Memory Transcription Subject: Rosi, Yotul Housewife

  Date [standardized human time]: November 19, 2136

  It wasn’t difficult to figure out what David believed in, or at least what he was trying to trick me into believing he believed in--“Humans are just like prey! Trust us, and let your guard down around us!” Pfft!--but Chiri was a more peculiar case study. ‘Fuck the Federation’, she’d shouted, but she thought it was still the best way for prey to live, herself somehow implicitly excluded. ‘Swear to God’, she’d said, but she’d been nonspecific about which god. ‘Follower of the Great Protector for nearly three decades’, she’d called herself, which was also her age… plus or minus the past few months of humanity existing on the galactic stage.

  Gojids rarely lied, but she’d chosen her words carefully.

  “You don’t follow the Great Protector anymore, do you?” I asked quietly.

  Chiri, who’d zoned out, suddenly came back around with a jolt. “Huh? Um.” There was a long pause as she stared off to the side again, at nothing, considering. “I guess… I suppose I don’t… Or do I?” She shook her head. “I mean, Gojids are omnivores, apparently. We have Predator and Prey aspects, like humans do. I’ve been trying to understand the predatory side of myself a bit better. I think that makes me a heretic? But then, our religion was also tampered with, so… I dunno. Maybe the Great Protector originally preached some kind of balance or control of our predator side, and the Federation changed it to simply rejecting it.” Chiri growled, not in a predatory way, but just out of sheer frustration. “I’m sorry, but it’s really hard to be pious when I have no idea what my god actually wants!”

  David sighed tiredly. “Don’t apologize. I have a book explaining in detail what my god wants, and it mostly just makes it harder to take him seriously.” He lifted his glass, toasting his assuredly monstrous predator god, whoever it was. “All praise the creator of the universe, and everything in it! He knows all, sees all, and his power is limitless! He also picked one tiny tribe of bronze age humans as his favoritest creations of all, and he has extremely specific guidelines on what their descendents should be doing on Saturdays.” David shook his head and drank.

  Chiri blinked in confusion. “You were working on Saturday?” she said, tentatively, wondering what the problem was.

  “Precisely!” said David. “That's one of the rules: no working on Saturdays. Well, on the weekly ‘day of rest’, which we’ve generally decided was Saturday. Other religions say Sunday. And you wanna know what people like to do on rest days?”

  I squinted in suspicion. “Eat at restaurants?”

  “Eat at restaurants!” David confirmed, throwing his hands into the air. “Our two busiest days are Friday and Saturday. People know they can sleep in on Saturday and Sunday, so they stay up late the night before, drinking and feasting.”

  A divinely-mandated day of rest was a baffling concept to hear out of a predator religion, and I wasn't sure what to read into it. It was just so utterly mundane! Resist your predatory urges, give in to your predatory urges… ‘Hey, maybe take it easy sometimes’ was such a wildly orthogonal commandment.

  I tapped the table, thinking. “So… what, you’re a sinner, even by the standards of your predatory religion?” I still didn’t know enough about his faith to decide if that made it better or worse.

  David visibly deflated. “At this point, honestly, I’m just a nonbeliever.” He shook his head, and stared into his glass, watching the bubbles drift slowly upwards through the toasty brown beer. “I don’t… I shouldn’t be this flippant about it,” he said softly. “I was fairly pious in my younger years. I know what it’s like, feeling that kind of connection to the divine. I know how it feels when that connection gets torn away.”

  “What tore it away?” asked Chiri, looking worried for her paramour.

  David shrugged. “Thoughts. Time.” He shook his head. There was a melancholic cloud hanging over him as he reminisced. If I hadn’t been trained to look for predatory deceptions, I probably would have even found it convincing. “The divine was never a matter of faith or grace for me. It simply was, and I wanted to understand it. I read scripture. I read the commentaries that generations of philosophers and preachers wrote interpreting scripture. And in my quest to understand, I ran into one little contradiction, one paradox I couldn’t resolve.”

  I had to fight to stay unsympathetic. “What was the contradiction?” I asked, trying to sound more annoyed than I actually was.

