A Separate War and Other Stories (2 page)

When I was too young to check books out of the adult section of the local library, I spent a lot of weekend time sitting there and reading the forbidden texts. There was one officious librarian who would always shoo me back to the children's section (and try to make me read something besides that science fiction trash), but most of them tolerated my intrusion.

My favorite adult book was a fat red tome called
Henley's Twentieth Century Book of Formulas, Processes, and Trade Secrets
. “Secrets” is the dramatic and operative word there. How to make your own root beer or nitroglycerin. Cure asthma or constipation in canaries. I would bicycle away from the library aglow with secret wisdom. Things I knew my parents didn't know.

Any letter of the alphabet would yield marvels: Bear fat, bookbinder's varnish, bust reducer, British champagne, broken bones (a test for), blasting powder, Bowl of Fire trick. “Burning Brimstone” is not a trick you'll find in contemporary manuals of magic: “Wrap cotton around two small pieces of brimstone and wet it with gasoline; take between the fingers, squeezing the surplus liquid out, light it with a candle, throw back the head well, and put it on the tongue blazing. Blow fire from mouth, and observe that a freshly blown-out candle may be lighted from the flame.”

The book was full of advice that might or might not help one survive into adulthood: “The warning as to the danger of experimenting with the manufacture of ordinary gunpowder applies with renewed force when nitro-glycerine is the subject of the experiment.”

It was old then, more than fifty years ago, and that was a large part of its charm. Even as a boy, I could appreciate the innocence and earnestness of that bygone day, when there was a secret formula for everything.

But did it have a secret formula for writing? You bet it did: Make a solution of alum in strong vinegar and, using a fine-tipped brush, write a message on an egg. When the vinegar dries, the message will disappear. But hard-boil the egg and break it open—and there it is again, inside!

Which brings us around to the point of this little essay.

When I put together my first collection of short stories—
Infinite Dreams
, back in 1978, I introduced each story with a paragraph or two about where I thought it had come from—admitting that I knew that some people didn't care for that kind of blather, but we put it in a different typeface, easy to skip.

In the next collection (
Dealing in Futures
, 1985), I refined the idea by dividing the introduction into one piece before the story, carefully not giving anything away, and then a “coda” piece after the story, which assumed the reader had read it, and would segue into the intro to the next story.

That was a little too complicated. In the third one (
None So Blind
, 1996), I wrote plain afterwords, commenting on the extent to which each story had been affected by actual events.

Ten years later, I wonder whether I've told anybody anything as useful as how to hide a message in an egg.

Anybody who's interested knows that there's no “secret formula” to writing fiction, at least fiction that aspires to accomplishing anything beyond filling time for the reader. Of course some forms of fiction are more or less formulaic, like sin-and-suffer confessions and pornography. When I was in graduate school in computer science, a friend and I put together a string-manipulation program that churned out WWI Flying Ace Stories, and, for the genre, I don't think they were half-bad. But most of us would rather read and write fiction that requires something more subtle than a random number generator to decide what happens next.

It occurs to me, assembling this fourth collection, that the typographical tradition of restricting story introduction and afterwords to a hundred or so words, and separating them by the stories themselves, limits what the author can say about each story, as well as how the stories might be related. So this time I'm assembling all of that stuff, I mean wit and wisdom, into one section in the back of the book, “Notes on the Stories.” If nothing else, it will make it convenient for people who, like me, flip through and read all the introductions first, as well as for those who want to ignore everything but the stories.

All of these stories are collected here for the first time, but (for reasons explained in “Notes on the Stories”) they cover a thirty-six-year span of writing, from my very first published story to one that I wrote while putting this book together. For perspective, I've added the year of writing to the end of each story.

Finally, the long average of nine years between story collections, from a person who writes for a living, ought to be addressed. Why don't you write more than two stories per year? It's not just that they pay less, per word or per hour of writing, than novels—in fact, they can sometimes pay more, if they're sold to a top market and often reprinted. But they represent an interruption, a distraction.

E. L. Doctorow caught the pace of a novelist's life with a driving metaphor: “Writing a novel is like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights will let you, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Writing a short story, then, is like taking the car out for an afternoon spin, to visit an interesting place or person.

