Ahead of me, Tway hung her hands on her hips and whistled.
My jaw dropped. To our front, the Pyramids rose.
Munchkin stood beside me and wiped her eyes. “Visitors don’t expect them to be so close to Cairo.”
To what had been Cairo. Yet here they stood, and so did we, still and silent.
“Egyptians say, ‘All the world fears time, but time fears the Pyramids.’ Welcome to Egypt! I am Haji.” Our tour guide, a mustached Egyptian whose smile showed off a gold incisor, motioned us to our tour vehicle, a UN-blue, diesel-powered relic he called a Humvee. Only a few ancient people have ever driven a diesel-powered vehicle. My head snapped back as the Humvee lurched away, then forward as he jerked the automatic transmission. Haji was plainly not among the ancient few.
The time the Pyramids themselves should fear is time spent riding in a Humvee. Humvees ride like ox carts. I know that because Haji stuck our Hummer in a mud pit and we finished our tour riding in an ox cart. Tway’s tour did teach me that most of the rest of the world lacked the tech to build spaceships.
Our first stop was the impact crater’s west rim. Munchkin kept Jude in the Humvee. Somewhere in that vast hole rested the remains of the family Jude would never know.
I stared three miles across, to the opposite rim, a shallow Grand Canyon. Like the Grand Canyon, a river ran through it.
Haji pointed at the wide Nile, and at the smaller crater that overlapped the impact crater’s south side. “Thanks be to God, United States reopened the Nile, or many more would have died in the floods.”
A U.S. nuclear missile had broken open the crater-rim dam and released the Nile to flow north to the Mediterranean. But there had likely been innocent Egyptians alive at ground zero when President Irons ordered the button pushed. Who could say that Margaret Irons had not killed Munchkin’s family? But who could say that Irons’s decision to save millions of Egyptians by nuking Cairo was wrong? The word was that Margaret Irons got forced to resign. But with a job like that, maybe she just quit. A lump grew in my throat. Command was a bitch. The stars on my shoulders weighed tons. I wanted to be a grunt again.
Tway shook her head. “Forty years ago, no one would have believed that Muslims would thank the U.S. for nuking the largest city in Islam.”
We spent an hour lobbying the mayor of New Cairo, in a Quonset-hut city hall. He greeted me Arab style, with a kiss on each cheek. He also seemed to me to be hitting on Munchkin, whether she was bundled up or not. The whole thing conjured visions of quasi-incestuous ménage à trois that I didn’t need with a queasy stomach. Then the Egyptian foreign minister showed us around the Pyramids while Munchkin chatted him up in Arabic.
Tway was smiling. We were winning over Muslim demographic groups like Grant took Richmond.
Later, Haji buried our Humvee axle-deep at a muddy clean-up and reconstruction site in the Nile floodplain, south of Cairo. I rolled up my trouser legs and climbed out, barefoot, in my American uniform, to see whether a push would free us. A turbaned man, ankle-deep in muck and digging with a wood-handled adze, looked up. He scooped mud with the adze blade, then flung it at me. Evidently, not all Muslims thanked us.
I asked Tway, as she leaned out the Humvee’s window, “What demographic is he?”
“Get used to it. Politics is no popularity contest.”
“I thought that’s exactly what it was.”
She sighed. “Wander, what made you so difficult?”
I tore one foot free from the mud with a sucking pop. “Difficulty.”
We outran the sun back to North America, but the Scram was returning us to Washington, not Canaveral. While Munchkin and Jude dozed, I asked Tway, “Doesn’t it strike you as ridiculous that Blitz survivors in Egypt are rebuilding with ox carts while we’re hunting publicity in a Scramjet with a fuel bill that would feed them all for a year?”
Tway smiled. “See? You’re beginning to understand why the world can’t afford soldiers as expensive as you are. But no, I don’t think the Scram is extravagant. Or, at least, it’s a necessary extravagance. You and Lieutenant Munshara-Metzger have another appearance in Washington in the morning. Only a Scram could get you to Egypt and back in a day.”
