Old Man's War Universe: Short Stories
Date: 2013-01-03 08:51:41+00:00
Rights: Copyright 2012 John Scalzi

Table of Contents

The Sagan Diary

After the Coup

Questions for a Soldier

The Sagan Diary

John Scalzi

The Sagan Diary Copyright © 2007 by John Scalzi.

All rights reserved.

Dust Jacket and interior illustrations Copyright © 2007

by Bob Eggleton. All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN: 9781596064676

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.subterraneanpress.com
www.scalzi.com

For Kristine

COLONIAL DEFENSE FORCES

Internal Security Command

CDF Information Retrieval and Interpretation, 1st Platoon

Col. Michael Blauser, Cmdr

DATE:

241.12.12 SUSN

(see linked table for local equivalents)

FILE NUMBER:

ISC/IRI-003-4530/6(C)

FILE TITLE:

BrainPal Diary, CSF Lt. Jane Sagan (VI)

Phoenix Station, 241.12.07

FILE DESCRIPTION:

See attached note

AUTHOR:

CSF Lt. Jane Sagan (VI)

CLASSIFICATION:

Classified. Security Clearance Level 2 required.

REDACTION:

Lake-Williams algorithm for emotional feed processing.

Emotional feed available as separate file ISC/IRI-003-4530/6(c)(a)

RECORDED BY:

CSF Lt. Jane Sagan (VI)

FILED BY

Lt. Gretchen Schafer, Chief Analyst (SubSpec: Psych), CDF/IRI

CC: Col. Michael Blauser

Preface Note to ISC/IRI-003-4530/6(c),

“The Sagan Diary”

Col. Blauser:

As per your instruction in your memorandum of 341.10.07, we have begun processing the BrainPal memory stacks of Colonial Special Forces members who have left that service, whether by death or (rather more rarely) by discharge from service. In both cases BrainPal retrieval was initially via method previously established in our CDF BrainPal retrieval protocol, but per the new directive of 341.10.09 we abandoned physical retrieval of CSF BrainPals and instead began processing BrainPal memory transcriptions as provided by the Special Forces’ own IRI office.

Let me reiterate again here in this memorandum what I have expressed to you verbally, which is that processing CSF-provided transcriptions is a massively unsatisfactory solution. The first seven CSF memory stacks we processed were rich in information that we then placed into our analysis matrix, and which were beginning to yield intriguing results before we were ordered to remove the data from the matrix and delete all analyses featuring the data. Data from the CSF-provided transcriptions have been notably inferior, and while our own forensic scans can show no overt signs that the CSF is tampering with the data, it is my professional opinion that the transcription data have been redacted in some way. I have requested funds and clearance for a more thorough forensic scanning. That request has been in your queue for several days now; I would greatly appreciate a response to it in one way or another.

To give you a sample of the sort of “data” that we are limited to processing at the moment, I am submitting this file, which we have informally been calling “The Sagan Diary.” It is a transcription of a series of personal files from the BrainPal of former CSF Lieutenant Jane Sagan, who was discharged from service last week and (somewhat unusually) chose to settle on the established colony world of Huckleberry rather than on Monroe, the colony world set aside for retired Special Forces.

These diary pieces are taken from the last several days before Sagan transferred her consciousness from her Special Forces body to a standard human-template body. I don’t need to tell you that for IRI purposes, late-term BrainPal files are typically a gold mine of data, as service members reminisce on their time in service, in doing so refreshing critical data for analysis. Lt. Sagan in particular should be a potentially rich trove of data, as she was present at or participated in several key battles/engagements in the last few years, notably the 2nd Battle of Coral and the Anarkiq offensive; she being Special Forces, she undoubtedly participated in actions which are classified but which, (I would remind those in the Special Forces) we here at IRI are rated to know and view.

Instead, what we have to work with are data-poor bits in which Lt. Sagan thinks about what appears to be a romantic partner of some sort (Cursory investigation suggests a CDF Major, John Perry, who also mustered out of service on the same day and who was on the same shuttle to Huckleberry as Lt. Sagan, accompanied by an unrelated minor, Zoë Boutin. A number of data files for Perry and Boutin are marked classified, which is why I note the investigation was “cursory.”). The diary files are of some anthropological interest, to be sure. It’s nice to know Lt. Sagan is in love; Major Perry seems like a lucky fellow. However, for our purposes these files are near useless. The only data of analytical note are Sagan’s notation of The Third Battle of Provence and the Special Forces retrieval of the Baton Rouge’s ill-fated Company D, about which of course we have a wealth of information, thanks to all the BrainPals that encounter sent our way, and a discussion of her relationship with prisoner of war named Cainen Suen Su, whose stay with and work for the CDF is classified but otherwise well-documented. Beyond this, the data are thin on the ground.

If I may be frank, Colonel, if the Special Forces are not going to allow us unimpeded access to the BrainPals of its fallen and retired soldiers, then I must question the utility of our processing the data from those BrainPals at all. We process thousands of BrainPals in a month, from regular CDF, and we barely have the staff to keep up with that; spinning our wheels processing bogus data from the Special Forces takes up time and processing power we don’t have from data which can be of actual use to us. Either we’re all working together here or we’re not.

Colonel, please read these “diaries” carefully; I’m sure you will come to the same conclusion we have down here in the processing labs. These diaries may be a window into Lt. Sagan’s soul, but what we really need is a window into Lt. Sagan’s history. I hope the rest of her life turns out the way she wants. Here in the labs, we need more data.

Sincerely,

Lt. Gretchen Schafer, Chief Analyst

(SubSpec: Psych), CDF/IRI

1 WORDS

Words fail me.

There is a disconnect between my mind and my words, between what I think and what I say; not a disconnect in intent but in execution, between the flower of thought and the fruit of the mouth, between the initiation and the completion. I say what I mean but I do not say all that I mean.

I am not speaking to you now. These words do not pass my lips or pass out of my mind. I say them only to myself, forming them perfect and whole and interior, and leaving them on the shelf and closing the door behind me. Others may find these words in time but for now they face only toward me, whispering back my image with full description, golems who write the words of life on my forehead.

These words are my life. Representation of time and counterfeit of emotion, record of loss and celebration of gain. They are not my whole life; words fail me here as they fail anyone, entire worlds slipping through the spaces between words and letters as a life among stars is compressed into this small space. A short life to be sure; and yet long enough to be lost in translation.

But it is enough. Give us a few lines arranged just so and we see a face and more than a face. We see the life behind it; the terrors and ambivalence, the desire and aspiration—intention in a pattern, a person in a coincident assemblage of curves. This is that: A few lines to follow that in themselves mean little but build on themselves; a crystal lattice using absence to suggest presence, the implication of more pregnant in the gaps.

I wish I could show these words to you, you who know me only from outward expression. I wish I could fold these words, package them and present them with a flourish, a rare gift I made of myself to you. But these words do not bend—or rather they will not—or perhaps it is that I cannot find the strength to push them through the doors of my mouth and my mind. They are stubborn words and I fear what would happen if I let them go. They stay inside where you cannot come; they are meant for you, but not sent to you. Words fail me and I return the failure.

But these words exist. These words record, these words stand witness; these words speak, if only to an audience of one. These words are real and they are me, or who I believe I have been; incomplete but truthful, through a mirror darkly but reflecting all the same. I have no doubt that one day you will find these words and that you will find me inside them: a seed to plant in your mind, to become a vine to filigree your memory of who I was and who I was to you. Words fail me but I will use them anyway. And in their failure and despite their failure I will live again and you will love me again, as you love me now.

♦♦♦

You do not remember your birth but I remember mine. I remember the sudden shock of consciousness, awareness flinging itself at me and demanding to be embraced, and me not knowing enough to do anything other than embrace it back. I sometimes wonder if I had a choice, or if I could have known then what I know now, if I would have received its embrace or would have punched it in the throat, and sent it staggering away to pester someone else, to leave me alone in a newborn senescence from which I would not awake. But in this we are all alike, those who remember our birth and those who do not: None of us asked to be born.

I awoke in perfect awareness and to a voice in my head which spoke “You are Jane Sagan,” and with those words the electric pricking of context, describing the relationship of “you,” and of “are” and of “Jane” and of “Sagan”—putting together the words like pieces of spontaneously generated puzzle, and then clicking them into place so the puzzle made sense, even if we later discovered how much we really hated puzzles.

But the words were a lie. I wasn’t Jane Sagan at all; I was a changeling, a creature stolen to take the place of someone else. Someone I did not know nor would ever know, someone whose entire life had been set aside for the mere utility of her genes, everything she ever was reduced to a long chemical strand—adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine—the abrupt tattoo of these four notes replacing a symphony of experience. She was dead but she would not be allowed to rest, because I was needed here.

I wonder if she was in this body before me, if before my consciousness was dropped in this head she waited sleeping, dreaming of her life before and dreaming of her life to come. I wonder if she’s dreaming still, housed in the interstices and the places in my mind I do not go. If she is here I wonder if she resents me for taking her place, or whether she is glad of the company, and enjoys the world through my eyes. I cannot tell.

But I dream of her. I dream she and I stand at her grave, standing apart with the headstone between us, close enough to touch although we never do. And she says “Talk to me” and I do, trying to explain a warrior’s life to a woman who never fought, ashamed that I have nothing to share with her but death, which she already knows more about than I.

But she smiles and I know that she doesn’t begrudge me that. I ask her to tell me about her and she does and speaks of home and children and of a life of connection, things I have not possessed in my own life but which she is happy to share. I wake up and her words dissipate, specifics evaporating and leaving behind a memory of comfort.

I dreamt of her before we met but I will not tell you that.

♦♦♦

The name “Jane Sagan.” The name itself mere words: The first name bland and common, the second name for a scientist who hoped for a better universe than the one we live in. I wonder if he were alive what he would think of the woman who used it now, and the cosmos in which she finds herself; whether he could embrace one or both, see beauty in either, or only entropy and slight regard; a rebuke on his lips for this demon-haunted world.

If he demanded his name back it would not matter. The name was random first and last, provided from a list designed to make sure only one Special Forces soldier owned a name at a time. There would not be another Jane Sagan until I bled my life away in battle, the name floating up off my corpse like the spirit of a Buddhist, to be reincarnated on the Wheel of Suffering: returning but learning nothing, repeating the same lessons again and once more, its owners torn from life on different worlds but performing the same actions.

My name is random but I earned it in time. I became Jane Sagan not through the whim of convention but through breathing and moving and fighting and discovering love—each of these coring through the undifferentiated mass of my existence, paring away that which was not me, shedding what was not essential and sometimes what was, demanding I retrieve what I lost or accept its loss; the diminution of a self only recently defined and still defining itself.

I lost some of what I should have been and could have been for you. The parts of me that I lent others who then left me unwillingly or willingly, as they earned the names they had, even as those names lifted up from them, their purpose spent—those which they signified already fading against the violence of bone and metal.

They took part of me with them. I kept part of them with me, to become me in the fullness of time, some of who I could have been replaced by all that was left of them. If you looked you could have seen them in me: discrete objects breaking down, atoms that would not willingly cohere to the molecule, a colloidal suspension of memory and more than memory; part of me and held within me, bound by names they no longer claimed but becoming me, to be called by my name, “Jane Sagan.”

In the end I am who I am. I am what I have made myself and what has been made of me. Part of who I am is who you are too; I have given you me as well. I would take your name and hold it in me, and whisper my name in your ear.

2  Killing

I am not Death. I am killing; I am the verb, I am the action, I am the performance. I am the movement that cuts the spine; I am the mass which pulps the brain. I am the headsnap ejecting consciousness into the air.

I am not Death but she follows close behind, the noun, the pronouncement, the dénouement and the end. She looks for where I have gone next, and where she is needed, and sometimes where she is wanted; desired as the worlds for those whom I have visited narrow down to a point too heavy to be long borne.

I have wondered whether death collapses the point into nothingness or expands it into eternity, but I do not wonder long. Death follows me but I do not look back to her and I do not dwell on what she does. I am killing, I am the action, and I have a job to do.

I am connected to those I kill: a T-shaped joint where their lives intersect mine, the line of their lives terminating in the contact while mine continues on to the next orthogonal encounter, toward the promise and threat of becoming the terminating arm—of the moment when death no longer follows but stands pitilessly before me, expanding or contracting everything I ever was or will be for her own unknowable aims.

I am connected to those I kill and I long to know them. I long to look down their line to see what has led them to me; whether they chose this moment or had it chosen. If they had chosen it, whether it was love or honor or duty or something else that set their line toward mine; if they had it chosen why they chose to accept it, and whether they would have accepted the choice if they knew I was waiting for them, preparing their final moment, every possible future imploding toward the point of my knife, the grain of my bullet, the grip of my hand.

I am connected to those I kill and would look past them, down the line of their lives to the originating point, to the other T-joint where their lives intersect with another: to the creature who bore them—to the woman, the female, the she; the verb and action and performance to complement my own, she who is not birth but whose acts allowed it, as I am not death but whose acts permit it.

When she first held this child who would become what I would kill, did she look for me as I look for her? Did she see me across the line of a life yet unlived? I want to know how I would appear to her: the anti-mother to kill whom she had created, or perhaps a crossbeam with her, to support the entirety of a life, without whom that life would be useless.

I do not flatter myself to suggest she would approve of what I represent, of what I would do, will do, have done, to the life she created and cherished. But I wonder if she would understand I am connected to her, through the one she bore. I stand facing her, staring across the chasm of time forded by this life between us.

♦♦♦

The first thing I killed was unspeakable. Its species had a name for itself spoken like a hammer thumping onto meat; we could not have spoken it if we had tried.

We did not try. We called them for their language, for the percussive explosions which passed for their speech and filled the air when we fought them, like the beating of heavy skins. They were talking drums with weapons.

They were Thumpers and they were our enemy, our nemesis for the crime of landing on a world we said we owned and begging to differ with us on the matter. We sent emissaries to negotiate with them: 16th Brigade, Company D on the ship Baton Rouge. The negotiations did not go well. The Baton Rouge was made to fall into the atmosphere in a sparkling show, as metal and men tore into the sky and the sky tore back, shearing them down in layers that grew into conical sections of ash expanding behind their shrinking mass, ignored by the members of Company D on the skin of the world, who could not look up from their battle to see their friends’ farewell.