  David rubbed his eyes. “What makes my religion true, and all the others that contradict it false? What evidence could I muster about the truth of my god that couldn’t equally apply to any others? And if one god or pantheon was the real one, why do they let so many people worship fakes?”

  “Oh!” Chiri said, abruptly perking up. “That’s actually one I can probably answer. My family followed a heterodoxical denomination of the Great Protector. In other words, the Great Protector was the means by which a universal truth had been conveyed to Gojids. On other planets, among other peoples, that truth was conveyed differently. The Krakotl follow Inatala, the Yulpas follow the Spirit of Life, but it’s all different facets of the same divine truth.”

  A large part of my schooling had been about becoming acquainted with other, ‘better’ cultures in the Federation. The pattern to her specific choices in deities hadn’t escaped me. Those were all religions whose holy symbols weren’t uncommon in any given Exterminator’s Guild office. “That divine truth being that prey are good and predators are evil,” I pointed out. “A divine truth you seem to be creatively reinterpreting with all this talk of omnivores and balancing prey and predator aspects.”

  Chiri bristled, and her typically casual cadence fell away to something a bit more prim, proper, and high-society. “I’m trying to better understand that underlying truth! New revelations need to be squared with the old. Did you know that even humans have religions that advocate against doing harm or eating meat? It’s a whole planet of new revelations to take into account, new lenses through which to understand the divine!”

  I shook my head tiredly. “That’s all far more complex and philosophical than it needs to be. You know what my people do? Polytheism. Just accept that there are many gods, and some of them want different things. Simpler that way.”

  David gestured at me with his beer glass. “Gods wanting different things doesn’t really cover the ways in which their dogmas can contradict each other. Like, you can’t have an endless cycle of reincarnation and an eternal afterlife at the same time. The universe and everything in it can’t have been created by a dozen different divinities, independently, at a dozen different points in time.”

  “Do you people not have myths about the gods being flawed or bickering with each other?” I shrugged. “I thought it went without saying that gods don’t always tell the whole truth.”

  Chiri nodded excitedly. “Exactly! That’s why we need to study them all and compare notes to understand our place in the universe.”

  I squinted at her incredulously. “If you want to understand your place in the universe, buy a flipping star map. What, you think we invented the steam engine via divine revelation? That’s not what gods are for.”

  “Oh for…” Chiri smacked the top of the bar with a paw. “Not scientific truth. Moral truth. Insubstantial things. Souls, and the idea of evil. Things like that.”

  I shook my head. “The gods still feel like a ridiculous place to get those ideas.”

  “And yet,” said David, “that core idea of predators versus prey is one you’ve gotten from somewhere anyway.”

  I shrugged. “Learned it in school.”

  “From Federation teachers who got the idea… where, exactly?” David asked.

  “The Exterminators, presumably,” I pointed out, sidestepping his insidious rhetorical trap. “The Guild interacts with predators constantly. They know from experience how dangerous predators can be.”

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  “Okay, so it’s just practical knowledge for you,” said David. “It’s science. If I show you that your belief reliably fails under specific circumstances, then you’ll have to update it, right?”

  I shrugged, trying to play it cool. He kept asking leading questions. If I derailed him, I'd escape his traps. “If it's science, then I yield to the scientists. I'm a tavern keeper. I'm not updating my beliefs every time I have too many drinks and think I've discovered the secret to time travel.”

  Chiri’s jaw dropped. “That… can't possibly be a thing drunk people do.”

  David grimaced. “You’d be surprised.” Human or not, there was an aura about him that I only saw in fellow veterans of the hospitality industry. And Chiri, curiously, seemed to lack it… Was she really not the bar owner? “Besides,” David continued, “depending on how you choose to measure time, your basic FTL drive is a time machine. You can zip a few light-minutes away, turn the ship around, and watch yourself take off.”

  “That’s an oversimplification,” Chiri said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “Suppose so.” David said with a shrug. He put his hand on Chiri's paw. “I’m just saying, you haven't had that many human customers yet. Lot of us are five drinks away from jumping at the chance to ask a real-life space alien which conspiracy theories are true. Secret shadow government operating from inside the hollow Earth, which world leaders are actually just Kolshians in elaborate disguises, that kind of thing.” He took another sip of his beer. “I bet it’s Zhao.”