In the limo to our hotel, Munchkin bounced Jude on one knee and asked me, “What do you think?”
“I think the world’s in the toilet. I think we need to spend every penny on reconstruction. I also think we need to spend every penny on defense. I think politics is an impossible balancing act and I hate it. I think this job fits me like bicycle shorts fit hippos.”
She sighed. “Maybe the thing tomorrow will change your mind.”
“What thing?”
Eighteen
The next morning Tway stood on the gravel path that split the Capitol Mall in front of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum while she read from a Chipboard. She shouted at me, “Well, not even you can screw up today!” An early-morning jogger stream parted and flowed, panting, around us.
Tway had to shout because, behind us, hydraulics whined as winches mounted on two diesel trailers big enough to move houses inched Mimi Ozawa’s V-Star, floodlit in dawn half-flight, onto the Mall’s dead grass. Alongside the V-Star rose a bunting-draped stage, UN blue and American-flag-striped, ringed by spindly temporary bleachers.
Tway adjusted her glasses and pointed at the stage. “You sit up there with the other veterans. The assistant to the Secretary-General hands over the title papers to the director of the Smithsonian—”
“She’s already an American ship!”
“Technically, she’s UN Space Force property. Look, it’s a chance for the world to thank America. Most of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force were American. It’s a friggin’ symbol. Like you.”
A friggin’ symbol. The V-Star, still painted Ganymedetan camo, would squat on its landing gear as a static display, on the Mall in front of the museum, for a year. Then more flatbeds would haul it off to be gutted of its avionics and engines. Then the V-Star would be tucked into some aircraft nursing home of a hangar, alongside other winged relics of other wars. That’s what happened to symbols. I blinked back a tear.
Tway looked in my eyes. “It’s just a hunk of titanium.”
I pretended to scratch my nose so I could wipe it.
“Hibble will be up on the stage, too. And Sharia with her little boy. And your Senior NCO, Brumby.” She drew a finger across the blank bottom of the Chipboard screen. “You’ve got the next two days off. After the ceremony, make the reception a reunion. Relax. Stay out of trouble.”
I straightened and smiled.
The ceremonies went off hitch-free. I had no responsibilities while the politicians spoke, so I sat onstage next to Howard and divided my attention between making eye contact with a business-suited brunette in the bleachers and watching three-year-old Jude Munshara-Metzger squirm on his mother’s lap. Brumby sat beside Munchkin. He squirmed, too, looking like he was searching for something to blow up.
Afterward, the Smithsonian hosted a buffet in the Air and Space Museum for ceremony participants.
Brumby, Munchkin with Jude, Howard, and I shared a table. At another table, the brunette in the business suit sat facing me in a group and smiled. Celebrity had its good points.
Brumby chewed a National Park Service cheeseburger. “They should have let President Irons accept the ship.”
Muchkin read nutrition labels on a chicken sandwich while she cut it into small pieces for Jude. “The crowd would’ve booed her off the stage. They think she wrecked the economy.”
Brumby waved his cheeseburger. “The crowd wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t! And the Slugs had just a little bit to do with it.”
I asked, “So, Brumby, what’s your new assignment?” Tway had me so conditioned that now I changed the subject away from controversy even when talking to friends.
He blinked. “You didn’t hear? Next month I’m gone. Medical.”
My mouth hung open. I had let myself get so wrapped up in fancy hotels and flir
ting brunettes that I had lost touch with a man who had become my brother. “Why?”
“Punched a guy. Like on Excalibur. They checked me into Bethesda and ‘observed’ me. PTSD.”
“They think a civilian with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is better than a soldier with it?”
“Civilians don’t usually carry guns.” His hands shook until he pressed his palms flat on the table. “It’s okay. I mean, where would I be in twenty years if I stayed in? Sergeant Major Ord’s got a cleaner record than I’ll ever have and I hear he’s pushing papers at the Pentagon since we got back. I can take a Gratitude Act pension, if I opt in by tomorrow.”
