Sometimes, even twenty-plus years of coexistence just isn't enough to promote any real understanding between species…
Lukewarm warning: With the exception of a few words best described as 'coarse' and Wikus's ubiquitous 'fooks', anyone can read Part I of this story without any risk of being corrupted. The 'M' rating is only for some explicit though cryptically-written smut contained within the latter half of Part II, which'll get going slowly enough that you can safely bow out beforehand whenever it gets to be too much for you. If you're only interested in the rescue portion of the story and want to know how it ends without dealing with the smut, just skip on ahead to 'The End' once you've had your fill of what goes on in Part II, count up exactly six paragraphs to the one which begins with 'All the accused…', and there you go!
Disclaimer: All legal rights connected with District 9 belong to its creators and distributors. The following fanfic was created solely for entertainment purposes and to have some fun with my favourite new alien squeeze.
A LITTLE SUGAR FOR CHRISTOPHER – PART I
Christopher Johnson watched the little human hustle up and bow and scrape and make an obsequious nit of himself.
"There you go, sir, Mister Johnson, sir," he said as he swung open the limousine door and bared his teeth in a smile of hideously overwrought proportions. Christopher didn't know which was worse, the constant overt hostility he'd known back in the District 9 days or this new false civility prompted by the humans' apprehension and terror.
The big arthropoid got in without a word. The vehicle's interior was oversized and offered plenty of headroom, but he still had to cant his large antennae sideways at an awkward angle—they always forgot about his antennae. A small window in the tinted shielding separating his compartment from the driver up front slid aside and the human liaison Christopher had been assigned looked back at him anxiously. It was well and proper that the man appear anxious, Christopher thought; the man was MNU. But still the alien said nothing for he knew that the pool of humans who were fluent in his language was still very limited. MNU had kept a jealous stranglehold on his people for a very long time.
Christopher held out a scrap of paper with human writing on it. "This address. I wish to go there," he said. The liaison took it, looked at the address, did a double-take, looked at Christopher and seemed about to speak, then thought better of it and slid the window shut without comment. Christopher leaned back into the soft upright of his seat, relieved. He was in no mood to explain himself, nor was he much enthused about the social call he was about to make.
The black limousine slid smoothly forward through the even blacker night, a night swept here and there by flaring searchlights. The beams made pretty latticework of the perimeter fencing and glinted off the coils of razor wire…razor wire, again, yet Christopher knew that this too was necessary. The military compound was simply the safest place in which to house him whenever he stayed on Earth and the humans had become nothing if not paranoid about his safety and well-being. Even now he could see it in their departure through a discreet side gate away from the main entrance, the two bigger vehicles which hooked up once outside the base and which tried to appear innocuous as they trailed a useful distance behind. The small convoy began a circuitous route through the undeveloped countryside hugging the nearby suburbs. The road was deserted. Rural dark closed in around them.
Christopher powered his window down for some fresh air and to look outside unimpeded. There was very little natural light and it was hard to see, even though his nocturnal vision was excellent. He angled his gaze upward. The planet's one moon was nowhere in sight and most of the stars were missing. They were hidden behind the hulls of dozens of serenely floating colony ships.
The ships were there because of Christopher, of course. His cry for help, so long delayed, had been heard and acted upon before he even made it all the way back to Homeworld. Miners working an asteroid belt near the Galaxy's edge had detected his ship as he limped past and sent the usual friendly greetings. When their hails went unanswered, they'd become suspicious and went after him, and were astounded to discover a colony ship long presumed lost with all aboard being flown by a single adult prawn and his nymphal offspring. By the time the two vessels reached their home planet, a rescue mission was already being organized by order of some very irate supreme leaders.
It was reflective of Christopher's humble nature that he was astonished to find himself and his son hailed as heroes. He'd thought he'd be censured for taking so long to get the emergency command module operational and reunited with the mothership. Instead, he was evaluated and reclassified as a valid member of the higher castes and promoted into the shipmaster trade with an officer's grade. His child, Little CJ, was also tested. The mysterious changes which had awoken Christopher's latent intellect and skills had gone gene-deep and he'd bred true. Little CJ was proclaimed pure high-caste with an aptitude for the same profession as his father. Christopher was delighted by the prospect of having his son nearby for the rest of his life, first working as his apprentice and underling, and later, as his colleague. All the hardships he'd suffered, all his agonizing and misgivings blew away as so much chaff on the wind whenever he thought about it.
But first, there were the prawns on Earth to rescue and Christopher had wanted Little CJ nowhere near that planet ever again. CJ was still young enough to know a child's joy at discovering his heritage and would remain on Homeworld. Christopher joined the crew of the colony ship leading the expedition. The trip back would be much less harrowing and lonely than his escape away from Earth. For the first time in a very long while, Christopher was surrounded by peers and potential friends who shared his interests and concerns and who were happy to help him learn his new duties and complete his training.
