The part of the interrogations that weighed heaviest on my heart was when I left the Stranger alone with the tree.
It was the 40-year Gently Plum that I had often taken shade under as a child. The committee had transplanted it within the walls of the fortress for the final test in the battery for the Strangers.
They usually performed well for the earlier stages of the interrogation - they would eat the food we gave them if they were hungry enough, though their manners were atrocious. The speaking test was less conclusive: they could not understand us but when they were entered into the chambers in pairs they directed their gibbering sounds more to each other than to the administrators. I believe that they use those sounds to communicate. Fertility tests were muddled until we found one with a peculiar amber meal lodged inside of it: one that seemed to have congealed in the rough shape of the Stranger’s body. Briefly, there was excitement among the committee for redemption, that maybe what we had thought was an amber meal was the true form of the creatures and that the callous, rakeless exterior was only sort of shell or cocoon, but the only amber meal we found was inert and insensible. We concluded that it was instead an internally-situated soft joey that might mature into a full Stranger.
The procedure for the final test was to simply leave the Stranger alone with the Gently Plum for a full day. We would observe their behaviour from the elevated platform above the walls. The tree was pre-marked on its north-facing aspect with intriguing but not over-old marks, in a pattern simple enough for an infant to understand.
But however many Strangers the scouts had brought over from the mainland, none of them added to the marks on the Gently Plum. No elaborations on the cross, no deepenings, sometimes not so much as a curious touch.
Often they climbed the tree. Strangers are very good climbers, and of course we oiled the walls before each interrogation, so the tree might have looked like an escape route to them. In the most heartbreaking cases they would tear branches off of the tree, or use their horrid weight to bring down a bough, to use as a profane kind of weapon against me or the others. In these unhappy events, my colleagues on the wall were forced to blow a thimble of paralytic spores towards the offender. There was something utterly tragic about their extreme reaction to the powder - they tensed so hard that their internal skeletons cracked and their mouth-claws crumbled, their throats brought to their fullest volume of complaint before their breath ran out.
Witnessing this makes it hard for me to retain the neutral attitude my role requires of me. Nobody would be more pleased than I to see the Strangers demonstrate a base level of humanity but I am beginning to feel it might be a lost cause. I petitioned the committee for an extraction, for I could not endure the insults heaped upon the Gently Plum. I asked for her to be transplanted back to the North Shore where she belonged, and after that the interrogations were much simpler.
I was there at the welcome party when Teroyd returned to us from the mainland. Their account was thorough and fresh, and they related it to us all through the celebration and graciously repeated it for weeks afterwards. They held back no detail, no matter how small or shocking.
And of course, soon the whole island was humming with the report. You were just as likely to hear a recount of it at the mealtimes of the Northern families as the Southern ones. But among all the trials and travails of Teroyd’s journey, that one appalling aspect lasted the longest in people’s tellings:
They don’t rake the bark.
Teroyd went to pains to state that they certainly have trees on the mainland - even more varieties than the ones we know, in fact. And the trees did grow near people, it’s just that the people of the mainland - according to Teroyd - never were seen to scour them.
They said that, early on in their travels, when they went to rake the bark, either for dawnrake or everake, that the men of the mainland would make loud banging sounds and chatter excitedly, as if they wanted to startle Teroyd away from the trunks.
On further observation, Teroyd saw that these faint milk men would pass by trees and ignore the bark altogether. On the rare occasions they saw the people touch the trees at all, the soft, limp protuberances on the end of each small manus made no mark. In their long, sad expedition, Teroyd found no sign of intent on any tree. In desperation, they climbed high up in the branches, thinking perhaps they had found a nation of perverts, but even among the leaves, there were no furrows, no cratches, no hashploughs, not even a tipe.
We had thought that the scant few people who washed up here from the mainland had been cruelly banished for their deformities, or had been disfigured in some barbaric punishment, but Teroyd insists there is a deeper horror out there: that for them, there is no digging through the chalky outer layer of a kind tree, no catching of the claw in the soft flesh below, no sharp exhale of scent on the uplift or the sweet tinkle of sloughspecks at their feet. They don’t know the language of the marks and their flat paws smell only of their own dirt. They talk of the stars in terms of the pungent milk they make, they name the world for the lifeless dirt.
How can they express even the barest sign of kinship or intelligence, having never raked the bark? Can they be said to even be truly alive? Surely on the mainland there can be no real people, just mechanisms inhabited by a slow trickle of instinct. They stagger through a world they can not commune with, their minds full of nothing but holes. All meaning seeps out of their brains and trails behind them on the ground they hold so dear.
So fellows, I will cast my vote for extermination. It will be an act of mercy, or gardening.
ticklish-art
Ethical Considerations by Ticklish 2024
The part of the interrogations that weighed heaviest on my heart was when I left the Stranger alone with the tree.
