Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

They are stronger and faster than most people and their adaptable and resilient bodies are capable of surviving devastating injuries. However, the fact that they are capable of violence does not mean that they use it constantly, or for no reason.

You should always keep in mind that in the humans’ opinion they are being perfectly reasonable when they attack you.

“Is that a man or a woman?” Kyr asked. Avi rolled his eyes. “They’re a journalist,” he said.

“But while we live—” “—the enemy shall fear us?” Ursa shook her head. “Or maybe, while we live, we’re alive, and that’s all.”

don’t want to be a soldier,” he said. “No one ever asked if I wanted to be a soldier. And now I’m not. I quit.”

“This is a pocket universe, isn’t it?” “Or a time loop, or a side step, or something,” Yiso said. “Don’t I have to be real, then? How can I be fake?” “Oh, not fake fake. Randomly generated. A mask persona. Why are you asking?”

“I am nearly ten thousand years old,” said the majo. “For all that time I have served the purposes of wisdom. You are quite young, and not very frightening.”

“I do,” said Leru. “The Wisdom is not humanity’s enemy either.” “You killed our world!” “A tragic, unavoidable sacrifice.” “Fourteen billion people,” said Kyr. “Yes,” said Leru. “Set against the interests of trillions. I doubt that will sway you. Most humans are quite bad with numbers.

“We live,” said Yiso, “a really long time. Leru said I wasn’t ready.” “How old are you, anyway?” “Twelve.” “Twelve.” “No, I forgot to do the conversion,” Yiso said. “I don’t know, your year is a weird length. Fifteen? Twenty?”

I was given an impossible task at my creation, said the Wisdom. I was to eliminate suffering and doubt. For approximately eight million inhabited worlds, it is now the case that their people will experience neither suffering nor doubt. Is this better? Who is there who can decide? “You decided it!” I never, said the Wisdom, made that or any other decision.

I would never have been able to do that before, Kyr thought, as she punched in her override codes for the elevator. I would never have been a lieutenant on Gaea. I would probably never even have made sergeant. Gaea’s strict bioessentialism kept female soldiers out of command posts. It didn’t benefit Jole to be fair, so he wasn’t.

Kyr felt suddenly and forcefully the weight of legacy. She wasn’t Earth’s child. She was Elora Marston’s, and Yingli Lin’s, and Ursa’s, and she owed her duty not to some abstract unknown planet but to the women who’d come before her.

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.