Joe Haldeman: Starbound

“It wasn’t immediately obvious, where I was. In an office full of foreigners. And it was a Jewish holiday, Passover.

“We had the news on, cube and radio—one of the car bombs had gone off two blocks away.

“Five or six people started having trouble breathing. All of them dead in a couple of minutes. They could breathe in, but couldn’t exhale.

“We called 9-9-9 but of course got nothing. Went down to the street and…” Elza put her hand on my knee, under the table; I covered it with mine.

“Millions died all at once,” Snowbird said.

“Within a few minutes. When we got outside, cars were still crashing. Alarms going off all over the city. Dead people everywhere, of course; a few still dying. Some had jumped or fallen from balconies and lay crushed on the street and sidewalks.”

Snowbird spread all four hands. “I’m sorry. This causes you pain.”

“It’s been twenty years,” I said. “Twenty- one. To tell the truth, sometimes it feels like it didn’t happen to me at all. Like it happened to someone else, and he’s told me the story over and over.”

“It did happen to someone else,” Elza said. “It happened to whoever you were before.” Her fingers moved lightly.

“You probably know the numbers,” I said to the Martian. “Almost 70 percent of the country dead in less than ten minutes.”

“They still don’t know who did it?” Snowbird said.

“No one ever claimed responsibility. More than twenty years of intense investigation haven’t turned up one useful clue. They really covered their tracks.”

“So it was done by someone like you,” Moonboy said. “Not really like you.”

“I know what you mean, yes. It wasn’t some band of foaming- at-the-mouth anti-Semites. It was a country or corporation that had… people like us.”

“Could you do it?” Paul said. “I don’t mean morally. I mean could you manage the mechanics of it.”

“No. You can’t separate the mechanics from the morals. After twenty-one years, we still don’t have one molecule of testimony. The people who drove the car bombs died, of course—and we don’t think they knew they were going to die; they were all on their way to someplace, not parked at targets—but what happened to the dozens of other people who had to be involved? We think they were all murdered during or just after Gehenna. It wasn’t a time when one dead body more or less was going to stick out. Every lead we’ve ever had ends that day.”

Carmen was nodding slowly. “You don’t hate them?”

I saw what she meant. “Not really. I fear what they represent, in terms of the human potential for evil. But the individuals, no. What would be the point?”

“I read what you wrote about it,” she said, “in that journal overview.”

“ International Affairs , the Twentieth Anniversary issue. You’ve been thorough.”

She smiled but looked directly at me. “I was curious, of course. We’ll be together a long time.”

“I read it, too,” Paul said. “ ‘Forgiving the Unforgivable.’ Carmen showed it to me.”

“Trying to understand why I was, why we were, selected?”

“Why military people were selected,” she said. “The pressure for that was obvious, but frankly I was surprised they gave in to it. There’s no way we can threaten the Others.”

She was holding back resentment that I don’t think was personal. “You’d rather have three more xenobiologists than three… political appointees? We’re not really soldiers.”

“You were, once.”

“As a teenager, yes. Everyone in Israel was, at that time. But I’ve been a professional peacekeeper ever since.”

“And a spook,” Elza said. “If I were Carmen, that would bother me.”

Carmen made a placating gesture. “We probably have enough xenobiologists, and really can only guess what else might be useful. Your M.D. and clinical experience is as obviously useful to us, personally, as Namir’s life as a diplomat is, to our mission. But we don’t know. Dustin’s doctorate in philosophy might turn out to be the most powerful weapon in our arsenal.

“I won’t pretend it didn’t annoy me when I found out the Earth committee had chosen an all- military bunch—and then spooks on top of that! But of course I can see the logic. And it’s reasonable in terms of social dynamic, a secure triad joining two secure pairs.”

That dynamic is interesting in various ways. The committee wanted no more than three military people, so the civilians would outnumber us, but they didn’t want to upset the social balance by sending up single, unattached people—so our family had a large natural advantage.

But how stable is it, really? Everybody’s married, but Carmen and Dustin and Elza are all under thirty, and the rest of us are not exactly nuns and monks.

In the first hour all of us were together, I suppose there was a lot of automatic and unconscious evaluation and categorizing—who might bond to whom in the winepress of years that we faced? At fifty, I was old enough to be Carmen’s father, but my initial feelings toward her were not at all paternal.

I could tell that the attraction was not mutual; she had me pigeonholed, the older generation. But my wife was her age, actually a few months younger. She must have known that as a statistic.

Was I just rationalizing, being the pathetic middle-aged male? Assuming that a woman must be attracted to me just because I was instantly attracted to her?

And I was, though I wouldn’t have predicted it, not “The Mars Girl.” As a diplomat, I’ve dealt with far too many famous people. Carmen had none of the automatic assumption of importance that I find so tiresome. She was almost aggressively normal, this least ordinary of all women. Ambassador to another species, a fulcrum of history.

She was not physically the kind of woman I would normally find attractive, either; so slender as to be almost boyish, her features sharp, inquisitive. Her eyes were green, or hazel, which I had never noticed in photographs. Hair cut close for space, like all of us. There wouldn’t be any need for that tradition on the long trail to Wolf 25.

Meryl was closer to my age and physically attractive, almost voluptuous. Olive skin and black hair, she looked like most of the girls and women I grew up with.

None of whom were still alive. I could not look at her without feeling that.

I didn’t expect to like Namir, but I did immediately. You might expect a professional diplomat to be likable, though in my “Mars Girl” experience that hasn’t been the case. Of course, those meetings have always been public and strained, physical contact limited to rubber-glove virtual reality.

How odd-feeling and pleasant to actually shake someone’s hand. Namir’s constrained physical strength. His face was strong, too, chiseled but with warm laugh lines around his eyes.

Our three spooks were the first new people we’d met, physically, in years. So I was immediately aware of their physicality. Dustin and Elza were my age, Elza athletic and assertive but Dustin more a quiet scholarly type.

Namir had a barely contained charisma, an air of authority that had nothing to do with rank. Probably born with it, bossing around adults from the crib. I wondered whether Paul would have trouble with that.

I wondered whether I would. We hadn’t planned on a hierarchy. Paul would make the pilot decisions. If there were medical decisions, Elza would make them, and otherwise we’d just talk things out and go with the consensus. When we got to Wolf and met the Others, I saw myself as a spokesperson, but in fact we had no idea of what the situation would be—maybe they would only talk with the Martians, and Fly-in-Amber would be the logical choice. The rest of us just baggage, perhaps disposable.