Mercenary

by Piers Anthony

  “It does hurt,” she whispered. “But I don’t mind. You are a nice man, Hope.”

  “You’re a nice woman, Juana.” And when I said that, she sighed and relaxed a little, and it was easier.

  “I think we’re going to make it,” she whispered.

  We were already making it. “I think so,” I agreed.

  “I could love you, Hope.”

  “It’s not authorized.”

  She laughed, then caught her breath, for that had hurt. But it helped me complete the position. We finished it, not with any sharp climax, and separated with a certain relief. There had been some discomfort for me, too, physical and emotional, for she had not been ready, and perhaps would never be ready. Sex is not always wildly exhilarating, contrary to myth, for either man or woman. Sometimes, with the best intentions, it is a chore. But we had accomplished it, and that pleased us both. Had it not been for the fertility suppressant in the base water supply that halted the female cycle, she could have become pregnant. It could have been much worse.

  “Can we be friends?” she asked wistfully.

  “Yes.” My limited passion had abated, but my emotion was stronger than ever.

  “Would you kiss me again?”

  I rolled over and kissed her. This time, free of the onus for performance, it was a deep and wonderful experience. We held it for some time, not wanting to let it go. The sexual act had been a somewhat artificial thing, done by Navy command, but this was genuine.

  Then I had an idea. “Juana, you know we have to come here to the Tail once a week, and it will be with different partners each time. We have no choice; we’re recruits.”

  “Yes. But I think I can tolerate it now. I will pretend it’s you.”

  I smiled in the dark. “And I will pretend it’s you. But after Basic, when we’re E2’s, a person doesn’t have to come here, if he has a hetero-roommate.”

  “I know.”

  “When that time comes, if we’re still here in this company or this base, will you be my roommate?”

  She made a little shudder of gladness. “Yes, Hope.”

  We lay there in the darkness, holding hands, and there was a certain affinity to love. We had worked it out.

  Training continued unabated. I learned to fire a laser rifle with accuracy and to do hand-to-hand combat and to make a “jump” in a space suit, with a miniature rocket jet to propel me. And I marched. The Navy in its infinite wisdom believed that marching with full gear built good soldiers. There was an all-purpose dome with a sand path around it, and we traversed that path interminably, until I thought I had memorized every obnoxious grain of sand.

  But it wasn’t all bad. The Navy also believed in culture, in the form of art, music, and dance. The art was in the form of repainting the buildings. They didn’t need it, in this controlled climate; that was not the point. We needed the experience. The music was in the form of a marching band. Those of us who could play musical instruments of the brass or percussion variety played them while we marched to the booming beat of the big drum. It was, I admit, fun to march to the drum; the beat made our feet respond, and the pace was always slow. The dance was in the form of trick marching: intricate maneuvers in unison. These were exacting but all right. Anything was better than the dreary marching in sand with gear.

  We did get fleeting moments of free time. The Navy encouraged us to use it in constructive entertainments. Our ship had an excellent day room, complete with pool table, table tennis, decks of cards, chess, checkers, backgammon (Acey-Deucy), dice, dominoes, and marbles. Naturally the troops generally ignored these and concentrated on the unauthorized entertainment: the feelies.

  The feelies were special programs played through headsets. Electrical currents were fed through the head in the form of trace magnetic fluxes, stimulating programmed visions. Some were benign, such as a tour of an Earthly zoo or a swim through ice water in a fissure on Europa. Most were sexual, ranging from normal Tail-type through sadomasochistic, which last extreme the Navy frowned on. This sort of thing did not appeal to me, either, but I was surprised by how many others professed to enjoy it. There were several brands that circulated, and it seemed some were better than others. Periodically there were crack-downs on the feelie-chips, but there were always more of them, and it was evident that the Navy did not take the matter seriously.

  “Hey, Hope, you should try this one!” a platoon-mate called to me. “It’s got your name on it!”

  “Hubris?” I asked, suspecting this was a joke.

