Expendable
by James Alan Gardner
To my parents (except the naughty words)
Thanks to the writing group who helped correct my first mistakes: Linda Carson, John McMullen, and Dave Till. Thanks to Rob Sawyer who helped correct my next mistakes, and to Jennifer Brehl who picked up the ones after that. If there are any slipups left, it's obviously my fault for hiding them too well.
Finally, a big hello and thank you to my fellow writers in PASS '77. Somewhere in our script meetings, the phrase "Expendable Crew Member" was spoken for the first time. It rattled around in my head for almost twenty years, and look what finally came out.
Part I
NIGHT
Flashback
"My name is Festina Ramos, and I take great pride in my personal appearance."
(Again.)
"My name is Festina Ramos, and I take great pride in my personal appearance."
(Again.)
"My name is Festina Ramos, and I take great pride in my personal appearance."
(Again…)
My Appearance
My name is Festina Ramos and once upon a time, no one in the Technocracy took greater pride in her personal appearance.
I showered, shampooed, depilated, and deodorized every morning without fail. Nothing stood in the way of my morning rituaclass="underline" not the fuzz of a hangover, nor the arms of a beckoning bed-partner. My discipline was absolute.
I exercised more than forty hours a week, and always complete workouts: martial arts, running, gymnastics, tai chi… even mountaineering when the opportunity presented itself.
My body fat ranked at the lowest percentile considered healthy. People said they envied my figure. For all I know, they might have been telling the truth.
I chose my civilian clothes with the care of an entertainer dressing for the chips. Even when I was in uniform, fellow officers said that black fatigues suited me.
Their very words: "Festina, that outfit suits you." They did not say, "Festina, you look good."
My name is Festina Ramos and even before I was given that name, I was given a lurid port-wine birthmark covering the right half of my face from cheekbone to chin. Years of operant conditioning gave me great pride in my disfigurement.
The Doctors
Each doctor began by saying my condition could be corrected. How would they cure me? Let me count the ways. They would cure me with electrolysis, with lasers, with cryogenics, with plastic planing, with "sophisticated bio-active agents conscientiously applied in a program of restoration therapy." Some even set a date when I would be booked in for treatment.
Then the appointments were canceled. Sometimes the doctor apologized in person. Sometimes the doctor invented excuses. Sometimes it was just a note from a secretary.
Here is the reason my birthmark endured with purple defiance in the face of twenty-fifth century medicine:
It had military value.
My Calling in Life
My calling in life was to land on hostile planets. I made first contacts with alien cultures.
I went anyplace the Admiralty didn't know what the hell to expect.
Officially, I belonged to the Explorer Corps. Unofficially, we Explorers called ourselves ECMs — short for Expendable Crew Members.
Why
Listen. Here is what all ECMs knew.
Violent death is rare in the Technocracy. We have no wars. The crime level is low, and few incidents involve lethal weapons. When accidents happen, victims can almost always be saved by sophisticated local medical centers.
But.
There are no medical centers on unexplored planets. Death may come with savage abruptness or the stealthy creep of alien disease. In a society where people expect to ease comfortably out of this world at a ripe old age, the thought of anyone being killed in the prime of life is deeply disturbing. If it happens to someone you know, the effect is devastating.
Unless… the person who dies is different. Not like everyone else.
Two centuries ago, the Admiralty High Council secretly acknowledged that some deaths hurt Fleet morale more than others. If the victim was popular, well-liked, and above all, physically attractive, fellow crewmates took the death hard. Performance ratings dropped by as much as thirty percent. Friends of the deceased required lengthy psychological counseling. Those who had ordered the fatal mission sometimes felt a permanently impairing guilt.
But if the victim was not so popular, not so well-liked, and above all, ugly… well, bad things happen, but we all have to carry on.
No one knows exactly when the High Council solidified this fact of human behavior into definite policy. In time, however, the Explorer Corps evolved from a group of healthy, bright-eyed volunteers into… something less photogenic.
Potential recruits were flagged at birth. The flawed. The ugly. The strange. If a child's physical problems were truly disabling, or if the child didn't have the intelligence or strength of will to make a good Explorer, the full power of modern medicine would be unleashed to correct every impediment to normality. But if the child combined ability and expendability in a single package — if the child was smart and fit enough to handle the demands of Exploration, but different enough to be less real than a normal person…
…there was an Explorer's black uniform in that child's future.
My Class
As I record this, I have in front of me a picture of my class at the Academy. In the first row are the ones with problems the camera does not reveaclass="underline" Thomas, the stammerer; Ferragamo, the man whose voice did not change at puberty; my roommate, Ullis Naar, who usually blinked convulsively every two seconds but managed to keep her eyes open for this photo; Ghent, loudly flatulent… yes, what a joke, who could take Ghent seriously? Not his crew-mates when Ghent was flayed alive by savages during a first contact. A few days of superficial mourning, and then his shipmates forgot him.
The system worked.
Back to the photo. One row of visually acceptable Explorers, and behind them the rest of us: pop-eyed, three-fingered, obese, deformed. No one in the back rows smiled for this picture. Most tried to hide behind the heads of those in front.
What unthinking Director of Protocol demanded that we pose for such a photo? I'd always been told (in smug, selfcongratulatory tones) that our society had progressed beyond the days of the freak show.
The majority of my graduating class could have been cured by modern medicine. We all knew it. Which of us hadn't jacked into a medical library and pored through the texts describing our conditions? Which of us didn't know the names of at least five techniques to make us into more-normal human beings? Yet those remedies did not exist for us. The Admiralty had a vested interest in keeping us repugnant. As long as we stayed as we were, no one lost sleep over sending us on dangerous missions.
Admirals need their sleep in order to make enlightened judgments.
My Duties
My most time-consuming duty was to review reports from other Explorers. The latest files were transmitted to our shipboard computer every day and stored on bubble till I went over them. Most of the time, the reports were simply copies of the running commentaries all Explorers gave when landing on an unfamiliar planet.
(Upon graduation, Explorers were fitted with permanent throat transceivers that transmitted continuously on planet-down missions. The transceivers were quite visible if you looked closely; but no one worried about a lump on the neck ruining an Explorer's appearance.)
Some of the transcripts I listened to ended abruptly. We called those transcripts "Oh Shits" because the Explorers often said, "Oh shit," just before their throat mikes went dead. You always wondered what they saw just before they stopped transmitting. You seldom found out.
"Oh Shit" reports weren't marked in any special way. Whenever I audited the log of someone I knew from the Academy, I wondered if it would end in "Oh Shit." An absent voice spoke in the quiet of my quarters and I never knew if the next word would be the last. Sometimes I listened to blank silence for half an hour, not wanting to believe that the report had ended.