“Me?” Fassin said, astonished. “Shit, no!”
“Right,” Taince said. She was sitting with one leg stretched out, one folded, hand resting on her knee. “So,” she flapped her hand. “Tough, is it?”
“They hunt them!” Fassin told her.
Taince shrugged. “So I’ve heard. At least they don’t eat them.”
“Ha! They still die sometimes. I’m serious. These are just little kids. They fall off cliffs or out of trees or into crevasses or they kill themselves, they’re so stressed. Some get lost in the outwoods and get hunted and killed and eaten by real predators.”
“Mm-hmm. High drop-out rate, then.”
“Taince, doesn’t any of that bother you?” Taince grinned at him. “What, you mean arouse my maternal instincts, Fass?” He didn’t answer. She shook her head. “Well, it doesn’t. You want to ask me do I feel sorry for these junior members of the Acquisitariat? Yes, for the ones that don’t make it out. Or the ones that leave hating their parents. For the others, it does what it’s supposed to do, I guess; produces another generation of the truly selfish. Well, not my department. Don’t even think about them. If I did maybe I’d despise them, but I don’t so I don’t. Maybe I’d admire them. Sounds worse than basic training.”
“You have a choice with basic training. These little—”
“Not if you’re drafted.”
“Drafted?”
“Laws are still on the statute books.” She shrugged. “But your point is taken. It’s tough on those kids. But it’s legal and, well, the rich are another breed.” She sounded unconcerned. “Sal’s really never said anything?”
Something in his tone made Taince look at Fassin. “You mean, like,” she waggled her dark eyebrows, “‘afterwards’, Fassin?” He looked away. “As you will.”
Taince looked at him again. “Fass, is this really all about whether Sal and I fuck?”
“No!”
“Well, we do. Now and again, thank you for asking. That settled any bets? Made you any money?”
“Oh, please,” he said. Damn, he thought, I’m not sure I really wanted to know that, now that I do. Fassin quite enjoyed thinking about some of the potential or actual couples and other groupings of his class and year having sex — grief, he’d watched\been part of the real thing a few times — but the thought of Sal and Taince bumping bits was slightly grisly.
Taince hoisted one eyebrow. “Ask nicely and maybe sometime we’ll let you watch. That’s what you like, isn’t it?”
Fassin felt himself colouring despite his best efforts. “Why, I live for nothing else,” he said, attempting sarcasm.
“And no, he hasn’t mentioned Severity School,” Taince told him. “Not before, during or after. Unless I was a lot more distracted than I thought I was.”
“But it sounds horrific! Cold showers, hot-bunking, corporal punishment, deprivation, intimidation, denigration, and, for a holiday, you get to run for what might be your life!”
Taince snorted. “You end up paying good money for the sort of treatment your ancestors spent their short, brutal lives trying to avoid. That’s progress.”
“I think the guy’s been damaged by it,” Fassin said. “I’m serious.”
“Oh, I’m sure you are,” Taince drawled, sounding bored. “Sal seems to be okay with it, all the same. Says it made him.”
“Yeah, but made him what?”
Taince grinned. “It’s all your people’s fault, anyway.”
“Oh,” Fassin sighed, “not this.”
“Well, it’s a Dweller thing, isn’t it?”
“Yeah? And so fucking what?”
“Well, who brought that particular little nugget of information regarding kin-kid-hunting blinking into the light?” Taince asked, still grinning. “You guys, that’s who. Seers—”
“They weren’t—”
“Well, Dwellers Studies, whatever.” Taince waved her hand dismissively. “They hunt their children, they’re a long-term, widespread, successful species and they’re right on our doorstep. Some wizzer comes along looking for the latest way to fleece the rich. What sort of lesson do you think they’re going to take from that?”
Fassin shook his head. “The Dwellers have been around for most of the life of the universe, they’ve spread throughout the galaxy but despite their head start on everybody else they’ve had the good grace not to remake the whole place to suit themselves, they’ve formalised war to the point that hardly anybody ever dies and most of their lives’ work is spent tending the greatest accumulations of knowledge ever assembled—”
“But we were told—”
“Albeit in the galaxy’s most disorganised libraries which they show enormous reluctance to let anybody else into, yes, but all the same: they were peaceful, civilised and everywhere before Earth and the Sun even formed, and what’s the one lesson we’ve taken from them with any enthusiasm? Hunt your kids.”
“Your lecture notes are showing,” Taince told him. The Dwellers, notoriously, hunted their own young. The species was present in the majority — the vast majority — of the gas-giant planets in the galaxy, and in every planetary society of theirs that had been sufficiently thoroughly investigated, it had been discovered that the mature Dwellers preyed upon their own children, hunting them singly or in packs (on both sides), sometimes opportunistically, as often in highly organised long-term hunts. To the Dwellers this was entirely natural. Just a normal part of growing up, absolutely a part of their culture without which they would not be themselves, and something they had been doing for billions of years. Indeed, some of those who could be bothered attempting to justify the practice to upstart alien busybodies claimed with some authority that young-hunting was precisely one of the many reasons that Dwellers were still around after all that amount of time to indulge in such harmless fun in the first place.
It wasn’t just their species that was long-lived, after all; individual Dwellers had, allegedly, lived for billions of years, so if they weren’t to use up even the colossal amount of living space provided by all the gas-giant planets in the galaxy (and, they’d sometimes hint, beyond), they had to keep numbers down somehow. And interfering outside species — especially those whose civilisations were inevitably so short-lived that they were called the Quick — would do well not to forget that the Dwellers doing the hunting had been hunted in their turn as well, and those being hunted would have their chance to become the hunters in the future. And anyway, if you had every prospect of living for hundreds of millions of years, being hunted for at most about a century and a bit was such a trivially insignificant detail that it was scarcely worth mentioning.
“They don’t feel any pain, Taince,” Fassin told her. “That’s the point. They don’t entirely understand the concept of physical suffering. Not emotionally.”
“Which I still beg to find unlikely. But, oh, so what? What are you saying? They’re not intelligent enough to feel mental anguish?”
“Even mental pain isn’t really what we understand as pain when there’s no physiological equivalent, no template, no circuitry.”
“That this year’s theory, is it? Exo-Ethics 101?”
A moderately powerful ground-quake shook the surface they were sitting on, but they ignored it. The huge, tattered strips of material hanging high above stirred.
“All I’m saying is, they’re a civilisation we could learn a lot more from than just how to abuse our young.”
“Thought they aren’t even a civilisation, technically”
“Oh, good grief,” Fassin sighed.
“Well?”
“Yeah, well, depends what definition you accept. To some they’re post-civilisational, because the individual groups on each gas-giant have so little contact with each other, to others they’re a diasporian civilisation, which is the same thing expressed more kindly, to others still they’re just a degenerate example of how to almost take over an entire galaxy and then fail, because they just lost interest, or they somehow forgot what the purpose of the operation was in the first place, or they misplaced their ruthlessness and came over all coy and conservational and decided it would only be fair to give everybody else a chance, too, or they were warned off by some higher power. All of which might be true, or nonsense. And that’s what Dweller Studies is all about. Maybe one day we’ll know for sure… What?” There was something about the way Taince was looking at him.