We felt Company D deserved its fate, the negotiations a lie and stupidly done at that; ham-handed arrogance that had gotten them stuck, and pleading for our help. We called them the “The Idiots”; we would have left them to die—an object lesson in
incompetence—but we were not allowed a vote. We found ourselves on a world we should not have been on, to retrieve those who should not have needed retrieval, to kill those whose lives we should have not been made to take.

We would not complain about it. This was what we were bred to do. But it did not change the fact; my first mission was fighting someone else’s battle, making it my own by necessity. There was not much of Company D to retrieve; just enough for someone above us to declare victory despite the dead we left behind.

I will not detail the battle. I am here and that is enough.

The first thing I killed danced when I killed it, the force of the bullet spreading across its surface even as the slug traveled through its mass. It danced and spun and twisted and fell, shedding blood in a spiraling helix, angular momentum and gravity bartering for its movement and gravity getting the better end of the deal. It fell and lay sodden and I moved on to the next, already the verb and the action, already movement and purpose. My body moved.

My mind stayed, and in quiet moments in the days that followed returned to the dance, to the spin and slide and the sound of mortality the thing thumped out as it fell. I returned to that sound and imagined what it said: a shout of pain, a brief tattoo of regrets, the name of a lover or a brother or perhaps a mother; a final call backward, a farewell to the one who had given it life or those who filled the life with joy, not to be seen again in the time that remained.

I have the moment recorded. If I chose I could open that moment again, find a translation and know for certain. I choose not to know. I had killed this thing. It deserved to have its final words fly past me, to find those for whom they were meant.

♦♦♦

I think on what I owe those I kill. Clearly I do not owe them their lives, nor do I owe them individual memory; I have killed far too many to mark each with remembrance. My time with nearly all is too short to note much other than that they are dead and I am alive, even if it was a near thing on both counts.

I do not owe them guilt or regret. I have done what I have done. I know what I have done well and what I have done poorly, and for whatever I might be judged, I know no one knows better than I for what things I should be called into account. I know my own measure and will not burden those whom I have killed. If they have souls let them go to where they are bound, without my pleas of forgiveness to chain them to me, and to this world.

What I owe those I kill is understanding. I owe them the courtesy of recognition; acknowledgement that they were something other than just another thing I had to kill on the way to other things I had to kill. I cannot know every creature I have killed; I cannot spare the memory for each of them entire. But I will not pretend they were not my equal. Their lives were their own, and in their way they loved and feared and wondered and hoped. They did not expect me to be the end of all of that.

I will not pretend that all there was to them was the flesh I wounded, the bones I shattered, the blood I made to spill. I will not pretend that it does not matter to them that their lives are at an end. I grieve the loss of those I love and I will not pretend that those I kill are not missed, were not loved, are not grieved.

Some would not choose to do this and I do not fault them. Each of us does what we can to accept ourselves and what we do. But to see those I kill as less than myself lessens myself. I do not have enough of myself to lose that way.

After my first mission I learned of the Thumpers: their culture and ways and world. I learned of their gods and demons, their myths and fables and stories, learned of their art and song and the dances they danced without a bullet to guide them. I became an expert on the creatures I had killed, and when I did the one I made to dance and die took its leave of me.

I learned of the next people I would kill before I killed them, as I have done every time since. It became my job, along with killing, to learn what I could about those we fought and killed, the better to fight them, and the better to kill them—my need to know and understand and recognize those whose lives I end turned to practical use.

It is good to be useful for more than just killing. It is better to know that in my way I honor those I kill, as I would hope they would honor me.

3  Speaking

Let me speak your name. Let me feel the movement of my tongue within my mouth, of lips stretched and jaw pushed slightly forward, of the breath from my lungs shaped and formed into noise and phonemes and syllables and words; into proper nouns signifying you. Two names with marvelous utility: to recall you from memory, to bid for your attention, to speak your identity into the air and in doing so affirm you in your tangible skin, with vibration and waves and exhalation, with the intimacy of sound spoken aloud; with the pleasure that comes from the physical act of declaring you.

Let me speak your name and in speaking let me sing, a secret melody whose notes rise like birds and fall into your ears, to turn you toward me, with a smile that anticipates your own hidden song that choruses with my name. Let me speak your name so I may hear my name spoken to me from you.

You cannot imagine the sensuousness of speech, you who have spoken all your life, you who have mouthed words like bread, a staff of life common on your tongue. You cannot appreciate the luxury speech represents to those of us who have no time for it, we who speed our words, transmitting mind to mind without mediation, not even the briefest pause between mind and mouth to temper what we say or to soften sharp edges.

To speak without words is to speak fast and cheap, to not have to choose words either wisely or poorly but to send them all without discrimination—all content and no style, function over form, everything being what is said and nothing being how it is said. I talk to those I know, one mind to another, efficient and sure. We say what we need to say and then move on. Words do not mean to us what they mean to you and yours. We have other ways to share our emotions and our care and regard. Words do not carry that freight for us; they are light and fast and hollow. Sparrows with fragile bones.

Your words are not like this. Your words are filled, their hollows crammed with meaning, things unsaid nested within, jammed with implication. It is a wonder they do not drop to the floor the moment they leave your mouth. I marvel at what you say and even more how you say it, how your words shift their shape and contain their intent until they are inside me and unpack their contents, to leave me in awe of their economy. So much said with so little.

I cannot do this myself. We speak the same language but build our words differently. Mine are simple and deliberate, yours effortlessly complex. You are not aware of the miracles you make of your words. I cannot do this myself; I do not even try, save when I am speaking your name. With those few words I am your equal, filling the words with complexity and light. Stained glass shining from the inside.

You are so used to what you do with your words that you do not notice the effort I put into mine. I don’t mind. Take for granted that your name flows from my lips. It is a gift to me that you expect it there. Let me speak your name and fulfill your expectation.

♦♦♦

I was not always in love with the spoken word. Those of you born to speech do not know how you tax the patience of those of us born to thought—how our first thought in hearing one of you speak is to wonder at the extent of your damage, to be curious at what sort of trauma could result in such an obvious and slow moving thing such as stands before us. We listen with politeness and internal pity: You cannot be faulted for the deficiencies to which you are born, and we would not choose to point out that they exist.

We listen and wait for our turn to speak, and then speak as slowly as you have been afflicted to do so. We try to get done with it as quickly as possible, because we know how much your sort wish to speak again, straining to pass along information along with asides and anecdotes and digressions and irrelevancies, leaving us to filter what you mean from what you say (We are no less verbose but at least we are quicker, when we talk among ourselves through our thoughts). And when you are done, again we speak, briefly and with economy and to the point, speaking what need be said and ignoring that which does not. For our courtesy we are labeled arrogant and curt. It annoys us.

In time I came to appreciate the spoken word, with its implications and intimations and allusions, with its potential of saying more than mere words, its palette of meaning richer and wider than I first grasped. And with that appreciation came exasperation at those gifted with speaking, who could say so much with what they said and how they said it, and chose to say nothing of consequence; who opened their mouth and allowed banality to fall out and thud to the ground; who were unaware that they could do with their words with the barest minimum of effort what I with all my desire could accomplish only haltingly, if at all. It was like being starved and watching those at a feast ignore the best dishes to fill up on bread.

If I could have I would have pushed their faces into their words, to make them see the parody they made of them. But they would have only have been confused and I would only have been more exasperated. There is a saying along the lines of not trying to teach a pig to sing because it wastes your time and annoys the pig. I want you to know how many times I have stood in pig-filled rooms, and longed to annoy.

I did not. I sat and listened to them talk instead, and was amazed to discover more in their words: subtext and overtones, emotional resonances that even those speaking did not know were there, the rhythm and pattern and tone of their speech opening them wide to be read. Books whose messages are not in the text but the footnotes. A library of the human experience.

It took time to translate the language, and I do not imagine I have mastered it. It will never be my native tongue. But I hear it well enough that in hearing it I see those who speak it anew, and once again I have pity for those who speak aloud. Not because they speak so slowly but because so many of them are deaf to all that they say. If they could hear what I hear they would be amazed.

♦♦♦

My native tongue is not a tongue but the flash of neurons decoded and transmitted by machine instead of muscle. But it is my tongue nonetheless: my tongue, my map, my window, my apprehension of the world to myself. I am leaving it behind to be with you. I am an immigrant whose first language will not be simply unused but amputated, the parts of me I used to speak it left behind, no part of who I will be to speak it, even in the silence of my mind.

You do not know how this worries me. It is not that I am to be made to speak aloud a language I love and long to hear but which I speak imperfectly. In time I will speak it well enough. I worry that who I am is in how I know to speak; that I am shaped by my words and how I say them, and that in my deprivation, that which is me will diminish and become something other than what I am and what I am to you.

I am doing something new. I am holding myself in my mind—who I have been and who I am—wordless and silent; no description to resolve into a lexicon spoken or sent, a view of myself immune to travel or translation or amputation. When I move to your world my thoughts will be filled with myself; the measure of my character and deficiencies and desires held mute and in being mute held whole, so that when I am sent to you, I will be who I have been and who I am, so I can be who I will become with you.

I know you would not begrudge me this, that you would want me to think on myself if by doing so I believed that it would keep me myself. But you should know that as I hold myself in my thoughts, to will myself into being myself once more, the version of me I hold to myself holds you in her thoughts. She holds you wordlessly: who you have been and who you are, and who you will become with her. She holds you in her without words or speech and longs to speak your name.

4  Friendship

I rose early the day I killed my friend. I knew that when I killed him I would have to be ready, could not hesitate or be moved by his suffering, but be ready to strike swift and sure, and for that I needed to prepare myself. I needed not to harden myself but to be strong enough to hold myself open, to measure his pain not with detachment but with empathy, to strike him at the precise moment when the balance between his will and his suffering tumbled irretrievably against him; to allow him his struggle but not to struggle needlessly. I was to honor his final moments by judging when they would be, to do what he would not be able to do, and to give him the honor he was due from me and for himself. I rose early and spent the day in silence, and when I was ready and when the time had come, I took my knife and I went to him.

He did not answer his door; it was too late for that. His disease was untreated and untrammeled, sending the impulses of his nerves to bleed into his flesh, to twitch the muscle and fritter away any semblance of control. A friend let me enter and drew me to the rough mat on the floor, on which our friend sat and shook. I knelt in front of my friend and greeted him; drew my knife for him to see and placed it between us, not as a threat but as a promise, fulfillment of his request and my requirement to end his life.

He turned his head toward the knife and reached out a palsied hand to touch it, jostling it slightly as he did so. Told me it would serve, then reached the same hand to me, bidding me to take it. I found that I could not, the hand holding itself up for long seconds before retreating to its owner.

You blame yourself for this still, said my friend. You blame yourself for this disease you gave me, the one that will kill me today. It sits between us like an unwelcome guest.

I will not ask you to absolve yourself of this guilt. You have willingly picked it up and placed it on your shoulders. Only you will be able to set it down again. But know that I do not ask you to carry it for me. I would not have you think you are unworthy to touch my hand, you who are the only one I can trust and who I will trust in this final hour.

You afflicted me with this disease, took me far from my home and far from the people I love, and brought me to this moment. But you have also called me friend, understood me, and have given me honor and do me great honor now.

You have been long forgiven by me, and all that I would have between us now is companionship and love. You are my last and best friend. Remember that when your burden of guilt weighs you down.

♦♦♦

And with those words my friend fell silent, curled himself small and began his wait, holding himself to himself as his body betrayed itself, scattering the messages between body and mind, pushing arms and legs, contorting his silent contemplation into a jester’s pantomime, making a mockery of his dignity—but not so much a mockery that his dignity did not hold.

It was hard to watch him leak and spasm and grunt. But I would not turn away. I watched every moment, silent and observant, owing him witness for the affliction I gave him and the release I would yet give him, until the moment when I became aware with every sense that my friend had arrived at his moment of release. I did not hesitate. I picked up my knife and prepared to find his heart.

There is a moment of surface tension when a knife blade presents its demand and the flesh honors it. An instant of pressure before the puncture, the rip before the slide, a small eternity easy to miss but impossible to ignore if you’ve felt it before. I lived in that moment a great while for the small sliver of time it was there.

And then I moved on, angled my blade in and up, felt its tip pierce its target and slide through the other side, and continued on until the flat of the hilt rested cold on his chest. I moved in close and embraced him, the better to provide leverage to twist the blade, and make the argument to his heart that its work was forever done. The heart did not argue and for that I was grateful.

My friend gripped me as I gripped him, exhaling at the crystal clarity of the knife, cutting through his diffuse and random pain to rally every thought in his body, every final message that coursed along his nerves, toward the goal of reaching his hand to me a second and final time.

I took it and held it, and wet it with my tears as I bent to kiss it, an action which surprised me and released me, and let me lay my burden down. I’m sure my friend saw it in his failing last moment of life; his last gift to me and my last gift to him, so that all that was between us in the end was companionship and love. He died in my arms and holding my hand, and after a minute I set him down on his rough mat, stepped back to where his other friend stood waiting, and gave our friend’s soul space to depart.

♦♦♦

I did not say goodbye to my friend then, but some time later, as I held his body in my hands, floating in the cold and dark above the brilliant green world of his birth. A place I had come to fulfill a promise: to see him home, to return him to a place from which my actions had kept him while he was still alive. It was not easy to get there and it would not be easy to return, but I had risked my own death for reasons far more trivial. I would not shame my friend or myself by denying him his return home, because it would be inconvenient for me to take him there.

And so I floated above this great green world, body in hand, holding it longer than I should have, whispering words to it that would not carry in the vacuum but which I said nonetheless, before letting it go and releasing it to spiral into the gravity well of my friend’s childhood world. My friend and I paced each other a while, sharing the same orbit, until I turned to make my way back to my own world. I did not turn back to see my friend fall away from me. I had said my goodbyes and was content to let him find his own way home.

I wonder if as he fell those he had loved felt him return home and felt his absence filled, as he shot across the sky and spread himself in it. I like to think they did, not because I am the one who took him from them, but because I loved him too, and in loving him felt his love for them. I hope they looked to the sky, saw him move through it, and were glad to have him home.

5  Age

When you were born all you could do was cry. When I was born I woke to a whisper, giving me a name and telling me to come away from my cradle. I walked, one foot and then another, understanding fully without understanding how I understood. I turned to see my birthmates, all walking and all sending out their own names, and receiving names in turn. We were born and we were aware and we would soon be made to fight.

