Expendable - James Alan Gardner [1]
But if the victim was not so popular, not so well-liked, and above all, ugly…well, bad things happen, but we all have to carry on.
No one knows exactly when the High Council solidified this fact of human behavior into definite policy. In time, however, the Explorer Corps evolved from a group of healthy, bright-eyed volunteers into…something less photogenic.
Potential recruits were flagged at birth. The flawed. The ugly. The strange. If a child’s physical problems were truly disabling, or if the child didn’t have the intelligence or strength of will to make a good Explorer, the full power of modern medicine would be unleashed to correct every impediment to normality. But if the child combined ability and expendability in a single package—if the child was smart and fit enough to handle the demands of Exploration, but different enough to be less real than a normal person…
…there was an Explorer’s black uniform in that child’s future.
My Class
As I record this, I have in front of me a picture of my class at the Academy. In the first row are the ones with problems the camera does not reveal: Thomas, the stammerer; Ferragamo, the man whose voice did not change at puberty; my roommate, Ullis Naar, who usually blinked convulsively every two seconds but managed to keep her eyes open for this photo; Ghent, loudly flatulent…yes, what a joke, who could take Ghent seriously? Not his crewmates when Ghent was flayed alive by savages during a first contact. A few days of superficial mourning, and then his shipmates forgot him.
The system worked.
Back to the photo. One row of visually acceptable Explorers, and behind them the rest of us: pop-eyed, three-fingered, obese, deformed. No one in the back rows smiled for this picture. Most tried to hide behind the heads of those in front.
What unthinking Director of Protocol demanded that we pose for such a photo? I’d always been told (in smug, self-congratulatory tones) that our society had progressed beyond the days of the freak show.
The majority of my graduating class could have been cured by modern medicine. We all knew it. Which of us hadn’t jacked into a medical library and pored through the texts describing our conditions? Which of us didn’t know the names of at least five techniques to make us into more-normal human beings? Yet those remedies did not exist for us. The Admiralty had a vested interest in keeping us repugnant. As long as we stayed as we were, no one lost sleep over sending us on dangerous missions.
Admirals need their sleep in order to make enlightened judgments.
My Dutles
My most time-consuming duty was to review reports from other Explorers. The latest files were transmitted to our shipboard computer every day and stored on bubble till I went over them. Most of the time, the reports were simply copies of the running commentaries all Explorers gave when landing on an unfamiliar planet.
(Upon graduation, Explorers were fitted with permanent throat transceivers that transmitted continuously on planet-down missions. The transceivers were quite visible if you looked closely; but no one worried about a lump on the neck ruining an Explorer’s appearance.)
Some of the transcripts I listened to ended abruptly. We called those transcripts “Oh Shits” because the Explorers often said, “Oh shit,” just before their throat mikes went dead. You always wondered what they saw just before they stopped transmitting. You seldom found out.
“Oh Shit” reports weren’t marked in any special way. Whenever I audited the log of someone I knew from the Academy, I wondered if it would end in “Oh Shit.” An absent voice spoke in the quiet of my quarters and I never knew if the next word would be the last. Sometimes I listened to blank silence for half an hour, not wanting to believe that the report had ended.
The Admiralty never listed Explorers as dead. We were simply Lost…like old shoes that might turn up in spring housecleaning. In private. Explorers used a different expression: we talked about our friends Going Oh Shit.