Federations Read online

  “I am not allowed to erase ansible communications,” said the female voice blandly. It was always bland, of course, but it felt particularly bland when saying irritating things.

  I could make you erase it, if I wanted to go to the trouble of reprogramming you. But Mazer didn’t say it, in case it might alert the program safeguards in some way. “Read it.”

  “Male voice?”

  “Female,” snapped Mazer.

  “Admiral Rackham, I’m not sure you understood the gravity of our situation. We have two possibilities: Either we will identify the best possible commanders for our war against the Formics, or we will have you as our commander. So either you will help us identify the traits that are most likely to be present in the ideal commander, or you will be the commander on whom all the responsibility rests.”

  “I understand that, you little twit,” said Mazer. “I understood it before you were born.”

  “Would you like me to take down your remarks as a reply?” asked the computer.

  “Just read it and ignore my carping.”

  The computer returned to the message from Lieutenant Graff. “I have located your wife and children. They are all in good health, and it may be that some or all of them might be glad of an opportunity to converse with you by ansible, if you so desire. I offer this, not as bribe for your cooperation, but as a reminder, perhaps, that more is at stake here than the importunities of an upstart lieutenant pestering an admiral and a war hero on a voyage into the future.”

  Mazer roared out his answer. “As if I had need of reminders from you!”

  “Would you like me to take down your remarks as—”

  “I’d like you to shut yourself down and leave me in—”

  “A reply?” finished the computer, ignoring his carping.

  “Peace!” Mazer sighed. “Take down this answer: I’m divorced, and my ex-wife and children have made their lives without me. To them I’m dead. It’s despicable for you to attempt to raise me from the grave to burden their lives. When I tell you that I have nothing to tell you about command it’s because I truly do not know any answers that you could possibly implement.

  “I’m desperate for you to find a replacement for me, but in all my experience in the military, I saw no example of the kind of commander that we need. So figure it out for yourself—I haven’t any idea.”

  For a moment he allowed his anger to flare. “And leave my family out of it, you contemptible . . . ”

  Then he decided not to flame the poor git. “Delete everything after ‘leave my family out of it.’”

  “Do you wish me to read it back to you?”

  “I’m on the toilet!”

  Since his answer was nonresponsive, the computer repeated the question verbatim.

  “No. Just send it. I don’t want to have the zealous Lieutenant Graff wait an extra hour or day just so I can turn my letter into a prize-winning school essay.”

  But Graff’s question nagged at him. What should they look for in a commander?

  What did it matter? As soon as they developed a list of desirable traits, all the bureaucratic buttsniffs would immediately figure out how to fake having them, and they’d be right back where they started, with the best bureaucrats at the top of every military hierarchy, and all the genuinely brilliant leaders either discharged or demoralized.

  The way I was demoralized, piloting a barely-armed supply ship in the rear echelons of our formation.

  Which was in itself a mark of the stupidity of our commanders—the fact that they thought there could be such a thing as a “rear echelon” during a war in three-dimensional space.

  There might have been dozens of men who could have seen what I saw—the point of vulnerability in the Formics’ formation—but they had long since left the service. The only reason I was there was because I couldn’t afford to quit before vesting in my pension. So I put up with spiteful commanders who would punish me for being a better officer than they would ever be. I took the abuse, the contempt, and so there I was piloting a ship with only two weapons—slow missiles at that.

  Turned out I only needed one.

  But who could have predicted that I’d be there, that I’d see what I saw, and that I’d commit career suicide by firing my missiles against orders—and then I’d turn out to be right? What process can test for that? Might as well resort to prayer—either God is looking out for the human race or he doesn’t care. If he cares, then we’ll go on surviving despite our stupidity. If he doesn’t, then we won’t.

  In a universe that works like that, any attempt to identify in advance the traits of great commanders is utterly wasted.

  “Incoming visuals,” said the computer.

  Mazer looked down at his desk screen, where he had jotted:

  Desperation

  Intuition (test for that, sucker!)

  Tolerance for the orders of fools.

  Borderline-insane sense of personal mission.

  Yeah, that’s the list Graff’s hoping I’ll send him.

  And now the boy was sending him visuals. Who approved that?

  But the head that flickered in the holospace above his desk wasn’t an eagerbeaver young lieutenant. It was a young woman with light-colored hair like her mother’s and only a few traces of her father’s part-Maori appearance. But the traces were there, and she was beautiful.

  “Stop,” said Mazer.

  “I am required to show you—”

  “This is personal. This is an intrusion.”

  “—all ansible communications.”

  “Later.”

  “This is a visual and therefore has high priority. Sufficient ansible bandwidth for full motion visuals will only be used for communications of the—”

  Mazer gave up. “Just play it.”

  “Father,” said the young woman in the holospace.

  Mazer looked away from her, reflexively hiding his face, though of course she couldn’t see him anyway. His daughter Pai Mahutanga. When he last saw her, she was a tree-climbing five-year-old. She used to have nightmares, but with her father always on duty with the fleet, there was no one to drive away the bad dreams.

