The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Day 251, GC Standard 306 THE LAST WAR

There were few things Dr. Chef enjoyed more than a cup of tea. He made tea for the crew every day at breakfast time, of course, but that involved an impersonal heap of leaves dumped into a clunky dispenser. A solitary cup of tea required more care, a blend carefully chosen to match his day. He found the ritual of it quite calming: heating the water, measuring the crisp leaves and curls of dried fruit into the tiny basket, gently brushing the excess away with his fingerpads, watching color rise through water like smoke as it brewed. Tea was a moody drink.

There had been no tea on his home planet. Heated water was only for sleeping in, not for drinking. So many wonderful things they had missed out on, simply because they had never thought to imbibe the stuff! No tea, no soup, no mek—well, the mek was hardly a loss. He did not share his crewmates’ enthusiasm for the murky brew. Something about it reminded him of wet dirt, and not in a pleasant way.

He sat on a garden bench in the Fishbowl, his tea cooling as he worked through slow thoughts. Rosemary sat across from him, holding her own mug in her bony Human hands. She was silent as he thought out loud. He knew how strange they each were to the other—he for never thinking quietly, she for having no thinking sounds. He knew she understood his noise by now, though, and that knowledge made her silence feel companionable.

The thoughts he was drumming up were old and safely kept. Kizzy had accused him once of “bottling his feelings,” but this was a Human concept, the idea that one could hide their feelings away and pretend that they were not there. Dr. Chef knew exactly where all of his feelings were, every joy, every ache. He didn’t need to visit them all at once to know they were there. Humans’ preoccupation with “being happy” was something he had never been able to figure out. No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief. Grief. Yes, that was the feeling that Rosemary needed him to find today. He did not run from his grief, nor did he deny its existence. He could study his grief from a distance, like a scientist observing animals. He embraced it, accepted it, acknowledged that it would never go away. It was as much as part of him as any pleasant feeling. Perhaps even more so.

He cooed readiness, and focused on his vocal cords, forcing them to work together as one. He looked into Rosemary’s white-rimmed eyes. He began to speak.

“Our species are very different from one another. You have two hands, I have six. You sleep in a bed, I sleep in a tub. You like mek, I don’t. Many little differences. But there’s one big thing that Grum and Humans have in common, and that is our capacity for cruelty. Which is not to say we are bad at the core. I think both of our species have good intentions. But when left to our passions, we have it within ourselves to do despicable things. The only reason Humans stopped killing each other to the extent that you used to, I think, is because your planet died before you could finish the job. My species was not so lucky. The reason you haven’t seen any other Grum is because there are only some three hundred of us left.”

Rosemary’s hand went to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. Such a quintessentially Human thing, to express sorrow through apology.

“I’m not,” Dr. Chef said. “It was our own doing. Our extinction wasn’t caused by a natural disaster or the slow crawl of evolution. We killed ourselves.” He thought aloud for a moment, sorting out all the pieces. “For generations, my species was at war with itself. I couldn’t even tell you why. Oh, there are historians with all sorts of theories and ideas. But it’s the same story you hear everywhere. Different beliefs, different cultures, territories everyone wanted. I was born into that war. And when I was ready, I took my place in it as a doctor.

I wasn’t the sort of doctor I am now. I didn’t become friends with my patients. I didn’t have long chats with them about their diets or what sort of imubots they should upgrade to. My job was to patch up dying soldiers as fast as I could, so that they could get back out there and keep killing.

Near the end, the Outsiders—that’s roughly what we called the others—started using these projectiles called—” He hummed in thought, trying to find an analog in Klip. “Organ cutters. You see, the Outsiders had been separated from us—from my faction for so long that they had become genetically distinct. The organ cutters were programmed to hone in on our genetic markers. If they hit an Outsider by mistake, it’d hurt them, but it was nothing worse than an ordinary bullet wound. But if an organ cutter hit one of us, that triggered its real purpose.”

“Which was?” Rosemary said, looking fearful.

He looked out the window, but he did not see the stars. “To burrow. A cutter would dig through a person’s insides until it hit something vital. It wouldn’t stop until the victim was dead. So, say a soldier took a hit to a limb. With a normal bullet, that’d be a minor wound. But with a cutter, they’d be dead within… oh, half an hour. And half an hour may not sound like much time, but when you’ve got a little piece of metal ripping through you—” The memories reached out to Dr. Chef, trying to pull him away from his safe observation point. They tugged, begging for him to give in. But he would not. He was not a prisoner of those memories. He was their warden. “Day after day, they’d bring me soldiers with live cutters still burrowing, and it was up to me to chase them down. I was often too slow. All the doctors were. See, the cutters emitted a type of interference that made them invisible to our scanners. We had to go looking by hand. In the end, we found it faster, and more merciful, to euthanize cutter patients on the spot.” He sucked in his cheeks in disgust, remembering mess after bloody, shrieking mess. “I hated the Outsiders for the cutters. More than hated them. It was ugly, the feeling within me. I thought that the Outsiders were animals. Monsters. Something… something lesser than me. Yes, lesser. I truly believed that we were better than them, that despite all the blood on our faces, at least we had not stooped that low. But you can already guess what happened next, right?”

