Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (8 page)

“The first choice is the hard one. It will make your skin crawl. Some of you will go home and sleep for three days in fetal position with your thumbs in your mouths. But there’s no negotiation. This is what you’ll do:

“You’ll give Lieutenant Graff real power. Don’t give him a high rank and a desk and a bureaucracy. Give him genuine authority. Everything he wants, he gets. Because the whole reason he is alive will be this: to find the best possible commander for the fleets that will decide the future of the human race.

“To do this he first has to find out how to identify those with the best potential. You’ll give him all the help he asks for. All the
people
he asks for, regardless of their rank, training, or how much some idiot admiral hates or loves them.

“Then Graff will figure out how to
train
the candidates he identifies. Again, you’ll do whatever he wants. Nothing is too expensive. Nothing is too difficult. Nothing requires a single committee meeting to agree. Everybody in the IF and everybody in the government is Graff’s servant, and all they should ever ask him is to clarify his instructions.

“What I require of Graff is that he work on nothing but the identification and training of my replacement as battle commander of the International Fleet. If he starts bureaucratic kingdom building—in other words, if he turns out to be just another idiot—I’ll know it, and I’ll stop talking to him.

“My quid pro for your giving Graff this authority is that once I’m satisfied he
has
it and is using it correctly, then I’ll turn this ship around immediately. I’ll get home a few years earlier than the original plan. I’ll be part of training whatever commander you have. I’ll evaluate Graff’s work. I’ll help choose among the candidates for the job, if you have more than one that might potentially do the job.

“And all along the way, Graff will communicate with me constantly by ansible, so that everything he does will be done with my counsel and approval. Thus, through Graff, I am taking command of the search for our war leader
now
.

“But if you act like the idiots who led the fleet during the war
I
won, and try to obfuscate and prevaricate and procrastinate and misdirect and manipulate and lie your way out of letting Graff and me control the choice and training of the battle commander, then I won’t turn this ship around, ever.

“I’ll just sail on out into oblivion. Our campaign will fail. The Buggers will come back to Earth and they’ll finish the job this time. And I, in this ship, will be the last living human being. But it won’t be my fault. It will be yours, because you did not have the decency and intelligence to step aside and let the people who know how to do the job of saving the human race
do
it.

“Think about it as long as you want. I’ve got all the time in the world. But keep this in mind: Whoever tries to take control of this situation and set up committees to study your response to this vid—
those
are the people you need to assign to remote desk jobs and get them out of the IF right now. They are the allies of the Buggers—they’re the ones who will end up getting us all killed. I have already designated the only possible leader for this program: Lieutenant Graff. There’s no compromise. No maneuvering. Make him a captain, give him more actual authority than any other living human, stand ready to do whatever he tells you to do, and let him and me get to work.

“Do I believe you’ll actually do this? No. That’s why I reprogrammed my ship. Just remember that I
am
the guy who saved the human race, and I did it because I was able to see exactly how the Buggers’ military system worked and find its weak spot. I have also seen how the human military system works, and I know the weak spot, and I know how to fix it. I’ve just told you how. Either you’ll do it or you won’t. Now make your decisions and don’t bother me again unless you’ve made the right one.”

Mazer turned back to the desk and selected
SAVE
and
SEND.

When he was sure the message was sent, he returned to his sleeping space and let himself think again about Kim and Pai and Pahu, about his grandchildren, about his wife’s new husband and what children they might have. What he did not let himself think about was the possibility of returning to Earth to meet these babies as adults and try to find a place among them as if he were still alive, as if there were anyone left on Earth for him to know and love.

The answer
did not come for a full twelve hours. Mazer imagined with amusement the struggles that must be going on. People fighting for their jobs. Filing reports proving that Mazer was insane and therefore should not be listened to. Struggling to neutralize Graff—or suck up to him, or get themselves assigned as his immediate supervisor. Trying to figure out a way to fool Mazer into thinking they had complied without actually having to do it.

The answer, when it came, was from Graff. It was a visual. Mazer was pleased to see that while Graff was, in fact, young, he wore the uniform in a slovenly way that suggested that looking like an officer wasn’t a particularly high priority for him.

He wore a captain’s insignia and a serious expression that was only a split second away from a smile.

“Once again, Admiral Rackham, with only one weapon in your arsenal, you knew right where to aim it.”

“I had two missiles the first time,” said Mazer.

“Do you wish me to record—” began the computer.

“Shut up and continue the message,” growled Mazer.

“You should know that your former wife, Kim Arnsbrach Rackham Summers—and yes, she does keep your name as part of her legal name—was instrumental in making this happen. Because whenever somebody came up with a plan for how to fool you and me into thinking they were in compliance with your orders, I would bring her to the meeting. Whenever they said, ‘We’ll get Admiral Rackham to believe’ some lie or other, she would laugh. And the discussion would pretty much end there.

