by Joe Haldeman
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.
Marygay had been bumped to captain, and I to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company’s executive officer.
But they weren’t the same company.
She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for ‘indoctrination and education’ before taking command.
For a long time we couldn’t say anything. ‘I’m going to protest,’ I said finally, weakly. ‘They can’t make me a commander. Into a commander.’
She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.
We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death.
We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had all been allotted. I pointed out that most of them probably hadn’t even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said. It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries.
Not in terms of people.
We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn’t just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other’s only link to real life, the Earth of the 1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into a grave.
I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from ‘our’ desert.
I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I
sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun’s oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn’t, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army’s. And it would be their ultimate victory over me — having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it.
That much, I owed to the enemy.
Major
Mandella
2458—3143 AD
1
What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too.
I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth.
Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development.
At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo ‘indoctrination and education’ prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company.
For my education on Stargate, they didn’t mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn’t feed me anything except glucose for three weeks. Glucose and electricity.
They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an ‘accelerated life situation computer.’ It kept me busy.
I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.
I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.
Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.
Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of ‘the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party commander will detail one platoon sergeant …’ and so on. That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.
If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.
One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.
I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner.
I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. So I munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.
‘Major Mandella?’ I’d been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn’t seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.
‘I’m in your debt,’ he said. ‘You saved me from at least half of a boring evening.’ He offered his hand. ‘Jack Kynock, at your service.’
‘Colonel—’
‘Don’t Colonel me and I won’t Major you. We old fossils have to … keep our perspective. William.’
‘All right with me.’
He ordered a kind of drink I’d never heard of. ‘Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Didn’t like it much, did you?’
‘No.’ Zombies, happy robots.
‘Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you.’ A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. ‘Then they got better again, then worse, then … I don’t know. Cycles.’
‘What’s it like now?’
‘Well … I’m not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it’s hard to filter out the propaganda. I haven’t been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Hmm, the name’s deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war.’
‘I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up.’ He smiled. ‘They must have missed one.’
‘For good reason. It was run by veterans — survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population.’
‘But didn’t win.’
‘We’re still here.’ He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. ‘Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn’t exactly a safe topic of conversation.’
‘It surprises me a little,’ I said, ‘well, more than a little. That Earth’s population would do anything at all … against the government’s wishes.’
He made a noncommittal sound.
‘Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn’t get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF — or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were.’
‘Ah. That’s a cyclic thing, too.’ He settled back in his chair. ‘It’s not a matter of technique. If they wanted to, Earth’s government could have total control over … every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.
‘They don’t do it because it would be fatal. Because there’s a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?’
I thought for a moment. ‘If I did, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.’
‘That’s true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody’s fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why.’
Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. ‘Tet-17, Sed-21, Aleph-14. The Lazlo … “The L
azlo Emergency Commission Report.” June, 2106.’
‘Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-1. Robots don’t make good soldiers.’
‘They would,’ I said. ‘Up to the twenty-first century. Behavioral conditioning would have been the answer to a general’s dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby’s Raiders, the Green Berets.’
He laughed over his glass. ‘Then put that army up against a squad of men in modern fighting suits. It’d be over in a couple of minutes.’
‘So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive.’ The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody’s vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally bloodthirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival — and the Taurans cut them to ribbons. The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.
Kynock took a drink and watched the colours. ‘I’ve seen your psych profile,’ he said. ‘Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It’s essentially the same, before and after.’
‘That’s reassuring.’ I signaled for another beer.
‘Maybe it shouldn’t be.’
‘What, it says I won’t make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I’m no leader.’
‘Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?’
I shrugged. ‘Classified, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you’re a major now. You can pull the profile of anybody in your command.’
‘I don’t suppose it has any big surprises.’ But I was a little curious. What animal isn’t fascinated by a mirror?
‘No. It says you’re a pacifist. A failed one at that, which gives you a mild neurosis. Which you handle by transferring the burden of guilt to the army.’