Our childhoods did not exist, except perhaps in the moment between being given our names and setting our feet on the ground. Once that step was taken we had a purpose, a call to action. We answered it unthinkingly, unaware of our options or that there were options—that concept left packed up for the time being because that was what was required in the moment—no more mind than it took to walk, one foot and then another, into the rest of our lives.

When you were two you had learned to speak and walk. When I was two I was made an officer—a lieutenant—to replace the one whose body had been bisected in front of me, dorsal and ventral peeling away from each other and falling sideways, the last thought he sent one of surprise at feeling a cool breeze between his front and back. And I, stumbling back with wounds of my own, holding my arm across my abdomen to keep my insides in, at an age when you were pulling the heads off your sister’s dolls.

When you were four you learned to read and tie your shoes. When I was four I attempted to negotiate a surrender, to keep my soldiers from having to risk their lives by having to take a settlement one hut at a time. There was no surrender and we went through the settlement, killing as we went and dying too, needless deaths all around, needless save to honor the death wish of the settlement leader, who preferred annihilation to life. I made sure I found him, denied him the martyrdom he imagined for himself, made him bury his dead, and gave him a cell to live a life which I hoped would be long enough to sprout regret.

When you were six you sat in school and learned to add two and three. When I was six I found you, or what remained of you—so much of you strewed behind you, along with the wreckage of your ship and your crew, and what was left of you alive only through luck and will and technology. You should have been dead when we met, and you should have died after we met, in the long minutes between finding you and saving you.

I remember touching your face and lying to you that you were all right now, seeing you weep and wondering if it might not be more merciful to let you die. But I had my orders to bring you back, so I did, knowing what it would mean for your life but not knowing what it would mean for mine. I was six when I met the person I would love, and became the person you would love again: the person I was made from, whom you met, or so you told me, when you were six.

♦♦♦

Please understand me. I do not mean to belittle you when I note that I was leading soldiers at an age when you could barely control your bladder, or that I stood dazzled by three moons rising over a phosphorescent sea, lacking the poetry to match in my head the song in my eyes, at an age where you enjoyed the taste of paste and boogers and small coins.

You no more chose how to be born than I did, and your life is no more or less complete because you required two decades to become an adult, and several decades after that to become a soldier, both of which I was from the moment I opened my eyes. I do not mean to demean you when I admit I find some amusement at the idea of you as a child, of you reaching no higher than my waist, of you big-eyed, and your big head wobbly on your neck, looking at the world with curiosity if not comprehension, needing to wait years to know enough to know how little you know.

I note these differences because they stand between us. When you speak of growing up and growing old, you speak to someone who did not do the first, and can choose not to fear the second. Every day of my life from first to this, in a body that defies both growth and decay, even if one day it cannot defy death. It is not eternal but it doesn’t change, and if I chose I could stay in it for as long as I could manage. Timeless in my way, unyielding to both creation and destruction, and because of this separate from the human stream of age—the arc that bends from development to deconstruction, that gives definition to your days, provides sense of story and an assurance of all things in their season, and all of it coming to an end as natural and complete as its beginning.

I hear you speak of your childhood as the blind hear someone speak of the color of a flower or of a beloved’s eyes; understanding that the color exists, understanding the emotion color can arouse, but lacking the experience that brings understanding into empathy, understanding a thing without feeling it deep in the brain, where the joy of it will shudder out, down the nerves to one’s very fingertips.

Childhood is a country undiscoverable to me, something so far removed from me that I cannot even say that it was denied, because it was never something that I was meant to have. Nor is it something I desire, whose absence I resent. I am who I am and that is enough. It is simply that childhood is an experience we do not share, another place where our lives refuse to link, a commonality we do not have. When I think of you as a child it amuses me, and it makes me sad that you do not get to think of me the same way.

♦♦♦

I am nine years old. In those nine years I have seen things that others could spend lifetimes and never once see. I have traveled farther than entire millennia of explorers, their journeys laid end to end and back again. I have been on more worlds than we knew could possibly exist for all but the smallest slice of time our species stared up at the stars. I have measured a life not in teaspoons or tablespoons or ladles or jugs but in inexhaustible gouts of experience, pushing me forward into wonder and terror and being.

I am nine years old and I have lived in every moment of that life. No time wasted in idleness and futility, in routine and repetition, in grinding gears or marking time. You can’t tell me I have lived less than those who have merely lived longer.

It does not matter: All these experiences and all this experience make no difference in how I am seen—how all of us are seen, those of us whose lives who begin in medias res. I am nine years old and must be what they remember nine-year-olds to be, seen, at best, as an idiot savant, a useful moron, a little girl in a big girl’s body.

Those who don’t belittle me fear me, me and mine; grown too fast, made too smart, too far out of their own experience to understand, assumed to be without morals because they would not have been moral at the same age. We are sent to do the things they judge necessary and yet fear to do—fine for us to be given tasks that might cost us our souls when we’re assumed not to have souls at all. We learn quickly not to hold this fear and stupidity against most of the human race, because the alternative is to let you all die.

When I first decided to love you I needed to know how you would see me. Whether you like so many others would see a child in an oversized body, or someone who was your equal in everything but time. I waited for the moment of condescension, for the casual dismissal, for the instance when you would ask what I could possibly know, given how little time I could have known it in.

I am waiting still, but I no longer expect its arrival. You are not blind to my age or our differences; you know better than anyone how brief my existence has been, because my life could have only begun after her life ended. Perhaps you see me as a continuation of a life interrupted, or perhaps you simply don’t care and see me as your equal because there is no reason not to. I have time to find out as our lives continue, and we mark time not by what has come before, but by what we have together.

6  Sex

I must apologize to you. I am sitting with you and you are talking to me, telling me about the world to which we are going, where you and I will start our lives together. I’m sure what you’re saying is important—critical things I need to know, about a place I have never been but where I will spend the rest of my days. I am sure you are telling me things I need to hear, but I must confess I’m not hearing a single word.

Instead I am intent on your face, and the movement of your lips, and the memory of how those lips feel when they are on me. While you speak I am thinking of the last time we kissed, and the subtle friction that took place because we were so slightly out of sync, the rush of blood flooding our lips to make them softer, and make us more aware of just how many nerve endings each of us were pressing against the other.

Your words arrive at ears that are not deaf but disinterested, because although what you say is something I need to know, I know I can make you repeat it some other time. You will oblige me that way. And so I watch your lips purse and thin and tighten and repeat, knowing that the same motions can be used for other ends, and enjoying the memory of those ends achieved.

I apologize now because I am staring at your hands, which you use as punctuation—another layer of language to illustrate the point you think I am hearing, but which in reality is flying past my head and falling into piles against the wall behind me. I realize that this is not like me, that you prize my seriousness and my ability to focus. You should know I am serious and I am focused, just not on what you’d prefer me to be. It is your hands that have my attention now, their short and choppy movements at the moment belying their startling fluidity as they move over me, and their strength when they lock with mine and press them down as you press your body into me.

There is an argument to be made as to which of us is stronger, but in the moment is not the time for that. Your strength is a sign of your intent and your request that I honor that intent. I’ve made the same request, and in the same way. I remember that you’ve honored it as well, hands locked and pressed and then released, to move with intent, another layer of language, to illustrate a point I want to hear.

I apologize yet again. This is a total loss. I am so far downstream from whatever it is that you’ve said that it would be impossible to catch up, and besides I am focused on other topics, about which I intend to make you presently aware. I am sorry that I have been entirely lost in your lips and hands and the memories of each on me. But you should know that I am going to make it up to you, and let you put them to what I feel is better use than the service to which they are put now. I think you will agree that all things considered, the purpose I have for them is a better one for all involved.

Even so I apologize for the inattention. I also apologize for surprising you just now, by knocking aside the table inconveniently set between us. And now I must apologize for upsetting your chair with you still in it, and for knocking your head on the floor. I will do what I can to make you forget your pain.

♦♦♦

Sex with you is unlike any other sex I’ve had. I do not say this like one of the restless virgins of literature, swept up in swooning tides of bliss. I am not the swooning type. And while you are good, you are not that good; your mere touch is not enough to transport me to fantastical realms of ecstasy, or whatever ridiculous phrase one would use to express such an idea.

Sex is not a holy or sacred thing or a physical machine to express a separate emotion. I fuck to enjoy myself and to celebrate the fact I am alive. I understand the idea of making love, but it seems a bad way to go about it. I don’t fuck to show my love. I love to show my love and let the fucking be its own thing. I love you and I love fucking you and I have no need to complicate either with the other. They are both true statements and they are both good. I am content to have them remain that way.

My sex before you was with my own, with those born as I was, who communicate as I do, equally adept at transmitting sensation and emotion whole and unrefined, over the same line as we send words. With us sex is not a matter simply of bodies, and of a pantomime approximation of knowing if what you are doing is working for those you are with. You feel what they feel and they feel what you feel, a positive feedback loop to take every thrust and pull and lick and touch, and magnify it until your nerves ring with your exhaustion, and the exhaustion of your partners.

It is needless to say what fun it can be. But it’s also worth noting what it lacks. Being inside someone’s head heightens the performance, and it makes you aware it is a performance: moves choreographed to increase pleasure, focused on the mechanics of sex but lacking in connection, ironic when you consider that your lover is inside your head as much as inside your body.

The first time we were together, I sent toward you to bind our thoughts and realized that your mind was shut to me; that not once had your mind been as open as your body. That you had lacked that dimension in your sex and always had. I pitied you. And then you put your mouth on me, and your hands, and I had nothing to do but focus on how you moved on me, and against me, and inside me.

And I realized that you lacked nothing; that in place of feeling your thoughts reflected in mine, I felt your desire and your inescapable need to be inside of me, not only with your body and not with your mind, but with every particle of your soul. I laughed and came at the same time, and wept as I tried to devour you, to own you and be every part of you as much as I was myself.

It was something I had never done before and will not do with anyone else. You opened me to desire, and I desire not to desire anyone but you.

♦♦♦

I regret to say that we have made a mess of the room, but I do not regret to say that you are inside of me. We will reconstruct the room later, but for now I want to focus on what we are doing, which makes me wonder why I am bothering to narrate this in my own head, observing me observing you inside of me.

Now I remember. I’m observing this because I want you to know how I know the nature of desire, that I have learned it from you, and that I question whether desire is truly what I feel. I have taken the time to read on the nature of desire and have learned the physiology of it—the rush of chemicals through the brain, tunneling pathways and new connections. But among this physiology, the psychology, the warning that desire does not stay, that novelty wanes and desire wanders, looking for someone new to attach to, or simply wanders off leaving behind something else that may be as satisfying in its way, but is not desire.

If this is true then I am not now feeling desire. What I feel for you has not wandered or waned or lessened, but has grown since the first time you pressed your mouth to mine and served your notice that you had desires of your own. I look at you now even as you are between me, and would push you farther into me until there is no space between us, no gap between where I stop and you begin, but a continuum and a binding, covalent and irrevocable. If it is not desire I do not know what to call it, save to call it love, which I already feel in different ways than this.

I am without a word to describe what I feel, if it is not desire and is not love. So I will express it how I can, not in words but in action, with lips and hands and bodies and merging, with sex and fucking and release.

I have never been inside someone as deeply as I am inside you. I love to feel you inside me, the physical complement to my spiritual state, expression made flesh of what I would say to you if I had the words. I press you into me, and draw into a kiss the lips that earlier had been speaking. I take the hands that had earlier moved in the air and bid you move them on me. Later you will tell me again what you had earlier said, and I will listen then, I promise.

But for now all I can say is that I apologize for wanting you, and in wanting you having you. And I apologize in advance for all the times I will want you between now and the end of our lives. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me I will make it worth your while, and will forgive you for all the times you will want me, and will accept your apologies, as you accept mine now.

7  Fear

Fear enters the room and sits down in a chair and with a polite smile asks to open negotiations. Fear is small and hard and patient, and duplicitous, because in asking to negotiate it knows I cannot refuse. I am obliged to accommodate Fear because I am human, and no human is without fear. Fear sits and smiles and is predatory, immobile and silent and serene; an observer who conserves his energy and is content to wait. We watch each other and take our measures, he to undo me and me to avoid being undone. We both sit and measure and stare. And then because I long for other company, I ask him to show me what I should fear.

To begin he offers me the fear of death, and I laugh. I laugh because I know Death far too well to fear her. Death is my intimate and my companion; I am her messenger and handmaiden. We have walked too many worlds and have become too familiar; close acquaintances if not friends, because you can never befriend Death without embracing her, and for now I keep her at a safe and prudent distance. Even so I know her methods and her means and her agenda. I know her legendary capriciousness is overstated but that her inevitability is not. Death comes to us all, even those who have served her so well.

It is foolish to fear the inevitable. I know I will die. Fearing Death will not make her come for me later and might send me to her sooner, when a blind rush from her sends me into her arms. I will not fear her and I will not fear going to her when it is time to do so. I tell Fear to show me something else.

He shows me Pain, myriad as Death is singular, creative in his attention-seeking, and in his desire to overwhelm every scrap of consciousness. The most perfect of egotists.

I am not impressed. Pain is a tool: a diagnostic instrument in one’s self, a lever in others, and in all things symbolic of something else that better deserves our attention. Pain may represent Death, who I refuse to fear. Pain may represent power, which I also refuse to fear; I am better than those who would use their power to make me fear them, power predicated on the assumption that I will do anything simply to exist. They presume to hold my life in trust; my regret as I would end my life would be that I would not be there as they realized how little power they had over me. I choose not to fear the things Pain represents, leaving pain a process, a signal, a firing of nerves to be endured.

♦♦♦

Of course Fear knows all this. Knows that I fear neither Death nor Pain, or those who use either to divorce me from my will. This is what fear does: presents you with what you can bear, so that when he shows you what is unbearable, you will open wider to let him feed on your heart. I know this and even knowing this does not keep me from a moment of satisfaction, and the hope that Fear will step away from my table. Fear allows you a moment to hope that he doesn’t truly know what will break you. But he does, and he proves it to me by showing me you, and showing you without me.

This is what I fear. And I confess that part of me hates you a little for it, hates that you have taken my life and so threaded it with yours that I can’t pull away without losing myself; I who had always been whole in myself but who now knows what she stands to lose in losing you.

