A NATURALIST ON HOTH
Hank Green
“The Empire is here.” My commander’s voice was resigned, not as strong as he probably would have liked. “Your evac slots have been assigned.” I looked around the room; we were a bunch of scientists and mechanics, not military personnel. We knew we were in harm’s way, but our job was not to fight and kill. Nonetheless, in war, sometimes it is your job to die.
“There’s a good chance that you’ll make it out of here alive, but if you have any final messages you’d like to send, now’s the time. We’ll encrypt them and then distribute them through the entire fleet, so if anyone gets out, your message will.”
That made the situation seem more real. I had had my chances to leave this assignment a dozen times, and yet I never had. When they told me I could go, I just found that—I couldn’t. Of all of the things to fall in love with, this hostile, bitter rock was not the one I expected.
“It has been a pleasure to serve with each of you.” I could see the tears filming his eyes, but his voice showed no sign of them. “And wherever we go on this day, may the Force be with us.”
I wasn’t born to fight. I never ached to feel like a blaster was an extension of my body. And while my friends went to the Incom/Subpro air shows, I was only ever annoyed by the screeching of X-wings or Headhunters ripping open the sky. That doesn’t mean that I don’t know the difference between a Z-95 AF4 and a Z-95 AF4-H. I still lived in an Incom company town, and even if you weren’t interested in starfighters, they were still the basis of our economy and our culture.
I understand that I’m the weird one. It would make sense, growing up surrounded by both classics and fresh-off-the-line starfighters and speeders, that you would imagine yourself becoming a pilot. The problem was, when I surveyed my homeworld, starfighters looked clumsy and brutish compared with even the ugliest, lumbering sand slug or the most garish, invasive mynock. The complexity of nature far surpasses the most marvelous of human engineering. An ecosystem leaning on itself into a structure so magnificent that it can never be fully understood is a force so great that it both tears and lifts me.
This is the only thing I’ve ever been able to imagine when I heard stories of the Force. I’ve never felt it, but I can see all of the folds and crevices where it must hide.
Growing up, my classmates thought the only thing a mynock could possibly be good for was eating…if you’d already eaten all the sand slugs. But the first time I watched an organic animal actually suckling electricity from a landspeeder, I ran to my teachers and asked every one I could if a living animal could actually sustain itself on electricity.
The good news was, even in an Incom company town, there was a need for all kinds of folks, and a kid with exceptional interests got exceptional attention. If I was just another kid jockeying to be a pilot, I’d’ve had to compete with nearly everyone else. Studying biology and ecology, on the other hand—I knew more than most of my teachers by the time I was fifteen. That wasn’t saying much, as our schools focused almost entirely on engineering, tactics, and galactic history.
I actually managed to not be mocked for my enthusiasms, though I am aware that this was entirely because of my parents, who were both high-level executives at Incom. Every kid in my school was told to kiss up to me because every one of their parents wanted a promotion. And my parents didn’t mind my interests, either. The instability of the Clone Wars had been good for Incom, but bad for pilots, and if I didn’t show interest in dying in a cockpit, they weren’t going to push me.
Somehow I managed to get into a Core world university, on Corellia, actually. I was immediately out of my depth, but in a beautiful way. There was so much to know, and now I was among people who actually wanted to know it. I expected to be treated well, so people treated me well. I never stopped being disoriented by big cities, but this was less about the people and more about how hard it was to get back someplace that felt real and not manufactured.
The Republic dissolved when I was a teen, and the Empire—well, it seemed bad. But I told myself that, regardless of who was in power, the world needed people studying sand slug physiology because they were far better at absorbing and retaining water than any system devised by even the most innovative moisture farmers.
Yes, occasionally I’d hear rumblings that a mining colony was simply wiped out because the laborers tried to organize, or that the Empire was supporting slavers operating on the Outer Rim. But I had a bench full of slugs that needed watching, and every day I was discovering things that literally no one had ever known before. It was exciting, and I was proud of my work.
And then…Alderaan. No one could equivocate or lie or cover up Alderaan. There’s a moment when you can’t sit back and watch anymore, and if it wasn’t Alderaan, it was never. It broke me. I could no longer work, I could no longer think.
There were many days in my life when you could say I became an adult, but that was the day I grew up.
I was on the next transport back to the Rim.
NOTES ON THE DESERT SAND SLUG
There isn’t much that makes less sense to the average naturalist than the desert-dwelling sand slug. This little beast, striped dark and light blue, almost like a tropical flower, is covered in wet, sticky mucus. But why? Why would any organism in the desert be so cavalier with its water use as to literally keep it evaporating on its skin? More important, where did this water come from?
