Howard looked from Kit to me, then he stared up at the ceiling, as though he could see through it all the way to the stars. “Make it? I believe mankind will always make it. We may make it by the skin of our teeth, but we will always make it. And that’s the truth.”
Then he lay back and closed his eyes.
AFTERWORD
Cliff’s Notes for Balance Point:
My wife and I once sat my daughter down with us at our kitchen table to resolve some now-unremembered error that probably involved Kool-Aid and a Dustbuster. The Accused clutched her mother’s forearm, wept, and pleaded, “I won’t do it again! Just don’t have Dad explain it to me!”
Like my daughter, fiction readers hate it when authors explain it to them. Fiction readers want to laugh a lot, cry a little, and learn something about life, and about the world, that they didn’t know. But readers don’t want a novel that turns into The Fourth Grader’s Big Book of Story Problems.
Fiction editors know this. So, when fiction writers forget this, editors decorate our manuscripts with red marginal notations like “Cut! Readers will get this (or don’t need to know it) anyway!” Or, in Hollywood screenplay-ese, “Cut!!! Too on-the-nose!!!”
What we authors cut, whether by editorial fiat or by self-inflicted wound, usually involves parallels from our life experience or from history that inspired some or all of our story.
This afterword adds back for curious readers a brief and “on-the-nose” guide to some of those anecdotes and historical parallels that would have slowed Balance Point as a story, or would have been “too on-the-nose.”
I’m a child of the Cold War. So, therefore, is Balance Point. I hope it conveys, from the comfortable distance that conversational science fiction imparts, the mood of a time when every day that mankind didn’t blow itself up was a gift, and much of the world presumed every foreigner was a spy.
But I know that generations who already see 9-11 as mere touchpad digits may already irretrievably see the Cold War only as a black-and-white non-war that was contested by dead people. But not zombie dead people, so who, like, cares?
Balance Point doesn’t bid to retell the Cold War like a quasi-historic thriller. Maybe you got that from the three-eyed King Kong on the cover. Rather, Balance Point is more a memory quilt appliqued with interesting, telling and occasionally true anecdotes. Or at least the author hopes readers find them so.
So, in no particular order:
Starship technology is like the A-bomb, and the last half of the twentieth century would undoubtedly have been vastly different if the West had somehow kept the Soviet Union from getting the A-bomb.
The Trueborns are, overtly and on-the-nose, us Americans. With all our faults and contradictions, I challenge anyone to name a dominant power on the world stage over the course of recorded history that has been a greater net force for good.
The Trueborn’s annihilation of the Slugs is like America’s use of that A-bomb.
Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki horrifically and directly killed, immediately or eventually, between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand people. But the A-bombings abruptly ended the thirty-one-year cycle of organized violence known as World Wars I and II, which killed over one hundred million people.
The so-called Pax Americanum that replaced that cycle of violence is blamed for less than half as many deaths from all wars and similar conflicts during more than double the time. That’s still a numbing statistic, but Pax Americanum marks the first meaningful interval during human history during which war mortality as a percentage of world population meaningfully decreased, rather than sharply increased.
Yet as a people, America’s strength is that we remain vigorously but peaceably of two minds whether that decision to use the bomb on Japan, and the ongoing World Police role it thrust upon us, was motivated by, or was for, the good.
Statistical asterisk to the two foregoing paragraphs: The “facts” cited about war dead vary among creditable sources over a range of more than forty million human souls. That’s roughly twice the population of the continent of Australia, give or take the Holocaust. Some of those varied sources are neutral. Some have skin in the game, like Robert McNamara and Zbigniew Brezinski.
My middle name is “Douglas,” after General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was an American general who became the effective military governor of Japan after the A-bombs. He introduced Japan to surrender, representative democracy and baseball. He later would have introduced Red China and North Korea to the A-bomb, if America hadn’t restrained him.
