The Last Day of the War, with Parrots

My hands will never move again. Jerith’s medi-bot works on them daily to stave off gangrene, but repair is out of the question; that has to wait till I get to a populated planet. The bot says a good med center might be able to cut off my arms at the elbows and put me in a tank till they grow back.

No one knows what to do with the others in our party, still marked by parrot blood. A week has passed, and the telepathy shows no signs of wearing off. One of the roadies tried to cut away his bloodstained skin with a knife, but he passed out before finishing the job. Now the medi-bot keeps him under sedation.

Sedatives are handed out freely these days — the bot can synthesize enough to keep everyone subdued until the rescue ship arrives. The ship is scheduled to land an hour after sunset tonight, and the Planet Protection Agency has a good record for punctuality.

They’ve reclassified Caproche as TPI: Total Permanent Interdiction. Jerith will have to start over, another dig, another planet. He says he doesn’t mind.

Jerith spends a few minutes with me every day... but with blood on his hands like everyone else, he mostly stays out in the wilds — a long way out, where he can’t hear anyone else’s thoughts.

I stay in camp, close to the medi-bot. It watches me and feeds me.

From time to time I catch sight of parrots, bright green and crimson, waddling across the dirt of the camp compound. I like to stroke their noses with my bandaged hands. When I do, the medi- bot stands beside me and whirs in disapproval.

It’s decided the parrots are dangerous.

Author’s Notes

A story from a woman’s point of view. People ask why I use female narrators so much. My answer is (a) I don’t use them any more often than I use male narrators, and (b) why shouldn’t I use female narrators, provided I’m not a jerk about it? To be sure, men often do lousy jobs of portraying women — but I have to believe that’s just sloppiness and inattention, not an inevitable fact of gender. I don’t accept that the only type of character I can legitimately write about is someone very much like myself... because frankly, I’m bored with middle-aged middle-class white men, and there are far too many of those guys in science fiction already.

Therefore, I resolved long ago that whenever I wrote about the future, I would show it containing just as many women as men, not to mention people of diverse cultural backgrounds, old, young, straight, gay, rich, poor, and every other variation I could make fit within the story’s logic. That’s the sort of future world I wouldn’t mind living to see.

One more thing about this story. It takes place in the League of Peoples universe, and readers who know about the League might be wondering how two groups of aliens could descend upon a planet and start waging war against each other. Isn’t that against the fundamental law of the League? Yes, it is; and someday, at the proper time, I may tell the story of what really happened on Caproche.