It is not your death I fear, or separation. We have been at war as long as we have known of each other. Death follows behind us both, and separation has been what we have had the most of, our time together both trivial and precious measured against our time in absence. Death and separation do not alter what is between us. What I fear is diminishment, and subtle change, and the moment in which a life without you becomes a sustainable thought.

It seems such a small thing compared to all the other things one may fear. There is no finality here; you and I would continue in our lives, no death or distance to separate us. Just disinterest, and the perception of what we have becoming what we once had, becoming memory and history and remembrance. What was separated from what is and separate from what will be.

A small thing and a survivable thing. And for all that the thought of it falls on me like wreckage and pulls into me to burn with sickening violence. I look across the table and Fear is gone, not because it has gone but because it has found the thing that will let it live in me. I fear a life without you and you without me.

♦♦♦

I choose not to share this fear with you. You do not deserve to have it put on you. There has never been a time when you have not reached toward me, even when I had pushed you away (or, when we were formally introduced, when I threw you across a table). You never made me ask your forgiveness for being her, and you never loved me simply because I was the only part of her you had left. You have always seen me and you have always seen me with you.

I feel ashamed I have this fear, based on nothing real, called into existence by my own irrationality. I have so many excuses for it, beginning with my youth, and my inexperience in weaving my life to someone else’s. But I will not rationalize this fear. It is what it is; the serpent in my ear, whispering the promise of the fall.

I am human. Fear lives in me and sets to make my heart bitter. But I know something about Fear. Fear is a scavenger who feeds on the future; on what may be and what is possible, extending down the line of our lives. Fear lives in me and I cannot change that. But I choose to starve Fear. I choose to live here with you now.

In the future perhaps we will diminish and we will divide, and all we will have is memory. I accept that this could be what we have in time, and in accepting it set it aside. What is left to me is this moment, and you with me. I choose to be with you in this moment, to love you in the present time and in the present tense. It is all the time we have, have ever had, or will ever have. All of our lives here and now, wherever here and whenever now may be.

I love you now and will not regret having loved you and will not fear loving you forward. I am here now and I am with you. It is enough for as long as I have it.

With that thought I accept what I must from Fear and move toward you. Negotiations are closed, and you and I remain.

8  Endings

It is time to come to the end of things and to the beginning.

I am standing in a room where there are two of me. One of them is who I have always been as long as I have had memory of myself. The other is who I will be, someone I will be poured into to become who I must be to start our lives together.

I cannot stop staring at her. I see myself in the curve of her cheek and the line of her nose and the length of her limbs. Through her I will gain many things I would not have.

I will gain a husband and a daughter and a new world, which I will not have to meet at the end of a gun, and whose citizens I will not have to defend or kill. I will gain a measure of peace and I will gain an identity that is my own—not one of a soldier or an officer or a killer, but simply Jane Sagan, whoever she may be.

She offers me so many things, she who is not yet me. And all I have to do for her to become me is to give up myself.

I give up myself in speed and strength; my new body has only what nature and evolution saw fit to provide, limbs weak enough to force the brain to better them, with spear and sword and bow, gun and gears and engines, every marvelous creation made by man to compensate for a body barely competent to carry its brain in its head.

I give up myself in mind, abandoning the fluid switch between machine and gray matter that extends myself into others, to disconnect my thoughts to them and theirs to me, to sever the connections that have sustained me. To shut myself off in my own head. To live alone with my thoughts, their echoes muffled in close quarters.

I give myself up in identity as a soldier and an officer and a killer, as a friend and a colleague, and as one by whose hand humanity keeps its place in the universe.

Make no mistake that I am weaker for the loss of each. Make no mistake that I will have to learn again how to fit myself into a world that no longer works like it should. Make no mistake that it will be through force of will alone, that my frustration and anger at being less than what I was will not be visited on you—that even in my newly weakened state I am still dangerous and liable to rage at what I have taken from myself, by becoming this new self.

The woman who opens her eyes in the body I see before me cannot be the same as the one who closes her eyes in the body I have now. Too much changed to remain intact, too much left behind that can’t be brought over. I will hold my image of myself to me, but there is only so much of me that will fit.

♦♦♦

If you knew all of this I know you would ask me to consider what I was doing, whether I was sure I was making the right decision, and that you would rather face a life without me than to have me choose a life I would not choose for myself. I know this is what you would say and do as well as I know myself.

And this is why I say with all affection that sometimes you can be such a stupid man. I wouldn’t mind you feeling just a little bit greedy for me, that the idea of not having me would make you angry, not heavy-hearted and accepting. There are things you still have to learn about me and this is one of them. It is not that you are too considerate but that I don’t mind when you tell me what you want and put that first instead of last.

I don’t mind because that is what I am doing now. You should not think I do any of this for you, that I am committing a selfless act or an expression of slavish devotion, that I have signed on for a mermaid’s sacrifice and will walk on knives for dumb love. I am too selfish for that. I want you to know that I am here not for you but for me. I want you for my own. I want the life we will have together for my own. I want the silence of peace and release from being the one who walks ten steps ahead of Death. I want the honor of not being feared or hated, and of not having those be the correct response to my presence.

I want to be able to say that I have done my part and I have done it well, but that my part is over and now it is time for my reward, and that reward is you and this life. I want all of this and I am willing to pay to get it.

But it is still hard.

In this I imagine that I am now your equal: You once gave up a life, leaving behind a world and everything on it, all that you had been and everything you knew, on that single sphere of rock and air and water. You put it behind you and stepped into a new life in which you found me. I can’t imagine that it was easy to do this.

But was it a sacrifice? Did it take from you more than you could bear? It takes nothing from what you did to say it was not, that you left a life that had nothing left for you except the marking of time. Hard though it may be, it is not a sacrifice to give up that for which you no longer have a use.

I am at that place now. This life has made me who I am and who I am no longer wants this life. I have seen so much of this universe behind a rifle and a mission. I am ready to see a smaller part of it in depth and in peace. It is not a sacrifice to pay for what you want though the price is high. The price for this new life is everything in the old one. You once gave up everything in your old life and gained me. I am ready to give up this life and keep you.

♦♦♦

I rest in the container that holds everything I am but not anything I will be, and watch as the technician makes her preparations. You are holding my hand and telling me of what it was like for you.

I smile and I want to kiss you, but not here and not now. I do not want a last kiss in an old body and in an old life. I want a first kiss in a new life, a promise fulfilled and no regrets. I am looking forward to that kiss. I hold it in my thoughts as I hold myself there and you there with me.

The technician looks at me now and asks me if I want to begin. I look to you and say I do.

Appendix: Company D in Memoriam

In the transcription of ISC/IRI-003-4530/6(C) (“The Sagan Diary”), Lt. Sagan briefly recounts her first mission, the rescue and retrieval of 16th Brigade, Company D, which participated in the Third Battle of Provence. Lt. Sagan’s assessment of the tactical qualities of Company D is overly harsh: the official history of the battle ( CDFBA/OHR-003-1800/1(A)) clearly indicates that Company D fought tactically and well against a far superior enemy force, and was key in allowing later CDF forces to retake the planet. As acknowledgment of its sacrifice, we note the fallen members of 16th Brigade, Company D here.

Thomas W. Aldrich

Carl Anderson

LaLani Anderson

Will Anderson

Jason Arneaud

Sgt. Sue Arnie

Sean Baeza

Kathryn Baker

Patrick Baker

Nathan P. Bardsley

Kevin Barry

David Baynham

Sean Bell

Spencer Bernard

Moray Binfield

Diane Blum

Eric Bowersox

Joe Brockmeier

Justin Brown

Kevin Brown

Harvey Byas

Jose Cabanillas

Christopher Carrera

Matthew Carroll

Howard Carter

Dave Ciskowski

Joseph Collins

Bruce A. Conklin, Jr.

Karl Cook

Stephen Crowell

Rich Daniels

Christian DeBaun

Griffin T. Demas

Parker B. Demas

Jason Donev

John Doty

Christopher M. Downing

Amanda Dwyer

Gerard Fievet

Stephen Fleming

Steven Frame

James Franks

Darren Fry

Juan Fuentes

Janice Galeckas

Matthew Gallagher

Nathan Gendzier

Gerald Getz

Mike Goffee

Samuel Ray Granade

Jeremiah J. Griswold

David Gulick

Christopher Hamilton

Christofer Hardy

Stephen Kennedy Harrison

Rodney Haydon

Lorelei Heinmets

Rein Jacob Bandicoot Heinmets

Jason Henderson

Tillman James Hodgson

Tatiana Hodziewich

Billy Hollis

Kristian Holvoet

Robert Holz

Jonathan Hoopingarner

David Horst

Eric Howald

Butch Howard

Glenn Howarth

D. Geordie Howe

D. Geordie Howe (no relation)

Kenneth Hunt

Robert Jackson

Melissa Jankovic

Randy Johnson

William Johnston

Jason Julier

Mary Kay Kare

Ben Katt

Adam Kearns

Jerry Kelleher

Sean Kelly

David Kirkpatrick

Michael Kranjcevich

Brent Krupp

John C. Kulli

Bobby Kuzma

Ken Nozaki Lacy

Steve Landell

Michael LaSala

Rich Laux

Mathieu Lavigne

Jennifer Leo

Adam Letterman

Allen Lewis

James Lewis

Sean Li

Stephen Lichtwark

Matthew Lindquist

Willem Lohr

Joshua Lopez

John Elliott Lowe IV

Joshua Lowman

John Lowrance

Do-Ming Lum

Susan Mahaffey

Pedro Marroquin

Harry Mayo

Damian McCarthy

Timothy McClanahan

Jason McCulley

Chris McLaren

Phil Merritt

Paul Meyer

Godfrey Milan

Christopher Miller

Jason Mitchell

Stephen Mitchell

P. Janiece Murphy

Michael Myers

Robert Myers

David Nater

Benjamin Nealis

William Nealis

John Needham

Michael Nolan

Patrik Nordebo

Kelly Norton

John O’Neill

Anthony Parisi

John Peitzman

Alex Penchansky

Kurt Perry

Foster Piekarski

Michael A. Porter

Robert Presson

Bryan Price

Michael A. Putlack

Adam Rakunas

David E. Ray

Randall Richmond

John Romkey

Michael Rowley

Karl Sackett

Tomas Sanchez Tejero

Becky Sasala

Jack Savage

James Seals

Ian Seckington

John Clive Edmund Sheffield

Patrick Shepherd

Chris Shipley

Neil A. Shurley

David Smith

Michael Smith

Scot Sonderman

Blaine Spaulding

Hugh Staples

Erik Stegman

Charles Stewart

Stuart Stilborn

Gail Stout

James Courtney Stowe

Jennifer Strachan

Abi Sutherland

Todd Taylor

Charles Terhune

Jason Thurber

Howard Kai-Hao To

Eric Tolladay

Doug Triplett

Lauren Uroff

George Vaughan

Patrick Vera

Lee Walter

Nik Weisend

Bradley G. Wherry

Geraldine Winter

Paul Wood

Paul Worosello

Jody L. Wurl

Todd Yankee

Adam Ziegler

Zane L. Zielinski

Author Afterword

On September 25, 2006, science fiction and fantasy author John M. Ford passed away. His loved ones suggested that those who wished to remember him do so by contributing to a book endowment, established in his name, which would benefit the Minneapolis Public Library. I had met Mike Ford only briefly, but a number of good friends and colleagues were close to him, and I wanted to do something to help get the endowment off to a good start. I offered a bound draft version of my novel The Last Colony for auction, and noted somewhat jokingly that if the bidding got to $5,000 or above, I would write a short story for the winning bidder, on the grounds that someone who bid that much deserved a short story.

As it happens, Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press had been trying to get me to write a story for him, set in my “Old Man’s War” universe. So he asked me if I was serious about writing the short story for a $5,000 bid. I said I was; he bid that amount. And here we are: The John M. Ford Book Endowment is $5,000 richer, and I wrote the story you now have in your hands.

I don’t want to overstate my relationship with Mike Ford; as I mentioned before, we had met only a few times, although each time was an enjoyable experience. Nevertheless, his warmth and kindness and wit enlightened the lives of people whom I have come to care about in the science fiction community, and their memories and celebration of his life served as an inspiration for me in the writing of this story. I encourage everyone who reads this to seek out his work, which is eminently worth reading.

I’d also like to give a word of appreciation to Bill, whose positive delight in maneuvering me over a barrel to get a story out of me in no way diminishes the generosity of his contribution, which serves both to honor the memory of Mike Ford and puts books in the hands of readers. Bill’s a good egg, and I’m delighted he got this story out of me.

—John Scalzi

December 16, 2006

After the Coup

Copyright © 2008 by John Scalzi.

All rights reserved.

Cover and interior illustrations

Copyright © 2008 by John Harris.

All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN

978-1-4299-5212-5

A Tor.com Original
www.tor.com

“How well can you take a punch?” asked Deputy Ambassador Schmidt.

Lieutenant Harry Wilson blinked and set down his drink. “You know, there are a number of places a conversation can go after a question like that,” he said. “None of them end well.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” Schmidt said. He drummed the glass of his own drink with his fingers. Harry noted the drumming, which was a favorite nervous tell of Hart Schmidt’s. It made poker games with him fun. “I have a very specific reason to ask you.”

“I would hope so,” Harry said. “Because as conversational ice breakers go, it’s not in the top ten.”

Schmidt looked around the Clarke’s officer lounge. “Maybe this isn’t the best place to talk about it,” he said.

Harry glanced around the lounge. It was singularly unappealing; a bunch of magnetized folding chairs and equally magnetized card tables, and single porthole from which the yellowish green limb of Korba-Aty was glowing, dully. The drinks they were having came from the rack of vending machines built into the wall. The only other person in the lounge was Lieutenant Grant, the Clarke’s quartermaster; she was looking at her PDA and wearing headphones.

“It’s fine, Hart,” Harry said. “Enough with the melodrama. Spit it out already.”

“Fine,” Schmidt said, and then drummed on his drink some more. Harry waited. “Look, this mission isn’t going well,” he finally said.

“Really,” Harry said, dryly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Schmidt said.

“Don’t get defensive, Hart,” Harry said. “I’m not blaming you.”

“I just want to know how you came to that conclusion,” Schmidt said.

“You mean, how did I come to that conclusion despite the fact I’m this mission’s mushroom,” Harry said.

Schmidt frowned. “I don’t know what that means,” he said.

