Federations

Deka and Hendeka are in tubes behind us, smaller and reserved, eyes closed; they’re not ready. We won’t even need them until I’m dead. Though it shouldn’t matter, I care less for them than I do for Ennea, less than I do for Octa, who’s watching me.

Octa, who seems to think none of them are worthy of Carthage at all. She’s been losing faith for years.

None of these copies are like Alpha. They all do their duty, but she believed.

• • •

At the fifty-year mark, Octa comes in to be expired.

She hands over the recording device, and the government guys disappear to their level to put together the memory flux for Ennea, who will wake up tonight and need to know.

“You shouldn’t keep doing this,” she tells me as we help her onto the table and adjust the IV.

There are no restraints. The Yemennis don’t balk at what they have to do; duty is in their bones. But Octa looks sad, even sadder than when she found out that the one before her had loved someone who was already dead.

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s the best way—one session of information, and she’s ready to face Carthage.”

“But she won’t remember something if I don’t record it? She won’t know?”

Octa’s always been a little edgy—I try to sound reassuring. “No, she won’t feel a thing. Forget Dorado. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Octa looks like she’s going to cry. “What if there’s something she needs to know?”

“I’ll get you a recorder,” I say, and start to hold up my hand for the sound tech, but she shakes her head and grabs my sleeve.

I drop my arm, surprised. No one else has even noticed; they’re already starting the machines to wake up the next one, and Octa and I might as well be alone in the room.

After a second she frowns, drops my hand, makes fists at her sides like she’s holding back.

The IV drips steadily, and around us everyone is laughing and talking, excited. They seem miles away.

Octa hasn’t stopped watching me; her eyes are bright, her mouth drawn.

“Have you seen the message?”

She must know I haven’t. I shake my head; I hold my breath, wondering if she’s going to tell me. I’ve dreamed about it my whole life, wondering what Alpha knew that made her cry with joy, four hundred years ago.

“It’s beautiful,” she says, and her eyes are mostly closed, and I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or just talking. The IV is working; sometimes they say things.

She says, “I don’t know how anyone could take up a weapon again, after seeing the message.”

Without thinking, I put my hand over her hand.

She sighs. Then, so quietly that no one else hears, Octa says, “I hope that ship never comes.”

Her face gets tight and determined—she looks like Alpha, exactly like, and I almost call out for them to stop— it’s so uncanny, something must be wrong.

But nothing is wrong. She closes her eyes, and the bio-feed flatlines; the tech across the room turns off the alarm on the main bank, and it’s over.

We flip on the antigrav, and one of the techs takes her down to the incinerator. He comes back, says the other delegates have lined up in the little audience hall outside the incinerator, waiting to clap and drink champagne.

It’s always a long night after an expiration, but it’s what we’re here to do, and it’s good solid work, moving and monitoring and setting up the influx for Yemenni’s first night. Nobody wants a delay between delegates. You never know when the Carthage is going to show up. We think another four hundred years, but it could be tomorrow. Stranger things have happened.

Wren Ennea-Yemenni needs to be awake, just in case; she’ll have things to do, when Carthage comes.

LIFE-SUSPENSION L. E. MODESITT, JR.

L. E. Modesitt is the bestselling author of the Saga of Recluse, the Spellsong Cycle, the Corean Chronicles, and several other series, as well as a number of standalone novels, such as The Eternity Artifact, The Elysium Commission, and a new book, Haze, that’s due out in June. His short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies, and was recently collected in Viewpoints Critical.

“Life-Suspension” is set in a future where interstellar travel is possible, but where there is warfare over who controls the lines of interstellar communication. “It’s a story that shows how thin the lines between all human passions are, especially in war,” Modesitt said. “I was a military pilot, and I’ve tried to capture the feel of those situations, and the contrast between the times of action and the quiet civility of officers in between action.”

I

The S.R.S. Amaterasu had left Kunitsu Orbit Station 2 less than three hours earlier, and Flight Captain Ghenji Yamato was more than ready to eat when the junior officers’ wardroom opened at 1600 KMT. He wasn’t the first entering—that would have been most impolite—but he was far from the last when he took his seat halfway down the second table.

He’d barely seated himself when his eyes registered a flash of white, and he glanced up.

The officer who had just entered the mess caught his eyes immediately, not because she was full-figured, which she was not, boyish as her frame was, but because her short-cut hair was pure white, and her pale white face was almost unearthly in its beauty. He almost laughed at the thought. Unearthly? None of them would ever see Earth—and probably not even Kunitsu—again for years. Objective years, not subjective, he reminded himself. He found himself still looking at her. For all the white hair, she was probably younger than he was. He couldn’t help but stare before he looked down abruptly.

She was ship’s crew—that was certain—and not one of the attack pilots for the mission ahead, because he knew most of them, except for the transfers and replacements, although her hair was cut every bit as short as that of the women pilots in his squadron. Yet . . . for all that he knew he had never seen her before; there was something about her. He just didn’t know what it was. He ate almost mechanically, although he did enjoy the black tea, probably a variant from the Nintoku Islands.

As he left the mess after the meal, he glanced back, but he didn’t see the white-haired captain. As he looked to the corridor ahead, leading to the attack operations spaces—there she was, waiting and looking at him. Her eyebrows were also white, as were her eyelashes, but she had deep black eyes and red lips.

“Hello,” he offered. “I’m Ghenji Yamato, Flight Captain.”

“I know. Your name, that is, and your reputation as ‘the monk.’”

“The monk?” Ghenji knew the allusion, but wasn’t about to admit it.

“The flight captain utterly devoted to his duties once he’s shipside.” She smiled. “I’m Rokujo. Rokujo Yukionna.” She smiled. “I’m in life-support.”

He thought he ought to recognize her name, but he hadn’t checked the roster of ship’s officers. He’d also never paid that much attention to names or where they came from. His educational background had been engineering, but he’d been fortunate, if one could call it that, to have been accepted by the service for training as an attack needle pilot. The current tour was his fourth, and, afterwards, he’d be eligible for promotion to major—and squadron commander, or the equivalent. With the time-dilation effect, even with military pay discounting, he’d even be able to retire, not that he’d ever considered that.

Ghenji glanced at her green skinsuit—medical—and the senior captain’s insignia on the collars of her shipvest. “Doctor or technical?”

“Does it matter?” She laughed ruefully. “At least you asked. Most of the pilots just assume tech because I look so young.”