you," Too said in a tenor voice, "if you pass the exam, humans will formally join the galactic community. Others wise, it will be in a few hundred years; another of your race, same exam."
"What?" Deri said, "such a decision... only one human... it's crazy!"
"I understand. But maybe not, maybe they know what they do."
Deri shook his head for a long time. It seemed impossible for him to have to be the sample for something so huge, that this depended on a test run by a single individual.
"What kind of exam is that?" Deri asked "physical? Mental? ..."
Too admitted he did not know.
"Okay," Deri said, "maybe this galactic community is not that good. So far we human got along without it, we can continue."
"Really?" the Uzhi said "I've tried to think so, when they told me. Then I found out the data."
Deri did not really want to know them, but Too went on.
"Of one hundred non-admitted races, sixty self-destroyed before the next examination. Thirty became extinct natural ally, leaving their planet in the hands of other rising intelligences. Four contested the verdict, indulging in unjustified violence, with endless suffering for everyone. There are also noble examples, though. One species has passed the examination at the third try, after seven thousand years of cultural development. Today it is almost gone; it sacrificed its existence by intervening in a war that threatened to destroy hundreds of billions of immature and wild beings. Today, those beings are among the most civilized in the community, a success come at a high price."
The Uzhi approached the human waving his fan.
"Deri. Intelligent beings left to themselves degrade. Is your species different? Is it... stable, balanced? If it is, you're lucky. There are fortunate races, I've known some. There are some of their members on board. Even them are here for the exam."
Too stood up and walked towards the door. He opened it.
"Deri, there's another thing I have to say. You will not like it," the Uzhi said.
The man stood up, he had not liked anything of what the other had told him so far.
"The community needs time to absorb new races. It can not accept all those who get sufficient results at the exam."
"A limited number" Deri murmured.
"Pre cisely," the Uzhi agreed.
"How many?"
"The best twenty, no more."
So the Uzhi and him were competing for those few places. At least, they seemed a few, if he understood correctly the nuances in Too's voice.
"How many will we be, at the exam?" Deri asked.
Too was at the door, carefully swivelling his big tail between the jambs.
"I do not know. I know the classroom. It's huge."
Too made a sort of farewell pirouette and left through the dimly lit corridor. Deri watched him disappear into the darkness.
4.
Deri continued to re-enact the events which had taken him there, again and again. It seemed to him the only way to convince himself that everything he was experiencing was real. After the fourth time he had enough, though, it was becoming an obsession, and he felt that it wasn't doing good to his already delicate mental balance. So he tried to interrupt yet another review and focus on the present time.
He mechanically smoothed his clothes, wrinkled after the night spent in the hammock. The pofriria had woken him just a few minutes earlier and he had her help him using the merchandise in the room. Unfortunately he had not enjoyed a great privacy. He had had to provide the useful urea again, but had managed to convince the alien to bring him something to eat while he was filling the big mug with pee. The pofriria was fascinated by the use of the human mouth: she did not miss a single crumb of the horrible solid agglomerate that Deri was crunching on.
"Examination. Now," the cadet said after he had finished.
"Now? Are we late?" Deri asked.
The meal had requested him some effort, that food was sinewy as raw meat and hard to swallow as glued coconut pulp.
"Examination not timed. Time does not matter."
The pofriria guided him in the corridors of the ship until they reached a very wide, locked door.
"Quiet now. Many different beings in there," the pofriria chided.
"Okay," Deri said, "I am calm."
Actually his legs were shaking, but not for the other examinees, the tension for such an important exam absorbed all the attention of his nervous system. He hadn't slept well that night. When he had managed to fall asleep, by counting pofriri instead of sheep, he had dreamed of the most sensational rejection and of a bitter return to the Earth. His human brethren had punished him harshly: with a permanent examination for the rest of his life, thick interrogations and written tests, sour reports of the giant Uzhi dean, reprimands and confinements behind the blackboard. The wake-up call of the pofriria cadet had been very welcome.