My father served under MacArthur, as a tanker scheduled to invade mainland Japan, which never happened because of the A-bombings. The invasion would likely have killed my dad, along with perhaps a million other GIs and five to ten million Japanese. In which case you would not be reading this. So I admit to that skin in this game. Choose your own facts and conclusions if you disagree.
The monolithic, gray, repressive, paranoid, insular and nuke-rich Yavi stand in for, well, you pick ’em. The Soviet Union, Red China, and for a host of wannabes (North Korea, East Germany) come to mind.
Ulys Gill reminds me of Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet Union GRU Colonel who in 1962 supposedly (In espionage every “fact” should be prefaced with “supposedly.” I’ve said “supposedly” this time. Imply “supposedly” hereafter) feared that his countrymen, who were sneaking nukes targeted on America into Cuba, were crazy enough to use them.
Nuking America would have gotten Penkovsky’s Mother Russia blown up far worse than America, to say nothing of ending the world as we know it. So Penkovsky revealed the nukes to America.
By that single sane, but treasonous, act Penkovsky gifted mankind with one get-out-of-blowing-ourselves-up-free card that we have to date used wisely.
But if Penkovsky was a sane traitor, he wasn’t a profligate traitor. Like Gill, he refused to rat out other Soviet spies he knew about to his adversary. Unlike Gill, Penkovsky’s sanity earned him a Soviet bullet in the back of his head.
In Balance Point, Max Polian, who was crazy enough to blow up his world, got the bullet to the back of the head. Because if reality were just, we wouldn’t need fiction to teach us what justice should be.
Historical allusions to dead-rat dead drops, eavesdropping from purpose-built garbage mountains, bugging the car phones of hypochondriac Politburo octogenarians, and most of the tradecraft portrayed in Balance Point, sound too nutty to be made up. They are in fact presented as accurately as a short-term Cold War era spy knows how.
Another area where Balance Point’s fiction is more-or-less true is that although it may be hard and dangerous to smuggle spies and secrets across borders, it’s much less hard to smuggle drugs, booze, bulldozers, luxury sedans and people willing to work for less than minimum wage.
Any and all references suggesting familiarity with alcohol, sex for hire, drugs and gambling are in no way autobiographical. And I’m stickin’ to it.
All that said, the lives of children of the Cold War have been about other balance points, too. And the book touches on those, too. Like the balance point between risk-taking, and risk-averse, people in love; and the balance point between the green but prosperous planet that Earth, by the skin of her teeth, still is. Compared to the gray, dirty Yavet we might make her into. And maybe the balance point between who children want their parents to be, and who the world lets them be.
Finally, if you know classic science fiction, not well but too well, you recognize that Howard Hibble’s last optimistic words about mankind “making it by the skin of our teeth” echo Robert Heinlein’s words in a nationally broadcast radio interview with Edward R. Morrow in 1952.
If you don’t even know that “nationally broadcast radio” was YouTube without skateboarding cats, Robert Heinlein was a quintessentially American bundle of the conservative, liberal, and libertarian contradictions that characterized the Cold War. In the century following Heinlein’s, he remains in any conversation about history’s greatest writer of classic
science fiction.
But a little homage to science fiction classics goes a long way. Sometimes as long as eight books. So I’ll just say so long, and thanks for the fish.
—Robert Buettner
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks, first, to my publisher, Toni Weisskopf, for the opportunity, encouragement and insights that helped not only make the Orphan’s Legacy books, but made them better. Most of all thanks for her extraordinary patience and encouragement with Balance Point, which came as easily to me as pulling grezzen teeth.
Thanks also to my editor Tony Daniel for wisdom, to my copy editor Miranda Guy, for perfection, and to Kurt Miller not only for his always-splendid cover art, but for his patience and insight in working with me to create it. Thanks to everyone at Baen books for their never-ending support and enthusiasm.
Thanks, in perpetuity, to my agent, Winifred Golden.