He was also placed on the ship's advisory council—another humbling development. Members of the advisory council, normally older, highly experienced high-caste officers, had direct access to the leadership caste and were tasked to offer their wisdom and expertise to assist the leaders in making their decisions. Christopher's unique knowledge was in high demand. Again and again he was asked to recount what he knew of the humans and how they thought, the sort of repercussions which might have befallen his kin left behind and what he believed the humans would do when he returned.
"They will expect us to come in force, I think," Christopher told them. "When humans turn primitive and violent, they expect violence in return."
"Oh, we'll come in force all right," said one of the leaders, with dangerous glee.
And that was just what they'd done, enter Earth's atmosphere with a good third of their ships, while the remainder were instructed to wait until needed in geostationary orbit above the North Pole, low enough that anyone with decent eyesight could see the twinkling new constellation of doom which had engulfed the Pole Star. The incoming ships flew even lower, just high enough to clear the tops of the Alps as they swept down over the Mediterranean.
The humans tried only twice to stop them. One moron country fired a missile at the armada when it first began to cross the coastline of Africa. The missile mysteriously exploded long before it reached the alien ships and the only people who were hurt by the falling debris were an oblivious old lady out walking her overweight pug dog and two UFO loons who were dancing around in their backyard, holding up Bristol board signs with crudely scrawled messages of welcome on them. A second country, even stupider, also fired a missile, which somehow got turned around and briskly returned to its point of origin, whereupon it blew itself and all the other waiting missiles up, creating a truly spectacular fireball and the stupid country's largest new landfill site. That was the end of any organized resistance. By the time the armada settled into a parking hover directly above District 10, the last of the compound's human shepherds and jailers had already long since fled.
Finding Wikus van de Merwe would be a lot harder, Christopher had thought. Even if he were still alive, there was a good chance he'd lost his human identity and would be unaware of who he'd once been. But only two days after their arrival, Wikus proved Christopher dead wrong by staggering out of the bush close to District 10's north-most perimeter line and promptly handing himself over to the guards patrolling there. Christopher, notified at once, had rushed to the scene and was directed to the guards' main assembly shelter. The slight, grey-green refugee he'd found resting there, exhausted and foot-sore, was unknown to him in appearance but his scent was not. He'd recognized his unique odour at the same time the stranger recognized him and struggled back up onto his feet.
"Christopher!" he'd cried and lurched forward. Christopher caught him before he fell. He held the smaller prawn tightly as Wikus began to shake and wail, frightening the guards who'd brought him in. One, who was a bit of a hypochondriac worried about catching alien germs, inquired whether the stranger was sick and having convulsions.
"No, he is only trying to weep. It is a human thing," Christopher explained gently and then just stood, patient and enduring, while Wikus sobbed out three years' worth of misery and frustration and fear against his stalwart chest.
It turned out that Wikus had never even resided in District 10. Afraid of the MNU agents hunting him and unsure of his acceptance by the other prawns, he'd chosen to live like a wild thing, first hiding within the deserted remnants of District 9 and later, when the bulldozers came, on the outskirts of Johannesburg's ritzier suburbs, where he could usually count on scrounging enough to stay alive. Despite his feral, hardscrabble existence, he'd done quite well on his own—surprisingly well, really—and was in good enough condition to begin his reverse-transformation at once. Christopher was there to watch as Wikus began the procedure. The last thing he did before drifting off under the influence of the drugs was to drowsily turn his prawn face towards Christopher and whisper, "Thank you."
The next time Christopher saw the man was when the transformation was about halfway complete. He'd looked awful, with pieces of exoskeleton falling off everywhere and bruised human flesh blossoming up beneath the bloody oozing welts left behind, and the pain had been so intense that Wikus had been kept unconscious most of the time. Yet still he seemed pleased and chipper and tried to stretch his raw changing mouth into a smile when he saw his friend.
"A right horror show, ay? But I'm getting there. It's working, just like you said." He held up one trembling, dripping hand. "See that? Two more fingers already. Never thought I'd be so glad to see a fooking pinky."
Wikus coughed, a horrid liquid bubbling sound. His respiration was still transitioning between his book gills and the new lungs forming within. Christopher patted him gingerly on one shoulder, full of sympathy and admiration for the human's sheer capacity for suffering.
"It will soon be over," he soothed. "The doctors say your mind was untouched."
"Ja, that's the main thing. I remember everything. Everything." His breathing eased and he closed his eyes. "Some of it was bad, Christopher. So bad. Even after you left."
