Request Denied

Captain Aubrey Smoot recalled all of a sudden that his hat was badly frayed. Self consciously, he slipped it from his head and smoothed his hair. The acolyte, standing to the side with head bowed, didn't seem to notice.

All of Captain Smoot's clothing was frayed, but the thin spots and shiny patches on his hard-worn uniform jacket and trousers were less noticeable than the tattered condition of his hat - at least, he hoped so. His boots were badly scuffed and the soles worn, but he'd taken the time to polish them as best he could that morning when he'd awakened early, feeling restless and anxious.

Captain Smoot was not an ambassador by training, but he had negotiated trade with the Thrass and survived encounters with the Jaddek. To the minds of those who sat in ever-dimming opulence on the Theox Council, that made him the best candidate for this audience with the Srolta.

It hadn't been easy to arrange. The Srolta had more or less given up on humanity, and Captain Smoot's home colony, Althus, was one of the very few outposts of civilized mankind left in the galaxy - in the universe, Smoot supposed, though lately hopeful rumors had started up about human colonies hidden in various corners of the cosmos, spirited away in ancient times or more recently escorted to safety by helpful superior races.

Such talk tried Smoot's patience. He filed it away with beliefs in the Nebula Gods that would - their adherents insisted - one day sweep the faithful off the face of their dying planet and escort them to a higher plane of existence, a place out beyond the reach of entropy.

Out of the reach of human nature would be more fitting if we're talking about paradise, Smoot thought to himself.

There was more, he reflected, to his having been selected to serve as the face and voice of Althus. It wasn't just his ability to engage with aliens; Smoot was also a well-regarded member of the Rationals. The party was never large and never in control of the Common Tributary, but much of the scientific progress Althus had enjoyed over the last two centuries was due to their industry and curiosity. The Rationals had long been sport for the much larger political party, the Nationals, not to mention a constant source of amusement for society at large. Snubbed and passed over socially and professionally, the Rationals were habitually locked out of the top economic strata even though it was they who provided the planet as a whole with new technological advancements in mining, medicine, manufacture - and, of course, space travel. Most of the people of Althus had forsaken space once they had been resettled on the planet by the Srolta. It was a rich and fertile world; why would they every want or need to go anyplace else?

That had been three and a half centuries ago. In that time the planet's forests disappeared; its rich loam had been exhausted; its oceans had been filled with rubbish and overfished to the point that the vast bodies of water were now devoid of animal life, with only bacteria and a few plant species flourishing there. The air itself was tainted. The common people had adapted as best they could for as long as they could, but prospects grew more narrow while the population swelled and the Theocrux - the class at the very top of the political, economic, and social food chain - had to have the first and best cut of everything, even when nothing much was left.

Now the common people were dying off like the rest of the planet. The groundwater had been poisoned by carcinogens and mutagens. By some estimates there was only one healthy child born out of every three hundred pregnancies... not that there were many pregnancies to begin with any more. Reproduction was an expensive business, metabolically as well as economically, and even the few people who had money to eat were, like everyone else, constantly battling fatigue and illness. Between famine, a constant barrage of pathogens, and spiking levels of hormone-mimicking pollutants, more and more people were becoming sterile.

The Rationalists had warned against this from the start, but their voices had been drowned out by everyone else: People who lived as though they were entitled to everything and anything, people who had little care or concern for a vague and unimagined future until suddenly they were living in it - and it occurred to them that the future was not a very pleasant place to be. Althus was rocked by political cross-currents, with many wanting to adopt the social and moral norms of earlier times, and many more wanting to solve their problems in a time honored way: By singling out different classes of people, declaring them unfit because of their morals or their eye color or their IQ levels or any of three dozen other factors, and then exterminating them wholesale and dividing up their possessions.

The world was on the verge of devouring itself. That was why Smoot was tasked with this assignment: To travel to a different world, to speak with the Srolta, to present a case for why the aliens should help the Althusians identify a new colony world and then gift them with the means to get there - in short, to beg and cajole a new future into existence.

It was a long shot, the Theocrux believed. The Srolta had long since adopted a policy of blanket refusal to such pleas. Over the last eighty years, thirty human colonies had either gone extinct or devolved into such barbaric chaos that extinction would have been a mercy. Only six functional colonies survived, and they were all fading fast.

