Only Human (Themis Files #3)(24)

—Sculptors? What about doctors?

—Well, most people work because they want to. No one there would get up every morning to do something they don’t like just so they can get more food or clothing than everyone else.

—How cute. And boring. There must be some crappy work no one wants to do.

—Sure. Farming, mostly. Kids do that, for a few years before they go to … I guess you could call it university.

—Child labor. Lovely.

—They’re more like teenagers. They just look very young.

—What about you and Dr. Franklin? What did you do all day?

—We didn’t have jobs if that’s what you’re asking.

—Why not?

—We were totally unqualified for … everything.

—Poor things. Did people make fun of you?

—They stared, mostly. They did call us hairy. Point is it probably never occurred to them to offer us work. I spent a few hours a day teaching English to Enatast while he taught me Ekt. I’m not sure how much he really wanted to learn. After a while, he might have come just so I’d have something to do. But he kept coming, so I didn’t ask. Rose … Rose spent some time with scientists of theirs, but she really didn’t have any skills they could use. I “hung out” with them for a while, especially at the beginning, so I could translate for Rose, but I stopped when I got good enough at spotting condescension. Except for the knee thing, Rose was much more interesting to them.

—Why is that?

—She knocked one of their robots out, all on her own. They were impressed.

—They weren’t angry?

—No. Not where we lived, anyway. We’re not enemies to them. We’re more like … They think they made us … sick, in some way, by messing with our gene pool. We’re also much less evolved technologically, scientifically, and we’re physically weaker, shorter. There’s nothing remotely menacing about us. I don’t know how to explain it … Have you ever seen a baby squirrel?

—I don’t think I have, but what’s that got— —Kara found one on the sidewalk once. It was right after they founded the EDC. We’d just moved to New York. We didn’t know anyone. Anyway, she saw this baby squirrel. We both didn’t want anything to do with it. We didn’t want it to die, but we also didn’t want to take care of a squirrel because … because it’s a squirrel, and we’d be stuck with it if its mother didn’t take it back. It was about nightfall, so we knew the cats were probably gonna get it, but we were ready to let nature take its course. Only the little bugger crawled onto my foot and curled up into a ball, then it fell asleep.

—Ohhhh …

—Yeah. That. We took it home for the night and dumped it in the same tree the next day.

—What happened to it?

—I have no idea. It probably died. That’s not the point. The point is it was a pest, a glorified rat with a fuzzy tail, but it was cute, and helpless, and we felt responsible. Fortunately for us, the Ekt are more patient than Kara and I were, so they took care of us for more than a day while their government decided what to do next.

—And what did they decide?

—Nothing.

—Vincent. I get that you don’t trust me, but if you’re gonna come up with lies, they should at least be reasonably believable. And this is coming from someone who’ll believe just about anything. No, really! I’m supergullible. I buy all these stupid things on television, then I’m too ashamed to return them.

—I told you before. The way they work, it’s slow.

—Nine years slow?

—Yeah! They have a very strict democracy. Some things are hard to decide for them.

—I thought they had an emperor.

—They do, it’s an empress now. But she doesn’t do anything. It’s a lot like the queen. The people make most of the decisions directly. Everything that involves another species, another planet, the decision belongs to the Great Council of Akitast.

—OK, so they vote on things. We do that. I don’t see what’s so hard about it that it would take a decade.

—It’s not like us. What we do, it’s baby vote. These people are major-league voters.

—What does that mean?

—Well, here, we vote on a few things, like government. Some places require an absolute majority, 50 percent of the vote plus one. Some places don’t care, they just pick whoever got the most votes. But we choose from a list; there are a limited number of options. Imagine that instead of a list of candidates, we let everyone write in the name of whoever they’d like, and to be elected to something, you’d need more than half the vote, from everyone. That’s how they decide things. Getting the votes isn’t a problem. These people vote on everything, all day every day. Getting things done depends on the question. If they can formulate it as a yes/no question, then it’s all good. If it’s multiple choice, it gets complicated. The Council had no clue what to do with us. That’s an endless number of possibilities, and they couldn’t agree on any of them. When we left, they were still debating whether they should allow us to stay.

—How stupid do you think I am, Vincent?

—What do you want me to say?

—Hmmm, I don’t know. The truth, maybe?

—That is the truth. What part of it is bothering you? That they’re not a threat?