The interview
In the aftermath of the terrible Commonweath-Ylesh war, Commonwealth scouts found Earth. As is their habit, the local sapients (humans, of course) are selected, kidnapped and studied. Most are returned to their homes, some are not. Species are the closest equivalents, such as "crab" for the vaguely crablike Xsir.
The Interview
By Strega
Alan woke in stages. His first dim realization was that the bed felt odd, foreign. The surface he lay on was fuzzy, and rather than sheets he found himself covered with thick, light coverlets with the texture of fur. Eventually, gaining awareness, he stretched out and found the bed too short for his frame. His feet hit at one end and his head the other.
When he opened his eyes he had to blink a few times before he understood what he saw. Rather than a proper bed, he lay in a rounded enclosure about five feet across. A curved top capped the bed, with an oval window on one side and a wide opening on the other. Through both, stars were visible.
Alan lay for a few moments and thought. The last thing he remembered was approaching the clinic. His backpack, heavy with the improvised bomb, dug its straps deep into his shoulders. It'd been a little after midnight. Then...what had happened then? Where was he now?
He sat up, banging his head on the padded bed cover, and discovered he was naked. The floor about three feet below the edge of the bed-opening, and hearing no activity he slid out, wrapping a furry coverlet around his hips.
And dropped it. He was on a platform perhaps fifty feet wide, and all around were stars. Bright, unblinking stars in their thousands. That was bad enough, but to one side was a hair-thin crescent of blue.
He was in orbit. The blue crescent, perhaps twenty times as wide as the moon normally looked, showed on its dark side constellations of city lights. And there off to one side, a minute gray crescent, the moon itself.
Vertigo beckoned, and Alan staggered back against the bed. A shape beneath his hand suggested a handle, and he turned to examine it. Thankfully this took his eyes off the bottomless precipice his little platform seemed poised over.
His bed had the basic shape of a thick-stemmed mushroom. At the top it bulged out into the bed, with its dish-shaped sleeping space and rounded, padded top. In effect he had slept in the hollow cap of the mushroom.
Just below this was an open shelf, empty, and below that were three drawers with their faces curved to follow the front of the mushroom-stem. He opened the top one and was pleased to find his clothes, minus his pack. Even his cell phone was there, still clipped to his belt. It was charged, but showed no signal bars.
The other drawers were empty, but being clothed again restored enough confidence that he began to explore the platform. He could not bring himself to approach the edges, which lacked even handrails.
Scattered around the platform were other items of furniture. Two open, padded dishes resembled larger versions of his bed, albeit lacking the dresser-stem. Another bed identical to his own save color - it was light blue, his was light green - sat directly across from his. Several small tables, none higher than his knee, were scattered about the platform. Close by his mushroom-bed was a hammock supported by a metal frame. Like his bed and the dishes, its material was plush rather than smooth.
In addition to the furniture there were several very large, padded pillows. One was far enough from the edge to examine, and he decided it, or the hammock, would be his next bed. Failing that, at least the large dishes would let him stretch out.
Finally his attention was drawn to a blue-gray outbuilding at the far end of the platform. Two openings on this side, one twice as wide as the other, beckoned.
Alan realized he was shivering, not from the cool air, against which his clothing was adequate, but because of his alien surroundings. There, he had thought it - no human hand had built this platform. It was not some trick; his view of the stars as he explored changed so little as to prove their utter remoteness. It was not a matter of lights placed on a black background to fool him. He was truly in space, protected from vacuum by some invisible agency. At least the constellations were familiar.
The outbuilding blocked a portion of the star field, and it provided a comforting sense of normalcy as he approached. The two openings were obvious in their function: the narrow one had at its back a glossy floor-fixture that must be a toilet. This was sunk into the floor, and a seamless splash board extended three feet up the wall behind it. No toilet paper was to be found, but by squatting and bracing himself at need against the wall he could use it. Alan shrugged and undid his fly. He needed to piss anyway.