"Hush. Rest. Save it for the trial."
"I will…" Then his sense of humour reasserted itself and he grew brighter. "My father-in-law won't be happy to see me, ay?"
"No, I expect he won't be," Christopher agreed.
"Good. Hope the bloody prick shits himself…"
Shortly afterwards, the pace of the changes accelerated again. Wikus, who'd been resting comfortably, tensed and clutched at Christopher's forearm.
"Here we go," he whispered. "It comes in waves. Like having a fooking kid."
Christopher, who'd experienced the contractions associated with his own race's version of childbirth firsthand, looked down at Wikus with curiosity and mild alarm.
"You mean that figuratively, I hope."
"Oh sure. Just…it hurts…"
A doctor soon came and put him under again. It would have been cruel to leave him otherwise.
The next time Wikus regained consciousness, he looked human enough that his wife, Tania, was allowed to start visiting. Christopher was grateful to the woman whom he'd yet to meet and who'd never lost hope and faith in her husband. She freed him from the duty of supporting and comforting Wikus through the remainder of his transformation so Christopher could better concentrate on helping with the rescue and on preparing for the upcoming trial.
The trial had actually been Christopher's idea. His leaders had been livid enough at first to contemplate wiping the Earth clean of life just as soon as the last stranded prawn had been removed. Christopher had argued that this would be unfair, that there had in fact always been many humans who'd wished to help, but that they'd been prevented from doing so by others who were far more malevolent and greed-driven and who—most unfortunate of all—happened to be in charge. Humans also had no experience with other-worldly life forms. They couldn't even come to terms yet with factions out of the ordinary amongst their own species. Some of them still fought each other over territory or resources or breeding rights, like animals. Despite that, there were glimmers of racial cohesion to be found. Humanity as a whole did have some global sense of justice and a surprising hunger to see wrongdoers punished, and punished hard. Gradually, the leaders had come to see the value in Christopher's suggestion to let the humans discipline their own. Besides, doing so would keep the wretched little apes busy and out of the way while the rescuers saw to the immediate task of evaluating and evacuating all their refugee brothers. They could always go back and incinerate the Earth after all, if they didn't like what was uncovered.
Conveying their demands had taken a while. Just the sight of the enormous spaceships coming down had been enough to send every human within kilometres of District 10 running off in a panic, and the refugees in any case took top priority. The prawn leadership ignored the first tentative attempts to communicate with them, and when the media started trickling back and pressing in too close, like a ring of annoying vultures about a lion kill, they set up a shimmer field to block all sight of what they were doing and gave the security branch the go-ahead to use their weapons and have some fun. A few strategically placed blasts aimed at the news vans and circling helicopters soon established the District's new boundaries. The media still hovered, but further away, ignored once more. The longer the silence between the two races grew, the greater became the humans' foreboding and near-hysteria. Theories and speculation about what the prawns planned to do abounded and got so sinister and ridiculous that the leaders began watching the more frenzied news programmes being aired on television just for the entertainment value.
A few of the more clear-headed individuals left on the human side finally gathered their courage and initiative and tried something utterly unaggressive and very old, yet brazen enough to hopefully capture the aliens' attention in a positive way. Four people, one of them holding aloft a white flag, walked across the no man's land and stopped by the shimmer fence snaking its scintillating way across the road that led to District 10's main entrance. They did nothing else once there, just stood and waited to be noticed, and noticed they were. The leaders had been watching their own surveillance footage of their approach from the very beginning.
"Look at those fools," scoffed one who knew all about the significance of white flags from having recently watched a certain old 50s movie in an effort to better understand the history of mankind's attitudes towards aliens. "It would serve them right if we vaporized them, like the Martians did in that human film."
"I'd prefer something slower," said another.
"Dismemberment is good," suggested a third. "Especially if you remove the head and send it back. It apparently constitutes a message."
In the end and despite all their cheery apocalyptic chat, the three leaders who best understood English donned their most forbidding ceremonial robes, grabbed Christopher, and they all marched out to meet the humans face to face and four on four. The only precaution they took was to bring along a mobile portable shield generator. They'd watched The Day The Earth Stood Still too…both versions.
"What d'you want, human?" demanded the leader who'd been amused by the white flag and who was enjoying his first-contact experience just a wee bit too much.
The man holding the flag and acting as a spokesperson for the group winced, already intimidated by his tone.
"We would like to know your intentions, sir," he said very carefully. "What it is you wish of us. What we can do for you."
"You've already done enough," a different leader snapped. He indicated Christopher. "Do you know who this is?"
The spokesman miserably realized that he didn't. "Ah, no."
