Passing the Test

 
1. You are alone in a room with a crying child. How do you shut it up?
 
“Drink slowly,” the man in white said. “Slowly.”
Cosulich tried to follow his advice. His hand shook. He kept looking at the corner, where Livia was almost completely swallowed by a vividly blue blanket, only her bright hair emerging in a dirty tangle. She too was attended by a white coat, a young woman with flitting eyes, who held her bowl back with a firm hand to stop her from gobbling up the milk. 
He could not identify what kind of milk it was. Not goat or sheep. Cow milk? It had been so rare back home. So unfashionable. Wait – it couldn’t come from actual cows, could it? 
He found it didn’t really matter, when you were hungry.
They were in a long, white room, more a corridor really. Maybe they had run out of rooms on the station’s infirmary. Everything he could see was white: the scratched, dull plastic floor, his angular chair, the gurney Livia had been made to sit on, feet dangling in her filthy sandals, the ceiling with its textured surface that tried unsuccessfully to dampen down echoing, the bright smooth walls. The strong white light should have been reassuring but was just a little bit threatening instead, so bland and ubiquitous, so contemptuous of shadows, even faint and small ones. Cosulich blinked in the relentless radiance. He had craved light so much during the voyage, in the reeking bowels of the ship, and not because he couldn’t see. It hurt his eyes, of course, though he was over the first watering and smarting by now. Hadn’t they thought about that on the station? That their eyes would be used to the gloom of the cargo hold?
“Thank you,” he croaked in the direction of the white-coated man. 
He wasn’t a doctor, that much he had gathered. He was some sort of nurse. He hoped they rated at least that much care. 
“Can we wash up?” he asked. He thought he had got over the shame after the first four weeks in the hold, but in this clean corridor it had come back to him, burning and painful. He could not imagine how he must smell to these clean people with neatly combed hair, neatly pinned badges, neatly pressed coats. 
The nurse, if he was a nurse, smiled kindly at him. He was a middle-aged man, but he had a young face, unlined and open and caring, with mild chestnut eyes. He said something very quickly. Feeling stupid, Cosulich said: “I’m sorry. My Terran is rusty. Could you repeat, please?” 
He paid close attention now and the words resolved themselves with some difficulty: “Don’t worry. You’ll be scrubbed and sterilized before going down.” 
There was something very false in his eyes, Cosulich thought for an uneasy moment. “Yes,” he asked, “but can we have a shower now?”
The nurse kept smiling. “We don’t have the facilities for that, right here, unfortunately.” 
 
2. What have you got in your pocket?
 
“Have you got an address on Earth?”
“No.”
“Employ?”
“No, I’m ...”
“Are you a tourist or visiting a relative?”
Cosulich looked at the man in the blue uniform in disbelief. He had come off the cargo hold of a freighter. Did they think people travelled that way for pleasure? Then he realized he had been reciting stock questions. 
“I wish to apply for asylum.”
The man visibly shifted gear.
“Name?”
“Mario Cosulich.” 
He wrote it down, frowning. 
“Shall I spell it out for you?” Cosulich said, worried. 
The man did not respond. “Date of birth?” he asked, without looking up. 
“May the first, 2145.”
“Place of birth?”
“The town or the planet?”
The man looked up. “The town.”
“Riba.”
“Where is that?”
“On Lamonda III. Northern Continent.”
The man made a face. Cosulich was confused, but he felt too scared and too unsure of his grasp on the language to ask. 
“Stay still now,” the man said, and Cosulich froze. There was a flash. The man pressed a last key, waited for a moment looking expectantly at a display, then picked up an ominous-looking chrome-plated instrument. It looked like a pistol, or a spray syringe. 
“What’s that?” Cosulich asked, alarmed. 
“ID chip. To help us keep track of you.”
He would have liked to protest, but he couldn’t find the words, or he couldn’t quickly enough. The man walked behind him and he felt a sudden intense cold to the nape of his neck. Helpless and scared, Cosulich remained still.
“You can proceed to the interview section now,” the man in the uniform told him, without looking at him.
 