“It means that you keep me in the dark and feed me shit,” Harry said.

“Ah,” Schmidt said. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Harry said. “This is a Colonial Union diplomatic mission, and I’m Colonial Defense Forces, and you don’t want me seen by the Korba because you don’t want my presence to be interpreted as provocation. So while the rest of you head down to the planet, and get to breathe real air and see actual sunlight, I stay up here in this latrine of a spaceship, training your technicians to use the field generator and catching up on my reading. Which is going well, incidentally. I just finished Anna Karenina.”

“How was it?” Schmidt said.

“Not bad,” Harry said. “The moral is to stay away from trains. The point is, I know why I’m kept in the dark. Fine. Fair enough. But I’m not stupid, Hart. Even if none of you tell me anything about the mission, I can tell it’s not going well. All of you deputies and assistants come back to the Clarke looking like you’ve had the crap beat out of you all day long. It’s a subtle hint.” He picked up his drink and slugged some back.

“Hmm. Anyway, yes,” Schmidt said. “The mission isn’t going well. The Korba haven’t been nearly as receptive to our negotiations as we thought they might be. We want to try something new. A new direction. A new diplomatic tack.”

“A new tack that is somehow focused on me getting punched,” Harry said, setting his drink back down.

“Maybe,” Schmidt said.

“Once or repeatedly?” Harry asked.

“I think that would depend on your definition,” Schmidt said.

“Of ‘once’?” Harry asked.

“Of ‘punched,’ actually,” Schmidt said.

“I already have very deep reservations about this plan,” Harry said.

“Well, let me give you some context,” Schmidt said.

“Please do,” Harry said.

Schmidt produced his PDA and began to slide it over to Harry, then stopped midway through the motion. “You know that everything I’m about to tell you is classified.”

“Good lord, Hart,” Harry said. “I’m the only person on the Clarke who doesn’t know what’s going on.” Harry reached over and took the PDA. On its screen was the image of a battle cruiser of some sort, floating near a skyscraper. Or more accurately, what was left of a skyscraper; it had been substantially destroyed, likely by the battle cruiser. In the foreground of the picture, small, vaguely-humanoid blotches seemed to be running from the ruined skyscraper. “Nice picture,” Harry said.

“What do you think you’re seeing there?” Schmidt said.

“A strong case for not letting trainees drive a battle cruiser,” Harry said.

“It’s an image taken during the recent Korban coup,” Schmidt said. “There was a disagreement between the head of the military and the Korban civilian leadership. That skyscraper is—well, was—the Korban administrative headquarters.”

“So the civilians lost that particular argument,” Harry said.

“Pretty much,” Schmidt said.

“Where do we come in?” Harry asked, handing back the PDA. “Are we trying to restore the civilian government? Because, to be honest about it, that doesn’t really sound like something the CU would care about.”

“We don’t,” Schmidt said, taking back the PDA. “Before the coup, the Korba were barely on our radar at all. They had a non-expansionist policy. They had their few worlds and they’d stood pat on them for centuries. We had no conflict with them, so we didn’t care about them. After the coup, the Korba are very interested in expanding again.”

“This worries us,” Harry said.

“Not if we can point them toward expanding in the direction of some of our enemies,” Schmidt said. “There are some races in this area who are pushing in on us. If they had to worry about someone else, they’d have fewer resources to hit us with.”

“See, that’s the Colonial Union I know,” Harry said. “Always happy to stick a knife in someone else’s face. But none of this has anything to do with me getting punched in the face.”

“Actually, it does,” Schmidt said. “We made a tactical error. This mission is a diplomatic one, but the new leaders of Korba are military. They’re curious about our military, and they’re especially curious about our CDF soldiers, whom they’ve never encountered because our races have never fought. We’re civilians; we don’t have any of our military on hand, and very little in terms of military capability to show them. We brought them that field generator you’ve been training our technicians on, but that’s defensive technology. They’re much more interested in our offensive capabilities. And they’re especially interested in seeing our soldiers in action. Negotiations up to this point have been going poorly because we’re not equipped to give them what they want. But then we let it slip that we have a CDF member on the Clarke.”

“We let it slip,” Harry said.

“Well, I let it slip, actually,” Schmidt said. “Come on, Harry, don’t look at me like that. This mission is failing. Some of us need this mission to succeed. My career’s not exactly on fire, you know. If this mission goes into the crapper, I’m going to get reassigned to an archive basement.”

“I’d be more sympathetic if saving your career didn’t require blunt force trauma for me,” Harry said.

Schmidt nodded, and then ducked his head a little, which Harry took as something akin to an apology. “When we told them about you, they got very excited, and we were asked by the Korbans’ new leader—a direct request from the head of state, Harry—if we would be willing to pit you against one of their soldiers in a contest of skills,” Schmidt said. “It was strongly implied it would make a real difference in the tenor of the negotiations.”

“So of course you said yes,” Harry said.

“Let me remind you of the part where I said the mission was going into the crapper,” Schmidt said.

“There is a small flaw in this plan,” Harry said. “Besides the part where I get the crap kicked out of me, I mean. Hart, I’m CDF, but I’m not a soldier. I’m a technician. I’ve spent the last several years working in the military science division of the Forces. That’s why I’m here, for God’s sake. I’m training your people to use technology we developed. I’m not training them to fight, I’m training them to twirl knobs.”

“You’ve still got the CDF genetic engineering,” Schmidt said, and pointed to Harry’s sitting form. “Your body is still in top physical shape, whether you use it or not. Your reflexes are still fast as ever. You’re still as strong as ever. Look at you, Harry. There’s nothing flabby or squishy about you. You’re in as good a shape as any soldier on the line.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Harry said.

“Doesn’t it?” Schmidt said. “Tell me, Harry. Everyone else on this mission is an unmodified human. Is there any one of us that you couldn’t take in hand to hand combat?”

“Well, no. But you’re all soft,” Harry said.

“Thanks for that,” Schmidt said. He took a sip of his drink.

“My point is whether or not I’m engineered for combat, I haven’t been a soldier for a very long time,” Harry said. “Fighting isn’t like riding a bicycle, Hart. You can’t just pick it up without practice. If these guys are so hot to see CDF in action, send a skip drone back to Phoenix and request a squad. They could be here in a couple of days if you make it a priority request.”

“There’s no time, Harry,” Schmidt said. “The Korba want a combat exhibition tonight. Actually,”—Schmidt checked the chronometer on his PDA—“in about four and a half hours.”

“Oh, come on,” Harry said.

“They made the request this morning, Harry,” Schmidt said. “It’s not like I’ve been keeping it from you. We told them about you, they made the request and ten minutes later I was being hustled off to the shuttle back to the Clarke to tell you. And here we are.”

“What is this ‘skill contest’ they want me to have?” Harry asked.

“It’s a ritualized combat thing,” Schmidt said. “It’s physical combat, but it’s done as a sport. Like karate or fencing or wrestling. There are three rounds. You get scored on points. There are judges. From what I understand it’s mostly harmless. You’re not going to be in any real danger.”

“Except for being punched,” Harry said.

“You’ll heal,” Schmidt said. “And anyway, you can punch back.”

“I don’t suppose I can pass,” Harry said.

“Sure, you can pass,” Schmidt said. “And then when the mission fails and everyone on the mission is demoted into shit jobs and the Korba ally themselves with our enemies and start looking at human colonies they can pick off, you can bask in the knowledge that at least you came out of this all unbruised.”

Harry sighed and drained his drink. “You owe me, Hart,” he said. “Not the Colonial Union. You.”

“I can live with that,” Schmidt said.

“Fine,” Harry said. “So the plan is to go down there, fight with one of their guys, get beat up a little, and everyone walks away happy.”

“Mostly,” Schmidt said.

“Mostly,” Harry said.

“I have two requests for you from Ambassador Abumwe,” Schmidt said. “And she said for me to say to that by ‘request,’ she means that if you don’t do them both she will find a way to make the rest of your natural existence one of unceasing woe and misery.”

“Really,” Harry said.

“She was very precise about her word use,” Schmidt said.

“Lovely,” Harry said. “What are the requests?”

“The first is that you keep the contest close,” Schmidt said. “We need to show the Korba from the start that the reputation the CDF has is not undeserved.”

“Not knowing what the rules of the contest are, how it’s played or whether I’m even physically capable of keeping up with it, sure, why not, I’ll keep it close,” Harry said. “What’s the other request.”

“That you lose,” Schmidt said.

* * *

“The rules are simple,” Schmidt said, translating for the Korban who stood in front of them. Normally Harry would use his BrainPal—the computer in his head—to do a translation, but he didn’t have access to the Clarke’s network to access the language. “There are three rounds: One round with Bongka—those are like quarterstaffs, Harry—one round of hand-to-hand combat, and one round of water combat. There are no set times for any round; they continue until all three judges have selected a victor, or until one of the combatants is knocked unconscious. The chief judge here wants to make sure you understand this.”

“I understand,” said Harry, staring at the Korban, who came up, roughly, to his waist. The Korba were squat, bilaterally symmetrical, apparently muscular, and covered by what appeared to be an infinite amount of overlapping plates and scales. What little information Harry could uncover about the Korban physiology suggested that they were of some sort of amphibious stock, and that they lived some of their lives in water. This would at least explain the “water combat” round. The gathering hall they were in held no obvious water sources, however. Harry wondered if something might not have been lost in translation.

The Korban began speaking again, and as he spoke and breathed, the plates around his neck and chest moved in a motion that was indefinably strange and unsettling; it was almost like they didn’t quite go back in the same place they started off at. Harry found them unintentionally hypnotic.

“Harry,” Schmidt said.

“Yes?” Harry said.

“You’re all right with the nudity?” Schmidt asked.

“Yes,” Harry said. “Wait. What?”

Schmidt sighed. “Pay attention, Harry,” he said. “The contest is performed in the nude so that it’s purely a test of skill, no tricks. You’re okay with that?”

Harry glanced around the gymnasium-like room they were in, filling up with Korban spectators, human diplomats and Clarke crew members on shore leave. In the crowd of humans he located Ambassador Abumwe, who gave him a look that reinforced her earlier threat of unending misery. “So everyone gets to see my bits,” Harry said.

“Afraid so,” Schmidt said. “All right, then?”

“Do I have a choice?” Harry asked.

“Not really,” Schmidt said.

“Then I guess I’m all right with it,” Harry said. “See if you can get them to crank up the thermostat.”

“I’ll look into it.” Schmidt said something to the Korban, who replied at length. Harry doubted they were actually speaking about the thermostat. The Korban turned and uttered a surprisingly loud blast, his neck and chest plates spiking out as he did so. Harry was suddenly reminded of a horny toad back on Earth.

From across the room another Korban approached, holding a staff just under two meters in length, with the ends coated in what appeared to be red paint. The Korban presented it to Harry, who took it. “Thanks,” he said. The Korban ran off.

The judge started speaking. “He says that they apologize that they are unable to give you a more attractive Bongka,” Schmidt translated, “but that your height meant they had to craft one for you specially, and they did not have time to hand it over to an artisan. He wants you to know, however, that it is fully functional and you should not be at any disadvantage. He says you may strike your opponent at will with the bongka, and on any part of the body, but only with the tips; using the unmarked part of the bongka to strike your opponent will result in lost points. You can block with the unmarked part, however.”

“Got it,” Harry said. “I can hit anywhere? Aren’t they worried about someone losing an eye?”

Schmidt asked. “He says that if you manage to take an eye, then it counts. Every hit or attack with a tip is fair.” Schmidt was quiet for a moment as the judge spoke at length. “Apparently the Korba can regenerate lost limbs and some organs, eventually. They don’t see losing one as a huge problem.”

“I thought you said there were rules, Hart,” Harry said.

“My mistake,” Schmidt said.

“You and I are going to have a talk after all of this is done,” Harry said.

Schmidt didn’t answer this because the judge had started speaking again. “The judge wants to know if you have a second. If you don’t have one he will be happy to provide you one.”

“Do I have a second?” Harry said.

“I didn’t know you needed one,” Schmidt said.

“Hart, please make an effort to be useful to me,” Harry asked.

“Well, I’m translating,” Schmidt said.

“I only have your word for that,” Harry said. “Tell the judge that you’re my second.“

“What? Harry, I can’t,” Schmidt said. “I’m supposed to be sitting with the Ambassador.”

“And I’m supposed to be in a bunk on the Clarke reading the first part of The Brothers Karamazov,” Harry said. “Clearly this is a disappointing day for both of us. Suck it up, Hart. Tell him.”

Schmidt told him; the judge started speaking at length to Schmidt, chest and neck plates shifting as he did so. Harry glanced back over to the seating area provided the Colonial Union diplomats and Clarke crew, who shifted in their rows. The stands were half-sized for humans; they sat with their knees bunched into their chests like parents at a pre-school open house. They didn’t look in the least bit comfortable.

Good, thought Harry.

The judge stopped speaking, turned toward Harry, and did something with his scales that caused a wave-like ripple to go around his head. Harry shuddered involuntarily; the judge seemed to take that as a response. He left.

“We’re going to start in just a minute,” Schmidt said. “Now might be a good time for you to strip.”

Harry set down his bongka and took off his jacket. “I don’t suppose you’re going to strip,” he said. “Being my second and all.”

“The judge didn’t say anything about it in the job description,” Schmidt said. He took the jacket from Harry.

“What is your job description?” Harry asked.

“I’m supposed to research your opponent and give you tips on how to beat him,” Schmidt said.

“What do you know about my opponent?” Harry asked. He was out of his shirt and was slipping off his trousers.

“My guess is that he will be short,” Schmidt said.

“How do I beat him?” Harry said. He slipped of his shoes and let his toes test the spongy flooring.

“You’re not supposed to beat him,” Schmidt said. “You’re supposed to tie and then take a fall.”

Harry grunted and handed Schmidt his pants, socks and shoes. “Am I correct in assuming that there are several species of legume that would do a better job being my second than you, Hart?”

“Sorry, Harry,” Schmidt said. “I’m flying by the seat of my pants here.”

“And my pants,” Harry said.

“I guess that’s true,” Schmidt said. He looked at the nude Harry and counted the number of apparel he was holding. “Where’s your underwear?” he asked.

“Today was laundry day,” Harry said.

“You went commando to a diplomatic function?” Schmidt asked. The horror in his voice was unmistakable.

