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War's Oversight

{From the author -- this is a story which has been bouncing around within the confines of my head for a little over half my life.

I would say, "It has been the subject of many changes."

"Which?" you might ask. "The story? The author's head? The author's life?"

In ways both literal and figurative, all three have changed. Perhaps it is equally true that all three have remained strangely true to their original natures. The story, while fiction, has changed to represent the changing perspective of the author, but has remained true to its original idea -- an idea about dualities -- about selves and others. The author's head, while more full of knowledge over the years, is arguably still as needful of knowledge or wisdom as when it started gathering either. The author's life, while longer, is still pitifully short. Short so far, at any rate.

Some levity is in order, perhaps, to lift the pall that I've cast over this introduction. My head, incidentally, is noticeably balder than it has been -- but if you consider the totality of my life, I have more hair than when I was born, and at some point I will have exactly as much hair on my aged-and-aging head as I did when I was born. At that point, I will have reached some point of equilibrium according to a poetic sense of the nature of life -- but I will also be only so far along a continuum. At least, in cosmic terms, there is less uncertainty about where my hair will be going as opposed to the head that bears it. I will be bald-er, and I will probably be bald in the fullness of time. Whether I gain wisdom or not, whether I gain years or not -- those are all things that I will need to await in order to find them out.

The story you are about to read is set in a place I like to call Ryan's Universe -- after a central character whom you may encounter later. The story is entitled War's Oversight for the reason of maintaining a sort of parallelism with the universe and other stories sharing that setting.}

Prologue

What are the odds?

Far too often a rhetorical question, the philosophical might say. Far too often a rhetorical question even before humankind reached for the stars.

In ways subtle and obvious, humans asked the question of themselves and of their neighbors, in times lost to history and in times of note. What chance that a person might grip the thighbone of a departed relative and find that they might whirl it about their body in anger or in fear? What chance that in such a thing as death, a simple hominid species might find the key to preserving life? What chance that this discovery might signal a new era of human history? For surely with the first weapon into the hands of humankind's early ancestors came a proverbial double-edged sword. A certain poetry, perhaps, in that the first double-edged sword was a sword's earliest precursor. With the power to take life came the power to defend life, or to threaten it. An early hominid might defend its family -- or it might threaten its neighbor. An early hominid might discover the uses of power, or the burden of responsibility.

What are the odds that humankind, with its unique intellect and reasoning powers turned invariably -- inevitably, some might say -- to conflict and warfare, was able to successfully lift itself off the face of the Earth and establish itself on another celestial body?

The philosophical cynic might say to one's self, "Humankind dodged a bullet." The philosophical poet, trying to find the moral lesson in such a thing, might point out, "The bullet, if one ever whizzed by the collective head of the human species, was something cast, jacketed, loaded, and fired by humankind's own steady hands."

Whether a thighbone club, a double-edged sword, a bullet from a gun, or a nuclear warhead, some humans believe -- and repeatedly emphasize -- that humankind was lucky not to have clubbed, sliced, shot, or incinerated itself into extinction sometime between its first toddling bipedal steps across an African savannah and the time that it first became capable of visiting other worlds.

What are the odds?

What chance that on exploring the galaxy which gave them life, that humans would find another form of life so much like themselves? What chance that either species would be able to breathe, or even thrive in the same environment? What chance that either species would not be in a position to merely scoop up the other and transplant them into some kind of interstellar playpen, where they would not cause mischief? What chance that this other species, having discovered the secrets to leaving their homeworld, would be capable of comprehending anything of the human experience, or of communicating their experience to others?

The number of things which would have to happen, and in which precise order, for this encounter to take place, would terrify the mind of most humans. Perhaps it will only be the philosophers and the scientists who can comprehend such things and grasp how truly fortunate -- if fortune is something which even exists -- humankind was to have such a chance to grow.

If philosophers and scientists are sometimes accused of being idealists, and an impractical, ineffectual lot of daydreamers, at least some of them knew what interstellar travel and extra-terrestrial contact meant, in the cosmic scale of things. Perhaps they grasped the odds. For those other humans, whose minds cowered at the thought of billions upon billions of asteroids, planets, moons, or stars -- or the uncountable grains of spaceborne dust in a solar system or the atoms in the fiery heart of a star -- they might have taken it as a warning that they still felt comfortable with clubs, or swords, or guns, or warheads. Even if they had ceased to fight amongst themselves with such things, humankind's grasping hands could still wrap themselves around the shaft of a club. They could still grip the hilt of a sword. They could still shoulder a gun. And, most especially, they could still press a button -- an action sometimes reserved for requesting the computed sum of "one plus one."

What are the odds?

What are the odds that a spacefaring species would have such things as hands?

What are the odds that they would have their own knowledge of all these things before encountering humans?

What would be the result?