"Why, this is number CT43107, the MNU piece of property to whom you assigned the human name 'Christopher Johnson'. He's been telling us all about you."
"That's right," the first leader added, warming to the moment. "And based on what he's said and on what we're hearing from the others, we've been debating whether we should demand restitution or just level your world altogether."
"W-world?" the spokesman yelped. "Level our world?"
Two of the other humans turned visibly paler. The fourth whirled around, heaved, and noisily redecorated his footwear. The leaders burst into the prawn version of uproarious laughter, clacking their jaws together while swinging their heads and swimmeret arms up and down. Christopher pretended to study the underside of the colony ship directly above him. Although it was not his place to question anything any leader did and he was too polite to have voiced his opinion anyway, Christopher's thought was that his own people were not exactly presenting themselves at their diplomatic best at that moment.
"Christopher here has also told us that you humans already have a judicial system in place to punish those who commit crimes of a species-wide nature," the first leader went on, turning serious again. "As of now, you will begin honouring our refugee citizens' rights, which even you deemed should to be equal to your own, and bring to justice those who've preyed upon them since their arrival. You'll do it in the city where our people first sought help and you'll broadcast it live to the populace of your entire planet. No withholding and no delays—we want it done fast. And a safe place elsewhere in the city, where we can meet and monitor what you're doing, we'll need that too. Christopher will represent us and convey any further demands. From now on, you will speak to us only through him."
Oh joy, thought Christopher, rolling his eyes.
"Do all that to our satisfaction and we'll consider leaving peacefully. But disappoint or annoy us in any way and…boom! Fireworks!"
"The last fireworks," the second leader clarified.
"Of the sort that fall on crowds and burn them up," added the third, and with that said, all three leaders spun about and strode regally back the way they'd come, leaving Christopher behind to deal with the humans alone. These worthies stared at the newly appointed ambassador with beseeching, wide-open eyes, still half in shock, desperate to appease him and, through him, the might of the prawn armada. It was a look which Christopher would become very used to over the coming weeks.
The threat of global annihilation proved to be just the ticket to kick humanity's collective butt and get things moving. The first step was getting Johannesburg back up and running. The city and its outlying municipalities had been virtually abandoned within hours of the new prawns' arrival, leaving behind only the crazies, the destitute, and a handful of genuine sorts who'd resigned themselves to their fate and who'd intended to observe and record all they could until the end. Now that the aliens' intentions were finally known, people started coming back, first in a trickle, then in torrents. Members of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice joined forces and set up shop in a convention center north of the city proper and began hastily rewriting their laws to include crimes against aliens of human-equivalency. Personnel at the Lenz military base were tasked to create and staff an ultra-secure compound nearby, just as requested, and a slew of potential liaisons and representatives for all mankind began lining up to present themselves for the prawns' perusal. Once again, the eyes of the world fixed upon Johannesburg, with fearful darts towards the mighty space fleet hovering above District 10. What was happening within the District itself still remained hidden from human scrutiny. Most people interpreted this as a bad sign and became more paranoid than ever.
The revelation that the prawn individual now serving as the aliens' ambassador was the same one who'd escaped from District 9 three years ago with the mothership created yet another giant uproar. Overnight, Christopher Johnson became a media sensation. Prawn sympathizers all over the globe cheered upon learning his story and rallied behind him. To others, he became the face of the prawn menace, both past and present, and was feared and hated in equal measures. Christopher was far too busy to take note of his growing superstar status on his own. He only became aware of it from his new colony colleagues and friends who were having a blast following all the media coverage and who teased him about it unmercifully.
MNU and its subsidiary and subcontracted companies had done a piss-poor job of mopping up after news of their initial alleged atrocities against the District 9 prawns first broke and it wasn't long before the newly renamed World Court issued its first list of criminals wanted for a variety of equally newly defined crimes against aliens of human-equivalency. Some of the culprits were still, almost unbelievably, going about their work just as they had been three years ago, still stubbornly convinced that they were doing nothing wrong. Others had bolted as soon as the armada first showed up and tried to go into hiding, but the possibility of racial termination had a way of trumping bribes and favours and the bolters without exception soon found themselves in custody, being marched back to Johannesburg to face the intergalactic music. The only wanted fugitives who managed to escape their fate were the ones who committed suicide rather than face justice. The general mood of the world by then was such that all of these deaths were considered well-deserved.
