Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show by Edmund R. Schubert

order to be in the position you’re in now. And I promise you, sir, that I will do everything in my power to make your sacrifices and theirs worth the cost.”
    Graff saluted, and then disappeared from the holospace.
    And even though he could not be seen by anybody, Mazer Rackham saluted him back.
    Afterword by Orson Scott Card
    I’ve always been fascinated by the issues involved in relativistic space travel. To me it seemed that any kind of voyage that was long enough for relativistic effects to kick in would be a kind of death. Your body would still be alive, but you would be cut off from the community around you for long enough that by the time you returned—if you returned—all the people you knew would either be dead, or would have lived so many years without you that you would not know them.
    This is particularly poignant when it comes to parents and children, or siblings. I remember how powerfully William Sleator’s brilliant novel Singularity dealt with that issue, when he had one of a pair of twins use a backyard singularity to age himself, deliberately, a full year in a single night. Because he did it at the onset of puberty, he emerged markedly larger and older than his brother. But he had also tricked himself, because it was a year spent in utter solitude, except for the books he was reading. He had not had a year of growth through interaction with other people. Fortunately, though, he had used the time to understand himself a little better and gain some perspective.
    When I gave myself the assignment of writing one Ender’s Game story per issue of the InterGalactic Medicine Show, I was quickly drawn to Mazer’s dilemma. Because he was regarded as essential to the survival of the human race in the next war with the Formics, he was sent out at (near) lightspeed on an empty voyage; he would then bring himself back, again at lightspeed, so that when the war came, he would hardly have aged.
    In one sense, this is no more than we ask of any soldiers in combat—they go away from their homes, knowing that a certain percentage of them will not come back.
    But when you send a fleet of soldiers on a relativistic journey, none of them will return to the world, and the people, that they knew. Even though their bodies remain alive, it’s a suicide mission.
    So in a way it’s merciful that the fleets were ordered to stay and colonize the planets they conquered; there was no point in bringing them home. Only Mazer had to face the bittersweet dilemma of meeting his family again.
    The challenge, then, was to determine how Mazer would feel about all this and then what he would do. Because one thing was certain: Mazer was smart enough to know that he was not the right man to command the human fleet. So if he did come back, he would face a burden that he knew he could not handle. What does a good soldier do then?

Tabloid Reporter to the Stars
BY E RIC J AMES S TONE
    When I was fired after ten years as a science reporter for the New York Times, the editor told me I’d never get a job with a decent paper again. He was right, at first: No one wanted to hire a reporter who had taken bribes to write a series of articles about a nonexistent technology in order to inflate the value of a company being used in a stock swindle—even if I had managed to get off without serving time.
    And that’s the only reason I took the job with the Midnight Observer tabloid. They didn’t care that I’d made up a news story—they were impressed that I’d managed to write something that had fooled experts for over a year. So began my new career under the pseudonym of Dr. Lance Jorgensen. The doctorate was phony, of course, and I never did decide what it was in. I worked that gig for three years before I caught the break that let me get back into real journalism.
    When the United Nations Space Agency decided to hold a lottery to choose a reporter to travel on board the first interstellar ship, they set strict qualifications: a college degree in