Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

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.

These dialects range from the unusually pronounced but largely comprehensible (International Business English and its ancestor “US” or “American” English) to the utterly strange (this author once found themselves at a gathering of individuals who spoke principally in an ancient dialect called “Scots”).

This twist of fate is unsurprising to students of human history. Since language and identity are closely intertwined in human culture, a society seeking to eradicate individual cultural identities and histories in favor of a fictitious pan-Terran “cause” must begin by robbing its people of their languages.

“I think Commander Jole hurt my sister,” said Kyr. It was like throwing herself into cold water in a polar scenario; it didn’t hurt less if you hesitated. “Hurt?” said Avi, distant and delicate, as if he were picking up the word with a pair of tweezers to examine it.

What would peace look like? Many have wrestled with the question. Perhaps it can be enforced? Empires have prided themselves on being peace-bringers and peacekeepers. But this is a paradox. A peace brought about with the threat of violence is only a war in waiting.

Utopia—the perfect society—demands what we might call an unenforced peace. But is it possible? Unenforced peace would require an end to all conflict. The question then arises: What causes conflict? Resources, says history, and ideas. So humans seeking this utopian society and its unenforced peace must first settle the question of resources: who has them, who wants them, who needs them.

History has a tendency to outrun us.

I swear they bred out the self-preservation chunk of your prefrontal cortex.

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.