Starbound by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online Page B

stomach. A constant assault of bad kosher cooking. A good son would have brought a ham sandwich.”
    “I’ll bring one if I come back. At 142, you’ll need it even more.”
    He closed his eyes. “Oh, please. You really think those alien bastards will kill you?”
    “They haven’t been well-disposed toward humans in the past. You did see the moon thing?”
    “Two nights running, yes. Some people here thought it was staged, a hoax.”
    He sipped his tea, made a face, and added more brandy. “I know bubkes about science. I couldn’t see how they’d fake that, though.”
    “No.” They could have faked the halo of dust, I supposed, but not the rain of gamma radiation. Orbiting monitors had pictures of the explosion, too, from farther out in the solar system. “It’s real, and it demands a response.”
    “Maybe. But why you?”
    I shrugged. “I’m a diplomat.”
    “No, you’re not. You’re a spy. A spy for a country that hardly exists anymore.”
    “They needed three military people in the crew. Our triune was perfect because we wouldn’t upset the social balance—two other married couples.”
    “Your shiksa wife could upset some marriages. Your husband . . . I’ve never understood any of that.”
    I decided not to rise to that bait. “They got a diplomat, a doctor, and a philosopher.”
    “They got three spies, Namir. Or didn’t they know that?”
    “We’re all military intelligence, Father. Soldiers, not spies.”
    He rolled his eyes at that. “It’s a new world,” I said, I hoped reasonably. “The American army has more officers in intelligence than in the infantry.”
    “I suppose the Israeli army, too. That did a lot of good with Gehenna.”
    “In fact, we did know something was about to happen. That’s why I was called back to Tel Aviv.”
    “ ‘Something’ had already happened. If I recall correctly.” His face was a stone mask.
    Maybe love could get through that. But I’d known for years that I’d never loved him, and it was mutual.
    He wasn’t a bad man. But he’d never wanted to be a father and did his best to ignore me and Naomi when we were growing up. I think I’m enough of a man to understand him, and forgive. But love doesn’t come from the brain, from understanding.
    I so didn’t want to be there, and he released me.
    “Look. I can see you have a million things to do. I will take all my pills and try to be here when you come back. Okay?” He stood and held out his arms.
    I clasped his fragile body. “Shalom,” he finally said into my shoulder. “I know you will do well.”
    I took the skyway across to the Port Authority and walked a mile through the rain back to our apartment. Saying good-bye to the city, more home to me than Tel Aviv or any other place.
    Life without restaurants. Walking by so many favorites, the Asian ones especially. But it was less about missing them than it was all the ones I’d been curious about and put off trying. I read that you could eat at a different restaurant for every meal in New York City and never eat at all of them. Does that mean that three new places were opened every day?
    A holo I recognized as James Joyce abjured me to come into a new place, Finnegans Wake, and have a pint of Guinness. I checked my watch and went in for a small one. A quartet was holding forth around the piano, with more spirit than talent, but it was pleasant. When I left, the rain was more forceful, but it wasn’t cold, and I had a hat. I rather liked it.
    Eleven years eating computer-generated healthy recycled shit. Well, I’d survived on army rations for some years. How bad could it be?
    When Elza came home, we’d have to decide where to go for dinner, the last one in this city. Maybe we should just walk until we got hungry and take whatever appeared.
    I was going to miss the noise and the crowds. And the odd pockets of quiet, like the postage-stamp park behind our apartment, two benches and a birdbath, running over as I took my last look.
    Neither