The door opened slowly. Deri peeked inside with half an eye. A lecture hall or so, with seats distributed unevenly in tiers and often placed at a considerable distance from one another. Here and there a number of candidates, each in their niche. Deri was perplexed. As the door opened up he saw more and more, but he didn't even begin to see the end of the classroom. The tiers followed each other going up, more or less indefinitely. In the lower part, the area of the teacher desk had no teacher desk. In its place there was a huge semicircular space in which several pofriri dressed in long gowns stationed. They seemed to be waiting for something, standing. Some were manipulating various instruments around other immobile beings, apparently lying on stretchers, curled on high-backed chairs, floating on multicoloured fluids or simply lying on the ground.
"What happened to them?" Deri asked the cadet.
"First aid" the pofriria said dryly.
"Hard examination, uh?" Deri said, nervously.
The pofriria turned to him and nodded.
"Yeess. Health care necesary, sometimes."
It seemed that the pofriri knew a lot about the physiology of the various races, they were the only ones around the unfortunate people. A sort of tank with four arms suddenly recovered, pushed the doctors away with slow gestures and regained control of himself. He began to walk awkwardly; doctors were so tightly around him that Deri could not see what he stood on the ground with. The pofriri did not seem in trouble even with beings accustomed to lesser gravity; there were brightly lit areas in which some porfiri physicians almost floated, moving cautiously to help the injured. The cadet lead Deri under the tiers, to the entrance of the lifts. There were of all sizes. The cadet stood in front of the seemingly more reasonable one and opened the doors. They entered. There was a strange, musty smell, but otherwise it wasn't too different from Earth elevators, except that it was made of wood and the walls were luminescent. But there was no artificial lighting system inside.
"Bacteria" the pofriria explained concisely "they feed on the sweat of many species."
"Mine too, for sure" Deri thought.
Tension had made a knot in his stomach, his forehead was beaded like after a long run. Deri tried to control his breathing.
The lift started smoothly, the man kept his eyes closed until, after about twenty seconds, the elevator stopped at destination. The cadet and the human exited to the tier and walked for a few minutes. Deri looked around, puzzled. He was very far from the door of the hall, the elevator had moved vertically, sure, but also horizontally.
Deri walked along a large basin in which a translucent, semi-transparent body of indefinite shape was moving. The creature had a small object in front of it, a sort of display on which small, contorted symbols appeared each time it squeaked with who knew what kind of apparatus. Twenty yards beyond, a magnificent cascade of blue-green froth flowed continuously, like a pool of spring water, soapy and fluid, permanently coming out from a common student desk. It squirted scented bubbles which systematically exploded without any sound; the perfumes were a great deal, sometimes marvellous, sometimes disgusting. But they only lasted for a moment. A plaque above the desk converted th
e aromas in the same symbols made by the water creature.
Finally they arrived. Nothing more than a small wooden desk with an austere seat. The pofriria stood beside the bench.
"There," she said "sit. Wait."
Just the time to settle in his place and Deri was alone, in less than no time the cadet had gone again.
Deri looked around. He could only see a part of the room from there, but it seemed that the seats around him were mostly empty. Even so, he could easily count a few hundred examinees. Apparently it was a written test, or something that, for the majority of participants, resembled a written test. The surface of his desk was slightly bright and, leaning on a groove on one side, there was something that definitely looked like a pencil, wooden and with a pointed core of graphite. Deri grabbed it and tried to write on his finger, but it didn't write at all. It looked like a pencil, but it was not. He focused on the desktop. It seemed to be divided into two uneven parts, one larger in front of him, in the centre, the other on a side, with some abstract symbol painted on the top line. Deri touched the writings. They seemed raised, but weren't. His touch, though, awakened the desk.
"Welcome," it said, with perfect pronunciation in the human language. The voice came from somewhere, but Deri could not understand where exactly. "welcome. This is the exam for admission to the galactic community. Please pay attention to the instructions that follow."
A few seconds passed without the desk saying anything more. Deri had been pretty stressed over the