Chapter 9: Chapter Nine

“I wish I could stay, but,” Mark paused his words and turned his head in the direction of his house, he took a long deep sniff, “I do believe I’ve got a steak waiting.” He tipped his cup back and drank it down all the way before setting it on the table and rising to his feet. He was about as tall as William, and had a slender build. His clothing, I learned a little about from the viewings, and I recognized what he wore as a business suit, slacks with a crease and a jacket over a shirt, with a long strip of fabric called a tie. My immediate thought was that the tie was there so that poorly performing wearers could use the noose to hang themselves to atone for their errors… but it turns out it’s just a traditional garb that nobody remembers why they wear it any more.

My ongoing theory was vanity, but strangely, everybody hates them. “Nothing combines so little function with so much potential for bad taste, and you have to buy it.” That was what William would say about it, and with the human propensity for jokes, I have often wondered if he was joking or not, but he would never say.

Mark left, of course, but if I may add something more before I speak of the interior of the house, it is the strange reluctance of William to reveal whether or not he was joking about ties.

And that reluctance is born out of perversity. Humans are the most perverse race of people you will ever come across. I do not mean this in the promiscuous sense, but they absolutely love to flummox, confuse, and confound at every turn. They have this thing called ‘sarcasm’. Which is basically lying, but with style and for fun and to make a point. And an example of this will be provided shortly. I hope you will forgive me for not stating it now, and holding it back until the proper time in the story, but I felt I had to prepare you now for this absurdity that lies ahead and give you time to process the sheer perversity of human social dynamics.

We made our farewells and I watched as Mark Latunde went down the stairs, across the street, and into his home, and only when he was gone did I finish that divine nectar called coffee and rise up with my hosts to go inside their home.

“You mentioned a ‘Fauve’, is this a houseguest, another of your offspring?” I asked, and Rebecca answered…

“Oh no, Fauve is just a wild beast we keep around the house for amusement, she’s a very dangerous creature so I would not advise getting closer to her than you have to. Especially while she’s feeling sick.”

I stopped in my tracks and stared at Rebecca for what felt like a long, long time while her lips quivered.

“That was sarcasm.” William finally acknowledged while he held the big red door to their home open for me. “Fauve is our daughter, her name means ‘wild beast’ and the only danger to you that she poses is the possibility of talking your ears off.”

“That’s an idiom, right? You can’t actually do that to my ears? I like my ears, I need all eight of them.” I said and reflexively covered them all with my hands.

“Yes. I was being metaphorical. Your ears will be fine. I promise.” William said and closed the door behind me. “And unfortunately she’s a bit under the weather right now… ah, sick, she’s sick. Nothing too serious, but some bed rest is called for at least.”

His elaboration was a bit of a relief, but here again I must point out that humans are a K-Selection organism. K-Selection organisms, for our amateur readers, are slow life organisms that reproduce slowly and put a great deal of time and care into their offspring. Most organisms will dispose of sickly young, but a human might actually adopt it, feeling pity and empathy for the weak and try to protect it from harm and raise it even at great cost to themselves. The human propensity for sheer compassion, while not universal, is quite possibly one of their greatest survival traits.

But then, I was still a true novice of humans so I asked a foolish question, “How do you dispose of your sickly ones?”

“Oh we throw them in the composter and spread them in the garden, why tonight’s vegetables for the stew grew out of fertilizer made from Michael’s big brother.” William replied, but the way he said it, drawing the words out with a big smile on his face that I’d begun to think was very silly, and it was almost even ‘sing-song’ like if I may describe it as such, told me to be wary of taking his answer at face value.

“That is a joke, yes?” I cocked my head in the way that so far got me truthful answers, and he nodded to me after latching the door shut.

“Yes, we don’t just ‘dispose’ of the sickly. Especially over a trivial thing like a minor flu.” He answered and then walking past me he said, “This way. I’ll show you to your room.”

I was honestly thrown off by his answer, I’d seen humans care for the sick, but it just wasn’t real to me. Some intelligent races care for the injured, but those who learn about disease and how it spreads, typically kill the sick out of hand to keep it from spreading. As a result they are, on the whole, less resistant than humans by far, but also generally healthier, as they wipe out almost all disease forms. Humans actively engage in the reckless process of caring for the sick so that they get better.

