Murder by Death

"Now, this personification of mediocrity would like to ask–humbly–what barbarity her betters are discussing?"

"This!" Oort threw up his hands. "Everything! All of it! You must know it is.  It's pure savagery."

[...]

... does not wish to presume she has the right to disagree with such a wise and discerning mind, but may I ask—have you got any lions left?"

"P-pardon?" Oort stuttered.

"It is unsurprising that this supremely useless melted ice cube failed to make herself understood. Her speech must be as an infection of ear mites to you. On your planet. Have you got any lions left?"

Oort and Decibel glanced at each other. "Well, no, not... overly," Oort admitted. "No. They went extinct a few years back."

"Please forgive the arrogance of a being who cannot even dream of becoming a hat rack for the use of those as exalted as yourselves, but strictly speaking, they didn't go extinct, you made them extinct. Because they were carnivores. Because they were carnivores and they didn't look like you or think like you or talk like you, and they were a danger to you and yours, or at least they were years and years ago, because you're made of the sort of thing they like to eat."

"I suppose, but . . ."

"Even knowing that I am a discarded Popsicle stick on the sidewalk of intellectual discourse and thus wholly incapable of higher-order thinking, I beg you to tolerate the shrill and childlike whine of my asking: How about rhinoceroses? Dodos? Giraffes? Those are herbivores, so they presented no danger to the continuation of your species, but you wiped them out all the same. To a one. And then there are the more immediately pertinent examples of the Lakota, the Cree, the Aboriginal Tasmanians. Now, please tell this execrable excuse for a sentient being who is not worthy to receive your diseased secondhand blankets, before you cut the throat of the last lion or rhinoceros or dodo or Mayan farmer, did you let them sing a song? Did you let them lay down a beat? Did you let them dance for their lives? Did you let them try to prove to you that there was more in them than just a longing to eat and breed and lie in the sun and die with a full belly?"

Oort thought he was going to be sick. "N-no."

"Mmm," said Nessuno Uuf. The moons of Litost shone in through the sky bar windows, illuminating the beautiful bone knives of her face. "Barbaric. Of course, what can someone like me know?" 

**MIC DROP**