Natty Looper paused the recording and called up the Ambassador's biodata. Perhaps the Ambassador had simply reached the end of his span. After a moment, he shook his head. The Ambassador's age had been verified thoroughly–apparently the Sirians weren't above using the natural demise of a diplomat as an excuse to attack the host world.
No, the Ambassador still had a dozen unused years left on his longevity meter.
However, Natty was starting to understand why the Sirians didn't understand the concept of suicide.
He sat back, and tried to imagine what it would be like to know exactly when he would shuffle off the clay. How would he live his life? Natty usually enjoyed that sort of philosophical musing; his ability to put himself in strange shoes had been his greatest asset, had led him to a rewarding career, had allowed to live at least part of his life in the Orbital Domains, above the stultifying and regressive cultures of the Enclaves. But suddenly it occurred to him that he and all the other humans in the Solar System had suddenly become members of a precisely determinate species.
«Back to work,» he told himself, and restarted the datawafer.
The narrator turned to a large flatscreen, on which an image of a male Sirian was projected. With a light pointer, she indicated the squat skull; the almost-human arrangement of eyes, flat nose, wide lipless mouth; the heavy upper arms; the delicate lower arms, with their long many-jointed fingers; the four tentacular psuedolegs. The image revolved slowly, then froze, again facing the camera.
«Note the armoring scales and lack of external genitalia. The Sirians evolved in a marshy, high energy environment, beset with numerous small, fast predators. On their world of origin, the narrow equatorial band of habitable lands was for the most part a featureless swamp. There were very few places of refuge available–only a few remnant basalt cores lifting above the ooze. They had no trees in which to take refuge, no caves, no hills. This perhaps accounts for their unusual reproductive strategy.»
The screen image changed, to show a creature that only superficially resembled the male Sirian. It was low and broad, something like an animated green-brown rug, with numerous small psuedolegs showing at its margins. It had no discernible features, other than a scattering of large wet pores in its upper surface.
«The Sirian female,» said the HighRise woman. «Researchers have not been allowed to closely examine any individuals of this gender, but it is suspected that they have no higher brain functions, and exist only as a bridge between generations. For every female hatched, slightly more than a thousand males are hatched. On the home world, the females spent their lives clinging to the rare stone outcroppings above the marsh. The males competed violently for the privilege of breeding the female; only a maximum of sixteen males succeeded. Immediately after breeding, these successful males expired. A fully gravid female produced approximately sixty-four thousand eggs. The hatchlings were initially nourished by the decay of their mother's body, after which the males dropped off the relative safety of the breeding crags into the swamp. The females remained.
«Most of the other males succumbed to the violence of the breeding competition. Those males that did not compete were the only sapient links between generations, and because of their determinate life span, this overlap was minimal. Xenoanthropologists generally agree that this biological impediment to communication between the generations is the major reason that the Sirians took such a long time to achieve a technological civilization.»
Natty touched the Pause button. Had the Ambassador somehow met with a horny female of his species? It seemed unlikely. He twitched the holotank onto another informational track, and found out that at the time of his death, the Ambassador had been the only member of his species in the system.
He scratched his head. The datawafer still held vast quantities of information about the Sirians–their biology, social norms, hierarchies, technologies. Much of it would be gibberish to Natty Looper's unspecialized ears. Perhaps he should switch to another tack; he could always come back to the experts.
He called up the Ambassador's first call.
The recording contained both sides of the conversation, as was usual in calls made by Very Important Creatures such as the Sirian diplomat. Natty watched the Ambassador punch in the number; then the tank split into two image fields.
The connection was nearly instantaneous. The second image field filled with a pulsating mandala in scintillating silver and glorious gold; celestial music filled the room, high and pure. It swelled to a brief crescendo, fell sweetly away, and then an androgynous angel spoke.
«Greetings, seeker after wisdom. You have reached Gods Unlimited, where all sapient beings are welcome to drink deep from the healing waters of faith. How may we serve you?»
The Ambassador grunted, and Natty thought he could read the Sirian's alien expression. The Ambassador was disgusted.
«You may serve me by showing me your wares, thereby demonstrating the vile weakness, the astounding credulity, the unforgivable sentimentality of your corrupt species.» The Sirian spoke with a well-practiced air of cold implacability.
A floating personage appeared in the center of the mandala; a young woman with large breasts and a luminous halo. «Skeptics are even more welcome than any other supplicants,» she murmured.
«An end to these platitudes!» the Sirian roared. «Show me this madness humans call religion!»
«Patience, patience,» she said. «God is essentially unknowable, not to mention invisible. Before you can experience your personal epiphany, we must design a suitable mythic focus for your faith.»
«Patience!» roared the Ambassador. «Patience? I have no patience! Time slips away; the rate never slows for an instant, and we are all soon enough slime at the bottom of the World Muck. Show me your wares, or I will name you a fraud of the terminal sort, the sort that begs for instant expungement.»
A tiny frown creased the young woman's perfect brow. «You must attempt tranquillity, seeker after wisdom. Our computers are working at their best speed; we've assigned your case our highest priority. But you are the first member of your species to visit the All-Shrine, so the process of development cannot be instantaneous. Soon... soon we will show you the perfect and highest expression of Sirian godliness–as determined by our deificatory system, which as you probably know has the most advanced software in the human worlds!»
The Ambassador opened his mouth to fulminate again, but a harmonious chime sounded, and the young woman said, «Ah! We're ready. Watch, keep an open mind, and you will doubtless achieve transfiguration.»
She faded from the holotank, replaced by a murky darkness, broken only by drifting wisps of phosphorescent gas.
A voice began to speak in the harsh clicking Sirian language. Natty listened without comprehension, but then a slider bar opened at the bottom of the holotank, and a translation in small red letters appeared: In the beginning was the Muck.
Natty smiled, and fast-forwarded the image, to a sequence in which a golden light began to paint the tops of the birthing-crags. A cacophony of unpleasant sounds bubbled forth: untidy slurps, sucking noises, wet plops. Presumably this was inspirational Sirian music.
When the birthing crags began to grow beards and to develop large mournful eyes, the Ambassador roared with outrage. «Obscene!» he shrieked, spitting large greenish globules of phlegm against the camera lens. «Unendurable! When we sanitize the unfortunate world that evolved you, you miserable insignificant fraudulent pornographers, you'll be the first to bum.»
He slapped the cutoff switch.
Natty sat before the dark holotank for a few minutes, musing. Already he sensed a pattern, or at least the glimmering of a purpose. The Ambassador seemed a volatile being, and he seemed to be very eager to find reasons to hate humans.