“I can’t tell you how long it will last, but at this point, the IF seems to be ready to comply fully. You should know that has involved about two hundred early retirements and nearly a thousand reassignments, including forty officers of flag rank. You still know how to blow things up.

“There are things I already know about selection and training, and over the next few years we’ll talk constantly. But I can’t wait to take actions until you and I have conferred on everything, simply because there’s no time to waste and time dilation adds weeks to all our conversations.

“However, if I do something wrong, tell me and I’ll change it. I’ll never tell you that we’ve already done this or that as if that were a reason
not
to do it the right way after all. I will show you that you have not made a mistake in trusting this to me.

“The thing that puzzles me, though, is how you decided to trust me. My communications to you were full of lies or I couldn’t have written to you at all. I didn’t know you and had no clue how to tell you the truth in a way that would get past the committees that had to approve everything. The worst thing is that in fact I’m very good at the bureaucratic game or I couldn’t have got to the position to communicate directly with you in the first place.

“So let me tell you—now that no one will be censoring my messages—that yes, I think the highest priority is finding the right replacement for you as battle commander of the International Fleet. But once we’ve done that—and I know that’s a big if—I have plans of my own.

“Because winning this particular war against this particular enemy is important, of course. But I want to win all future wars the only way we can—by getting the human race off this one planet and out of this one star system. The Formics already figured it out—you have to disperse. You have to spread out until you’re unkillable.

“I hope they turn out to have failed. I hope we can destroy them so thoroughly they can’t challenge us for a thousand years.

“But by the end of that thousand years, when another Bugger fleet comes back for vengeance, I want them to discover that humans have spread to a thousand worlds and there is no hope of finding us all.

“I guess I’m just a big-picture guy, Admiral Rackham. But whatever my long-range goals are, this much is certain: If we don’t have the right commander and win this war, it won’t matter what other plans anybody has.

“And
you
are that commander, sir. Not the battle commander, but the commander who found a way to get the military to reshape itself in order to find the right battle commander without wasting the lives of countless soldiers in meaningless defeats in order to find him.

“Sir, I will not address this topic again. But I have come to know your family in the past few weeks. I know now something of what you gave up in order to be in the position you’re in now. And I promise you, sir, that I will do everything in my power to make your sacrifices and theirs worth the cost.”

Graff saluted, and then disappeared from the holospace.

And even though he could not be seen by anybody, Mazer Rackham saluted him back.

Afterword by Orson Scott Card

I’ve always been fascinated by the issues involved in relativistic space travel. To me it seemed that any kind of voyage that was long enough for relativistic effects to kick in would be a kind of death. Your body would still be alive, but you would be cut off from the community around you for long enough that by the time you returned—if you returned—all the people you knew would either be dead, or would have lived so many years without you that you would not know them.

This is particularly poignant when it comes to parents and children, or siblings. I remember how powerfully William Sleator’s brilliant novel
Singularity
dealt with that issue, when he had one of a pair of twins use a backyard singularity to age himself, deliberately, a full year in a single night. Because he did it at the onset of puberty, he emerged markedly larger and older than his brother. But he had also tricked himself, because it was a year spent in utter solitude, except for the books he was reading. He had not had a year of growth through interaction with other people. Fortunately, though, he had used the time to understand himself a little better and gain some perspective.

When I gave myself the assignment of writing one
Ender’s Game
story per issue of the
InterGalactic Medicine Show,
I was quickly drawn to Mazer’s dilemma. Because he was regarded as essential to the survival of the human race in the next war with the Formics, he was sent out at (near) lightspeed on an empty voyage; he would then bring himself back, again at lightspeed, so that when the war came, he would hardly have aged.

In one sense, this is no more than we ask of any soldiers in combat—they go away from their homes, knowing that a certain percentage of them will not come back.

But when you send a fleet of soldiers on a relativistic journey,
none
of them will return to the world, and the people, that they knew. Even though their bodies remain alive, it’s a suicide mission.

So in a way it’s merciful that the fleets were ordered to stay and colonize the planets they conquered; there was no point in bringing them home. Only Mazer had to face the bittersweet dilemma of meeting his family again.

The challenge, then, was to determine how Mazer would feel about all this and then what he would do. Because one thing was certain: Mazer was smart enough to know that he was
not
the right man to command the human fleet. So if he did come back, he would face a burden that he knew he could not handle. What does a good soldier do then?

When I
was fired after ten years as a science reporter for the
New York Times,
the editor told me I’d never get a job with a decent paper again. He was right, at first: No one wanted to hire a reporter who had taken bribes to write a series of articles about a nonexistent technology in order to inflate the value of a company being used in a stock swindle—even if I had managed to get off without serving time.

