Despite the security guards’ repeated instructions, I tended to forget to lock doors. Our camp was fenced in, we all knew one another, and the savages entered only during working hours, and then only with permission. How had she sneaked in?
Years of field work had taught me how to cope with all sorts of situations. “Good morning,” I said to her. I didn’t even consider reaching for the button to call the guards. True, there had been occasional attacks in other camps but, for all sorts of reasons, there had been none in ours to date. Besides, as I always said, the people most likely to be attacked were the policemen and the missionaries, not me, so I had a logical justification for bending the rules a little.
The savage woman didn’t answer me. She leant over to pick something up from the other side of the desk, and immediately I became afraid. The fear spread rapidly from my legs to my chest, but my brain kept working. So the rumour was true: they had got their hands on a cache of old weapons. To them, perhaps we were all alike after all—policeman or scientist, it didn’t matter much from their point of view. But then the woman turned back to me: she was holding a human larva strapped into a carrier, which she lay on the table.
“You promised you wouldn’t take our babies from us,” she said in the angry, agitated voice so typical of the Slows. As my adrenaline level fell, it was hard for me to steady my legs. The savage woman fixed me with her black eyes and seemed to see this. “You pledged that you wouldn’t take them. There are treaties, and you signed them,” she spat out impatiently. I was always amazed at how fast news reached the Slows. It was clear to anybody who worked with them that they were hiding computers somewhere, and perhaps they also had collaborators on the political level. The nearest settlement of Slows was half an hour’s flight away. They weren’t allowed to keep hoverers, and there were no tracks in the region so, to get to our camp, she must have set out the evening before. It seemed that she had known about the decision to close the Preserves even before I did.
“Those treaties were signed many generations ago. Things change,” I said, though I knew that it was silly to get into an argument with one of them.
“My grandmother signed them.”
“Is it your baby?” I asked, making a point of using their term, as I gestured at the human larva on my desk.
“It’s mine.” Luckily, the larva was asleep. Fifteen years of work had more or less inured me but, at that hour of the morning and in my condition, I knew that my stomach wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of a squirming pinkish creature.
“Do you have others?”
“Maybe.” The female Slows don’t usually give birth to more than three or four offspring. Given the way they are accustomed to raising offspring, even that many is hard work. This savage woman was young, as far as I could judge. She might have concealed another larva somewhere before coming here. There was no way of knowing.
“You can’t break the agreements,” she said, cutting into my thoughts. “No. Listen to me. You’ve violated almost every clause. Every few years you renegue on something. When you forced us into the Preserves, you promised us autonomy, and since then you’ve gradually stolen everything from us. From hard experience, we’ve learnt not to trust you. Like sheep, we kept quiet and let you push us further and further into a corner. But now I’m warning you. Just warning you: don’t you dare touch the children!”
Many people will think this strange but, over the years, I’ve learnt to see a kind of beauty in the Slow women. If you ignore the swollen protrusions on their chests and the general swelling of their bodies, if you ignore their tendency to twist their faces wildly, with some experience you can distinguish between the ugly ones and the pretty ones, and this one would definitely have been considered pretty. If her grandmother had really signed the treaties, as she’d said, she might have been one of their aristocrats, the descendant of a ruling dynasty. It was evident that she could express herself.
“Will you agree to have some coffee with me?” Field work often involves long hours of conversation. With time, I had got used to the physical proximity of the Slows and, sometimes, when their suspicions subsided—when they accepted that I wasn’t a missionary in disguise—they told me important things. The new decree had put an end to my research, but I might still be able to write something about the reaction of the savages to the development. Attentiveness had become a habit with me and, besides, I was not yet capable of packing up the office.
“Coffee,” I repeated. “Can I make some for you?” Since she didn’t answer and just stared at me with a blurred face, I said, “You’ve certainly come a long way. It wouldn’t hurt me to have a cup, either. Wait a minute, and I’ll make some for both of us.” The Slows had grown used to harsh treatment, so when they encountered one of us who treated them courteously, they tended to get flustered. Indeed, this dark-eyed woman seemed confused, and she kept her mouth shut while I operated the beverage machine.
No doubt the savages were a riddle that science had not yet managed to solve and, the way things seemed now, it never would be solved. According to the laws of nature, every species should seek to multiply and expand but, for some reason, this one appeared to aspire to wipe itself out. Actually, not only itself but also the whole human race. Slowness was an ideology, but not only an ideology. As strange as it sounded, it was a culture, a culture similar to that of our forefathers. People don’t know, or perhaps they forget, that when the technique for Accelerated Offspring Growth (AOG) was developed, it wasn’t immediately put to use. Until the first colonies were established on the planets, the UN Charter prohibited AOG. It’s not pleasant to think about it now, but the famous Miller, German, and Yaddo were subjected to quite a bit of condemnation for their early work on the technique, all of it on ethical grounds. In a society that had not yet conquered space, AOG was viewed as a catastrophe that, within ten years, was liable to cause a population explosion on Earth that would exterminate life through hunger and disease. The morality of the Slows had an undeniably rational basis under those conditions. We may be revolted by the thought, but the fact is that Miller, German, and Yaddo had all spent the first years of their lives as human larvae, not unlike the one that was now lying on my desk; they, too, had been slowly reared by savage females, just like the one who was waiting beside me for her coffee.
“We have to talk,” she said as I placed the cup on the desk and glanced for just a split second at the creature sleeping in the carrier. “There’s no reason for you to use power. There’s no point, because you have all the power anyway. We’re no threat to you.”
I knew something that she didn’t know because it was a secret that hadn’t been publicised on the networks: in one of the colonies on Gamma, far from the Preserves, there had been an outbreak of Slowness. This was probably why the decision had been made to close all the Preserves—to eliminate any possibility of the infection spreading.
“It’s possible to compromise on all sorts of clauses,” the savage woman said, “so why not compromise with us? We’ll die out on our own in a few generations anyway. There are less than ten thousand of us left.”