It wasn't unusual for Rationals to serve in the space flight services. Space was regarded as dirty, unlovely, dangerous - not a place for anyone of refinements. And because Rationals were typically deprived of refinements, they tended to be naturally intelligent and resourceful - and charismatic, too, often times. There was an additional aspect to humanity that few had understood before the last few centuries, and that was their psych-signal. Some claimed it to be evidence of the soul; others asserted that it was a natural form of telepathy or empathy; no one knew how it worked, or what it was, exactly, but even though it was invisible and defied explanation it was demonstrably the case that human beings possessed something over and above body and mind, a kind of personal field that could interact with the personal fields of others.

Those fields carried information and exerted influence. Individuals with strong charisma levels could convince others to do what they wanted them to do, or give what they needed others to give.

Smoot was that rare individual who possessed the intelligence, the drive, and the charisma necessary to become a ship captain. The Theocrux were convinced it was the strength of his charisma -- more than his smarts or native skill at diplomacy -- that accounted for his having been able to communicate so successfully with non-human intelligences.

Smoot wasn't so sure of any of that, himself. He knew he had charisma - he'd used it to his advantage many times when dealing with other human beings - but he doubted aliens were susceptible to it. Smoot thought it was a matter of sheer good luck that he'd had several encounters with the Jaddek and come away unscathed... of course, the Jaddek weren't the sadistic killers that people on Althus thought them to be. True, the Jaddek had engaged the colonists a time or two on what seemed to be invasion attempts, and there had been some short-lived periods of space-borne aggression between the two species, but Smoot had developed a theory that this was simply the result of the Jaddek testing them, or else annihilating human ships and facilities if they happened to be in the Jaddeks' way. The Jaddek didn't hate human beings; they didn't want to conquer or destroy them; but neither did they value human life. The Jaddek might open fire on a ship or a convoy, but then again they might not. On the three occasions when Smoot's ship had crossed paths with Jaddek forces, they had paid him scant mind. Only once did Smoot's ship contact a Jaddek vessel, and the exchange had been brief and unremarkable. Of course, the report about the exchange was seen as some sort of act of exceptional courage on Smoot's part by the media, and a popular legend had grown up about the captain. He was one of the few Rationals who the Nationals took seriously, rather than dismissing him as an "egghead," a "space jockey," or a common worker.

Smoot saw the acolyte suddenly lift his head and grow attentive. The Srolta representative must be about to appear. Smoot wrung the worn fabric of his hat in trembling fists, a prickle of nervous sweat starting across his back. Well, talent or luck - or Gods of the Nebula - whatever it took, he hoped he had it working for him now.

***

The audience had been brief and brutal. The Srolta representative had fixed Captain Smoot with its black eyes and intoned a long list of humanity's crimes. Smoot hadn't had a chance to employ his carefully rehearsed speech, and obviously his charisma wasn't working on this alien.

Nothing the Srolta said had been false or unfair. It pointed out that in the eight centuries since their two species had made contact, the Srolta had expended enormous resources on humanity: First in trying to rehabilitate the Earth with their terraforming technology, and then evacuating half a billion humans from the face of the dying world to the initial six colonies. Once that transplantation had been completed, the Srolta had kept watch over humanity - the colonists as well a the struggling dregs left on Earth. When the last of the Earthbound humans had finally succumbed, the Srolta had set up an even more comprehensive program of terraforming to turn Earth into a clement planet once again, after more than two centuries of high-tech human abuse had derailed its climate, toxicified its atmosphere and oceans, and rendered large swaths of its continents too arid or too radioactive for habitation. It was a massive job, the Srolta let Smoot know, a task that would not be complete for centuries to come.

Then - the Srolta representative continued - the humans of the six colony worlds had lapsed back into their old ways, maiming their new homes with strip-mining, pollution, and reckless use of imperfect technologies that had left half a dozen previously virgin worlds scarred and tainted. Though the original colonists had managed on their own to spread to two additional planets, they were unable to tame their destructive impulses; waste, war, runaway consumerism, a culture of rampant pollution: All the same economic and social habits that destroyed humanity's home world rendered their new worlds almost incapable of sustaining life after only a few hundred years. So the Srolta had stepped in again and moved humanity to two dozen new worlds, parceling out their numbers among the planets so as to let the new colonies start with sustainable populations.