It was the 40-year Gently Plum that I had often taken shade under as a child. The committee had transplanted it within the walls of the fortress for the final test in the battery for the Strangers.
They usually performed well for the earlier stages of the interrogation - they would eat the food we gave them if they were hungry enough, though their manners were atrocious. The speaking test was less conclusive: they could not understand us but when they were entered into the chambers in pairs they directed their gibbering sounds more to each other than to the administrators. I believe that they use those sounds to communicate. Fertility tests were muddled until we found one with a peculiar amber meal lodged inside of it: one that seemed to have congealed in the rough shape of the Stranger’s body. Briefly, there was excitement among the committee for redemption, that maybe what we had thought was an amber meal was the true form of the creatures and that the callous, rakeless exterior was only sort of shell or cocoon, but the only amber meal we found was inert and insensible. We concluded that it was instead an internally-situated soft joey that might mature into a full Stranger.
The procedure for the final test was to simply leave the Stranger alone with the Gently Plum for a full day. We would observe their behaviour from the elevated platform above the walls. The tree was pre-marked on its north-facing aspect with intriguing but not over-old marks, in a pattern simple enough for an infant to understand.
But however many Strangers the scouts had brought over from the mainland, none of them added to the marks on the Gently Plum. No elaborations on the cross, no deepenings, sometimes not so much as a curious touch.
Often they climbed the tree. Strangers are very good climbers, and of course we oiled the walls before each interrogation, so the tree might have looked like an escape route to them. In the most heartbreaking cases they would tear branches off of the tree, or use their horrid weight to bring down a bough, to use as a profane kind of weapon against me or the others. In these unhappy events, my colleagues on the wall were forced to blow a thimble of paralytic spores towards the offender. There was something utterly tragic about their extreme reaction to the powder - they tensed so hard that their internal skeletons cracked and their mouth-claws crumbled, their throats brought to their fullest volume of complaint before their breath ran out.
Witnessing this makes it hard for me to retain the neutral attitude my role requires of me. Nobody would be more pleased than I to see the Strangers demonstrate a base level of humanity but I am beginning to feel it might be a lost cause. I petitioned the committee for an extraction, for I could not endure the insults heaped upon the Gently Plum. I asked for her to be transplanted back to the North Shore where she belonged, and after that the interrogations were much simpler.
The Matter of the Strangers by Ticklish 2024
I was there at the welcome party when Teroyd returned to us from the mainland. Their account was thorough and fresh, and they related it to us all through the celebration and graciously repeated it for weeks afterwards. They held back no detail, no matter how small or shocking.
And of course, soon the whole island was humming with the report. You were just as likely to hear a recount of it at the mealtimes of the Northern families as the Southern ones. But among all the trials and travails of Teroyd’s journey, that one appalling aspect lasted the longest in people’s tellings:
They don’t rake the bark.
Teroyd went to pains to state that they certainly have trees on the mainland - even more varieties than the ones we know, in fact. And the trees did grow near people, it’s just that the people of the mainland - according to Teroyd - never were seen to scour them.
They said that, early on in their travels, when they went to rake the bark, either for dawnrake or everake, that the men of the mainland would make loud banging sounds and chatter excitedly, as if they wanted to startle Teroyd away from the trunks.
On further observation, Teroyd saw that these faint milk men would pass by trees and ignore the bark altogether. On the rare occasions they saw the people touch the trees at all, the soft, limp protuberances on the end of each small manus made no mark. In their long, sad expedition, Teroyd found no sign of intent on any tree. In desperation, they climbed high up in the branches, thinking perhaps they had found a nation of perverts, but even among the leaves, there were no furrows, no cratches, no hashploughs, not even a tipe.
We had thought that the scant few people who washed up here from the mainland had been cruelly banished for their deformities, or had been disfigured in some barbaric punishment, but Teroyd insists there is a deeper horror out there: that for them, there is no digging through the chalky outer layer of a kind tree, no catching of the claw in the soft flesh below, no sharp exhale of scent on the uplift or the sweet tinkle of sloughspecks at their feet. They don’t know the language of the marks and their flat paws smell only of their own dirt. They talk of the stars in terms of the pungent milk they make, they name the world for the lifeless dirt.
How can they express even the barest sign of kinship or intelligence, having never raked the bark? Can they be said to even be truly alive? Surely on the mainland there can be no real people, just mechanisms inhabited by a slow trickle of instinct. They stagger through a world they can not commune with, their minds full of nothing but holes. All meaning seeps out of their brains and trails behind them on the ground they hold so dear.
So fellows, I will cast my vote for extermination. It will be an act of mercy, or gardening.
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