But the two don't mix well. Most writers can't just take time off from a novel, knock off a short story, and then come back and pick up the novel where they left it. The time and concentration that go into the story make you lose momentum on the novel. Run out of gas, there in the night.

So most of the stories here were written in between novels or in periods when I've suspended work on a novel in order to teach (which I do every fall semester). I admire people who can write novels and teach at the same time, but for me it's like holding down two jobs, both of which seem to draw on the same source of energy, and I only do it when forced to by deadlines. While I'm teaching I usually write only poetry, articles, and short stories, which don't require the level of engagement that a novel imposes.

Most of the stories here were written to order in one sense or another—challenges or requests from friends and editors. “I'm putting together an anthology of stories about the future of fruitcakes, and naturally I thought of
you
first.” That's a lot different from my first two collections, which are mostly made up of stories that just happened. (The third one was about half and half, sui generis versus on-request.)

I remember those days with a certain wistfulness. I'd have several projects going at once, and when I got up in the morning, while fixing coffee, would decide which was most appealing, and then have at it.

It's been some years since I've had that freedom, which I've traded, conventionally, for security: like most of the people I know who write fiction for a living, I sign novel contracts with deadlines and write books more or less on schedule. If I get an idea for a short story while I'm working on a novel, I put it in a “Crazy Ideas” file, actually an old cigar box, which I sort through every now and then. I'm often startled to find that I've used one of those ideas in a novel—I'd forgotten jotting it down, but remembered at the deep level where stories must ultimately come from.

I suppose that's why it doesn't bother me that most of the short stories I write now are done on request. The answer to the question “Where do your crazy ideas some from?”—which really is the sought-after Secret of Writing—is not the editors who want a story about
A.D.
3001 or terraforming or Future Washington or fruitcakes. I think if you're a storyteller, you have a myriad of more or less unformed stories simmering away, waiting for a reason to be told. The request frees the story to tell—perhaps to find out—what it's about.

—Joe Haldeman

1

Our wounds were horrible, but the army made us well and gave us Heaven, temporarily.

The most expensive and hard-to-replace component of a fighting suit is the soldier inside of it, so if she or he is crippled badly enough to be taken out of the fight, the suit tries to save what's left. In William's case, it automatically cut off his mangled leg and sealed the stump. In my case it was the right arm, just above the elbow.

That was the Tet-2 campaign, which was a disaster, and William and I lay around doped to the gills with happyjuice while the others died their way through the disaster of Aleph-7. The score after the two battles was fifty-four dead, thirty-seven of us crips, two head cases, and only twelve more or less working soldiers, who were of course bristling with enthusiasm. Twelve is not enough to fight a battle with, unfortunately, so the
Sangre y Victoria
was rerouted to the hospital planet Heaven.

We took a long time, three collapsar jumps, getting to Heaven. The Taurans can chase you through one jump, if they're at the right place and the right time. But two would be almost impossible, and three just couldn't happen.

(But “couldn't happen” is probably a bad-luck charm. Because of the relativistic distortions associated with travel through collapsar jumps, you never know, when you greet the enemy, whether it comes from your own time, or centuries in your past or future. Maybe in a millennium or two, they'll be able to follow you through three collapsar jumps like following footprints. One of the first things they'd do is vaporize Heaven. Then Earth.)

Heaven is like an Earth untouched by human industry and avarice, pristine forests and fields and mountains—but it's also a monument to human industry, and avarice, too.

When you recover—and there's no “if”; you wouldn't be there if they didn't know they could fix you—you're still in the army, but you're also immensely wealthy. Even a private's pay rolls up a fortune, automatically invested during the centuries that creak by between battles. One of the functions of Heaven is to put all those millions back into the economy. So there's no end of things to do, all of them expensive.

When William and I recovered, we were given six months of “rest and recreation” on Heaven. I actually got out two days before him, but waited around, reading. They did still have books, for soldiers so old-fashioned they didn't want to plug themselves into adventures or ecstasies for thousands of dollars a minute. I did have $529,755,012 sitting around, so I could have dipped into tripping. But I'd heard I would have plenty of it, retraining before our next assignment. The ALSC, “accelerated life situation computer,” which taught you things by making you do them in virtual reality. Over and over, until you got them right.

