Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero, Lilit Zekulin Thwaites Read Free Book Online

became clear that the four species were in no way competing against one another and posed no threat to one another. Their home planets were vast distances apart, and teletransportation was equally harmful to all of them. The grandeur of the cosmos seemed somehow to encourage human nobility, and the talks advanced rapidly and harmoniously, culminating in the Global Agreements of Cassiopeia in 2096, the first interstellar treaty in history. The agreements regulate the patenting and use of technologies (for example, we buy the Gnés’ telegnés, and they buy teleportation from us, but both the intellectual property and the rights to exploitation belong exclusively to the civilization that developed the particular invention) , the exchange of goods, the type of currency, the use of teletransportation, terms of migration,etc. Faced with the need to coin a word that would define our new partners in the universe and identify us with them, the term
sentient beings , an expression borrowed from the Buddhist tradition, was agreed to. The sentients ( G’nayam in Gnés, Laluala in Balabí, Amoa in Omaánese) constitute a new level in the taxonomy of living things. If, up to that point, human beings had belonged to the kingdom Animalia , the phylum Cordata , the class Mammalia , the order Primates , the family Hominidae , the genus Homo and the species Homo sapiens , after the agreements a new rank was added—the line Sintiente , located between class and order—because, curiously, all extraterrestrials appear to be mammals and to have hair of one sort or another.
    Although teleportation has enabled the four civilizations to exchange ambassadors, it is not very common to see an alien in person. In total, there are fewer than twenty thousand aliens on our planet, a tiny number compared with the four billion citizens of Earth, known as Earthlings. Each diplomatic delegation consists of three thousand individuals, spread across the most important cities in the USE. There are also about ten thousand Omaás, who TP’d to Earth fleeing from a religious war on their own planet. That said, their unusual looksare extremely well known to all, thanks to the images screened on the news. The official name for extraterrestrials is Other Beings , but they are commonly referred to as bichos
, or creeps .

CHAPTER SIX

    “I found this on my desk two days ago,” said Myriam Chi.
    She leaned forward and handed Bruna a small holograph ball. Bruna held it in her palm and pressed the button. Immediately, a three-dimensional image of the RRM leader formed on her hand. It was no more than four inches tall, but it clearly showed Myriam in her entirety, smiling and waving. Suddenly, from nowhere, a minuscule hand appeared holding a knife, and the blade, enormous by comparison, slit the rep’s belly from top to bottom and, using the tip of the weapon as a lever, skillfully extracted her intestines. Her guts spilled out and the hologram switched off. That was it, but it was more than enough.
    “Shit,” murmured Bruna despite herself.
    She had felt the impact of the scene in her stomach, but a millisecond later she had managed to recover her aplomb. She pressed the button again and this time paid closer attention.
    “You’re smiling the whole time. It must be an image from a news bulletin, or—”
    “It’s from the end of one of last year’s rallies. We holographed the whole thing and sell it in our souvenir shop. Our sympathizers buy it. It’s a way of raising funds for the movement.”
    “So anyone can get hold of it.”
    “We have many supporters, and that hologram is one of our most popular items.”
    Bruna picked up a particular timbre in Myriam’s words, an ironically sarcastic tone, and glanced up. The other woman gazed back at her with an impenetrable look. Long, wavy, chestnut-brown hair, a tailored suit, makeup on her face. For the leader of a radical movement, she had an oddly conventional look. Bruna pressed the ball again. The