Paul Thomas
- CONCEPTUAL HUMOUR -
The negotiations were not going well. Arch-Servitor Abraham Absalom was exhausted after thirty-four hours of talks. The fourth moon was barely a third of the way across the sky and the Phristis night still had another eighty-two hours left before the twin dawns. The Kellai were used to such long nocturnal periods of activity but Absalom certainly wasn’t. If not for the regular injections from his Armour of Light, he would not have been able to keep going.
He waited for the Kellai negotiator to speak. “Once you have asked a question never speak again until it has been answered,” the Cardinal General had told him four months before when he had set out for the negotiations. “It is considered the height of bad manners.” It was one of the two pieces of advice Absalom was given, the other being: “For a race whose name means jokers, the Kellai have absolutely no sense of humour”. There was very little known about the Kellai race. “They keep sending our ambassadors back and absolutely refuse to allow us to establish a battle station in their system,” the Cardinal had explained. “I’m going to send you over there to see what you can make of those damned lobsters. Do the best you can, Brother Abraham.”
The Kellai negotiator knew how tired Absalom was and, being a wise crustacean, was using it to his advantage. Eventually, he clicked his mouth-parts together twice. The group of other Kellai looming darkly behind him bobbed a few times, a sign that they agreed with what had been said.
“No,” translated the AI in Absalom’s helm. The Arch-Servitor felt a surge of anger at the reply to the question he had posed over forty minutes ago. The fatigue was starting to fray his nerves despite the stimulants, and he was growing to detest the planet.
He had to stay awake for over a hundred hours each night to accept their hospitality, and then the Kellai went to sleep for the next hundred. It was always night when the negotiations took place, dark and murky Phristis night, only dimly lit due to the Kellai sensitive eyes. The rain never stopped and was semi-corrosive to everything organic except the Kellai’s body plating. Since all official business was conducted outdoors, Absalom had been living in his armour almost continually since his arrival. The Kellai insisted that negotiators came alone and accept local hospitality. They were a grim race whose language sounded like someone eating with chopsticks and whose pace of life was so slow they spent an average of twelve hours eating a meal. After four months that was the answer. Simply a “No.”
“Can I ask why?” Absalom inquired bitterly. It was fortunate that the angst in his voice could not be translated. His armour sent out a series of clicks, muffled by the heavy atmosphere.
The negotiator replied quite quickly for once, using the strange language tense of the Kellai. “To be not involved in the vertebrate’s crusade, to not see why the vertebrates fight the Wazoon and to not care either.”
“Because we are on a righteous crusade,” Absalom replied, feeling himself growing angry. “And because those we fight are an evil, cruel race who attack our colonies brutally and who will continue to do so until we exterminate them. But we can’t do that without a battle station in this sector.” He waited for the long procession of clicks from his suit to finish, still feeling aggravated.
There was a long pause. Absalom felt a dragging despair as he anticipated another forty minute wait for a reply. Before he could stop himself he had spoken again, breaking the rules of Kellai etiquette. “The Wazoon are a race of unholy genetic manipulators,” he fumed. “They have no respect for the purity of form given them by God and seek to change it wherever they can. Do you know how this war began?” Again he didn’t wait for the question to be answered before continuing. “We sent an ambassador to greet them and to take the word of God with him. He was a man of peace and they subjected him to the most gruesome of horrors. He was returned to us disfigured, unrecognisable, mutated by their unholy sciences. He was part fish, with useless appendages, flopping about, whimpering and gibbering, bulbous eyes leaking mucus. We had to put our dear Brother out of his misery and commend his soul to God. That is why we are at war with those abominations and that is why we must destroy them all before their heresy can spread.” He felt flushed and wished like never before the Kellai had chairs so he could sit down.
The Kellai were completely silent - dark cyclopean shapes in the gloom. Suddenly the negotiator’s mouth-parts began to move rapidly against each other, clacking with a rising racket. He raised himself up as high as his eight legs would allow, beating the shell of his thorax with his claws, his eyes glaring down at the Arch-Servitor. After a pause, the other Kellai behind him did the same thing and the racket became terrifying.
Absalom found himself backing away, filled with terror. Were they going to rush forward and tear him to pieces? Kellai rended food apart when they ate, using casually the strength of a battle mech.
The Kellai did not rush forward, but the din rose and fell, slowing for a few seconds and then suddenly picking up again. An indicator was flashing on Absalom’s heads-up-display to indicate that the AI was unable to translate the sounds. No wonder, it sounded like the Kellai equivalent of bestial rage. Was the social taboo taken so deadly seriously?
After a while as the racket lessened, and the Kellai slowly lowered themselves back to their normal height, the negotiator began to make more normal sounding clicks.
“To flop about…gibber…leak mucus,” the negotiator was saying in broken sentences, split up by frenetic bouts of clacking.
Absalom was overcome with confusion.
“To be very funny,” said the negotiator. “To flop about…like a fish.” He clacked again furiously.
Absalom was dumbfounded. “It wasn’t a joke,” he announced. “The poor man rolled around the deck, trying to right himself with weak and rubbery arms, his mouth opening and closing like a damned trout, jabbering incoherently.”
The Kellai erupted into another bout of deafening clacking, rising up and down like pistons, claws thumping on shells. “To jabber…” one of them managed to say amongst the raucous and then descended into an even louder battery of sound.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Absalom shouted, forgetting any attempt at etiquette in his outrage.
“To like you, vertebrate,” the negotiator said when the clacking had died down again. “To know that vertebrates have no sense of humour, but to see that you are different.”
“I don’t understand,” said Absalom weakly.
The negotiator approached him, something only done in Kellai society with someone considered a friend. He placed a mandible on Absalom’s shoulder. “To understand why the vertebrates fight their war now. To let them build their battle station. To know the Wazoon’s joke was one worthy of vengeance.”
*