I’m not sure any of us enjoyed a morsel of food, but it was considered courteous to eat in this world when a host offered food and drink, and so we did. I found the wine flavorful but safely weak. I took only sips. I wanted to keep my mind absolutely clear. I was pondering the scans we’d seen, going over in my memory the images. No brain visible, no heart visible in our bodies, and what were the tiny organs threaded all through our arms and legs and neck and head? Where were our brains? Why did I hear a heartbeat from myself? Why did I hear the heartbeat of Welf or Garekyn or Derek? Where was the physical command center of our intelligence and our bodily systems? Why were the networks of seed and vein so much denser in our hands and feet, in our necks, in our heads?

Finally Amel began to speak again. “I was born in the far north, in the cold lands, where snow is frequent and people wear heavy skins just to survive. My tribe was much paler than the people of the southern climes.” He paused and took a deep breath as though all this caused him pain. “But even for a pale tribe I was a mutant, a green-eyed red-haired child in a world of dark hair and dark eyes, and my skin looked sickly. In our tribe, I inspired fear and distrust. And so my parents, after many painful mishaps had befallen me, decided to sacrifice me to the gods they believed in. They decided this when I was twelve years old. They laid me on an open altar in the forest and left me there, bound and helpless. In time wolves or bears would come, or the wildcats. I had been drugged and did not care too much. I was frankly glad to be out of the world where I was constantly ridiculed and persecuted. It was then that the Bravennans removed me from the planet. I spent years on Bravenna growing to my full height, and being educated by the Parents and being altered into the being I am now. But! Understand this!”

He sat forward and looked into my eyes again. “Understand this,” he repeated. “Everything good in me came from my birth as a human being, my childhood among human beings, my parents on Earth, my teachers on Earth, the wise and the kind of my village, the children brave enough to befriend me and pity me—and not so much from the superstitious and fearful notions of my tribe, but from the underlying morality of the tribe!” He pressed his lips together. Again we saw anger and emotion. “It is from nurture, mammalian nurture, that all human beings derive their sense of what it is to be loved, to be cared for, to feel this world as a good place, to feel life as something good. And it is from mammalian nurture that they derive their crucial sense of fairness.”