  The human’s statement was so matter-of-fact and confident, it caught me off-guard. I nearly choked on my beer. “The Secretary-General of the UN?” I said, laughing. “You think he’s a Kolshian wearing a human suit. Sorry, just… what?”

  David shrugged, but smiled coyly. “I mean, think about it. Secretary-General Meier was so utterly diplomatic that it started to undercut the Kolshian ‘predators are all mindless violent savages’ party line. Then he gets assassinated, and his new replacement’s suddenly on the warpath? It plays right into the Kolshians’ tendrils.” He nodded decisively, but was trying and failing to keep a straight face. “The only explanation is that Zhao is a Kolshian wearing a human suit.”

  I snorted in amusement, but Chiri looked at him more askance. “You don’t believe that,” said Chiri.

  “Nah, I’m just making stuff up,” David confirmed. “Honestly, Zhao’s probably just with Humanity First. Or riding that wave of resentment into office, more likely. Little lip service goes a long way in politics.”

  “Or Zhao was behind the assassination,” I said, climbing aboard the ‘making stuff up’ train. “The old Secretary-General’s diplomatic approach was a sign of weakness, so the younger candidate killed and ate him to take his place.”

  Chiri looked worried at what I was saying, but David was laughing.

  Whatever, I said, sipping at my beer and feeling my face beginning to get warm. She wants me to stick around near her pet predator, I may as well have fun with it.

  “It’s true,” said David, smirking. “Killing and eating your opponent is a key part of how our election process works. That’s why our politicians, famously, are all professional bodybuilders in their thirties. Meier was actually the first gray-haired politician in human history. It's a tragedy to have lost such a trend-setter!”

  Chiri looked back and forth between us, wondering suddenly if there was a gas leak in the building. “What is happening?”

  “The food’s getting cold, is what’s happening,” said David, nodding to the last bit of fried food on the plate. “C’mon, mangia, mangia.”

  The last bite was a rounded oblong similar to the first, golden brown and sitting in a puddle of dark sauce. No easy hints as to what it contained. Probably not meat, buuuuut… I glanced over at Chiri as she popped it into her mouth. “Oh!” she exclaimed in surprise. “This one’s a little spicy. Oh, and you used the--”

  David shook his head and gestured at me. No spoilers, I guess. Fine. I hated to admit it, but the food had been pretty good so far. Having a Gojid to coach him on non-barbaric flavors seemed to be paying off for him. I wasn’t as crazy for spicy foods as my husband was, but I could handle them. If this dish was good, too, maybe I could replicate it. I nibbled it daintily this time, and with good reason: like the first, this was another croquette with a hot, gushing filling. Inside the batter, it looked like a whole tiny fruit or seed pod that had been stuffed with another of David’s bean-based fake dairy concoctions. The filling had gone peculiarly off, though, but in a way that didn’t taste as bad as I’d been expecting. A touch acrid, a touch funky, with an odd blueish marble pattern woven through the white paste… “That Roquefort stuff you mentioned earlier?” I guessed.

  “You got it,” said David, pleased that I’d noticed. “It’s vegan, obviously, but the mold spore inoculation is real, which is what gives the blue cheese filling its flavor. It’s otherwise a cross between an American jalape?o popper, and its traditional Mexican antecessor, the mole poblano. Mostly in the dark sauce. It’s savory chocolate. Try it!”

