Prologue · The First Ship
No one remembered which direction that ship had come from.
When the Human Alliance’s deep-space radar caught it for the first time, it had already been inside the Solar System for a long while. A ship, or rather a fleet—dilapidated, pieced together, looking as though it had fled from an earlier war. On board were those whom humans later called “the Fire Fiends.”
The Alliance issued an ultimatum. Polite in phrasing, unmistakable in meaning: stop your ships, turn around, leave.
The fleet did not stop.
So the Alliance ordered the attack.
I. Harmonious Coexistence
When the fleet closed in, it was the universities on Earth that descended into chaos first.
Munich. Students poured into the streets. The signs they carried bore words that were later transcribed, without a single character changed, into the trial records:
“Extraterrestrials are people too. Alien refugees are refugees. We should coexist harmoniously with aliens, not massacre them.”
The march lasted less than a day. The government arrested every participant on charges of illegal assembly, illegal demonstration, and endangering social security. The charges were neat and clean; not one had to do with “speech”—because under the regulations, speaking up for aliens was not speech, but a threat to security.
Yet the war did not end as the Alliance had envisioned.
Just as the fleet was about to carry out the final purge of the refugee ships, more demonstrations surged across the interior of Earth. This time, those representing them were no longer students. Among them was an East Asian man named Yuji Kamimura.
Yuji Kamimura did something that everyone at the time thought was insane: he married a Fire Fiend.
He was the first.
Later, the war subsided. No one could say for sure whether Yuji Kamimura’s marriage had done the trick, or if the Alliance had killed enough, or if they simply lacked the strength to keep killing. When the war ended, the survivors on the refugee ships lived on, alongside the people on Earth who wanted them to live. The children they had with humans received a new name.
The Infernals.
II. Two Hundred and Ninety-Eight Pages
The Alliance did not break its word. It indeed did not kill all the Fire Fiends.
It did something far more thorough—it wrote them a book.
The Infernal Control Act, totaling two hundred and ninety-eight pages.
The public later summarized those two hundred and ninety-eight pages into two sentences:
“Infernals shall not engage in any activities other than mining and manufacturing. Infernals under the age of eighteen are strictly forbidden from appearing in public places.”
These two sentences were not the official text. The official text was scattered across clauses, bylaws, supplementary notes, and judicial interpretations spanning two hundred and ninety-eight pages, framed in far more refined language. But the meaning was the same.
The regulations were meticulous. Infernals could not study. Could not keep pets. Could not share a train carriage with humans. Which class of Infernals could walk on which streets, and after what hour they had to return to which designated residential area—all of this was clearly set down in those two hundred and ninety-eight pages.
Later, a man named Aie Koichi, a labor leader—before him, many Infernals had already quietly crept into various government agencies—came to power and abolished several of those clauses. The regulations gradually became a dead letter.
“Gradually.” That word mattered. Because in places where nationalist sentiment ran high, the regulations had never truly died.
The community where Douglas Cromwell lived was one such place. Governor Quilla, chest full of medals, possessed a voice fit for speeches—the community under his rule welcomed no Infernals. The servants in their homes were mostly another kind of people.
The Furred.
No one had ever written two hundred and ninety-eight pages for the Furred in this book. They needed no regulations; they needed only a summons. Servants, cleaners, bottom-tier laborers at the mining sites—these positions were naturally left empty, waiting for them to fill. No one asked why. Just as no one asked why there were so many “species,” why humans were split into so many strata, each one notch shorter than the one above it.
These questions, like the Source Stone, had no answers.
III. The Man from the Garbage Heap
Hubery Phillip did not remember his parents.
The first image he remembered was trash. The trash heaps on the streets of Berlin, the smell of summer, flies. When he crawled out from that pile of trash, he was still an infant.
Sarah Phillip found him. An Infernal, a street cleaner in Berlin. She carried Hubery home.
But Berlin at that time did not allow Infernals to marry, let alone own children. And so Hubery had no official status before the age of eight. No household registration, no name, non-existent in any official record. He was a patch of shadow raised in secret by Sarah.
It was not until the policies loosened that he gained a household registration.
From a young age, Hubery displayed a gift: a photographic memory. What he loved reading most was The Complete History of the Human Alliance, several volumes thick enough to crush a man to death; he could memorize the historical events within after a single reading. At seventeen, he was admitted to the history department of Humboldt University of Berlin. It was a very old institution, so old that even the floor tiles in the corridors had been worn down by centuries of footprints.
What Hubery studied was not history, but government reports.