Not a drop of urine clung to the slope of the floor-toilet or splash plate. Not even a sheen of wetness remained. He filed that away for future reference and moved to the larger opening. This proved to be a shower, the only unusual element of which were the several shower-heads at different heights. Well, that and the controls, which were unlabeled but obvious blue and red colored tiles. No towels, either. Alan collected water in his hands and poured it into the toilet. Once again it disappeared down what must be a nearly frictionless drain. Yet when he touched the splash plate, there was friction. A strange, smart -- was that the word? -- material.
Past the end of the outbuilding he could see a ledge. Though the way between it and the starry abyss was only two yards wide, the presence of the building gave him the confidence to edge out and examine it.
A shelf ran at waist height along the back wall of the outbuilding. At one end was a sink, controlled by the same colored tiles. Next to that was a stack of bowls, and past that a plate of hand pies -- amusingly like Hostess's, but without the bright wrappers -- and a bowl full of fruit.
Suddenly realizing he was hungry, he picked out a banana and began to peel it. Only when it was half eaten did he consider it might be drugged. Come to think of it, his muzzy recovery from sleep might mean he'd been drugged before.
Alan shrugged. Whoever left him here surely had ways to abuse him if they so chose. He moved back in front of the "outhouse" to get away from the edge, and munched the banana.
The crescent of blue was noticeably wider now, the dark portion of the globe smaller. He could make out what looked like the western sections of Europe -- Spain was covered by clouds, but he was sure that other half-overcast shape was Italy. Without thinking he flung the banana peel off the edge of the platform.
It bounced back and hit him in the calf. Blinking, he picked it up and tried again. A foot past the edge of the platform it reversed direction and bounced back again.
Two more repetitions of this at different spots along the edge of the platform hinted that the invisible barrier enclosed the entire platform. Even dropping the peel just off the edge brought it right back on to the platform. Eventually he worked up the nerve to approach the edge. He reached out and felt a rubbery resistance that increased as he pushed harder.
Throwing the peel into the toilet saw it slip smoothly down the drain. Alan made a mental note not to step into the toilet.
Just then something flicked into view at the far end of the platform. One moment the pillow-bed was empty, the next an animal was sitting in it. Or was it an animal? The size of a large dog, it possessed a wedge-shaped head and a long bushy tail. Overall it was reddish brown with streaks and spots of yellow-white. Alan noted the green, scaly bands on its forelegs and the leathery-looking harness it wore, hung with pouches and oddly shaped...tools? Weapons? Jeweled earrings glittered in both cup-shaped ears, and its forepaws were suspiciously hand-like. Perhaps it was shock, or the repeated input of surprises, but he wasn't particularly startled when it spoke.
"Good morning," it said in a clear, if purring contralto voice. "You can call me Laura." It - she? - turned to look at the crescent Earth. "I love the view from here, but I apologize for the lack of proper accommodations. This platform is not usually visited by your species."
Alan shook his head. By all rights he should be curled up moaning, or throwing himself fruitlessly into space, but an eerie calm gripped him.
"Why am I here?"
"We are studying you. We have taken up various flavors of humanity to question, to understand. This month we are studying extremism. It is not unknown among our peoples, but it is not as often driven by spiritualism as among your kind."
The alien paused, looking him over. Her eyes were green, catlike, slit pupiled. She was a bit bigger than he first thought, but even with the ferret-like tail added in he figured he had at least twenty pounds on her. The pointed teeth that showed when she spoke and the equally sharp claws on her feet made it seem a bad idea to try to overpower her, though. She continued. "Your bomb was interesting, clearly a makeshift, yet it performed well."
"It went off at the clinic, then?" Long though he had planned the bombing, Alan was still unsure whether he was happy or sad.
"No," she said, her head tilted to the side liked an inquisitive cat's. "It came with you, and we detonated it in a test chamber. Are you sorry that it did not?"
"It was a message," Alan said. "The clinic is a place of murder."
"That is not for me to say," Laura purred. She was a handsome animal, he thought. Sleek and clearly strong beneath the soft fur. "Opinions on that subject differ among my people, too."
"The point remains," said a much deeper, yet hissing voice, "That he was willing to kill noncombatants to make his point."