“Your side started using cutters, too?”

“Yes. But it was worse than that. I learned that the cutters had been our tech to start with. The Outsiders had just stolen the idea before we could complete it. They had only done to us what we had planned to do to them. That was the moment in which I no longer knew who the animals were. I no longer wanted to mend our soldiers so that they could go use cutters and…” He searched for serviceable words. “Sticky-fire and germ bombs. I wanted to heal them. Actually heal them. Sometimes I’d see a body added to the pile, someone I had just put back on her feet a few days earlier. It made me wonder what the point of it all was.” He stopped, and rumbled in thought for a long, long time. The thought he was arriving at grasped and clung, but he remained in control. “One night, one of the other doctors ran into my shelter. She told me to come quickly. I followed her to the surgery, and there, ripped to pieces by a cutter—by our tech—was my youngest mothered-child. My daughter. I hadn’t even known she was fighting nearby.”

“Oh, no,” Rosemary said. Her voice was soft as leaves.

Dr. Chef wiggled his head up and down, the Human gesture for “yes.” “They had given her drugs to block the pain, and were preparing the… I don’t know what to call it. An injection. The last one we gave to cutter patients. An injection to stop her heart. I shoved the doctor working on her aside. I held her face. She was barely there behind her eyes, but I think she knew who I was. I told her I loved her, and that the pain would be gone soon. I gave her the injection myself. I knew it was the right thing to do, that I be the one to take her back out of the world I had brought her into. She was the last of my children. There had been five of them, all beautiful gray-speckled girls. And they all became soldiers, as most of our girls did. They died on scorched battlefields far from home. None of my children ever mothered. None of them ever became male. My last child, I didn’t love her any more or less than any of the others, but something about knowing that all my children were gone broke me. I couldn’t keep my grief at a distance any longer. My thoughts became too big. I had to stop being a doctor. I spent the rest of the war in a… a quiet home. A place of rest. Learning how to steady my mind again.”

“Dr. Chef, I…” Rosemary shook her head from side to side. Her face was wet. “I can’t imagine.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to. A few years later, there were too few daughters on either side for anyone to keep fighting. The germ bombs had mutated into things we couldn’t cure. Our water was poisoned. Our mines and forests had nothing left to give. The war didn’t end, exactly. It just burned itself out.”

“Couldn’t you rebuild? Find a colony somewhere to start over?”

“We could have. But we chose not to.”

“Why?”

He hrmmed, considering the best way to explain. “We are an old species, Rosemary. There were Grum long before there were Humans. After all we had done, all the horrors we had created, both sides decided that perhaps it was time for us to end. We had squandered our time, and we didn’t feel that we needed—or perhaps deserved—another chance. The war ended thirty standards ago, but we kept dying from the diseases we designed, or injuries that came back to haunt us. To my knowledge, there has not been another Grum born in decades. There may be, somewhere, but it will not be enough. Most Grum did what I did—they left. Who wants to stay on a poison world filled with dead daughters? Who wants to be around others of our kind, knowing the things that every one of us had to do? No, no, better to leave alone and die gracefully.”

Rosemary thought in silence. “Where did you go?”

“I traveled out to the nearest spaceport and talked my way aboard a trade ship. Mixed crew. We mostly hopped between modder rocks and fringe colonies. I earned some credits helping in the kitchen. Just cleaning, at first, but their cook saw that I had an interest in food, and he indulged my desire to learn. Once I had enough money, I left the ship and made a home for myself on Port Coriol. I had a tiny soup shack near one of the family districts—the cook taught me about soup, you see—nothing fancy, but it was fast and cheap and good for you, and merchants in a hurry like food that is fast and cheap and good for you. There was a Human doctor who lived in the neighborhood, a man named Drave, and he came by often. I liked him a lot, but I was jealous of his profession. He was a family doctor. He’d seen his patients grow from babies to adults with babies of their own. It sounded like such a joy, to watch people age and help them do it healthily. One day, I was finally brave enough to confess to him that I had been a doctor once, and that I wanted to use those skills for something good. We made a deal: I could come work with Drave in his clinic for three days a tenday, and he could have free soup whenever he liked. Much better deal for me, I think! So that was my life for six standards—making soup, working in the clinic, taking Linking courses on alien anatomy. Oh, and herbs, I found out about herbs during that time. Drave was a good friend to me. Still is, we write from time to time. His grandson took over the soup shack for me, after I started becoming male. Bad time to be working. Bad time to be doing anything, really. The transition isn’t easy.” He rumbled. His thoughts were straying from the point. He hummed and burred to get them back. “Some time later, this Human named Ashby stopped in the clinic to get his bots upgraded. We talked for a long time, and a few days later, he came back to tell me that he was gathering crew for a tunneling ship, and offered me a wonderful job. Two jobs! I was sad to say goodbye to Drave, but what Ashby had offered was exactly what I needed. There is peace out here in the open. I have friends and a garden in the stars and a kitchen full of tasty things. I heal people now. I cannot pretend that the war never happened, but I stopped fighting it long ago. I did not start that war. It should never have been mine to fight.” He slunk down so that he could look Rosemary square in the eye. “We cannot blame ourselves for the wars our parents start. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is walk away.”

