The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (89 page)

The minute that followed this speech was the longest and chilliest I’d experienced up to that time. Then I said, “If you don’t object, Ma’am, I think I’ll move back into my old quarters. When he gets out of sickbay, Morales can join me.”

“Suit yourself I hope you’ll be very happy together.”

I came to attention, saluted, did a right-about-face, and walked out. That was how my shipboard romance ended.

So, Jesús son of Jesús, now you know how the Zoo, by saving your father’s life and returning him to us, made it possible for him to meet and marry your mother a few years later and for you to be begotten and born. Remember the nameless creatures of that nameless ship with gratitude; for their atoms have long since been dispersed, and they’ve left no memorial behind except you.

After we returned to Terra, I read Marie’s report. It was a fine work of fiction. It told how the aliens had already slaughtered the colonists when we arrived, and in revenge we then engaged and destroyed their ship. The public loved it. The news of our belated victory over an enemy who’d beat us handily in the war sent a thrill all across the far-flung outposts of humanity. The
Zhukov’s
Space Service officers loyally supported their commander’s version of events, and were duly rewarded a few years later when the Council of State made her the first woman Commandant of the service. She died quite recently, and her ashes lie entombed in Paris at the Invalides, near the dust of Napoleon.

Morales and I turned in reports to Security HQ giving the facts, which of course were ignored because we were only lieutenants. Though we didn’t stay so for long. We were both promoted to captain on the basis of our service in “the epic voyage of the
Zhukov”
(as the Council called it) – “a mission to save humanity that became a mission to avenge humanity.” That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Words are so much handier than realities. Meanwhile, all that your Papa and I really had done and endured vanished into the category of non-events.

There was another and fatal epilogue to this story. Nobody knows for sure the reason for the outbreak of the Second Alien War, but personally I’ve always believed the creatures of the Zoo were seeking revenge for the treacherous destruction of their ship. By then the Trans-Aran Wormhole had been discovered and mapped, and there was that terrible battle near the exit where we lost so many ships and so many thousands of our best people, including your father, who was commanding a landing party aboard the old Sun-Tzu when an FTLM vaporized it.

That was how I learned that regardless of our smarts or our rank, we’re all the serfs and peons of history. But I also decided that I didn’t have to surrender my soul, as Marie had done. I decided to knuckle under when I had to, but keep a lifelong obligation to tell the truth whenever that became possible. It’s possible now, and I’m laying it on you, hoping that in the future when great power comes into your hands, you’ll know how not to use it.

In my new condition of humility, I also started to look up my old enlisted people – my fellow peons, you might say. I began meeting annually with O’Rourke and Chu and as many of our people as wanted and were able to come. Like veterans everywhere, we met to lift some brews together and reminisce, and I learned a lot from talking with them. Once when he was drunk, O’Rourke told me in a friendly way that he’d always regarded me as “a *#%& fool, but a *#%& fool with possibilities.” I thought that was a real compliment, coming from such a fathomless well of cynicism.

Chu admitted to me that sometimes he wished he’d followed his family tradition and become a pirate instead of a soldier. “The danger’s the same,” he said, “but the profits are much greater. Like you, I must have some ethics squirreled away somewhere.” He looked embarrassed saying that, and I think he must have been drunk, too, at the time.

I was able to follow the lives of some of our guys long after the old
Zhukov
had gone to Europa to be scrapped. One of the wildest of our douches quit the service and succumbed to respectability. She’s now married to a Councilor of State – and I won’t tell you his name, so don’t ask. Another quit and got rich running a brothel in the capital at New Angkor.

Our baffling genius Soza told me that the events on Paradiso had scared him so badly, he’d finally realized that hiding from responsibility in the enlisted service was even more dangerous than living in the real world outside it. So, instead of re-upping when his tour was over, he quit and worked his way through a minor college, won a scholarship to a major medical school, and the last I heard of him was a neurosurgeon doing great work on reconstructing damaged spinal cords. There always are some people who beat the odds, right?

Still, most of our guys remained simple soldiers. I found talking with them something of a chore because they totally lacked the ability to generalize – they never summed up, they just remembered with numbing precision exactly this place or that place, exactly what words exactly what person had said and when he or she had said them. “D’you remember, sir,” one said, “when we went into O-1, how we come around that corner with the little white house with the blue sign about twenty booties painted on it? Wasn’t that a laugh?”

They often spoke about Marie. “You remember, sir, when we got back to the ship and the commander herself told us how great we were?” said another guy. “I was covered with blood and puke, and yet she shook my hand anyhow and said I was a hero. Gawd, that was amazing. And now she’s a big wheel, I seen her last week in the feelies. Think about that. Gawd, I’ll never forget her.”

Nor will I.

