Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

by Edmund R. Schubert

  “Male voice,” said Mazer.

  Immediately the voice changed to a robust baritone. “The trouble I’m having, Admiral, is that when I ask them specifically what traits of yours I should try to identify for my recruits, everything becomes quite vague. The only conclusion I can reach is this: The attribute of yours that they want the new commander to have is ‘victorious.’ In vain do I point out that I need better guidelines than that.

  “So I have turned to you for help. You know as well as I do that there was a certain component of luck involved in your victory. At the same time, you saw what no one else could see, and you acted—against orders—at exactly the right moment for your thrust to be unnoticed by the Hive Queen. Boldness, courage, iconoclasm—maybe we can identify those traits. But how do we test for vision?

  “There’s a social component, too. The men in your crew trusted you enough to obey your disobedient orders and put their careers, if not their lives, in your hands.

  “Your record of reprimands for insubordination suggests, also, that you are an experienced critic of incompetent commanders. So you must also have very clear ideas of what your future replacement should not be.

  “Therefore I have obtained permission to use the ansible to query you about the attributes we need to look for—or avoid—in the recruits we find. In the hope that you will find this project more interesting than whatever it is you’re doing out there in space, I eagerly await your reply.”

  Mazer sighed. This Graff sounded like exactly the kind of officer who should be put in charge of finding Mazer’s replacement. But Mazer also knew enough about military bureaucracy to know that Graff would be chewed up and spit out the first time he actually tried to accomplish something. Getting permission to communicate by ansible with an old geezer who was effectively dead was easy enough.

  “What was the sender’s rank?” Mazer asked the console.

  “Lieutenant.”

  Poor Lieutenant Graff had obviously underestimated the terror that incompetent officers feel in the presence of young, intelligent, energetic replacements.

  At least it would be a conversation.

  “Take down this answer, please,” said Mazer. “Dear Lieutenant Graff, I’m sorry for the time you have to waste waiting for this message…no, scratch that, why increase the wasted time by sending a message stuffed with useless chat?” Then again, doing a whole bunch of editing would delay the message just as long.

  Mazer sighed, unwound himself from his stretch, and went to the console. “I’ll type it in myself,” said Mazer. “It’ll go faster that way.”

  He found the words he had just dictated waiting for him on the screen of his message console, with the edge of Graff’s message just behind it. He flipped that message to the front, read it again, and then picked up his own message where he had left off.

  “I am not an expert in identifying the traits of leadership. Your message reveals that you have already thought more about it than I have. Much as I might hope your endeavor is successful, since it would relieve me of the burden of command upon my return, I cannot help you.”

  He toyed with adding “God could not help you,” but decided to let the boy find out how the world worked without dire and useless warnings from Mazer.

  Instead he said “Send” and the console replied, “Message sent by ansible.”

  And that, thought Mazer, is the end of that.

  The answer did not come for more than three hours. What was that, a month back on Earth?

  “Who is it from?” asked Mazer, knowing perfectly well who it would turn out to be. So the boy had taken his time before pushing the matter. Time enough to learn how impossible his task was? Probably not.

  Mazer was sitting on the toilet—which, thanks to the Formics’ gravitic technology, was a standard gravity-dependent chemical model. Mazer was one of the few still in the service who remembered the days of air-suction toilets in weightless spaceships, which worked about half the time. That was the era when ship captains would sometimes be cashiered for wasting fuel by accelerating their ships just so they could take a dump that would actually get pulled away from their backside by something like gravity.

  “Lieutenant Hyrum Graff.”

  And now he had the pestiferous Hyrum Graff, who would probably be even more annoying than null-g toilets.

  “Erase it.”

  “I am not allowed to erase ansible communications,” said the female voice blandly. It was always bland, of course, but it felt particularly bland when saying irritating things.

  I could make you erase it, if I wanted to go to the trouble of reprogramming you. But Mazer didn’t say it, in case it might alert the program safeguards in some way. “Read it.”

  “Male voice?”

  “Female,” snapped Mazer.

  “Admiral Rackham, I’m not sure you understood the gravity of our situation. We have two possibilities: Either we will identify the best possible commanders for our war against the Formics, or we will have you as our commander. So either you will help us identify the traits that are most likely to be present in the ideal commander, or you will be the commander on whom all the responsibility rests.”

  “I understand that, you little twit,” said Mazer. “I understood it before you were born.”

  “Would you like me to take down your remarks as a reply?” asked the computer.

  “Just read it and ignore my carping.”

  The computer returned to the message from Lieutenant Graff. “I have located your wife and children. They are all in good health, and it may be that some or all of them might be glad of an opportunity to converse with you by ansible, if you so desire. I offer this, not as a bribe for your cooperation, but as a reminder, perhaps, that more is at stake here than the importunities of an upstart lieutenant pestering an admiral and a war hero on a voyage into the future.”

  Mazer roared out his answer. “As if I had need of reminders from you!”

  “Would you like me to take down your remarks as—”

  “I’d like you to shut yourself down and leave me in—”

  “A reply?” finished the computer, ignoring his carping.

