Old Man's War, Page 2

  (This makes the agreement to colonize where the CU tells you to colonize something of a moot point—since they’re the only ones with the ships, you go where they take you anyway. It’s not as if they’re going to let you drive the starship.)

  A side effect of the Quarantine Laws and the skip drive monopoly is to make communication between Earth and the colonies (and between the colonies themselves) all but impossible. The only way to get a timely response from a colony is to put a message onto a ship with a skip drive; the CDF will grudgingly carry messages and data for planetary governments this way, but anyone else is out of luck. You could put up a radio dish and wait for communication signals from the colonies to wash by, but Alpha, the closest colony to Earth, is eighty-three light-years away. This makes lively gossip between planets difficult.

  I’ve never asked, but I would imagine that it is this paragraph that causes the most people to turn back. It’s one thing to think you want to be young again; it’s quite another thing to turn your back on everything you’ve ever known, everyone you’ve ever met or loved, and every experience you’ve ever had over the span of seven and a half decades. It’s a hell of a thing to say good-bye to your whole life.

  I signed.

  “Paragraph six—final paragraph,” the recruiter said. “I recognize and understand that as of seventy-two hours of the final signing of this document, or my transport off Earth by the Colonial Defense Forces, whichever comes first, I will be presumed as deceased for the purposes of law in all relevant political entities, in this case the State of Ohio and the United States of America. Any and all assets remaining to me will be dispensed with according to law. All legal obligations or responsibilities that by law terminate at death will be so terminated. All previous legal records, be they meritorious or detrimental, will be hereby stricken, and all debts discharged according to law. I recognize and understand that if I have not yet arranged for the distribution of my assets, that at my request the Colonial Defense Forces will provide me with legal and financial counsel to do so within seventy-two hours.”

  I signed. I now had seventy-two hours to live. So to speak.

  “What happens if I don’t leave the planet within seventy-two hours?” I said as I handed the paper back to the recruiter.

  “Nothing,” she said, taking the form. “Except that since you’re legally dead, all your belongings are split up according to your will, your health and life benefits are canceled or disbursed to your heirs and being legally dead, you have no legal right to protection under the law from everything from libel to murder.”

  “So someone could just come up and kill me, and there would be no legal repercussions?”

  “Well, no,” she said. “If someone were to murder you while you were legally dead, I believe that here in Ohio they could be tried for ‘disturbing a corpse.’”

  “Fascinating,” I said.

  “However,” she continued, in her ever-more-distressing matter-of-fact tone, “it usually doesn’t get that far. Anytime between now and the end of those seventy-two hours you can simply change your mind about joining. Just call me here. If I’m not here, an automated call responder will take your name. Once we’ve verified it’s actually you requesting cancellation of enlistment, you’ll be released from further obligation. Bear in mind that such cancellation permanently bars you from future enlistment. This is a onetime thing.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Do you need to swear me in?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I just need to process this form and give you your ticket.” She turned back to her computer, typed for a few minutes, and then pressed the ENTER key. “The computer is generating your ticket now,” she said. “It’ll be a minute.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Mind if I ask you a question?”

  “I’m married,” she said.

  “That wasn’t what I was going to ask,” I said. “Do people really proposition you?”

  “All the time,” she said. “It’s really annoying.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said. She nodded. “What I was going to ask was if you’ve actually ever met anyone from CDF.”

  “You mean apart from enlistees?” I nodded. “No. The CDF has a corporation down here that handles recruiting, but none of us are actual CDF. I don’t think even the CEO is. We get all our information and materials from the Colonial Union embassy staff and not the CDF directly. I don’t think they come Earthside at all.”

  “Does it bother you to work for an organization you never met?”

  “No,” she said. “The work is okay and the pay is surprisingly good, considering how little money they’ve put in to decorate around here. Anyway, you’re going to join an organization you’ve never met. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I’m old, my wife is dead and there’s not much reason to stay here anymore. Are you going to join when the time comes?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t mind getting old.”

  “I didn’t mind getting old when I was young, either,” I said. “It’s the being old now that’s getting to me.”

  Her computer printer made a quiet hum and a business card–like object came out. She took it and handed it to me. “This is your ticket,” she said to me. “It identifies you as John Perry and a CDF recruit. Don’t lose it. Your shuttle leaves from right in front of this office in three days to go to the Dayton Airport. It departs at 8:30 A.M.; we suggest you get here early. You’ll be allowed only one carry-on bag, so please choose carefully among the things you wish to take.

  “From Dayton, you’ll take the eleven A.M. flight to Chicago and then the two P.M. delta to Nairobi from there. They’re nine hours ahead in Nairobi, so you’ll arrive there about midnight, local time. You’ll be met by a CDF representative, and you’ll have the option of either taking the two A.M. beanstalk to Colonial Station or getting some rest and taking the nine A.M. beanstalk. From there, you’re in the CDF’s hands.”

  I took the ticket. “What do I do if any of these flights is late or delayed?”

