James Alan Gardner (born January 10, 1955) is a Canadian science fiction author.
Raised in Simcoe and Bradford, Ontario, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo.
Gardner has published science fiction short stories in a range of periodicals, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Amazing Stories. In 1989, his short story "The Children of Creche" was awarded the Grand Prize in the Writers of the Future contest. Two years later his story "Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large" won a Prix Aurora Award; another story, "Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream," won an Aurora and was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards.
He has written a number of novels in a "League of Peoples" universe in which murderers are defined as "dangerous non-sentients" and are killed if they try to leave their solar system by aliens who are so advanced that they think of humans like humans think of bacteria. This precludes the possibility of interstellar wars.
He has also explored themes of gender in his novels, including Commitment Hour in which people change sex every year, and Vigilant in which group marriages are traditional.
Gardner is also an educator and technical writer. His book Learning UNIX is used as a textbook in some Canadian universities.
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 ritual: 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.
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 some times 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.
Copyright ) 1997 by 1997 by James Alan Gardner
