Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“Can you tell me anything more about Ley’ang?”

He looked up at me, instantly distressed. “I— I—”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to…”

“No, no, I mean, that is, I…”

“Pew, I’m sorry. I know you don’t like talking about her. We’ll have to eventually, but if you’d rather talk about something else, we can do that today.”

“Okay.” He sighed, safe from the hard questions he feared. But we would have to get there somehow — if I could get him to talk about her, I might be able to get him to talk about the breeding programme, which he’d conspicuously avoided in every other conversation I’d had with him.

“So you said last time that you hated the Soo, and that’s quite understandable. But you seemed to get along quite well with Shan’oui. I was wondering if there were any other Soo you found tolerable?”

“Can I have some tea?”

“Of course. You carry on, I’ll pour.”

I filled a cup and he talked. “I, well, they weren’t all bad. I mean they were, but they didn’t all want to be.”

“I’m sorry?” I said as I poured milk.

“They were kind of… they grew up with everyone telling them Pu weren’t good for anything, but most of them never actually met any of us.”

“So they were just ignorant?” I handed him his tea.

“Yeah.”

“How do you know this?”

“Shan’oui told me.”

“And you believed her?”

“She tried to help. She didn’t do very well but she tried.”

“Were there any others who tried?”

“Oh, loads. There was a big group of Soo who’d been campaigning for the Pu for years, well, longer than that. Centuries.”

“Was Shan’oui one of those people?”

“Yeah.”

“Is this the SPCA? I think I read about them…” I pulled up my notes on a pad: IU Diplomatic research teams had identified a group called the SPCA as potential allies on the Soo world. “The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Aboriginals?”

“Yeah. That’s them.”

“Did they run the breeding programme?”

“No. That was the government. There were a lot of SPCA people involved, though.”

“Can you tell me more about them?”

“Um. Well, it started with Ang’zi…”

“He founded the SPCA?”

“No, no, he was Pu. Pu Ang’zi. He was a mechanic, he was one of the first ones who’d been captured in the Arctic, well, his parents were.”

“Ah. So, what did he do?”

“He wrote a book, um, On the Rights of the Pu as Compared with the Beasts of the Field and Engines of Steam .”

“Catchy.”

“That was how they wrote things back then. The government thought somebody in the SPCA had written it, some Soo pretending to be a Pu. So they banned it for being harmful to Pu interests, you know, giving us ideas above our station.

“And then they figured out the truth. His owner was an SPCA member and she tried to hide Ang’zi, but they found him and took him away. So she sued the government for stealing her property, but the court case was one of those things where they use it to talk about something else. Do you know what I mean?”

“They made the court case about the Pu as a whole?”

“Yeah. And they lost. Ang’zi was executed. They called it euthanasia because of a brain deformity, can you believe that? Because he wasn’t stupid. Like being intelligent was an illness. His owner was compensated, and she gave the money back to the SPCA to print more copies of the book. That was how it got going, really.”

“So there was something good about the Soo, after all?”

“Huh. Yeah. They started getting all the owners to give retired Pu to zoos instead of just killing them and turning the bodies into fertiliser.”

“Ah. So they didn’t go all that far…”

“They never wanted to set us free. They just wanted to make our lives easier.”

“Do you think Shan’oui would have set you free?”

“She didn’t think we were ready. Maybe she was right.”

“Don’t you think the Pu should have been free?”

“On our world? Where could we have gone?”

“And the SPCA never thought about letting us help you?”

“The IU? Hah! They didn’t trust you. They thought you wanted to take us off to be slaves somewhere else. They thought they were protecting us from you.”

“And outside the SPCA, was there anyone with any sympathy?”

“A lot of people thought they were on our side. They weren’t. I found that out before the breeding programme started.”

“Did something happen?”

He looked up and took a breath. “There was a girl.”

“A Soo girl?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“What did she do?”

“I was… no, it was her. Or maybe I… oh, shit, I was only fourteen.”

“What happened?”

He sighed. “I saw her behind the glass.”

“In the zoo?”

“She kept coming in every day at the same time. She must have had a season ticket. She was always there just after three, when the school groups were gone…”

“I thought it was one way glass?”

“Yeah, but you could see a bit of what was on the other side. And there was this girl. And she was… beautiful. Amazing. Every day at the same time. She’d come up as close to the glass as she could, and then wave at me. I mean, kids did that all the time, but this was…” He sighed. “So I waved back. Didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Next day, she jumped the barrier and came up to the glass. She put her hand up to it and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I did the same. She smiled again, I thought my heart was going to come out of my chest…”

“Very normal for teenage boys. Teenage girls, too. What happened next?”

“She ran for it. I suppose security turned up. They didn’t catch her because she came back the next day, in disguise. And that time she had a note, she put it up against the glass. It said she wanted to meet me. I was still trying to find a pen when she had to run away again.

“Shan’oui asked me about it and I lied. I’d never lied to her before. I said I hadn’t seen a note. She said they were going to put in new barriers, and I thought I was never going to see her again. I was so miserable…

“And then she turned up. On the inside! She’d joined the SPCA and volunteered to help look after the other Pu. They were really old then, they needed someone with them all the time. She just smiled and put her finger to her lips and I was happier than anything.

“We couldn’t talk, though, because of all the cameras, until she managed to switch one off and get me alone…” He sighed.

“You must have been very excited to see her.”

“She said her name was Sha Ai’mi. She thought I was cute because she’d seen me on TV. Her uncle was in the SPCA, so that’s how she’d managed to get in. She thought it was amazing how I was a completely different species. I should have figured it out then…

“She didn’t want me . She wanted an interview.”

“Ah.”

“She was studying journalism. She wanted to write an article about me. She wanted to know what it was like to live in the wild. She wanted to know if I felt anything for real when the others died, or if it was just a crying reflex. What it was like to be an animal and a human at the same time.

“I thought someone had dropped the ceiling on me. She wasn’t interested in me at all. I was all stammering and going ‘but, but…’ and then I actually said it. I told her I thought she liked me. And there was this look on her face — she was disgusted. She was sorry for me but she was disgusted as well. I was just an animal to her. An animal that could talk.”

“You must have felt betrayed.”