Omake: the Lucky Ones
Stardate 20989.6
Stars flew past the transparent dome, striping the space around Zeliya with strikes of white. She had loved the sight of them, ineffably huge and distant things flying by like ripples beneath a swift barge, during the journey to Andor. Now on the way back home, all she could think about was how cold they looked at this distance, how alien and unnatural their smearing across the eternal night. On the table before her sat the beginning of the report she was supposed to finish by the time they returned, but she still couldn't bring herself to type, or even dictate.
It's true. All of it is true. Everything it said in Captain ka'Sharren's data transfer, and so much more. She shuddered.
So much more, and so much worse
.
Behind her, the floor hatch opened and she heard Rinelis' heavy footfalls rise to the deck. She wanted to greet him with a smile, but any movement of her face threatened to break loose the tears.
"Good day, captain."
She forced her lips to curve up, but didn't turn around. "Welcome, life-scholar. What's mine is yours."
There was a slow, sodden pause as Rinelis waited for her to turn around. "Can I ease your sorrow?" he asked when she did not.
Zeliya shook her head. She knew that the thing that ailed her - and probably Rinelis as well, though his face was as brave as always - couldn't be cured by mere pleasure. "I wish you could."
"As do I, I'm sure you know."
He walked up beside the captain, joining her distorted stargazing beneath the canopy. Another difficult pause before he spoke again.
"We've finished our initial biopsychological comparison. There's much more work to be done, once we're back on Risa and have the time and manpower for more analysis, but I think we've started to make sense of the aliens."
She took in a deep breath, preparing herself for whatever he said next. Hopefully it wouldn't be any worse, but that hope had been dashed time and time again with every new bit of information she'd learned in the past few weeks. "Please continue."
"On their homeworld - on nearly
all of their homeworlds, from what we can tell - the Unlucky Ones rose to sapience."
She finally turned to face him, her chestnut eyebrows going wide. "You're telling me these people-" whatever the hell was wrong with them, the aliens WERE still people "-are
swamp apes?"
The scholar shook his head. "No moreso than ourselves. Our ancestors were just another subspecies of swamp ape." He paused. "Obviously, that's only a crude comparison. Their ancestral ecosystems don't map
that closely with ours, but there are close enough analogues on most of their homeworlds. The humans probably have the closest one; they call them
chimpanzees and
bonobos."
She bit her lip, doing her best to recall her childhood natural history lessons. "So then their natural way of resolving conflicts..."
"Violence."
The passing stars smeared themselves against her eyes and brain, each seeming to call back images from the data. Green skinned women stuffed into a cargo hold. Giant, sharp-toothed men with bony foreheads cutting one another in half with a smile. Explorer ships on "peaceful" missions that carried hundreds of high yield annihilation missiles just in case. The United Federation of Planets, a diverse society of cooperating species, had only come into being when four warring races were forced to unite against a more powerful fifth in an even bloodier war. It was perhaps that last one that shook her the deepest. It was like something that the edgiest hack science fiction writer on Risa would come up with...no, it was like a PARODY of that. A group of species so violent that they were forced to make peace
in order to fight better.
"How can this be, Rinelis? We feared there might be a species like that out there, but
everyone besides us?"
The scholar shook his own head, his rich brown skin standing out against the black space and white streaks. "It's only a hypothesis, but...our species diverged during the worst part of the Eastern Megafaunal Extinction. We know from the fossil record that Risa has usually had more large land animals and fewer edible fruits and herbs to go around than it does in our era. It's hard to wrap your mind around, but the kind of safety and plenty our ancestors built their society on is the exception for our biosphere, not the norm. In that kind of environment, violent competition is only useful in limited situations, or in the more extreme environments. Its long been believed that that's why we were able to spread across the continents while the Unlucky Ones stayed in their bogs and never had to evolve the intelligence necessary for biome adaptability. Our sense of community, our reluctance to hurt one another, those gave us a competitive advantage."
His meaning sunk in, and Zeliya felt a chill run down her spine. "And assuming sapient life
could have evolved at any time in Risa's history, and against the odds just
happened to arise in the conditions that favored us..."
"Then it is statistically inevitable that the majority of sapient life forms would have arisen in more
typical conditions. Even in just the last ten thousand years, we've seen it starting to change on Risa. In the pristine jungles, everything has been growing steadily more competitive, more violent, as new species start to emerge. From a paleobiological perspective, what we've been observing for our entire history is things gradually returning to normal."
Normal. Out of more than two dozen spacefaring species, there was only one whose development of technology had been motivated not by warfare, but by the guileless desire for comfort and safety, even if the latter took much longer. Only one who offered what it had, rather than taking whatever it could take. Only one who solved its problems by spilling seed rather than blood. The universe that Zeliya thought she had lived in was a lie.
"We are lucky it was the Federation, and not the Klingons. It could have just as easily been them. Maybe more easily, looking at the starmaps."
The life-scholar shook his head again. "I'm not convinced it actually makes much difference, captain. The Andorians, Humans, Tellarites, and others have been killers for tens of thousands of years, and what could very generously be called peaceful for, at best, two hundred. The Federation's professed ideals are at odds with its member races' genetic imperatives. Maybe they'll hold out for a few more decades, or even centuries, but in the long run I don't think it will have made a difference who we met."
She was about to argue that buying their people even a few decades or centuries was worth it, but reminded herself that Rinelis had been trained to see the passage of time on geologic scales, not in years and decades. Of course it wouldn't make a difference to him.
"What would you recommend to the Directors of the Hedony, then, in my place?"
The scholar stood up again and stepped around in front of her. "I'd recommend that we abandon space exploration. Return to Risa, cut back on radio transmissions. No one's invaded us yet, and I think if we avoid attracting any more attention to ourselves we can keep that going."
The thought of her star corvette, the vehicle she had spent her entire life learning to captain, being consigned to the dustbin of history nearly brought back the tears. His logic was hard to dispute, but...no, no it still didn't work.
"I think it's too late now," Zeliya said. "They know about us. Even if the ones we've spoken to forget, we're in their databanks. Someone will come back. Sooner or later. And it probably won't be the Federation."
"What, then? We try to become like them? Our own biology-"
She placed her hand on his chest, squeezing gently to silence him. She knew what he was about to say. Trying to be like the aliens would not only ruin everything they knew and loved, but it wouldn't even work. While warfare was a part of Risa's history, it was a small-scale and very infrequent affair by the apparent galactic standards, neither side having the stomach to continue it for too long. The people who had agonized so long over whether or not to put the laser cannons on Zeliya's corvette - the laser cannons that had been outright laughed at by every technician in Starfleet - would never be the equal of the Klingons or the Amarki in battle.
"No. I shall tell the Directors..."
She thought carefully, turning over the words in her mind.
"I shall tell the Directors of the Hedony that the Federation is our only hope. They are not like us, they'll
never be like us, but we can accomodate them. The diplomats and officers we met all admired things about Risa. Our food, our beaches, our sexuality. Even our kindness appears to be a commodity in their eyes, at least as much as a weakness. We'll invite them to our world, and tell them that what is ours is theirs. If we're lucky, they'll leave us enough for ourselves."
He looked down at her, his deep, dark eyes asking the question he didn't need to voice.
If we're lucky.
Against all odds, their people had come into being free of the suffering and cruelty that defined the rest of the galaxy. Against all odds, their first contact had been the Federation in its least bloodthirsty era thus far, rather than the Klingons or Romulans or really anyone else. How many more times could they keep getting lucky?
