Parasites

A parasitic person, shown real size. Although their fate seems inhumane in every aspect to an observer of today, their very survival shows that such subjective values are ineffectual in matters of long-term survival.

Humanity had diverged into two separate lineages on their world. On one hand there were several races of almost Australopithecine cripples, degraded by the Qu for managing to turn back their initial wave of invasion. Yet simple atavism was too light a punishment for them. Their twisted relatives, the parasites, made up the second part of their sentence.

There were actually several kinds of parasitic ex-people, ranging from tortoise-sized ambulatory vampires to the more common fist-sized variety that lived attached to their hosts. There was even a tiny, endoparasitic kind that infested the wombs of their female victims like ghastly, living abortions.

All of these evolutionary tortures were played out under the careful scrutiny of the Qu for forty million years. The punishment was so baroque, so elaborate that most of the artificial parasitehost relationships died out when the Qu left. Some sub-men learnt to cleanse their tick-like relatives by drowning, burning or even eating them. Others, like the vaginal parasites, died out as their aggressive method of parasitism effectively sterilized their hosts.

Yet one or two varieties did manage to cling on to their hosts with abdominal suckers, muscular, gripping limbs and sterile, pain-soothing saliva. But their success did not lie entirely in the strength of their parasitical advantages. They also learnt to regulate their dumb hosts, not killing them by over-infestation and thus ensuring their own long-term survival as well.

In any case, totally single-sided relations were rare in any ecology, natural or artificial. In millennial cycles, the cousin species' vicious parasitism began to give way into something more beneficial for both sides.