“Yes, Hart, I went commando to a diplomatic function,” Harry said, and then motioned to his body. “And now, as you can see, I’m going Spartan so a midget can whack me with a stick.” He bent and picked up his Bongka. “Honestly, Hart. Help me out here. Focus a little.”

“All right,” Hart said, and glanced at the pile of clothes he was holding. “Let me just put these somewhere.” He started off toward the human seating area.

As Hart did this, three Korba approached Harry. One was the judge from earlier. Another Korban was carrying his own bongka, proportional to his own height; Harry’s opponent. The third was a step behind Harry’s opponent; Harry guessed it was the other second.

The three Korba stopped directly in front of Harry. The one holding the bongka handed it to his second, looked up at Harry, and then thrust out his hands, palms forward, making a grunting noise as he did so. Harry hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with this. So he handed his bongka to Schmidt, who had just come running up, thrust his own hands forward, and returned the motion. “Jazz hands,” Harry said.

The Korban seemed satisfied, took back his bongka, and headed toward the other side of the gym. The judge spoke, and held up something in his hand. “He says that they’re ready to begin,” Schmidt said. “He will signal the start of the round with his horn, and will use it again at the end of the round. When the round ends, there will be a few minutes while they set up for the next round. You can use that time to rest and to confer with your second. Do you understand?”

“Yes, fine,” Harry said. “Let’s get to it, already.” Schmidt responded; the judge walked off. Harry began working with the bongka, testing its balance and warp. It felt like it was made of a hard wood of some sort; he wondered if it would splinter or break.

“Harry,” Schmidt said, and pointed to where the judge stood, horn raised high. “We’re starting.”

Harry held his bongka in both hands, chest high, horizontal to the ground. “Any last pieces of advice?” he asked.

“Aim low,” Schmidt said, and backed off the floor.

“Great,” Harry said. The judge blasted his horn and moved to the side of the gym. Harry stepped forward with his bongka, keeping his eye on his opponent.

His opponent raised his bongka, expanded his chest and neck by an alarming amount, emitted a deafening noise somewhere between a belch and a roar, and launched himself at Harry as fast as his little feet could carry him. The Korba in the stands, ringing the gym save for the small section for the humans, cheered mightily in a similar chest-inflating, burping fashion.

Three seconds later Harry was confronted by the fact that he had absolutely no clue what he was doing. The Korban had set on him with a slashing, dizzying array of bongka maneuvers; Harry blocked about a third of them and avoided the rest by stumbling backward as the Korban pressed his advantage. The Korban was whirling his bongka like a rotor blade. Harry realized that having the longer bongka was not an advantage here; it took longer to swing, block and attack. The little Korban had the upper hand, as it were.

The Korban lunged at Harry and appeared to overextend; Harry swung his bongka overhead to try to tap him on the backside. As he did the Korban twisted inside the arc of Harry’s attack; Harry realized he’d been played just as the Korban viciously whacked both of his ankles. Harry went down; the Korban jumped back just far enough to begin enthusiastically tenderizing Harry’s midsection as he fell. Harry rolled and blindly thrust his bongka at the Korban; somewhat improbably, it connected, poking the Korban in its snout. The poke fazed the Korban into stopping its attack and taking a step back. Harry poked it back a couple more steps and then stood up, testing his ankles. They complained but held.

“Keep poking him!” Schmidt yelled. Harry glanced over to snap something back, giving the Korban an opening. He took it, whacked Harry hard upside the head, then reapplied himself to Harry’s ankles. Harry stumbled but kept upright, wheeling in a drunken fashion toward the center of the gym. The Korban followed, swinging merrily at Harry’s already bruised ankle bones. Harry got the distinct feeling he was being toyed with.

Screw this, Harry thought, and stopped, planted his bongka firmly into the gym mat and hurled himself up the staff. A second later he was doing a handstand at the top of it, balanced by dint of his finely calibrated if disused motor control, courtesy of the Colonial Defense Forces genetic engineering.

The Korban, clearly not expecting this tactic, stopped and openly gawked.

“That’s right,” Harry said. “Come whack on my ankles now, you little prick.“

Harry continued to feel smug about his plan right until the moment the Korban crouched and launched itself into the air with a push of its powerful legs. The Korban didn’t make it as high as Harry’s ankles. He did, however, get right on level with Harry’s face.

Oh, crap, Harry thought, before the blinding crack of a bongka smashed across the bridge of his nose and robbed him of any further capacity for reaction, commentary or thought. All those things came back to him with blinding pain as Harry’s spinal column compressed into the gym mat as he fell. After that there were a few moments of curiously distant sensation as the Korban’s bongka dug into various parts of his body, followed by an even more distant blast of a horn. The first round was over. The Korba strutted off to the sound of belching applause; Harry propped himself up on his bongka and staggered over to Schmidt, who had found him a water bottle.

“Are you okay?” Schmidt said.

“Are you dumb?” Harry said. He took the water bottle and squirted some of the water on his face.

“I’m kind of wondering what the thinking was on that handstand,” Schmidt said.

“The thinking was that if I didn’t do something my ankle bones would be a fine powder,” Harry said.

“What were you going to do then?” Schmidt asked.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I was in a rush, Hart. I was making it up as I went along.”

“I don’t think it worked the way you wanted it to,” Schmidt said.

“Well, maybe if I had a second who told me these little bastards could high jump two meters straight up from a squat, I would have tried something else,” Harry said.

“Fair point,” Schmidt said.

“Anyway, you want me to lose, remember?” Harry said.

“Yes, but we want you to lose by just a little,” Schmidt said. “You need to keep it closer than this. Ambassador Abumwe is glaring a hole through the back of your head right now. No, don’t look.“

“Hart, if I could have made it closer I would have,” Harry said. He drank some water and then stretched, trying to find a place on his body that didn’t hurt. His left instep seemed the most likely candidate. Harry glanced down and was glad the Korban had not seemed aware that human testicles were especially painful when struck; his had managed to escape injury.

“Looks like they’re ready for the second round,” Schmidt said, and pointed at the judge, who was standing with his horn. On the other end of the gym the Korban was hopping from foot to foot, loosening himself up for the hand-to-hand combat.

“Swell,” Harry said, and handed the water bottle back to Schmidt. “Words of wisdom for this round?”

“Mind your ankles,” Schmidt said.

“You’re a big help,” Harry said. The horn blew and he stepped back onto the gym floor.

The Korban wasted no time fronting an offensive, charging Harry almost as soon as he was on the floor. A few meters out the Korban kicked and launched himself into the air, claws out; he was aiming for Harry’s head.

Not this time, you son of a bitch, Harry thought, and pushed himself back and toward the gym floor. The Korban slid just over Harry’s head, slashing as he did so; Harry responded by bringing up a leg and delivering to the Korban’s posterior a truly excellent bicycle kick. The Korban suddenly accelerated head first into the stands, colliding violently into several other Korba, whose refreshments went flying. Harry arched his head from a lying position to see the carnage, then glanced over to Schmidt, who gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up. Harry grinned and picked himself off the floor.

The Korban burst out of the stands, enraged and refreshment-coated, and launched himself once more and incautiously at Harry. Being suddenly and humiliatingly launched into the stands had apparently simplified the Korban’s attack strategy down to tear the human a new one. Harry didn’t mind.

The Korban approached and wheeled back to deliver a mighty blow, either to Harry’s midsection or genital region, whichever was closer. Harry responded by holding steady until the last second and then shot out his arm. The Korban’s forward motion smacked to standstill as Harry’s left palm met the little alien’s forehead. It was like stopping a particularly aggressive eight year old. Harry smirked.

The Korban was not amused at what it registered as a condescending defense maneuver on Harry’s part; it burp-snarled its rage and prepared to shred Harry’s forearm. Harry reared back his right arm to slug the Korban, distracting it, and then quickly retracted his left palm, made a loose fist, and popped the Korban in the face. The Korban snorted in alarm; Harry took that moment to bring his right hook square into the Korban’s snout.

The scales and plates of the Korban’s face puffed out as if the alien’s head was a flower traumatized into blossom; they settled back as the Korban collapsed onto the ground. Harry kept him on the ground by kicking it viciously every time it so much as puffed a plate. Eventually the judges got bored with this and blew their horn. Harry walked off the floor; the Korban’s second came and dragged him off.

“I think you might have overdone the kicking,” Schmidt said, handing Harry his refilled water bottle.

“You’re not the one whose kidneys were mashed into pâté in the first round,” Harry said. “I was just giving him what he gave me. He was still breathing at the end of the round. He’s fine. And now the contest is closer, which is what you wanted.” He drank.

A door opened on the side of the gymnasium and a forklift-like contraption drove in, carrying what appeared to be a large kiddie pool full of water. The pool was set down near Harry; the forklift then retreated, to reappear a minute later with another pool, which it set down near Harry’s Korban competitor.

Harry looked over at Schmidt, who shrugged. “For the water combat round?” He ventured.

“What are we going to do, splash each other?” Harry asked.

“Look,” Schmidt said, and pointed. The Korban competitor, now somewhat recovered, had stepped into his pool. The judge, standing again in the middle of the gym, motioned at Harry to step into his pool. Harry looked at Schmidt, who shrugged again. “Don’t ask me,” he said.

Harry sighed and stepped into his own pool; the water, very warm, came up to his mid-thigh. Harry fought back the temptation to sit down in it and have a nice soak. He looked over again to Schmidt. “Now what do I do?” he asked.

Schmidt didn’t respond. Harry waved his hand in front of Schmidt. “Hart. Hello?” he said.

Schmidt looked over to Harry. “You’re going to want to turn around, Harry,” he said.

Harry turned around, and looked at his Korban competitor, who was suddenly about a foot taller than he had been, and growing.

What the hell? Harry thought. And then he saw it. The level of the water in the Korban’s pool was almost slowly falling; as it did, the scales and plates on the Korban were shifting, sliding against each other and separating out. Harry watched as the scales on the Korban’s mid-section appeared to stretch apart and the join, as the plates that used to be underneath locked into place with the plates that used to be above, expanded by the water flooding into the Korban’s body from the pool. Harry eyes shifted from the Korban’s midsection to its hands, where its digits were expanding by rotating the overlapping scales, locking them together into a previously unknown dance of Fibonacci sequences.

Harry’s mind thought of several things at once.

First, he marveled at the absolutely stunning physiology of the Korbans on display here; the scales and plates covering their bodies were not simply integumentary but had to be structural as well, holding the shape of the Korban body in both states; Harry doubted there was an internal skeleton, at least as it was understood in a human body, and the earlier puffing and expanding suggested that the Korbans’ structural system used both air and water to do certain and specific things; this species was clearly the anatomical find of the decade.

Second, he shuddered at the thought of whatever evolutionary pressure had caused the Korban—or its distant amphiboid ancestors—to develop such a dramatic defense mechanism. Whatever was out there in the early seas of this planet, it had to have been pretty damn terrifying.

Third, as the Korban forced water into its body, growing to a size now a square of the size and some terrifying cube of the mass of Harry’s own dimensions, he realized he was about to get his ass well and truly kicked.

Harry wheeled on Schmidt. “You can’t tell me you didn’t know about this,” he said.

“I swear to you, Harry,” Schmidt said. “This is new to me.”

“How can you miss something like this?” Harry said. “What the hell do you people do all day?”

“We’re diplomats, Harry, not xenobiologists,” Schmidt said. “Don’t you think I would have told you?”

The judge’s horn sounded. The towering Korban stepped out of his pool with a hammering thud.

“Oh, shit,” Harry said. He splashed as he tried to get out of his own pool.

“I have no advice for you,” Schmidt said.

“No kidding,” Harry said.

“Oh, God, here he comes,” Schmidt said, and then stumbled off the floor. Harry looked up just in time to see an immense fist of flesh, water and fluid dynamics pummel into his midsection and send him flying across the room. Some part of Harry’s brain remarked on the mass and acceleration required to lift him like that, even as another part of Harry’s brain remarked that at least a couple of ribs had just gone with that punch.

The crowd roared its approval.

Harry groggily took stock of his surroundings just as the Korban stomped up, lifted up its immense foot, and brought it down square on Harry’s chest, giving him the sensation of involuntary defibrillation. Harry watched as the foot lifted up again and noted two large hexagonal depressions in them. The part of his brain that had earlier marveled at the physiology of the Korba recognized these as the places where the body would take in water; they would have to be at least that large to grow the body as quickly as it did.

The rest of Harry’s brain told that part to shut the hell up and move, because that foot was coming down again. Harry groaned and rolled, and bounced a little as the impact of the foot on the floor where Harry had just been caused everything to vibrate. Harry crawled away and then scrambled to his feet, narrowly missing a kick that would have sent him into a wall.

The Korban lumbered after Harry, swinging at him as the crowd cheered. The alien was quick because its size allowed it to cover distance quickly, but as it swung at Harry, he realized that its attacks were slower than they were before. There was too much inertia going on here for the Korban to turn on a dime or make quick strikes. Harry suspected that when two Korba fought in this round, they basically stood in the middle of the gym and beat the hell out of each other until one of them collapsed. That strategy wouldn’t work here. Harry thought back on the first round, where the smaller Korba’s size was an advantage—size and the fact it knew its way around a bongka. Now the situations were reversed; Harry’s smaller size could work to his advantage, and the Korban, in this size, wouldn’t know how to fight something smaller.

Let’s test that, Harry thought, and suddenly ran at the Korba. The Korba took a mighty swing at Harry; Harry ducked it, got in close, and jammed an elbow into the Korban’s midsection. Whereupon he discovered to his dismay that thanks to their engorgement, hitting the Korban’s plates was just like punching concrete.

Oops, Harry thought, and then screamed as the Korban grabbed him by his hair and lifted him. Harry caught hold of the arm lifting him so his scalp wouldn’t tear off. The Korban commenced punching him in the ribs, cracking a few more. Through the pain, Harry levered himself on the Korban’s arm and kicked upward, jamming his big toe into the Korban’s snout; clearly it was the one body part of the Korban’s that Harry was having luck with today. The Korban howled and dropped Harry; he flopped down and thudded to the floor on his back. Before he could roll away the Korban stamped on his chest like a piston, once, twice, three times.

Harry felt a sickening stab. He was reasonably sure he had a punctured lung. The Korban stamped again, forcing fluid out of Harry’s mouth. Definitely a punctured lung, he thought.

