Rosemary’s hand went to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. Such a quintessentially Human thing, to express sorrow through apology.
“I’m not,” Dr. Chef said. “It was our own doing. Our extinction wasn’t caused by a natural disaster or the slow crawl of evolution. We killed ourselves.” He thought aloud for a moment, sorting out all the pieces. “For generations, my species was at war with itself. I couldn’t even tell you why. Oh, there are historians with all sorts of theories and ideas. But it’s the same story you hear everywhere. Different beliefs, different cultures, territories everyone wanted. I was born into that war. And when I was ready, I took my place in it as a doctor.
I wasn’t the sort of doctor I am now. I didn’t become friends with my patients. I didn’t have long chats with them about their diets or what sort of imubots they should upgrade to. My job was to patch up dying soldiers as fast as I could, so that they could get back out there and keep killing.
Near the end, the Outsiders—that’s roughly what we called the others—started using these projectiles called—” He hummed in thought, trying to find an analog in Klip. “Organ cutters. You see, the Outsiders had been separated from us—from my faction for so long that they had become genetically distinct. The organ cutters were programmed to hone in on our genetic markers. If they hit an Outsider by mistake, it’d hurt them, but it was nothing worse than an ordinary bullet wound. But if an organ cutter hit one of us, that triggered its real purpose.”
“Which was?” Rosemary said, looking fearful.
He looked out the window, but he did not see the stars. “To burrow. A cutter would dig through a person’s insides until it hit something vital. It wouldn’t stop until the victim was dead. So, say a soldier took a hit to a limb. With a normal bullet, that’d be a minor wound. But with a cutter, they’d be dead within… oh, half an hour. And half an hour may not sound like much time, but when you’ve got a little piece of metal ripping through you—” The memories reached out to Dr. Chef, trying to pull him away from his safe observation point. They tugged, begging for him to give in. But he would not. He was not a prisoner of those memories. He was their warden. “Day after day, they’d bring me soldiers with live cutters still burrowing, and it was up to me to chase them down. I was often too slow. All the doctors were. See, the cutters emitted a type of interference that made them invisible to our scanners. We had to go looking by hand. In the end, we found it faster, and more merciful, to euthanize cutter patients on the spot.” He sucked in his cheeks in disgust, remembering mess after bloody, shrieking mess. “I hated the Outsiders for the cutters. More than hated them. It was ugly, the feeling within me. I thought that the Outsiders were animals. Monsters. Something… something lesser than me. Yes, lesser. I truly believed that we were better than them, that despite all the blood on our faces, at least we had not stooped that low. But you can already guess what happened next, right?”
“Your side started using cutters, too?”
“Yes. But it was worse than that. I learned that the cutters had been our tech to start with. The Outsiders had just stolen the idea before we could complete it. They had only done to us what we had planned to do to them. That was the moment in which I no longer knew who the animals were. I no longer wanted to mend our soldiers so that they could go use cutters and…” He searched for serviceable words. “Sticky-fire and germ bombs. I wanted to heal them. Actually heal them. Sometimes I’d see a body added to the pile, someone I had just put back on her feet a few days earlier. It made me wonder what the point of it all was.” He stopped, and rumbled in thought for a long, long time. The thought he was arriving at grasped and clung, but he remained in control. “One night, one of the other doctors ran into my shelter. She told me to come quickly. I followed her to the surgery, and there, ripped to pieces by a cutter—by our tech—was my youngest mothered-child. My daughter. I hadn’t even known she was fighting nearby.”
“Oh, no,” Rosemary said. Her voice was soft as leaves.
