Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

ὡς τρὶς ἂν παρ᾽ ἀσπίδα στῆναι θέλοιμ᾽ ἂν μᾶλλον ἢ τεκεῖν ἅπαξ. I would rather stand three times in the battle line than give birth to one child. —Euripides, Medea

After the hell-din of the Wisdom, the single shot had a strangely muted sound. Mags’s body fell awkwardly sideways between Avi and Kyr. Somewhere unimportant Yiso was still keening for the deaths of thousands of worlds. Kyr went on her knees. She turned Mags over. He was heavy. She thought of the Medical sergeant with tired eyes. First aid. The entry wound was a small hole in her brother’s temple, and the exit wound had torn away a good chunk of the side of his face. He was dead, of course. Of course he was dead. On Gaea Kyr hadn’t even known he was unhappy. It was bizarre that she hadn’t known. She could see the shape of Mags’s unhappiness now cloaked in everything he’d said to her for years. She pulled him into her lap. He was still dead. No use being childish about it. A person with that much of their head missing was certainly dead.

The government of Earth and its colonies—formally known as the Terran Federation, less formally as Magna Terra, Earth the Great—is a self-described democracy. Outsiders, and some human dissidents, consider this an empty label; although human government includes democratic elements (indeed it is hard to find times when humans are not voting for something) these are, by and large, window dressing. Democratically elected local councils hold almost no power, and the various parliaments and congresses of the colonies are advisory bodies, not real legislative assemblies. Earth’s own chief assembly is famously ineffectual. The fact that some important decisions (such as, for example, the initial declaration of war against the majoda) are left to mass plebiscite should not be taken as evidence of democratic rule. Humans themselves will cynically point out that no popular vote is ever taken unless those in power already know what the answer will be. The actual operation of power in Magna Terra is best described as a militarized technocratic oligarchy with elements of authoritarian populism: or, as one human historian puts it, a dreadful international compromise that pleases no one. It is an accepted truism that nothing would ever have persuaded the infamously tribal human race to unite except the specter of an alien threat. On Earth proper, the Terran Federation must still maintain a light touch in order to avoid offending the powerful nation-states, which continue to wield outsize...

Kyr thought about calling Lisa before they left, but what would she say? Hi, I liked kissing you, but for complicated reasons I need to run away and commit crimes, sorry. Also, in another universe I failed you in every possible way and never even noticed, so it’s weird now. Bye!

What a waste it was, what a terrible waste, to take a person who dreamed cities and gardens and enormous shining skies and teach him that the only answer to an unanswerable suffering was slaughter.