She smiled. Then her face creased into panic and she stiffened.
I threw my palm up. “The jewelers said it’s suitable to be set as a pendant. A major piece suitable for evening wear.” The jewelers had also said it was too big for a ring, but clarifying it that way would have made the moment even more awkward.
Mimi relaxed and held the diamond near her throat as she turned her head left, then right, and watched her reflection in the mirror on the far wall.
She returned the jewel to its box, smiling at me. “You might not be an idiot.”
Mimi unwrapped the towel from around her head, then curled around until she faced me, on her knees on the sofa, and leaned toward me and breathed in my ear. “I missed you, Jason.”
A diamond may be a girl’s best friend, but it is also a boon companion to a man who might not be an idiot.
Four hours later, I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling of Mimi’s bedroom. Her head lay on my bare chest, and her finger traced the scar-tissue line where my regrown arm joined my shoulder. “Your arm works fine. Everything works fine.”
Military homecomings are blisteringly awkward in so many ways. But once physical contact occurs, mutual hormonal autodrive kicks in for a while. I kissed her hair and knew that the right thing to do was to savor the moment, to say nothing.
Therefore, I said, “Pinchon fired me.”
Her finger continued to trace across my chest as she whispered, “Huh? It sounded like you said-”
“I did. My Relief and Retirement ceremony’s in ninety days.”
She sat up straight and shook her head, which made everything else shake delightfully. “No. Doesn’t that idiot know there’s a war on?”
“Not for long, there isn’t. Howard’s already got a fix on the homeworld. The weaponized-Cavorite project is down to just troubleshooting.”
“You’re going to fight the retirement mandate.”
“I was, I guess.” I shook my head. “But I dunno. You’re here. I could be here.”
The panic crossed her face again, and she looked toward her kitchen. “I was gonna do a rack of lamb, but… I could scramble some eggs. I input for a guest, so the house ordered extra.”
“Sure. That would be fine.”
Twenty minutes later we sat at her kitchen table, me in underwear and Mimi in a silk robe. I pushed eggs around my plate with a fork.
She leaned forward. “Are they all right? I don’t cook much.”
“They’re great. It’s the chives. I’m allergic.”
“I didn’t know.”
She ate one bite, then said, “Jason, I put in for a command.”
“Another ship? That would take years.”
“Not a keel-up command. I told them I’d take any rust bucket that opened up.”
“You just said you loved this job. And in your letters you said that you loved-”
“I do. I think.” She turned away as she stabbed her finger back at my plate. “But, hell, I can’t even make eggs for you right!”
“That’s a small thing. The kind of thing people in love learn about each other when they spend time together.”
“Oh, really? What about the big things? When you take the retirement gut-punch, I’m there for you. But they put me out to pasture as a schoolmaster and you don’t give a shit! All you do is complain about my cooking!”
My jaw dropped, and I spread my palms. “I never-you said…” For once, I shut up before I made it worse. How can you know a person you see at three-year intervals?
We sat and stared into the tabletop.
Mimi said, “Jason, I’m not ready to sit in rocking chairs playing Nat and Maggie.”
“Neither am I. Earth hasn’t changed for the better while I’ve been gone. Or I’ve changed for the worse. So what do we do?”
She stood up, carried both our plates to the sink, and scraped the eggs down the drain. “I don’t know. Can we talk about it tomorrow? After your speech?”
We reloaded the dishes in the Sanaid, then sat on her couch in the dark, her head on my shoulder, without speaking, until I heard her breath turn heavy as she slept.
I stared into the dark, at our reflections in her mirror. They touched, but they were dark silhouettes that I couldn’t make out.
I tried to sleep, too, but wound up thinking about the speech I had to give in four hours.
TWENTY-SIX
THE NEXT MORNING I stood at parade rest on the academy’s lecture-hall stage and stared out across three thousand young faces, all eyes staring up at me. The cadets’ uniforms were gray, impeccable, and indistinguishable one from another. The faces, however, were brown, white, yellow, male, and female. Tattoos curled around some faces; jewels dangled from others. They were badges of their human homeworlds, each spawned by, and once ruled by, the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Some of those worlds I had fought to free from the hegemony. Some I had fought to keep in the union. The names of some I could barely pronounce.
Mimi stood to my right, then gave me a wink.
She gripped the podium, and her words to her cadets echoed off the arched ’lume ceiling. “I’ll keep the intro brief. I know you don’t want the assembly to run long. That could shorten morning PT.”
Three thousand throats boomed a chuckle off the ceiling. Then silence returned.
The ceiling ’lume dimmed, and a quote faded in on the flatscreen wall behind the commandant. Mimi turned, then read aloud:
“‘Terracentric it may be to refer to “The Pseudocephalopod War,” much less to date its onset from “ 2037.” However, all history pivoted on those events in the Spiral Arm, as undeniably as conventional space folds around every ultradwarf at every Temporal Fabric Insertion Point. Students of that time and place will find no truer account than in the warrior’s-eye view of Jason Wander.’
Volume XXIII”
That was I. That was me. A historical footnote.
The commandant turned back to her Corps of Cadets. “Today’s topic is a retrospective on the campaign for the liberation of Bren.” Mimi took a seat in the audience, leaving me alone center stage.
I stepped alongside the chair placed there for me. My legs ached, as they always did in the mornings. So did every other part that the Slugs and the calendar had forced the army to rebuild.
But I frowned down at the chair and said to the audience, “Everybody provides one of these for me, these days. Deference to rank, or age, I suppose. But infantry doesn’t sit.”
Whoops and pumped fists erupted from the back rows, where the lousy students stood. When the first graduating class came to draw postgrad assignments in a few months, the top students would snatch the glam slots, like flight school and astrogation. The back row would become infantry lieutenants. It was natural selection. Infantry gets the sharp, dirty end of the stick from the beginning, so it learns to laugh about it.
I smiled and pumped my fist back at them. Where they were going, whatever the war, they would need their sense of humor.
I cleared my throat.
PalmTalkers swiveled up alongside whispering lips. Personal ’Puter keyboards unfolded in hands. A few kids snatched pterosaur-quill pens and sheets of flat paper from hiding places beneath stiff shirtfronts. Different cultures, different study habits.
I waved the devices away. “No notes. You get enough logistics and tactics at the puzzle factory next door.”
