“Did you see Cal Charlton headed in that direction recently?”
“Charlton got on the lift at 11:32 and it went down to the storage level.”
“Was he armed?”
“I could not tell.”
“He tried to kill me with an axe,” the Tauran said. “I heard glass break, and he came running in. He got the axe from the fire station outside my quarters.”
“Ship, can you confirm that?”
“No. If he had pulled the fire alarm, I would have known that.” Well, that was an interesting fact.
“So you took the axe away from him?”
“It was simple. I heard the glass break, and correctly interpreted that. I stepped behind the door. He never saw me.”
“So you killed him with the axe.”
“Not actually. I believe I broke his neck.” It demonstrated with a convincing karate-like stroke.
“Well, that’s…it could be worse.”
“Then, to be sure, I took the axe and severed his head.” It made a gesture like a shrug. “That’s where the brain is.”
You don’t want to be disrespectful of the dead, but it was a good thing the Tauran hadn’t killed someone anybody liked. Cal was kind of a loose cannon when he was younger, and although he seemed to have calmed down in recent years, he did have outbursts. Married three times, never for very long. In retrospect, it’s clear we shouldn’t have brought him along; if he hadn’t been in on it from the beginning, he probably wouldn’t have been chosen, in spite of his many useful talents.
He was one of Diana’s depression patients, it turned out, but when we looked over his belongings we found that he had taken one pill and then quit. Two days later, he tried to kill Antres 906.
If everyone aboard had liked Cal, we would have had a lynch mob. As it was, the council agreed with the sheriff that it was an unambiguous case of self-defense, and there was no public disagreement with that. So we were spared the knotty problem of a trial between species. No Tauran had ever committed a crime on MF. Antres 906 claimed that the Taurans had no equivalent to the human legal system, and it appeared to me that it didn’t really grasp what a trial was. If there are no individuals in your race, what constitutes crime and punishment–or morality or ethics, for that matter?
Anyhow, Antres 906 was in a kind of existential solitary confinement already, by choice. Whatever “choice” means to a Tauran; I suppose they normally have their equivalent of the Whole Tree, and just follow its orders without question.
In solitary, but not alone. One of the council was always with it for several days after the killing, protecting it, armed with the tranquilizer rifle. It was a lot more time than I’d ever spent with a Tauran, and Antres 906 didn’t mind talking.
One time, I brought along the five-page document from Earth, sentencing us to stay out of space. I asked it about that mysterious last line: “Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable.”
“I don’t understand this,” I said. “Is it supposed to be a general statement about reality?”
It rubbed its neck in an almost human gesture, which I knew meant I’m thinking. “No. Not at all.” It lightly ran its long finger over the Braille twice more.
“Our languages are very different, and the written language is subtle. The translation is incomplete, because…” It rubbed the line again.
“I don’t understand human jokes, but I think this is something like a joke. When you say something and mean something different.”
“What words would you use?”
“Words? The words are accurate. They are familiar, a saying in what you would call our religion.
“But when we use them, they are not inflected this way, which is what makes me think of your jokes. The word ‘unknowable’ here, it means, or rhymes with, ‘unnamable,’ or `nameless.’ Which is sort of like fate, or God, in human terms.”
“It’s supposed to be funny?”
“Not at all, no, not in this inflection.” It handed the paper back to me. “Normally, it is meant to be an expression about the complexity of the universe.”