Old Man's War

by John Scalzi

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, and looked at them both. “Please. Let me go, Harry. I’ll be fine.”

  Harry and Jesse looked at each other. Harry let go of my hand.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “What are you going to say to her?” Harry wanted to know.

  “I’m going to tell her thanks for saving my life,” I said, and got up.

  By this time, she and two companions had got their orders and had made their way to a small table farther back in the commissary. I threaded my way to the table. The three of them were talking, but stopped as I approached. She had her back to me as I approached, and turned as her companions glanced up at me. I stopped as I got a look at her face.

  It was different, of course. Beyond the obvious skin and eyes, she was so much younger than Kathy had been—a face that was as Kathy was half a century before. Even then, it was different; leaner than Kathy’s had ever been, keeping with the CDF genetically-installed predisposition for fitness. Kathy’s hair had always been a nearly uncontrolled mane, even as she aged and most other women switched to more matronly cuts; the woman in front of me kept her hair close on her head and off her collar.

  It was the hair that was the most jarring. It’d been so long since I’d seen a person without green skin that it didn’t register with me anymore. But the hair was nothing that I remembered.

  “It’s not nice to stare,” the woman said, using Kathy’s voice. “And before you ask, you’re not my type.”

  Yes I am, a part of my brain said.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t really mean to intrude,” I said. “I was just wondering if you might recognize me.”

  She flicked her eyes up and down on me. “I really don’t,” she said. “And trust me, we weren’t in basic training together.”

  “You rescued me,” I said. “On Coral.”

  She perked up a little at this. “No shit,” she said. “No wonder I didn’t recognize you. The last time I saw you, you were missing the lower half of your head. No offense. And no offense to this, either, but I’m amazed you’re still alive. I wouldn’t have bet on you to make it.”

  “I had something to live for,” I said.

  “Apparently,” she said.

  “I’m John Perry,” I said, and held out my hand. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

  “Jane Sagan,” she said, taking it. I held it a little longer than I should have. She had a slightly puzzled expression when I finally let go.

  “Corporal Perry,” one of her companions began; he had taken the opportunity to access information about me from his BrainPal, “we’re kind of in a rush to eat here; we have to be back to our ship in a half hour, so if you don’t mind—”

  “Do you recognize me from anywhere else?” I asked Jane, cutting him off.

  “No,” she said, slightly frosty now. “Thanks for coming over, but now I’d really like to eat.”

  “Let me send you something,” I said. “A picture. Through your BrainPal.”

  “That’s really not necessary,” Jane said.

  “One picture,” I said. “Then I’ll go. Humor me.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Hurry it up.”

  Among the few possessions that I had taken with me when I left Earth was a digital photo album of family, friends and places that I had loved. When my BrainPal activated, I had uploaded the photos into its onboard memory, a smart move in retrospect since my photo album and all my other Earthly possessions but one went down with the Modesto. I accessed one particular photo from the album and sent it to her. I watched as she accessed her BrainPal, and then turned again to look at me.

  “Do you recognize me now?” I asked.

  She moved fast, faster than even normal CDF, grabbed me, and slammed me against a nearby bulkhead. I was pretty sure I felt one of my newly repaired ribs crack. From across the commissary Harry and Jesse leaped up and moved in; Jane’s companions moved to intercept. I tried to breathe.

  “Who the fuck are you,” Jane hissed at me, “and what are you trying to pull?”

  “I’m John Perry,” I wheezed. “I’m not trying to pull anything.”

  “Bullshit. Where did you get that picture?” she said, close up, low. “Who made it for you?”

  “No one made it for me,” I said, equally low. “I got that picture at my wedding. It’s…my wedding photo.” I almost said our wedding photo, but caught myself just in time. “The woman in the picture is my wife, Kathy. She died before she could enlist. They took her DNA and used it to make you. Part of her is in you. Part of you is in that picture. Part of what you are gave me this.” I held up my left hand and showed her my wedding ring—my only remaining Earthly possession.

  Jane snarled, picked me up and hurled me hard across the room. I skipped over a couple of tabletops, knocking away hamburgers, condiment packages and napkin holders before coming to rest on the ground. Along the way I clocked my head on a metal corner; there was the briefest of oozes coming from my temple. Harry and Jesse disengaged from their wary dance with Jane’s companions and headed over to me. Jane stalked toward me but was stopped by her friends halfway across.

  “Listen to me, Perry,” she said. “You stay the fuck away from me from now on. The next time I see you you’re going to wish I’d left you for dead.” She stalked off. One of her companions followed after her; the other, who had spoken to me earlier, came over to us. Jesse and Harry got up to engage him, but he put his hands out in a sign of truce.

  “Perry,” he said. “What was that all about? What did you send her?”

  “Ask her yourself, pal,” I said.

  “That’s Lieutenant Tagore to you, Corporal.” Tagore looked at Harry and Jesse. “I know you two,” he said. “You were on the Hampton Roads.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harry said.

