When I was a little girl, my sister Marie and I used to play with ants. Our favorites were the big black ones that lived in a dead tree near our home, their nest deep far inside the wood. Little did I know then that I would someday meet with alien beings much like the ants we played with so innocently back then as children do. My childish cruelty to them causing me considerable discomfort six centuries when my most secret memories of such events were revealed to the ant-like Lorr by their mind-scanner.
The Lorr are not really "ants" in the sense that we think of them, the aliens from another star system now nearly a hundred light years away having originally come from a planet rather like Mars, I understand from what I have been told. They are however, quite completely "alien" in the full sense of the word, their mental and physical characteristics alien to anything we of Earth are familiar with. They are in a way perhaps a more successful life-form than Man, but this is a matter open to debate. The thought processes of the Lorr are not like those of Men. We share little with them. They are perhaps a better and nobler race than Man. Our evolutionary paths have been completely different. We are an aggressive species. They are not. Had their sun not started to turn into a red giant over fifty thousand years ago, it is doubtful that they would have ever developed the capability to travel between the stars. Man on the other hand would have probably done so in another century or so had The War not put a sudden complete halt to his technological development.
The great Lorr battle-disc came a day after Sharon and I arrived in Sarn. The silvery terrifying craft floating with its soft hum of almost infinite power over the Imperial Palace, its shadow bigger than that of a football field. We obeyed its orders. You do not argue with something like that. The Lorr commander had her orders directly from the antennae of She who is First among the Lorr. I was to be taken to Mars for interrogation by Raspa herself! I kissed Darlanis and Sharon good bye. I did not know if I would ever see either one of them again. The black horror now standing there on its six legs at my side was like something out of a nightmare. It was impatient, seemingly annoyed with me for delaying it when it had been ordered by Raspa herself to bring me to her. The great horrible mandibles angrily opening and closing as it waited there in the Imperial Palace for me, those who served their ruler shrinking away in terror at the sight of it. I felt it best then not to annoy it any further by delay. I saw the moisture in Darlanis' eyes. Would I ever see her or Sharon again? Those who the Lorr took sometimes never came back. I feared that such a fate awaited me there on Mars!
The First Princess inclined her antennae towards me as I sat there helplessly strapped in the "interrogation chair", her great black compound eyes like multi-faceted jewels in the dimly lit cavern a mile beneath the surface of Mars as the two others of her kind on either side of her silently regarded me. I knew she did not see as I did. The Lorr evolved under a different type of sun than did Man. Their visual sense is nothing like that of humans. The Lorr see far into the infrared. They speak by means of radio waves instead of sound, and use radar to find their way in the darkness of their caverns. Their lungs are adapted to an atmospheric pressure of one tenth that of the Earth. They can breathe the thin surface atmosphere of 26th Century Mars and live and thrive upon its surface where all humans require oxygen masks, even their "Servitors", who are adapted to a pure oxygen atmosphere at a pressure of one tenth Earth normal. Such an atmosphere being maintained inside the Lorr caverns for their human "Servitors", all female, men being considered too violent and untrustworthy. The Lorr using their same cloning techniques on their human servants as they use upon themselves, the males of their race having been extinct for nearly fifty thousand years! I feared what these creatures might "do" to me if they thought I might perhaps be a "danger" to them because of my own knowledge, a fear that I felt "justified" knowing what I did about them now! And the "visions" that they drew from my mind were certainly no help as everyone "saw" just what "sort" of a creature that I was!
After a flight of about a week we had landed inside Mars, a bit of disappointment here as I thought the Lorr could do better, although the best spaceships Earth ever built would have taken over a month and exhausted all their reaction mass for their impulse fusion drives in making the trip. During the trip I had been kept in a state of suspended animation, my every memory recorded by means of their "mind-scanner" and then transmitted ahead of the battle-disc by a coherent radio beam to the TRIAD, the Lorr ruling council of three Princesses of which Raspa is the head, holding the position of the First Princess among the Lorr.