Finally and forever, thanks to Mary Beth for everything that matters.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Buettner’s best-selling debut novel, Orphanage, 2004 Quill Award nominee for Best SF/Fantasy/Horror novel, was compared favorably to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers by the Washington Post, Denver Post, Sci-Fi Channel’s Science Fiction Weekly and others. It has been called the Post-9/11 generation’s Starship Troopers, and a classic work of modern military science fiction.
Now in its ninth English-language printing, Orphanage, and other books in his Jason Wander series, have been republished by the Science Fiction Book Club, and released by various publishers in Chinese, Czech, French, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.
Orphanage has been adapted for film by Olatunde Osunsanmi (The Fourth Kind) for Davis Entertainment (Predator, I, Robot, Eragon).
Orphan’s Triumph, the fifth and final book in the Jason Wander series, was named one of Fandomania’s best fifteen science fiction, fantasy and horror books of 2009—one of only two science fiction books to make the list.
Robert was a 2005 Quill nominee for Best New Writer.
In March, 2011, Baen books released Overkill, his sixth novel, and in July, 2011, his seventh, Undercurrents.
A long-time Heinlein Society member, he wrote the Afterword for Baen’s recent re-issue of Heinlein’s Green Hills of Earth/Menace From Earth short story collection. His own first original short story, Sticks and Stones, appears in the 2012 anthology Armored, edited by John Joseph Adams. Robert served as the author judge for the 2011 National Space Society Jim Baen Memorial short story writing contest.
Born in 1947 on Manhattan Island, Robert graduated with Honors in Geology from the College of Wooster in 1969, and received his Juris Doctor from the University of Cincinnati in 1973. He served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer, a director of the Southwestern Legal Foundation, and was a National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology.
As attorney of record in more than three thousand cases, he practiced in the U.S. federal courts, before courts and administrative tribunals in no fewer than thirteen states, and in five foreign countries. Six, if you count Louisiana.
He lives in Georgia with his family and more bicycles than a grownup needs.
Visit him on the web at www.RobertBuettner.com.
AUTHORS PREFACE TO MOLE HUNT
Mole Hunt was originally published electronically, as a Baen Free Library short story, in 2011. The events detailed in Mole Hunt occur in the Orphan’s Legacy series time line before Balance Point and after series book 2, Undercurrents.
Mole Hunt was written as an experimental standalone short story, and therefore differs radically in style and viewpoint from the rest of the Orphan’s Legacy series.
Superficial similarities to Shakespeare’s Othello are purely on purpose.
MOLE HUNT
In the pre-dawn alien twilight, Roald Otman knelt in the mud, and groped until his blood-slick fingers found Rodric’s carotid artery. Cold, even in the equatorial heat. First Sergeant Rodric’s body lay tangled in death with another bipedal corpse, man-sized and reptilian.
The line wrangler who knelt alongside Otman stared across the ring of cleared ground that separated the two of them from the rain forest. The minefields in that ground protected Downgraded Earthlike 476’s human settlement from the rest of this hostile world.
The wrangler shook his head. “Never seen these little ones cross the minefield before.”
Otman narrowed his eyes. “But this one did. My cameraman’s dead. Why?”
The wrangler pushed his broad-brimmed hat back on his forehead and shrugged. “Bigger pred chasin’ after this one probably flushed it across. Coincidence.”
Otman frowned. After twelve years as a covert ops mercenary, he disbelieved in coincidence.
The wrangler pointed at the hilt of Rodric’s bush knife protruding from the dead beast’s throat. It was his turn to narrow his eyes and frown. “For a nature photographer, your friend was good with a knife.”
After twelve years in covert ops, Otman also lied easily. He cast his eyes down and pressed his hands to them. The pose was only partly for show. Since his team had hit dirt two days before, he had experienced sharp, momentary headaches. Alien pollen and spores, probably. “It’s ironic. My crew and I came to film this uniquely savage ecosystem, and already it has consumed one of us.”
The wrangler laid a hand on Otman’s shoulder. “Mr. Otman, you seem like a nice fella. Want some advice?”
Otman managed the nicest smile a mercenary killer could, and nodded.
