It was too fine a day, he thought, to dwell on what might have been. But he could not help himself.
Composed of a solidified cocktail of carefully engineered binding molecules, the pedestrian promenade was wide and white, easy on the feet yet impervious to heat, cold, and the weather. There were no vehicles about. In Pe’leoek both mass and individual transit ran belowground, pollution-free, out of sight, and, except for an occasional slight humming as a line of capsules passed underfoot, out of hearing. Citizens of all three sexes strolled beneath the intense light of Myssar’s sun, the youngest still attached to their birth mothers by the strong, flexible, cartilaginous tube that would keep them under control while supplying them with supplementary nutrition until they reached the age of separation. Ruslan smiled as he watched one mother snap an unresponsive offspring back to her side by contracting her muscular leash.
Several varieties of short, broad-leafed growths provided shade from the powerful UV rays beating down on the walkway. Shading in hue from pale lavender to deep purple, their upturned leaflike pads were round, flat, and held perfectly parallel to the ground. In bloom now, they put forth flowers of intense crimson that attracted waiflike multi-winged pollinators. The botanical rationale behind their enchanting colors had been explained to him. Like much other information supplied by his hosts, it had already been forgotten. Having to cope with and survive among an entirely alien civilization left little room in his aged and overstuffed mind for such choice bits of information, however enchanting or enlightening they might be.
A child came up to him. Tube-weened, it was attached to nothing but its own curiosity. If not for the restraint imposed upon their offspring by Myssari parents, Ruslan would have found himself unable to move, so dense would have been the crush of curious youth around him. This one looked to be about halfway along the path to adulthood. The narrow, ribbed skull with its small, bright blue eyes with horizontal pupils gaped up at the peculiar two-legged creature. As a sophisticated city and the capital of its homeworld, Pe’leoek saw its share of visiting aliens. This routine influx did nothing to mitigate Ruslan’s uniqueness.
“I am a human.” Ruslan had long since grown used to preempting inevitable questions.
The half-adult had no trouble understanding his excellent Myssarian. An adept if not especially enthusiastic student of the language of his saviors, Ruslan had been well coached by tutors both live and inorganic. His fluency had progressed to the point where his speech was colloquial. Ingenuously expecting nothing else, the youngster was eager to converse.
“What’s a human?”
Ruslan sighed. “I am the last representative of my species. Its sole survivor. A relic.”
“You speak well for a relic.” The adolescent regarded the strange biped appraisingly. “So if I was to kill you, there would be no more of you?”
There were times when characteristic Myssari directness could diverge from the refreshing to the appalling. Looking on from nearby, Ruslan’s friend and minder Kel’les appeared as if s’he was about to intervene, but Ruslan raised a hand to forestall him. A gesture, he reflected, that was shared among many intelligent species.
“I cannot swear to that. My kind settled a great many worlds. But I am the last that I know of. So, yes, if you were to kill me, then there would be no more of me. Beyond me I cannot say.”
On the other side of the promenade, the half-adult’s mother, father, and intermet looked as if they wished they were somewhere else. They were too polite to say anything and too conflicted to intervene physically. In Myssari society curiosity among youth was a trait highly prized. This parental triad did not want to inhibit their offspring. At the same time, they worried that his inquisitiveness might spill over into prying.
They need not have worried. The youth pondered the peculiar biped’s response, then gestured with a three-fingered hand that was one of a trio. “I won’t kill you, then.”
The last human smiled. “That’s very considerate of you. It seems that I’m very hard to kill anyway.” Opening his eyes wide, he leaned toward the youth. This action was sufficiently startling to cause the youngster to step back. In addition to having evolved small eyes due to the intense light of their sun, the Myssari could not “open” them in the manner of humans. Their enclosing bony orbits were fixed and inflexible. Turning, the bemused and now slightly frightened youngster loped off on his three legs to rejoin his parents.
Ruslan straightened. The special slip-on lenses the Myssari had made for him allowed him to move about in Pe’leoek in broad daylight without damaging his own large, sensitive eyes, just as the third lung they had grown for him from bits of his own lung tissue enabled him to breathe comfortably in air that was thinner than Seraboth’s. The organ lay deflated behind his two normal, larger lungs, expanding and contracting with them in perfect unison only when his body demanded additional air. In the event he found himself once more on a human-settled world, it would not inhibit his normal breathing. Myssari surgeons were very adept.
Other than the third lung and the artificial lenses that protected his retinas, his body was much as the Myssari had found it. Manufactured to his own suggested design by a local crafts-professional, the broad-brimmed hat he wore protected his head from the strong sunshine better than did his close-clipped gray hair. Finding clothing of any type or style was no problem, nor was anything else he might desire. He could pick and choose from among the miscellany of a hundred worlds. Artifacts to fit the artifact.
More than once he had grudgingly admitted to himself that his was not a terrible way to finish out one’s life. Other than the absence of company of his own kind, he wanted for nothing. The considerate Myssari did not even have to synthesize food for him. Secure in its varied packaging, enough remained on the now-silent human worlds to sustain him until the end of entropy.
He would be dead, he knew, rather sooner than that.
Meanwhile he lived on and did his best to enjoy the delights natural as well as artificial that the Myssari homeworld and others presented. He had even made a few friends: locals who came to regard him as an individual worth knowing and not just a specimen. Chief among them was his soft-voiced, tripodal official minder and companion of the morning.
Kel’les was an intermet. A neuter, s’he was unmated. The use of the conjoined identifier was a deliberate choice by Ruslan. He needed a way to refer to Kel’les without employing a name, and it would not do to think of or refer to Kel’les as an “it.”
Visiting metropolitan locales like the seaside promenade enabled the Myssari functionary to participate in activities beyond his assigned task of seeing to the needs of the human. That s’he chose to spend some of it in nonofficial consorting and communication with the human was a tribute to Kel’les’s character as well as curiosity.
Ruslan paused to bend and smell of a deep blue, trumpet-shaped flower. He did not hesitate. Here on one of the city’s main pedestrian walkways, there would be no dangerous flora. He struggled to identify the scent. Vanilla, he decided. Or possibly the wonderful balume that in the days of interstellar commerce had been imported to Seraboth from Porustra. Once, such things had been common on his homeworld—until the Aura Malignance had halted imports and every world had retreated into its own increasingly desperate self-imposed quarantine. Such thinking brought yet again to the forefront of his thoughts a notion he had never been able to shake.
“I’ve always wondered, Kel’les: if your people had made contact with mine a couple of hundred years earlier than they did, would your scientists have been able to find a cure for the Malignance? You would have been immune. The lightning-fast mutable vectors were designed to attack only human neuralities.”