James Gardner: Radiant

One has to admit it’s an elegant way to keep lesser beings in check. The League doesn’t directly govern humankind or the other alien species at our level of development. The League has no courts, no bureaucracies; it doesn’t tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. It simply kills anyone who isn’t sufficiently considerate of sentient life. The onus falls on us to intuit what the League will accept. We receive no hints or guidelines — we just get killed when we don’t do our best.

Which means every commercial product in the Technocracy is as safe as imperfect humans can make it. Also that human communities are built with the finest possible protections against fires, floods, etc. And that police forces are provided with all the facilities they need in order to apprehend criminals who might otherwise jeopardize innocent victims.

So, like Prince Gotama, people of the Technocracy are shielded from life’s cruel grind-wheel. The only exceptions are the few men and women whose duties take them outside the pleasure palace, to places that haven’t been "sanitized."

Men and women who land on unexplored planets.

Men and women called Explorers.

The navy’s Explorer Corps takes in freaks from every corner of the Technocracy. People who can die and not be missed. People whose messy demise won’t paralyze ship operations, or make normal-looking personnel think, "Someday I too will suffer and die."

Because if the person who dies has a weeping reeking cheek, those inside the pleasure palace are less likely to identify with the victim. When an Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl gets killed, the death won’t affect real people’s performance. Why should it? She wasn’t quite… quite. And the news services won’t report her decease to the world at large, because then they’d have to publish her picture.

Nothing hurts a newswire’s circulation figures like pictures of Explorers.

At least that’s what we were told in school. Even back then, I wondered if there might be more to it: if perhaps somebody in the back rooms of government or elsewhere recognized that the Technocracy’s pleasure palace culture was a dead end. Prince Gotama couldn’t achieve his potential until he walked away from his harem and feasts.

Could it be the Explorer Corps was intended to follow Gotama’s example? That we’d been sent down our difficult path because we alone were worthy? Or that the corps had been created for some as-yet-unrevealed purpose, and the popular belief that "ugly deaths don’t hurt morale" was simply a cover-up for the truth?

The pampered mobs in the pleasure palace were too weak to become wise. Only those marked by adversity — running sores, deformed jaws, bulging eyes, angry birthmarks — had the strength to become fully free. Perhaps the Explorer Corps had been created so there’d always be a few of us who weren’t sedate cattle. Perhaps some unknown bureaucrat, blessed with the stirrings of enlightenment, was offering Explorers the chance to Awaken.

Or was that wishful thinking? Given the stupidity displayed by people in power, why should I believe secret wisdom was at work? More likely, the Explorer Corps resulted from age-old hatreds against those who looked different, disguised as a branch of the navy because the League didn’t allow the outright slaughter of pariahs.

Or perhaps it was the ultimate deterrent to discourage bioengineering: don’t gene-splice your children, or we’ll force them to become Explorers.

Klesha [Sanskrit]: Poison. Used to describe any mental attitude that leads to disruptive fixations.

I graduated from the Explorer Academy four days after I turned nineteen. A week later, I was assigned to the frigate Pistachio. The name made me laugh when I heard it; but tradition dictated that all vessels in the Outward Fleet be named after Old Earth trees, and only big ships got majestic titles like Iron-wood or Sequoia. Little ships like ours (a crew of thirty-five plus a handful of cadets-in-training) had to settle for names of less grandeur… and just be thankful we weren’t Sassafras, Kumquat, or Gum.

For two months after my arrival, I did nothing except "button-polishing" — the mundane chores required to keep my equipment in top condition. Pistachio didn’t have anything else for me to do. Explorers on a starship filled the same niche as marines on old seagoing boats: while the regular crew ran the ship, we did whatever else was necessary. Landing on hostile planets. Boarding civilian craft suspected of breaking safety regulations. Helping to evacuate vessels in distress.

But Pistachio never had any such missions. We were just a utility ship, running straightforward errands in the tamest regions of space — mostly transporting personnel and materials. Pistachio’s uninspiring work never demanded an Explorer’s specialized skills. Therefore, I idled away my days like a firefighter in monsoon season, filling the time with preventive maintenance: inspecting the tightsuits we’d use for landings, calibrating my Bumbler (an all-purpose scanning/analysis device), checking the charge in my stun-pistol, and generally inventing work to keep myself from self-destructive boredom.

Despite years of rejection and being an Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl, I was still "unskillful" at finding things to do on my own. In the Academy, I’d had classwork every waking moment. I’d also had fellow students who knew how it felt to watch pleasure-palace people reel away from you in disgust. On Pistachio, however, I’d entered a social vacuum with no friends and no pressing duties. No mother to fight with. No coping skills.

I thought I would die from loneliness — not the sharp, aching kind but the dull, ongoing blur. It can feel like fatigue that never goes away; it can feel like dissatisfaction with everything around you; it can even feel like lust, as you lie alone in the dark and pretend someone else is there.

But it’s loneliness. Deep, helpless, hopeless.

I tried to clear my head with meditation, but never managed more than half an hour at a sitting. Not nearly enough to ease my restlessness. If I’d been back home, I’d have asked a spiritual master what I was doing wrong… but no one on Pistachio could help me, and I certainly couldn’t help myself.

I found myself prowling the ship corridors at night, hoping something would happen. The engines exploding. Falling in love. Having a mystic vision. Getting a nice piece of mail.

Now and then, I contemplated becoming a drunk or nymphomaniac. Wasn’t it traditional for bored, lonely people to plunge into petty vice? But that was more Western than Eastern; when Bamars went stir-crazy, they usually shaved their heads, stopped bathing, and starved themselves into oblivion. Which I might have done, except that head-shaving, etc. were favorite tricks of my mother when she wasn’t getting enough attention. I swore I wouldn’t go that route.

For a while, I tried to exhaust myself dancing: in my cabin, in the Explorer equipment rooms, in the corridors when I was alone. But every place on Pistachio felt cramped, except a few big areas like the transport bay, which always had people around. I couldn’t bring myself to dance with regular crew members watching. Anyway, I hadn’t danced much since I’d entered the Explorer Academy. My ballet was rusty, my flamenco lacked rhythm, my yein pwe had no grace, my derv just made me dizzy, and my freestyle… every time I started something loose and sinewy I ended up as tight as wire — stamping my feet and shedding hot tears, though I couldn’t say what I was crying about.

Maybe I cried because I’d lost the flow. Once upon a time, I’d had the potential to be a dancer. Now I’d never be anything but an Explorer.