  “None of these flights has ever experienced a single delay in the five years I’ve worked here,” she said.

  “Wow,” I said. “I’ll bet the CDF’s trains run on time, too.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve been trying to make jokes to you the entire time I’ve been here.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. My sense of humor was surgically removed as a child.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That was a joke,” she said, and stood up, extending her hand.

  “Oh.” I stood up and took it.

  “Congratulations, recruit,” she said. “Good luck to you out there in the stars. I actually mean that,” she added.

  “Thank you,” I said, “I appreciate it.” She nodded, sat back down again, and flicked her eyes back to the computer. I was dismissed.

  On the way out I saw an older woman walking across the parking lot toward the recruiting office. I walked over to her. “Cynthia Smith?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”

  “I just wanted to say happy birthday,” I said, and then pointed upward. “And that maybe I’ll see you again up there.”

  She smiled as she figured it out. Finally, I made someone smile that day. Things were looking up.

  TWO

  Nairobi was launched from underneath us, and dropped away; we walked over to the side as if on a fast elevator (which is of course exactly what the beanstalk is) and watched the Earth begin its slide.

  “They look like ants from up here!” Leon Deak cackled as he stood next to me. “Black ants!”

  I had the strong urge to crack open a window and hurl Leon out of it. Alas, there was no window to crack; the beanstalk’s “window” was the same diamond composite materials as the rest of the platform, made transparent so travelers could sightsee below them. The platform was airtight, which would be a handy thing in just a few minutes, when we were high enough up th
at cracking a window would lead to explosive decompression, hypoxia and death.

  So Leon would not find himself making a sudden and entirely unexpected return to the Earth’s embrace. More’s the pity. Leon had attached himself to me in Chicago like a fat, brat-and-beer-filled tick; I was amazed that someone whose blood was clearly half pork grease had made it to age seventy-five. I spent part of the flight to Nairobi listening to him fart and expound darkly on his theory of the racial composition of the colonies. The farts were the most pleasant part of that monologue; never had I been so eager to purchase headphones for the in-flight entertainment.

  I’d hoped to ditch him by opting to take the first ’stalk out of Nairobi. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d need a rest after busily passing gas all day. No such luck. The idea of spending another six hours with Leon and his farts was more than I could take; if the beanstalk platform had windows and I couldn’t hurl Leon out of one, I might have jumped myself. Instead, I excused myself from Leon’s presence by telling him the only thing that seemed to hold him at bay, which was by saying I had to go relieve myself. Leon grunted his permission. I wandered off counterclockwise, in the general direction of the rest rooms but more specifically to see if I could find a place where Leon might not find me.

  This was not going to be easy to do. The ’stalk platform was donut-shaped, with a diameter of about one hundred feet. The “hole” of the donut, where the platform slid up the ’stalk, was about twenty feet wide. The cable’s diameter was obviously slightly less than that; perhaps about eighteen feet, which if you thought about it hardly seemed thick enough for a cable several thousand miles long. The rest of the space was filled with comfortable booths and couches where people could sit and chat, and small areas where travelers could watch entertainment, play games or eat. And of course there were lots of window areas to look out of, either down to the Earth, across to other ’stalk cables and platforms, or up toward Colonial Station.

  Overall the platform gave the impression of being the lobby of a pleasant economy hotel, suddenly launched toward geostationary orbit. The only problem was that the open design made it difficult to hide. The launch was not heavily subscribed; there weren’t enough other passengers to hide by blending in. I finally decided to get something to drink at a kiosk near the center of the platform, roughly opposite of where Leon was standing. Sight lines being what they were, that’s where I stood the best chance of avoiding him the longest.

  Leaving Earth physically had been an irritating thing, thanks to Leon’s obnoxiousness, but leaving it emotionally had been surprisingly easy. I had decided a year before my departure that, yes, I would join the CDF; from there it was simply a matter of making arrangements and saying good-byes. When Kathy and I had originally decided to join up a decade earlier, we put the house in our son Charlie’s name as well as our own, so that he could take possession of it without having to go through probate. Kathy and I otherwise owned nothing of any real value, just the bric-a-brac that you pile up in a life. Most of the really nice stuff was dispersed to friends and family over the last year; Charlie would deal with the rest of it later.

  Leaving people was not that much harder. People reacted to the news with varying levels of surprise and sadness, since everyone knows that once you join the Colonial Defense Forces, you don’t come back. But it’s not entirely like dying. They know that somewhere out there, you’re still alive; heck, maybe after a while, they might even come and join you. It’s a little what I imagine people felt hundreds of years ago when someone they knew hitched up a wagon and headed west. They cried, they missed them, they got back to what they were doing.

