Old Man's War

by John Scalzi

  “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.

  “What do you mean physics isn’t holding it up?” Jesse said. “Believe me, this is not what I want to hear right at this moment.”

  Harry smiled. “Sorry. Let me rephrase. Physics is involved in holding up this beanstalk, certainly. But the physics involved aren’t of the garden variety. There’s a lot going on here that doesn’t make sense on the surface.”

  “I feel a physics lecture coming on,” I said.

  “I taught physics to teenagers for years,” Harry said, and dug out a small notepad and a pen. “It’ll be painless, trust me. Okay, now look.” Harry began drawing a circle at the bottom of the page. “This is the Earth. And this”—he drew a smaller circle halfway up the page—“is Colonial Station. It’s in geosynchronous orbit, which means it stays put relative to the Earth’s rotation. It’s always hanging above Nairobi. With me so far?”

  We nodded.

  “Okay. Now, the idea behind the beanstalk is that you connect Colonial Station with the Earth through a ‘beanstalk’—a bunch of cables, like those out the window—and a bunch of elevator platforms, like the one we’re on now, that can travel back and forth.” Harry drew a line signifying the cable, and a small square, signifying our platform. “The idea here is that elevators on these cables don’t have to reach escape velocity to get to Earth orbit, like a rocket payload would. This is good for us, because we don’t have to go to Colonial Station feeling like an elephant had its foot on our chests. Simple enough.

  “The thing is, this beanstalk doesn’t conform to the basic physical requirements of a classic Earth-to-space beanstalk. For one thing”—Harry drew an additional line past Colonial Station to the end of the page—“Colonial Station shouldn’t be at the end of the beanstalk. For reasons that have to do with mass balance and orbital dynamics, there should be additional cable extending tens of thousands of miles past Colonial Station. Without this counterbalance, any beanstalk should be inherently unstable and dangerous.”

  “And you’re saying this one isn’t,” I said.

  “Not only is not unstable, it’s probably the safest way to travel that’s ever been devised,” Harry said. “The beanstalk has been in continuous operation for over a century. It’s the only point of departure for colonists. There’s never been an accident due to instability or matériel failure, which would be related to instability. There was the famous beanstalk bombing forty years ago, but that was sabotage, unrelated to the physical structure of the beanstalk itself. The beanstalk itself is admirably stable and has been since it was built. But according to basic physics, it shouldn’t be.”

  “So what is keeping it up?” Jesse said.

  Harry smiled again. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it.”

  “You mean you don’t know?” Jesse asked.

  “I don’t know,” Harry admitted. “But that in itself should be no cause for alarm, since I am—or was—merely a high school physics teacher. However, as far as I know, no one else has much of a clue how it works, either. On Earth, I mean. Obviously the Colonial Union knows.”

  “Well, how can that be?” I asked. “It’s been here for a century, for God’s sake. No one’s bothered to figure out how it actually works?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Harry said. “Of course they’ve been trying. And it’s not like it’s been a secret all these years. When the beanstalk was being built, there were demands by governments and the press to know how it worked. The CU essentially said ‘figure it out,’ and that was that. In physics circles, people have been trying to solve it ever since. It’s called ‘The Beanstalk Problem.’”

  “Not a very original title,” I said.

  “Well, physicists save their imagination for other things.” Harry chuckled. “The point is, it hasn’t been solved, primarily for two reasons. The first is that it’s incredibly complicated—I’ve pointed out the mass issues, but then there are other issues like cable strength, beanstalk oscillations brought on by storms and other atmospheric phenomena, and
even an issue about how cables are supposed to taper. Any of these is massively difficult to solve in the real world; trying to figure them all out at once is impossible.”

  “What’s the second reason?” Jesse asked.

  “The second reason is that there’s no reason to. Even if we did figure out how to build one of these things, we couldn’t afford to build it.” Harry leaned back. “Just before I was a teacher, I worked for General Electric’s civil engineering department. We were working on the SubAtlantic rail line at the time, and one of my jobs was to go through old projects and project proposals to see if any of the technology or practices had application to the SubAtlantic project. Sort of a hail-Mary attempt to see if we could do anything to bring down costs.”

