But haven’t they refused to hand any of their greatest scientific and technological discoveries—hyperspace travel, artificial intelligence, immortality serum, self-induced regeneration, stuff like that—over to Earthlings, even though they easily could? Well, true. By the same token, they haven’t exterminated or enslaved humanity, which they could also do. And they’ve at least maintained trade relations with Homo sapiens. Under their own rules, of course.
Rules they’ve made absolutely clear. They see humanity as an “unpredictable species.” Which is a polite way of saying humans are a stupid and very dangerous race who have to be kept in check. Accordingly, they’ve shared a few of their secrets with the humans, such as artificial gravity and their universal energy crystals. But that’s it. Trade is one thing, promiscuity’s another. Partners, not equals. Everyone in their own place. No aliens on Earth, no humans among the stars.
There was a call for a no-man’s land, a trading post, and that’s why they built the William S. Burroughs, this enormous station orbiting around Titan.
The orbit of Saturn’s satellite proved perfect: close enough to Earth and its colonies on Mars and the asteroids for slow, plasma-powered human ships laden with grain, petroleum, and art productions to reach it after a couple months’ flying time, then get back after two more months loaded with a few universal energy crystals, high-tech materials, and cybernetic control systems. Also conveniently near the system’s hyperspace portal (merely a common geometric point half an AU above the plane of the ecliptic, with no immediate identifying signs—no romantic vortices of matter and energy glowing in a thousand colors) but far enough from the rest of the galaxy that, without hyperspace travel (which the aliens have no intention of ever allowing humans to get—not until humans have something valuable enough to trade for it, that is), the stars will remain an unreachable dream for mankind. And a safely uncharted paradise for those stars’ own powerful and greedy inhabitants.
There’s only one reason why my buddies and I exist: somebody has to enforce the law. Or keep up the appearance of lawfulness, at least, in this no-man’s land. We’re the only ones authorized to bear arms here—and to use them. We’re the customs officers of this borderland between Earth and the Galaxy, the Charons of this River Styx between underdevelopment and high tech.
Waxing poetic, am I? What a pity the reality turns out to be so prosaic. That’s a fact. Isaac Asimov proved prophetic with his R. Daneel Olivaw, after all: like him, we pozzies aren’t human police officers, just positronic robots. Sometimes reality makes literature look small, even science fiction.
True, ever since the aliens showed up nobody on Earth writes SF anymore. Too bad. I really liked the good doctor’s stories. After Chandler, I mean. Maybe now that the future has caught up with humans and it turns out they don’t like it, they find it hard to think up new possible tomorrows.
Of course, we’re neither dead nor alive, neither earthlings nor galaxians, humans nor aliens, but rather both things—and something more. Or something less.
Earth probably would have preferred a police force consisting of human beings, or of living beings at least, but the Galactic Trade Confederation isn’t made up of a single race of aliens. They don’t trust humans, but they have just as little faith in each other. Following what by now is an ancient tradition, the police forces of the various Stations (and I’d love to know how many there are; of course, like all interesting facts, that’s classified and above a simple pozzie’s pay grade) are made up of beings like us.
Neither fish nor fowl. Perfectly fair and neutral. In theory, at least.
Sometimes I wonder what my equivalents on other Stations look like. Quadrupeds? Gas clouds? Do they swim or float in superdense atmospheres? Most likely I’ll never find out. But I’m sure they must be very different, at least in appearance. The Confederation sticks to a prudent policy of making their police in each system look like the predominant sentient race there—at least approximately.
That’s why we’re bipedal, have five-fingered hands with opposable thumbs, our pupils turn in our eye sockets, our jaws move when we speak (using thoracic air compressors, because we don’t need to breathe and have no lungs). We even wear clothes even though we have no need for them, strictly speaking. We’ve got nothing to hide—no genitals, inside or out.
And there are other differences. Though we have tongues in our mouths and noses on our faces, we don’t have a sense of taste or smell. And why should we? Well, considering that we work as bloodhounds, a sense of smell might have come in handy. But some paranoid Grodo must have figured that over time we could maybe decipher their pheromonic speech, so smell was out. We don’t need to eat or sleep (our teeth and lips are for purely cosmetic purposes), don’t sweat or defecate, we have no body hair (except on our heads, some of us; not me), our pseudoskin is red, blue, silver, gold, or any other humanly impossible color (apparently somebody wanted us to look like mannequins), most of our “brains” are in our torsos, not our heads (that’s why Weekman, Makrow 34’s human henchman, shot Zorro at stomach-level: destroying that region is the most effective way of neutralizing a pozzie; I’m still wondering how he knew), and other such details. It’s just a matter of looking human—a very different proposition from being human.
We’re also stronger and faster than humans—but without overdoing it. Yes, our reflexes and strength are superior to the average human’s. But our reaction time is slower than a Grodo’s and our muscles are weaker than a Colossaur’s, for example. (The aliens hate taking risks; they’d never accept a police force of robots that were too powerful for them to beat one-on-one.) That’s as far as our superpowers go. We can’t fly and don’t shoot death rays (at least not without antigrav belts or energy weapons). Much less do we have Psi abilities.
The material part of us, our bodies, are 100 percent human tech: we are manufactured on Earth, Mars, or the asteroids. We have state-of-the-art cybernetic bodies, just like all the industrial robots used in terrestrial factories, except ours are completely android—that is, much more anthropomorphic than any industrial use would require.
Nor are our germanium-foam positronic brains fundamentally different from the computers that guide any terrestrial interplanetary ship.
What makes us special are our—can I say “personalities”? I don’t know if the aliens left them up to randomness generators or planned them one by one. The fact is, no two are alike. But as individualized as we are, we still have our limits. Oh, yes, it remains an enigma to human cybernetics how positrons move through our germanium-foam labyrinths; the sole yet definitive alien contribution to the package. The divine spark that animated our dead metallic clay. The thing that turned us into individual entities, with characters, skills, and tastes all our own.
Take our keynames, for instance. They’re not just a way of distinguishing us at a glance; they are expressions of our individuality that sometimes extend even to our appearance. As a fan of crime novels and especially those of Raymond Chandler, I always wear a trench coat and a broad-brimmed hat like Humphrey Bogart’s. Like Philip Marlowe must have worn. Zorro wore a Cordovan sombrero, a mask, and a black cape to go with his sword and whip. Achilles had his plumed helmet, breastplate, greaves, lance, and shield. Arnold Stallone wears a leather jacket with rivets and dark glasses, after the Terminator. Mao Castro never takes off his khaki Red Guard uniform from Cultural Revolution times. And so on, all of us. It isn’t as boring and monotonous as uniforms would be (not that some aliens wouldn’t prefer that), but it serves almost the same function: anywhere in the station, if you run into a humanoid who looks like he’s stayed up late at a costume party, there’s no question, he’s one of us.