The first shot struck the joint at my raised elbow and I shrieked as I my arm hyperextended. A split-second later, a second shot struck the back of my knee and I toppled, as hundreds of other bolts buffeted my head, back, and chest. I collapsed onto the ground holding my arm in agonizing pain.
“Deploying!” I heard Marsten shout as a bolt struck the side of my head, blurring my vision. Rauder launched her firebomb into the sky even as I cried for her to stop. A chest-thumping thud reverberated in the air, and with the last of my strength, I pulled Adriassi flat and smothered his body with my own as we heard the second and third firebombs detonating.
The dust swirled in miniature tornadoes as the bombs sucked the oxygen from the air, then a white-hot bath of flame poured over us. Before the fog of pain enveloped me, I remember the flame finding the seared holes in my armor and scorching my flesh, and my voice joining with Adriassi’s, screaming.
I write this from an orbital infirmary, far away from planet ES-248QRT4T. The armor saved my life, but the firestorm branded me with third-degree burns: thick ropy scars down my arm and leg that will be with me forever. Had the plasma bolts opened a gap at my neck, I would be dead. Rauder’s armor was never breached and she walked away from the assault with only some severe bruising from the force of so many direct hits. They tell me Adriassi survived, albeit as a quadruple amputee. My body covered his head and vital organs but his exposed arms and legs were incinerated in the firestorm. Of course, there’s no way for me to contact him to apologize, to tell him how I wished things hadn’t turned out this way.
During Vok’s visit, she said some trade agreements on the far side of the galaxy had broken down and, as a result, the Confed has decided against using the planet as a refueling hub. The squad was being redeployed to some other far-off rock somewhere else, and Vok assured me that the replacement Xeno temporarily assigned to my squad is even more annoying than me.
All that remains, however, is the issue of my naming the planet. I have spent a considerable amount of my time laid up in bed researching options and have finally come to a decision. I’ve checked and the name hasn’t yet been registered for any other planet, so applying for naming rights is a formality. Besides, only a few people will ever remember this planet anyway.
Like many words, the one I have chosen has ancient roots, and it has spawned many other words during its continuous, circuitous evolution. Originally it meant the hearth, or the place of the fire; a few thousand years and dozens of permutations later, changing spelling and meaning, it signifies a black mark on the skin, a sign of damage by burning. I have decided that this insignificant place—a nothing rock in the corner of nowhere—deserves a name designating both fire and scars.
It will be named Eskhara, in remembrance of what happened there, the impact we had on those who would be our enemies, and on those who would be our friends.
THE ONE WITH THE INTERSTELLAR GROUP CONSCIOUSNESSES
by James Alan Gardner
James Alan Gardner is the author of several novels, including Expendable and the others in the League of Peoples series. His most recent book is Gravity Wells, a collection of his short fiction.
When he was first getting started as a writer, Gardner won the grand prize in the Writers of the Future contest, then went on to win two Aurora Awards (the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award), one of them for his story “Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream,” which was also a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
About this story, Gardner says that although the protagonist is somewhat unusual, deep down, he’s really just a lonely guy looking for love. Given that this lonely guy is, in fact, an entire interstellar society, you might say that this story is a romantic comedy of cosmic proportions.
One day, the Spinward Union of Democratic Lifeforms decided to seek a wife.
The Union was roughly two thousand years old—still young by the standards of galactic federations, but no longer a carefree adolescent. It had responsibilities: trade deals with other interstellar entities; mutual defense pacts; obligations to prevent supernovas and gamma ray bursters from blighting the neighborhood; and of course, a quadrillion component organisms who expected the Union to make possible their brief little lives.
[The organisms thought they ran the Union… and they did, in the same way that a body’s cells run the body. On a low level, each cell leads its individual life; but on a high level, an aggregate identity emerges, and the cells are minuscule parts of an overall system. The Union was the same: a conscious Zeitgeist made from the sum of its citizens… a regular guy who just happened to cover four hundred cubic parsecs.]
There was a time when the Union had felt free to go on benders. Wars, population explosions, unchecked economic binges—they’d seemed like harmless fun at the time. But after such bouts of wretched excess came hangovers lasting for decades. Ugh. Eventually, the Union was forced to admit that the wild reckless life had lost its charm. “I guess,” it said with a wistful sigh, “I’m ready to settle down.”
All that remained was to find the right partner: another interstellar entity who’d complete the Union’s life. An entity who was smart and fun to be with. An entity whose component orgs were carbon-based. (Some of the Union’s best friends were silicon-based, but still…) What the Union was looking for was an entity with its own natural resources, and ideally, a sharp new space fleet. And of course, an entity whose citizens were hot for interbreeding.
The Union’s first move was to talk to its roommate, the Digital Auxilosphere. Didge shared the same star systems and energy sources as the Union. They split the housekeeping between them: Didge did the Union’s number-crunching, while the Union handled Didge’s scut-work… chores that were better done by fungible meat-creatures than by delicate high-strung machines.
The Union always thought twice before talking to Didge about relationships—Didge sometimes went into logic-overdrive and picked apart the Union’s lifestyle. Still, Didge was close at hand, and the Union was accustomed to consulting with her on everything from financial calculations to gene-engineering experiments. When the Union had a problem, talking to Didge just came naturally.
“Uhh,” said the Union, “the thing is… lately I’ve been feeling… well, not feeling, but thinking… well, not thinking, but wondering…”
“Sure,” Didge said, “I can set you up.”
[If you must know the details, here’s what happened at street level. On any given block, on any given day, the Union’s citizens simply slogged through their lives—highs and lows, pleasure and pain, the ups and downs of existence. Like the individual atoms of a gas, people bounced and jostled against each other in chaotic disarray. But if you totaled up the haphazard motion, a cumulative order emerged: an overall direction of flow. Keep adding day by day, year by year, and you discovered a prevailing wind, constructed from seemingly erratic breezes.
The prevailing wind was the question, “Is this all there is?”—an anxiety that the Union was spinning its wheels. Diverse voices offered answers to the question—politicians and priests, artists and orators—but they only added wind to the gathering storm. While many individuals were perfectly content, the Union as a whole bridled restlessly.
When the clamor for “renewal” grew loud enough, members of the Union’s executive council appointed a subcommittee which spent eighteen months in hearings on A Plan for the Next Millennium. They produced a file of recommendations, one of which was to investigate the costs and benefits of contacting unknown civilizations for the purpose of “productive interaction.” Teams of scientists spent ten years constructing AI-driven sensors for determining where such civilizations might be found. After several more years of data gathering, the computers generated a list of “regions of interest” which could be reached without much new development in communications and transport.