Radiant

love of irony.

It’s no challenge to create a baby who’s intelligent, robust, and exquisite. The technology is well established. Building better babies has always been the driving force behind bioengineering, even if proponents pretend otherwise. Since the earliest days of gene-splicing, scientists have muttered about 'improving agricultural stock' or 'facilitating medical research,' but those are just side issues. The primary target was and is the production of superbabies; any other result is a lucky offshoot. Never mind that manufacturing uberchildren has been banned for five hundred years. Laws or no laws, money continues to change hands to create gifted progeny who’ll outshine their peers. DNA technicians have all the equipment and expertise needed to produce smart, athletic, attractive offspring…

…provided one keeps to conventional notions of brainpower, fitness, and beauty. That’s what the black market does well. If, on the other hand, you make a special order — such as yellow-white streaks in specific regions of a little girl’s face — then the gene-engineers have to improvise.

They have to try untested genes and histones. They have to wing it.

Therefore:

I was born adequately bright. In the ninety-ninth percentile of human intelligence.

I was born an adequate physical specimen. Small but strong. Thin but not scrawny. By my teen years, I excelled at five forms of solo dance. I even performed, to great acclaim… at least in Anicca’s yein pwe dances, where all the dancers wore masks.

I had to wear a mask because I was not born adequately beautiful. My hair was black and lustrous, my skin resembled feather-soft silk, and my body had tastefully generous curves. But I was still an Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl.

Sometime before birth, the yellow-white pigments intended to adorn my face congealed into a single palm-sized blob glaring from my left cheek. A leprous puckered livid spongelike weeping mass of tissue.

Mostly, it wept a thin, oily ooze. If I told gawking strangers the fluid was just sweat, they said they believed me. But it wasn’t sweat. I obsessively studied biochemistry till I could determine the fluid’s exact chemical composition… then obsessively fell into the habit of listing those chemicals under my breath, reciting their names like a chant that could drive away demons. (I’d recite them for you now, but I’ve given up being neurotic.)

The fluid from my cheek stank of gangrenous pus. At least it did to me. Others assured me they couldn’t smell a thing, so perhaps I just imagined the stench. A psychosomatic olfactory delusion. It’s possible.

It’s also possible people were lying when they said there was no putrid reek of necrosis. I accused them of that many times, shrieking, 'Admit it, admit it, admit it!'

As I’ve said, I was more emotional back then. Subject to outbursts.

Occasionally, when I was under stress or drank too much caffeine, my cheek wept blood. I still told people the fluid was sweat; then I glared, daring anyone to contradict me.

Few did.

Inevitably, my face drew the attention of the Explorer Corps. Explorers are 'brave volunteers' — draftees — whom the navy sends into unknown situations. Or into known situations that are too damned dangerous for unblemished personnel.

Explorers are expendable. If someone has to die, let it be an Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl. Otherwise, there might be repercussions. Measurable drops in morale and productivity.

In Explorer Academy, we were forced to read studies that showed just how badly navy personnel reacted to the death of normal or attractive-looking crew members. Performance ratings plummeted; clinical depression became rampant; people on duty made serious mistakes from shock and grief. Why? Because modern society resembles a character from Bamar sacred stories… a young prince named Gotama. The prince was brought up by his royal father in a luxurious pleasure palace where he was kept unaware of old age, disease, and death. He grew up knowing only the joys of his harem, and parties and feasts and games. But the gods refused to let Gotama waste his life in superficialities. Through trickery, they showed him the ugly truths his father had concealed. When Gotama finally learned that the world had a dark side, he was devastated — affected so deeply that the experience set him on the road to enlightenment. Prince Gotama became a Buddha: our Buddha, the most recent in a long line of Awakened teachers who’ve pointed the way to wisdom.

But normal Technocracy citizens aren’t ready for Buddhahood. They’re not emotionally equipped to leave the pleasure palace. When confronted with anything that suggests their own mortality, they don’t get stronger — they crumple.

They’ve never learned to live with untimely death. How could they? Old age has been alleviated by YouthBoost treatments. Disease can almost always be cured. As for fatal accidents, they’re virtually nonexistent thanks to the League of Peoples. The League, headed by aliens billions of years more advanced than Homo sapiens, regards willful negligence as equivalent to deliberate homicide; and the League never hesitates to punish those responsible. If, for example, a corporate executive approves the design for a vehicle, or a body implant, or a nanopesticide that hasn’t been sufficiently tested for safety — sufficient to satisfy the League, not just human inspectors — the negligent executive will be exterminated the next time he or she enters interstellar space. It doesn’t matter if the product is safe; failing to test it thoroughly shows callous indifference toward the lives of others. Therefore, the League considers the culprit a 'dangerous nonsentient creature'… and the League instantly kills any dangerous nonsentients attempting to leave their home star systems. There’s no escape, no appeal, and no sentence but summary execution.

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.

CHAPTER 2

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.