One of the wanted men who'd been taken while still on the job was Wikus's own father-in-law, Piet Smit, the managing director of MNU's South African branch, and what Wikus and Tania thought of that was something they weren't about to make public yet; although both van de Merwes were back on Earth and in protective custody by then, Wikus's very existence was being kept secret for the time being. Christopher, who knew some of the background story, wondered how Wikus would hold up when he had to testify against his relative in court. He'd told Christopher of how he'd feebly begged Piet for help and had been shrugged aside, even though the older man had known that Wikus was about to be eviscerated alive.
Christopher found out soon enough. Wikus van de Merwe's appearance in court, when he was first called as a witness, amounted to an even bigger bombshell than Christopher himself. And while Piet Smit didn't shit himself, the colour of his face and that of some of the other accused sitting in the dock with him did for a while bear an uncanny resemblance to curdled milk. Wikus, in all honesty, didn't look much better. He was still gaunt, with yellowish smudges visible about his eyes and along the lines of his lower jaw, the last healing remnants of his extensive bruising, and his hair looked as if it'd been brutally shorn for a stint in a third-world prison. Yet his eyes were clear and his gaze steady, and he held himself well and spoke with no trace of the nervous stammer evident in footage of the man from the day he'd begun the historical evictions of District 9. Something remarkable had happened to him, that was obvious. And where had he been during the intervening years? Had he really been getting off banging the prawns? All over the planet, viewers clung to their screens, fascinated by the mysterious turns the interspecies saga was taking. Feeding one's puerile curiosity helped keep the anxieties over being obliterated at bay.
For the first time, the true reason for Wikus's so-called infection and why he'd fled from MNU and gone on the run came out. Where had he gone? Nowhere, really. He'd simply lost himself amidst the throngs of other homeless, overlooked individuals roaming the city's underside…it hadn't been that hard, sad to say. When Christopher and his fellows returned, Wikus had sought them out and asked for help, and the prawns had purged his body of the alien mutagen which had ravaged him and that was that. Of course, such a bald, abbreviated explanation was nowhere near enough to assuage the public's curiosity, but he refused to elaborate any further nor could he be forced into revealing more—the man's personal troubles had no real pertinence, after all. What the prosecutors wanted to hear were all the gory details of what had transpired in the MNU labs, and on that subject, Wikus had plenty to say, seasoned with much simmering virulent rage. His recounting of how he'd been forced to kill a prawn marked with a cartoonish 'X' as part of a weapons test was especially damning and had Piet Smit drawing his lips back from his teeth like a snarling cornered wolf. Christopher was glad to see Wikus handling the difficult testimony with such aplomb. It was the prawn still in him, he'd thought, lending the human man extra strength and resilience when he needed it most.
There was more. Wikus had also seen what happened to the prawns who'd refused to let themselves be evicted from District 9, the wild, aggressive ones who'd gone feral and who no longer bowed to human authority. These holdouts, MNU had dug out mainly at night, secretly sending in sharpshooters equipped with silencers and infrared and starlight technology to find their targets. The humans had shot to kill, with no warnings given. On two occasions, Wikus had witnessed wounded prawns trying to surrender and being shot in the head and killed anyway. A hyena wandering into the city would have been treated with more compassion and understanding. An attempt would have been made to tranquilize such an animal or otherwise capture it alive, but with the renegade prawns, MNU hadn't even tried.
Tania van de Merwe always sat in the courtroom while her husband testified and would always leave when he did, presumably to meet up with him again and keep him company. Christopher sometimes watched her on his monitors at the military compound with interest. She appeared, in her own way, as resilient and steely as Wikus himself. That her own parent was one of the most vilified culprits on trial didn't even seem to trouble her, but then the bonds between human mates normally overrode those between parent and child, or were supposed to…Christopher wasn't exactly sure about this part of it, as human social behaviour in general still confused him. All he did know for certain was that Wikus had missed her terribly and that much of his motivation to help Christopher during those crazy few days before Christopher had escaped could be traced back to his desperate determination to return to her.
Wikus was on the stand for four days and his testimony was so devastating that the defence wouldn't even touch him. Christopher caught some news footage of him leaving the convention centre shortly after being released, his face very wan as he clung to Tania, almost being supported by her, as the two walked to a waiting car and got in. It was the only sign Christopher ever saw of how much the ordeal truly cost his human friend.
Another former MNU employee named Fundiswa Mhlanga was up next. Christopher vaguely remembered the man as having been present the day Wikus had first tried to serve Christopher his eviction notion, a nervous sort who'd tried to stay behind the others and who'd looked very upset throughout. He was surprised to hear that Fundiswa was the man who'd first tried to expose MNU's experimental outrages. Christopher had gotten the sense at the time that Fundiswa was just the old Wikus all over again, just another low-level bureaucrat being groomed in practical methods of how to keep prawns in line and compliant.