3. What is your definition of humanity?
 
Seated patiently in another white corridor he stared at a line, just slightly irregular, of white rivets on the white-painted metal wall. There was an almost indiscernible edging of grime on the rivets that he found enormously relieving. 
Out there, somewhere on the other side of the bulkhead, there was Earth. He could not see it, but he could imagine it with painful precision, haloed by a thin turquoise fuzziness, dark blue and white in its curl and whorls. It was almost within reach. He closed his eyes and saw, in a giddy moment of anticipation, the sky widening over him to a vast blue expanse, and felt some weight lift that had crushed his chest since he had stepped in the cargo hold.
He had been waiting for a long time. He wondered about Livia. They had separated and he had lost sight of her. Wherever she was, she was alone, scared. But maybe she was beyond fear now. She looked at him, when he tried to talk to her, with solemn, serious eyes, but only answered him in clipped monosyllables. She seemed to have run out of words. Or maybe she was too intent thinking things through to spare time for talking.
“Cosulich?”
A middle-aged man was leaning out of the doorway, looking at him. He got up smartly. 
“Second door on the left,” the man said. Cosulich walked the short corridor and found himself in front of a closed door. A. Lagarda, said a small plaque in the centre of the door. Cosulich knocked. 
“Come in,” said a woman’s voice.
She was young and very neatly turned out, he saw while he sat gingerly in front of her desk. She had precise blond hair and arresting blue eyes. She spoke in a soft, polite alto. 
“Good morning, Mr. Cosulich,” she said. “I see here that you have requested landing on Earth.”
She waited. Cosulich cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, because it seemed something was expected of him. He was again acutely conscious of how he must smell. They hadn’t been able to let him have a shower, or a change of clothes. It was him, the woman, and The Stench in there.
“Are you an Earth citizen, Mr. Cosulich?”
“I ... I am not sure, Ms Lagarda.”
“Officer Lagarda.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You are not sure?”
“I mean, I ... my grandparents were citizens, I guess. I don’t know if ...”
“Ah. You wish to claim citizenship.”
“I just need to find somewhere to go, Officer. Me and my daughter. My wife ...”
The woman’s gaze remained polite. “Are you a human?” she asked. 
Cosulich looked at her, completely lost. “I beg your pardon?”
“Are you a human being?”
Cosulich thought carefully. “Yes?”
“Can you prove it?”
Cosulich looked down instinctively at his body. He had been a bit overweight when they had left, but he wasn’t now. He looked like nothing special, like a civil servant with a little kid and a beautiful, passionate wife who meddled in things she maybe shouldn’t have meddled in. He was not particularly handsome or plain or distinctive. He looked normal. Worried sick about his little kid, right now, but normal. He lifted his eyes again, confused. 
“I ... I’m not sure what you mean.”
“We only let in humans,” the woman said, without losing any of her politeness. “Not aliens,” she elaborated helpfully.
“Aliens?” Cosulich asked. “But we are all ...”
He was about to say We are all, all of us, descendants of colonists from Earth. There are no aliens. He checked himself. He didn’t want to get into a dispute. This blond nice-looking woman had the power to admit him and Livia to Earth, to any residual safety they might have, or send them back. And he knew what awaited him back home. 
He didn’t know if the Terrans had some particular definitions of human that escaped him, or if they really believed that there were actual aliens in the colonies. It might well be that they didn’t ask themselves where these supposed aliens came from. 
“I can take a DNA scan if you want,” he said, eagerly.
The woman’s face stiffened with horror. Cosulich recoiled in his seat. There was a long, violent silence. 
“We do not make use of genetic engineering,” the woman said, enunciating each word with precision. 
A DNA scan had nothing to do with genetic engineering, of course, but he was not a stupid man. He recognized the magical power the word DNA had had on the woman. 
He had never paid too much attention to this kind of news, but suddenly some heated rant of his wife’s, directed at the nightly summing-up of interplanetary affairs, came back to him. Yes. That was one of the reasons they had left Earth, all those years ago. No genetic modifications were allowed here. He thought again of his daughter, of her small blond head and grave eyes. Neither he nor Pola had had blond hair, but Pola had wanted Livia to have it, a trivial cosmetic modification, a minor obsession that had irked him at the time but that he had acceded to. It would show up on a scan. But then, of course, all the rest would show up as well: all the genes they had had excised from their daughter’s genetic code so that she might be healthy and happy and sane. Their grandparents had lacked the technology and their parents the money. But they believed themselves a happier generation. Maybe this was the definition of aliens? And he had come this close to give them both away. 
“Of course,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.” His heart was beating and his hands were sweating. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply ... I’m sorry.”
“You understand,” the woman said. “It’s for your own good. We have to make sure you will find yourself comfortable in Terran society.”
Cosulich swallowed. He was beginning to suspect that he would never feel comfortable on Earth, but it was much better than a bullet through the head, which was probably the alternative, back home. He had a sudden, vivid vision of his wife’s lifeless body, her open blind eyes turning opaque. He hadn’t seen it – had known she had died only from second-hand reports – but his imagination had no problem conjuring up a different image each time. 
“What do I have to do?” he asked, trying to hold the image of Livia and her silent haunted stare to his heart, for courage. 
 