And that’s the only reason I took the job with the
Midnight Observer
tabloid. They didn’t care that I’d made up a news story—they were impressed that I’d managed to write something that had fooled experts for over a year. So began my new career under the pseudonym of Dr. Lance Jorgensen. The doctorate was phony, of course, and I never did decide what it was in. I worked that gig for three years before I caught the break that let me get back into real journalism.

When the United Nations Space Agency decided to hold a lottery to choose a reporter to travel on board the first interstellar ship, they set strict qualifications: a college degree in journalism, at least five years of experience as a science reporter, and current employment with a periodical or news show with circulation or viewership of at least one million.

Technically, I qualified. So I entered. And a random number generator on an UNSA computer picked my number.

Less than five minutes after UNSA announced the crew of the
Starfarer I,
including yours truly as the only journalist, the calls began. The first was from my old editor at the
Times
. He wanted me back on an exclusive basis—I could name my own price. I’ll admit I was bitter: I told him that my price was full ownership of the paper and that I’d fire him as soon as I had it. He sputtered; I hung up.

By the end of that week, I had a TV deal with CNN and a print/Web deal with the
Washington Post
. And so, without a gram of regret, Dr. Lance Jorgensen gave the
Midnight Observer
his two weeks’ notice. I was once again Lawrence Jensen, science reporter.

A lot of journalists squawked that I didn’t deserve to be on the mission because of my scrape with the law, even if I had managed to avoid a conviction by turning state’s evidence. But the rules were on my side for a change: My degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, my experience at the
Times,
and the
Midnight Observer
’s seven-million-plus circulation fit the letter, if not the spirit, of the rules. Despite their fervent wishes, I made it through spaceflight training without a hitch, and proudly boarded the
Starfarer
as the world looked on.

This mission was my chance for redemption. I’d made one big mistake, and I planned to make up for it with accurate, well-written science reporting that made the wonders of space travel understandable to everyone. I had loved science since I was a kid; if I’d had the brains to do the math, I might have chosen a career as a scientist instead of a reporter. Reporting this mission was my dream job, and I was determined not to mess things up.

The day we launched, the
Midnight Observer
ran a cover story claiming that I had been selected for this mission because while working undercover for them I had already met the aliens the
Starfarer
would encounter, and they had requested that I serve as Earth’s ambassador. They had even ’shopped a picture of me shaking hands with a stereotypical short, gray, bald, bulge-headed alien.

During all two hundred and twenty-three days of hyperspace travel, my crewmates refused to let me live that down.

Fortunately, when we found the aliens, they didn’t look anything like that picture.

Observations from Hubble III had indicated the possibility of a planet with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere in this system, and now that we had arrived, our onboard telescopes had confirmed that the fourth planet had such an atmosphere. I had just finished my third column for this week’s homelink, explaining about nonequilibrium gases and why this meant there was life of some sort on the planet, when Singh began pounding on my cabin door.

“Hey, Ambassador, you in there?”

I didn’t dignify that by responding.

“Come on, Jensen, open up. I’ve got a scoop for you.”

Narinder Singh was one of
Starfarer
’s xenobiologists, and until we actually got down on the ground, he didn’t have much to do except make guesses based on the limited data our telescopes could gather. So it was unlikely that he had anything important. Besides, since I was the only reporter on board, there wasn’t anyone who could scoop me. But I said, “Come in,” anyway.

He opened the hatch and came in. “Look at these.” He shoved a handful of eight-by-ten photos in front of my face.

I took the photos and began leafing through them. They showed a thin sunlit crescent of planet, which I assumed to be Aurora, the planet with the good atmosphere. “So, it’s nighttime on half the planet. Excuse me while I call my editor and tell him to stop the presses.”

“No, look closer at the nighttime side. Over here.” He pointed to a region along the equator near the edge of the darkness.

Peering at the photo, I noticed that there were a dozen or so little clumps of bright spots. “You think these are the lights of cities?”

“Yes. There’s a civilization on that planet. And I want you to remember I came to you with this discovery first.”

I looked over at the column I had just finished. I could rewrite a bit to mention Singh’s speculations, with plenty of caveats. But it still seemed a little too flimsy—and the whole situation with the
Midnight Observer
story made me leery of anything involving aliens. “Yeah, I’ll remember, if it turns out to be anything. It’s probably volcanoes or forest fires or something. Did you run this by Khadil?” Iqrit Khadil was our geologist. “I mean, if it’s really a civilization down there, how come there’s no radio traffic?”

“Maybe they haven’t developed radio yet. Or maybe they’ve moved beyond it. But I’m telling you, this is it: a sentient species with at least rudimentary civilization.”

“Look, if you can get Khadil to agree that those are not volcanoes or any other geological phenomenon within the next half hour, I’ll put your speculations in today’s column. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait till next week, which might be better anyway, since by then there might be more evidence one way or the other.”