I
T BEGAN, AS
these things often do, at a bar – a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle’s Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins. The music was winding down. Richard and Cody (whose real name was Candice, though no one she had met since high school knew it) lived on different coasts, but tonight was the third time this year they had been drinking together. Cody was staring at the shadows gathering in the corners of the bar and trying not to think about her impersonal hotel room. She thought instead about the fact that in the last six months she had seen Richard more often than some of her friends in San Francisco, and that she would probably see him yet again in a few weeks when their respective companies bid on the Atlanta contract.

She said, “You ever wonder what it would be like to have, you know, a normal type job, where you get up on Monday and drive to work, and do the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, every week, except when you take a vacation?”

“You forgot Friday.”

“What?” They had started on mojitos, escalated through James Bonds, and were now on a tequila-shooter-with-draft-chaser glide path.

“I said, you forgot Friday. Monday, Tuesday—”

“Right,” Cody said. “Right. Too many fucking details. But did you ever wonder? About a normal life?” An actual life, in one city, with actual friends.

Richard was silent long enough for Cody to lever herself around on the bar stool and look at him. He was playing with his empty glass. “I just took a job,” he said. “A no-travel job.”

“Ah, shit.” She remembered how they met, just after the first dotcom crash, at a graduate conference on synergies of bio-mechanics and expert decision-making software architecture or some such crap, which was wild because he started out in cognitive psychology and she in applied mathematics. But computers were the alien glue that made all kinds of odd limbs stick together and work in ways never intended by nature. Like Frankenstein’s monster, he had said when she mentioned it, and she had bought him a drink, because he got it. They ran into each other at a similar conference two months later, then again at some industry junket not long after they’d both joined social media startups. The pattern repeated itself, until, by the time they were both pitching venture capitalists at trade shows, they managed to get past the required cool, the distancing irony, and began to email each other beforehand to arrange dinners, drinks, tickets to the game. They were young, good-looking, and very, very smart. Even better, they had absolutely no romantic interest in each other.

Now when they met it was while traveling as representatives of their credit-starved companies to make increasingly desperate pitches to industry-leading Goliaths on why they needed the nimble expertise of hungry Davids.

Cody hadn’t told Richard that lately her pitches had been more about why the Goliaths might find it cost-effective to absorb the getting-desperate David she worked for, along with all its innovative, motivated, boot-strapping employees whose stock options and 401(k)s were now worthless. But going back to the groves of academe was really admitting failure.

She sighed. “Where?”

“Chapel Hill. And it’s not . . . Well, okay, it is sort of an academic job, but not really.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, really. It’s with a new company, a joint venture between WishtleNet and the University of North—”

“See.”

“Just let me finish.” Richard could get very didactic when he’d been drinking. “Think Google Labs, or Xerox PARC, but wackier. Lots of money to play with, lots of smart grad students to do what I tell them, lots of blue sky research, not just irritating Vice Presidents saying I’ve got six months to get the software on the market, even if it is garbage.”

“I hear you on that.” Except that Vince, Cody’s COO, had told her that if she landed the Atlanta contract she would be made a VP herself.

“It’s cool stuff, Cody. All those things we’ve talked about in the last six, seven years? The cognitive patterning and behavior mod, the modulated resonance imaging software, the intuitive learning algorithms—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“ – they want me to work on that. They want me to define new areas of interest. Very cool stuff.”

Cody just shook her head. Cool. Cool didn’t remember to feed the fish when you were out of town, again.

“Starts next month,” he said.

Cody felt very tired. “You won’t be in Atlanta.”

“Nope.”

“Atlanta in August. On my own. Jesus.”

“On your own? What about all those pretty girls in skimpy summer clothes?”

The muscles in Cody’s eyebrows felt tight. She rubbed them. “It’s Boone I’m not looking forward to. Boone and his sleazy strip club games.”

“He’s the customer.”

“Your sympathy’s killing me.”

He shrugged. “I thought that lap-dancing hooker thing was your wet dream.”

Her head ached. Now he was going to bring up Dallas.

“That’s what you told us in – now where the hell was that?”

“Dallas.” Might as well get it over with.

“You were really into it. Are you blushing?”

“No.” Three years ago she had been twenty-eight with four million dollars in stock options and the belief that coding cowboy colleagues were her friends. Ha. And now probably half the geeks in the South had heard about her most intimate fantasy. Including Boone.

She swallowed the last of her tequila. Ugly stuff once it got tepid. She picked up her jacket.

“I’m out of here. Unless you have any handy hints about landing that contract without playing Boone’s slimeball games? Didn’t think so.” She pushed her shot glass away and stood.

“That Atlanta meeting’s when? Eight, nine weeks?”

“About that.” She dropped two twenties on the bar.

“I maybe could help.”