“No, let him ask,” said Amel. “Let him ask his questions. I will answer. I will always answer! I like it that he asks, that all of you ask and speak up and express your souls!”

This was the first time we’d heard the word “soul”—that is, one concise word containing multimeanings of the same concept.

“What is a soul?” asked Derek.

“Your soul is your inner being, your thinking, reasoning, loving, choosing inner being!” said Amel. “Your capacity to stand up for what is right. Your capacity to fight against what is wrong. Your capacity to choose even to die for what you believe is right. That’s your soul.” He shook his head. He wasn’t satisfied. “It is the irreducible part of you that combines conscience, and deep feeling.”

“I see,” I said. “And you believe that we have souls? We? The Replimoids?”

“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely. I know you do! I’ve watched you. Even if I’d never seen you before, I would have detected your souls here in this room. But why do you even ask?”

“Because we were made for one purpose,” I said. “We weren’t birthed from human beings like you were. We were grown on Bravenna.” I could see he wasn’t understanding me. “I suppose I would have expected you to tell us that we had no souls! I suppose I expected that you would tell us we were tools especially made to appear human, but that we were not human.”

“Who said you had to be human to have a soul?” he asked. “Look, I’ve been on this planet for thousands of years. Everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanates from self-consciousness. The soul is the expression of self-consciousness. The soul is generated by organized self-consciousness. When they endowed you with self-consciousness, when they bred you out of Earth elements to the point where self-consciousness emerged in you, they put you on the road to having a soul. When you began to think and feel, a soul was formed within you as the result of your thinking and feeling.”

“I see what you’re saying.” I looked at Derek, Derek who was so often moved to tears, Derek who knew fear the way the rest of us did not, Derek who had always given himself so much more than the rest of us to the joys of music, or feasting, or drinking, or dancing. But I saw that we all had souls. It was the “I” of each one of us, the “we” of us, the “who we are” part.

I looked at Amel searchingly. “But why is this important, that we have souls, that you have a soul, that anyone has a soul? I can see that perhaps animals even have souls, the sheep, the goats, the faithful dogs of the villages, even these have partial souls perhaps….But why does it matter exactly?”