Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

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 flirting 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.