William had half again as much money as I did, since he had outranked me for centuries, but I didn't wait around just to get my hands on his fortune. I probably would have wanted his company even if I didn't love him. We were the only two people here born in the twentieth century, and there were only a handful from the twenty-first. Very few of them, off duty, spoke a language I understood, though all soldiers were taught “premodern” English as a sort of temporal
lingua franca
. Some of them claimed their native language was English, but it was extremely fast and seemed to have lost some vowels along the way. Four centuries. Would I have sounded as strange to a Pilgrim? I don't think so.

(It would be interesting to take one of those Pilgrim Fathers and show him what had evolved from a life of grim piety and industriousness. Religion on Earth is a curiosity, almost as rare as heterosex. Heaven has no God, either, and men and women in love or in sex with people not of their own gender are committing an anachronistic perversion.)

I'd already arranged for a sumptuous “honeymoon” suite on Skye, an airborne resort, before William got out, and we did spend five days there, amusing each other anachronistically. Then we rented a flyer and set out to see the world.

William humored my desire to explore the physical, wild, aspects of the world first. We camped in desert, jungle, arctic waste, mountaintops, deserted islands. We had pressor fields that kept away dangerous animals, allowing us a good close look at them while they tried to figure out what was keeping them from lunch, and they were impressive—evolution here had not favored mammal over reptile, and both families had developed large swift predators in a variety of beautiful and ugly designs.

Then we toured the cities, in their finite variety. Some, like the sylvan Threshold, where we'd grown and trained our new limbs, blended in with their natural surroundings. This was a twenty-second-century esthetic, too bland and obvious for modern tastes. The newer cities, like Skye, flaunted their artificiality.

We were both nervous in Atlantis, under a crushing kilometer of water, with huge, glowing beasts bumping against the pressors, dark day and dark night. Perhaps it was too exact a metaphor for our lives in the army, the thin skins of cruiser or fighting suit holding the dark nothingness of space at bay while monsters tried to destroy you.

Many of the cities had no function other than separating soldiers from their money, so in spite of their variety there was a sameness to them. Eat, drink, drug, trip, have or watch sex.

I found the sex shows more interesting than William did, but he was repelled by the men together. It didn't seem to me that what they did was all that different from what we did—and not nearly as alien as tripping for sex, plugging into a machine that delivered to you the image of an ideal mate and cleaned up afterwards.

He did go to a lesbian show with me, and made love with unusual energy that night. I thought there was something there besides titillation; that he was trying to prove something. We kidded each other about it—“Me Tarzan, you Jane,” “Me Tarzan, you Heathcliff.” Who on this world would know what we were laughing about?

Prostitution had a new wrinkle, with empathy drugs that joined the servicer and customer in a deep emotional bond that was real while it lasted, I suppose to keep in competition with the electronic fantasy. We told each other we weren't inclined to try it, though I was curious, and probably would have done it if I'd been alone. I don't think William would have, since the drugs don't work between men and women, or so one of them told us, giggling with wide-eyed embarrassment. The very idea.

We had six months of quiet communion and wild, desperate fun, and still had plenty of money left when it suddenly ended. We were having lunch in an elegant restaurant in Skye, watching the sun sparkle on the calm ocean a klick below, when a nervous private came up, saluted, and gave us our sealed orders.

They were for different places. William was going to Sade-138, a collapsar out in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. I was going to Aleph-10, in the Orion group.

He was a major, the Yod-4 Strike Force commander, and I was a captain, the executive officer for Aleph-10.

It was ridiculous. We'd been together since Basic—five years or half a millennium—and neither of us was leadership material. The army had abundant evidence of that. Yet he was leaving in a week, for Stargate. My Strike Force was mustering here, in orbit around Heaven, in two days.

We flew back to Threshold, half the world away, and got there just as the administrative offices were opening. William fought and bought his way to the top, trying at the very least to have me reassigned as his XO. What difference could it make? Most of the people he'd muster with at Stargate hadn't even been born yet.

Of course it was not a matter of logic; it was a matter of protocol. And no army in history had ever been so locked in the ice of protocol. The person who
signed
those orders for the yet unborn was probably dead by now.

We had a day and a night together, sad and desperate. At the end, when I had to go into isolation three hours before launch, we were almost deferential with one another, perhaps the way you act in the presence of beloved dead. No poet who ever equated parting with death had ever had a door slam shut like that. Even if we had both been headed for Earth, a few days apart, the time-space geometry of the collapsar jump would guarantee that we arrived decades or even centuries from one another.

