Chapter 3: What it Means to Lose One's Soul
At the commerce moon, I spend nearly an arn in my transport, waiting for those in the control tower to decide to open the docking bay. A variety of other vessels hover close to mine, and once a threshold number is reached, the doors will open to admit us all. The policy is an efficient one, no doubt designed to conserve atmosphere, but I don't recall it being in place last time I was here.
I lace my fingers behind my head and lean back, stretching my legs out in front of me. The air in the transport is pleasantly cool, like the temperature-optimized atmosphere in the Peacekeeper vessel all those cycles back. We were here to be outfitted before our final transfer to the command carrier, a place so many metras from the world that the number became a long string of placeholders that simply meant "far". For Tauvo, the sight of the buildings on the commerce moon was a sharp reminder of the close-built wooden houses in our village, and the control tower appeared reminiscent of the stone church spire.
He began to cry as we watched the approach on the Peacekeeper transport's view screen, and I felt as if the fifty-seven other recruits were all watching him, pointing and laughing. In truth, most of them were probably thanking the gods that they were not bursting into homesick tears, but all I saw was my miserable brother calling unwanted attention to himself, and for his sake, I had to stop it. I punched him on the arm hard enough to shock him out of his sniveling, and I reminded him that Captain Raydel Durk, the hero of our bedtime stories, would never be seen crying. The tactic worked, though later I would wish I had stopped at the physical blow.
Now, on the view screen of my transport, I see the doors of the docking bay open. The motley vessels around me stampede inside, but I linger a moment in the void, unwilling to risk a collision for the sake of a landing spot close to the main doors. Once the chaos has subsided, I pull in between a compact transport that looks like Kalish workmanship and a cargo runner that appears to be welded together from multifarious scraps. After a few macrots, a klaxon sounds, indicating that atmosphere has been reestablished, and beings begin exiting their transports and making their way toward the main door.
I join the throng of sentient lifeforms, half of which I cannot identify as belonging to a known race. I shudder as a furry appendage brushes my arm and its owner mutters a series of whistles that could be an apology or a string of curses. The sample of language is too small for my translator microbes to adapt. The creature smells like stale food cubes, or perhaps the odor comes from the scaly thing in front of me and its brood of smaller scaly things, all shoving each other and dealing playful blows with their suction cup covered tentacles. I swallow a surge of bile and push past the aliens, stepping over the smallest ones.
"Always keep three rifle-lengths between yourself an alien!" The remembered words of Recruiter Deera ring in my mind as I recall being herded through these very doors.
"We'll see aliens here?" Tauvo asked, his tone half wonder and half trepidation.
"Course we will! That's why they had us..." I struggled to remember the word. "Immunized. So we don't get contaminated. But they don't know if they got us protected against all the different aliens we're going to see, so you have to stay away from all of them, just in case they have germs."
"I don't care if they have germs or not. They're disgusting." A girl my own age shuddered theatrically.
"Why?" Tauvo demanded. He had always loved picture books with fantastic creatures and had never grown tired of hearing stories about the denizens of far-off worlds.
"Be-cause," the girl said, speaking in a slow drawl that oozed contempt, "they have too many arms and legs, or too few, or too much hair, or none, or scales, or they're the wrong color, or they do strange things, or they make weird sounds..."
"Doesn't matter," I interrupted. "Wouldn't matter if they looked just like us. They're aliens, so they're not people, and you can't trust 'em. 'Every race has its own agenda.' Didn't you listen to Recruiter Hyndrip?"
"I guess, but..." Tauvo shrugged and looked down at the floor.
"But nothing." I clapped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "Don't worry. I'll protect you from the aliens."
Now, as I find myself carried along with the kaleidoscopic crowd of life forms, I realize just how quickly the Peacekeepers began their brutal reshaping of our minds. They stole our glorious "beyond" by taking the fanciful creatures that populated Tauvo's imagined universe and replacing them with hateful aliens. They ripped away a young boy's sense of wonder, leaving xenophobia and paranoia in its place. I envy Talyn his inability to understand what it means to lose one's soul.
Even now, I make a mental estimate of three rifle lengths, though I would be lucky to have a hand's breadth between me and the slug-like being in front of me. If I recall correctly, the Peacekeeper outfitter is to the left, so I make a sharp right and walk past food stalls that reek with the culinary atrocities of a thousand cultures. Innumerable languages fill the air around me, merging into a sort of white noise that is not unpleasant, though too loud. When I stare into the crowd, not focusing on any one being, the people become a sort of visual noise, a collage of fabrics and skins, fur and scales.
As a Peacekeeper, I could not have visited such a place without experiencing near panic over the prospect of becoming irreversibly contaminated. Thinking back, I remember Tauvo's analysis and see it for the wisdom it was: "Aren't the aliens irreversibly contaminated by being aliens? Cause if they are, then it must not be so bad, right? They don't mind." At the time, that musing earned him a punch on the shoulder and an admonition about asking too many questions. Now, the memory of his words helps me push away my lingering Peacekeeper prejudice and follow a familiar scent wafting from an establishment ahead.
The place must be serving food imported from the world, which is only a short transport ride away. I can smell a bread baked from the grain I helped harvest each cycle, the ale my father brewed from it, and the complex scent of the spice plants I remember from my mother's stew pot. I grew up knowing that our grain harvest served the Peacekeepers. They take the bulk of each crop and process it into food cubes, rendering it bland and unrecognizable, soulless. Somewhere ahead, the stuff of my world is being presented as it should be, and I quicken my pace.