Read Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show for Free Online Page B

still very proud of the result. That’s not to say that I did this alone. I have all my fellow ’05 Bootcampers to thank and, of course, Card himself. As I recall, Card was critical of my initial story idea, and rightly so. It was with his insights and all the excellent advice I received during Bootcamp that “Cat” was conceived, created, and refined. My heartfelt thanks to all those involved.

Mazer in Prison
BY O RSON S COTT C ARD
    Being the last best hope of humanity was a lousy job.
    Sure, the pay was great, but it had to pile up in a bank back on Earth, because there was no place out here to shop.
    There was no place to walk . When your official exercise program consisted of having your muscles electrically stimulated while you slept, then getting spun around in a centrifuge so your bones wouldn’t dissolve, there wasn’t much to look forward to in an average day.
    To Mazer Rackham, it felt as though he was being punished for having won the last war.
    After the defeat of the invading Formics—or “Buggers,” as they were commonly called—the International Fleet learned everything they could from the alien technology. Then, as fast as they could build the newly designed starships, the IF launched them toward the Formic home world, and the other planets that had been identified as Formic colonies.
    But they hadn’t sent Mazer out with any of those ships. If they had, then he wouldn’t be completely alone. There’d be other people to talk to—fighter pilots, crew. Primates with faces and hands and voices and smells, was that asking so much?
    No, he had a much more important mission. He was supposed to command all the fleets in their attacks on all the Formic worlds. That meant he would need to be back in the solar system, communicating with all the fleets by ansible.
    Great. A cushy desk job. He was old enough to relish that.
    Except for one hitch.
    Since space travel could only approach but never quite reach three hundred million meters per second, it would take many years for the fleets to reach their target worlds. During those years of waiting back at International Fleet headquarters—IF-COM—Mazer would grow old and frail, physically and mentally.
    So to keep him young enough to be useful, they shut him up in a near-lightspeed courier ship and launched him on a completely meaningless outbound journey. At some arbitrary point in space, they decreed, he would decelerate, turn around, and then return to Earth at the same speed, arriving home only a few years before the fleets arrived and all hell broke loose. He would have aged no more than five years during the voyage, even though decades would have passed on Earth.
    A lot of good he’d do them as a commander, if he lost his mind during the voyage.
    Sure, he had plenty of books in the onboard database. Millions of them. And announcements of new books were sent to him by ansible; any he wanted, he could ask for and have them in moments.
    What he couldn’t have was a conversation.
    He had tried. After all, how different was the ansible from regular email over the nets? The problem was the time differential. To him, it seemed he sent out a message and it was answered immediately. But to the person on the other end, Mazer’s message was spread out over days, coming in a bit at a time. Once his whole message had been received and assembled, the person could write an answer immediately. But to be received by the ansible on Mazer’s little boat, the answer would be spaced out a bit at a time, as well.
    The result was that for the person Mazer was conversing with, many days intervened between the parts of the conversation. It had to be like talking with somebody with such an incredible stammer that you could walk away, live your life for a week, and then come back before he had finally spit out whatever it was he had to say.
    A few people had tried, but by now, with Mazer nearing the point where he would decelerate to turn the ship around, his communications