And if learning of the man's heroics was surprising to Christopher, then finding out that Fundiswa had been subsequently arrested for his efforts, that he was in fact still serving out a prison term, bewildered him. The prawn ambassador had to turn to one of the humans assigned to him for help, a correspondent named Grey Bradnam whom Christopher had selected personally after seeing him in a documentary and liking his frank manner.
"I don't understand," Christopher had said to Grey via one of the translating machines the prawns on Christopher's ship had built. "This man provided evidence of illegal activity and yet he is the one being punished."
"Yes, that's true," Grey replied. He paused, trying to think of the best way to explain the concept of whistle-blowing to an alien whose own loyalty was species-wide. "Fundiswa signed a contract of non-disclosure when he first joined MNU. It's a common practice for many of our companies and corporations. Signing the contract forbids employees from disclosing information about the company they work for to a third party, especially information that could have negative consequences for the company."
"But they committed crimes. Atrocities!"
"I know. And I agree that under such circumstances non-disclosure agreements shouldn't apply. But they do, and Fundiswa broke his."
"So you value confidentiality and artificially-enforced loyalty above the rights of my people."
"I don't. I believe that it's wrong, terribly wrong," said Grey, "but from a legal standpoint…" He trailed off and shrugged, his sad eyes pleading. "We are trying. Some of us are trying. In some countries, people like Fundiswa would be protected. The contract wouldn't apply if the information disclosed revealed criminal activity on the part of the company. But here…"
He shrugged again. Christopher regarded him severely, refusing to be mollified.
"You know it is wrong and your leaders know it is wrong, and yet you do it anyway," the alien reflected aloud, half in anger and half in dull wonder. "Why, why, why do you people behave this way?"
"Ego. Greed. Fear, maybe. It's humanity's eternal struggle. Our tragedy and our shame."
"And perhaps your doom."
Grey swallowed hard. "If that is your decision, then yes, our doom."
Christopher asked nothing more. He understood all too well already.
Grey Bradnam was perhaps the most honest and upfront human aiding Christopher, and Christopher came to value him highly because of it. Given different circumstances, he was the sort of person Christopher could have also befriended, another human besides Wikus he might have grown to like. But it was too late to be establishing friendships now—it was too late for all the prawns—and they continued to hold themselves aloof and all their doings remained inscrutable. They wouldn't even reveal their true names or where they were from. When Christopher was asked what his people preferred to be called, he advised the humans to simply carry on as they had, leaving them with the innocuous terms 'alien' and 'space person' and one other which might have been derogatory or maybe not; when they got right down to it, none of the humans who'd made the request could think of a single actual case of an alien ever objecting to being called a 'prawn'. It was just human assumption that they'd mind, and no one had the guts to go back and ask for a clarification.
Dealing with Christopher Johnson was becoming awkward for all the members of his human team. It was his personality. Aloof or not, he was just too darn nice. And the more affable and polite he was, the guiltier they felt for knowing that such an obviously intelligent and perceptive creature had been persecuted and forced to live in squalor for decades. He was the only alien they were allowed to deal with, too. The few times any others showed up, they kept their distance and would speak only with their ambassador, dashing the team's hopes that the compound might serve as a sort of healing embassy through which humans and aliens could finally establish equal and friendly relationships. It was as maddening a development as it was baffling. They were right there, in their fabulous ships, the leaders and creators and builders this time, the smart ones, and still they wouldn't talk aside from issuing threats and demands. The aliens' refusal to explain themselves became another of mankind's great disappointments. The vague sense many humans had, that it was exactly how they deserved to be treated, only made it worse.
Christopher could have explained a great deal, of course, and he could also have eased some of the humans' guilt. He could have told them of how his leaders, despite all their professed anger, had been generally pleased with what they'd found in District 10. By cramming the refugee prawns together into more crowded quarters, their human caretakers slash jailers had finally unwittingly done something very right. The cramped living conditions had concentrated the colonial pheromones exuded by all prawns and greatly accelerated the changes occurring in those with latent traits encoded into their DNA. Within the last two years alone, almost a thousand more prawns had evolved into high-castes. Even more wondrously, the very first leader nymph had just hatched, with several more on the way. The fractured, stranded colony was repairing itself. It would have been whole and healthy again within a generation. A few years more and the humans would have had a terrible war on their hands, for prawn leaders could not tolerate mistreatment the way the lower castes could. For this reason alone, the rescue had come in the nick of time, although whether more for the humans or for the sake of the prawns was hard to say.