  “Listen to me, all of you,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell that was about, but I want to be very clear about this. Whatever it was, we weren’t part of it. Tell whatever story you want, but if the words ‘Special Forces’ are anywhere in it, I’m going to make it my personal mission to ensure that the rest of your military career is short and painful. I’m not kidding. I will fuck your skull. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jesse said. Harry nodded. I wheezed.

  “Get your friend looked after,” Tagore said to Jesse. “He looks like he just got the shit kicked out of him.” He walked out.

  “Christ, John,” Jesse said, taking a napkin and cleaning off my head wound. “What did you do?”

  “I sent her a wedding photo,” I said.

  “That’s subtle,” Harry said, and looked around. “Where’s your cane?”

  “I think it’s over by the wall she slammed me into,” I said. Harry left to go get it.

  “Are you okay?” Jesse said to me.

  “I think I busted a rib,” I said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

  “I know what you meant,” I said. “And as far as that goes, I think something else is busted, too.”

  Jesse cupped my face with her hand. Harry came back with my cane. We limped back to the hospital. Dr. Fiorina was extremely displeased with me.

  Someone nudged me awake. When I saw who it was, I tried to speak. She clapped a hand over my mouth.

  “Quiet,” Jane said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  I nodded. She took her hand away. “Talk low,” she said.

  “We could use BrainPals,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I want to hear your voice. Just keep it down.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about today,” she said. “It was just unexpected. I don’t know how to react to something like that.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I shouldn’t have broken it to you that way.”

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “You cracked a rib,” I said.

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  “Already healed,” I said.

  She studied my
face, eyes flicking back and forth. “Look, I’m not your wife,” she said suddenly. “I don’t know who you think I am or what I am, but I was never your wife. I didn’t know she existed until you showed me the picture today.”

  “You had to know about where you came from,” I said.

  “Why?” she said hotly. “We know we’ve been made from someone else’s genes, but they don’t tell us who they were. What would be the point? That person’s not us. We’re not even clones—I’ve got things in my DNA that aren’t even from Earth. We’re the CDF guinea pigs, haven’t you heard?”

  “I heard,” I said.

  “So I’m not your wife. That’s what I’ve come here to say. I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Good. I’m going now. Sorry about throwing you across the room.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “What? Why?” she asked.

  “I’m just curious,” I said. “And I don’t want you to go yet.”

  “I don’t know what my age has got to do with anything,” she said.

  “Kathy’s been dead for nine years now,” I said. “I want to know how long they bothered to wait before mining her genes to make you.”

  “I’m six years old,” she said.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I say you don’t look like most six-year-olds that I’ve met,” I said.

  “I’m advanced for my age,” she said. Then, “That was a joke.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “People don’t get that sometimes,” she said. “It’s because most of the people I know are around the same age.”

  “How does it work?” I said. “I mean, what’s it like? Being six. Not having a past.”

  Jane shrugged. “I woke up one day and I didn’t know where I was or what was going on. But I was already in this body, and I already knew things. How to speak. How to move. How to think and fight. I was told I was in Special Forces, and that it was time to start training, and my name was Jane Sagan.”

  “Nice name,” I said.

  “It was randomly selected,” she said. “Our first names are common names, our last names are mostly from scientists and philosophers. There’s a Ted Einstein and a Julie Pasteur in my squad. At first you don’t know that, of course. About the names. Later you learn a little bit about how you were made, after they’ve let you develop your own sense of who you are. No one you know has many memories. It’s not until you meet realborn that you know that anything’s really different about you. And we don’t meet them very often. We don’t really mix.”

  “‘Realborn’?” I asked.

  “It’s what we call the rest of you,” she said.

  “If you don’t mix, what were you doing at the commissary?” I said.

  “I wanted a burger,” she said. “It’s not that we can’t, mostly. It’s that we don’t.”

  “Did you ever wonder about who you were made from?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” Jane said. “But we can’t know. They don’t tell us about our progies—the people we’re made from. Some of us are made from more than one, you know. But they’re all dead anyway. Have to be or they wouldn’t use them to make us. And we don’t know who knew them, and if the people who knew them get in the service, it’s not like they’d find us most of the time. And you realborn die pretty damn fast out here. I don’t know anyone else who’s ever met a progie’s relative. Or a husband.”

  “Did you show your lieutenant the picture?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “He asked about it. I told him you sent me a picture of yourself, and that I trashed it. And I did, so the action would register if he looked. I haven’t told anyone about what we said. Can I have it again? The picture?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I have others, too, if you want them. If you want to know about Kathy, I can tell you about her as well.”

  Jane stared at me in the dim room; in the low light she looked more like Kathy than ever. I ached just a little to look at her. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I don’t know what I want to know. Let me think about it. Give me that one picture for now. Please.”

  “I’m sending it now,” I said.

