Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

mostly divided into females and males, though there are substantial minorities which are neither. These categorizations are considered so meaningful that most human languages, including the ubiquitous Terran- or T-standard, embed them constantly in everyday speech.

You will find that humans you interact with insist on fitting you into a human sex category, and can be distressed or embarrassed if unable to do so. The fitting is arbitrary: humans tend to regard all lirem as female (using the T-standard pronoun she), all zunimmer as male (he), and most others as neither (they is the commonest pronoun in this case, although others exist).

Human histories and media are full of “soldiers” and “heroes”—individuals who perform acts of violence for the sake of their tribe—and astonishingly, these are considered admirable.

“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.”

Kyr thought how mismatched he looked: the broad shoulders of a perfect warrior, the body language of an unhappy child.

Humans themselves will cynically point out that no popular vote is ever taken unless those in power already know what the answer will be.

You’re just sad, Kyr heard herself think. You’re sick. You come from a poisonous culture and it made you poison too.

Maybe he wouldn’t have been as bad, here. He would probably still have been awful. Val was pretty awful. But awful wasn’t the same as bad.

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!

“I always thought I just,” she said, “didn’t have, you know. Feelings.”

“The very best space fascist girl scout of them all.”

solving resource conflict is the easier problem. Humanity’s greatest wars have always been conflicts of ideas—ideas of ethnicity and nationality, of religion and belief, of justice and morality.

All those teeth, Kyr thought. Even if you know what a smile is, humans have a lot of teeth.

Gaea Station is set up to stop kids coming up with anything. Crush them between secondary trauma one direction and physical exhaustion the other and see how much initiative and empathy the average kid has left.

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.

I would not normally end a work of fiction with a reading list. But if the ideas in this book interest you, you may wish to read about them in treatments which are fuller and more thoughtful than a novel can aspire to. In no particular order, here are a few of the books I read while writing this story: The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton, for a considered examination of the twentieth century’s most terrible political creation; The Impossible State by Victor Cha, which discusses the history, the logic, and the peculiar international position of North Korea; Going Clear by Lawrence Wright, particularly interesting on the personalities that drove the creation and lasting power of the modern cult of Scientology; The Spartans by Paul Cartledge, for an overview of the ancient militarized ethnostate that has cast such a remarkably long mythic shadow over the two thousand–odd years since its total failure.