Possibly unsurprisingly, not many people had cared to spend much time observing these creatures. They are beautiful, if slugs can be beautiful, and I believe they can. But more beautiful than their striking appearance is their mere existence. And I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
So, armed with nothing more than a stick and a tank, I did what any young naturalist would. I snagged one and put it in a terrarium. I was not prepared for what I found next.
At twelve hours, the slug had dug beneath the surface of the sand, hardened, and lost all color, appearing to be nothing more than a dark brown pebble.
This was nothing compared with the next transformation.
The little seed of the slug then began to extend tendrils out from its body—thin, hairlike filaments that stretched, by thirty-six hours, up to fifteen centimeters away from the slug. At seventy-two hours, these filaments spidered through the entire tank, and the seed of the slug had shrunk from three centimeters across to a mere fifty millimeters! The slug’s body was almost entirely in those filaments!
On a whim, I then poured a cup of water onto the bare sand of my terrarium. Over the course of only three hours, the filaments had retracted, and the slug was happily slugging over the once-more-parched sand.
I never wondered what good I might be to the Rebellion, because I never questioned the worth of my work. I couldn’t shoot a bantha from five paces, but if you wanted to exist anywhere outside of deep space, you needed to understand the organisms you’d be living alongside. You needed to understand them because they could help you and also because they could kill you.
My homeworld was, by this point, full of rebel contacts sourcing parts for their secondhand snubfighters, so it wasn’t hard to say a few words to the right people before my potential utility was recognized.
In a matter of months, I was having my first briefing.
Every briefing was done in a small group. A geologist, an ecologist (me), a meteorologist, two soldiers, and a commander.
Somehow, no one groaned when General Jan Dodonna told us about our candidate planet in his confident, no-nonsense voice.
“Candidate Nineteen Point Two is an iceball planet in an actively forming solar system. It’s treacherous. Constant meteorite impacts create thermal signatures that would make it easier to hide. However, it will be difficult to survive. It is frozen from equator to pole, with glaciers covering the majority of the surface of the planet.”
Ryssle, the meteorologist, spoke then. “Water glaciers?”
“Yes,” the general replied.
“But that would mean snow, which would mean water was evaporating somewhere,” she told him.
“I am not a scientist, I’m telling you what we know. Your job is to solve exactly that kind of mystery. The other thing we suspect is that there are predators, big ones.” This took me aback. There was no way an iceball planet would have the ecology necessary to support an apex predator. I wasn’t going to mention it to the general, but my interest in this mission had gone from Well, maybe I’ll get to see some interesting lichen, to I need to get to this planet right now.
NOTES ON THE ECOSYSTEM OF HOTH
Anyone who looks at Hoth from above would be forgiven for thinking it a mostly dead ball of ice. But mostly dead would not be a problem for us. My research and exploration team arrived on what we were then calling Candidate 19.2 with enough supplies to keep us warm and fed for a year.
Within two weeks, and over the objections of several team members, Tev, the team geologist, and I had convinced our commander that we had to track a tauntaun over the open surface or we would never uncover the secrets of the planet. We understood why other members of the party were not interested in this, and so we offered to make the trek with just the two of us. Tev’s compact frame and fur made him the most well suited to the planet of our group, and my ecological knowledge was most necessary to the mission. Commander Habria, of course, refused to split the party, and so everyone was dragged along on our hunt.
Our working theory was that the planet could not house a rebel base on the surface. Temperatures during the night were simply too low, and any base would be visible as a massive source of heat. But the planet was geologically active, and so we hypothesized that the ecology of the planet was based on that energy, and that the large organisms must exist in subterranean ecosystems.
We packed for a ten-day excursion, and then one of the team’s troopers fired a tracking dart into the flank of a tauntaun. It soon became obvious that the conditions of the planet limited the range of the tracker, so we had to stay within three kilometers of the beast.
That, combined with the indisputable reality that we could not travel at night, soon became a clear problem. By evening the tauntaun had led us nowhere except into the middle of a glacier. I had been steadfastly ignoring the complaints of our two troopers and the milder but more worrying anxieties of Ryssle, our meteorologist, all day. But as the temperature dropped, the concern escalated.
Eventually Commander Habria called for us to make camp. I argued strongly that we would lose the tauntaun if we stopped and thus had to follow for at least another half hour. My arguments were not well received by anyone in the party, not even Tev, and so I, resigned, took one last look at the tracking screen.
There I found my deliverance…the tauntaun had stopped.
Commander Habria put together a three-person party to go and examine the tauntaun while the rest of the team made camp. The team was Anita, one of the troopers; Habria herself; and me. The other trooper’s tone changed then, from gentle but friendly complaints to legitimate worry. It was then that everyone realized that the two troopers, Xaime and Anita, had, in the short time we’d been onplanet, become a pair, and he was worried for her safety. It was touching, but also worrying. Any strong emotions could make a mission like this more deadly.