  “General Electric bankrupted itself on that, didn’t they?” I asked.

  “Now you know why they wanted to bring down costs,” Harry said. “And why I became a teacher. General Electric couldn’t afford me, or much of anyone else, right after that. Anyway, I’m going through old proposals and reports and I get into some classified stuff, and one of the reports is for a beanstalk. General Electric had been hired by the U.S. Government for a third-party feasibility study on building a beanstalk in the Western Hemisphere; they wanted to clear out a hole in the Amazon the size of Delaware and stick it right on the equator.

  “General Electric told them to forget it. The proposal said that even assuming some major technological breakthroughs—most of which still haven’t happened, and none of which approach the technology that has to be involved with this beanstalk—the budget for the beanstalk would be three times the annual gross national product of the United States economy. That’s assuming that the project did not run over budget, which of course it almost certainly would have. Now, this was twenty years ago, and the report I saw was a decade old even then. But I don’t expect that the costs have gone down very much since then. So no new beanstalks—there are cheaper ways of getting people and material into orbit. Much cheaper.”

  Harry leaned forward again. “Which leads to two obvious questions: How did the Colonial Union manage to create this technological monstrosity, and why did they bother with it at all?”

  “Well, obviously, the Colonial Union is more technologically advanced than we are here on Earth,” Jesse said.

  “Obviously,” Harry said. “But why? Colonists are human, after all. Not only that, but since the colonies specifically recruit from impoverished countries with population problems, colonists tend to be poorly educated. Once they get to their new homes, you have to assume they’re spending more time staying alive than they are thinking up creative ways to build beanstalks. And the primary technology that allowed interstellar colonization is the skip drive, which was developed right here on Earth, and which has been substantially unimproved for more than a century. So on the face of it, there’s no reason why the colonists should be any more technologically advanced than we are.”

  Something suddenly clicked in my head. “Unless they cheat,” I said.

  Harry grinned. “Exactly. That’s what I think, too.”

  Jesse looked at me, and then Harry. “I’m not following you two,” she said.

  “They cheat,” I said. “Look, on Earth, we’re bottled up. We only learn from ourselves—we make discoveries and refine technology all the time, but it’s slow, because we do all the work ourselves. But up there—”

  “Up there humans meet other intelligent species,” Harry said. “Some of which almost certainly have technology more advanced than ours. We either take it in trade or reverse engineer it and find out how it works. It’s much easier to figure out how something works when you’ve got something to work from than it is to figure it out on your own.”

  “That’s what makes it cheating,” I said. “The CU is reading off someone else’s notes.”

  “Well, why doesn’t the Colonial Union share what it’s discovered with us?” Jesse asked. “What’s the point of keeping it to themselves?”

  “Maybe they think that what we don’t know can’t hurt us,” I said.

  “Or it’s something else entirely,” Harry said, and waved toward the window, where the beanstalk cables slid by. “This beanstalk isn’t here because it’s the easiest way to get people to Colonial Station, you know. It’s here because it’s one of the most difficult—in fact, the most expensive, most technologically complex and most politically intimidating way to do it. Its very presence is a reminder that the CU is literally light-years ahead of anything humans can do here.”

  “I’ve never found it intimidating,” Jesse said. “I really never thought about it much at all.”

  “The message isn’t aimed at you,” Harry said. “If you were President of the United States, however, you’d think of it differently. After all, the CU keeps us all here on Earth. There’s no space travel except what the CU allows through colonization or enlistment. Political leaders are always under pressure to buck the CU and get their people to the stars. But the beanstalk is a constant reminder. It says, ‘Until you can make one of these, don’t even think of challenging us.’ And the beanstalk is the only technology the CU has decided to show us. Think about what they haven’t let us know about. I can guarantee you the U.S. President has. And that it keeps him and every other leader on the planet in line.”

  “None of this is making me feel friendly toward the Colonial Union,” Jesse said.

  “It doesn’t have to be sinister,” Harry said. “It could be that the CU is trying to protect Earth. The universe is a big place. Maybe we’re not in the best neighborhood.”