  “Peace!” Mazer sighed. “Take down this answer: I’m divorced, and my ex-wife and children have made their lives without me. To them I’m dead. It’s despicable for you to attempt to raise me from the grave to burden their lives. When I tell you that I have nothing to tell you about command it’s because I truly do not know any answers that you could possibly implement.

  “I’m desperate for you to find a replacement for me, but in all my experience in the military, I saw no example of the kind of commander that we need. So figure it out for yourself—I haven’t any idea.”

  For a moment he allowed his anger to flare. “And leave my family out of it, you contemptible…”

  Then he decided not to flame the poor git. “Delete everything after ‘leave my family out of it.’”

  “Do you wish me to read it back to you?”

  “I’m on the toilet!”

  Since his answer was nonresponsive, the computer repeated the question verbatim.

  “No. Just send it. I don’t want to have the zealous Lieutenant Graff wait an extra hour or day just so I can turn my letter into a prizewinning school essay.”

  But Graff’s question nagged at him. What should they look for in a commander?

  What did it matter? As soon as they developed a list of desirable traits, all the bureaucratic buttsniffs would immediately figure out how to fake having them, and they’d be right back where they started, with the best bureaucrats at the top of every military hierarchy, and all the genuinely brilliant leaders either discharged or demoralized.

  The way I was demoralized, piloting a barely-armed supply ship in the rear echelons of our formation.

  Which was in itself a mark of the stupidity of our commanders—the fact that they thought there could be such a thing as a “rear echelon” during a war in three-dimensional space.

  There mi
ght have been dozens of men who could have seen what I saw—the point of vulnerability in the Formics’ formation—but they had long since left the service. The only reason I was there was because I couldn’t afford to quit before vesting in my pension. So I put up with spiteful commanders who would punish me for being a better officer than they would ever be. I took the abuse, the contempt, and so there I was piloting a ship with only two weapons—slow missiles at that.

  Turned out I only needed one.

  But who could have predicted that I’d be there, that I’d see what I saw, and that I’d commit career suicide by firing my missiles against orders—and then I’d turn out to be right? What process can test for that? Might as well resort to prayer—either God is looking out for the human race or he doesn’t care. If he cares, then we’ll go on surviving despite our stupidity. If he doesn’t, then we won’t.

  In a universe that works like that, any attempt to identify in advance the traits of great commanders is utterly wasted.

  “Incoming visuals,” said the computer.

  Mazer looked down at his desk screen, where he had jotted

  Desperation

  Intuition (test for that, sucker!)

  Tolerance for the orders of fools

  Borderline-insane sense of personal mission

  Yeah, that’s the list Graff’s hoping I’ll send him.

  And now the boy was sending him visuals. Who approved that?

  But the head that flickered in the holospace above his desk wasn’t an eagerbeaver young lieutenant. It was a young woman with light-colored hair like her mother’s and only a few traces of her father’s part-Maori appearance. Still, the traces were there, and she was beautiful.

  “Stop,” said Mazer.

  “I am required to show you—”

  “This is personal. This is an intrusion.”

  “—all ansible communications.”

  “Later.”

  “This is a visual and therefore has high priority. Sufficient ansible bandwidth for full-motion visuals will only be used for communications of the—”

  Mazer gave up. “Just play it.”

  “Father,” said the young woman in the holospace.

  Mazer looked away from her, reflexively hiding his face, though of course she couldn’t see him anyway. His daughter, Pai Mahutanga. When he last saw her, she was a tree-climbing five-year-old. She used to have nightmares, but with her father always on duty with the fleet, there was no one to drive away the bad dreams.

  “I brought your grandchildren with me,” she was saying. “Pahu Rangi hasn’t found a woman yet who will let him reproduce.” She grinned wickedly at someone out of frame. Her brother. Mazer’s son. Just a baby, conceived on his last leave before the final battle.

  “We’ve told the children all about you. I know you can’t see them all at once, but if they each come into frame with me for just a few moments—it’s so generous of them to let me—

  “But he said that you might not be happy to see me. Even if that’s true, Father, I know you’ll want to see your grandchildren. They’ll still be alive when you return. I might even be. Please don’t hide from us. We know that when you divorced Mother it was for her sake, and ours. We know that you never stopped loving us. See? Here’s Kahui Kura. And Pao Pao Te Rangi. They also have English names, Mirth and Glad, but they’re proud to be children of the Maori. Through you. But your grandson Mazer Taka Aho Howarth insists on using the name you went…go by. And as for baby Struan Maeroero, he’ll make the choice when he gets older.” She sighed. “I suppose he’s our last child, if the New Zealand courts uphold the Hegemony’s new population rules.”

  As each of the children stepped into frame, shyly or boldly, depending on their personality, Mazer tried to feel something toward them. Two daughters first, shy, lovely. The little boy named for him. Finally the baby that someone held into the frame.