The Korban raised his foot again and this time aimed for Harry’s head, taking a moment to perfect his aim.

Harry reached up and grabbed the top of the Korban’s foot with his left hand; with his right he formed his fingers into a point and jammed them into one of the hexagonal depressions as hard as he could. As he did, Harry could feel something tear: the fleshy valve that closed to keep the water inside the Korban. It tore, and a spray of warm water pushed out of the Korban’s foot and splashed over Harry.

The Korban offered an unspeakably horrible scream as the unexpected pain obliterated any other focus and tried to shake Harry off. Harry hung on, jamming his fingers further into the valve. He wrapped his left arm around the Korban’s lower leg and squeezed, juicing the Korban. Water sprayed on the floor. The Korban hopped, frantically attempting to dislodge Harry, and slipped on the disgorged liquid. It fell backward, causing the entire floor to quake. Harry switched positions and now started pushing on the leg from the bottom, forcing even more water out of it; he could actually see the leg deflating. The Korban howled and writhed; he clearly wasn’t going anywhere. Harry figured that if the judges had any brains at all, they would have to call the round any second now.

Harry looked over to Schmidt. Schmidt looked at him with something akin to raw terror on his face. It took Harry a minute to figure out why.

Oh, right, Harry thought to himself. I’m supposed to lose.

Harry sighed and stopped juicing the Korban, letting the leg go. The Korban, still in pain, eventually sat up and looked at Harry, with a look that Harry could only imagine was complete confusion. Harry walked over and knelt down into the Korban’s face.

“You have no idea how much it kills me to do this,” Harry said, reached out to the Korban’s face and made a grabbing motion. Then he stuck his thumb out from between his index and middle fingers and showed it to the Korban. The Korban stared at him, non-comprehending.

“Look,” Harry said. “I got your nose.“

The Korban swung a haymaker straight into Harry’s temple, and the lights went out.

* * *

“That’s really not the way we expected you to do that,” Schmidt said.

From his bunk, Harry tried very hard not to grimace. Facial expressions hurt. “You asked me to keep it close, and you asked me to lose,” he said, moving his jaw as little as humanly possible.

“Yes,” Schmidt said. “But we didn’t think you’d make it so obvious.”

“Surprise,” Harry said.

“The good news is, it actually worked for us,” Schmidt said. “The Korban leader—who, incidentally, you caused to get drenched in fruit juice when you kicked your competitor into the stands—wanted to know why you let your competition win. We had to admit we told you to lose. He was delighted to hear it.”

“He had money on the other guy,” Harry said.

“No,” Schmidt said. “Well, probably, but that’s not the point. The point was he said that your willingness to follow orders even when winning was in your grasp showed that you could make a short-term sacrifices for long-term goals. He saw you almost winning as making a point about CDF strength, and then losing as making a point about the value of discipline. And since he seemed quite impressed with both, we said those were indeed exactly the points we had wanted to make.”

“So you have brains after all,” Harry said.

“We rolled with the changes,” Schmidt said. “And it looks like we’ll come out of this with an agreement after all. You saved the negotiations, Harry. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Harry said. “And I’ll bill you.”

“I have a message for you from Ambassador Abumwe,” Schmidt said.

“I can’t wait,” Harry said.

“She thanks you for your service and wants you to know she’s recommended you for commendation. She also says that never wants to see you again. Your stunt worked this time but it could just as easily have backfired. All things considered, you’re not worth the trouble.”

“She’s welcome,” Harry said.

“It’s nothing personal,” Schmidt said.

“Of course not,” Harry said. “But I like the idea that I had choreographed having the crap kicked out of me down to that level of detail. Makes me feel like a genius, it does.”

“How do you feel?” Schmidt said. “Are you okay?”

“You keep asking that same very dumb question,” Harry said. “Please, stop asking it.”

“Sorry,” Schmidt said. He turned to go, and then stopped. “It does occur to me that we know the answer to another question, though.”

“What’s that?” Harry said.

“How well you can take a punch,” Schmidt said.

Harry smiled, and then grimaced. “God, Hart, don’t make me smile,” he said.

“Sorry,” Schmidt said again.

“How well do you take a punch, Hart?” Harry asked.

“If this is what it takes to find out, Harry,” Schmidt said, “I don’t want to know.“

“See,” Harry said. “I told you you were soft.“

Schmidt grinned and left.

- end -

Questions for a Soldier

John Scalzi

Questions for a Soldier

Copyright © 2005 by John Scalzi.

All rights reserved.

Cover and interior illustrations

Copyright © 2005 by Bob Eggleton.

All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN

9781596064683

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519
www.subterraneanpress.com

COLONIAL DEFENSE FORCES

Colonial Outreach Command

CDF Public Relations, 3rd Platoon

Colonel Wm. Schafer, Cmdr

DATE:

238.05.15 SUSN

(see linked table for local equivalents)

FILE NUMBER:

COC/CPR-OOI-3793/16(N)

FILE  TITLE: Public Speech, CDF Capt. John Perry, Huckleberry Colony, 238.05.10

FILE DESCRIPTION:

Capt. Perry meets with citizens of village of New Goa on Huckleberry Colony; answers questions about life of CDF servicepersons and other queries.

PRINCIPAL SPEAKERS:

Capt. Perry, New Goa administrator Rohit Kulkarni,

seven New Goa villagers

CLASSIFICATION:

Non-classified

REDACTION:

None. Editing for clarity: Standard voice to text algorithms

RECORDED BY:

Capt. John Perry, unedited BrainPal audio feed

FILED BY:

Cpl. John Scalzi, Acting Librarian, CDFPR 3rd Platoon

CC: Col. Wm. Schafer

——TRANSCRIPT BEGINS 238.05.10 03:05:34

(21:30:15 LOCAL)——

ROHIT KULKARNI:

Please, please, everyone. I see Naren Bhatia setting down his dessert, so I truly know that it is time to move on to the next portion of the evening. (laughter) You have licked that bowl clean, Naren? (laughter) My Anjali will be pleased to know her contribution to the evening met with such success.

It is not often that our simple village receives a visitor of such esteem as the man I have the honor of presenting to you this evening. As with all of the colonies in the Union, Huckleberry and New Goa remember with horror of the Rraey invasion of Coral, one of the oldest and most precious of our colonies. The Rraey slaughtered all of the colonists there, more than 100,000 lives ended. It was one of the darkest hours in the history of the Union.

But the Rraey did not hold Coral for long, thanks in part to the efforts of our guest, whose courageous actions in battle caused him to be awarded the Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross, as well as the first Order of Coral award. He is here tonight to share some of his experiences as part of the Colonial Defense Forces that keep all of the colonies safe, including our own. With great honor, I present to you Captain John Perry.

(applause)

CAPT. PERRY:

Thank you, and thank you, Administrator Kulkarni. It was your wife who made tonight’s dessert? No wonder you look so happy. (laughter) The whole dinner was wonderful, really. I don’t think I’ve eaten this well in years.

KULKARNI:

I don’t doubt you say that everywhere you go.

PERRY:

Well, I do, but this time I mean it. (laughter) And I’ve been having a wonderful visit here in New Goa. I have to warn you all that in addition to doing this goodwill tour of the Colonies for the CDF, I also have an ulterior motive: I’m checking out colonies for when I retire. So get a good look at this face; you might have to get used to it one day. (laughter)

KULKARNI:

We would welcome you, Captain.

PERRY:

You say that now, Administrator. (laughter) I do have to say that one advantage of settling in New Goa is that although I come from a different culture than you back on Earth, we do share a common language, or at least share one common language. Before I came to Huckleberry, I was on Shaw Colony, which was settled by Norwegians. I had to use an interpreter while I was there. I think I accidentally declared war on them at least once. (laughter) There is much less of a chance of that here.

Now, my understanding is that I’m supposed to stand up here and lecture you all on how the Colonial Defense Forces are working to protect you from the rest of the universe, but I have to say that I did that a couple of times and then I got really bored of hearing my own voice. And everywhere I go, people have questions that they want to ask. So if it’s all right with you, I’m going to suggest we skip whatever bad speech I would give you and go right to the questions. (pause) Since I see about two dozen hands, I’m guessing that means it’s okay with you. (laughter) Yes, ma’am. You here in the front.

VILLAGER #1:

Are you married? (Uproarious laughter) Not for me! For my niece. She is about your age.

PERRY:

Well, thank you. I’m deeply flattered, although I’m sure your niece would be surprised to find out you’re trying to get her hitched.

VILLAGER #1:

Not at all! She’s here in the room! Aparna! Stand up! (more laughter)

PERRY:

Hello, Aparna. Please, sit. You’re safe from me. (laughter) To answer the question, I’m not married. But it’s also against CDF policy for soldiers to be married. We ship all over this part of the universe and it would be very difficult to maintain a marriage. In fact, when we sign up for service back on Earth, we’re legally declared dead, which ends any marriage we were in. Some of the people I served with were thankful for that, (laughter) but I don’t think it would have made me happy. I was married before I signed up, but my wife passed away before I left. We had been married for over 40 years.

Ah, that look. I get that every time I mention something relating to my age. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m 77 years old. So, ma’am, not only am I too old for Aparna, I’m too old for you. (laughter) One of the advantages of joining the CDF is that they give you a new body. I’m older than I look. Yes, sir.

VILLAGER #2:

Why are you green?

PERRY:

The food was so good, I ate too much. (laughter) The real answer is that these bodies we’re given are engineered to use chlorophyll to give us an extra energy boost, which we need to help maintain other improvements in this body, like more and denser muscles, faster reflexes and other things. We can also go longer without food than most people, although we don’t like it any more than anyone else.

I can see some of you wish that you could have an improved body, but I want to make you aware of the tradeoffs. First, this body is so modified that it can’t reproduce. That’s definitely not an advantage on a colony. Second, the only way to get a body like this is join the CDF, where you’ll have to serve for ten years. In those ten years eight out of ten of the people you joined with will have died in service. I know for myself that of the people I met and became friends with when I joined up, only two are still alive. Look around you in this room and imagine that sort of mortality rate among the people you love and care for. So you have to ask yourself if the new body is really worth it. Yes, sir. Yes, you.

VILLAGER #3:

I am sure you have encountered many alien species. Is there one encounter that is more vivid than others?

PERRY:

Well, there was the time I was eaten. (audible muttering)

VILLAGER #3:

I believe we would all like to hear about that.

PERRY:

All right. It was about a month before the Battle of Coral, and I and my platoon were sent to an unexplored planet to find a colonial survey team that had disappeared. The first tip-off that something was strange about the planet should have been that it looked gorgeous — perfect for human habitation — but it was completely uninhabited. That’s strange because if a planet is perfect for us, it’s perfect for a couple hundred other intelligent species, too. And that means it should have been colonized by then. It’s like that old joke: A doctor and economist are walking down the street when the doctor looks down and says “there’s a $20 bill on the sidewalk.” And the economist says “Impossible! If it were a $20 bill, someone would have picked it up by now!” This planet was a $20 bill on the street if there ever was one. It was impossible that it would be uninhabited. And yet it seemed to be. So they sent out a survey team, and after a couple of days they disappeared.

We landed at the coordinates where the survey team had been, and there was no sign the survey team had ever been there — I mean, nothing: No portable buildings, no vehicle tracks or hover pressure damage, no litter. And no bodies. It was as if they simply hadn’t landed. All we saw was a long, rolling plain of what looked like some form of grass. It was very pretty, actually. It was like the universe’s biggest front lawn. It was very peaceful, at least until the worms came out of it.

Have any of you ever seen a blue whale? You’ve seen pictures at least. Imagine something of that size coming up out of the ground right underneath you. We felt a rumbling before they breached the surface — but not as much as you might expect — and then these huge things were all around us. I remember feeling the ground rumbling and then looking over to see one of my platoonmates fall. As she was trying to stand up, the ground lifted up under her. One of those worms had tunneled under her and had opened its mouth just as it was coming up, so about two or three meters of ground on every side of her was already in the thing’s mouth. She was reaching up as the mouth shut on her. I saw her arm and hand dangling out as the worm slid back into the ground, waving like a parody of Moby Dick.

I and some of my squadmates started running back for the landing craft when one of the worms surfaced behind us and literally jumped into the air to come down on where we were. My friend Alan Rosenthal was directly in front of me, so I shoved him forward as hard as I could. It worked, because the thing missed Alan. But it got me. It was like a big fleshy wall came down on top of my head, and then I was tumbling ass over head — excuse the language — in this thing’s mouth, along with about a ton of dirt. After a minute of this I felt the dirt clearing behind me. The worm was starting to swallow what was in its mouth, dragging me down its throat.

My Empee — that’s the rifle we use — was somewhere in the worm’s mouth with me, but I didn’t keep a grip on it and it was pitch black in there, so it was useless to me. I tried grabbing onto the side of the mouth to keep from sliding back but I had no traction. Finally I took the combat knife from my belt and jammed it into what I guessed was its lower jaw. That kept me from sliding long enough for me to get out my multi-purpose tool. I don’t know if any of you know about this; it’s a block of nanobots that can take the form of just about any sort of thing you need. It’s like the Swiss army knife of the gods. I ordered it into a barbed hook and jammed it in right next to the combat knife just as worm jostled the knife free. The knife slipped out of my hand and down the worm’s throat, and I hoped the worm would choke on it. No such luck, though.

I wasn’t in danger of being digested at that minute, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t in trouble. If the worm opened its mouth, there would be a new avalanche of dirt coming in on me, and that could knock me off my hook and down its throat. No matter what, every second I was in the worm was another second I was moving away from my platoonmates. If the worm went deep into the ground, even if I managed to kill it, I would be buried alive. So I had to kill the thing, and kill it fast. I had two grenades on me, so after I got as secure a grip on my hook as I could with my left hand, I activated the grenades and threw them behind me, down the worm’s gullet.

They didn’t go down as far as I hoped — I was struck in the foot with shrapnel as they detonated — but they did the job, because the worm’s mouth immediately started filling with blood, and the thing stopped moving forward and began twitching. After a few minutes of this the worm stopped moving altogether. I waited a few more minutes to make sure it really was dead, and then I endured the worst part of the whole ordeal: I had to actually force myself down the worm’s throat to get my Empee. Because you don’t leave your rifle behind if you can help it.

KULKARNI:

How did you eventually get out of the creature’s mouth?