That made a total of thirty planets the Srolta had given humanity. The colonists then spread to six other worlds on their own, but even thirty-six worlds weren't enough for ravenous, ever-expanding hordes of homo sapiens. Now, after less than three centuries, those thirty-six worlds had been all but exhausted, and the perpetrators who had devastated them were once again unable to effect their own rescue and were facing a massive die-off. Other colonies had approached the Srolta for additional help, but they had been turned away. One by one, thirty human worlds had fallen into chaos and ruin, and while human life still clung in thin, desperate numbers to most of them, two of those once-verdant planets were now devoid of all human presence and almost all of their indigenous forms of life.

Humanity, the Srolta said, was the most appalling plague in known galactic history. Not even the Jaddek had caused such wanton, widespread destruction.

Captain Smoot's face had burned at that - burned with both shame and indignation. Yes, humanity had done all those things; yes, it was shameful, it was shocking, it was outrageous. But would the Srolta really let them die?

It seemed as though they would. Two lifeless worlds and twenty-eight others that were probably going to end up as soot-shrouded bone yards certainly gave that impression. Worse was the likelihood that before the final silence descended on the colony worlds, the struggling remnant of humanity would struggle through decades of ever-steeper suffering. Though the Srolta spoke Indila, the common human language, perfectly well, its voice had a deep and watery quality that sounded inhuman. If the Srolta felt any regret or guilt at letting Captain Smoot's species die out, that sentiment didn't come through. Its manner, too, was unsympathetic; the representative simply ticked through the long list of human misdeeds like it was reading a catalogue. Indeed, it was - a catalogue of unconscionable crimes against nature and against itself - but though the Srolta didn't sound angry, the very manner of its recitation seemed accusatory.

The Srolta representative had then ended the audience with two words: "Request denied." Then, without giving Captain Smoot a chance to make a rebuttal or a statement of his own, it had simply left the greeting chamber.

The human acolyte had guided Captain Smoot out of the room directly afterwards. The two of them walked to the suite of rooms that Smoot had stayed in the night before. Smoot's head was ringing with everything the Srolta had said to him in its gurgling alien voice; he hadn't gotten out more than two sentences of his own, so peremptory and unyielding was the representative's commentary.

Smoot moved through the suite numbly. He sat in the parlor on a handsome and very comfortable sofa, feeling faint and cold. The acolyte crossed the room and retrieved a bottle of something from a shelf; Smoot didn't quite see where the shelf was located, but he heard a clink of glass and the sound of something pouring - a sound that was too much like a miniature rendition of the Srolta's hateful, pitiless voice.

The acolyte pressed the glass into Smoot's hand. He took a sip and winced.

"What the hell is this?" he asked in Indila, then switched to Swangrant and repeated the question. Swangrant was the language of Althus, and it had cheered and bolstered Smoot unaccountably when it turned out to be the case that it was also the acolyte's native tongue. That meant the acolyte had to be from either Sympres or Thalia. If Sympres, he had Smoot's pity - that was one of the two worlds where human beings had gone extinct. If from Thalia, the acolyte had Smoot's pity and scorn in equal measure: Thalia was trembling on the brink of complete collapse, and what was the acolyte doing here when his home world was tumbling into disaster?

"Scotch," the acolyte said.

"What?" In his musings, Smoot had forgotten the question he'd asked.

"You're drinking scotch," the acolyte said.

"What's that?" Smoot put the glass on a long, low table situated in front of the sofa. The drink tasted like some sort of fuel.

"It's a form of liquor," the acolyte said. "It's distilled from grain and then flavored by aging in wooden barrels."

Smoot had never heard of such a thing.

"It's supposed to brace up those of fading spirit," the acolyte said.

"My spirit is not fading," Smoot replied, his voice sharp. "But my planet is dying. What kind of people are these Srolta?"