It is something about my own admitted bias at this time, that I thought the human compassion was still over dramatic and a weakness. If you get rid of a minor handful, you eliminate disease vectors in a generation or two, why strive to preserve those who are going to actively harm the whole just by existing?

Still, I concluded enough to know not to actively suggest terminating their Fauve person, and followed William in thoughtful silence through the house. A few things to note about the Walker home, the floor was of polished and smoothed wooden boards nailed together, and there was a large open space that had couches enough for multiple guests. It was easily recognized by me at this point as a ‘social’ zone.

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Curiously they also had a place where they put fire inside, a place for fire they uncreatively called a ‘fireplace’. I guess plainness makes sense there, after all you wouldn’t want anyone to be confused.

From there he took me through another room that had a vague circular shape and was lined with shelves full of old books. Humans are a collector species, their tendency to settle seemed to ensure that, and my new humans clearly liked to collect these old things, or must have, as a digital datapad could have held a thousand libraries that size and not used a tenth of its space.

I did let it pass without comment for the moment, I was after all, reasonably sure I had a handle on the human knack for clinging to stuff, and as an educated student, I knew there were worse things to collect than books, even if their format was outdated. The only thing I will add here is the sheer number of fictions they had. And how long some of them were. I saw one whole shelf taken up by a single series over ten books long, called ‘Who Endures’. Another shelf was lined with something called ‘Lord of the Rings’. I assumed it was about a wrestler in the intergalactic olympics… humans are such a viscerally physical species after all. But many books would be revisited before the end of my time there, and some are still in my collection today.

Through the library he took me down a flight of stairs to an underground area, and there was a simple room established for me, a door for privacy, though it wasn’t the thick wood that was the entry to the house, it was a bigger space than I needed, that was obvious even before he opened the door.

The room had a bed designed for humans but… serviceable for me. A chest of drawers that looked very heavy, with six compartments, three on either side, and a large wardrobe sitting against a far wall. A small square table of black wood, and a lamp. There was, for good measure, a chair, a small round table, a miniature cube that turned out to be a ‘miniature refrigerator’ so I could have my own food, even a little heating unit they call a microwave… they clearly went all out.

Nobody had ever tried to make me feel so welcome anywhere before. I turned around after taking it all in and looked up at William and asked him, “Did you really, like you were talking about before, move all this around and set this all up for me?”

“Yes, but we just used our telekinetic powers and it was no trouble at all.” William said, and winked.

I then realized my breath caught. I'd thought he was telling the truth, but the wink told me he wasn’t, so I exhaled hard. Humans often downplay their own virtues, they can be very self effacing. Donate a pint of blood, or a bloody kidney, and the good humans will downplay their gift to minimize any doubts you have about accepting their generosity.

It turns out that a good way to determine a bad human, is to see how they treat their own good deeds if they do any. Do they make themselves a martyr or a hero for something they did or do for another person? Or do they just take it as a given that they should help where they can and not everything needs to be fawned over as the greatest good deed since the invention of good and evil?

Knowing that, you will be able to detect most bad humans early on, unless they are true masters at disguising their evilness. William had injured himself, however slightly, preparing my room for me, and I was thankful, but he’d made it seem like nothing.

I wouldn’t. I responded with ‘Thank you’ and it slipped into the noise they would consider a bark, my ears twitched and tail wagged, but he just waved my gratitude aside.

“Nah, don’t thank me, this is just what we do. Now why don’t you rest up from your trip, there’ll be dinner soon, and if you oversleep, don’t worry about it, we’ll put your share in the fridge.” William promised, and all I could do was nod.

“Goodnight, Bailey.” He said to me and began to walk away.

I answered him with a goodbye ‘bark’ as he would call it, and then lay down on my bed, stretching myself out over the shockingly soft mattress and pillow, and going into a deep, deep sleep at last. I had just enough time to realize that I was far more tired than even I knew only an hour before. And when I did finally start to give in to that urge to sleep, my final thought was…

“I have such a busy day ahead tomorrow. I can hardly wait.”

I could only hope my hosts were as eager as I to get started.

And they were, as I would find out.

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