The twin suns of the Baylisec system gleamed off the silver hull of the small cutter and filled the command cave with light. The system’s primary was an enormous blue Galfor-range star that had already consumed most of its fuel.
In the timescale of the cosmos, it would soon swell to many times its present size as a prelude to its ultimate destruction in a titanic explosion, vaporizing itself completely. Too big even to leave behind an infinite well.
The benefactor of this cataclysm would be its neighbor: a relatively small, red Dipier-range star. Unlike its hard-living fraternal twin, this small sun would last for many ages more, and the debris from the larger star’s death would seed its orbit with precious heavy elements. It would be enough mineral wealth to form a system of planets, and with some luck, maybe even a new generation of life.
The cutter’s pilot looked on, contemplating the future of the system. Each star had a duty to perform—the enormous blue smelting furnace and the tiny red factory. He tried to appreciate the irony of their relationship. The giant sun burned so brightly that its neighbor could barely be seen. It overpowered it in mass, luminosity, heat, pressure, even the range of materials it could produce. But it was merely a flash, a set-builder for a grand play. The glory and adoration would eventually go to its tiny companion, which would still be around to oversee a civilization emerge on one of its future worlds. The inhabitants would worship their meek little sun as a god, without ever knowing of the contributions of its giant blue kin.
D’armic tried to appreciate the irony, but he hadn’t taken his pills. He continued to look on because without them, he couldn’t grow bored either.
The slender creature had mottled gray skin and soft features arranged in an outwardly humanoid body. He wore no clothes because unassisted, he didn’t feel shame. He and his ship were of Lividite origin.
If one were not a student of xenoanthropology, the Lividites would appear to be the most erroneously named species in the long history of arbitrary labels. They were not an angry race. In fact, they were devoid of naturally occurring emotions of any sort.
They were dependent on artificial mood-altering chemicals to experience any response beyond their baseline stoicism. Emotions could be had in pills, patches, injections, nasal sprays, syrups, slow-release gel tabs, and suppositories for when they needed to feel like someone was a pain in the … well, you know the rest.
The average Lividite packed a small container with drugs to induce friendliness, annoyance, excitement, frustration, and satisfaction before leaving for work. They planned their day around when to take the drugs so that the emotions would appear at the appropriate times. It was a time-honored prank among schoolchildren to mislabel the drugs of their classmates with hilarious results, so long as everyone had taken their Humoric.
It’s only with study of Lividite history that the name’s origin comes into focus. Many tens of thousands of years ago, the Lividites were the single most destructive, genocidal, xenophobic, and all around prickly race in known space. They were so irrationally violent that their neighbor races (after a ruinous multigenerational war triggered by a careless embassy valet) staged an intervention for the entire planet and sponsored the population through ten generations of anger management counseling.
After this episode, Lividite society bred for emotional stability and fair-mindedness. However, after many hundreds of generations, this guided-breeding program had selected the emotions right out of the population.
Hearing of the situation, an off-world pharmaceutical company specializing in psychoactive drugs recognized the unprecedented business potential and quickly set up R&D centers, retail outlets, and an enormous marketing apparatus to chemically supply the blasé species with all their emotional needs.
As it happened, this particular Lividite resented his drug dependency mightily, at least while he was taking his Resentitol. The rest of the time, he tried to keep the memory of resentment fresh in his mind. D’armic was part of a small but growing group that extolled the virtues of drug-free living. It wasn’t that they wanted to abandon emotions. Quite the opposite. They wished to experience the full, subtle palette of genuine emotions in real time. Not the delayed, monochromatic effects of ingested chemicals.
However, the vestiges of natural emotions that remained in the Lividite genome were faint indeed. But they were real, and to D’armic and those like him, quality counted far more than quantity.
Frontier managers spent tours lasting many years out in wild, undeveloped areas of space, a role for which Lividites were ideally suited. Without specific drugs, they couldn’t grow lonely or homesick. D’armic had picked his career path because the travel central to the job allowed him to pursue experiences that he surmised would have the most emotional impact.
In his time as a Bureau of Frontier Resources officer, D’armic had gone solar-sailing around the shattered moon of Xemji, rode an untamed four-winged Telerack through the center of a storm vortex on Oerm, and watched the famous Korge of Datron perform his wildly popular stand-up routine in the ten-millennia-old Vilaj Amphitheater, where he made such impolitic observations as, “Why is it illegal to pay someone to rotate your obigon, when it’s perfectly legal to do it for free?” and “Do androids think oxidation is an embarrassing skin condition?”
His pursuit of the drug-free emotional life is what caused D’armic to detour to the Baylisec system in the first place. He’d estimated the immensity of the blue primary star and the undertones of destruction and creation the pair represented might stir unexplored feelings of awe, inspiration, irony, or even insignificance.
But the result of this experiment had been no different from the others. No matter how intense the experience, a tiny trickle of feeling was all he could conjure. He just hadn’t found the right levels of danger, absurdity, beauty, or accomplishment to clear a channel for the wellspring of emotions he believed was trapped below the surface.
D’armic took a moment to soak in the view outside his windows, then turned back to the cutter’s navigational panel. He had spent enough time here already, and his duties called elsewhere.
An alert popped up in his field of vision. One of the buoys in the Earth network, #4258743-E, to be precise, had thrown an error code and requested maintenance. It wasn’t alone; at least three others had logged errors in the last two cycles. D’armic made a note of it and resolved to bump the health of the buoy network further up his priority list. But for the moment, it would have to wait. There was the trimming of sun-weeds in Okim and the burgeron migration in the Tekis Nebula to worry about.
There was always more for a frontier manager to do, and many larims to go before he could sleep.