Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

That made the situation seem more real. I had had my chances to leave this assignment a dozen times, and yet I never had. When they told me I could go, I just found that—I couldn’t. Of all of the things to fall in love with, this hostile, bitter rock was not the one I expected.

“It has been a pleasure to serve with each of you.” I could see the tears filming his eyes, but his voice showed no sign of them. “And wherever we go on this day, may the Force be with us.”

—

I wasn’t born to fight. I never ached to feel like a blaster was an extension of my body. And while my friends went to the Incom/Subpro air shows, I was only ever annoyed by the screeching of X-wings or Headhunters ripping open the sky. That doesn’t mean that I don’t know the difference between a Z-95 AF4 and a Z-95 AF4-H. I still lived in an Incom company town, and even if you weren’t interested in starfighters, they were still the basis of our economy and our culture.

I understand that I’m the weird one. It would make sense, growing up surrounded by both classics and fresh-off-the-line starfighters and speeders, that you would imagine yourself becoming a pilot. The problem was, when I surveyed my homeworld, starfighters looked clumsy and brutish compared with even the ugliest, lumbering sand slug or the most garish, invasive mynock. The complexity of nature far surpasses the most marvelous of human engineering. An ecosystem leaning on itself into a structure so magnificent that it can never be fully understood is a force so great that it both tears and lifts me.

This is the only thing I’ve ever been able to imagine when I heard stories of the Force. I’ve never felt it, but I can see all of the folds and crevices where it must hide.

Growing up, my classmates thought the only thing a mynock could possibly be good for was eating…if you’d already eaten all the sand slugs. But the first time I watched an organic animal actually suckling electricity from a landspeeder, I ran to my teachers and asked every one I could if a living animal could actually sustain itself on electricity.

The good news was, even in an Incom company town, there was a need for all kinds of folks, and a kid with exceptional interests got exceptional attention. If I was just another kid jockeying to be a pilot, I’d’ve had to compete with nearly everyone else. Studying biology and ecology, on the other hand—I knew more than most of my teachers by the time I was fifteen. That wasn’t saying much, as our schools focused almost entirely on engineering, tactics, and galactic history.

I actually managed to not be mocked for my enthusiasms, though I am aware that this was entirely because of my parents, who were both high-level executives at Incom. Every kid in my school was told to kiss up to me because every one of their parents wanted a promotion. And my parents didn’t mind my interests, either. The instability of the Clone Wars had been good for Incom, but bad for pilots, and if I didn’t show interest in dying in a cockpit, they weren’t going to push me.

Somehow I managed to get into a Core world university, on Corellia, actually. I was immediately out of my depth, but in a beautiful way. There was so much to know, and now I was among people who actually wanted to know it. I expected to be treated well, so people treated me well. I never stopped being disoriented by big cities, but this was less about the people and more about how hard it was to get back someplace that felt real and not manufactured.

The Republic dissolved when I was a teen, and the Empire—well, it seemed bad. But I told myself that, regardless of who was in power, the world needed people studying sand slug physiology because they were far better at absorbing and retaining water than any system devised by even the most innovative moisture farmers.

Yes, occasionally I’d hear rumblings that a mining colony was simply wiped out because the laborers tried to organize, or that the Empire was supporting slavers operating on the Outer Rim. But I had a bench full of slugs that needed watching, and every day I was discovering things that literally no one had ever known before. It was exciting, and I was proud of my work.

And then…Alderaan. No one could equivocate or lie or cover up Alderaan. There’s a moment when you can’t sit back and watch anymore, and if it wasn’t Alderaan, it was never. It broke me. I could no longer work, I could no longer think.

There were many days in my life when you could say I became an adult, but that was the day I grew up.

I was on the next transport back to the Rim.

NOTES ON THE DESERT SAND SLUG

There isn’t much that makes less sense to the average naturalist than the desert-dwelling sand slug. This little beast, striped dark and light blue, almost like a tropical flower, is covered in wet, sticky mucus. But why? Why would any organism in the desert be so cavalier with its water use as to literally keep it evaporating on its skin? More important, where did this water come from?

Possibly unsurprisingly, not many people had cared to spend much time observing these creatures. They are beautiful, if slugs can be beautiful, and I believe they can. But more beautiful than their striking appearance is their mere existence. And I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

So, armed with nothing more than a stick and a tank, I did what any young naturalist would. I snagged one and put it in a terrarium. I was not prepared for what I found next.

At twelve hours, the slug had dug beneath the surface of the sand, hardened, and lost all color, appearing to be nothing more than a dark brown pebble.

This was nothing compared with the next transformation.

The little seed of the slug then began to extend tendrils out from its body—thin, hairlike filaments that stretched, by thirty-six hours, up to fifteen centimeters away from the slug. At seventy-two hours, these filaments spidered through the entire tank, and the seed of the slug had shrunk from three centimeters across to a mere fifty millimeters! The slug’s body was almost entirely in those filaments!

On a whim, I then poured a cup of water onto the bare sand of my terrarium. Over the course of only three hours, the filaments had retracted, and the slug was happily slugging over the once-more-parched sand.

—

I never wondered what good I might be to the Rebellion, because I never questioned the worth of my work. I couldn’t shoot a bantha from five paces, but if you wanted to exist anywhere outside of deep space, you needed to understand the organisms you’d be living alongside. You needed to understand them because they could help you and also because they could kill you.

My homeworld was, by this point, full of rebel contacts sourcing parts for their secondhand snubfighters, so it wasn’t hard to say a few words to the right people before my potential utility was recognized.

In a matter of months, I was having my first briefing.

Every briefing was done in a small group. A geologist, an ecologist (me), a meteorologist, two soldiers, and a commander.

Somehow, no one groaned when General Jan Dodonna told us about our candidate planet in his confident, no-nonsense voice.

“Candidate Nineteen Point Two is an iceball planet in an actively forming solar system. It’s treacherous. Constant meteorite impacts create thermal signatures that would make it easier to hide. However, it will be difficult to survive. It is frozen from equator to pole, with glaciers covering the majority of the surface of the planet.”

Ryssle, the meteorologist, spoke then. “Water glaciers?”

“Yes,” the general replied.

“But that would mean snow, which would mean water was evaporating somewhere,” she told him.

“I am not a scientist, I’m telling you what we know. Your job is to solve exactly that kind of mystery. The other thing we suspect is that there are predators, big ones.” This took me aback. There was no way an iceball planet would have the ecology necessary to support an apex predator. I wasn’t going to mention it to the general, but my interest in this mission had gone from Well, maybe I’ll get to see some interesting lichen, to I need to get to this planet right now.