by Joe Haldeman
Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think. “Hello, broken toy,” she said.
“How—how do you feel?” Bright question.
She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. “Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore.” She smiled. “Did they tell you? We’re going to Heaven.”
“No. I knew it would be either there or Earth.”
“Heaven will be better.” Anything would. “I wish we were there now.”
“How long?” I asked. “How long before we get there?”
She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. “No telling. You haven’t talked to anybody?”
“Just woke up.”
“There’s a new directive they didn’t bother to tell us about before. The Sangre y Victoria got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we’ve done all four. Or until we’ve sustained so many casualties that it wouldn’t be practical to go on.”
“How many is that?”
“I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we’re headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.” New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.
One knock on the door and Dr. Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. “Still in separate beds? Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that.” Foster was all right. A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.
He examined Marygay’s stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn’t talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You’re both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you’ve sustained isn’t going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I’m keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can’t handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.
“Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you’ll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you’re going to think of how lucky the other one is. You’re going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other…You may be at each other’s throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.
“Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don’t kid yourselves if it doesn’t work out.”
He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. “Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.” He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, “We’ve got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.”
We went into the tanks—so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells—and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.
Predictably, the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren’t exactly straining at the leash.
It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.
Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity: Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof; Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.
We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city, Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it’s by far the planet’s largest city, but you couldn’t tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.
Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks. They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.
I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, and that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.
We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital’s reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren’t set up for that.
“Earth-year” was 2189. So I was 215 years old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat—no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I’d find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.
They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.
An aide came in. “How you feelin’, sir?” I almost told him to forget the “sir” bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.
“I don’t know. Hurts a little.”
“Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait’ll the nerves start to grow.”
“Nerves?”
“Sure.” He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. “How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It’d just sit there.”
“Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think ‘move’ and the thing moves?”
“’Course you can.” He looked at me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.
What a wonder. “Prosthetics has sure come a long way.”
“Pross-what-ics?”
“You know, artificial—”
“Oh yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff.”
How’d he ever get a job? “Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump.”
“Look, sir.” He set down the clipboard he’d been scribbling on. “You’ve been away a long time. That’s gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can’t break.”
“They do it with arms, too?”
“Sure, any limb.” He went back to his writing. “Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes.”
“Fantastic.” Marygay would be whole again, too.
He shrugged. “Gues
s so. They’ve been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?”
I told him, and he whistled. “God damn. You musta been in it from the beginning.” His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.
“Yeah. I was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.” They’d started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.
“Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?”
“I don’t know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago—hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I reenlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.”
He shrugged. “Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.”
“What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?” No wonder I couldn’t place his accent.
“Born, raised and drafted.” He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. “Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.” He spelled it out, didn’t say “youneff” the way I’d always heard it.
“Look, I’ve gotta run, Lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour.” He backed out the door. “You need anything, there’s a buzzer on the table there.”
Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they’d colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?
It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.
The guy wasn’t kidding about the pain. And it wasn’t just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to “take,” they’d had to subvert my body’s resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.
I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fascinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.
I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt—she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.
I’d had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.
They transferred me to orthopedics, for “range and motion repatterning”—a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.
Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her, she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.
As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor-guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.
The only real excitement we had on Heaven—excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities—was in that carefully guarded water.
They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.
The undisputed master of Heaven’s oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the “shark.” It could eat a stack of earth sharks for breakfast, though.
The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there’s a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.
He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.
They couldn’t just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.
I wasn’t too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d’oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.
These “sharks” supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen’s stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat, armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.
This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.
We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn’t attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn’t be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he’d bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.
Finally, he just let go of the beef, whipped around and charged. Great sport. He was the size of your finger one second, way down there at the other end of the field, then suddenly as big as the guy next to you and closing fast.
Maybe ten of the spears hit him—mine didn’t—and they tore him to shreds. But even after an expert, or lucky, brain shot that took off the top of his head and one eye, even with half his flesh and entrails scattered in a bloody path behind him, he slammed into our line and clamped his jaws around a woman, grinding off both of her legs before it occurred to him to die.
We carried her, barely alive, back to the beach, where an ambulance was waiting. They poured her full of blood surrogate and No-shock and rushed her to the hospital, where she survived to eventually go through the agony of growing new legs. I decided that I would leave the hunting of fish to other fish.
Most of our stay at Threshold, once the therapy became bearable, was pleasant enough. No military discipline, lots of reading and things to potter around with. But there was a pall over it, since it was obvious that we weren’t out of the army; just pieces of broken equipment that they were fixing up to throw back into the fray. Marygay and I each had another three years to serve in our lieutenancies.
But we did have six months of rest and recreation coming once our new limbs were pronounced in good working order. Marygay was released two days before I was but waited around for me.
My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor’s credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.
Heaven’s economy was governed by the continual presence of thousands of resting, recreating millionaire soldiers. A modest snack would
cost a hundred bucks, a room for a night at least ten times that. Since UNEF built and owned Heaven, this runaway inflation was pretty transparently a simple way of getting our accumulated pay back into the economic mainstream.
We had fun, desperate fun. We rented a flyer and camping gear and went off for weeks, exploring the planet. There were icy rivers to swim and lush jungles to crawl through; meadows and mountains and polar wastes and deserts.
We could be totally protected from the environment by adjusting our individual pressor fields—sleep naked in a blizzard—or we could take nature straight. At Marygay’s suggestion, the last thing we did before coming back to civilization was to climb a pinnacle in the desert, fasting for several days to heighten our sensibilities (or warp our perceptions, I’m still not sure), and sit back-to-back in the searing heat, contemplating the languid flux of life.
Then off to the fleshpots. We toured every city on the planet, and each had its own particular charm, but we finally returned to Skye to spend the rest of our leave time.
The rest of the planet was bargain-basement compared to Skye. In the four weeks we were using the airborne pleasure dome as our home base, Marygay and I each went through a good half-billion dollars. We gambled—sometimes losing a million dollars or more in a night—ate and drank the finest the planet had to offer, and sampled every service and product that wasn’t too bizarre for our admittedly archaic tastes. We each had a personal servant whose salary was rather more than that of a major general.
Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.
We did have the consolation, not small, that however short the remainder of our lives would be, we would at least be together. For some reason it never occurred to me that even that could be taken from us.
~~~
We were enjoying a light lunch in the transparent “first floor” of Skye, watching the ocean glide by underneath us, when a messenger bustled in and gave us two envelopes: our orders.