The wrangler, a Trueborn Earthman like the rest of the colonists, rested his hand on the gunpowder revolver holstered at his waist. “Here on Dead End, every man’s business is his own.”
Otman stifled an eye roll at the prospect of a terracentric rant about liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“And here every man’s business is dangerous.” The wrangler pointed into the mist that clung to the distant trees. “But making a movie out there? Call this a preview, a bad omen. Whatever. But Dead End’s waiting to eat you alive. The spiders are as big as supper plates. Even the plant eaters are carnivores. They only eat the plants to get the parasites inside. The mid-level predators are like six-legged tyrannosaurs. And on top of the pyramid, the grezzen are eleven tons of speed, guile and meanness. Natural history’s not worth what your documentary’s gonna cost.”
Otman nodded. On that, he agreed with this cowboy. Otman’s recon team came here not to film natural history, but to change human history. The prize they sought could win Cold War II for Yavet and lose it for the Trueborns. And that was worth any cost to a Yavi, even one for hire.
Otman said, “Bad omen or not, it’s a risk we’re prepared to take.”
The wrangler looked up at the lightening overcast of his adopted world and sighed. “Well, then, safest time for you all to cross the line is dawn. The nocturnal predators are bedding down. But the day shift’s still yawnin’ and peein’.” He paused. “Sir, I know you’re upset. But if you’re bound to continue, an early start is safer. I can have the body buried for you.”
This civilian had no idea how abhorrent it was to leave a man behind. But Otman the “filmmaker” just swallowed. “That’s very kind. But I would prefer that we return the remains home to Yavet with us. Would it be possible for you to just have Mr. Rodric’s remains held at the local morgue until we return in ten days?”
The wrangler raised his eyebrows, just as something huge bellowed from the distant trees. “Sure. Just never thought about the possibility that you’d be returning.”
Then, without further discussion or emotion, the man walked back down the trail toward his line cabin. Otman watched him go and felt a strange kinship. This wild outpost and Otman’s overpopulated home world shared an indifference to death, though for very different reasons.
Otman stared, arms crossed, at the rainforest’s billion billion trees until the Earth man disappeared. Then Otman permitted himself a tear. Rodric had been Otman’s non-commissioned right hand for six years. But then Otman blinked, breathed and ground his
teeth.
Not at the wrangler’s indifference, nor even at Rodric’s death, but at his own failure.
As the team’s commanding officer, Otman had sent Rodric ahead to recon the vehicle path through the minefield before their “film crew” zigzagged its three vehicles out beyond the perimeter. It was a routine precaution that Otman had delegated a hundred other times in a hundred other places. But this time, Otman had actually wondered, fleetingly, whether predators ever got flushed in across the minefield.
Otman could have—obviously, should have—ordered Rodric to carry a rifle. Otman could have sent two men, not one. But Otman had done neither, because, as the wrangler had just confirmed, this attack was unprecedented.
Coincidence. Bad luck. Bad omens. Otman believed in none of those.
Otman believed in focus on the mission, in discipline and in steel well maintained and accurately aimed.
He zipped Rodric’s death into a mental body bag and thumbed his hand talk. No names, no ranks. These Trueborns were frontiersmen, not counterespionage wizards, but a cover worth doing was worth doing to excess. “Bring the vehicles forward. But please don’t jolt the editing equipment.”
“Yes . . . Mr. Producer. Uh . . . that Trueborn cowboy just passed by on the way back to the settlement. He said Rodric—”
”It’s true. But Mr. Rodric went down swinging.” Otman looked over his shoulder as three headlight pairs lurched toward him up the trail from the outpost.
He thumbed his hand talk again. “Let’s make sure he died for something.”
Otman knew that his team, to a man, felt gut-shot at the news of Rodric’s death. But he also knew that each man would now seal that loss into his own mental body bag. They would grieve together, but only after the job was done.
Nine hours and fifty miles later, Dead End’s hot, humid gray dawn had yielded to its hotter, humider gray afternoon.
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