Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

by Edmund R. Schubert

  “‘Bugger’ is a noun. ‘Git’ is a substandard verb, and ‘gitling’ is not in any of my wordbases. I cannot spell or parse the message properly without explanation…Do you mean ‘Leave this place, alien enemy’?”

  “I made ‘gitling’ up, but it’s an excellent word, so use it. And I can’t believe they programmed you without ‘bugger off’ in the wordbase.”

  “I detect stress,” said the computer. “Will you accept mild sedation?”

  “The stress is being caused by your forcing me to view a message I did not want to see. You are causing my stress. So give me some time to myself to calm down.”

  “Incoming message.”

  Mazer felt his stress levels rising even higher. So he sighed and sat back and said, “Read it. It’s from Graff, right? Always use a male voice for the gitling.”

  “Admiral Rackham, I apologize for the intrusion,” the computer baritoned. “Once I broached the possibility of letting your family contact you, my superiors would not give up on the idea, even though I warned them it would be more likely to be counterproductive if you hadn’t agreed in advance. Still, it was my idea and I take full responsibility for that, but it was also clumsily handled without waiting for your permission, and that was not my responsibility. Though it was completely predictable, because this is the military. There is no idea so stupid that it won’t be seized upon and made the basis of policy, and no idea so wise that it won’t be perceived as threatening by some paper pusher, who’ll kill it if he can, or claim complete credit for it if it works. Am I describing the military you know?”

  Clever boy, thought Mazer. Deflect my anger to the IF. Make me his friend.

  “However, the decision was made to send you only those letters that you would find encouraging. You’re being ‘handled,’ Admiral Rackham. But if you want all the letters, I’ll make sure you get the whole picture. It won’t make you happier, but at least you’ll know I’m not trying to manipulate you.”

  “Oh, right,” said Mazer.

  “Or at least I’m not trying to trick you,” said the computer. “I’m trying to persuade you by winning your trust, if I can, and then your cooperation. I will not lie to you or leave out information in order to deceive you. Tell me if you want all the letters or are content with the comfortable version of your family’s life.”

  Mazer knew then that Graff had won—Mazer would have no choice but to answer, and no choice but to request the omitted letters. Then he would be beholden to the gitling. Angry, but in debt.

  The real question was this: Was Graff staging the whole thing? Was he the one who withheld the uncomfortable letters, only so he could gain points with Mazer for then releasing them?

  Or was Graff taking some kind of risk, scamming the system in order to send him the full set of letters?

  Or did Graff, a mere lieutenant, have a degree of power that allowed him to flout the orders of his superiors with impunity?

  “Don’t send the bugger-off letter,” said Mazer.

  “I already sent it and receipt has been confirmed.”

  “I’m actually quite happy that you did that,” said Mazer. “So here’s my next message: Send the letters, gitling.”

  Within a few minutes, the reply came, and this time the number of letters was much higher.

  And with nothing else to do, Mazer opened them and began to read them silently, in the order they were sent. Which meant that the first hundred were all from Kim.

  The progression of the early letters was predictable, but no less painful to read. She was hurt, angry, grief-stricken, resentful, filled with longing. She tried to hurt him with invective, or with guilt, or by tormenting him with sexually charged memories. Maybe she was tormenting herself.

  Her letters, even the angry ones, were reminders of what he had lost, of the life he once had. It’s not as if she invented her temper for this occasion. She had it all along, and he had been lashed by it before, and bore a few old scars. But now it all combined to make him miss her.

  Her words hurt him, tantalized him, made him grieve, and often he had to stop reading and listen to something—music, poetry, or the drones and clicks of subtle machinery in the seemingly motionless craft that was hurtling through space in, the physicists assured him, a wavelike way, though he could not detect any lack of solidity in any of the objects inside the ship. Except, of course, himself. He could dissolve at a word, if it was from her, and then be remade by another.

  I was right to marry her, he thought again and again as he read. And wrong to leave her. I cheated her and myself and my children, and for what? So I could be trapped here in space while she grows old and dies, and then come back and watch some clever young lad take his rightful place as commander of all the fleets, while I hover behind him, a relic of an old war, who lived out the wrong cliché. Instead of him coming home in a bag for his family to bury, it was his family who grew old and died while he came back still…still young. Young and utterly alone, purposeless except for the little matter of saving the human race, which wouldn’t even be in his hands.

  Her letters calmed down after a while. They became monthly reports on the family. As if he had become a sort of diary for her. A place where she could wonder if she was doing the right thing in her raising of the children—too stern, too strict, too indulgent. If her decisions could have a wrong outcome or a wrong motive, then she wondered constantly if she should have done it differently. That, too, was the woman he had known and loved and reassured endlessly.

  How did she hold together without him? Apparently she remembered the conversations they used to have, or imagined new ones. She inserted his side of the conversation into the letters. “I know you’d tell me that I did the right thing…that I had no choice…of course you’d say…you always told me…I’m still doing the same old…”

  The things that a widow would tell herself about her dead husband.

  But widows could still love their husbands. She has forgiven me.

