Book One – Chapter 19

In general, human tribes were mentally deranged. They were, simply put, utterly dumb. Even the tairan of the present age – descendants of unions between humans and the original tairan, which in practice meant warfaring humans violating imprisoned tairan slaves – even they, no matter how respectable they presented themselves, still bore the damage carried by human blood. In the Barnstreams, only two family lines could claim undiluted and undisputed tairan ancestry. They prided themselves on invention, producing tools for farming, fishing, domestic labour, and the conveniences of daily life.

All other tairan carried at least some human lineage. And on rare occasions, a human was born in the habitat with such pronounced tairan features that the admixture could not be denied. In those cases, the human was removed from the habitat and handed over to the tairan community to be evaluated and educated as one of their own. The average human, however, was as dim as any other livestock.

Tria’s humans were, in this regard, an exception. She claimed that many of them carried faint tairan traces; blood too thin to show, but sufficient to grant them an advantage. It gave them potential. Several generations back, she had begun selecting the more capable individuals, while sterilising or isolating the unsuited. Yu had no choice but to believe her. He had never seen another habitat. He knew only what Tria reported after her visits to the Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth. Every other year, she travelled to a different one. Occasionally, other directors came to see her. Never the wizard directors, though.

In short, the human in the sick bay might be able to understand what was happening to her. She might even speak. Or she might, on the other wing, be nothing more than a compliant, mindless pet-slave to the borman.