When Anita, Habria, and I arrived at the tauntaun, I was immediately distraught, though I tried not to show it. Anita, however, came right out to say it, and asked, “Is it dead?”
It certainly seemed so. The animal had simply lain down in the snow, which was now drifting on one side of it. I approached cautiously, pulling my glove off, and placed my bare hand against its un-furred muzzle. It was the temperature of ice. I said a word under my breath, only remembering that we were on an open comm when Habria chastised me for my language.
It did not make sense to me that the animal was dead. Why would this native animal be less able to survive than us? There were only three possibilities. First, that it was ill and dying when we started tracking it, which seemed extremely unlikely. Second, that it knew we were following and ran from us past exhaustion. Third, that it was not actually dead.
Now, it turned out to be true that it knew we were following it, though I would not know for some time of the extreme infrared radiation sensitivity of tauntauns. But on this night, I made a guess and then, against my instincts as a scientist and a member of my squad, I proclaimed it as if it were definitely true.
“It’s just playing dead” I said, confidently. “It will wake in the morning, when the threat has past.” No air was exiting its nostrils, no warmth was radiating from its body, but there was no one who was qualified to argue with me.
And then we went back to camp and I lay awake, knowing that, if the tauntaun did not get up in the morning, I would have to tell my commander and the rest of the team that I had lied to them and we had risked our lives in the snow for my pride.
I did my best not to show how pleased I was when the dot began to move the next morning. And in less than half an hour, we were back on the trail.
It was that second day that the animal turned sharply down a valley and then, suddenly again, into a glacial ravine.
And then the signal disappeared.
The area the signal disappeared in was treacherous, with sudden jagged slants of broken ice that were only visible from a few feet away, but finally we found a crack from which warm air was rising.
This was how we found our first tauntaun family group, and the future location of Echo Base.
A keystone species is one that isn’t just part of an ecosystem, but helps create it and holds it together. Like the sapphire ice worm on Hoth. These worms can burrow through miles of glacier in search of food, and they leave behind small channels, smaller than the width of my finger. But as warm air rushes up and out after being heated by the interior of the planet, these tiny tunnels widen. Over decades, or even centuries, they become massive. They become a home for the entire subterranean ecosystem of Hoth. They build their world and have no idea that they do it.
This is how I felt. I came to Hoth to study this world’s life, and while I did it, a base formed around me. I had found a way to do what I loved while also helping the Rebellion, but that didn’t make me a soldier. In fact, despite my efforts, I feel a quiet contempt for those reckless souls who are here only to kill and be killed.
Not long ago, I watched such a man hop on a tauntaun as dusk rushed over the base. I turned to my commander and said, “He’ll need to closely monitor the animal’s vitals if they both want to make it back alive.” My commander then repeated my concern to him, louder, and abbreviated, “Your tauntaun’ll freeze before you reach the first marker.” The man had nothing kind to say in reply, but that didn’t stop him from saying something. When the man returned, and I discovered how he’d made it through the night, I felt sick. Had he even noticed the warning signs as the creature froze to death? Had he even cared? The tauntaun was another casualty, a natural creature conscripted to be a soldier in a war it couldn’t understand. At least he had saved his friend, but the Rebellion’s lack of respect for this planet still had me quietly seething.
We all have our blind spots and our indulgent ignorances. None of us can know everything, and that is more true of me than anyone. I do not know how to win a war, but I find myself also no longer able to care. Alderaan tore a hole in me. I didn’t just lose faith in the Empire; to some extent, I lost faith in my species. That was not a thing done by evil, it was a thing done by us, and I will never forgive us. I will never be able to see my own face in the mirror the same way. And so maybe I have stopped looking. As this base formed around me, I became less and less a part of the Rebellion—not because I don’t feel like their mission is worthwhile, but because I feel less and less like a part of the human species.
Only now am I finally accepting what I’ve known since the moment we found out the Empire was coming.
When we found out General Dodonna had been killed, I stayed on Hoth. I stayed after Ryssle disappeared from our camp one night and never came back. When the Rebellion reassigned my team to a new planet, I convinced them I had more work to do here. And just now, when my evac shuttle assignment was called, I stayed. I am sick with this knowledge, but I cannot stop knowing it.
I am not going anywhere.
I know these tunnels like no one else on the planet. I know this planet like no one else in the galaxy. Yet still, I know almost nothing of what there is to know. I cannot leave these mysteries behind. The sum of what I have learned, I have attached in the form of field notes in the hope that they will be of use or interest to someone in the future. I apologize that they are not well organized; I did not have much time to prepare.
And to my family. Mom, Dad, I hope you get this. I’m fine. The Empire will not find me, and neither will the wampas. When the war is over, send someone for me. I’ll be in the worm caves with the tauntauns. It’s where I belong.
—Kell Tolkani, Base Naturalist, Echo Station, Hoth