  “I brought your grandchildren with me,” she was saying. “Pahu Rangi hasn’t found a woman yet who will let him reproduce.” She grinned wickedly at someone out of frame. Her brother. Mazer’s son. Just a baby, conceived on his last leave before the final battle.

  “We’ve told the children all about you. I know you can’t see them all at once, but if they each come into frame with me for just a few moments—it’s so generous of them to let me—

  “But he said that you might not be happy to see me. Even if that’s true, Father, I know you’ll want to see your grandchildren. They’ll still be alive when you return. I might even be. Please don’t hide from us. We know that when you divorced Mother it was for her sake, and ours. We know that you never stopped loving us. See? Here’s Kahui Kura. And Pao Pao Te Rangi. They also have English names, Mirth and Glad, but they’re proud to be children of the Maori. Through you. But your grandson Mazer Taka Aho Howarth insists on using the name you went . . . go by. And as for baby Struan Maeroero, he’ll make the choice when he gets older.” She sighed. “I suppose he’s our last child, if the New Zealand courts uphold the Hegemony’s new population rules.”

  As each of the children stepped into frame, shyly or boldly, depending on their personality, Mazer tried to feel something toward them. Two daughters first, shy, lovely. The little boy named for him. Finally the baby that someone held into the frame.

  They were strangers, and before he ever met them they would be parents themselves. Perhaps grandparents. What was the point? I told your mother that we had to be dead to each other. She had to think of me as a casualty of war, even if the paperwork said Divorce Decree instead of Killed in Action.

  She was so angry she told me that she would rather I had died. She was going to tell our children that I was dead. Or that I just left them, without giving them any reason, so they’d hate
me.

  Now it turns out she turned my departure into a sentimental memory of sacrifice for God and country. Or at least for planet and species.

  Mazer forced himself not to wonder if this meant that she had forgiven him. She was the one with children to raise—what she decided to tell them was none of his business. Whatever helped her raise the children without a father.

  He didn’t marry and have children until he was already middle-aged—he’d been afraid to start a family when he knew he’d be gone on voyages lasting years at a time. Then he met Kim, and all that rational process went out the window. He wanted—his DNA wanted—their children to exist, even if he couldn’t be there to raise them. Pai Mahutanga and Pahu Rangi—he wanted the children’s lives to be stable and good, rich with opportunity, so he stayed in the service in order to earn the separation bonuses that would pay to put them through college.

  Then he fought in the war to keep them safe. But he was going to retire when the war ended and go home to them at last, while they were still young enough to welcome a father. And then he got this assignment.

  Why couldn’t you just decide, you bastards? Decide you were going to replace me, and then let me go home and have my hero’s welcome and then retire to Christchurch and listen to the ringing of the bells to tell me God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. You could have left me home with my family, to raise my children, to be there so I could talk Pai out of naming her firstborn son after me.

  I could have given all the advice and training you wanted—more than you’d ever use, that’s for sure—and then left the fleet and had some kind of life. But no, I had to leave everything and come out here in this miserable box while you dither.

  Mazer noticed that Pai’s face was frozen and she was making no sound. “You stopped the playback,” said Mazer.

  “You weren’t paying attention,” said the computer. “This is a visual ansible transmission, and you are required to—”

  “I’m watching now,” said Mazer.

  Pai’s voice came again, and the visual moved again. “They’re going to slow this down to transmit it to you. But you know all about time dilation. The bandwidth is expensive, too, so I guess I’m done with the visual part of this. I’ve written you a letter, and so have the kids. And Pahu swears that someday he’ll learn to read and write.” She laughed again, looking at someone out of frame. It had to be his son, the baby he had never seen. Tantalizingly close, but not coming into frame. Someone was controlling that. Someone decided not to let him see his son. Graff? How closely was he manipulating this? Or was it Kim who decided? Or Pahu himself?

  “Mother has written to you, too. Actually, quite a few letters. She wouldn’t come, though. She doesn’t want you to see her looking so old. But she’s still beautiful, Father. More beautiful than ever, with white hair and—she still loves you. She wants you to remember her younger. She told me once, ‘I was never beautiful, and when I met a man who thought I was, I married him over his most heartfelt objections.’”

  Her imitation of her mother was so accurate that it stopped Mazer’s breath for a moment. Could it truly be that Kim had refused to come because of some foolish vanity about how she looked? As if he would care!

  But he would care. Because she would be old, and that would prove that it was true, that she would surely be dead before he made it back to Earth. And because of that, it would not be home he came back to. There was no such place.

  “I love you, Father,” Pai was saying. “Not just because you saved the world. We honor you for that, of course. But we love you because you made Mother so happy. She would tell us stories about you. It’s as if we knew you. And your old mates would visit sometimes, and then we knew that Mother wasn’t exaggerating about you. Either that or they all were.” She laughed. “You have been part of our lives. We may be strangers to you, but you’re not a stranger to us.”

  The image flickered, and when it came back, she was not in quite the same position. There had been an edit. Perhaps because she didn’t want him to see her cry. But he knew she had been about to, because her face still worked before weeping the same way as when she was little. It had not been so very long, for him, since she was small. He remembered very well.

