Old Man's War Universe: Short Stories
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 w
ould 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.”