Rahel crept forward on all fours. Beneath her hands, the narcotic thrumming of the train’s drive engines felt as reassuring as her own heartbeat. “I… I’m…” This time, the duacs made no effort to pad over and investigate.
A twinkle of movement picked out both the dohke and its attendant dhaktu as the translator helped slip some alien firearm back into the mazhet’s sleeve. Rahel hadn’t heard the gun fire, hadn’t seen the muzzle flash, hadn’t even felt the kiss of its thunderbolt passage. She took a deep breath and blinked away the image of the diet’s melted appendages and the gaudy ribbons of blood that strewed the floor around it. Doing barter with the mazhet no longer seemed the safe, trustworthy business it once had.
The dohke clicked in rhythm with its quiet ringing. “You have spoken with Gertrude.” It wasn’t a question, and neither the dohke nor its brightly dressed dhaktu bothered to look at her.
Rahel nodded stiffly, then crawled unsteadily to her feet, careful not to reach out toward any of the mazhet for assistance. “I—well, yes,” she finally stammered. “Gertrude sent for me.”
“Irrelevant.” Tapping the heads of three duacs in turn, the dohke touched its eyes one by one, then rang its veils by brushing hastily at its mouth. “That was unwise.”
Rahel couldn’t keep herself from snorting. “Tell me about it.”
“What information did you convey?”
“I… I’m not sure…” She scoured her hands against the legs of her trousers, then dragged her sleeves across her shirt as if that could help dislodge whatever smell the tlict had basted her with. “I’m not even sure what we were talking about. She had a lot of questions about the feral boy the mazhet bought for me last evening, and about how humans tell the difference between children and adults.” She looked up at the dohke, shrugging helplessly. “At least, that’s what I think she was asking. And what I think I told her.”
The dohke laced elegant fingers into a single filigreed ball. “Did you reveal to her that humans may not necessarily be bom self-aware?”
“What ‘may not’?” Rahel judged from the dhaktu’s wrinkled forehead that her answer told them more than she’d meant it to. “I think we touched on the basics of society and observational learning. Why?”
Mazhet closed around her in a dervish of maddeningly color. Thin, cool hands grazed fleeting patterns on her cheeks. “You must leave the Interface.” The dhaktu’s voice rose from somewhere out of sight behind the dohke’s left shoulder.
Rahel twisted side-to-side, only to find herself frowning up into the same impassive features wherever she turned. “Why do you think I was in such a hurry to squeeze myself into this transport?” It occurred to her that mazhet body odor reminded her faintly of cinnamon.
“Your ship will require a departure code to cast moorings from the station. You may use the mazhet code 3572019 and apply for immediate departure.”
The numbers ricocheted into and out of her memory as she tried to split her attention between the wall of mazhet and any mnemonic that might help her remember the sequence. “The Newborns said I’d have to apply for a departure code twelve hours before I planned to ship out. Do they let you guys just keep a list of departure codes on hand or what?”
“The mazhet have a special arrangement,” the dohke informed her with a lift of its chin. “Code 3572019 is valid for immediate departure. The mazhet extend it to you as an equitable service.” Another of the mazhet clapped its hands twice, smartly. The dohke added with a bow, “Your employer will be invoiced for the execution of this contract.”
At the moment, she didn’t even care what kind of expenses that invoicing might entail.
“Aren’t you guys gonna tell me what I did to flip the tlict out before I go?”
They stared back at her, even their bells and jewelry silent. Their infuriating calmness made her want to scream. “I’ll pay you for it!”
A dozen voices rose up like a chorus of manic rad-counters, and Rahel found herself uncertain of who to talk to or where to look.
“What the tlict think of, how the tlict feel—much of this cannot be translated to creatures outside the web of tlict genetics.” Human words reeled out of the racketing chaos almost too quickly for Rahel to follow. She wondered if the dhaktu spoke for one of the many mazhet, or all of them, or if it really mattered. “This the mazhet can say: Tlict at birth possess no minds. They possess only hunger, and a need for air and sunlight. In the first days of their lives, tlict children consume more than 70,000 times their own mass, and excrete only once. So rapid is their growth, they achieve adult proportions within seventeen days of birth. At this time, they exhibit the Change.”
Larva-you. Adult-you… Change. Yes? “They turn into adults.”
The dohke and thirteen other mazhet nodded gravely. “Tlict children who do not Change continue to eat, and grow, and reproduce themselves, but they never inherit the intelligence—the sentience—”
Rahel suspected the dhaktu inserted that clarification on his own.
“—Which the tlict judge holds them separate from all senseless, unaware animals. Including their own mindless young.”
Every shudder, scuttle, and tortured half-sentence ground together in her memory like slabs of crushing stone. Caught beneath the weight of her redefined knowledge, Rahel poked through the rubble of what had come before. “I told her we grew up, looking just the same from baby to adulthood. I told her…” she scrubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and groaned, “…that we were animals, every last human in existence. Just like paramecia.”
“You told her worse than that.” The dhaktu said it, but it sounded like most of the mazhet actually uttered the response. “You told her that humans are unchanged children, abominations who would feed themselves to the destruction of everything else around them. You told her that humans cannot be lived with or trusted.”
Rahel glanced up into the nearest mazhet countenance. “What do the tlict do with the children who never make the Change?”
The dohke alone gave her the answer. “On the eighteenth day, the adults kill them.”
“I’ve got to get off this station.” She made a desperate circle within the knot of mazhet. “Everybody’s got to get offstation.” Everybody human, at least. “Is there some way to get word out to the other human visitors? Through the Newborn administrators, maybe?”
The dohke inclined its head. “Shall this be accepted as an addendum to your contract with the mazhet?”
Rahel was horrified to think how much her blunder was costing. “Yes!”
“This is equitable.” The dohke flicked its hands in a double chime. “It shall be done.” Then it proffered one palm with a delicate mazhet flourish, and waited.
“What?” Not sure what else to do, Rahel slowly slipped her own hand on top of the alien’s. The dohke curled its fingers around her wrist to turn her hand palm upright. “What?” she asked again. One involuntary tug as the dohke accepted some small, narrow tool from another mazhet proved she couldn’t pull herself free, so she didn’t try again. “If you don’t mind, I’m kind of in a hurry.”