  “You don’t have to answer this,” she said. “Lieutenant Graff told us that you might not welcome this transmission. Might even refuse to watch it. We don’t want to make your voyage harder. But Father, when you come home—when you come back to us—you have a home. In our hearts. Even if I’m gone, even if only our children are here to meet you, our arms are open. Not to greet the conquering hero. But to welcome home our papa and grandpa, however old we are. I love you. We all do. All.”

  And then, almost as an afterthought: “Please read our letters.”

  “I have letters for you,” said the computer, as the holospace went empty.

  “Save them,” said Mazer. “I’ll get to them.”

  “You are authorized to send a visual reply,” said the computer.

  “That will not happen,” said Mazer. But even as he said it, he was wondering what he could possibly say, if he changed his mind and did send them his image. Some heroic speech about the nobility of sacrifice? Or an apology for accepting the assignment?

  He would never show his face to them. Would never let Kim see that he was not changed.

  He would read the letters. He would answer them. There were duties you owed to family, even if the reason they got involved was because of some meddling jerk of a lieutenant.

  “My first letter,” said Mazer, “will be to that git, Graff. It’s very brief. ‘Bugger off, gitling.’ Sign it ‘respectfully yours.’”

  “’Bugger’ is a noun. ‘Git’ is a substandard verb, and ‘gitling’ is not in any of my wordbases. I cannot spell or parse the message properly without explanation . . . Do you mean ‘Leave this place, alien enemy’?”

  “I made gitling up, but it’s an excellent word, so use it. And I can’t believe they programmed you without ‘bugger off’ in the wordbase.”

  “I detect stress,” said the computer. “Will you accept mild sedation?”

  “The stress is being caused by your forcing me to view a message I did not want to see. You are causing my stress. So give me some time to myself to calm down.”

  “Incoming message.”

  Mazer felt his stress levels rising even higher. So he sighed and sat back and said, “Read it. It’s from Graff, right? Always use a male voice for the gitling.”

  “Admiral Rackham, I apologize for the intrusion,” the computer baritoned. “Once I broached the possibility of letting your family contact you, my superiors would not give up on the idea, even though I warned them it would be more likely to be counterproductive if you hadn’t agreed in advance. Still, it was my idea and I take full responsibility for that, but it was also clumsily handled without waiting for your permission, and that was not my responsibility. Though it was completely predictable, because this is the military. There is no idea so stupid that it won’t be seized upon and made the basis of policy, and no idea so wise that it won’t be perceived as threatening by some paper pusher, who’ll kill it if he can, or claim complete credit for it if it works. Am I describing the military you know?”

  Clever boy, thought Mazer. Deflect my anger to the IF. Make me his friend.

  “However, the decision was made to send you only those letters that you would find encouraging. You’re being ‘handled,’ Admiral Rackham. But if you want all the letters, I’ll make sure you get the whole picture. It won’t make you happier, but at least you’ll know I’m not trying to manipulate you.”

  “Oh, right,” said Mazer.

  “Or at least I’m not trying to trick you,” said the computer. “I’m trying to persuade you by winning your trust, if I can, and then your cooperation. I will not lie to you or leave out information in order to deceive you. Tell me if you want all the letters or are content with the comfortable version of your family’s life.”


  Mazer knew then that Graff had won—Mazer would have no choice but to answer, and no choice but to request the omitted letters. Then he would be beholden to the gitling. Angry, but in debt.

  The real question was this: Was Graff staging the whole thing? Was he the one who withheld the uncomfortable letters, only so he could gain points with Mazer for then releasing them?

  Or was Graff taking some kind of risk, scamming the system in order to send him the full set of letters?

  Or did Graff, a mere lieutenant, have a degree of power that allowed him to openly flout the orders of his superiors with impunity?

  “Don’t send the bugger-off letter,” said Mazer.

  “I already sent it and receipt has been confirmed.”

  “I’m actually quite happy that you did that,” said Mazer. “So here’s my next message: Send the letters, gitling.”

  Within a few minutes, the reply came, and this time the number of letters was much higher.

  And with nothing else to do, Mazer opened them and began to read them silently, in the order they were sent. Which means that the first hundred were all from Kim.

  The progression of the early letters was predictable, but no less painful to read. She was hurt, angry, grief-stricken, resentful, filled with longing. She tried to hurt him with invective, or with guilt, or by tormenting him with sexually charged memories. Maybe she was tormenting herself.

  Her letters, even the angry ones, were reminders of what he had lost, of the life he once had. It’s not as if she invented her temper for this occasion. She had it all along, and he had been lashed by it before, and bore a few old scars. But now it all combined to make him miss her.

  Her words hurt him, tantalized him, made him grieve, and often he had to stop reading and listen to something—music, poetry, or the drones and clicks of subtle machinery in the seemingly motionless craft that was hurtling through space in, the physicists assured him, a wavelike way, though he could not detect any lack of solidity in any of the objects inside the ship. Except, of course, himself. He could dissolve at a word, if it was from her, and then be remade by another.