  And finally, in a letter written not so long ago—last week; half a year ago—she said it outright. “I hope you have forgiven me for being so angry with you when you divorced me. I know you had no choice but to go, and you were trying to be kind by cutting all ties so I could go on with life. And I have gone on, exactly as you said I should. Let us please forgive one another.”

  The words hit him like three-g acceleration. He gasped and wept, and the computer became concerned. “What’s wrong?” the computer asked. “Sedation seems necessary.”

  “I’m reading a letter from my wife,” he said. “I’m fine. No sedation.”

  But he wasn’t fine. Because he knew what Graff and the IF could not have known when they let this message go through. Graff had lied to him. He had withheld information.

  For what Mazer had told his wife was that she should go on with life and marry again.

  That’s what she was telling him. Somebody had forbidden them to say or write anything that would tell him that Kim had married another man and probably had more children—but he knew, because that’s the only thing she could mean when she said, “I have gone on, exactly as you said I should.” That had been the crux of the argument. Her insisting that divorce only made sense if she intended to remarry, him saying that of course she didn’t think of remarrying now, but later, when she finally realized that he would never come back as long as she lived, she wouldn’t have to write and ask him for a divorce, it would already be done and she could go ahead, knowing that she had his blessing—and she had slapped him and burst into tears because he thought so little of her and her love for him that he thought she could forget and marry someone else…

  But she had, and it was breaking his heart, because even though he had been noble about insisting on the divorce, he had believed her when she said she could never love any other man.

  She did love another man. He was gone only a year, and she…

  No, he had been gone three decades now. Maybe it took her ten years before she found another man. Maybe…<
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  “I will have to report this physical response,” said the computer.

  “You do whatever you have to,” said Mazer. “What are they going to do, send me to the hospital? Or—I know—they could cancel the mission!”

  He calmed down, though—barking at the computer made him feel marginally better. Even though his thoughts raced far beyond the words he was reading, he did read all the other letters, and now he could see hints and overtones. A lot of unexplained references to “we” and “us” in the letters. She wanted him to know.

  “Send this to Graff. Tell him I know he broke his word almost as soon as he gave it.”

  The answer came back in a moment. “Do you think I don’t know exactly what I sent?”

  Did he know? Or had he only just now realized that Kim had slipped a message through, and now Graff was pretending that he knew it all along…

  Another message from Graff: “Just heard from your computer that you have had a strong emotional response to the letters. I’m deeply sorry for that. It must be a challenge, to live in the presence of a computer that reports everything you do to us, and then a team of shrinks tries to figure out how to respond in order to get the desired result. My own feeling is that if we intend to trust the future of the human race to this man, maybe we ought to tell him everything we know and converse with him like an adult. But my own letters have to be passed through the same panel of shrinks. For instance, they’re letting me tell you about them because they hope that you will come to trust me more by knowing that I don’t like what they do. They’re even letting me tell you this as a further attempt to allow the building of trust through recursive confession of trickery and deception. I bet it’s working, too. You can’t possibly read any secret meanings into this letter.”

  What game is he playing? Which parts of his letters are true? The panel of shrinks made sense. The military mind: Find a way to negate your own assets so they fail even before you begin to use them. But if Graff really did let Kim’s admission that she had remarried sneak through, knowing that the shrinks would miss it, then did that mean he was on Mazer’s side? Or that he was merely better than the shrinks at figuring out how to manipulate him?

  “You can’t possibly read any secret meanings into this letter,” Graff had said. Did that mean that there was a secret meaning? Mazer read it over again, and now what he said in the third sentence took on another possible meaning. “To live in the presence of a computer that reports everything you do to us.” At first he had read it as if it meant “reports to us everything you do.” But what if he literally meant that the computer would report everything Mazer did to them.

  That would mean they had detected his undetectable reprogramming of the computer.

  Which would explain the panel of shrinks and the sudden new urgency about finding a replacement for Mazer as commander.

  So the cat was out of the bag. But they weren’t going to tell him they knew what he had done, because he was the volatile one who had done something insane, and so they couldn’t believe he had a rational purpose and speak to him openly.

  He had to let them see him and realize that he was not insane. He had to get control of this situation. And in order to accomplish that, he had to trust Graff to be what he so obviously wanted Mazer to think he was: an ally in the effort to find the best possible commander for the IF when the final campaign finally began.

  Mazer looked in the mirror and debated whether to clean up his appearance. There were plenty of insane people who tried, pathetically, to look saner by dressing like regular people. Then again, he had let himself get awfully tangle-haired, and he was naked all the time. At least he could wash and dress and try to look like the kind of person that military people could regard with respect.

  When he was ready, he rotated into position and told the computer to begin recording his visual for later transmission. He suspected, though, that there would be no point in editing it—the raw recording was what the computer would transmit, since it had obviously reported his earlier reprogramming.

  “I have reason to believe that you already know of the change I made in the onboard computer’s programming. Apparently I could take the computer’s navigational system out of your control, but couldn’t keep it from reporting the fact to you. Which suggests that you meant this box to be a prison, but you weren’t very good at it.