PERRY:

It involved a lot of digging. (laughter) But my experience explained why this world, which seemed so suitable for intelligent life, was in fact entirely clear of any species we’d met before. Any creatures who landed on its surface were turned into worm food in a matter of hours or even minutes. Those vast plains were the worm’s roaming grounds — and not only that, they seemed designed that way. Remember the “grass” I told you about? Within an hour of our worm attacks, that “grass” had completely covered where the worms had come out of the ground. Visually, it was like the attack had never happened. We did sonic tests — unmanned tests — and the ground underneath the plains was hardly packed at all, even hundreds of feet down. It was like topsoil. Which made it easy for the worms. It was like they were swimming in the earth. And these plains covered almost all of the landmass of the planet. Which our scientists said didn’t make sense, because the planet was tectonically active. It should have had mountains and rock formations like any other planet.

VILLAGER #3:

Could the worms have changed the entire planet to their liking?

PERRY:

See, that’s just it, isn’t it? Did the worms make the planet the way it is, or do the worms exist because the planet is the way it is? And if it’s the first of these, does that mean the worms did it intentionally, and that they’re intelligent? You don’t have to be an intelligent animal to completely change an ecosystem. Back on Earth, animals like sheep or goats could completely strip an area of vegetation, changing the character of the land. Now, they were managed by humans, which means somewhere along the line there was an intelligence at work. But deer, which were not domesticated, could do the same thing: by eating certain young plants, they’d help create forests with only a few plant species in them.

But even then, we’re talking a forest, or part of a grassland. Here, it’s an entire planet, and the ecosystem isn’t being damaged; it’s being managed. The more we looked at it, the more it seems like conscious engineering.

KULKARNI:

Perhaps someone should go back and try to talk to them.

PERRY:

Maybe someone should. Just not me. I’d hate to think what would happen if they carried grudges. Yes, ma’am.

VILLAGER #4:

Yes, Captain Perry, how would you respond if I told you that the current political structure of the Colonial Union was one of imperial colonialism and totalitarianism, and that you yourself represented the racist, colonial impulses of that system of control? (audible groans)

PERRY:

Nice to meet you, too.

KULKARNI:

You’ll have to excuse Savitri, Captain Perry. Her parents were political exiles to this colony after the Subcontinental War. Rightly or wrongly. But they indoctrinated their daughter well, even though she was born a colonist. She enjoys rabble rousing, although the rabble here isn’t often roused. Most of us chose to be here.

VILLAGER #4:

I don’t need you to excuse me, Administrator. And I don’t need you to patronize me, Captain Perry. All we have to do is look at the reality. The colonists, the people who the Colonial Union is built on, are all from poor countries on Earth, most of which are outside the Western sphere of countries. Only Norway regularly sends colonists from Europe, and we all know of that country’s ecological disasters. But the Colonial Defense Forces are exclusively taken from rich, affluent countries back on earth, most especially your own United States. Americans practically run the CDF as far as we can tell. And the Colonial Union administration is taken from old-line Colonial stock, which is to say Western countries, before the Colonial Union decided only to take colonists from third-world countries. So: Western administration, American military, poor brown people as colonists and pawns. What about this set-up doesn’t stink of colonial imperialism?

KULKARNI:

You can ignore her question if you would like, Captain.

VILLAGER #4:

That would be entirely in character for the Colonial Union.

PERRY:

Why would I ignore her? Maybe she’s right.

VILLAGER #4:

Excuse me?

PERRY:

Well, aren’t you? Colonists are from third world countries, or except for those from the earliest colonies, come from populations that were. CDF personnel are from the first world, particularly from the U.S., although not always, since I’ve served with people from Argentina, the UK and Japan as well as various parts of Europe. And while no one wants to talk about it, from time to time the CDF is made to step in with colonial issues. One of my dear friends lost her life during a labor uprising on Elysium; some petroleum drillers blew her up and then fed her to a fish while she was still alive, so you can imagine the CDF did not tread lightly when it retaliated. Now, as it happens, Elysium is one of the first generation colonies. I think it’s mostly Greeks there; the name would fit, anyway. But the larger point stands.

I have to tell you that while I think your point of view makes some sense, those of us in the CDF look at it a little bit differently. Here we are, members of the richest countries on Earth — and we’re told by the Colonial Union we can’t colonize. We’re not given a reason, other than that the Colonial Union simply chooses not to recruit colonists from the US or other rich countries. There’s no appeal, since the Colonial Union enforces its monopoly on space travel. And so we see the citizens of India, of Pakistan, of Ethiopia, of Guatemala and New Guinea filling up the universe while we’re stuck on planet Earth. The only way we get to go is if we agree to fight, and we have to wait until we’re old men and women before they’ll take us. Then we have to wait, and survive, for another ten years before we’re given permission to colonize. Not many of us make it that long.

So I can understand why you feel that the Western countries are trying to keep the third world in line, even out in the universe. But I can promise you that if most of us had been given the choice between colonizing and fighting, we would have gladly chosen colonizing, and equally gladly would have let others have the military responsibilities we’ve had to take on. Those of us in the CDF are just as much pawns in whatever master plan the Colonial Union has as you are.

VILLAGER #4:

Except that you have the guns.

PERRY:

Well, there is that. The only thing I can say to that is that at some point in the future, if I live that long, I’ll be putting my weapon down and colonizing myself. Then you and I will be in the same boat. I’d rather colonize than fight, personally. But this was how I was allowed to get out in the universe. For better or worse, I agreed to the terms. If I could change the terms, believe me, I would. But it wasn’t up to me.

VILLAGER #5:

Why doesn’t the CDF let colonists sign up to fight, too?

PERRY:

You know, I wish they did! (laughter) My understanding of it is that very early on in the Colonial Union, the Union decided that it would be better if the colonists were allowed to focus on building the colonies while the CDF chose recruits who weren’t tied to one colony or another. I’m sure — and here you see me nodding in the direction of my former questioner here — that there are several levels of Machiavellian realpolitik I’m skating over here, and that the true reason for this is more complex than I just gave it. But on the surface this reason makes good sense to me. I’ve been touring the colonies for the last few months. From what I can see, colonizing seems like incredibly hard work, and in many colonies, especially the newer ones, there hardly seem to be enough people to do the work that’s needed. Huckleberry has been colonized for a while now — how long, Administrator?

KULKARNI:

We will be celebrating our fifty-eighth anniversary in another two months.

PERRY:

Right. Okay, Huckleberry’s been colonized for almost sixty years, which is time enough for the planetary population to fill out some, both from immigration and natural birth rates. That’s enough time for several million people to be here. But some of these new colonies have just a couple thousand people as part of the “seeding” colony; that’s the people who work to prepare things for a second wave of colonists. Those people never stop working. Three stops before I was here, I was on Orton, which is only in its first year. I got tired just watching them work. They certainly can’t afford to ship any of their people off to fight. And to be honest, I don’t see why anyone who is already a colonist would want to sign up for the CDF.

VILLAGER #4:

To have control of our own collective destinies, that’s why.

PERRY:

She’s back! (laughter) That’s not a bad reason, but I don’t know if the reality of CDF life matches that. Your vision of what it means to be in the CDF — and I mean no disrespect — is romanticized. On a day-to-day basis, you wouldn’t be fighting for your colony, other than in the most generalized sense. You’d be fighting to keep some alien creature from killing you or killing one of your squadmates. You’d be fighting not to die, and to stop other people — some you know and some you don’t — from dying. Destiny gets compressed, you know, into just that small fraction of a second you have right in front of you at any one time. And there’s nothing romantic about keeping your head down to avoid getting shot, or trying to save a friend who’s been injured, or coming face to face with a creature who is as smart and mean and as terrified of dying as you are, and who wants to make sure that if someone is left on the ground there, it’s you and not it.

I mean, let me say it again, just to make it clear: Eight out of ten CDF members die in ten years of service. Most of those in the first couple of years. It’s one thing to say you’re willing to die to be in control of your own destiny, whether it’s personal or political. But it’s another thing to actually be dead, light-years away from everyone you ever knew, by the hand or paw or claw or whatever of some thing whose motivations for fighting you can hardly begin to understand.

VILLAGER #5:

And yet you chose to serve.

PERRY:

I did. Although when I look back on it now, if I had known then what I know now, I might have chosen to stay in Ohio and die in my own bed. I would be lying if I didn’t say that when I signed up I had my own romantic notions of what military life would be like. I guess I thought I would be, oh, I don’t know, swashbuckling around and fighting Ming the Merciless and kissing green-skinned maidens. Although, come to think of it, I have kissed green-skinned maidens. (laughter) So maybe it hasn’t been so bad. But to be more serious again, the reality of life in the CDF is far different and far more difficult than I could have imagined.

Knowing what I know now, I would do it again, if only because I wouldn’t choose not to meet the people I have, and to have missed the opportunity to love them, even if only briefly. But I do wish I had the opportunity to have gone into this with open eyes. Maybe the CDF wouldn’t get as many recruits if they knew what they were getting into, but the ones they would get might be better prepared. And I suppose to come back around to Miss Savitri again, that would be an advantage to having colonials in the CDF. They would know what they’re getting into. Yes, sir.

VILLAGER #6:

You were saying earlier that this body you have is improved beyond the normal human limits.

PERRY:

That’s right. Improved senses, improved reflexes, improved physical agility. I even smell better. (laughter) You laugh, people, but it’s true.

VILLAGER #6:

I am curious, how strong are you?

PERRY:

I’ve never really tested it.

VILLAGER #6:

Could you break that table behind you? With your hands?

PERRY:

I probably could. But I won’t. Because that would hurt. (laughter) They’ve made me stronger, not impervious to pain.

VILLAGER #6:

Still, it must be nice to be that strong.

PERRY:

It’s useful, is what it is. I don’t notice being stronger or enhanced all that much, to tell you the truth. Most of the people I spend time with are enhanced just as much as I am, so I have no competitive advantage. I lose a lot at arm wrestling. (laughter) The other thing is that the reason we have these physical improvements is that they put us on an equal footing with the aliens we have to go up against. I remember my drill instructor telling us that these new bodies were the bare minimum we’d need to fight, which if you think about it is kind of a terrifying thought. All those alien species out there, each of them with native abilities that are better than our own. Some are faster, some are stronger, some are smarter. Some just plain have more limbs, which is really a problem in hand-to-hand combat. We’re just keeping up. The one real advantage that humans have is that on a pound-for-pound basis, we’re meaner. (laughter) Now, I said that to get a laugh, so I’m glad I got one. But when it gets right down to it, it’s also usually true. I imagine it’s kept our species alive more than once. Should I be wrapping things up now?

KULKARNI:

I think we have time for one last question. And if I may be so bold, I see that my Anjali has come into the room, and has a question.

PERRY:

So you’re the woman who made dessert.

VILLAGER #7:

I am.

PERRY:

I love you. (very loud laughter) And I want the recipe before I go. And I will be happy to answer your question.

VILLAGER #7:

Thank you. I came in late, but I have heard enough of what you’ve said that I can sense the depth of the violence you confront out there on other worlds. It seems to be a dangerous universe out there.

PERRY:

Yes.

VILLAGER #7:

My question is simple: Can we ever find peace in this universe?

PERRY:

(pause) I’ll share with you a story. About four months before the Battle of Coral, my ship, the Modesto, was part of an attack group bearing down on a colony held by the Ni-ni, who if you don’t know are a reptilian sort of race, about a yard tall, and venomous — not in their personalities, mind you, but in that they genuinely spit poison. It makes them very difficult to fight one on one.

The colony was Ni-nin, but there had been a human colony on it a decade or so before. The seed colonists had arrived just before a huge volcanic event that killed off the summer and made the winter unimaginably brutal; the colonists that survived abandoned the planet, and no one could have blamed them. So there were no humans when the Ni-nans arrived and set up shop. But it didn’t matter. The Colonial Union had it on the ledgers as our planet, and if it was ours, then anyone else on it was a problem.

And so there we were, the Modesto and about twenty other ships, with a total of about 20,000 CDF soldiers, which would have been more than enough to wipe out the Ni-nin colony about nine times in a row. We were in the process of suiting up for the attack when a Skip drone popped into our space and broadcast a general cancellation of the invasion. Apparently — in a shocking moment of clarity for both sides — the Ni-nins and the humans realized that they could actually share the planet. The Ni-nin colony was situated on the edge of an equatorial desert, which was blindingly hot for humans but suited the Ni-nins just fine, while the Union was planning a new seed colony in a temperate zone on an entirely different continent. So the Ni-nins and the Union decided to call off the war. It was just that simple.

The attack group all went home except for the Modesto, which was told to make a courtesy call on the colony. So I and my platoon spent the next three days in the company of the people who earlier we were going to kill. And you know what? We had a great time. The Ni-nins are ugly as hell — they look like exploded lizards — but their body chemistry is close enough to ours that we can eat their food. And these people are great cooks. Just dynamite. We stuffed ourselves silly and held spitting contests, which they are very serious about, by the way, and generally acted like civilized sentient beings.

And I remember sitting on a sand ridge with a couple of Ni-nans on the last day we were there, watching the sunset with the two of them, and thinking about just how easy it was not to fight every damn creature we came across. Then, of course, we packed up, headed out and found ourselves at a place called Cova Banda, trying to wipe an entirely different species who had a planet the Union decided was actually ours, but this time, no one wanted to share.

Can there be peace? Sure there can. We made peace with the Ni-ni, and it was a simple thing to do, and now we happily share a planet. But will there be peace? Well, that’s the question, I think. Making peace is often a simple thing, but simple isn’t the same thing as easy. I knew someone who said he believed the Union sometimes thought it was just easier to make war than to bother with peace. I didn’t much like this person, but from time to time I see some truth in what he said.

And it’s not just the Union — it’s all the races all over this part of the universe, all of them deciding to do the easy thing rather than the simple but difficult thing. Maybe what it will take is a great meeting of all the species, where they decide to share worlds instead of fighting each other for them. But God knows it’s hard enough even trying to get humans to agree on something. Getting all the species together would take a miracle, and about twenty years.

Still, we can hope. We can certainly hope. And that’s what I’d ask you to do: Hope for peace. Because I know that I would love to be able to lay down my weapon and get to being a colonist. Just like you are. Just like I want to be.

Thank you, thanks for your attention, and good night.

(applause)

——END TRANSCRIPT——