Chapter Four

Greed. It isn’t unique to humans. Even the baser animals incapable of higher thought can be greedy, in fact it is far more common across species than almost any other trait. Greed has value in survival, hoarding things means that the one to starve last is the one who has held the most. With the rise of currency across most intelligent species, that greed became connected to the common medium of exchange.

But greed is unique in humans in that, like most things, it can be carried to great extremes, much like their capacity for empathy, acceptance, and great acts of generosity, their extremes of greed are just as boundless. Which is exactly why they began wealth restrictions in the first place. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised then that Percival found a way around those restrictions, ‘giving’ people great wealth expressly so he could access it, sounds like something almost… perverse in its counter intuitive cleverness.

Knowing what I now did, I sat down at the table wishing all the more that I had gotten to talk further with him. The room was crowded with far more people than there were at his funeral, and my hair began to stand on end. I probably would have fled the room entirely, except for four things.

The first was that the sound dampeners were on and so the noise was almost nonexistent, the second was that my humans were with me. And the third was that each of the tables was carefully placed in the room and each one had a small nameplate on the seating. This might be nothing by itself, but what mattered was that the placement for ‘our’ table set it well apart from the crowd, giving me space I badly needed. And lastly, the table was near the exit.

Much like at the transport site, knowing there was an easy way out made it easier to bear the crowd. My sharp nose told me that there was also alcohol in the area, and my tongue lolled out briefly, I started panting and licked my mouth, there was bourbon in the area… and beer. Good bourbon. And good beer.

Boatswain looked over at me, his head cocked to the right, “You haven’t tried alcohol yet, have you?”

“No.” He answered.

“Try it.” I said, “Trust me.”

He let out a loud huff and tilted his nose up to sniff the air. Military dlamisa in crowded areas usually took drugs of some sort to suppress their more powerful senses, it kept them from being overwhelmed, nothing too straining, just enough to dull the worst effects. However, this dulling meant that the big bodyguard of my race couldn’t know what I could.

I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that I was finding this amusing, in particular when Byron leaned over and began to whisper the explanation to Boatswain… and without thinking, he absently reached over and scratched the back of Boatswain’s head just behind the ears.

I was distracted from observing the pair when I smelled cooked meat, humans are masterful chefs, able to turn common bland materials into banquets, and it was obvious that Percival chose to demonstrate that mastery again in how he funded his funerary meal. Cart after cart was wheeled in, on each cart was a silver tray, on each tray was a covered set of smaller silver dishes, some cups, some bowls, some plates, each in turn was delivered to a table while Teresa waited patiently behind the podium on the elevated stage.

It is worth noting that everybody else, even those who hadn’t attended the funeral, were dressed in Percival costume, some of whom did very well, even having canes made like his, and here I want to say something about this trend.

Humans never really seem to lose their desire to ‘play’. It begins in childhood for most forms of animal life on most worlds, but in humans, it never truly fades. The desire to simply ‘have fun’ is always there. Almost all of the reforms I read about seemed centered on improving the human ‘quality of life’ not ‘quantity of wealth’ for as many people as possible, and this always seems to center around giving humans more time to do what they count as play. One of the great authors of their 21st century said this, ‘No happy person has forgotten how to play, and nobody has ever died wishing they’d laughed less often.’

“This ‘cosplay’ or ‘costume play’ practice is an outgrowth of that, humans being tellers of tall tales, story collectors, and the like, it should come as no surprise that they desire to immerse themselves in their myths and fictions to such an extent that they will dress up as their favorite characters. The desire to truly bring their imaginations to life has driven art, artists, actors, and animators for generations.

This simple act of dressing up as Percival and having fun with it, even with him dead and unable to get a laugh out of it, was emblematic of so much of their character.

No sooner had I finished putting those thoughts into my datapad than our tray reached our table, the waiter removed the trays and revealed a steak and lobster dinner.

I want to point something else out here, and that is that neither the steak nor the lobster were ever alive. They were ‘cloned’ meat. Late in the 21st century by Earth reckoning, it was discovered that the large scale animal husbandry was doing serious harm to the environment at large, with cattle gaseous emissions contributing to a greenhouse effect and the requirements of feeding them all taking up vast amounts of land that could have otherwise been used to grow edible plants and fruits.

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So in the early 21st century as cloning technology improved, the idea of cloning the desired animal meat took hold, imitation meat made from plants was tried, but could never quite compete. According to my research, real meat was so thoroughly a part of the dominant cultures of large countries that the substitutes just weren’t as in demand.

Reality clashed with culture, and compromise began with the increasingly effective cloning methods, eventually making it cheaper than raising cattle and pigs, and cheaper than trying to harvest from the sea itself.