  Anyway, I told people a whole year before I left that I was going. That’s a lot of time to say what you have to say, to settle matters and to make your peace with someone. Over the course of the year, I had had a few sit-downs with old friends and family and did a final poking of old wounds and ashes; in nearly every case it ended well. A couple of times I asked forgiveness for things I didn’t particularly feel sorry about, and in one case I found myself in bed with someone who otherwise I’d rather I hadn’t. But you do what you have to do to give people closure; it makes them feel better and it doesn’t cost you much to do it. I’d rather apologize for something I didn’t really care about, and leave someone on Earth wishing me well, than to be stubborn and have that someone hoping that some alien would slurp out my brains. Call it karmic insurance.

  Charlie had been my major concern. Like many fathers and sons, we’d had our go-rounds; I wasn’t the most attentive father, and he wasn’t the most self-directed son, wandering through life well into his thirties. When he originally found out that Kathy and I intended to join, he’d exploded at us. He reminded us that we’d protested against the Subcontinental War. He reminded us that we’d always taught him violence wasn’t the answer. He reminded us that we’d once grounded him for a month when he’d gone out target shooting with Bill Young, which we both thought was a little odd for a man of thirty-five to bring up.

  Kathy’s death ended most of our battles, because both he and I realized that most of the things we argued about simply didn’t matter; I was a widower and he a bachelor, and for a while he and I were all we had left. Not long thereafter he met and married Lisa, and about a year after that he became a father and was reelected mayor all in one very hectic night. Charlie had been a late bloomer, but it was a fine bloom. He and I had our own sit-down where I apologized for some things (sincerely), and also told him equally sincerely how proud I was of the man he’d become. Then we sat on the porch with our beers, watched my grandson Adam swat a t-ball in the front yard, and talked about nothing of any importance for a nice long time. When we parted, we parted well and with love, which is what you want between fathers and sons.

  I stood there by the kiosk, nursing my Coke and thinking about Charlie and his family, when I heard Leon’s voice grumbling, followed by another voice, low, sharp and female, saying something in response. In spite of myself, I peered over past the kiosk. Leon had apparently managed to corner some poor woman and was no doubt sharing whatever dumb-ass theory his beef-witted brain stem was promulgating at the moment. My sense of chivalry overcame my desire to hide; I went to intervene.

  “All I’m saying,” Leon was saying, “is that it’s not exactly fair that you and I and every American has to wait until we’re older than shit to get our chance to go, while all those little Hindis get carted off to brand-new worlds as fast as they can breed. Which is pretty damn quick. That’s just not fair. Does it seem fair to you?”

  “No, it doesn’t seem particularly fair,” the woman said back. “But I suppose they wouldn’t see it as fair that we wiped New Delhi and Mumbai off the face of the planet, either.”

  “That’s exactly my point!” Leon exclaimed. “We nuked the dot heads! We won that war! Winning should count for something. And now look what happens. They lost, but they get to go colonize the universe, and the only way we get to go is if we sign up to protect them! Excuse me for saying so, but doesn’t the Bible say, ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’? I’d say losing a goddamn war makes you pretty damn meek.”

  “I don’t think that phrase means what you think it does, Leon,” I said, approaching the two of them.

  “John! See, here’s a man who knows what I’m talking about,” Leon said, grinning my way.

  The woman turned to face me. “You know this gentleman?” she asked me, with an undercurrent in her voice that implied that if I did, there was clearly something wrong with me.

  “We met on the trip to Nairobi,” I said, gently raising an eyebrow to indicate that he wasn’t my companion of choice. “I’m John Perry,” I said.

  “Jesse Gonzales,” she said.

  “Charmed,” I replied, and then turned to Leon. “Leon,” I said, “you’ve got the saying wrong. The actual saying is from the Sermon on the Mount, and it says, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ Inheriting the earth is meant to be a reward, not a punishm
ent.”

  Leon blinked, then snorted. “Even so, we beat them. We kicked their little brown asses. We should be colonizing the universe, not them.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but Jesse beat me to the punch. “‘Blessed are they which are persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven,’” she said, speaking to Leon but looking sidelong at me.

  Leon gaped for a minute at the both of us. “You can’t be serious,” he said, after a minute. “There’s nothing in the Bible that says we should be stuck on Earth while a bunch of brownies, which don’t even believe in Jesus, thank you very much, fill up the galaxy. And it certainly doesn’t say anything about us protecting the little bastards while they do it. Christ, I had a son in that war. Some dot head shot off one of his balls! His balls! They deserved what they got, the sons of bitches. Don’t ask me to be happy that now I’ll have to save their sorry asses up there in the colonies.”

  Jesse winked at me. “Would you like to field this one?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Oh, not at all,” she replied.

  “‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies,’” I quoted. “‘Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father who is in Heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’”

  Leon turned lobster red. “You’re both out of your fucking gourds,” he said, and stomped off as fast as his fat would carry him.

  “Thank you, Jesus,” I said. “And this time I mean it literally.”

  “You’re pretty handy with a Bible quotation,” Jesse said. “Were you a minister in your past life?”

  “No,” I said. “But I lived in a town of two thousand people and fifteen churches. It helped to be able to speak the language. And you don’t have to be religious to appreciate the Sermon on the Mount. What’s your excuse?”