“Yes, well. You can find beauty, but you choose to create it instead?”
“Some of my kin do so, yes.”
“Imagine, for a moment, what it is like to be my kin.”
“Rennick—”
Scoros, however, stood. The two men faced each other across the length of the table. Severn kicked Kaylin under the same table, motioning for silence.
“He doesn’t understand what they’ve suffered,” she hissed.
“Then allow Scoros to make that clear, if that is their wish.”
Scoros’s antennae were weaving frantically in the air, and Ybelline’s were doing a similar dance. But watching the two, Kaylin could see the differences in their gestures, these antennae that had seemed so much like a threat. Ybelline’s movements were graceful and exact, as if each rise and fall of stalk was perfectly timed and deliberate. Scoros’s looked like whips.
Two conversations. Two arguments.
Scoros turned to Rennick. “I spend little time imagining anything else,” he told the playwright. Ice was gone; fire was present. He was angry. “My job—my duty—is to prepare our young for life in your world. And it is a life that they are not suited to live. They do not lie, they do not fear, they do not hoard. Nor do they steal or kill.
“Imagine what it is like to be you? What is it, exactly, that you do that allows you to come here and speak thus to us? You create these—these lies—and you spread them. And you are proud of this. Do you think we want to serve—”
“Scoros.” If Kaylin had ever wondered whether or not Ybelline’s kindness was based in strength, she had her answer. There was steel there.
“What do you value?” Scoros snapped, retreating from the previous sentence as if it were death. “Gold. Precious gems. Fine cloth—things. How do you reassure yourself of your own worth? By soliciting the admiration of people who value only that much. You spoke of love, in your travesty of—of—disinformation. What do you know about love? Your love is little better than base greed and insecurity! You want the regard of your peers, but you allow none to be peers. You want impossible, stupid things.
“You kill each other, rape each other, steal from each other—how are you to speak our truths? How are you to decide what beauty means?”
“Because it doesn’t matter what it means to you, or your kin. It only matters what it means to mine.” Rennick folded his arms across his chest. He appeared to be entirely unfazed by the fury that he had provoked. Kaylin, head pounding, couldn’t say the same. “I don’t demand that you like us. I don’t care if you respect us.” He shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first race to look down on us, you certainly won’t be the last.
“And you interrupted me,” he added quietly.
Scoros’s eyes rounded. He was actually shocked.
“So, clearly you’ve thought about some of what it means to be us. Let me direct your thoughts to other aspects. You speak of fear—how do you recognize it if you don’t feel it yourself?”
“A fair question, Scoros,” Ybelline said pointedly. “Please answer it.”
“We understand fear,” he replied stiffly. “Nothing that lives is without fear. We fear for our sick, when the doctors have done all they can. We fear for our children. We fear—”
“Do you fear death?”
“No. Pain, perhaps, but not death.”
“Do you fear to be forgotten?”
“We will never be forgotten, while even one of us lives.”
Rennick lifted a hand. “And the rest?”
“The rest?”
“Greed. What you call human love. You don’t feel it?”
“We’ve all felt greed,” was the equally stiff reply. “We were all children once.”
“And love?”
“We do not mean the same thing by that word.”
“Very well. Speak of your meaning, mine is no longer an issue here.”
Scoros’s antennae waved again in the air, and Ybelline’s snapped back.
Grudging every word, and speaking in the stilted way of Tha’alani who are using language they are not familiar with, Scoros said. “It is joy, to us.”
“And what do you love?”
“My people. Our children,” he added. “Their lives. Our parents. Our siblings. Our … husbands, if we have them, or our wives, if we have them.”
“Plural?”
“No one person can be all things to all people. Some have tried, and some try—but it is youthful, and experience teaches much.”
“I … see.” Rennick was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Kaylin highly doubted that he would stay that way, but she was fascinated in spite of herself. She was also grateful, because if there was a diplomatic incident today, it wouldn’t be her fault.
“Imagine lives without that love,” Rennick finally said. It was not what she expected. “Without the certainty of kin. We create art, and not all of it is beautiful to all people—but you have said that this is true of your kin as well.
“We don’t have perfect memory. We don’t have any faith that we’ll be remembered when we’re dead, and yes, I know it makes no sense, but we do care. When we talk of making our mark on the world, we simply mean we want to be remembered. Remembered fondly,” he added.
“Because we don’t have perfect memory, and we also lack the Tha’alaan, we have no way of truly understanding each other’s lives. We don’t even understand our own parents or the decisions they made.” This last sentence was accompanied by a twisted, bitter smile that spoke of experience. “What we want, we sometimes can’t explain to ourselves, let alone others. But some of us try anyway, and the best way to do that, for many of us, is with words.
“My art,” he said, “if you can call it that, is just such an attempt. People will take the words you’ve read—my people—and they will speak them in front of an audience, and they’ll speak them as if they were their own words. They’ll lend the words emotion, strength, that you can’t see.”
“But they’ll be lies.”
“Yes. And no. They will be like your paintings, or like your sculptures—they will be true, in some fashion. They will evoke something that the reality itself can’t evoke as cleanly or as easily. We don’t consider them lies, just a different way at getting at a truth that might be too big—or too small—to be seen.
“People are busy. They know their own problems and their own fears and they have no easy way of letting everyone else know what they are. And if I’m being truthful—which you seem to prize—most of us simply don’t care what other people’s fears are. Ours take up too much of our time. But when someone watches one of my plays, they leave those problems behind. They signal, by being in the audience, that they’re willing to be lifted out of their own lives, and concerns.
“It’s only for a few hours, but for those few hours, they’re watching and they’re listening to things that they would never otherwise think about.” He sat down, then, heavily. “I admit that the situation here is more complicated than I thought. There are many things I don’t understand,” he said, and he turned a thoughtful look upon Kaylin. “But I understand better what did not work in the play that I originally conceived.”
“Why