.
Time passed. Until we had spent much longer on this world than either of us had anticipated. Tango began to sulk. Especially about not wanting to miss an imminent rendezvous, a Thrills-and-Chills halfway across the galaxy with a merry group of cybbers, including a favored partner.
As the deadline for making the T&C opener crept closer, Tango’s constant theme became: With The Expert on the scene, The Mere Assistant is unnecessary.