  “No, Hope,” he said. “Here, try it! You’ll see!”

  Still wary, I borrowed his headset and set it over my own head. The front of it came down to cover my eyes, and the sides covered my ears. Sight and sound came, three-dimensional and binaural, seeming to put me in a different world. The touch and smell sensations took longer to manifest, as the currents did not immediately align with those of the brain; the participant had to cooperate, to get himself into the mood, and I was not doing so. I was just looking.

  I seemed to stand on the hull of a bubble in space, with the pale illumination of the sun highlighting the curve of it. Before me was a bag or package. From it poked a human arm, and the hand reached toward me. “Here is what you need,” a voice said in my ears. But the hand was empty.

  Then my vision panned around, and I saw the name printed on the surface of the bubble: HOPE.

  I removed the helmet, controlling my reaction. “So it is,” I said as I returned the headset to the other recruit. “What’s it all about?”

  “You okay?” he asked. “I thought you were going to fall over for a moment there!”

  “I thought you were joking,” I said quickly. “It was a shock to see my name on that spacecraft.”

  “I guess it was. I’m only a little way into this one. It’s a reverse-role experience—pretty hot stuff, I’d say.”

  “Reverse-role?” I asked blankly. “You mean where the man’s passive and the woman dominant?”

  He laughed. “Naw, that’s tame! Hell, you can get that in the Tail, if you ask for it. This is where it’s keyed to a man, but he’s in a girl’s body. I played through one the other day. It’s really something, getting felt up when you’re a girl. Feeling things happen to anatomy a man doesn’t even have. Drove me crazy, till I caught on. Penetration—” He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Some freaks really go for this stuff, though.” He set the helmet firmly on his head and settled back in the chair.

  A man’s awareness in a woman’s body. While that woman underwent the experience of sexual stimulation and culmination. That was surely not on the authorized list!

  I read the label on the chip container projecting from the top of the helmet. Each chip was protectively encased, but the cases plugged into the helmet socket. It was easy to use. This one said EMPTY HAND—HOPE.

  I went to my hammock and closed my eyes, feigning sleep. We had already passed morning inspection, and it was a weekend, so my gear no longer needed to be reserved for display and could be used for its theoretical purposes. I wanted a chance to think without being disturbed.

  When my family had fled Callisto and traveled toward Jupiter in a bootleg bubble, using gravity shields somewhat the way the ancients had used sails on ships of the seas, our toilet tanks had filled up and had had to be evacuated. My fiancée, Helse, and my sister, Spirit, had gone out with me onto the hull without the benefit of magnetic boots—bubble equipment had been minimal—and guyed ourselves with ropes and done the job. But I had passed close to one of the bodies frozen and bagged and tied to the hull—the bodies of our men folk, slain by the pirates—and suffered a vision of a dialogue with my father, Major Hubris, who had told me there was food and shown me his empty hand. That vision had horrified me, but the revelation had been valid, and we had found food.

  All the people of the bubble had known of my vision, but all were dead now. All except me—and my little sister, Spirit. She alone knew the significance of the empty hand. This particular thing I had not s
poken of when I told my tale to the migrant crew; it was a very private matter.

  The feelie chip was labeled EMPTY HAND, and the particular show was titled HOPE. Could that be coincidence? Perhaps, but the view it presented of the bubble hull and the packaged corpse could not. No one could have guessed about that, and I had told no one. Well, I had written it in my biography of my experience as a refugee, but that was safely out of the way; I knew no one here had seen it.

  And the reverse-role theme—that also related. Spirit and I had escaped the pirates by masquerading as the opposite sex. She had become a little boy, and I a teenaged girl. We had learned that device from Helse, who had protected herself from molestation by passing as a boy. That strategy was not effective in all cases, of course, but it had worked for her. I had left Spirit on a pirate ship, in a compromise with necessity, to be the cabin boy for a reverse-role captain named Brinker.

