Free SGA - 14 - Death Game by Jo Graham

does. How does a kid from the most liberal town in America wind up in the Air Force?”
    “I wasn’t thinking that,” Rodney said. Why would he be? Like he cared where Lorne was from?
    “Or you’re going to say it must be the only way to rebel, right? The only thing you can do when you grow up in San Francisco to get your parents’ goat is join the military?”
    Rodney sat down in the shade and took another long drink of water. It did taste good. And there was something about Lorne’s very nonchalance that was comforting. “Let me guess. You’re going to tell me a long, sad story about how you signed away your life for an education.”
    Lorne didn’t seem offended. He also didn’t shut up, as Rodney had more or less intended. He looked amused. “It’s not exactly a sad story and not all that long either.”
    ***
    I was conceived in the summer of ‘69, the Summer of Love, right? My dad had been drafted so he and my mom went on a road trip, one last blast before. She’d just gotten back to San Francisco and he’d reported in when she found out she was pregnant. Strange time, you know? She moved into this apartment in Haight Ashbury with this guy she’d met on the trip, my Uncle Ron. It wasn’t like that. Uncle Ron is gay so they were just roommates. You know, with my dad gone and all. He got sent overseas. He was in the middle of his tour when I was born, on April 30. May Eve, my mom used to say, like that made me special.
    My dad’s an ok guy. It just didn’t work out between them. When he got home he was too different and it was all too different. He wasn’t so much into the scene, and he couldn’t stand the city. He wanted somewhere big and quiet, where he could hear himself think, somewhere totally unlike the jungles of Southeast Asia. He works for the Park Service in Arizona now. Big sky and mesas, Navajo country. He was married to a woman who was half Navajo for a while, but they broke up. My sister Dorinda’s a quarter Navajo, though. She’s a great kid. She’s married and has a baby, and she’s in veterinary school in Phoenix now. She’s got it all together.
    My dad believes in UFOs. He thinks that there are really spaceships and that aliens have visited Earth before. People think he’s kind of crazy that way. I wish I could tell him, sometimes, that he’s not. That I’ve walked around on other planets and seen the damndest things. That there really are spaceships, and that you’ve never lived until you’ve taken the Tok’ra to a bar in Colorado Springs. Maybe one day I will. I think my dad can keep his mouth shut a lot more than he lets on.
    But I didn’t grow up with him. I grew up in San Francisco with my mom. She’s an art teacher. She does all kinds of fabric art, painting on silk and weaving with raw fabrics, but you can’t make a living doing that. So she teaches art to little kids at school. She says she really enjoys it because their minds are fresh. They haven’t learned what they can’t do.
    I could have gone to college without the Air Force. My dad said he’d help, and Uncle Ron and Uncle Gene did too, and by then my mom was married to Boris, so it wasn’t like it was just her who’d have to come up with the money. But it was what I really wanted.
    No, my mom wasn’t thrilled, but she wasn’t mad either. See, my mom? She’s the world’s biggest optimist. She believes in a Star Trek future. We’re going to reach this place where we don’t have wars anymore, and everyone is judged on their merits, not by the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation. She thinks we can get there in two or three hundred years if we really try. She says look where we’ve come in the last three hundred years. Nothing is impossible.
    And I’m with her. I believe in that Star Trek future too. I just think you can’t get there without Starfleet, without the people who go out and keep it safe, the people who explore and who make it real. They’re both so sure, my