The Travellers

摘要

I first met the Farquah as a twenty-three year old college graduate, when the last thing I wanted was to learn another language, meet another species, come to terms with another world. I was feeling, more than anything else, displaced. I slid the shutter of my cabin up, stared glumly at the indigo sky, too tired to wish it any other colour, too tired to hate it or feel the thrill of novelty I'd felt on Earth, and slammed the shutter again. I was born a mulatto on New Tokyo, when we were still under Earth rule. My mother was a local, and people said quietly that my father was a fool to marry her - much less reproduce with her - but fool or not, he was also the Team Statistician, so nobody dared question his judgement face to face. I wasn't still born, although I had no twin, which every New Tokyan does. I was deformed, because I carried traits of both lineages - my father's slanted eyes, black hair, and yellowish skin, and my mother's flexible rubbery limbs, and elongated stature. By the time I arrived in college, some light-years later, the word had changed its meaning, just as my father said it would: by then it meant a species unable to survive. Fook knows what it meant now, as I lay in my cabin. But even that was an anachronism: no-one but a handful of fundamentalists believe in Fook, anymore. The whole religion was a linguistic mistake, I'm told, because the first colonists used to say "Fuck knows," and the New Tokyo locals added omniscience to the properties of their god-complex. Not that I was ever that devout. My mother believed, but my father forewarned me to keep an open mind.