Within a century, the only reason not to eat cloned meat was the express desire to kill. So? Cloned meat it was. Curiously, this mirrors much of the history of my world, as dlamisa hunters still exist and kill their own food, but most for purely practical purposes, clone their food.

However, unlike with humans, there was no perverse pushback against it. Our lives are very long, relative to humans, and as such we can live to see consequences that humans often did not. Moreover, there are always perverse humans who will do the opposite of the sensible thing, purely because other people want them to do the sensible thing.

Humans are the only known race to suffer from oppositional defiance disorder, wherein an otherwise sentient and intelligent being will engage in deliberate defiance of even the most obviously sensible things, even if it puts them at risk or kills them. As an example of this, in the late 20th century of North America’s largest nation, ‘seatbelts’ became mandatory. These restraints are there to compensate for the human love of unsafe velocities and minimize the risk of death in an accident.

And many humans resisted the law requiring their use, even to the point of cutting the seatbelts out of their cars in order to defy the law. Decades later they were a mockery, but their outlook is endemic to their species, and there are always a few who defy reason simply for the pleasure of feeling they have stymied someone else, up to and including refusing to eat meat that didn’t suffer before dying.

Once every table was served, we heard the ringing of a bell from up on the stage and our eyes all turned to Teresa. She cleared her throat, coughed once into her hand, and then said, “Thank you all for coming to this dinner in honor of my grandfather. If my parents were still alive, I’m sure they would be pleased to know that their father was so widely loved and respected that we not only filled this hall, but left a lot of opportunists confused and dismayed.”

A rumble of laughter swept the room, and Teresa gracefully waited until it passed before going on. “My grandfather was a lot of things, a sometime philanderer, a sometime philanthropist, an entrepreneur, an innovator, an inventor, and so much more. But in that long list of things that he was, he was a businessman, and he always said you should get business of work out of the way so you can get straight to the business of living as fast as possible.” She paused and held up a datapad in her hands.

“With that in mind, in accordance with his wishes and as the executor of his estate, I will read the dispensation of his estate, and then let you all enjoy your dinners after one final toast to his memory. As you know, he never believed the dead had a claim on the time of the living, no matter how much they were loved before they passed.”

With my sharp eyes, I could see that Teresa’s businesslike demeanor was wavering a little, to the point where she was clearly blinking to get rid of her tears before she read.

“To my granddaughter Teresa, I leave my shares of the Cooperative, conditional upon her election. If unelected, I leave her the full control of all my worldly possessions, after taxes, which if I did this right will be a big fat middle finger to the directorate that tried to screw me on my filing fees when this cooperative got started. Suck an egg, you rat bastards.”

The confusion around the room was evident, and Teresa looked up at us all, “Yes, it really says that. I’m just reading it.”

The entire room shrugged, and she resumed reading, stopping to tap the screen, and then I heard the noise of shrill dings and buzzing as devices went off all over the room. “All those who have received a ding or a buzz have just been notified that access to a trust established in your names has just been granted. Contact the number listed in the message to arrange for the depositing of between one and five million interstellar credits into your accounts.”

Teresa then looked over to our table, none of our devices had gone off, but it was obvious that the young woman intended to say something more. “To my last media project, there was insufficient time to make the arrangements for contact, but to Fauve I leave the sum of five million credits in trust until she reaches the age of her majority, and a standing offer of an internship and a position in the cooperative if she so desires.”

Fauve said nothing, her eyes were, however, all but bugging out of her head, her mouth dropped open like she wanted to say something. But words were clearly failing her, her parents were no less dismayed than she, nor was Byron or Boatswain, however Byron might have been bug eyed because of what was on his own screen. It was clear he’d inherited something.

Teresa however, was not done. “All other properties listed in the… blah blah blah… will be sold and the money invested into the media expansion of the cooperative, assuming my granddaughter is elected to the position of CEO by the board.”

Teresa set the datapad down and rang the bell again. “That’s business, now as my grandfather would have said, ‘on to the serious business of living, his final instructions are this, ‘drink his winery dry so my granddaughter has to start all over.’ Personally, I can’t think of any orders I’d enjoy following more.”

Before the last tinkling noise of the bell finished, trays were wheeled in again, each stacked high with bottles of bourbon, wine, and other liquors I didn’t recognize at the time… and would not remember the next morning.

But what I do remember of the rest of the evening, was Byron and Boatswain rocking side to side with their arms over each other’s shoulders and enjoying a drinking song, while Fauve discretely departed with Teresa, I presumed about the nature of her future career, or at least leaving the business of serious drinking to the adults.

I wish I knew more, but as you know, it is possible for a dlamisa to get black out drunk.