“Mr. Davis!” a curly haired, cowish woman gasped, shuffling out of the knot of bookworms. She offered him her white-gloved hand.
He wondered how long it would be necessary to endure their little tribute. Damn, he was tired! “This is flattering,” he managed to say with a smile, though he thought it amazing they could not seem to tell that his teeth were gritted.
Proteus finally decided that the white-gloved woman’s live beetle brooch could prove a danger. He flashed a pseudopod out and crushed it against her pink lapel.
“He’s apparently not correctly carded to Demos,” Davis said, barely able to suppress his laughter at the dripping mess.
She reached to wipe the bloody splotch from her suit and merely succeeded in smearing her glove as well. “A harmless beetle,” she said. “There’s very little that is harmful on Demos, Mr. Davis. Demos is the next thing to Paradise.”
Wasn’t the next thing to Paradise—Purgatory? Yes, perhaps this had been a paradise before the Alliance arrived, coating the plains with concrete to berth their giant ships. And it wouldn’t have been so bad if only the landscape had been destroyed—but they had obliterated Demos’s people as well. Such a small population, the winged people, yet the Alliance had killed rather than make concessions. The Demosians, after all, had been so insolent as to offer resistance to the Alliance’s annexation of their world. So the Alliance had shut them up. Permanently . . . The motto of every ruthless government: Never go around, go over. And, of course, these winged people had been aliens—which word could be translated as “animals” as far as Alliance government was concerned. Forget that the Demosians were intelligent with a culture and heritage that was rich and ancient. To the Alliance, that was irrelevent. The provincial policy-making board of the Earth-centered government considered all alien lifeforms inferior to mankind. Therefore, if an alien was less than a human, he did not require humane treatment. The logic of megalomaniacs; but such were the types in power. The Supremacy of Man coalition still ruled the Alliance as the major party, and they understood only the voice of the gun. Did this dumpy, self-important woman not understand that his next novel would have to be about the slaughter that took place here, about a hundred and seventy million winged men and women who had been murdered in the Alliance’s colonization of Demos, with condemning details on the sterilizing effects of the mutant mustard gas that had eventually spelled GENOCIDE in dark letters across the face of an entire race? Paradise . . .
She interrupted his reverie to request that he address their book club before leaving Demos. That he sign a handful, just a few, not many mind you—will take only a moment—of his first editions which they had brought with them . . .
There’s really little need for one of those here,” the Alliance representative said, motioning toward the bobbling form of Proteus as Davis slouched into a seat before the heavy metal desk.
“He killed a spiderbat just after we got off the ship.”
“Oh, most of those have been exterminated. They’re rare anymore.”
“It only takes one.”
The rep frowned.
“I believe you’ll be pleased to know you’ll be living right in one of the aviaries. It was used by a research team, sociologists, a few years back and is all decked out for human habitation. Working right in there, you’ll be better able to get an idea of how they lived.” The last three words were said with an undertone of disgust, as if the winged people had been unimaginably barbaric.
“The Sanctuary is only a mile and a half from where you’ll be staying,” the rep continued, pulling at the comers of his mustache with his thin, nervous hands, as if he thought the ordering of that patch of brush would bring a corresponding order to his thoughts. “They’ll supply you with food and provisions.”
“Sanctuary?” Davis asked.
“Where they keep the last of the winged people.”
“Keep them?”
“Yes. Until they—well, die.” The rep looked uncomfortable and did not meet Davis’s gaze. “We have a car waiting to take you up there right now. If you’ll just follow me . . . your luggage has been collected and loaded already.”