"As the representative said to you, they have helped us for centuries," the acolyte told him. "And we haven't been worth it. At first they thought it was a matter of needing to support us, teach us... surely if we had enough food and water and air, we'd recover our senses and begin to act rationally? Surely after a few generations of plenty, we would no longer hoard, or compete, or organize ourselves according to flimsy criteria of status, or seek wealth as means of securing social position? Surely our rational minds would overcome our hominid brains, and we'd rise above ourselves? That's what the Srolta themselves did; that's what they still do. It's part of their individual maturation. A Srolta isn't considered to be an adult until he's gone through all those essential phases of his personal evolution. The way a human embryo passes through all the earlier phases of human evolution... you see what I mean?... a Srolta individual evolves ethically, spiritually.

"But, of course, we aren't that evolved. We don't have it in us to transcend our self-destructive nature. We grow up into adults, we leave childish things behind... only to cling to the petty things that adults find themselves unable to let go of. Lust, greed, envy, resentment... rage. If the Srolta hadn't saved us, none of us living now would ever have existed. No one living over the last five or six or seven centuries would have existed. Our kind would long since have perished into extinction, the human race a dead end... but, no. The Srolta invested more faith in us than we deserved. They thought we had simply backed ourselves into a corner and needed their help to get out of it. They thought once they'd gotten us on our feet we would flourish - they've seen it happen with other races.

"But no, not homo sapiens, poor little hominid," the acolyte went on. "They thought the best of us, and we never overcame our worst nature. Our true and only nature. We're not," and the acolyte sighed heavily, "not a breakout species, I'm afraid."

"Except for those of us who broke out," Smoot said, glaring at the acolyte.

The other man looked at Smoot questioningly.

"You? Your wife, your children?" Smoot said hotly. "Safe here, serving your Srolta masters? You slaves, you lackeys - you collaborators!"

The acolyte smiled sadly and shook his head. "You don't understand. We're not their slaves. We do serve them, and we do act as go-betweens when need be... but they aren't our masters. Actually, we're penitents. We're doing this as an act of contrition - and apology."

Smoot kept glaring at him with a hot wrath. It was the Srolta representative he was angry with, but that grotesque toad wasn't here. The human acolyte would have to do.

But the acolyte wasn't finished speaking.

"Do you know how much the Srolta gave up for us? They had other projects of their own, they had important colonies they needed to establish. They took time and resources away from those projects to keep us from dying in our own industrial excrement. And what did we do? Well, first of all - before they even got us off the Earth - we attempted, many times, to perpetrate terrorist acts against them. When none of those attempts were successful, we went after the humans who were trying to help them - or, better said, help them help us. We tried to murder our own kind! For helping! The Srolta almost abandoned us then and there, they were so shocked at our behavior. But they also saw that some of us - some of us - had a potential for far-sightedness; for compassion; for ethics, in the sense that the Srolta understand the word. So for the sake of those good humans, for the sake of a future in which we might one day evolve into our better selves, the Srolta kept on trying to save us from our own worse inclinations.

"Then, once it was plain Earth wasn't going to recover - because we were poisoning Earth as quickly as they could clean it up -- they took us into space and gave us whole new planets to settle... whole new planets! And what did we do? We declared those planets off limits to Srolta visitors, and we taught the generations that were born and grew up there that the Srolta were demons trying to subjugate us, indenture us, steal our souls... We defamed them, and we rejected their counsel and aid until we had destroyed those planets the very same way we destroyed the Earth. Oh, but then - then we were all too happy to accept the Srolta's generosity, when they gave us two dozen more planets. We had absolutely no idea how expensive that was, what it took from their economy and their civilization and their own future to make a gift of those worlds to us... and we didn't respect that gift any more than we respected anything else they had done for us... or our own original home world, for that matter."

The acolyte fell into angry silence. Smoot stepped into the lull, his own fury unabated.

"Five billion people," Smoot said. "Five billion! That's how many are on my home world crying out for hope, pleading for help - and it would be so easy for the Srolta. They have so much, their technology is so advanced - "

The acolyte frowned. "Just because we don't see how hard it is for them doesn't mean it's easy. And when do you stop wasting good grain on bad livestock?"