This was now my third day on Mars, the first two having been nothing but biological tests and then an interesting type of "brain-washing" where they showed me their own history and then my own race's history in comparison. Needless to say the Lorr were depicted as being noble, wonderful brave intelligent beings whereas human beings were shown as being warlike, aggressive, and unable to accept life in a universe where they had to share their solar system with another race. When you got done seeing all this you felt like something that had crawled out from underneath some flat rock that very richly now deserved being "stepped on"!
What was far worst was the way their mind-scanner revealed my own memories, especially the time when I had as a child used a magnifying glass to concentrate the burning rays of the sun upon helpless black ants, horribly burning several of them to death, my memories of this event being displayed on holographic displays all over the planet so that everyone could see just what sort of a despicable creature that I truly was! This having a profound effect upon the Lorr, who are in appearance almost identical to the ants I had so horribly burned to death as a child! Especially since to the Lorr this brought back their own racial histories of how millions of their own kind died a similar fate when their own sun swelled up into a red giant and burned them all to death! Only a few million of the billion inhabitants of their world being able to flee aboard the three starships they had managed to construct before the terrible heat put an end to everything!*
* It is of course interesting to "ponder" what happened to the third Lorr starship which was sent towards another G-type star.
They had of course shown me their "Exodus", which is to them almost a sacred event in their history, and I realized then for the first time that they were not really that unlike us humans! I saw their bravery, their courage as they fought against time to construct a means where a small portion of their race might live!
Hollowing out small asteroids and installing inside them a form of anti-gravity space drive far in advance of anything Man ever built. One such starship now circling the Earth, the other having been destroyed in a futile attempt to stop the gigantic comet that nearly destroyed them in 2047. The Lorr showing me the half a dozen Earth spaceships that had accompanied it there on their computer generated display, the ships all loaded with H-bombs to finish off any surviving Lorr after the giant comet hit Mars!
"You are a true example of your race, Lorraine," Raspa said to me, her radio voice coming to me by means of the hearing aid type device that is used to convert Lorr radio speech into sound. The Lorr gathered there in the great cavern by the thousands like black frozen rocks standing on their stick-like legs. The utter silence of the numbers uncanny. There were among them a number of women, clad in the various colored jumpsuits which seem to be the uniform of those who serve the Lorr. Among them the one called "An'na", whom I suspected to be the daughter of Darlanis!
"What I did I did as a child, without knowing the evil of my deeds," I answered. Who thinks of the pain an insect might suffer? I remembered once spraying a number of ants with RAID back a few years ago when they had infested our patio. I had watched them die, squirming and twisting in agony. The Lorr had watched "that" part of my memories too. Displayed there before them on a great glowing screen in full color, as my own eyes had seen it!
"You are a barbarian, of a race of barbarians," Raspa said. "There is little that can be said in favor of your kind." I supposed that it was true. "Your people without provocation once attempted to exterminate our entire race," she added, those awful eyes seeming to glow directly into mine. "Were we not a civilized people we would have long ago turned your world into a radioactive cinder as lifeless as your Moon." I had little doubt that they had the capability to do it whenever they wished too!
"We are in a way your children. You created us," I pointed out. The Lorr were responsible for Man's rise to civilization, to his leaving the caves and building cities. To the lifting of his eyes from the dirt beneath his feet to the stars above him. In a way the Lorr were "God". They were our "Creator". They had "made" us what we were. Over the centuries they had attempted to guide us, using their technology to "civilize" us. They are perhaps even responsible for some of the religions that Men once believed, although Raspa assures me that Christianity isn't theirs.