  They were strangers, and before he ever met them they would be parents themselves. Perhaps grandparents. What was the point? I told your mother that we had to be dead to each other. She had to think of me as a casualty of war, even if the paperwork said DIVORCE DECREE instead of KILLED IN ACTION.

  She was so angry she told me that she would rather I had died. She was going to tell our children that I was dead. Or that I just left them, without giving them any reason, so they’d hate me.

  Now it turns out she turned my departure into a sentimental memory of sacrifice for God and country. Or at least for planet and species.

  Mazer forced himself not to wonder if this meant that she had forgiven him. She was the one with children to raise—what she decided to tell them was none of his business. Whatever helped her raise the children without a father.

  He didn’t marry and have children until he was already middle-aged; he’d been afraid to start a family when he knew he’d be gone on voyages lasting years at a time. Then he met Kim, and all that rational process went out the window. He wanted—his DNA wanted—their children to exist, even if he couldn’t be there to raise them. Pai Mahutanga and Pahu Rangi—he wanted the children’s lives to be stable and good, rich with opportunity, so he stayed in the service in order to earn the separation bonuses that would pay to put them through college.

  Then he fought in the war to keep them safe. But he was going to retire when the war ended and go home to them at last, while they were still young enough to welcome a father. Then he got this assignment.

  Why couldn’t you just decide, you bastards? Decide you were going to replace me, and then let me go home and have my hero’s welcome and then retire to Christchurch and listen to the ringing of the bells to tell me God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. You could have left me home with my family, to raise my children, to be there so I could talk Pai out of naming her firstborn son after me.

  I could have given all the advice and training you wanted—more than you’d ever use, that’s for sure—and then left the fleet and had some kind of life. But no, I had to leave everything and come out here in this miserable box while you dither.

  Mazer noticed that Pai’s face was frozen and she was making no sound. “You stopped the playback,” said Mazer.

  “You weren’t paying attention,” said the computer. “This is a visual ansible transmission, and you are required to—”

  “I’m watching now,” said Mazer.

  Pai’s voice came again, and the visual moved again. “They’re going to slow this down to transmit it to you. But you know all about time dilation. The bandwidth is expensive, too, so I guess I’m done with the visual part of this. I’ve written you a letter, and so have the kids. And Pahu swears that someday he’ll learn to read and write.” She laughed again, looking at someone out of frame. It had to be his son, the baby he had never seen. Tantalizingly close, but not coming into frame. Someone was controlling that. Someone decided not to let him see his son. Graff? How closely was he manipulating this? Or was it Kim who decided? Or Pahu himself?

  “Mother has written to you, too. Actually, quite a few letters. She wouldn’t come, though. She doesn’t want you to see her looking so old. But she’s still beautiful, Father. More beautiful than ever, with white hair and—she still loves you. She wants you to remember her younger. She told me once, ‘I was never beautiful, and when I met a man who thought I was, I married him over his most heartfelt objections.’”

  Her imitation of her mother was so accurate that it stopped Mazer’s breath for a moment. Could it truly be that Kim had refused to come because of some foolish vanity about how she looked? As if he would care!

  But he would care. Because she would be old, and that would prove that it was true, that she would surely be dead before he made it back to Earth. And because of that, it would not be home he came back to. There was no such place.

  “I love you, Father,” Pai was saying. “Not just because you saved the world. We honor you for that, of course. But we love you because you made Mother so happy. She would tell us stories about you. It’s as if w
e knew you. And your old mates would visit sometimes, and then we knew that Mother wasn’t exaggerating about you. Either that or they all were.” She laughed. “You have been part of our lives. We may be strangers to you, but you’re not a stranger to us.”

  The image flickered, and when it came back, she was not in quite the same position. There had been an edit. Perhaps because she didn’t want him to see her cry. He knew she had been about to, because her face still worked before weeping the same way as when she was little. It had not been so very long, for him, since she was small. He remembered very well.

  “You don’t have to answer this,” she said. “Lieutenant Graff told us that you might not welcome this transmission. Might even refuse to watch it. We don’t want to make your voyage harder. But Father, when you come home—when you come back to us—you have a home. In our hearts. Even if I’m gone, even if only our children are here to meet you, our arms are open. Not to greet the conquering hero. But to welcome home our papa and grandpa, however old we are. I love you. We all do. All.”

  And then, almost as an afterthought: “Please read our letters.”

  “I have letters for you,” said the computer, as the holospace went empty.

  “Save them,” said Mazer. “I’ll get to them.”

  “You are authorized to send a visual reply,” said the computer.

  “That will not happen,” said Mazer. But even as he said it, he was wondering what he could possibly say, if he changed his mind and did send them his image. Some heroic speech about the nobility of sacrifice? Or an apology for accepting the assignment?

  He would never show his face to them. Would never let Kim see that he was not changed.

  He would read the letters. He would answer them. There were duties you owed to family, even if the reason they got involved was because of some meddling jerk of a lieutenant.

  “My first letter,” said Mazer, “will be to that git, Graff. It’s very brief. ‘Bugger off, gitling.’ Sign it ‘respectfully yours.’”