  “So I will now tell you exactly what you need to know. You—or, by now, your predecessors—refused to believe me when I told them that I was not the right man to command the International Fleet during the final campaign. I was told that there would be a search for an adequate replacement, but I knew better.

  “I knew that any ‘search’ would be perfunctory or illusory. You were betting everything on me. However, I also know how the military works. Those who made the decision to rely on me would be long since retired before I came back. And the closer we got to the time of my return, the more the new bureaucracy would dread my arrival. When I got there, I would find myself at the head of a completely unfit military organization whose primary purpose was to prevent me from doing anything that might cost somebody his job. Thus I would be powerless, even if I was retained as a figurehead. And all the pilots who gave up everything they knew and loved on Earth in order to go out and confront the Formics in their own space would be under the actual command of the usual gang of bureaucratic climbers.

  “It always takes six months of war and a few dreadful defeats to clear out the deadwood. But we don’t have time for that in this war, any more than we did in the last one. My insubordination fortunately ended things abruptly. This time, though, if we lose any battle then we have lost the war. We will have no second chance. We have no margin of error. We can’t afford to waste time getting rid of you—you, the idiots who are watching me right now, the idiots who are going to let the human race be destroyed in order to preserve your pathetic bureaucratic jobs.

  “So I reprogrammed my ship’s navigational program so that I have complete control over it. You can’t override my decision. And my decision is this: I am not coming back. I will not decelerate and turn around. I will keep going on and on.

  “My plan was simple. Without me to count on as your future commander, you would have no choice but to search for a new one. Not go through the motions, but really search.

  “And I think you must have guessed that this was my plan, because you started letting me get messages from Lieutenant Graff.

  “So now I have the problem of trying to make sense of what you’re doing. My guess is that Graff is trained as a shrink. Perhaps he works as an intelligence analyst. My guess is that he is actually very bright and innovative and has got spectacular results at…at something. So you decided to see if he could get me back on track. Only he is exactly the kind of wild man that terrifies you. He’s smarter than you, and so you have to make sure you keep him from getting the power to do anything that looks to you like it might be dangerous. And since everything remotely effective will frighten you, his main project has been figuring out how to get around you in order to establish honest communication between him and me.

  “So here we are, at something of an impasse. And all the power is in your hands at this moment. So let me tell you your choices. There are only two of them.

  “The first choice is the hard one. It will make your skin crawl. Some of you will go home and sleep for three days in fetal position with your thumbs in your mouths. But there’s no negotiation. This is what you’ll do:

  “You’ll give Lieutenant Graff real power. Don’t give him a high rank and a desk and a bureaucracy. Give him genuine authority. Everything he wants, he gets. Because the whole reason he is alive will be this: to find the best possible commander for the fleets that will decide the future of the human race.

  “To do this he first has to find out how to identify those with the best potential. You’ll give him all the help he asks for. All the people he asks for, regardless of their rank, training, or how much some idiot admiral hates or
loves them.

  “Then Graff will figure out how to train the candidates he identifies. Again, you’ll do whatever he wants. Nothing is too expensive. Nothing is too difficult. Nothing requires a single committee meeting to agree. Everybody in the IF and everybody in the government is Graff’s servant, and all they should ever ask him is to clarify his instructions.

  “What I require of Graff is that he work on nothing but the identification and training of my replacement as battle commander of the International Fleet. If he starts bureaucratic kingdom building—in other words, if he turns out to be just another idiot—I’ll know it, and I’ll stop talking to him.

  “My quid pro for your giving Graff this authority is that once I’m satisfied he has it and is using it correctly, then I’ll turn this ship around immediately. I’ll get home a few years earlier than the original plan. I’ll be part of training whatever commander you have. I’ll evaluate Graff’s work. I’ll help choose among the candidates for the job, if you have more than one that might potentially do the job.

  “And all along the way, Graff will communicate with me constantly by ansible, so that everything he does will be done with my counsel and approval. Thus, through Graff, I am taking command of the search for our war leader now.

  “But if you act like the idiots who led the fleet during the war I won, and try to obfuscate and prevaricate and procrastinate and misdirect and manipulate and lie your way out of letting Graff and me control the choice and training of the battle commander, then I won’t turn this ship around, ever.

  “I’ll just sail on out into oblivion. Our campaign will fail. The Buggers will come back to Earth and they’ll finish the job this time. And I, in this ship, will be the last living human being. But it won’t be my fault. It will be yours, because you did not have the decency and intelligence to step aside and let the people who know how to do the job of saving the human race do it.

  “Think about it as long as you want. I’ve got all the time in the world. But keep this in mind: Whoever tries to take control of this situation and set up committees to study your response to this vid—those are the people you need to assign to remote desk jobs and get them out of the IF right now. They are the allies of the Buggers—they’re the ones who will end up getting us all killed. I have already designated the only possible leader for this program: Lieutenant Graff. There’s no compromise. No maneuvering. Make him a captain, give him more actual authority than any other living human, stand ready to do whatever he tells you to do, and let him and me get to work.