4. What is your favourite joke?
 
They sat him down to take the test in an small room, right in front of an Immigration officer. He wasn’t there as an interviewer, obviously, because he refused to answer any question and just sat there reading a wide floppy screen full of bright colours, and looked bored. “You have one hour,” he said.
Cosulich rubbed his hands on the grimy fabric of his trousers and read the sheet. It ran to two pages. He made to turn the page, but the Immigration officer tut-tutted at him, as if he had tried to cheat. 
 
1.  You are alone in a room with a crying child. What do you do? a) ignore it; b) scold it; c) try to find its mother so that she can make it shut up; d) slap it so that it shuts up.
 
That was when he had tried to ask for clarification. Cosulich read the question several times. He read the offered choices several times. He still couldn’t make sense of them. If he found himself in a room with a crying child, he would try to find out what was wrong with it, pick it up, try to comfort it. Wasn’t that the normal human reaction? Was it just culture shock at work here? And in that case, what was the right answer? He was tempted to rule out d), but if the culture he was trying to pretend he belong to was that different, could he tell even that for sure? And what if it was a trick question? What if he was supposed to write in his own answer? There seemed to be the space to do it.
He agonised over it for a while, then wrote in his answer. 
 
2. What have you got in your pocket?
 
This confused him even more. He actually patted his pockets to see if he had anything in them – he was used to answer questions truthfully. His wife had so often made fun of him for it. But he had had nothing in his pockets that day when he had gone out to pick Livia up at school. It was just round the corner, and Pola had been home to open the door for him, he hadn’t even bothered to take his home keys. And when coming back with Livia hanging from his hand he had seen them drive away in the grey van with Pola, her face looking out of the back viewport white and terrified, he hadn’t gone back to pick anything up. He had more sense than that. So his pockets were now empty, and they had been for a while. What had that to do with his eligibility to land on Earth, anyway? He dutifully wrote Nothing on the sheet. He had a bad feeling about this.
 
3. What is your definition of humanity?
 
Compared to what? he thought. He almost wrote that on the sheet, on the couple of lines provided for the answer. But when your life and your daughter’s depend on you being a good boy and giving the authorities exactly what they want, you don’t get sarcastic. He tried to think. Did they mean belonging to the Homo sapiens species? Or being compassionate, sympathetic, kind? That was the point, wasn’t it? If only he could know. 
What would happen to us if I don’t get it right?, he thought. I suppose I could try to sneak back somehow. They can’t be looking for me very hard, I’m only Pola’s husband, after all, and I knew next to nothing of what she had been doing, whatever it was. Of course they don’t know that, do they? But still, they have other, bigger fishes to fry. I could try to sneak back in under some assumed name, and ... He squeezed his eyes. Will they send me back in something better than the cargo hold? A clean cabin, with a toilet other than the corner of the hold, with enough water and food and protection from the predators, the thieves? Will they? I suppose so. And would Livia be any less hurt by this second travel towards the unknown? 
“Half an hour,” the Immigration guy said. 
Cosulich scribbled “Somebody who belongs to the human race and is worthy of it,” which seemed to him a pompous and lame answer but had the virtue of sidestepping the issue of which of the two meanings was the correct one. 
 
4. What is your favourite joke?
 
Cosulich looked at the sheet, horrified. A joke? A joke? And then he thought, why not? Humour is one of the defining characteristics of being human, right? Maybe he had underestimated the subtlety and intelligence of whoever it was who had devised this thing. The problem was, no joke came to his mind right away. He thought and thought. Oh hell, this was ridiculous. He wasn’t a grave and humourless man. He made people laugh. He made Pola laugh. Had made Pola laugh. 
He decided to answer the rest of the questions and then come back to this one. He turned the sheet. The last question was hand-written.
 
