Abukoff House Books

“There were nights when I feared being released to be returned home. When I would rather face death at the hands of my captors than the eyes of my countrymen.”

“And then the humans came for me.”

Ghrannar looked away from the two meter tall red crystalline Tsantarii and into the morning crowd. There were mostly Ev’nan wandering and going about their business. A few humans and perhaps a dozen human children being herded towards a nearby school. Two Tsantarii were walking together, in the general direction of their diplomatic compound. Then he looked back to the Tsantarii who sat regarding him with a completely alien disinterest.

“I was being held on one of those nameless planets in the Iron Triangle Zone. You know what I’m talking about. Where the law is supposed to apply but nobody will go there to apply it, and the people who really run them know that the law isn’t coming. I was stuck there and whoever had me wasn’t even prepared to tell me who they were or why they’d taken me. They were just holding me. And that made it worse. But I also knew that eventually they’d kill me, and that somehow made it easier to take. I knew that there would be an end to it. Eventually. Then they took my Urq. My great great grandmother.”

There was a moment’s delay as Ghrannar’s words, spoken in English, worked their way through the translator that the Tsantarii wore in a small plastic case that hung around its neck. Then it made noises that were translated back into unaccented English. “Your what?”

“My Urq. The tritanium cases we carry on lanyards around our necks. Certainly you’ve heard of them.”

The Tsantarii shuffled briefly and made noises that the translator ignored. Then it replied. “Those kinds of things are discouraged on Ev’nan. They tend to bring outside troubles inside. And the great Ev’nan multi-culture survives because we immigrants leave our troubles at the door.”

“Well they won’t have to worry about my Urq. It’s lost. She’s lost. The mummified remains of a great woman, discarded somewhere in an alien trash can on an alien planet in a lawless corner of space. But that’s just about where I am too.”

“How so? You’re living in relative comfort on one the most civilized planets in the galaxy. Safely isolated from our countrymen, who even now are at war.”

“No, I’m not. I died on that nameless, lawless planet along with my honored ancestor.”

This elicited a long string of confused sounding noises from the Tsantarii, and the translator finally settled for a bland “Please explain.”

“Because of stupid, brave humans,” Ghrannar almost laughed with bitterness. “They came charging in. An atmospheric patrol ship right above the complex I was being held in. Explosives crashed through the roof, and I could see that they were dropping in. Five of their soldiers, rappelling through what had been the ceiling, with blasters at their hips. Just like a recruiting film. Then something went wrong. The patrol ship dropped hard, the soldiers dropped to the floor, and the ship was struggling to rise again. It lifted a little, and again, it went down. Then there were more human soldiers, struggling on the ground and fighting around the remains of the small ship as armored thugs started pouring into the room. I grabbed a dropped rifle from one of the humans and was shooting my way to a door. Ten feet away, with nobody looking at me…”

“And?”

“And then I find myself in a teleport chamber on one of their ships. A teleport chamber!”

“So?”

“Do you know how those things work? The subject is scanned down to the quark. Digitized. Converted to pure energy, beamed to wherever the destination is, and then reconstituted into identical matter.”

“So? Statistically speaking, it’s the safest way to travel.”

Ghrannar grunted angrily. “No, it is not the safest way to travel. It literally destroys the subject by converting it to energy, and then builds a replica. It kills the subject. Every time. Not to mention the soul. Do humans have souls? I don’t know. We Bhengarr do. I’m pretty sure these Ev’nan do. I might even be convinced that you Tsantarii do. But the point is, their machine cannot scan, digitize, and replicate a soul. So no, it’s really not a safe way to travel.”

“But-.”

“The Bhengarr consider it to be murder.”

“Murder?”

“Yes. Why do you think I’ve been exiled here to Ev’nan, to live among the wretched refuse? As soon as I was presented to the Bhengarr ambassador and related my story, I was declared dead, and had an application for diplomatic asylum here on Ev’nan forced upon me. All of Bhengarr’s ambassadors have been recalled from Earth. I don’t know what will happen. They murdered an ambassador.”

“You seriously think they murdered an ambassador. By using a teleporter to rescue you.”

“Yes. Their own science agrees with us. But that’s not the real irony.”

“What is?”

“The fact that my great great grandmother, tossed into a garbage can somewhere out in that lawless jungle out there, was treated better than I was. She still has a place in Bhengarr society. And I’m sitting here dead, drinking something that they call coffee, with someone I was at war with a couple of months ago.”