Opening: "Return fire!" the colonel ordered, bleeding on the deck of her ship, ferocity raging in her nonetheless controlled voice.
The young and untried officer of the deck cried, "It won't do any good, there's too many--"
"I said fire, goddammit!"
Capsule: In this cleverly-titled and clever story Nancy Kress offers some interesting speculations on the convergence of two lifelines: art and war. In the midst of the Human-Teli war, the protagonist, a military art historian, is sent to 149-Delta to explain why the Teli have been hoarding human art. Through the application of chaos-based mathematics, he is able to discover what drives the Teli's behavior, which leads to greater revelations about the entire war.
While the conceptual premise was intriguing and the resolution well-handled, it was really the intermeshing of that with the character development that made the story work for me. The protagonist and narrator struggles with unnamed seizures, and the General in charge of the mission happens to be his mother, with whom he has been in lifelong conflict. None of the elements in this diverting story feel very new or will cause you to think too hard, but their combination and measure into a suspenseful piece with equal measure idea and character is well-executed, in the best space operatic fashion.
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