“I must remember the word,” Delgado said. “The world has quite a few like that.” These men were not her enemies, Aleka thought. They did not want to oppress anybody. It made them the more dangerous.
“Bueno,” she continued, “as the numbers of the Keiki Moana increased, they naturally had to range farther to support themselves … Wait. Let me finish, por favor. They could not and should not have kept on being pensioners, fenced off and fed. They aren’t pets or show animals, for Pele’s sake, they’re sentients! They had their, their own potentials to realize, their own culture to develop, and it couldn’t be the same as ours. Do you expect sophotects to think or feel or act like you? Then why should metamorphs? And what might we learn, what might we get in the way of inspiration, from a nonhuman organic civilization?”
She had almost said “living,” but checked it. Best not let out any antagonism toward artificial intelligence, no, call it electrophotonic intelligence. Otherwise her words were beginning to run smoothly. How often had she used them on outsiders, trying to explain?
“For that, they needed to be self-sufficient. You know about the fish ranches, dolphin domestication, aquaculture, recreational enterprises, salvage and repair and scientific survey work and all the rest, whatever they could do together with humans, at sea or on the reefs. It was labor-intensive, but viable because it spared the capital cost of robotization. The proceeds let us of the Lahui give a living to our poets, thinkers, singers, artists, dancers, inventors, dreamers. Our spirits.
“But robotization got to be cheap. And the Keiki population grew. Poverty did. More and more of them had to go hunting for food. Fewer and fewer were in regular, direct relationships with the Lahui, the core society. There’s the origin of the kauwa, senores. The poor people, the fringe people. Yes, certain of them have gone back to a kind of savagery. But can you blame them?”
Aleka drew breath. “Pardon me if I’ve repeated common knowledge,” she ended. “I know you’ve heard most of this before, Major Delgado. But sometimes it’s hard to tell what is common knowledge, out in your Orthosphere.”
Hakim raised his brows. “Then you consider your … Lahui to be of the Heterosphere?” he asked.
“Bueno, we don’t have much to do with the cybercosm or the global economy. I suppose, yes, to you we may all look like kauwa.” Defiantly, Aleka knocked back her beer.
Had the Lyudov Rebellion succeeded—or had it even won to a middle ground, where some bounds were put upon the machines—But that was a daydream. It had been a lost cause from the start; and maybe rightly. No sense romancing about a wildness that ceased long before she was born. Yuri Volkov had stopped doing so … and he and she drifted apart …
“Your metamorphic friends could have ample food, and whatever else they require, for the asking,” Hakim said. “They need only heed the law, quit damaging property and ecology.”
“Give up their freedom?” she challenged. “Hunting is in their genes.”
“Humans adapt.”
“Humans have had far longer, and many more opportunities. Why, the world as it is came from them. And I’m not sure now well or happily adapted most of them are.”
“Given proper population restriction, a limited amount of predation on wildlife would be allowable, integrated with the general ecosystem. But the seals’ hunting is uncontrolled, and becoming serious.”
“Birth control isn’t in their genes either.” Abruptly she felt how forlorn her arguments were in the face of this implacable reasonableness.
“Humans generally manage.” Hakim paused. “There are exceptions. Your little society—your, ah, Lahui Kuikawa—has not reduced its birth rate much. I mean your part of it, the human members. Already you are crowded on your island, are you not? Soon you too will have to give up your freedom, as you put it.”
“We need time,” Aleka pleaded. “Of course we have to stabilize our numbers. The Keiki close to us know it too. We’re working on it, both our species, and we’ll bring the idea to the kauwa. They aren’t stupid either. But—a life with so few children around us, so few pups—Give uptime!”