Julia Ecklar - The Human Animal

Ayr patted her chest, hands fluttering like bird’s wings, then pressed a corpse-cool palm to her forehead.

“I don’t understand what you want from me.” Rahel ducked a look at the mazhet still waiting by the unopened crate. “Do you have a dhaktu you could send for? Anyone you could bring?”

They might have been deaf for all the reaction they gave her. Ayr pushed at her forehead again, touched her chest, and Rahel caught its hands between hers to keep the mazhet from flustering through the senseless pattern again. Its hands felt as though she could shatter them with a single intemperate squeeze.

“Just let me have a look at it.” She locked her eyes with the mazhet’s fathomless black ones, not at all sure if that gesture was socially correct. “I won’t hurt it, I won’t let it out. But I need to see what you’ve brought me before we can go any further.” The gentlest of pressure backed Ayr into its former position alongside the others. “You know, you could have brought one of your ‘invisible voices,’ and we wouldn’t be having this problem.”

The mazhet all rustled with the same ringing of bangles, but they said nothing to her or each other.

Rahel repositioned herself in front of the crate, and checked the charge on her snooze pistol. More than enough to lay low anything that could fit inside a container this size. “OK, then…” She nodded tightly to the green and aqua mazhet. “Open her up.”

A chime and brush of movement, and the mouth of the crate hissed open. Rahel crouched, steeling herself for an explosion of movement, a scream of animal anger, a howl of animal pain. Instead, still silence puffed out on the stench of sweat and feces, and the tiny, rapid sound of breathing echoed through the empty crate like thunder. Frowning, she knelt very slowly.

“Oh, good God…” She thumped down onto her bottom without meaning to, and the snooze pistol fell, unfired, across her lap. Hand tangled halfway through her sleep-tousled hair, she stared into the long, darkened crate without the ability to marshal enough thought to disbelieve.

From the back of the crate, the brown, frightened eyes of a very human boy stared back at her in silence.

“It’s all right, nobody’s gonna hurt you.… Do you have a name? Do you know what I’m saying?”

No, of course he didn’t. Rahel could tell by his eyes—those quick, intelligent eyes that followed her every gesture, her every shift in weight with the desperate intensity of a wild animal. She’d seen Toad look at her with more understanding whenever she said the words “out” or “play” or “good dog.” All this boy’s reactions proved was that he wasn’t deaf—and that he was nearly mindless with fright.

“You poor thing…” Rahel eased into the mouth of the crate and sat back on her heels. “I wish I knew where the hell she got you.” The boy only stared at her and hugged his knees ever tighter to his chest.

Naked and unwashed, he wasn’t recognizably from any particular culture, and his small, Caucasian features placed him squarely in the least remarkable phenotype. Even his filthy hair and build proved little help in guessing his origins; Rahel thought the matted snarl might be yellow (but wouldn’t put money on it until she had him washed), and his 150 centimeter height could be indicative of either a normal child or a smallish adult. His face and chest were hairless. The muscles of his legs and shoulders, though, were those of a post-pubescent who’d reached the wiry spareness of maturity. Yet he’d defecated in the opposite comer of his crate, which was something even a dog wouldn’t do. The debate over Nature vs. Nurture sat staring at her from the end of a mazhet-built shipping crate, and it looked like Nature was winning.

She leaned back into the open and met Ayr’s eyes across the top of the box. “Has anyone got the control for the collar?” From a crate-length away she could see how the boy’s collarbones were bruised and raw from the restraining band Nadder had bolted around his neck. She wondered how many times the black-marketeer had found it necessary to sting the boy with the restrainer’s neural pulse, and how many times she had jolted him completely unconscious. Getting rid of the damnable “training device” moved up to Rahel’s first priority.

“The collar,” she said again, a little louder and more slowly as she traced an arc on the front of her neck with one finger. “Did Nadder give you the control for the restraining collar?”

The mazhet stood as though unhearing. Rahel groaned and turned away from them with an angry wave. “Why do I bother to ask you anything?” It hadn’t occurred to her she’d need to insist the mazhet retrieve all the hardware associated with Nadder’s merchandise. But, then, it hadn’t occurred to her the merchandise would be human, either.

A melodic chime fell from the AI’s shipboard speakers. “There are two beings requesting entry at the main airlock,” the ship informed her.

Rahel craned a hopeful look toward the ceiling. “Is either of them human, by any chance?”

“One of them is human.”

“Hallelujah.” She shimmied the rest of the way out of the crate, then stood and placed her body in front of the exit with both hands on either comer of the roof to feel for any movement from inside. “Let them in.”

The dhaktu scurried through before the airlock door even finished sliding open. True to his job description, he slipped among the mazhet in timid silence, not sparing Rahel so much as a smile. Maybe he was afraid she’d humiliate him by offering a greeting. Rahel made an effort to contain herself. It wasn’t until Toad scrabbled to her feet with a scream of distress that it occurred to Rahel to look and see who followed the dhaktu inside.

The Larry tlict cringed away from Toad’s frantic barking, upper appendages flaring wide in what had to be a threatening display, medial appendages pulling close to cover its eyes. Remembering the barely controlled violence of the first tlict she had seen, Rahel dove to grab the puppy out of this one’s way. Toad’s only movement was to back away from the tlict in panicked hops every time she bayed. She wheeled with a startled shriek when Rahel’s hand closed on her collar, then hunched into a crouch and squirmed up into Rahel’s arms. From that position of safety, she took up her barking again while Rahel trotted down the corridor to lock her in the bedroom. She’d never felt the little dog tremble so violently.

By the time Rahel made it back to the central compartment, the tlict had crabbed its way halfway around the room so as not to lose sight of the dog. “Private abode. Restrictions. Restrained. Yes? Yes?” The translator pressed against the tlict’s abdomen muttered and hummed with untranslatable pheromones.

Rahel ducked a peek into the unattended shipping crate. Eyes bright like polished walnuts glinted back at her through the darkness. At least they hadn’t lost the boy.

“This ship is my private property,” she told the tlict, turning back to face it. Limbs wove between each other to pass the translator up to the alien’s tiny mouth. “My animal has the right to run free in here, and the Newborns promised me this.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“She’ll stay in another part of my ship now, so that she won’t bother you or the others.”

“Yes. Yes. Good air. Good breathing.”

Whatever the hell that meant. “Now will somebody please tell me why I have this Larry on my ship?”

Ayr drew her attention with a gentle ringing of golden chain. “The merchandise did not appear in a healthy state.” The dhaktu stood as still and servile as ever behind the row of mazhet, but Rahel had never heard an invisible voice sound sweeter. “It was determined a physical caretaker should be consulted as to its viability.”