The best of the refugees had already been rehomed in the spanking new, empty vessel the rescuers had brought along for just this hoped-for happy outcome. A few years of guidance from volunteers would be all the incipient colony needed to complete its regeneration and become self-sufficient. The excess workers—and there were almost two million of them—were still being evaluated and divided up amongst the crews on the other ships. Many of them were in a bad way, psychologically ruined and thin and unhealthy. But even the most damaged ones were expected to recover once bathed in the regulating pheromonal soup of a normally functioning, happy colony and well fed and given back some purpose in life. Worker prawns were incredibly resilient creatures, capable of withstanding almost anything fate threw at them. That they'd been able to survive and even thrive on such a backwards, half-assed world as planet Earth was a perfect testament to their legendary toughness.
Christopher's own colony adopted sixty thousand of the excess workers. Seeing the faces of the new prawns, some scarred and pinched with long-standing rage or despair, brighten with fresh hope once aboard brought the reality of what Christopher had accomplished into focus like nothing else and filled him with joy. He needed the boost. The trial had slogged on in the meantime and Christopher was up next as the last witness for the prosecution.
Christopher had a few bad minutes when he first took the stand and flashed back to memories of an interrogation he'd undergone at the hands of MNU operatives many years ago. It had happened when he was still changing and had just intelligence enough to appreciate the gravity of his situation and be scared half to death. Luckily, he'd managed to pull off playing dumb well enough to fool his interrogators, but it had been a near thing and left him fearful of all humans for a very long time afterwards. The man questioning Christopher this time had to gently coax him along until the traumatic memories faded, then the floodgates opened and his prawn witness became able to speak freely.
And what a lot he had to say, first corroborating Wikus's account of what they'd seen together in the MNU labs and then recounting all the previous abuse he'd had to endure, years and years worth of abuse at the hands of humans in general and MNU agents in particular. His deep rumbling alien words, accented with ticks and clonks and swishy rattles, were translated into dozens of languages and broadcast round the world and attracted the largest audience ever to watch or listen to any witness at any trial. It became a hallmark testimony, the representative deposition of an entire species, and a bewilderment for many who'd assumed for decades that all the aliens who'd been living on Earth were as dumb as stumps. The accused in the dock glared daggers at Christopher throughout, knowing now that they'd been duped by at least one prawn and probably many more, but all their impotent anger did was encourage him. As it was with Wikus, Christopher's evidence was too devastating to touch. He would be released at the end of his passionate purge with not a single query or rebuttal.
While Christopher was still on the stand delivering the testimonial which would make him famous, the rescue party removed the very last prawn from District 10 and completed its mission. When the world awoke the next morning, the alien shimmer field was gone, and the so-called sanctuary park was once again visible, looking much the same as it had the last time the humans had seen it. But not for long. What happened next shocked everyone.
Two large auxiliary vessels detached from a nearby mothership and flew down together to hover a hundred or so meters above the surface of District10. They began spooling out a thick cable between them, metallic and segmented, with a curious double array of flaps hanging all along its bottom. With the cable stretched tight between them, the two vessels then turned in tandem and positioned themselves by one of the perimeter fences. Then they activated the cable, and a curtain of unearthly white fire rained down.
There was no sound, no explosions, possibly not even any heat emitted at all. But whatever the fire touched, it instantly turned into a grey powder, which fell to earth and lay in drifts. All day long the two ships moved up and down over the former camp, dragging their harrow of death between them, and by evening, nothing remained of District 10 but a huge field of pale ashes. Even the soil was cleansed. Weeks into the future, when scientists finally investigated, they would find that the white fire had burned several meters deep, reducing even the microbes into nothing but a powdery elemental residue.
The show of power spooked everybody. Several human supremacy groups and countries with more ordnance on hand than brains, who hadn't taken kindly to Christopher's testimony and who were starting to entertain ideas about fighting back, suddenly found their will and their plans dissolving. It was just as well. Christopher had no sooner finished up in court than he found himself addressing the humans again, this time in his role as the aliens' representative ambassador. Now that the prawns had removed all trace of their former presence in District 10, what they wanted next was the return of all alien artefacts left on planet Earth, whether tech or biological, even if it was just a few cells preserved on a microscope slide. Any artefacts that weren't handed over freely, would be hunted down and taken. By force, if necessary.
As demands went, it was the first one which generated some real defiance. Few people really minded that the prawns were leaving. But to give up their valuable weapons and devices, and private souvenirs which had been obtained at terrific expense and often illegally, that was a different matter altogether! Much was brought out for pickup over the following week, and just as much was kept hidden. The deadline the prawns had set came and went.
