John Scalzi: Old Man's War

"All I'm saying, " Leon was saying, "is that it's not exactly fair that you and I and every American has to wait until we're older than shit to get our chance to go, while all those little Hindis get carted off to brand-new worlds as fast as they can breed . Which is pretty damn quick. That's just not fair . Does it seem fair to you?"

"No, it doesn't seem particularly fair," the woman said back. "But I suppose they wouldn't see it as fair that we wiped New Delhi and Mumbai off the face of the planet, either."

"That's exactly my point!" Leon exclaimed. "We nuked the dot heads! We won that war! Winning should count for something. And now look what happens. They lost, but they get to go colonize the universe, and the only way we get to go is if we sign up to protect them! Excuse me for saying so, but doesn't the Bible say, 'The meek shall inherit the earth'? I'd say losing a goddamn war makes you pretty damn meek ."

"I don't think that phrase means what you think it does, Leon," I said, approaching the two of them.

"John! See, here's a man who knows what I'm talking about," Leon said, grinning my way.

The woman turned to face me. "You know this gentleman?" she asked me, with an undercurrent in her voice that implied that if I did, there was clearly something wrong with me.

"We met on the trip to Nairobi," I said, gently raising an eyebrow to indicate that he wasn't my companion of choice. "I'm John Perry," I said.

"Jesse Gonzales," she said.

"Charmed," I replied, and then turned to Leon. "Leon," I said, "you've got the saying wrong. The actual saying is from the Sermon on the Mount, and it says, 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.' Inheriting the earth is meant to be a reward, not a punishment."

Leon blinked, then snorted. "Even so, we beat them. We kicked their little brown asses. We should be colonizing the universe, not them."

I opened my mouth to respond, but Jesse beat me to the punch. "'Blessed are they which are persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven,'" she said, speaking to Leon but looking sidelong at me.

Leon gaped for a minute at the both of us. "You can't be serious, " he said, after a minute. "There's nothing in the Bible that says we should be stuck on Earth while a bunch of brownies, which don't even believe in Jesus, thank you very much, fill up the galaxy. And it certainly doesn't say anything about us protecting the little bastards while they do it. Christ, I had a son in that war. Some dot head shot off one of his balls! His balls ! They deserved what they got, the sons of bitches. Don't ask me to be happy that now I'll have to save their sorry asses up there in the colonies."

Jesse winked at me. "Would you like to field this one?"

"If you don't mind," I said.

"Oh, not at all," she replied.

"'But I say unto you, Love your enemies,'" I quoted. "'Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father who is in Heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.'"

Leon turned lobster red. "You're both out of your fucking gourds," he said, and stomped off as fast as his fat would carry him.

"Thank you, Jesus," I said. "And this time I mean it literally."

"You're pretty handy with a Bible quotation," Jesse said. "Were you a minister in your past life?"

"No," I said. "But I lived in a town of two thousand people and fifteen churches. It helped to be able to speak the language. And you don't have to be religious to appreciate the Sermon on the Mount. What's your excuse?"

"Catholic school religion class," she said. "I won a ribbon for memorization in the tenth grade. It's amazing what your brain can keep in storage for sixty years, even if these days I can't remember where I parked when I go to the store."

"Well, in any event, let me apologize for Leon," I said. "I barely know him, but I know enough to know he's an idiot."

"'Judge not, that ye be not judged,'" Jesse said, and shrugged. "Anyway, he's only saying what a lot of people believe. I think it's stupid and wrong, but that doesn't mean I don't understand it. I wish that there had been a different way for me to see the colonies than to wait an entire life and have to join the military for it. If I could have been a colonist when I was younger, I would have."

"You're not joining for a life of military adventure, then," I said.

"Of course not," Jesse said, a little scornfully. "Did you join because you have a great desire to fight a war?"

"No," I said.

She nodded. "Neither did I. Neither did most of us. Your friend Leon certainly didn't join to be in the military—he can't stand the people we will protect. People join because they're not ready to die and they don't want to be old. They join because life on Earth isn't interesting past a certain age. Or they join to see someplace new before they die. That's why I joined, you know. I'm not joining to fight or be young again. I just want to see what it's like to be somewhere else. "

She turned to look out the window. "Of course, it's funny to hear me say that. Do you know that until yesterday, I'd never been out of the state of Texas my entire life?"

"Don't feel bad about it," I said. "Texas is a big state."

She smiled. "Thank you. I don't really feel bad about it. It's just funny. When I was a child, I used to read all the 'Young Colonist' novels and watch the shows, and dreamed about raising Arcturian cattle and battling vicious land worms on colony Gamma Prime. Then I got older and realized that colonists came from India and Kazakhstan and Norway, where they can't support the population they have, and the fact I was born in America meant that I wouldn't get to go. And that there weren't actually Arcturian cattle or land worms! I was very disappointed to learn that when I was twelve."

She shrugged again. "I grew up in San Antonio, went 'away' to college at the University of Texas, and then took a job back in San Antonio. I got married eventually, and we took our vacations on the Gulf Coast. For our thirtieth anniversary, my husband and I planned to go to Italy, but we never went."

"What happened?"

She laughed. "His secretary is what happened. They ended up going to Italy on their honeymoon. I stayed home. On the other hand, they both ended up getting shellfish poisoning in Venice, so it's just as well I never went. But I didn't worry much about traveling after that. I knew I was going to join up as soon as I could, and I did, and here I am. Although now I wish I had traveled more. I took the delta from Dallas to Nairobi. That was fun. I wish I had done it more than once in my life. Not to mention this "—she waved her hand at the window, toward the beanstalk cables—"which I never thought I would ever want to ride in my life. I mean, what's keeping this cable up ?"

"Belief," I said. "You believe that it won't fall and it won't. Try not to think about it too much or we're all in trouble."

"What I believe," Jesse said, "is that I want to get something to eat. Care to join me?"

"Belief," Harry Wilson said, and laughed. "Well, maybe belief is holding up this cable. Because it sure as hell isn't fundamental physics."

Harry Wilson had joined Jesse and me at a booth where we were eating. "You two look like you know each other, and that's one up on everyone else here," he said to us as he came up. We invited him to join us and he accepted gratefully. He had taught physics at a Bloomington, Indiana, high school for twenty years, he said, and the beanstalk had been intriguing him the entire time we had been riding it.