"We could have given you much," Raspa said, "But your people could only see what they wished to see, and they looked upon us as `INSECTS' to be exterminated, nothing else." I suspected from what Darlanis had told me that there was also another reason why the World Federation of 2046 had decided to exterminate the Lorr. It having become known on the Earth that the Lorr used human women as servants to perform the tasks their claws could not easily do. While the women who serve the Lorr are not mistreated, there is an issue of "slavery" here that has not ever been addressed.*
* Most "Servitors" are content with their lives, but some do feel the lack of "freedom" that we of Earth often take for "granted". Mars also reminds me in some aspects of a gigantic "nunnery". I also have my "suspicions" about Aurora, who once admitted to me that she was once the "mistress" of Darlanis' own father in 2521. This plus certain other "evidence" I have makes me suspect that it is "possible" that Aurora is actually Darlanis' own mother...
"But Mankind saw you as a species that enslaves other intelligent species, and thus felt it proper to destroy you before you perhaps took over the Earth too and used its people for your own selfish purposes," I answered her back, recalling what Darlanis had told me from her own studies of what had been written just before the Lorr bombing from space put an end to everything.....
"You practice slavery on your own world," Raspa answered. "We do not abuse our `Servitors' as you abuse your slave girls."
Trying to argue with Raspa was like arguing with an ultra-powerful computer. The Lorr having the capability in their caverns of taping into their own central data banks for anything they require by just sending out a signal from their antennae to a nearby receiver. The Lorr Princesses on either side of her regarding me with that motionless stare that only the Lorr possess, those great compound eyes seeming to burn into my consciousness. The slight movement of their long whip-like antennae the only evidence I could see that they were even alive there beside Raspa!
"Have those who serve you ever been given the `choice' of where they would like to live?" I challenged her back, well aware that I was far out of my "intellectual depth" in arguing with a creature whose I.Q. was approximately "300" in human terms! Even Janet Rogers, who was the smartest person I've ever met, only was about 190 or so. The Lorr of course, by their control of genetics, are able to do things far beyond our own capabilities. They are, I should mention here, quite superior to us in intelligence.
"Few of them wish to live in a social order as crude and barbaric as your own," Raspa answered. I knew that there were small communities on the surface of Mars, a number of the "Servitors" having opted to live there on the surface despite the discomforts and dangers of living on a world where one had to always concern themselves with whether or not there was oxygen to breathe. While the surface pressure is only a little less than that of the caverns, the oxygen content of the atmosphere is only a portion of that inside the caverns, which requires the use of an oxygen mask for any human venturing on the surface. The Lorr, with their compound lungs, are able to function on the surface of Mars, although they find the oxygen content of the present atmosphere even a bit too low for their liking and often carry oxygen with them when they move about on the surface. There is some water on the surface, not much, but some, most of it coming from the shattered comet that crashed into Mars in the middle of the 21st Century. Enough water anyway that the Lorr are now "terraforming" Mars and colonizing it with "Servitors" who reproduce by means of cloning techniques far beyond anything known to 21st Century Man. These are the lovely "Martians", and someday Mars will be a new world where Woman and Lorr will live together not as master and servant, but perhaps as "equals" beneath the skies.
"Are you aware that your An'na may be Queen Darlanis' daughter?" I suddenly challenged Raspa, curious to see what her reply would be. An'na standing there close to another Servitor, an older woman, blonde haired, little different than a woman of Earth. Many such women of Mars being "blonde", the Lorr preferring such.
"That is known to me, but it is An'na's decision whether or not she wishes to stay with us or be returned to that barbarian," Raspa answered. The young woman under discussion now putting her arms about the older woman, whose name I understood was Aurora. An'na's eyes so much just like Darlanis' now "burning" into mine. "Here she can live as a civilized creature, not some sword-swinging barbarian as her own mother has now become there on Earth." Then after perhaps a long "minute" of soundless discussion among the three horrors before me Raspa announced that it was the decision of the TRIAD that while I needed "watching", I was not at this time at least a "danger" to their "domination" of the Earth. I breathed a sigh of relief then, as I had feared that they would just "reprogram" my mind and make me into another "Servitor"...
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