  “I have to go,” she said. “Listen, I wasn’t here. And if you see me anywhere else, don’t let on that we’ve met.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “It’s important for now,” she said.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Let me see your wedding ring,” Jane asked.

  “Sure,” I said, and slipped it off to let her look at it. She held it gingerly, and peered through it.

  “It says something,” she said.

  “‘My Love is Eternal—Kathy,’” I said. “She had it inscribed before she gave it to me.”

  “How long were you married?” she asked.

  “Forty-two years,” I said.

  “How much did you love her?” Jane asked. “Your wife. Kathy. When people are married for a long time, maybe they stay together out of habit.”

  “Sometimes they do,” I said. “But I loved her very much. All the time we were married. I love her now.”

  Jane stood up, looked at me again, gave me back my ring, and left without saying good-bye.

  “Tachyons,” said Harry as he approached my and Jesse’s breakfast table.

  “Bless you,” said Jesse.

  “Very funny,” he said, sitting down. “Tachyons may be the answer to how the Rraey knew we were coming.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Now if only Jesse and I knew what tachyons were, we’d be a lot more excited about them.”

  “They’re exotic subatomic particles,” Harry said. “They travel faster than light and backward through time. So far they’ve just been a theory, because after all it’s difficult to track something that is both faster than light and going backward in time. But the physics of skip drive theory allows for the presence of tachyons at any skip—just as our matter and energy translates into a different universe, tachyons from the destination universe travel back into the universe being left behind. There’s a specific tachyon pattern a skip drive makes at a translation event. If you can spot tachyons forming that pattern, you’d know a ship with a skip drive was coming in—and when.”

  “Where do you hear this stuff?” I said.

  “Unlike the two of you, I don’t spend my days lounging about,” Harry said. “I’ve made friends in interesting places.”

  “If we knew about this tachyon pattern or whatever it is, why didn’t we do something about it before?” Jesse asked. “What you’re saying is that we’ve been vulnerable all this time, and just been lucky so far.”

  “Well, remember what I said about tachyons being theoretical to this point,” Harry said. “That’s sort of an understatement. They’re less than real—they’re mathematical abstractions at best. They have no relation to the real universes in which we exist and move. No race of intelligence that we know of has ever used them for anything. They have no practical application.”

  “Or so we thought,” I said.

  Harry gave a hand motion of assent. “If this guess is correct, then it means that the Rraey have a technology that’s well beyond what we have the capability to create ourselves. We’re behind them in this technology race.”

  “So how do we catch up?” Jesse said.

  Harry smiled. “Well, who said anything about catching up? Remember when we first met, on the beanstalk, and we talked about the colonies’ superior technology? You remember how I suggested they got it?”

  “Through encounters with aliens,” Jesse said.

  “Right,” Harry said. “We either trade for it or take it in battle. Now, if there really is a way to track tachyons from one universe to another, we could probably develop the technology ourselves to do it. But that’s going to take time and resources we don’t have. Far more practical to simply take it from the Rraey.”

  “You’re saying the CDF is planning to go back to Co
ral,” I said.

  “Of course we are,” Harry said. “But the goal now isn’t just to take the planet back. It’s not even going to be the primary goal. Now, our primary goal is to get our hands on their tachyon detection technology and find a way to defeat it or use it against them.”

  “The last time we went to Coral we got our asses kicked,” Jesse said.

  “We’re not going to have a choice, Jesse,” Harry said gently. “We have to get this technology. If the technology spreads, every race out there will be able to track Colonial movement. In a very real sense, they’ll know we’re coming before we do.”

  “It’s going to be a massacre again,” Jesse said.

  “I suspect they’ll use a lot more of the Special Forces this time around,” Harry said.

  “Speaking of which,” I said, and then told Harry of my encounter with Jane the night before, which I had been recounting to Jesse as Harry walked up.

  “It looks like she’s not planning to kill you after all,” Harry said after I was finished.

  “It must have been so strange to talk to her,” Jesse said. “Even though you know she’s not really your wife.”

  “Not to mention being just six years old. Man, that’s odd,” Harry said.

  “It shows, too,” I said. “The being six part. She doesn’t have much emotional maturity. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with emotions when she has them. She threw me across the room because she didn’t know how else to deal with what she was feeling.”

  “Well, all she knows is fighting and killing,” Harry said. “We have a life of memories and experiences to stabilize us. Even younger soldiers in traditional armies have twenty years of experiences. In a real sense, these Special Forces troops are children warriors. It’s ethically borderline.”

  “I don’t want to open any old wounds,” Jesse said. “But do you see any of Kathy in her?”

  I thought about it a moment. “She looks like Kathy, obviously,” I said. “And I think I saw a little of Kathy’s sense of humor in her, and a little of her temperament. Kathy could be impulsive.”

  “Did she ever throw you across the room?” Harry asked, smiling.

  I grinned back. “There were a couple of times that if she could have, she would have,” I said.