  “Harry, were you always this paranoid,” I asked, “or was this something that crept up on you as you got older?”

  “How do you think I made it to seventy-five?” Harry said, and grinned. “Anyway, I don’t have any problems with the CU being much more technologically advanced. It’s about to work to my advantage.” He held up an arm. “Look at this thing,” he said. “It’s flabby and old and not in very good shape. Somehow, the Colonial Defense Forces are going to take this arm—and the rest of me—and whip it into fighting shape. And do you know how?”

  “No,” I said. Jesse shook her head.

  “Neither do I,” Harry said, and let his arm down with a plop onto the table. “I have no idea how they’ll make it work. What’s more, it’s likely that I can’t even imagine how they’ll do it—if we assume that we’ve been held in a state of technological infancy by the CU, trying to explain it to me now would be like trying to explain this beanstalk platform to someone who’s never seen a mode of transportation more complex than a horse and buggy. But they’ve obviously made it work. Otherwise, why would they recruit seventy-five-year-olds? The universe isn’t going to be conquered by legions of geriatrics. No offense,” he added quickly.

  “None taken,” Jesse said, and smiled.

  “Lady and gentleman,” Harry said, looking at the both of us, “we may think we have some idea of what we’re getting into, but I don’t think we have the first clue. This beanstalk exists to tell us that much. It’s bigger and stranger than we can imagine—and it’s just the first part of this journey. What comes next is going to be even bigger and stranger. Prepare yourself as best you can.”

  “How dramatic,” Jesse said dryly. “I don’t know how to prepare myself after a statement like that.”

  “I do,” I said, and scooted over to get out of the booth. “I’m going to go pee. If the universe is bigger and stranger than I can imagine, it’s best to meet it with an empty bladder.”

  “Spoken like a true Boy Scout,” Harry said.

  “A Boy Scout wouldn’t need to pee as much as I do,” I said.

  “Sure he would,” Harry said. “Just give him sixty years.”

  THREE

  “I don’t know about you two,” Jesse was saying to me and Harry, “but so far this really isn’t what I expected the army to be.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said. “Here, have another donut.”

  “I don’t
need another donut,” she said, taking the donut anyway. “What I need is some sleep.”

  I knew what she meant. It had been more than eighteen hours since I left home, nearly all of it consumed with travel. I was ready for a nap. Instead I was sitting in the huge mess hall of an interstellar cruiser, having coffee and donuts with about a thousand other recruits, waiting for someone to come and tell us what we were supposed to do next. That part, at least, was pretty much like the military I expected.

  The rush and wait began on arrival. As soon as we got off the beanstalk platform, we were greeted by two Colonial Union apparatchiks. They informed us that we were the last recruits expected for a ship that was leaving soon, so could we please follow them quickly so that everything could stay on schedule. Then one took the lead and one went to the rear and they effectively and rather insultingly herded several dozen senior citizens across the entire station to our ship, the CDFS Henry Hudson.

  Jesse and Harry were clearly disappointed at the rush job, as was I. Colonial Station was huge—over a mile in diameter (1800 meters, actually, and I suspected that after seventy-five years of life, I would finally have to start getting used to the metric system) and served as the sole port of transport for recruits and colonists alike. Being herded across it without being able to stop and take it in was like being five years old and being hustled through a toy store at Christmas time by a harried parent. I felt like plopping down on the floor and having a tantrum until I got my way. I was unfortunately too old (or alternately, not nearly old enough) to get away with that sort of behavior.

  What I did see on our speedy trek was a tantalizing appetizer. As our apparatchiks poked and prodded us along, we passed a huge holding bay filled to capacity with what I would guess were Pakistanis or Muslim Indians. Most were waiting patiently to gain entrance to shuttles that would take them to an immense colony transport ship, one of which was visible in the distance, floating outside the window. Others could be seen arguing with CU officials about one thing or another in accented English, comforting children who were clearly bored, or digging through their belongings for something to eat. In one corner, a group of men were kneeling on a carpeted area of the bay and praying. I wondered briefly how they had determined where Mecca was from twenty-three thousand miles up, and then we were pushed forward and I lost sight of them.