5. Why don’t you smelly good-for-nothing parasites go back to your planets anyway?
 
He felt physically hit. His mouth went dry and there was a sound in his ears, insistent and shrill and painful. Everything became darker. He clenched his fists with determined forbearance, and waited. Through the sickly shame of the wronged, he thought: this is deliberate, this is a trick, it’s all a trick, they want me to stand up and hit the guy standing there bored with his floppy screen, they want me to lose it, they want an excuse to kick me back. But I’m not going to give it to them. I can’t. I won’t. I’ll breathe in and out, in and out, I’ll see reason in this, I’ll keep my mind’s eyes on that invisible Earth out there, my home, I’ll keep my wounded daughter held hard against my chest, and I won’t lose it. 
But just as the tide of fury and shame and hurt began to recede, he thought: what if the trick lies somewhere else, what if the proof of my humanity is my ability to stand up and scream and yell at them, tell them that I’m not having any of their shit? Is this the correct response? 
He felt faint and giddy. He kept his eyes on the white sheet with its spidery black marks and his own flowing, slanted handwriting. His mind had totally stopped. He felt completely empty, stripped of his power of speech or reasoned argument. 
“You time is over,” his warden told him. Cosulich lifted red and stupid eyes at him, and let him take away the sheet.
 
5. Why don’t you smelly good-for-nothing parasites go back to your planets anyway?
 
By the third day he was feeling tentatively hopeful. People were granted permission to land, and he began to see a pattern. They were all people like him – not too young, family people, without the hungry look of the predators. One of the wardens brought some paper and coloured pencils for Livia the second day, in the large white dormitory where they were lodged. She took them gingerly, without looking at him, without thanking him, and ran off in her corner, where she started drawing hungrily. Cosulich felt his heart surprised by hope. He turned back to the warden and apologized for his daughter’s lack of manners, but unconvincingly.
At night he couldn’t sleep for this uncertainty of doom. He could feel the station’s discreet noise through the metal, a low hum, a gentle vibration that seemed to him, but maybe it was just his imagination, to rise and fall in a rhythm, like a beat or a breath, and the station seemed to him suddenly a huge animal. He wondered where they were in relation to it: nestled among his paws, nurtured and protected? Or slowly digested by its stomach, until the time came to spit out their bones, his like truncheons and stones, Livia’s like matchsticks and pearls? 
On the fourth day a couple of the blue-uniformed officers of the station’s police came to the door of the dorm and called his name. He gathered up his daughter and went, scared and hopeful.
“I’m sorry, Cosulich,” said one. “There’s a ship leaving for Lamonda right now.”
He stood there rooted for a moment. “Does that mean that they turned down my application?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He felt a rising panic. “Can’t I go somewhere else? I mean, can’t I ...”
“I’m sorry, Cosulich. We got to go.”
“But I can’t go back,” he said. “We can’t go back. They’ll be looking for me.”
The officer met his gaze with a surprisingly genuine look of apology. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “That’s the standard procedure. You get sent back from where you came.”
“The chip,” he said. His throat was tight. “Get the ID chip off me at least.” And then he added: “Please.”
The two man exchanged a look. Cosulich heard a muffled moan and realized he was squeezing his daughter’s hand so hard that she had whimpered. He looked down and met a sorrowful look. Livia did understand.
“It’s lodged in the spinal cord,” the first officer said. “It can’t be removed.”
Cosulich looked at them in complete horror. “Well for God’s sake,” he said. “Erase its memory, scramble it, burn it, do whatever you have to do, but don’t send me back with it. I’m a wanted man.”
“Well, they’ll be wanting you for something, I guess,” growled the other officer. He was obviously getting fed up. Both of them though, even the one who had kept saying he was sorry, looked like they were ready to jump him and carry him bodily to the ship. He squeezed his daughter’s hand in surrender, and went.
 
Humanity Discrimination Test, Revision 4.5
 
He tried to get the chip out on the ship. The ship’s crew managed to get to him before the fellow traveller he had talked into doing it could cut too deep. He spent three weeks in the ship infirmary. When the ship arrived, they were waiting for him. 
He looked back from the van when they took him away, just like his wife, and saw Livia look back at him with those large serious eyes, pale and lost. 
He wondered if she would be killed out of hand, or raised by good, law-abiding citizens, or indifferent wardens in an institution; if she would grow up to be a rebel, like her mother, or a good citizen, like those nice people back at the station, or if she would, like her father, wonder one day about her humanity.