He moved through the rooms by starlight, touching nothing, until he came to the bedroom door. Opened it, the cold latch burning his hand. And saw her there, lying asleep under the silver robe of the Pleiades. Slowly he closed the door, waited, opened it once more and filled the room with light.
She sat up, blinking, a fist against her eyes and hair falling ash-golden to her waist. She wore a long soft dress of muted flowers, blue and green and earth tones. “Maris? I didn’t hear you, I guess I went to sleep.”
He crossed the room, fell onto the bed beside her, caressing her, covering her face with kisses. “They said you were dead… all day I thought—”
“I am.” Her voice was dull, her eyes dark-ringed with fatigue.
“No.”
“I am. To them I am. I’m not a spacer anymore; space is closed to me forever. That’s what it means to be ‘dead.’ To lose your life… Mactav—went crazy. I never thought we’d even get to port. I was hurt badly, in the accident.” Fingers twined loops in her hair, pulled—
“But you’re all right.”
She shook her head. “No.” She held out her hand, upturned; he took it, curled its fingers into his own, flesh over flesh, warm and supple. “It’s plastic, Maris.”
He turned the hand over, stroked it, folded the long limber fingers. “It can’t be—”
“It’s numb. I barely feel you at all. They tell me I may live for hundreds of years.” Her hand tightened into a fist. “And I am a whole woman, but they forbid me to go into space again! I can’t be crew, I can’t be a Mactav, I can only be baggage. And—I can’t even say it’s unfair…” Hot tears burned her face. “I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know—if I should come. If you’d want a… ballerina who’d been in fire.”
“You even wondered?” He held her close again, rested her head on his shoulder, to hide his own face grown wet.
A noise of pain twisted in her throat, her arms tightened. “Oh, Maris. Help me…please, help me, help me…”
He rocked her silently, gently, until her sobbing eased, as he had rocked a homesick teenager a hundred years before.
“How will I live… on one world for centuries, always remembering. How do you bear it?”
“By learning what really matters… Worlds are not so small. We’ll go to other worlds if you want—we could see Home. You’d be surprised how much credit you build up over two hundred years.” He kissed her swollen eyes, her reddened cheeks, her lips. “And maybe in time the rules will change.”
She shook her head, bruised with loss. “Oh, my Maris, my wise love—love me, tie me to the earth.”
He took her prosthetic hand, kissed the soft palm and fingers. And make it well… And knowing that it would never be easy, reached to dim the lights.
“Tin Soldier” was the first story I ever seriously sat down to write. Up until the beginning of 1973 I had only written bits and pieces of things, beginning stories and putting them aside, with no real idea of where they were going, or any intention of trying to publish them. But my husband Vernor (who is also a science fiction writer) encouraged me to take my writing seriously; and this was the result.
Although it was my first story, it seems to be the one a lot of readers like the best. (I may wind up someday feeling like Isaac Asimov, who complains that after all these years, people still like his first story best—everything has been downhill ever since.) But actually this story is one of my personal favorites as well. A writer has the opportunity to play God when working on a story; to be in complete charge of the world that’s being created and the lives of the inhabitants—for better or worse. There is a kind of omniscient detachment from what’s being written; because whatever happens, you are in complete control of your (imaginary) universe. Once a story is finished and in print, however, I find that it becomes very much like a story written by someone else, for me; I lose my detachment and feel a different kind of emotional response, as though I’d never seen it before. As a result, some of the stories I’ve written have turned out to be more downbeat than the kind I generally prefer to read; and I find that I don’t have much of an urge to go back and reread them. This story is one that I have no regrets about when I see it with stranger’s eyes. If I never write a story that people like better, I won’t really be all that disappointed.
And this is one more story that had its roots in song—in this case a song called “Brandy,” which was about a woman waiting for her man to return from the sea; always knowing, and accepting, that the sea would always come first for him. I had remarked to Vernor that a similar kind of story set in space would have terrific potential for descriptions of the beauty of deep space. He made the suggestion that it ought to be the woman who went into space, the man who stayed patiently behind… The story grew from there, and somewhere in the planning stages I noticed the parallel between my story as it was developing, and the Andersen fairy tale “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” Having a background in anthropology, I’ve always been fascinated by mythology (and fairy tales, or folk tales, are frequently a degenerate form of mythology); so I decided to make use of the symbolic aspects of the Andersen story within the framework of my own.
Recently I became aware of another uncanny parallel to this story—George R. R. Martin has written a story which was also inspired by the song “Brandy,” and also involves a woman who goes into space and a man who stays behind. Much to our mutual relief, the resemblances end there, and the basic stories are very different. Which perhaps goes to prove the three-thousand-year-old adage that there is nothing new under the sun. But there are always new ways of looking at it, and always other suns… And that, I think, is what science fiction is really all about.