Part 96 (1/2)

On Turnaround Day they dusted me off. I found myself standing at a c.o.c.ktail party next to the President of East America, wondering how I'd gotten there, wondering what was in the brown paste on the glorified cracker in my hand.

I turned around to say something to that effect to Carl before I remembered he'd died eighteen months before, predeceased by his wife of forty years. After he died, he used to call me every week, like clockwork.

His jokes still weren't that funny. But I could feel him waiting, lonely, on the other end of the line. As waiting and as lonely as me.

The world really did hold its breath. And our silence was met by an answering silence ... and after a pause the world moved on.

It's not just Carl. Most of my other colleagues are gone. I live alone, and the work I can still do goes frustratingly slowly now.

Sometimes I think waiting to hear the answer was what kept me going this long.

I don't expect to hear an answer anymore.

Maybe the Echoes forgot they'd called out to us. Maybe they never really expected an answer. Maybe they moved beyond radio waves, the same way we have. Maybe-even more so than us-they no longer listen to the stars.

Maybe, despite their safe old world and their safe old star, something horrible happened to them. Maybe Fermi was right, and they blew themselves up.

Maybe we'll blow ourselves up someday really soon, too.

But they reached out once. They let us know we weren't alone. We heard them and reached back, and they haven't answered-or they haven't answered yet.

Maybe they live a lot longer than we do. Maybe they don't have the same sense of urgency.

We do keep trying. And maybe someday they'll send an answer.

But it will be a slow conversation and I won't be here to hear it. (Two words; one p.r.o.nunciation.) Too late, I think I figured something out. It's everybody, isn't it? It was Carl, too, and that's what he was trying to tell me. That we could be lonely together, and it might help somehow.

The silence stretches loud across the s.p.a.ce between us. And I can't decide if knowing they were out there and that they reached out in friends.h.i.+p, with a map and the sound of their voices, is worse than imagining they were never there at all.

War Stories No s.h.i.+t, there I am.

So it's 2030, right? And I'm sprawled on my belly in the pile of rubble that used to be 100 Const.i.tution Plaza, rifle fire skipping over my head, a broken rock gouging my groin just down and to the left of my armor. My neck wants to crawl into my helmet like a turtle jamming itself into its sh.e.l.l. There's a crater the size of Winterpeg under my nose, and busted rocks and shattered gla.s.s scattered all over Main Street. Suicide van bomb.

Any a.s.shole can die for his country. The scary s.h.i.+t is living for it.

Old joke: join the army, see the world, meet interesting people and shoot them. And h.e.l.l, I could be anywhere. Anywhere in the newly reconst.i.tuted Commonwealth, say. Where there's fewer places to see every week, and I-so I'm what, eighteen when this is going on?-would like to get a look at a few of them before they're under ice, or under water.

Ah, the Commonwealth. Back again like it never left.

I could be anywhere. I could be in the UK, evacuating Glas...o...b..ry or helping sandbag, or process refugees, in London. London, which is not holding. I could be in South Africa, putting down the warlord-of-the-week. h.e.l.l, I could be in Canada, guarding the home front.

No.

I'm face down in a pile of bricks in Hartford, Connecticut, in the good old U.S. of A., pinned under enemy fire, wondering when they're going to bring in the sonics to relieve us and if we're going to catch friendly fire when they do-and not loving a minute of it.

s.h.i.+t. If I'm going to get my a.s.s shot off, you'd think they could send me someplace pretty to do it in.

Carter's yelling at me from better cover, shouting something I can't catch over the noise. His mike might be on the fritz, or maybe it's my earpiece. His electronics seem okay, at least-he isn't eightysixed on my heads-up.

Good thing, too; you can see it yourself when it happens-unless your whole rig goes dead-and it's creepy as s.h.i.+t. Your icon grays out on the map and there are all your buddies, looking around to see if you got garroted or picked off by a sniper while the team was otherwise engaged.

Modern technology. Used to be, you got shot, you screamed and bled on people until a medic got there. Now, they have machines to do your bleeding for you.

So I wave back at him, hand down low beside my a.s.s: yeah, I have enough cover.

Yeah. Enough. He's just a private anyway, which means...

. . . which means, technically, this is my action.

Mother pus-bucket.

I hope the rest of the guys show up fast.

I'm still thinking about that when I catch a little motion down in the hole.

That thing about your life flas.h.i.+ng before your eyes? It's bulls.h.i.+t. Never had it happen, and I've been scared. What did happen, even before I was wired, was the adrenaline-dump shocked-time thing, and that's what I get, a freeze frame image of the crater and the sunlight shattering off broken gla.s.s.

f.u.c.k me with a chainsaw. There's a child down there.

The social position of a MWO in the Canadian Army is a little odd. You're not a commissioned officer. But you're not really one of the grunts any more, either. The ”I work for a living” joke only works until you get past warrant.

It's more like you're a va.s.sal. A country of one, owing absolute allegiance, but generally trusted to wipe up your own a.s.s-and your own spilt milk-as necessary.

It's an uncomfortable kind of freedom to get used to. But yanno, I never would have made it to RMC with my math skills, and we don't have enough college grads anymore to keep all the whirlybirds for lieutenants. And the way it works out, the rest of the pilots are scared to death of me, anyway.

So I don't have to leave the service to move in with Gabe Castaign. He got out before I did, and then we could be friends in public, even. The way we couldn't when I was a corporal and he was a captain and he saved my life.

Thank G.o.d he was never in my chain of command. I don't think we could have managed to stay pals; it would have gotten all knotted to that feudal thing, and that would have been the end.

Of course, I don't quite get to move in with him in the sense that I really wanted to, because by 2053, Gabe's married and has two beautiful, ridiculous, towheaded baby girls. And when I de-enlist, I do it to stay with him and Geniveve.

Because they already know that the transplants haven't taken, that the stem therapy and the chemo aren't working. And Geniveve wants to die at home. She needs help doing it, if she's going to do it comfortably. And Gabe, well.

Gabe doesn't really want to live through it alone.

So Geniveve comes home to die with her husband and her children, and I- I go along because I don't have anyplace else to call home, and they need me. And yeah, I know going in it's going to be hard. And some poisonous bit of me hopes that Gabe will rebound in my direction when she's gone, because you think things like that, even when you don't say them.

But I like Geniveve. She's got every right to be jealous, but Geni is five nine and blonde and pert-nosed and has the greenest eyes I've ever seen that aren't contact lenses. And look at my face. But... I could be Gabe's scary war-buddy who he owes some kind of life debt, and she could walk on eggsh.e.l.ls. She could leave us in the kitchen and herd the babies away.

And she treats me like her best girlfriend.

The first time I met her was at the bridal shower, a kind of Jack and Jill thing, and if she'd been strong enough I think she would pick me up in a Gabe-standard bear-hug, just like him. She kissed my burned cheek, and nevermind I couldn't feel it, and she laughed at my jokes.

So what I'm saying is, I'm here for Geniveve as much as I'm here for Gabe. But it's not them I leave the army for. In '53 I get my 25 in. I always wear a glove on my left hand, and I'm heading down the back side of notorious into old warhorse. Infamy doesn't suit me.

I leave the army because it's time to leave the army. You can't fight all your life.

They've got a spare bedroom. Geniveve-the coincidence of names is no end of amus.e.m.e.nt, but Gabe calls me Maker not Jenny and so does Geniveve and so that's okay-has good days and bad days. Gabe mostly helps her. I mostly help with the girls and the housework, my Cinderella childhood all over again.

And don't I just look like the perfect fairytale princess, too?