Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

It wasn’t just in looks that Greg was older; back before I’d gone away, his self-censorship mechanism had been much better. He would have kept that last comment to himself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and then, just so there was no possibility of his misconstruing the comment, I added, “About your other wife dying, I mean.”

He nodded a bit, accepting my words. Or maybe he was just old and his head moved of its own accord. “I’m alone now,” he said.

I wanted to ask him about his second wife—about whether she’d been younger than him. If she’d been one of those grad students that went over to South Africa with him, the age difference could have been as great as that which now stretched between us. But I refrained. “We’ll need time,” I said. “Time to figure out what we want to do.”

“Time,” repeated Greg, as if I’d asked for the impossible, asked for something he could no longer give.

* * *

So here I am, back on Earth. My ex-husband—he did divorce me, after all—is old enough to be my father. But we’re taking it one day at a time— equal-length days, days that are synchronized, days in lockstep.

My children are older than I am. And I’ve got grandchildren. And great-grandchildren, and all of them are wonderful.

And I’ve been to another world … although I think I prefer this one.

Yes, it seems you can have it all.

Just not all at once.

But, then again, as Einstein would have said, there’s no such thing as “all at once.”

Everything is relative. Old Albert knew that cold. But I know something better.

Relatives are everything.

And I was back home with mine.

Biding Time

After winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year late in 2003 (for my novel Hominids, first volume of my “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy), I found myself much in demand for public speaking, teaching, script writing, and so on, plus I was also busy editing my own science-fiction line, the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

I very much enjoyed doing all those things, but the net effect was that by the summer of 2004, I was way behind on my seventeenth novel, which was under contract to Tor Books. And so I made a resolution, after finishing the novella “Identity Theft” on July 14, 2004:1 was going to give up writing short fiction. After all, I find writing short stories enormously hard work; I’m much more at home at novel-length. Also, the sad reality is that short fiction pays an order of magnitude less well per word than do my novels.

I dutifully turned down various commissions for the next four months, but in November 2004, I was Guest of Honor at Windy Con 31, a large science-fiction convention in Chicago. Two things happened there that at least temporarily broke my resolve. First, a limited-edition hardcover collection by me called Relativity was published by WindyCon’s sponsoring organization, ISFiC, and I was enormously pleased with how that book turned out. It contained eight short stories (four of which appeared in my previous collection, Iterations, and four more of which also appear here in Identity Theft), plus almost 60,000 words of my nonfiction: essays, articles, and speeches by me about SF. I decided I liked having collections to put on my brag shelf—but I didn’t quite have enough words yet for a third one.