Dr. Chef wiggled his head up and down, the Human gesture for “yes.” “They had given her drugs to block the pain, and were preparing the… I don’t know what to call it. An injection. The last one we gave to cutter patients. An injection to stop her heart. I shoved the doctor working on her aside. I held her face. She was barely there behind her eyes, but I think she knew who I was. I told her I loved her, and that the pain would be gone soon. I gave her the injection myself. I knew it was the right thing to do, that I be the one to take her back out of the world I had brought her into. She was the last of my children. There had been five of them, all beautiful gray-speckled girls. And they all became soldiers, as most of our girls did. They died on scorched battlefields far from home. None of my children ever mothered. None of them ever became male. My last child, I didn’t love her any more or less than any of the others, but something about knowing that all my children were gone broke me. I couldn’t keep my grief at a distance any longer. My thoughts became too big. I had to stop being a doctor. I spent the rest of the war in a… a quiet home. A place of rest. Learning how to steady my mind again.”
“Dr. Chef, I…” Rosemary shook her head from side to side. Her face was wet. “I can’t imagine.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to. A few years later, there were too few daughters on either side for anyone to keep fighting. The germ bombs had mutated into things we couldn’t cure. Our water was poisoned. Our mines and forests had nothing left to give. The war didn’t end, exactly. It just burned itself out.”
“Couldn’t you rebuild? Find a colony somewhere to start over?”
“We could have. But we chose not to.”
“Why?”
He hrmmed, considering the best way to explain. “We are an old species, Rosemary. There were Grum long before there were Humans. After all we had done, all the horrors we had created, both sides decided that perhaps it was time for us to end. We had squandered our time, and we didn’t feel that we needed—or perhaps deserved—another chance. The war ended thirty standards ago, but we kept dying from the diseases we designed, or injuries that came back to haunt us. To my knowledge, there has not been another Grum born in decades. There may be, somewhere, but it will not be enough. Most Grum did what I did—they left. Who wants to stay on a poison world filled with dead daughters? Who wants to be around others of our kind, knowing the things that every one of us had to do? No, no, better to leave alone and die gracefully.”
Rosemary thought in silence. “Where did you go?”
“I traveled out to the nearest spaceport and talked my way aboard a trade ship. Mixed crew. We mostly hopped between modder rocks and fringe colonies. I earned some credits helping in the kitchen. Just cleaning, at first, but their cook saw that I had an interest in food, and he indulged my desire to learn. Once I had enough money, I left the ship and made a home for myself on Port Coriol. I had a tiny soup shack near one of the family districts—the cook taught me about soup, you see—nothing fancy, but it was fast and cheap and good for you, and merchants in a hurry like food that is fast and cheap and good for you. There was a Human doctor who lived in the neighborhood, a man named Drave, and he came by often. I liked him a lot, but I was jealous of his profession. He was a family doctor. He’d seen his patients grow from babies to adults with babies of their own. It sounded like such a joy, to watch people age and help them do it healthily. One day, I was finally brave enough to confess to him that I had been a doctor once, and that I wanted to use those skills for something good. We made a deaclass="underline" I could come work with Drave in his clinic for three days a tenday, and he could have free soup whenever he liked. Much better deal for me, I think! So that was my life for six standards—making soup, working in the clinic, taking Linking courses on alien anatomy. Oh, and herbs, I found out about herbs during that time. Drave was a good friend to me. Still is, we write from time to time. His grandson took over the soup shack for me, after I started becoming male. Bad time to be working. Bad time to be doing anything, really. The transition isn’t easy.” He rumbled. His thoughts were straying from the point. He hummed and burred to get them back. “Some time later, this Human named Ashby stopped in the clinic to get his bots upgraded. We talked for a long time, and a few days later, he came back to tell me that he was gathering crew for a tunneling ship, and offered me a wonderful job. Two jobs! I was sad to say goodbye to Drave, but what Ashby had offered was exactly what I needed. There is peace out here in the open. I have friends and a garden in the stars and a kitchen full of tasty things. I heal people now. I cannot pretend that the war never happened, but I stopped fighting it long ago. I did not start that war. It should never have been mine to fight.” He slunk down so that he could look Rosemary square in the eye. “We cannot blame ourselves for the wars our parents start. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is walk away.”