Congress had accelerated pension eligibility for Ganymede Expeditionary Force veterans who wanted to retire. Brumby could collect his pension based on his acting rank. In the long haul, it was cheaper for the country to get rid of us than to pay us and train us and maintain us. There were only seven hundred survivors to pay off, anyway.
I had been thinking about it, myself. A major general’s pension was The Brick. Time for another subject change, before I thought too closely about it. “Howard, what’s new with you?”
He tapped an unlit cigarette against his palm. “We transcribed the Ganymede survey data we downloaded from Jeeb. You should have let me keep hunting artifacts. The Football? It wasn’t unique. They were tucked away all over Ganymede, like eggs on Easter morning.”
I looked over at Jude. “Easter eggs get hidden just enough so they get found. What were the Slugs up to?”
Howard shrugged. “Could be a message. We’re waiting for Brace’s people to carve up The Football. It’ll be another flea circus like this. You’ll see for yourself.”
“Can’t wait.”
As youngest among the three juveniles, Jude got restless before Brumby or Howard. I walked Munchkin and my godson down the Mall to her rental car. If new cars were scarce, rental cars were scarcer. But Uncle Sam was generous with her per diem because Munchkin had mothered the only extraterrestrial-gestated child in human history. Her disembarkation physical was being conducted at Walter Reed Hospital. That was a short drive.
We might have been a family, Jude my three-year-old son, instead of my godson. But he had Metzger’s strawberry-blond hair and Munchkin’s café au lait skin, and I was as honky-white as five sunless years can drain a cauc. I tossed a styrofoam glider—a V-Star in UNSF blue I had bought at the Smithsonian. Jude chased it like any three-year-old.
Munchkin caught my elbow with gloved fingers and whispered, “Watch!”
The glider arced up into chill, dry air, then stalled and swooped back to the ground. Jude ran twenty feet to it, giggling.
Grinning, he ran back to us, waving the tiny blue wedge like a flag. “Frow! Frow again!”
Munchkin had paled beneath her café au lait. She hugged herself against the Washington chill.
“What’s wrong?” Was she afraid he would become a pilot? And die like his father had?
She shook her head. “They think he’s a freak. Something about reaction times. They can’t measure the differences, yet.”
Jude sat cross-legged in the grass, hand-flying the glider and making roaring noises punctuated by drool sprays.
“He’s a kid, Munchkin. A cute, smart, healthy kid.”
She frowned. “Gamma rays. Low gravity. Who knows what about him is different?”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like he has a third eye.”
She turned to me, hands on hips. “It isn’t that. I’d love him if he was as ugly as you. It’s them.”
“Who them?”
“The doctors. The cognitive scientists. The Intel weenies. They think the only extraterrestrially born and conceived human is their lab rat. I think he’s my son.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Am I? Look behind us.”
I didn’t have to. Twenty yards behind us sauntered a male-female plainclothes MP team, playing tourist. “You’re a celebrity. So’s Jude. Lots of nuts are still mad at Jude’s father for wiping out the only other intelligent species in the universe.”
She poked her hands into her parka pockets and hissed. “Right.”
I smiled. “Your trusting and jolly demeanor is one reason I’m glad you’re staying in the service. I need the example of someone more paranoid than I am.”
She scuffed grass bristles with her shoe.
Finally she looked up at me. “I’ve been wondering how to tell you. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Leaving where?”
“Washington. The Army.”
She might as well have slapped me. “But—”
She glanced back at the MPs. “Jason, even if I trusted the government, why stay in?”
“But you’re leaving me alone.”
“I’ll be close. There’s a place I’m looking to buy. In Colorado.”
“You’re not going back to Egypt?”
“It isn’t home. Cairo’s gone. My family with it. Besides, America is the free-est society on the planet.”
I jerked a thumb at our guards. “You think?”
“In America, secret police are a joke. In the Middle East, they still are a fact. Real democracy is still new to Egypt. In the U.S., I can buy my own forty acres and raise my son in peace. With a couple good guns.” I had seen Munchkin shoot. Any would-be Jude kidnappers had better strap on their Eternad armor. “If I opt in to the Gratitude Act by tomorrow, we collect my pension plus Metzger’s. What about you, Jason?”