  I grumbled, but now that I knew what was in it, and what to expect from it gushing hot filling, I popped the whole thing into my mouth and chewed. The batter was crispy and toasty, if a bit granular. The odd berry--a jalape?o?--was brightly tangy and slippery, a far textural leap from the spicy-starchy kadew squashes native to my homeworld. Fairly mild heat, overall, though. Nothing I couldn’t handle. No, the stars of the show were the filling and the sauce. I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d never tasted anything like either before. They both had that oddly fatty richness that Terran dairy analogues tended to favor, but the mole sauce was a blend of exotic spices I could scarcely recognize. There was a depth to it that I could scarcely follow! It was the tiniest bit sweet and bitter, but there were such incredible aromas… The spice trade wasn’t unknown on Leirn, but steamboat shipments had been just beginning to bring the prices down when the Federation arrived, and they tended to emphasize the virtues of simplicity in their cuisine. And the filling… I had no real frame of reference for mold-cured dairy, obviously, but the peculiar sharp funk cut through some of the richness nicely, and reminded me of…

  “Kinpara,” I said, hoping that the odd delicacy translated. “It tastes like kinpara.” David and Chiri both looked a bit lost, so I sighed and tried to say it again longform. “Grain blight? It’s a parasitic fungus that grows in our graineries, but somebody tried it out of desperation. It’s funky and weird and kind of an acquired taste, but it’s pretty good. Old Yotul grannies tend to torture their descendents by making them try it. It’s traditional, it’s healthy, you know what I mean, right?”

  I was staring at Chiri when I said it, but no, the human answered. “Oh! Kinda like huitlacoche, maybe?” David tried. That was far too obscure a term to translate, sadly, so he translated it himself. “It’s an old Mexican delicacy. In English, it’s corn smut.”

  “Corn porn?!” Chiri blurted out.

  “No, the…” David had to stop to compose himself. “The non-euphemistic definition of smut. Like literal filth. It’s a fungus that grows on one of our grains.”

  I nodded. “Exactly! Kinpara is…” I trailed off, and my eyes narrowed. “Wait, back up. Why do you, the predator, know exactly what I’m talking about, but the herbivore has no concept?”

  “I’m not an herbivore!” Chiri protested, bristling.

  I rolled my eyes. “The woman raised as an herbivore, whatever. Why does a predator know about tasty forms of grain blight, but the Federation old guard doesn’t?”

  Chiri had an odd twist to her mouth, but powered through. “Because the Federation probably redacted most of my culture! And because humans aren’t nearly as monstrous as we were told they are.”

  I rolled my eyes again, and threw my paws up in the air. “Whatever.”

  David took a deep breath, and tapped at the bar top. “Look… I was talking earlier about my descent into nonbelief? I can’t emphasize enough how slow it was. There was no single magic moment for me when everything flipped on its head. I…” He shook his head bitterly. “Beliefs have intellectual components and emotional components. You can argue someone out of the intellectual component. You can argue yourself out of the intellectual component! You can start making excuses, maybe, start waging a fighting retreat back towards more defensible rhetorical terrain. ‘God still exists, but naybe my version of God isn’t any more true than any other’, or ‘maybe the true nature of the divine is simply unknowable to mere mortals like ourselves’, and so on. But you don’t give the belief up, not fully, until the emotional ties fade. You wake up one day, and you just find it gone, and realize it’s been gone for a while.”

  I snorted derisively. “I’m sorry, David, but there’s just no version of this world where I somehow forget that predators like you are evil.”

  Chiri bristled in affront again, but David just shrugged. “I disagree,” he said. “I think you’ve already got all the necessary tools to notice, intellectually, that the ‘predators are all universally evil’ idea doesn’t hold up. It’s just the emotional connection that’s left. That will fade with time, and with familiarity. You’re going to find a life here on Earth. You’re going to find yourself surrounded by humans who like you, and by Yotuls who don’t share your suspicions of humans. You’re going to fall back, have your ideology stage a fighting retreat to more defensible ground. I’ll be ‘one of the good ones’, then maybe some subset of humans are trustworthy, and so on. Then, one day, you’ll be zoned out, wiping down a table, at my restaurant or yours, and you’ll realize you’ve gotten so used to humans, you haven’t thought of us as monsters in months.”

  I shook my head dismissively and sipped at my beer. “David, you’re very clever, and you’re a very good cook, but I promise you, that’s never going to happen.”

  --------------------------------

  Memory Transcription Subject: Rosi, Yotul Sous Chef

  Date [standardized human time]: May 18, 2137

  My eyes went wide, and I abruptly stopped wiping down the table with the Arxur claw-marks on it, mid-motion, as the realization sunk in. “Oh, that neverpouched fucker!”