And this wasn't Earth. There were 150,000 light-years between Sade-138 and Aleph-10. Absolute distance means nothing in collapsar geometry, they say. But if William were to die in a nova bomb attack, the tiny spark of his passing would take fifteen hundred centuries to crawl to Orion, or Earth. Time and distance beyond imagination.

The spaceport was on the equator, of course, on an island they called Pærw'l; Farewell. There was a high cliff, actually a flattened-off pinnacle, overlooking the bay to the east, where William and I had spent silent days fasting and meditating. He said he was going there to watch the launch. I hoped to get a window so that I could see the island, and I did push my way to one when we filed into the shuttle. But I couldn't see the pinnacle from sea level, and when the engines screamed and the invisible force pushed me back into the cushions, I looked but was blinded by tears, and couldn't raise a hand to wipe them away.

2

Fortunately, I had six hours' slack time after we docked at the space station Athene, before I had to report for ALSC training. Time to pull myself together. I went to my small quarters and unpacked and lay on the bunk for a while. Then I found my way to the lounge and watched the planet spin below, green and white and blue. There were eleven ships in orbit a few klicks away, one a large cruiser, presumably the
Bolivar
, which was going to take us to Aleph-10.

The lounge was huge and almost empty. Two other women in unfamiliar beige uniforms, I supposed Athene staff. They were talking in the strange fast Angel language.

While I was getting coffee, a man walked in wearing tan-and-green camouflage fatigues like mine. We weren't actually camouflaged as well as the ones in beige, in this room of comforting wood and earth tones.

He came over and got a cup. “You're Captain Potter, Marygay Potter.”

“That's right,” I said. “You're in Beta?”

“No, I'm stationed here, but I'm army.” He offered his hand. “Michael Dobei, Mike. Colonel. I'm your Temporal Orientation Officer.”

We carried our coffee to a table. “You're supposed to catch me up on this future, this present?”

He nodded. “Prepare you for dealing with the men and women under you. And the other officers.”

“What I'm trying to deal with is this ‘under you' part. I'm no soldier, Colonel.”

“Mike. You're actually a better soldier than you know. I've seen your profile. You've been through a lot of combat, and it hasn't broken you. Not even the terrible experience on Earth.”

William and I had been staying on my parents' farm when we were attacked by a band of looters; Mother and Dad were killed. “That's in my profile? I wasn't a soldier then. We'd quit.”

“There's a lot of stuff in there.” He raised his coffee and looked at me over the rim of the cup. “Want to know what your high-school advisor thought of you?”

“You're a shrink.”

“That used to be the word. Now we're ‘skinks.'”

I laughed. “That used to be a lizard.”

“Still is.” He pulled a reader out of his pocket. “You were last on Earth in 2007. You liked it so little that you reenlisted.”

“Has it gotten better?”

“Better, then worse, then better. As ever. When I left, in 2318, things were at least peaceful.”

“Drafted?”

“Not in the sense you were. I knew from age ten what I was going to be; everybody does.”

“What? You knew you were going to be a Temporal Adjustment Officer?”

“Uh-huh.” He smiled. “I didn't know quite what that meant, but I sure as hell resented it. I had to go to a special school, to learn this language—SoldierSpeak—but I had to take four years of it, instead of the two that most soldiers do.

“I suppose we're more regimented on Earth now; crèche to grave control, but also security. The crime and anarchy that characterized your Earth are ancient history. Most people live happy, fulfilling lives.”

“Homosexual. No families.”

“Oh, we have families, parents, but not random ones. To keep the population stable, one person is quickened whenever one dies. The new one goes to a couple that has grown up together in the knowledge that they have a talent for parenting; they'll be given, at most, four children to raise.”

“‘Quickened'—test-tube babies?”

“Incubators. No birth trauma. No real uncertainty about the future. You'll find your troops a pretty sane bunch of people.”

“And what will they find
me
? They won't resent taking orders from a heterosexual throwback? A dinosaur?”

“They know history; they won't blame you for being what you are. If you tried to initiate sex with one of the men, there might be trouble.”

I shook my head. “That won't happen. The only man I love is gone, forever.”