Jude stretched his arms and she picked him up as we walked.
I raised my eyes to the Capitol, far up the Mall. I shrugged. “I dunno.” I told her about Grodt, about the book.
She frowned.
“Should I do the book?”
She shrugged while Jude tugged her hair. “If you give the proceeds to charity, I guess so. But that’s not a life. This whole circus tour they have you doing. It’s not you.”
We arrived back at her rental car and I slid the door up so she could fit Jude into his seat and pump up the bolsters. I turned away.
“Jason? You’re coming back to our place for dinner, aren’t you?”
A nearly visible sunset was beginning beyond the Washington Monument. I shook my head. “I’ve gotta think.”
She reached out from behind the wheel and touched my sleeve. “Take care.”
I pressed her door down. Through the windome Jude saluted. I returned it and the car purred out into sparse traffic. The incognito Olsen Twins followed behind her in a Ford four-door so plain it had to be government.
I thrust my hands in my pockets and walked back down the Mall, toward the Washington Monument. The wind off the Potomac picked up and I bowed my head against it. I had thought it was cold earlier in the day. Now it seemed as cold here as out by Jupiter.
I was an orphan. My surrogate family, the Army, had become as irrelevant as it had been before the war. The woman I loved was buried three hundred million miles away. And now I had to face my next crisis, whatever it was going to be, without the person who had grown to be my sister.
I drifted down the brown lawns of Washington and wondered what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
In a quarter of an hour I reached the White House fence and paused to stare through the wrought iron across the south lawn.
The house lurked as pale as a ghost in the gloom. External floodlights would have sent the wrong, unfrugal signal to a nation and a world bowed beneath war spending. Jude Metzger’s grandchildren would still be paying off the Slug War’s budget deficits.
But had there been a choice? Evidently a lot of people thought so, in hindsight. Margaret Irons, the first African-American, not to mention the first woman, to inhabit the White House as President, hadn’t agreed with those people. While I was away, winning that war in spite of my own incompetence, Irons was forced from office. I never even got old enough to vote for her.
I shrugged my collar up around my ears again, turned away from the fence, and walked farther into the dark
ness.
I hiked alongside the wind-wrinkled Reflecting Pool, unfrozen since this was July. People stayed indoors after dark since the war. Impact dust blotted out moonlight and starlight, and evenings were meat-locker cold even in July.
I passed by the World War II Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and finally the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a flat reminder of a historical blind alley.
Someday, I supposed, Slug War veterans would have their memorial. Washington still had empty lawns. But America seemed in no hurry. Ours had been a different war. In a world of billions, only ten thousand of us had fought. And we had been handpicked war orphans. We left no one behind to tie on yellow ribbons. And the mission had been so secret that the billions who didn’t know us hadn’t even known we had gone to battle until the war was over. Seven hundred of us lived through it.
What the world remembered about this war was sixty million civilians dead. And the diversion of the world economy to beat plowshares back into swords so completely that the evening lights of Washington were still out, three years after the war was won.
No wonder we hadn’t rated much of a welcome-home celebration.
A car, just an urban electric, whispered up along the curb and the passenger side window dropped. “Come in out of the cold, soldier?”
The brunette in the business suit leaned across her center console.
My heart skipped. Ogling women was one thing. Actually becoming involved with one was another. Pooh had been gone nearly three years now. We had only 616 days together from the day I first spoke to her until the day I laid the last stone on her grave. My parents had been married eight years when Mom lost Dad. Had Mom ever gotten over it?
My head shook slowly. “I’m flattered. You’re very attractive, but—”
Her head shook, too. “I’m not hitting on you. I’m very married. I recognized you in my headlights. It’s cold outside. You just seem like you could use someone to talk to.”
That I could.
A gust cut at my cheek and I climbed in the passenger door.
“Lynn Dey.” We shook hands.
“What were you doing at the reception?”
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