Adopted By Humans II by Robert Butler

Author:Robert Butler [Butler, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2022-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

I’m sure if they ever make a movie about our coffee session that evening, they’ll compress the story so that we came up with the perfect solution within a few hours. Movies are like that; they compress real events that take weeks or months or years and make them into hours or even minutes. But for the proper historical record, we came up with nothing.

“Could you do something with the military? Like the thing with the embassy guy? You know, showing how we can work together that way?” Fauve asked, and I cocked my head so hard my ears briefly flopped.

“The military?” I asked her in return, placing special emphasis on the word. “Fauve, that might work well for relations with my world. But most intelligent races in the galaxy are prey races. Species like yours, mine, Ka’wik and Sxlith, and my other colleagues, that come from predator origins, are extremely rare. There’s no more than twenty of those out of the roughly one thousand known intelligent species, and that’s not counting the ones that look like they might develop higher intelligence at some point. Including those?” I had to shake my head at the idea, “Predators are outnumbered in the galaxy. Let alone real apex predators.”

She looked down at the table when I said that and reached for her spoon, predictably enough, at least to me, she kept sugar on the table, and after scooping a few spoonfuls in and stirring it her lips pursed thinly together while she took long slow breaths.

The metal spoon scraped against the glass with the steady slowness of grains of wheat being ground by oxen, and I could see that what I said did nothing to make her any happier. I didn’t have to wait for too long to find out why.

“In our history,” she said, “those who are outnumbered don’t come to good ends. Not most of the time. What would the Zenti have done if they found Earth before we got strong enough to protect ourselves?”

The answer was obvious, “Raid. Raid. And raid some more. If you were weak enough, maybe even occupy your world and make you plunder it for them. They’ve done it before.” She bit her lower lip, and I hesitated. I thought I went too far, that I scared her, and my immediate instinct was to reassure her.

“But you don’t have to worry about that. The Zenti are at peace now, and the human fleets, and soldiers, have a mighty reputation.” I reassured her, and it had the added benefit of being true. If the Zenti wouldn’t dare attack humans, nobody would.

“Still.” She said, “That sounds dangerous.”

I couldn’t really deny it, though I had no idea just how significant her three little words were in the human psyche at the time, and more importantly I could see it wasn’t going to make her happy, and making her happy was far more important to me than I ever imagined it could be when I was still far from Earth.

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