  No, this was no coincidence! That pirate ship must now be involved in the illicit distribution of this line of feelies, and Spirit, who would now be about fourteen, had sent me a message only I could comprehend.

  My spirited little sister survived, and was reaching out with considerable ingenuity to find me! I had hardly dared think of her in the interim, fearing confirmation of her demise; now a portal in my heart flung open.

  Until this time my life had been somewhat desultory. I had spent a year in the dead-end occupation of migrant labor and gotten into the Navy more or less coincidentally. I had lived from day to day and hour to hour. Now my life assumed meaning, for I had a mission: to rescue my sister, Spirit.

  For Spirit was my life. She alone, of all people living, had shared my ordeal of refuge and survived. She alone truly understood me. She was my kin. I had loved Helse as a woman, but I loved Spirit as family and friend. Helse was dead, and I mourned her forever; Spirit lived, and I needed her.

  From that moment, I had purpose. The knowledge of Spirit guided me like the light of a distant beacon. Two thirds of the emptiness of my situation could be filled by the restoration of my sister.

  I checked the other feelie-chips. They were scattered about the post, traded from unit to unit, and, of course, there was no computer-library index to them. The Navy might tolerate illicit chips, but the Navy did not encourage them or admit their existence. Everyone knew of them, but no one spoke openly of them, apart from such in-barracks exchanges as had introduced me to the first. It was an unwritten code: Do not rock the boat.

  I became a collector of experience, viewing every EMPTY HAND chip I could borrow. The shows were not important to me; I familiarized myself with them only to be able to discuss them intimately with others, justifying my interest in more of the same. It was better to be judged a reverse-role freak than to have my real purpose known. In this manner I became acquainted with the programs FAITH, CHARITY, MAJOR, HELSE, and, of course, HOPE. The names of my older sister, mother, father, fiancée, and myself. But there was none for my younger sister, Spirit. And that made sense, for her own name would be suspect among the pirates. Her absence amounted to confirmation: Spirit was reaching for me and now had touched me.

  But where was she? She was aboard the pirate ship, but that could be anywhere in the Jupiter Ecliptic. The pirates would not identify themselves to the Jupiter Navy.

  But they did do business with the Navy, however covertly. The EMPTY HAND chips had to get from ship to base. What was their route? It should be possible to trace it backward. There should be pickup points, distribution centers, authorized agents to accept payments—that sort of thing. The chips might be illegitimate, but there had to be a framework. Pirates did not distribute chips free; they were in it for the money. The chips were free to enlisted personnel, common property; that meant that the Navy was in fact paying for them, and what the Navy paid for, it had on record, somewhere, somehow.

  Part of my training was in computer research. That is, learning to use the Base Computer to ascertain such things as how many pairs of combat boots were available in storage, for each size of foot. It was not that I had an aptitude for data retrieval; I did, but they didn’t know it, because I had literally slept through that segment of my placement testing program. In fact, I wondered how I had scored so well overall, considering that, but the Navy seemed to have more use for supply clerks than for combat specialists. The training computers were centuries out of date, contributing to what I now perceived as the monumental inefficiency of the Jupiter Military System. But I realized that I might be able to use them to gain the information I needed. If the monthly purchases and disbursements of boots were listed, the feelie-chips had to be entered somehow, probably under an alias. I had to look. So I picked the lock during off-hours and sneaked into the terminal room.

  Alas, I did not yet know quite enough about even those primitive machines. They were keyed for trainee exercises; when I punched the coding for an unauthorized listing, an alarm was sounded in the Military Police Station. Suddenly I found myself under arrest.

  To add to my ignominy, I learned that the Base Computer System had no information of the acquisition or disbursal of entertainment chips. The records for gray market purchases were kept separately, by hand, so as to keep the official record clean. I had blundered badly.

  My unit was notified, and my platoon sergeant came to fetch me. I knew I was in for the Navy version of hell.