He believed implicitly in every government report. Whomever the government criticized, he criticized alongside it, complaining that the government’s criticism was not harsh enough and adding fuel to the fire. When the government said Douglas and Byrne were problematic, he depicted Douglas and Byrne as unforgivable villains. He felt this was right—everything the government did was for the people.
The local Infernals respected him greatly. Because in his report research, the very things he criticized most harshly were the parts of the regulations aimed at the Infernals.
Douglas did not respect him. Douglas called him the “white Infernal pig.”
A human, picked up from a garbage heap and raised by an Infernal street cleaner, grew up to be a scholar speaking for the Infernals, only to be called a pig by a human governor. That fact itself spoke louder than any government report. But Hubery did not believe in that. He believed in reports.
IV. Cheerful Air
September 9, 2553. Berlin. Hubery Phillip’s fortieth birthday.
Half of this banquet has already been told earlier—about Bruce Sinclair holding a wine glass and calling the Claude Engine trash; about Geoffrey Bray smiling and saying Claude was a scientific madman; about how, amid the hall full of laughter, no one mentioned that plastic bag.
That half was for Claude.
This half is for the people present.
The hall was filled with people. Only one was human—Hubery himself. The rest were all Infernals. Beneath the candlelight, pair after pair of red eyes glowed with a soft light.
Hubery stood up. The speakers around the room hummed briefly, and the hall fell silent.
“Today is my, Hubery Phillip’s, fortieth birthday.” His voice was not loud, but every word carried to the corners. “Everyone present is an elite of society. Regrettably, the former Governor Quilla, Mr. Douglas Cromwell, did not come. He said he caught a cold and found it inconvenient.”
He paused.
“I don’t believe him anyway. Does everyone believe him?”
“No!”
“Why mention him?” Bray shouted again, having drunk even more this time. “He’s just an extreme racist. Who present likes him?”
Laughter. Applause.
The Mayor of Berlin, Zhu Weichang, stood up as well. He was an Infernal.
“In the past,” Zhu Weichang raised his red wine glass, unable to suppress the smile in his voice, “we Infernals couldn’t enter politics, couldn’t even study. Now, am I not serving as mayor all the same?”
He shifted his tone, pointing his finger at Hubery.
“We must also thank Mr. Hubery. Without the bills he pushed forward, could we have reached where we are today?”
Thundering applause.
Just as the applause had yet to die down, the closed door was pushed open from the outside.
Aie Koichi stood at the doorway.
His temples were streaked with gray; his entire person had stepped into his twilight years. Yet his eyes still radiated the sharp glint of former days. Pair after pair of red eyes turned in unison to look at him.
The cheerful atmosphere was interrupted.
“I didn’t enter the wrong place, did I?” Aie Koichi asked awkwardly.
Hubery froze for a split second. He had not invited Aie Koichi. No one knew how Aie Koichi had obtained the address, or why he had appeared tonight. But Hubery was Hubery—he immediately burst into a smile.
“If it isn’t the former chairman of the Workers’ Association, Mr. Aie Koichi! Any visitor is a guest. Look at my memory, I forgot to reserve a seat for you.” He walked over, gave Aie Koichi a large embrace, supported him, and seated him in a corner of the hall.
The crowd’s gazes lingered on Aie Koichi for a moment, then slowly turned away.
“That was just a small interlude,” Hubery said with a grin. “Everyone, keep drinking.”
The hall was once again filled with cheerful air.
Epilogue · Red Eyes
No one knew why Aie Koichi came that night.
He was the grandson of Yuji Kamimura—the first East Asian to marry a Fire Fiend. He had been a labor leader and had abolished several pages of the regulations. Now, his temples streaked with gray, he was shown to a corner of the hall by a host who had not invited him.
While in the center of the hall, the lights were warm, the glasses bright, and the red eyes filled with smiles. A race that once could not study now had one of its own as mayor. An orphan without status was now surrounded by applause. A regulation of two hundred and ninety-eight pages was now a dead letter.
Everything looked splendid.
Only at the very bottom layer, the Furred were still sweeping the floor. No one had written regulations for them, and no one had ever thought to abolish anything for them. They were the kind of people who, even if things got better to the absolute limit, would never get a seat at the table.
And further down, legends spoke of other species. Some were written into classified files; others did not even have classified files.
The candles of the banquet burned halfway down. Cheerful air floated in the hall, floating on and on.
No one noticed that in the corner, the uninvited old man was watching, table by table, with his still-sharp eyes.
—End of Chapter Four.