He grabbed the photos back. “I know what I know. I’ll talk to Khadil.”

By the time the OM reached planetary orbit five days later, all the evidence pointed to a developing civilization on Aurora, so I decided it was a good thing I’d included Singh’s speculations in my column. We didn’t know what the reaction from Earth was yet—the HM was still charging its capacitors for its weekly jump into hyperspace to transmit our reports and download communications from home. But first contact with an alien species, which had always been considered only a slight possibility, transformed our mission from one of simple exploration into something far greater. I’d already written and rewritten and discarded several columns about the meaning of all this. It was probably the biggest news story ever; I was writing history, and I wanted to get the words right.

I wasn’t the only one. Commander Inez Gutierrez de la Peña, who was in overall command of our mission, commed me in my quarters in the middle of the night. The next morning most of the crew would be taking the Landing Module down to an isolated island in the middle of Aurora’s larger ocean, and she would take the first human step on a planet outside our solar system. She wanted my opinion on what she would say upon taking that step.

I was flattered, but feigned irritation out of habit. “It’s two in the morning. How’d you know I wasn’t sleeping?”

“I checked the power consumption in your quarters and could tell the lights and your computer were on.” UNSA hadn’t picked Gutierrez by lottery; she knew this ship six ways from zero.

“Okay. Tell me what you’ve got so far.”

She hesitated a moment. “It’s no ‘One small step,’ but…‘Humanity has always been a race of explorers. Though in the past we have not always lived up to our aspirations, letting fear and exploitation rule our encounters with the unknown, today on this new world we have a chance—”

“Blah blah blah. Are you looking to write a pamphlet on social responsibility, or do you want to say something that will still be quoted a thousand years from now?”

“I was thinking that putting the event in its historical context—”

“Leave that to the historians and people like me. What you need is a sound bite. Short. To the point, yet something that recalls the dreams of our first ancestors, who looked up at the stars and wondered what lay beyond them.”

On my com screen, her face nodded. “I see what you mean. You going to be up a while longer?”

“Yeah. Call me when you come up with something.”

I may not have sounded very respectful, but Commander Gutierrez had my respect. Not only was she almost irritatingly competent at her job, but out of the thirty-seven other members of the crew, she was the only one who had never called me “Ambassador.”

It took her six more tries over the next three hours before I thought she had it about right.

The next morning, precisely on schedule, she climbed down the ladder outside the LM’s airlock. We could hear her steady breathing over her spacesuit’s com system. When she reached the bottom and took that first step onto Aurora’s soil, her voice came in loud and clear.

“Today humanity walks among the stars. Where will we walk tomorrow?”

As those of us on board the LM clapped and cheered, I felt twin twinges of pride and jealousy. Every word I had ever written would be long forgotten, and still those words would be remembered. They were not mine, but at least I had helped shape them.

I took my little shares of immortality wherever I could.

Our landing spot’s isolation allowed the biologists to analyze the native life with the least risk of contaminating the planetary biosphere. Seven days after landing, I got a chance to take a five-minute walk around the island. Aurora’s light gravity—78 percent of Earth’s—gave a spring to my step despite the weight of the spacesuit.

I daydreamed of spotting something significant during my walk, a scientific discovery of my own that I could reveal to a waiting world, but in the end all that I had discovered for myself was the sensation of walking beneath an aquamarine sky and looking up at a sun that seemed too blue and too small.

As far as important discoveries went, I had to settle for the daily breakthroughs of the biologists. The biggest one was the fact that life on Aurora was not based on DNA, but rather on a previously unknown nucleic acid molecule with a hexagonal cross-section. A few days later came the finding that the protein building blocks of Auroran life consisted of twenty-two amino acids instead of just twenty.

Exciting and heady information though these details might be for the fraction of Earth’s population who were molecular biologists, I needed a subject that would grab the average reader’s attention. That meant either danger or sex or both—suitably phrased for the
Washington Post,
of course. I abandoned my half-written amino acid column and went down to the biolab to wheedle something worth writing about out of the biologists.

Singh was in the middle of something delicate and didn’t have time to talk, but Rachel Zalcberg said she could spare a few minutes while she waited for some test results.

About three months into the hyperspace flight, I’d made a pass at Rachel. She’d shot me down in no uncertain terms. Asking her about alien sex was definitely not the right place to start, so I focused on danger. “Since life here on Aurora is so different, how likely is it that there’s some sort of disease organism that our immune system can’t handle?”

She waved a hand dismissively. “Most disease organisms have trouble crossing the species barrier. Genetically, you’re closer to an elm tree than to anything here, and you don’t have to worry about Dutch elm disease. Our biochemistry is so different, the Auroran equivalents of bacteria and viruses wouldn’t be able to reproduce inside us, assuming they even managed to survive at all.”