  Sergeant Smith was an E5, the lowest level of sergeant, though, of course, that was far beyond my El recruit status. He was no young soldier; he seemed to be in his forties, and the seven longevity slashes on his left sleeve showed he had twenty-one years’ service. He had four slanted slashes on the right sleeve, too, indicating two years of combat duty. He should have had a higher rank by this time. He was a rough-tough soldier and a harsh barracks master; he breathed fire when we fouled up, which was often, since we were normal recruits. He was Saxon and did not speak Spanish, and there was a general suspicion that he did not like Hispanics. I had felt the heat of his wrath before, and I was afraid of him.

  But Smith surprised me. He brought me to his barracks room, which was in strict military order, its hammock folded away and its furnishings sparse. There were two chairs and a table, and he bade me sit down. “Hubris, I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You’re inexperienced but hardened to work, and you’re three times as smart as your tests show. Why’n hell’d you pull a stunt like this?”

  “I can’t tell you, Sergeant,” I said, hating this.

  “You broke ‘n entered, and that’s a black mark on your platoon and on me,” he said. “It’s my business to see that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. You aren’t a criminal-type, Hubris. You had to have reason. You were after something, and I mean to know what it was.”

  I sat silent. I couldn’t tell him about my quest for Spirit; this was not a thing the Navy would understand. It would be better to take my punishment straight. I deserved it for my foolishness.

  “Tell me why, and give me your word there will be no repetition, and I will give you minimum standard punishment,” he said.

  I shook my head no, fearing what was coming.

  He said no more on that subject. “The barracks needs cleaning,” he said. “You will scrub it down, beginning at floor level, during your free time, commencing today. Here is your scrub brush.” He handed me an archaic toothbrush.

  That afternoon, and the afternoon following, I labored to clean the immense inner hull with that tiny brush. My platoon-mates saw me but did not comment; it was forbidden to talk with a person undergoing punishment. The labor was mind-deadening, but I had spent a year on the migrant circuit, so I was toughened to this sort of thing. I simply tuned my mind to other things, freeing it from the mundane blank, and proceeded, as it were, on automatic.

  On the third day Sergeant Smith approached while I worked. “This isn’t necessary, Hubris,” he said. “You have completed minimum punishment and have served as an example. What have you to say?”

  “This is supposed to be a training battalion,
” I said gruffly. “I did wrong and I am being punished; that’s fair. But you are making me do something useless when you should be making me do something that forwards my competence as a Jupiter fighting man, even though I’m really a mercenary.”

  “Just what are you trying to say, Hubris? You may speak freely.” That meant I would not suffer additional punishment for anything I might utter; this code, too, is honored. I could call him a fecal-consuming pederast whose hash marks were forged, and get away with it.

  I elected for a less personal critique. “This is chicken shit,” I said, using the age-sanctified vernacular for pointless harassment.

  “You want a rationale to justify it?” he asked disdainfully.

  He had the temerity to argue the case. “Yes, if I have to indulge in it.” I should have known better than to challenge a military professional. The officer at the Tail had tackled my doubt head-on, and so did Sergeant Smith.

  “The foundation of the military service, any military service,” he said carefully, “is discipline. Men and women must be trained to do exactly what is required of them, in precisely the way required, and at the moment it is required. The military organization is ideally a finely crafted machine, and the individual parts of that machine can not be permitted free will, or the machine will malfunction. We want the soldiers of the Navy to be able to fight; but first they must obey, lest we become no more than a random horde of scrappers. Civilians come to the service with a number of ungainly and counterproductive attitudes; we must cure them of these, just as we must build up their bodies and their skills. Naturally, civilians resist these changes, just as they resist the first haircut and the first session in the Tail. They have other ideas—and because we must rid them of these ideas, we put them through a program some call chicken shit. It may be unpleasant, but it is necessary if they are ever to become true military personnel, able to function selflessly as part of an effective fighting force. It is, ultimately, not hardware or firepower or numbers that determines the true mettle of any military organization; it is discipline. What you are undergoing now is not useful work by your definition; it is the essence of discipline.”