Another creature had flicked in, this time into one of the large dish beds. It was of such size that it lay curled up to fit; Alan took a step away from the at least tiger-sized beast. This one was dark green, long-furred, larger of body but shorter of tail than the other...and this one had six legs, each bearing four long white claws. Smaller toes on each side of the claws might be opposable. Ink-dark feral eyes looked him over, whiskers flicked, and many terribly sharp teeth showed below the pink nose pad. The teeth were responsible for the lisp, which would be humorous coming out of a less menacing creature.
"Alan, meet Shrilka," Laura purred. "She is another of our evaluators."
Somehow he did not find himself intimidated. "Those doctors were killing babies. The nurses were helping. Women coming to the clinic to have their babies killed--"
"Have earned death?", the huge predator growled. "Perhaps. If you see it as a war, then even civilians may become valid prey."
Alan opened his mouth to respond, but Laura spoke first. "The bomb had a timer, Alan. Other people with feelings as intense as yours do not bother with those, do they?"
"I meant to survive, yes," Alan said. "And maybe continue my mission elsewhere."
Laura cocked her head at Shrilka. "Suicide missions are hardly unknown in desperate circumstances. Our missions of that nature killed many billion civilians during the great war. Is it less forgivable when the killer believe enough to kill, but not enough to die?"
Alan's mouth went dry. It took two tries to get the words out. "Billions?"
"Yes," came a third voice, dry and rasping. This time the creature appeared on the bare floor. It resembled a long-legged crab, its body about the size of a cat's. Inlays of dark and bright metal were set into its bluish carapace, and two smaller versions of itself clung to its back. When it spoke again he realized it was actually all three of them speaking in concert, rubbing their legs together to produce the words.
"The suicide strikes destroyed just under two hundred star systems. Post-action analysis indicated some six hundred thirty billion sapients dead. These were core worlds, heavily populated and industrialized. Valid targets in such circumstances. Another twenty to twenty-five billion died in other systems as the radiation wave fronts from the induced supernovae expanded. Resources were not available to evacuate the neutral worlds." It gestured with two of its smaller legs. "This is regrettable."
"Regrettable," Alan said through a mouth without saliva.
"It was war," growled Shrilka. "You do not know the nature of the great enemy. It was, quite literally, us or them."
"We are only now exploring the full extent of the enemy's former empire," Laura purred. "Your solar system is in their fringe territories. Had they turned their eyes this way before they were annihilated, we would not be having this conversation. Your species would most likely be extinct."
"Possibly there would be survivors. Slaves, workers, future food," said the crab.
Alan didn't remember sitting down. "Food," he mumbled.
"Vak is right," Laura said. "They could be conservative. This large a population center in a lightly inhabited sector might be kept as a slave source or future treat." She flicked her tail. "But, we are disturbing our guest."
"Let him be disturbed," the six-legged thing hissed. "It is rare and disquieting for a sapient species to feed on another. The chemistry is usually incompatible." Alan noticed that the thing's teeth were not only pointed, but actually serrated. "But the Enemy was not concerned with such things."
" 'It is good that war is terrible'," Laura purred. " 'Lest we grow too fond of it'."
"We stray from the point," the crab -- Vak -- rasped. "Alan, you were willing to kill to enforce your beliefs. This concept is not foreign to us."
"This is too much," Alan said. He felt queasy.
"However, your willingness to attack a public meeting place in support of those beliefs is something I cannot support," the crab continued. It bobbed an eye stalk at Laura, who disappeared without a sound. Another eye pointed at Shrilka, but it was the crab who vanished. That left Alan and Shrilka, with the six-legged beast now rising to her feet.
"It is very unusual for the chemistry of alien sophonts to be sufficiently similar for one to safely eat the other," she said, and darted forward. Alan jumped over a table, but the six legged weasel-thing flowed up and over it without slowing. The short-legged creature was faster than he thought and there was nowhere to run.
"But not unheard-of," she hissed as her forepaws pulled him down. The long white claws were not very sharp, but the curved ones that unsheathed from the short toes were, and her teeth even sharper.