"What?" Smoot asked, alarmed and confused. "We're livestock to them?" Even now, on Althus and other colony worlds, there were pockets of people who claimed that the Srolta were planning horrible things. Experiments. Torture. Contests to the death. Butchery and bloody feasting... Smoot recoiled.

The acolyte saw what he was thinking and made a gesture to indicate this was not what he'd intended to convey. "I'm sorry, it's a saying from back home. I come from an agricultural region... it was an agricultural region until agriculture became impossible. The saying means... what I meant to say was, at some point the Srolta were going to have to recognize that if we are ever to evolve to a point of rationality and racial responsibility equal to the task of long-term technological survival on our own, it won't be in a couple of centuries. It will take thousands - more likely, hundreds of thousands - of years. Are they supposed to stop everything and give us constant hand-holding until then? And even if they did, would we advance and develop while held in their all-nurturing embrace?"

The man's vernacular expressions were ridiculous, but Smoot got the gist. "I understand," he said, "but - but - "

"But you are a good man, and what about you and those like you?" the acolyte said. "Right?"

That had not been what Smoot was about to say, but it was a point he considered valid.

"I'm sure you represent some faction that argues from reason and evidence, and claims to root its philosophies and actions in facts, rather than assumptions... a much-mocked minority that deals in reality instead of delusions," the acolyte said. "Yes?"

Smoot's eyes flickered to the floor, and his mouth tightened involuntarily.

"So was I," the acolyte said. "My people were called the Reasoners. We were placed under heavy legal burdens, not allowed to marry, forced to pay a poll tax even though it was hard for us to find decent work. Children labeled as Reasoners were banned from the Christic schools, which meant that university education was closed to them. Those children were often expelled from their homes. They banded together in desperate enclaves, or else were rescued by charities. I say they - but I was one of them myself. I was luckier than most. I was taken in as the house servant of a family influential and wealthy enough to do what they wanted. Like others in my situation, I paid for their protection with my body."

Smoot winced.

"But still we clung to reason, still we argued against polluting and destroying the world," the acolyte went on. "No one listened. Then the weather was too hot and dry for our crops, and the oceans became more acidic, and sickness spread along with hunger, and strongmen took advantage of the situation to seize control - until their henchmen grew weak, and other strongmen took over - and the planet seemed washed in blood. A small group of us came here in secret to seek help from the Srolta."

"And they said no," Smoot interrupted. "And you stayed here with them because you didn't want to leave the good life."

"No," the acolyte said. "We stayed here because our purloined ship, stolen in haste and with little preparation, didn't have the fuel to make a return journey. And even if we had, our ship was in such disrepair we almost certainly would never have made it. We would have tried, though, except other acolytes were here already. They put it to us: What good would it do for us to go back... or rather, die trying to go back... to people who would probably kill us even if we managed to survive the trip? They suggested we join them in penance."

Captain Smoot rose in a fury, grabbed the acolyte by the front of his shirt, and shoved him backwards across the room until he thudded into a wall. "And you sold your souls to those devils?" he roared into the man's face. "While your own people died?"

The acolyte responded with a fighter's move. Smoot, startled - he had not imagined the acolyte could have had combat training - nearly lost his balance, and stumbled back. The acolyte regarded him with cool contempt. Then he spoke.

"They weren't people any more," the acolyte said. "Just like on the other planets that failed, they... they became brutes. Animals, savages, worse than animals. Beasts." His eyes grew tight, brimmed up, and spilled over. His face filled with anguish. "And no, there was nothing to go back to, nothing but that."

His rage subsiding, Smoot turned away and, with sudden weariness, shuffled back to the couch. The gravity on this planet was higher than that of Althus. Fatigue gnawed at his joints. He slumped on to the sofa and almost reached for the neglected glass of scotch.

Almost.

Surrendering to gravity, Smoot felt the air pressed from his body, and his frame dragged deeper into the settling sofa cushions. Still, his anger burned a bright thread through him. After a moment he sat up again and looked hard at the acolyte, who stood unmoving across the room, composed now - almost seeming to have entered a state of meditative calm.

That calm infuriated Smooth all over again. "And here you are, eating and breathing and having children who will thrive while those you left behind perish," he accused.

