The Dominant Species
16

I had my first meeting as a queen with my advisors. Their names were Brianna, Luther and Henry. I liked Luther more because he was open-minded and he had never made things hard for me and my parents. Brianna and Henry were equally skilled when it came to politics, but they were stubborn and they didn’t accept new ideas. My parents had considered replacing them twice, but they had to admit all three of their advisors were the best they could replace. And they always wanted what was best for the people, even if their ideas were different from our own.

I was nervous, but I did my best to hide it. I told myself there was a chance I could get through this meeting. We all sat down and started talking about the first issue.

“I have spoken to the human prince again,” I began. “He says he would like to have the land we were going to build on so that humans could have a safe place to live. There are creatures on land that are terrorizing the humans and killing them.”

“We don’t know much about the humans,” Brianna argued. “So I don’t see why we should give them what they want.”

“We should stay away from them,” Henry said.

“Why?” I asked.

“We’ve never met anything that could talk and think and build civilizations like we do,” Brianna reminded us. “They could harm us.”

“We don’t know them,” I argued. “We might be able to benefit each other.”

“We should approach humans more carefully than any other creature we’ve faced because they are clearly different,” Luther said.

“That doesn’t make them bad or dangerous,” I told everyone.

“I agree,” Luther said. “And if they’re going to be our allies, we might have to give the humans what they’re asking for.”

“I agree,” I said, relieved. “We can afford it and we would gain allies.”

“We should think of merpeople first,” Brianna said. “Humans aren’t as powerful as we are. They can’t stand up to us or declare war.”

I didn’t like the idea of denying someone something just because they couldn’t do anything about it. We had many meetings about this. I argued that I didn’t want to deny humans what they wanted because I wanted to establish a peaceful relationship with them.

Next, we talked about which merpeople needed jobs. Or which merpeople needed new jobs. It has been the law with every merpeople city in the world that everyone has to have a job or work within the home. Ironically, some people had the job of checking on everyone in the city once a month and making a list of those who didn’t work. One of my responsibilities was to make sure everyone had a job. I read the names on the list and made a list of all the vacancies I knew about, including anything we needed at the castle.

Merpeople have figured out centuries ago that if everyone worked, it would help us develop and stay civilized. This rule hasn’t always been around, which caused some problems because some people didn’t work. Lots of merpeople thought it was unfair that they had to work when others didn’t. Eventually, that was a huge setback for our cultures. It set us back several decades. So, centuries ago, a king came up with this law and started enforcing it. He wasn’t entirely successful during his time because it was still new, but other monarchs took it from there. Over the next few decades everyone had a job.