The first forced retrieval made was of a cache of illegally obtained alien rifles that a rich American was keeping in a private vault at a ranch in Texas. A smallish gunship of sorts, just another of the multitude of auxiliary vessels all the motherships seemed to carry, flew an unerring course straight to the ranch and started firing and blew the absolute crap out of the main ranch house. The rich American and a screaming blonde floozie he'd been entertaining escaped in only their underwear just before the roof collapsed. The gunship then landed, disgorged two prawns wearing exosuits who rummaged through the rubble and dragged out the vault and cut it open, and that was the end of those particular rifles' brief stay in the Lone Star State. An alert local TV news crew caught almost the entire event on video. The prawns didn't mind one bit being filmed. One of them even made his exosuit wave at the camera.
By the next morning, thousands more weapons and other items had been handed in to local police stations who were acting as drop-off centers. However, it took several more 'retrievals', most notably a spectacular firefight which erupted over a Central American warehouse and which ended with a liberal application of the white fire weapon, before all humans everywhere accepted that the prawns could track and find their stolen tech and biomatter regardless of where it was and complied fully.
Other alarming things began to happen. Although many of the colony ships dispersed to various strategic parts of the globe to take part in the retrieval sweep, the lead ship—Christopher's vessel—simply shifted position from District 10 to an ominously low new station directly over the convention center where the trial was taking place. A number of other motherships retreated into space and were subsequently tracked by observatory telescopes to some of the other planets in the solar system where they then did who-knew-what, raising the disturbing possibility that they might be casing the system for eventual invasion. It made the humans at the prawns' monitoring compound antsy enough to risk asking Christopher point-blank about the purpose of all the recent interplanetary activities. The prawn ambassador had looked down at them out of his great brown eyes and replied that they were 'exploring'.
As explanations went, it did absolutely nothing to calm anyone's fears. The brief clashes over the return of the weapons and the almost effortless ease with which the prawns had quelled them had scared everyone, and the giant mothership once again hovering over Johannesburg cast its oppressive pall over more than just the city. A general anxiety gripped humanity. It spread to the handling of the trial, which had taken front and center in the news again, and made everyone want to hurry through its remainder and get to the verdicts. If mankind was destined to die beneath a rain of cool white death, better to know sooner than to put it off, most felt. Thus it was that the defence of those accused of the world's first crimes against aliens of human-equivalency went down in the books as being among the shortest on record. Even if the prawns weren't always present, it was believed that they were always watching, and nobody really wanted to be seen as defending or in any way sympathizing with the MNU gang anyway.
The World Court announced that the verdicts were in and would be read out the following morning at nine o'clock local time. The convention center was already packed by dawn, the courtroom filled to capacity, thousands more visitors waiting outside to watch the broadcasts on the big screens. Even the prawns paid attention, with every ship in space and elsewhere returning to fill the skies high over Johannesburg, the entire great armada gathered together at last with its lead ship slung low beneath them all, poised to observe or perhaps to strike. Their ambassador also chose to observe from afar; tensions were running too high for him to have felt safe in the courtroom and he'd been feeling a curious malaise when around humans ever since testifying, as though the memories he'd dredged up had finally soured him for keeps towards the entire species. Only Wikus, with whom he'd shared a life and death adventure which went beyond race and history, still appealed to him, yet Wikus wasn't present in the courtroom either. He'd been put off attending in person by the same tensions and crushing potential publicity that had discouraged Christopher.
All of the accused were found guilty of every last charge, which caused a wave of cheers and relief that rippled across the entire planet. The prawns didn't react at all. Their ships remained still, nothing but silvery stately sentinels dotting the heavens, their inaction and silence for once seeming a good thing. By noon, Christopher issued a short statement to the effect that his people were pleased with the outcome so far, just to keep the media hounds at bay, then began to make plans to return to his mothership to get away from being further pestered. It was only the hand-delivery of a certain special message at that point which made him delay his getaway and remain in the compound after all. The same message which had included the address of someone who'd been in protective custody for the duration of the trial. Wikus's address, attached to an invitation to attend a private little celebration with the van de Merwes that very evening after supper.
Ambivalent feelings or not, this was one invitation which Christopher couldn't refuse. He sent back a notice of acceptance and made arrangements for his transport. And now here he was, being driven through the dark, en route to see the human man whose fate had intersected with his own in such a profound and life-altering way.
The little convoy eventually made its way onto a quiet, secluded street servicing a number of expensive gated residences. The limo pulled up before the front entrance of one of the smaller properties, one fully enclosed by tall, thick brick walls and wrought ironwork fencing, and the driver spoke to someone via an intercom, then the gate opened. Christopher peered out curiously as they drove in. Much of the property was landscaped with mature trees and bushes, an additional layer of privacy for the modest stone house nestled in their midst. The limo halted. They'd arrived, at the van de Merwes', and Christopher got out for his date with destiny.
…continued in Part II