Now the acolyte was moving. Coming at him for revenge? Smoot watched warily as the other man crossed the room to that unobtrusive recess with the shelf and the bottle of scotch. The acolyte was reaching for another glass, then holding the glass beneath an automatic tap. Fresh water flowed into the glass. The acolyte drank, and spent a long minute in silence. "No," he said at last, turning to Smoot. "Don't you see? Don't you know? We have no children here. We have all been voluntarily sterilized."

Smoot stared at him, shocked.

"That was the Srolta's only requirement. They don't want or need us to serve them, but they let us do it. They see our penance as a form of psychologically useful work, something for us to do. They don't really understand the ideas of sin and redemption - they look at us not as evil, but as creatures who simply cannot do other than what we do. By their standards, our inability to choose rationally and live by such choices makes us less than cognizant. They don't see us as self-aware. They accept us, but they have no further interest in helping us. It's distressing for them to see us create such pain and hardship - and death - for ourselves."

"So you, you..."

"We serve them out of shame. Until we die. And we leave no children behind. Yes, we are willingly going extinct to pay for the crimes of our species. And because they see us making this sacrifice, the Srolta forbear to put our colony worlds out of their misery."

"You mean they would destroy us?"

"Not themselves. The Jaddek would do it for sport. Even the Jaddek look at us as useless, as parasitic - a failed species, offering nothing to the cosmos, an impediment to the order of things. The Srolta warned the Jaddek not to touch any of our colonies."

Sooth thought back to his encounters with the Jaddek. Maybe it had not been luck that allowed his ship to survive those experiences unscathed, much less his cool-headed and diplomatic intelligence. Suddenly his mission - his career - his entire life - everything looked much different. His rage flickered, then quickly cooled in to weariness and resignation.

The two men watched each other for a good long while.

Then the acolyte spoke again: "Will you join us? It's the last way you can be of service to your home world. And maybe, if perhaps enough smart and rational people manage to survive... if they can survive a few centuries, begin to rebuild their world... who knows? Maybe the Srolta will extend the hand of friendship to them after all, if they see that we can choose to evolve. If we prove to them through our service, through our proximity to them that it's possible, that there's a glimmer of hope for our kind. I don't know if we are capable of it... but maybe, maybe we are. In any case, it's all we can think to do. One last fading chance - but we have to take it, do we not? So... will you?

"Maybe..." Smoot looked down at the floor. The tap ran once more, and a moment later the acolyte was standing next to the sofa, a fresh glass in his hand - water this time.

Smoot accepted the glass, took a sip, remembered how pure the water was here. Filtered, aerated, supplied with minerals - all no doubt for the comfort of the human penitents.

It hurt the Srolta to see them suffering.

So they cared after all?

The Jaddek, merciless vandals that they were, would have slaughtered the last human beings on the last colony worlds and hardly given another thought to their beleaguered species. But the Srolta held the Jaddek at bay. They refrained from ending humanity's long slide into oblivion, an action that would have been both justified and merciful.

And why would the Srolta withhold such brutal mercy? To punish them? Smoot doubted it.

The Srolta allowed human penitents to offer service even though the Srolta had no real need of it?

Smoot sipped his water slowly, but his mind raced like ball lightning during the autumnal storm season back on Althus.

Could this have been one final test of humanity's fitness to survive? A hard test, if so - considering the Srolta required their human helpers to submit to sterilization. Were the Srolta testing the best humanity had to offer, testing them to destruction? Did they see self-sacrifice as a racially redeeming virtue? Humans might. But the Srolta were not humans, didn't think like humans...

Still, there had to be some sort of logic to their actions, there had to be a form of logic that transcended race, a kind of rationality that pervaded and emanated from the very fabric of the mathematical, self-consistent universe...

A rationality that evaded most of the human species, but united those disparate exceptions who clung to reason in the face of savage abuse and injustice meted out not by aliens, but by their own kind. A rationality that bound those exceptional humans to... to the Srolta themselves, beings who had evolved to the point of possessing a less provisional and more deeply-rooted, consistent form of intelligence.

Smoot looked up at the acolyte, who was standing by patiently. "Maybe," he murmured. "Maybe."

In that single word, Smoot suddenly understood, hung all possible futures.