Rosemary was silent for a long time. “The cutters were horrible,” she said. “But on some level, I can understand why your people used them. They were at war, they all hated each other. My father is not a soldier. He’s never been in a war. He doesn’t hate the Toremi. I don’t know if he’s ever even met one. We had everything on Mars. Everything. He allowed those weapons to be designed and sold—he encouraged it—and for what? More money? How many people are dead because of what he did? How many people’s children?”

Dr. Chef sat back on four. “As you said, he had everything. That made him feel safe and powerful. People can do terrible things when they feel safe and powerful. Your father had probably gotten his way for so long that he thought he was untouchable, and that is a dangerous way for a person to feel. I don’t think anyone on this ship blames you for wanting to get as far away as you could from a person like that.”

“Ashby wasn’t exactly pleased.”

“Only about the deception. Not about who you are.” He glanced back toward the empty kitchen, the empty hallway. “And between you and me, he understands. He’s not going to hold it against you. But he’s also your boss, and sometimes he has to speak in a way that reminds us of that.” He hummed, shifting thoughts. “In a way, I think you must be feeling much the same way as I did the day that I found out where the cutters came from. You found something dark within your own house, and you are wondering how much of it has rubbed off on you.”

Rosemary started to nod, then shook her head. “That’s not the same. What happened to you, to your species, it’s… it doesn’t even compare.”

“Why? Because it’s worse?”

She nodded.

“But it still compares. If you have a fractured bone, and I’ve broken every bone in my body, does that make your fracture go away? Does it hurt you any less, knowing that I am in more pain?”

“No, but that’s not—”

“Yes, it is. Feelings are relative. And at the root, they’re all the same, even if they grow from different experiences and exist on different scales.” He examined her face. She looked skeptical. “Sissix would understand this. You Humans really do cripple yourselves with your belief that you all think in unique ways.” He leaned forward. “Your father—the person who raised you, who taught you how the world works—did something unspeakably horrible. And not only did he take part in it, he justified it to himself. When you first learned of what your father had done, did you believe it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think he was capable of it.”

“Why not? He obviously was.”

“He didn’t seem like he was. The father I knew never could’ve done such a thing.”

“Aha. But he did. So then you begin wondering how you could’ve been so wrong about him. You start going back through your memories, looking for signs. You begin questioning everything you know, even the good things. You wonder how much of it was a lie. And worst of all, since he had a heavy hand in making you who you are, you begin wondering what you yourself are capable of.”

Rosemary stared at him. “Yes.”

Dr. Chef bobbed his head up and down. “And this is where our species are very much alike. The truth is, Rosemary, that you are capable of anything. Good or bad. You always have been, and you always will be. Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. You think every soldier who picked up a cutter gun was a bad person? No. She was just doing what the soldier next to her was doing, who was doing what the soldier next to her was doing, and so on and so on. And I bet most of them—not all, but most—who made it through the war spent a long time after trying to understand what they’d done. Wondering how they ever could have done it in the first place. Wondering when killing became so comfortable.”

Rosemary’s freckled cheeks had gone a little pale. He could see her throat move as she swallowed.

“All you can do, Rosemary—all any of us can do—is work to be something positive instead. That is a choice that every sapient must make every day of their life. The universe is what we make of it. It’s up to you to decide what part you will play. And what I see in you is a woman who has a clear idea of what she wants to be.”

Rosemary gave a short laugh. “Most days I wake up and have no idea what the hell I’m doing.”

He puffed his cheeks. “I don’t mean the practical details. Nobody ever figures those out. I mean the important thing. The thing I had to do, too.” He made a clucking sound. He knew she would not understand it, but it came naturally. The sort of sound a mother made over a child learning to stand. “You’re trying to be someone good.”